What Chemicals Are Turning Boys Into Girls?
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The government of Denmark has released a 326-page report affirming that endocrine disrupting chemicals are probably continuing to the birth of fewer males and the “feminization” of existing ones.
The report centers on chemicals like PVC, flame retardants, phthalates, dioxins, PCBs and bisphenol-A, all of which mimic the action of estrogen in the body. The researchers concluded that due to the prevalence of these chemicals, children could easily be exposed to high enough levels to place them at “critical risk” of harm.
The chemicals have been blamed for falling sperm counts among men worldwide, and their full effects remain unknown. A study by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, found that male children who had been exposed to PCBs and dioxins while in the womb were more likely to dress up in female clothes and play with dolls than boys who had not been. Other research has documented a connection between prenatal phthalate exposure and “feminization” of male genitals, including smaller penises.
Evidence is increasingly emerging that estrogen mimics might also be responsible for a puzzling phenomenon: fewer boys are being born than ever before. Typically, 106 male children are born for every 100 females in most populations. In recent years, however, this distribution has been shifting in favor of females, with endocrine disruptors a likely culprit.
For example, a Canadian Inuit community living on Lake Huron and surrounded by chemical factories produces two girls for every boy born. Similar phenomena have been observed in contaminated communities in Brazil, Israel, Italy, Taiwan and the Arctic Circle, as well as among workers in Russian pesticide factories.
Many hormone-mimicking chemicals build up in the body and resist environmental degradation, meaning that they are now widely distributed across the planet.
“There is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families,” the environmental group WWF said.
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Chemicals Pass Through Breast Milk to Cause Cancer
February 9, 2010
Natural News
by: David Gutierrez
Higher exposure to toxic chemicals may explain the difference in testicular cancer rates between Denmark and Finland, researchers from the University Department of Growth and Reproduction have found in a study on breast milk.
“Our findings reinforce the view that environmental exposure to [endocrine-disrupting chemicals] may explain some of the temporal and between-country differences in incidence of male reproductive disorders,” said lead researcher Niels Skakkebaek.
Rates of testicular cancer, genital abnormalities, low semen quality, and other male reproductive disorders are four times higher in Denmark than in nearby Finland. These conditions have previously been linked to exposure to industrial chemicals that disrupt the hormonal (endocrine) system.
Endocrine disruptors have also been linked to birth defects, neurological problems, and increased rates of cancer and heart disease. The most dangerous chemicals are known as persistent organic pollutants, because they resist environmental degradation and accumulate in the environment.
Most of these chemicals bind to animal fat. As a consequence, animal-based foods tend to contain higher concentrations. So does human breast milk.
In the current study, researchers tested the breast milk of 68 women in Denmark and Finland for 121 different chemicals. They found significantly higher levels of pesticides, dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the Danish breast milk.
The higher rates of testicular cancer and other reproductive disorders in Denmark may not be explained directly by contamination via breast milk. Breast milk contamination is thought to be a reliable marker of prenatal chemical exposure, which is likely to pose an even greater risk.
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Birth Weights Fell From 1990 to 2005
January 22, 2010
The Washington Post
By Lauran Neergaard
U.S. newborns are arriving a little smaller, says puzzling new Harvard research that can’t explain why. Fatter mothers tend to produce heavier babies, and obesity is soaring. Yet the study of nearly 37 million births shows newborns were a bit lighter in 2005 than in 1990, ending a half-century of rising birth weights.
The change isn’t big: The average birth weight of full-term babies is just under 7 1/2 pounds, a drop of about 1.8 ounces, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
That’s surprising considering doctor warnings about 9-pound, or bigger, babies. So the researchers double-checked.
The proportion born large for their gestational age dropped about 2 percent, which is good.
“What physicians are responding to is that the bigger babies are getting bigger,” said lead researcher Dr. Emily Oken of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Plus, “babies are still bigger than they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. It’s just the trend seems to have flattened or reversed itself.”
That’s particularly true for women at lowest risk for too-small babies: White, well-educated, married non-smokers who got early prenatal care. Still, their babies, on average, weighed 2.8 ounces less over the study period.
Babies born too big are at increased risk of obesity and diabetes later in life. On the other hand, babies born too small may require intensive care right away and also be at risk for later chronic diseases. The proportion of babies small for their gestational age did increase slightly, by 1 percent, Oken said.
Moreover, babies’ length at birth suggests even full-term pregnancies are 2.5 days shorter than they used to be. That can’t account for all the weight change, and Oken couldn’t find a full explanation from the birth certificates she studied.
Oken excluded premature babies, as well as twins or other multiples, from her study. (Obese mothers also are at higher risk of having a preemie.) Yes, there are more scheduled cesarean sections or induced labors now, but her analysis concluded that wasn’t to blame.
But that’s not clear as induction often isn’t listed on birth certificates, and the study found a drop in babies born at 40 or 41 weeks gestation, noted Dr. Joann Petrini, an adviser to the March of Dimes.
Regardless, it’s too soon know what this drop means for babies but “we should keep vigilant” about any decline among the smallest newborns, Petrini said.
The study uses the most recent data available from official U.S. birth certificates.
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Sugary Drinks During Pregnancy Increase Risk of Diabetes in Child
December 11, 2009
Natural News
By Sherry Baker
According to the American Diabetes Association, approximately 4% of all pregnant women (about 135,000 expectant moms) in the U.S. develop gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) each year. These are women who have never had diabetes before but suddenly have high blood sugar (glucose) levels during the later part of pregnancies. And if not well controlled, the condition can hurt their babies — causing newborns to be so extremely large and heavy their shoulders can be damaged during birth. The babies born to women with GDM often have very low blood glucose levels at birth and may likely have breathing problems, too. What’s more, babies born with excess insulin due to their mother’s GDM often become obese in childhood and they frequently grow into adults who are at risk for type 2 diabetes.
So what causes gestational diabetes? That has remained unclear — but now scientists have discovered what appears to be one cause. A new study, published in the December issue of the journal Diabetes Care, has found for the first time that drinking more than 5 servings of sugar-sweetened cola drinks weekly prior to becoming pregnant significantly raises the risk of developing diabetes during pregnancy.
“Compared with women who consumed less than 1 serving per month, those who consumed more than 5 servings per week of sugar-sweetened cola had a 22% greater GDM risk,” Dr. Liwei Chen, MD, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Sciences Center in the New Orleans School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in a statement to the press.
Although scientists have not yet unraveled the precise underlying mechanism resulting in gestational diabetes, they have some strong clues. Previous studies strongly suggested that the main defect in the development of GDM is diminished secretion of insulin combined with pregnancy-induced insulin resistance.
So how do sugar-laden soft drinks fit into this? The research team behind the new study has suggested several explanations for their findings. For one thing, the high sugar intake associated with the drinks may lead to impaired pancreatic cell function. Drinking a large amount of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to a high glycemic load (GL). The large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars cause levels of glucose in the body to spike — and this can result in insulin resistance and impaired function of pancreatic beta cells, which make insulin.
In their paper, the scientists noted that the only significant association they found between sweet drinks and gestational diabetes involved sugar-sweetened colas. They did not find that other sweet beverages, including fruit drinks, raised the risk of GDM. Dr. Chen suggests that the explanation may simply be that sugar-sweetened colas are tremendously popular in the U.S. and, unfortunately, widely consumed in excess by women of child-bearing years.
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Medications Causing Birth Defects by Blocking Folic Acid
November 19, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
(Natural News) An epidemiological study in Israel that included 84,832 babies born at Soroka Medical Center, in Beer-Sheva concluded that medications taken during the first trimester that block folic acid more than double the risk of congenital malformations.
The study team involved Epidemiologists, Pediatricians, Clinical Pharmacologists, Obstetricians and Gynecologists who examined birth and abortion data collected in Israel between 1998 and 2007.
The medications that act as folic acid inhibitors are the antibiotics trimethoprim, sulfasalazine for treating ulcerative colitis, and the chemotherapy drug methotrexate. This group of drugs prevents folic acid from being converted to its active metabolites.
Anti-epileptic drugs and cholesterol lowering drugs are among the group of medications that lower serum and tissue concentrations of folic acid.
All about folic acid
Folic acid (B9) is also known as folate or folacin. It is essential for building new cells, and everyone needs it. But it is especially crucial for a woman’s physiological fetal function during pregnancy. Abundant folic acid during early pregnancy is important for preventing neurological and spinal birth defects.
Doctors are now recommending extra folic acid intake for women during the first trimester of pregnancy. Folic acid is abundant in leafy green vegetables, grains, dried beans, peas, nuts, and fruit. Adding daily supplements of folic acid is usually recommended.
The most common major birth defect from folic acid deficiency is spina bifida, or open spine. It is the result of the fetal spinal cord not closing completely during the first month of pregnancy. Nerve damage can result in the child’s paralysis of the legs, fluid in the brain, learning difficulties, and urinary or bowel problems. There is no cure for this birth defect.
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Giving Birth at Home Equally as Safe as Hospital
September 30, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Women who give birth at home do not have any higher rate of complications or death than women who give birth in a hospital, according to a study conducted by researchers from the TNO Institute for Applied Scientific Research in the Netherlands, and published in the journal BJOG.
“We found that for low-risk mothers at the start of their labor it is just as safe to deliver at home with a midwife as it is in hospital with a midwife,” researcher Simone Buitendijk said. “These results should strengthen policies that encourage low-risk women at the onset of labor to choose their own place of birth.”
One-third of women in the Netherlands choose to give birth at home, due to a government encouragement of the policy. Because the Netherlands has one of the highest rates in Europe of infant death during or just after birth, some researchers have suggested that home births might be unsafe.
In the current study, researchers examined data from 530,000 births attended by midwives, and found no difference in the risk of mother or infant death between home births and hospital births.
The study looked only at low-risk women, defined as those going into labor with no known complications. Known complications include a prior cesarean section, a breech baby or a baby with congenital abnormalities.
The study did not include hospital births attended by a doctor rather than a midwife.
The researchers found that a full one-third of women who began their birth at home eventually had to be transferred to a hospital. This might have occurred due to complications such as an abnormal infant heart rate, or simply because the mother chose to opt for pharmaceutical painkillers that could not be administered at home. Even in cases where women were transferred to the hospital, however, neither the mother nor infant was at any higher risk of dying than in any of the other births in the study.
Click here for the full report from Natural News
Recession Means Fewer Babies; US Births Fell 2 Pct
August 8, 2009
Associated Press
By Mike Stobbe
There aren’t just fewer jobs in a recession. There are fewer babies, too. U.S. births fell in 2008, the first full year of the recession, marking the first annual decline in births since the start of the decade and ending an American baby boomlet.
The downturn in the economy best explains the drop in maternity, some experts believe. The Great Depression and subsequent recessions all were accompanied by a decline in births, said Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health and epidemiology.
And the numbers have never rebounded until the economy pulled out of it, she said, calling the 2008 recession the most likely culprit for fewer babies.
It’s not clear that it’s the only explanation, however. Another expert noted a recent decline in immigration to the U.S. may also be a factor.
The nation recorded about 4,247,000 births last year, down about 68,000 from 2007, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics.
This recession began in December 2007, and since then the economy has lost almost 7 million jobs. Housing foreclosures worsened in 2007 too, and fell into a state of crisis in 2008.
The largest decline in births were in California and Florida, two states hit hardest by the housing crisis.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Hogue said, of the new numbers, which are not final and will be updated.
But the downturn’s effect on the public psychology — and families’ willingness to have babies — may not have really hit until the fall of 2008, said Stephanie Ventura of the health statistics center, the agency that put out the report.
Of course, 2007 was a year in which more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. In the past, a fluctuation of births by 1 or 2 percent would not be seen as very significant, especially from such an unusual year.
But the drop seems to break an unusual trend. Births had been rising since 2002, and birth rates had been increasing in women of different age groups, said Ventura, chief of the agency’s reproductive statistics branch.
The new report is an early count of births from each state, and does not contain demographic breakdowns that might more completely explain whether birth declines occurred in some groups, but not others.
Births were up in January, February and April of 2008 compared to 2007, but were down every month after that except September. The largest declines were in October and November.
Births were down in all but 10 states, primarily the northwest quadrant of the country, including North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and Alaska.
In contrast, births in California were down by 15,000 and in Florida, by 8,000, compared to 2007.
While the recession probably played an important role in fewer babies, another factor may be the net decline in recent years in immigration to the United States, said Mark Mather, demographer with the Population Reference Bureau.
“If there are fewer immigrants coming to the U.S., there are fewer moms and dads,” said Mather, noting that California and Florida are states with large immigrant populations.
“I don’t think we have enough data to know for sure what’s going on,” he added.
About half of U.S. pregnancies are unplanned. But Hogue, the Emory professor, said the recession likely affected the other half.
The recession also may have cut into the number of unplanned pregnancies that progressed to live births, but it’s hard to say. Abortion statistics for 2008 are not yet available, Hogue said.
Click here for the full report from ABC News
