Flame Retardants Are Everywhere, Seriously Hurting Us, Not Helping
When I was a kid and you went near a flame with your pajamas, you were, well. toast. But now it's turning out that the flame retardants put in everything from pajamas to furniture to the very ice floes penguins stand on in the Arctic, are so toxic -- and everywhere -- they may give us all cancer. According to Deborah Blum at The New York Times, scientists are now finding traces of these chemicals in breast milk. It appeared that the compounds were carried into the milk from fat in the mothers’ bodies. “The route wasn’t a surprise,” she quotes Dr. Arnold Schecter, a public health researcher and a professor of environmental health at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas. Breast milk is rich in fat, and the compounds he was looking at linger in fat. How did they get into women’s bodies in the first place? Flame retardants are now in butter and peanut butter, bacon, salmon, chili with beans, sliced lunch meat and more. They are pre...