by Barbara Minton
(Health Secrets) If you have mysterious symptoms that nobody can make sense of but they just won’t go away, there is probably one or several potent endocrine disruptors in your life. What are endocrine disruptors? They are chemicals that are added to many of the products we use on a daily basis that cause mysterious symptoms to occur in our bodies. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a consumer protection organization, has just identified a Dirty Dozen of the worst endocrine disruptors. But before we go to them, let’s see how endocrine disruptors manage to create mysterious symptoms and cause so much trouble.
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Endocrine disruptors wreck communication in the body
The organs of the endocrine system produce hormones, which are the great communicators of the body. Hormones are the chemical messengers that transfer signals and instructions from one set of cells to another. When you become involved with a endocrine disruptor, this communication system no longer functions like it should, and a host of mysterious symptoms can be the result.
Hormones influence and regulate almost every cell, tissue, organ, and function of the human body, so it is easy to see how a disruption in this system can create the havoc in the body that can produce many mysterious systems. Hormones orchestrate the maintenance and balance of our internal environment through a process known as homeostasis. A body in homeostasis is a healthy body and one without symptoms.
Hormones circulate in the blood stream and come in contact with cells throughout the body. But each hormone is able to affect only a limited number of cells, the cells that have specialized receptor proteins for receiving that particular hormone. When a hormone is secreted into the blood and binds to a receptor site, biological effects from that binding produce a specific physical change.
Chemicals can mimic hormones and gain admittance to our hormone receptors. When they do, they block the receptor so the hormone that needs to bind there cannot complete that action.
Chemical endocrine disruptors have a tremendously negative effect on the body. When foreign hormones bind to the body’s hormone receptors, the body is unable to achieve and perpetuate homeostasis, resulting in a cascade of events that lead first to mysterious symptoms, and then to full blown disease.
This cascade starts off with symptoms you may be experiencing already, such as rapid heart beat, irritability, mood swings, sleep disturbance, fatigue, anxiety, feelings of dread or doom, panic attacks, inflammation, mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, allergies, arthritis, migraines, indigestion, weight gain or bloating, thinning hair, arthritis, muscle or tendon aches, dizziness, itchy or crawly skin, sugar intolerance, skin problems, yeast infections, hypoglycemia, and plenty more.
One good way to make sure this does not happen to you is by keeping all your hormones at optimal levels. If you do that, your hormone receptors will be occupied by the hormones that should be there, and not be open to invasion from endocrine disruptors. When levels of hormones fall, receptors for them go unoccupied and are wide open to be occupied by endocrine disrupting foreign chemcials.
It’s clearly important to minimize your exposure to endocrine disruptors, and this is where EWG’s Dirty Dozen comes in.
Chemicals that cause endocrine disruption
Many of these are potent chemicals found in the immediate environment and even in your home. Products containing them can be bought from such places as your local grocery store, Target or Walmart. There are plenty of them in products sold at drug stores such as Walgreens or CVS too. But endocrine disrupting chemicals are not ingredients, so you won’t find them on labels.
Here is a sampling of the endocrine disruptors from EWGs Dirty Dozen: