A Beef With Hormones

News (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=9FB640EA6ABE0E849C8C1FD6EEA97C22) linking mothers' consumption of beef with low sperm count in their sons caught my attention. Like all studies, it isn't conclusive -- but it raises interesting questions. The theory is that women in the U.S., when they eat beef, ingest a number of hormones used in that beef to spur growth and health. Among them are sex hormones, such as estrogen. Those hormones then can interact with the growth of a fetus in their womb, somehow disrupting its own development. In this case, low sperm counts.

Similar questions have been raised about hormones we all end up eating in our food or drinking in our water -- some plastics have estrogen-like chemicals that may affect our bodies.

And all of this has me wondering about what subtle effects may occur from any number of chemicals piling up in our environment, whether we breathe, eat or drink them. Pesticides, heavy metals, hormone-like substances, nanoparticles -- you name it. I used to think of people who obsessed about such things as being alarmists, but now I'm not so sure.

The problem is that it's very hard to trace subtle effects that occur over a long period of time. Science is relatively good at measuring acute effects: we give the mouse a certain amount of a chemical and it dies. OK, that's bad. Our safe level of exposures to many contaminants are often based on those types of studies. Granted, in the interests of safety, the accepted levels of those contaminants are set at proportionate numbers many times lower than the fatal toxic level.

But how about those subtle effects? Where low-level exposures may grow over time? Or, even trickier, where (1) a low-level exposure to a pregnant woman may (2) affect the expression of certain genes or development of the fetus in a way that, (3) partly because of the genes it inherited in the first place, (4) may cause the person that fetus becomes to suffer harm when then exposed to yet another, or more of the same, substance or germ in its environment as a child and adult.

That becomes waaaaay harder to trace in a study. And makes me think that an organic, natural lifestyle may be more important than we think -- both to us and to our planet.

Of course, the good news may be that really subtle effects may take such a long time to develop that we'll die of something else first anyway. Things we deliberately do to ourselves, like sucking on cigarettes or parking our butts in front of the TV.