Plastics

My friend Nick and I have been talking a bit lately about why there seems to be such a preponderance of kids with ADHD, autism, Aspergers, pre-mature births, etc. Is it just that we are hearing about it more?  Is it because we're in a relatively affluent part of the world with well-educated parents who get these things identified?  I don't think that can be the whole story (Nick does).

I keep telling him it has to do with pesticides, those crazy little neurotoxins we so willingly spray all over our food.  Mostly, I'm telling him this because he's got his first garden ever and is using pesticides to protect his tomatoes.  Really?  In a home garden?  Isn't the point of growing your own to not have chemicals on them? 

But I digress.  Yes, there are good reasons to kill pests on food and it's what allows us to feed our ever-growing population and that of other countries.  The only problem is that neurotoxins don't just stop working after it kills the bug on your tomato.  It's in your food, and your nervous system is just as good a place to do it's job as a bug's. 

Nick's not buying this argument.  As he points out, we've had bad pesticides for generations and even worse ones if you go back to the 30s, 40s and 50s.  So why just now are we seeing the effects on this generation so heavily?  I keep telling him that once these bad boys get into your system, they are there working on you at the cellular and DNA level and that's the kind of thing that gets passed down through generations, mutating along the way.  Again, Nick's not buying this argument, and insists it's because of hyper-sensitive parents.  I'm not disagreeing fully, but I'm sticking with my side that we're overwhelmed with chemicals far more than prior generations and that could have something to do with it.

An interesting article in The New Yorker about the effect of plastics on us may be supporting my side (which I need in any argument with Nick).  A multi-generational study being done at Columbia of mothers and children is starting to show the effects of exposure to plastics over time in a family line.  And if you think pesticides are hard to wean off of, try going without plastic for a day.  Besides your water bottle, it's in your cosmetics, shampoo, personal care products, wrapped around your food and on and on. 

Now, there are other sides to the story and other research is getting different results, but just anecdotally don't you feel that you're hearing about more and stranger diseases showing up where once they were rare? Is Nick right, that it's only because parents are more vocal?  Or maybe are we killing ourselves in the name of "progress"?