Description

In this health video you will learn whether your baby swimming in the toxic sea or not.

Transcript

Lyle Hurd: We’re talking to Dr. Sherrill Sellman, author of What Women Must Know to Protect their Daughters from Breast Cancer. I would like to expand that to say what mothers and fathers and educators and public officials need to know. I wonder if you can give me some idea—you mentioned that precocious puberty is a major problem, starts with young women that are sometimes 8-years-old, 6-years-old, it affect young men. Why? What do you attribute this to? Is something going on in our society or environment? What’s the precursor, or why are we having these problems? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: Well, first of all, I’d like to say that if a family goes to the doctor, seeing this condition in their children, the doctor will most likely say, “we don’t know why this is happening”. But there are some known causes that have been attributed to this early development of pushing puberty into young children at an early age. Let’s look at some of those things. Well, let’s look at some of those things. Well, first of all, we are well aware that there are chemicals in our environment that are called hormone mimics—these are estrogenic chemicals that can actually go right through the placenta barrier and enter the womb. Many of these chemicals that have hormone disrupting effects can alter the development of the fetus—can either cause reproductive abnormalities while still developing in the womb or can predispose these children to be highly sensitive to these chemicals and to kind of simulating estrogen levels when they’re out of the womb and developing, in critical times. So, these hormone mimics actually can fuel the early development, cause aberrations, cause genetic issues—can alter things. So we are surrounded in a sea of these hormones that are stimulating and pushing us to have high levels of these hormone disrupting chemicals in our body. In fact, what we need to appreciate is that there is no longer a child born in the United States that doesn’t have synthetic chemicals in their body. Lyle Hurd: With 247, isn’t that what the average is? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: There was a study that looked at the cords of the umbilical blood of newborns and they found an average of 200 and something—synthetic chemicals in blood of newborns. So these newborns are swimming in a sea of a toxic soup in the womb that are programming us in many ways; and particularly they’re programming our reproductive nature and our hormonal nature while we’re still in the womb. We need to remember that a female fetus has all the eggs that she will ever have to produce her children. So we have— Lyle Hurd: I’m sorry, can you repeat that please? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: Okay. So if a woman is pregnant with a female fetus, has a baby in the womb, that baby has the full compliment of all the eggs she will ever have. So in a sense, a pregnant woman with a daughter—there are 3 generations of women living in that pregnant woman. 3 generations: the pregnant woman, her daughter, and these future, these eggs, okay. In fact, there are studies showing us that exposure to some chemicals such as bisphenol A, and bisphenol A is a synthetic estrogen—a very potent estrogenic chemical. bisphenol A is put into plastics. Bisphenol A is found in plastic water bottles, for instance. It is the plastic lining of tin cans. This leeches into the water and into the food. We have found—studies have found that bisphenol A is a potent hormone mimic at a million times less than what is considered a danger by the Environmental Protection Agency. A million times or more, more powerful—minuet, minuet amounts are hormone disrupters and have been—this type of chemical—have been associated with developing precocious puberty. So, creating these hormonal levels, we’re creating infertility problems. We’re creating a predisposition to fibroids, to ovarian cysts, to a range of hormonal issues. So we’re finding that first of all the chemicals in the environment are a major role. Then we have to look at diet. And when we look at our diet, we’re looking at things that first of all, if it’s not organic food, it’s being sprayed with chemicals—pesticides, herbicides, fungicides—hundreds of these chemicals are hormone mimics. So we are further exasperating this hormonal overload and pushing this tendency in our children from all these hormone mimics—many of them are estrogen mimics. Lyle Hurd: Are there any other examples of other species that are being involved or affected by these things? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: We do have examples in the world of nature that have been the harbingers of this problem. We see, for example, fish in rivers throughout the world that are actually being affected by hormone disruptive chemicals in the water. What we’re finding is that male fish are now becoming female, becoming feminized. They are actually developing eggs and producing eggs. So we’re changing—we’re gender-bending these animals. We have seen it in mammals. We have seen reproductive abnormalities in all sorts of mammals that we have been investigating—the frogs are showing this; our natural world is reflecting back what’s happening. [It’s] something that we don’t ever think about, but we are taking billions of prescriptions of pharmaceuticals drugs—everything from birth control pills, HRT, cholesterol lowering drugs; we’re taking chemotherapy; we’re taking you name it, we’re taking all these pharmaceutical drugs and where do they go? So we pee them out, and where do they go then? They go into our sewer system which is incapable of removing the metabolized of these pharmaceuticals. They get into our water system and they come back into our drinking supply and we literally have chemicals on tap. We now know—there are studies showing—there are chemicals coming out of our tap water that are minuet amounts of these pharmaceuticals but we don’t need a lot to be having affects. So we are just surrounded until we can clean up our environment, or at least take control of our own personal environment. We’ve got to filter our water. It’s imperative that we eat organically. It’s imperative that we remove household cleaning products and personal care products that have ingredients in them that are known to be hormone disrupters that get absorbed. All of these things are driving this trend to upset and compromise hormonal development of the most vulnerable of us, which are our children. Lyle Hurd: So What Women Must Know to Protect their Daughters from Breast Cancer is also a call to action, I would suppose, for any one that reads it and you don’t have to have a daughter. You just have to be concerned about whose going to be taking care of you 25 years from now, as opposed to you having to take care of them at 70 or 80 years old. Dr. Sherrill Sellman: It is definitely a call to action. We must wake up for the sake of our children and the title has ‘what we must know to protect our daughters from breast cancer’—first of all, males are getting breast cancer, too—but these issues that are affecting little girls are affecting little boys—affecting our children. The information in this book is really most relevant for parents to have to protect their children and also it’s a wake up call. But more than that, it’s a manual—it’s a road map of the steps we can start taking right now to make the changes and support the health of our children and future generations. Lyle Hurd: Thank you Dr. Sellman. You are an ideal example of the kind of people that are helping this change our attitudes towards health care and we appreciate you being here. Dr. Sherrill Sellman: Thank you.