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12 Common Hormone Disruptors And How To Avoid Them (You Won’t Believe #9!)
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Chances are pretty good that you eat well, try to get regular exercise, and get plenty of sleep but you are actually surrounded by chemicals that interrupt your natural hormone production and development as well as your immune system, not to mention their possible neurological effects.
The chemicals that we are speaking about mimic some hormones in your body, including estrogen, androgen, and thyroid hormones. Chemicals that mimic natural hormones block the hormonal signals in the body and/or interfere with the way hormones work.
These chemicals can change the way hormones travel throughout the body and they can even alter your natural, normal hormone levels. Hormone disruptors are often referred to as endocrine disruptors because they interrupt or mimic all the endocrine glands in the body including the thyroid, pancreas, testes, pituitary, adrenal, thymus, and ovaries.
As you can imagine, altering with these precisely timed and tuned systems is playing with fire. Worse still, you are coming into contact with these chemicals every single day.
The World Health Organization released a report in 2013 which stated that exposure to these types of chemicals can lead to serious health problems including:
- Developmental problems in the nervous system in children
- Thyroid cancer
- Non-descended testes in young men
- Prostate cancer
- ADHD in children
- Learning and memory problems
- Obesity
- Infertility or reduced fertility
- Heart disease
Some of these effects might not show up for decades and some scientists have suggested that many adult diseases or infertility problems actually started when they were still fetuses and their mothers were exposed to these hormones.
By the way, it’s not just humans who are affected by these chemicals. These hormone disrupting chemicals are found in our air, food, water, and are putting wildlife at risk. Fish in the Great Lakes, for example, have been found to have reproductive problems and abnormal swelling of the thyroid gland due to a common endocrine disruptor known as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)
How often are you being exposed to these hormone interrupting, cancer causing chemicals? Most likely, a great deal more than you think!
One professor from the University of Massachusetts Amherst who specializes in how chemicals affect our endocrine system, Thomas Zoeller, has stated that there are more than 1,000 of these chemicals on the American market place today.
We have made a list of the top 12 most common sources of these chemicals, chemicals you probably have at least some contact with on a daily basis. See which ones you are exposed to on a regular basis and find out what you can do to limit or stop your exposure.
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