“Common products inside your home are contributing to serious health conditions.”
Thanks to volumes of research conducted since the 1980s, this statement can now be said emphatically—with few detractors.
Moreover, with the problem now more widely accepted, research conducted during the past decade is less generalized. For example, some research has focused on the link to specific diseases or to specific demongraphics.
One demographic researchers have focused on is men—for the simple reason that sperm counts and birthrates are down, and researchers are desperately trying to determine the causes.
Risk for major diseases
In a study from 2017, a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute focused on phthalates, which are common chemicals that virtually everyone in developed countries come in contact with daily.
Phthalates are a family of man-made chemical compounds developed in the last century to be used in the manufacture of plastics, solvents, and personal care products. They are colorless, odorless, oily liquids that do not evaporate easily and do not chemically bind to the material they are added to.
In a typical home phthalates are often found in a variety of consumer goods including kitchen and laundry cleaners, food packaging, toys, pet products and even medications.
To conduct the study, the researchers performed observations on 1,500 men from South Australia. The team found phthalates were easily detected in the urine of more than 99% of those 35 years or older.
What are phthalates?
Where do you find them? How do they cause damage?
An awareness brochure from National Institutes of Health has the answers. Downloade PDF here.
Can phthalates be eliminated?
Yes! Learn more about a unique product that enzymatically “eats” phthalates.
From there the team correlated the rate of the most common diseases with progressively-higher levels of phthalates in the study subjects’ bodies.
“We found that the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes and high blood pressure increased among those men with higher phthalate levels,” reported Zumin Shi, an associate professor and contributing researcher in a press release.
The findings were published in the October 2017 edition of the journal Environmental Research.
Risk to men’s reproductive health
In addition to general health and common diseases, other studies have focused on how phthalates affect men’s testosterone and semen.
A 2016 study conducted in China found that environmental exposure to phthalates impaired both semen volume and quality of the men in their trial.
The Chinese researchers conducted the study on 1247 males who, with their wives, sought semen examination in their attempt to conceive.
Writing in the study summary the researchers commented: “The associations of semen phthalate metabolites with a decrease in semen volume, as well as an increased percentage of abnormal heads and tails, suggest that exposure to phthalates at environmental levels may impair human semen quality.”
The study was published in Environmental Pollution in April 2016.
A 2015 Swedish study documented similar findings. In this study researchers at Lund University in Malmö, Sweden, recruited 314 young men who provided semen, urine and blood samples.
The researchers analyzed reproductive hormones and several semen parameters including progressive motility and high DNA stainability—a marker for sperm immaturity.
The researchers then studied associations between urinary levels of phthalate metabolites and semen reproductive parameters.
The researchers found one specific phthalate metabolite, diethylhexyl phthalate, was particularly devestating. In fact, the men in the highest quartile of diethylhexyl phthalate saturation had 27% greater high DNA stainability than men in the lowest quartile—meaning they had a much lower likelihood of conceiving children.
The study was published in Environment International in December 2015.
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Sources: Environmental Research (2017), Environmental Pollution (2016), Environment International (2015).
