EDCs Explained: The Data on Toxicity and the Endocrine System

What are Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs), and how concerned should we be about toxicity? We dive into the science behind things such as BPAs and phthalates, exploring what the data actually says about their effects on hormonal health and the endocrine system. We discuss where EDCs come from, working toward a non-toxic home, and understanding what you can and can’t control.

In this episode, Erin mentions The Plastic Detox, a documentary series streaming on Netflix; and the nonfiction book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.

We take a moment to remind you that while this is a medical discussion, it is not providing a diagnosis or treatment or any medical advice. The only way to get a diagnosis, treatment or medical advice for your particular condition is through a discussion with your doctor.

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Get your copy of The Hormone Loop by Dr. Gillian Goddard wherever books are sold.

This episode was produced and edited by Erin Stein. Music: “All We Live For (instrumental)” by Wolfclub licensed through Audiio.com. Intro and outro edited, and video created, by Ian Mayer. The Savvy Patient logo by Amanda Spielman.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 Intro

00:33 Defining Chemicals and EDCs

05:11 What Data Do We Have?

07:26 The Problem is Everywhere

14:09 Why It's Hard to Study Now

20:18 What We Do at Home

24:29 It Affects Us All

30:06 Cosmetics

32:45 Greatest Exposures

35:20 What Can We Do?

40:33 Outro

Erin Stein: Hello, welcome to The Savvy Patient. Today, we dive into the wonderful world of chemistry and chemicals. Specifically endocrine disrupting chemicals because Gillian is an endocrinologist. So, she should know what that means: EDCs.

Gillian Goddard: It's always nice to have a little alphabet soup in every episode.

Erin Stein: It's so much alphabet soup and we haven't even gotten into the alphabet soup because there are so many different things considered an EDC and all of them have multiple acronyms, the PFAs and the BPAs and the whew it's a lot. There's BPA, BPS, BPF, so “BP “seems bad.

Gillian Goddard: Yes.

Erin Stein: Let's define a chemical. What is a chemical, Gillian?

Gillian Goddard: Sure, a chemical is just a molecule that is made up of different atoms. That's why you study chemistry.

Erin Stein: Yeah, boring. [laugh] I ask that because I feel like we've made chemical a bad word. Like we've made the idea that if it's a chemical, it's bad, but chemicals are everywhere. Our body makes chemicals. The earth makes chemicals. Chemicals themselves are not bad.

Gillian Goddard: Yes. I think it gets a bum rap because of certain types of man-made chemicals that have not always been so good for people and or animals and or the earth.

Erin Stein: Yes, and to be clear, there are some of those. But I also think chemical now has this connotation of being manmade. And obviously there are some, but there are plenty that are not manmade. So, you can't just run away from everything that's a chemical, basically.

Gillian Goddard: Sadly, no, you really literally can't because many of them are in you and need to be there.

Erin Stein: A fun fact that I wanted to start with is formaldehyde is a chemical and it is something that I remember a big movement to remove it from nail polish. Because can't have it in your nail polish. It's toxic. It's so bad, but actually we have formaldehyde in the human body and we eat food like bananas that contain formaldehyde and it's just a natural byproduct of biological and chemical processes.

Gillian Goddard: Indeed, you're ready for your chemistry PhD.

Erin Stein: Yeah, I'm really not, but I did okay in high school chemistry. The thing with chemicals is, a little bit of any chemical is not going to kill you. And it's when we get to very high levels of chemicals that they might kill you. But that's just the nature of everything.

Gillian Goddard: It's the Goldilocks Principle.

Erin Stein: Plants are poisonous. Natural doesn't mean good, natural doesn't mean bad, manmade doesn't mean good, doesn't mean bad. And everything is toxic at high levels, even vitamin A. That's another fun fact, everybody.

Gillian Goddard: Correct. That's why you can't take Accutane while you're pregnant. It's too much vitamin A for the developing fetus.

Erin Stein: That's the thing we don't talk about with vitamins. You need some. All vitamins are chemicals, everybody. Come on. Okay, so we've laid some groundwork there, but when we're talking about endocrine disrupting chemicals, what are we talking about?

Gillian Goddard: We are talking about a huge category of chemicals that affect how a hormone is made or how it is released or the receptor it's supposed to bind to. Basically, in the feedback loop that is the endocrine system, an endocrine disrupting chemical can act anywhere in the loop to disrupt the feedback loop.

Erin Stein: right and what are the key functions of your endocrine system to recap.

Gillian Goddard: my goodness, reproduction, metabolism, stress response, growth.

Erin Stein: So big things, important things. Now, you will not be shocked that fertility, I believe, is the most studied element of endocrine disruption because everyone's obsessed with having babies all the time.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, the best evidence that certain endocrine disrupting chemicals are harmful comes from rats. We should state right off the bat that there's very little evidence in humans and we can get into why that is later. But the best evidence we have that endocrine disrupting chemicals are harmful is that they have been shown to reduce or affect the production of sperm in rats. There's other evidence. There's definitely evidence that, again, in rats and mice, that endocrine disrupting chemicals may also affect the female reproductive system. But the earliest and best evidence is in the male reproductive system of rats.

Erin Stein: Good times.

Gillian Goddard: It should be noted, though, that when they do these studies in rats, first of all, the effects are often in utero. So, they give the mother rat the endocrine disrupting chemical while the fetal rats are developing their reproductive systems. And they give it in really high concentrations. While rats in general are a reasonable model before you do studies in humans, there are important differences between rats and humans. And so, you cannot assume that every effect that something has in a rat, it will also have in a human.

Erin Stein: I know that that's obvious, but it's not. It has to be said.

Gillian Goddard: It bears stating.

Erin Stein: How do we even begin to talk about this? Because people are concerned about them and they have some reason to be, I would say. And there are so many of them and they are everywhere, in everything.

Gillian Goddard: Yes. Literally. I think that this is both the most important point about endocrine disrupting chemicals and the thing that is most difficult for the types of proactive type A people who like to listen to podcasts about hormonal health struggle with the most. And that is endocrine disrupting chemicals are ubiquitous in our environment. So, you can...

not microwave your food in plastic and you can give your baby a silicone spoon instead of a plastic spoon and you can do all of those things and not really reduce your endocrine disrupting chemical exposure in a meaningful way, which I think is really hard for people. They want to be like, well, I use glass lock and my kids take their stainless-steel bento boxes to school—all things which we do in the Goddard home—and not be significantly reducing your EDC exposure. To me, the reason that is important is because the level at which this problem is going to be need to be dealt with is not an individual one. It's going to have to be dealt with on a global, systemic level because our biggest exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals comes from our food and water supply. And, you know, there's a giant mound of plastic floating out in the ocean, and that is why your fish that lives in the ocean has plastic in it. 

Erin Stein: Also, apparently sharks have narcotics in their systems now.

Gillian Goddard: Well, if you throw your medication out and it goes into a landfill and then that rains and the water runoff from the landfill goes into a stream and a river.

Erin Stein: Yeah. So, this is sort of the little bit of history that I want to get in there is that no one started out saying, yeah, we're just going to spread toxic chemicals all over the world. We invented these things and we thought they were amazing substances and no one really matched up, is this toxic or not? They were just like, ‘I invented this plastic and it is so useful and we can do all these things with it’ and didn't look at the process of making it and what kinds of stuff were released making it or you know, they made all these products, they all came out, they made life amazing, right? So useful. 

Gillian Goddard: and cheap.

Erin Stein: yes, well that's the big thing is it made things cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap. And now that we're in this place where it is so cheap, companies are making so much money. But now we also have studied and looked at the toxicity and we know now they're bad, but the companies don't want to stop making money. They have become so ubiquitous…

Gillian Goddard: And getting rid of them, in many cases, would be a real challenge. So, my industry, the medical industry…

Erin Stein: I was just going to say when I was in the hospital for my surgery, every single thing is in plastic to keep it sterile, right? So, a million times a day she's ripping plastic off of a plastic thing. And I'm just like, my God, there's so much plastic in the hospital.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, before we had plastic IV bags, they used giant bottles that were glass. The tubing is plastic. It used to be rubber. Then everything is wrapped and sealed in plastic to keep it sterile. Drug bottles are plastic. I remember hearing a story about a family that really got rid of all the plastic in their house. They started going to like food co-ops and you know, like buying in bulk and doing things that most of us don't have the even the resources to do. But they got rid of all the plastic, not just the single-use plastic, all the plastic in their house. And you want to know what the one thing was that they could not get rid of? Plastic pill bottles. The pharmacy did not have any other option for dispensing their medication to them, the pharmacy is legally not allowed, if they took a bottle, like a little jar, the pharmacy is legally not allowed to dispense them their pills in that glass jar. So, the medical system is a huge player in this. And when we talk about, you know, an industry that is already the costs are growing exponentially, and it's an industry that we all interact with, it's a challenging problem.

Erin Stein: It's really, I think three things. One is the toxic sludge created from manufacturing processes, which usually gets dumped somewhere and then pollutes wherever they've dumped it. Then there's the products themselves and the plastics we use shedding microplastics, BPA or phthalates, you know, being absorbed in the body from products, direct exposure. Then the third part is our trash then polluting, as you said, the ocean, the landfill. It's a three-part screw to the earth.

Gillian Goddard: Yep, all of us and all the other living things.

Erin Stein: Yes, we are actively polluting ourselves in multiple ways. And so, as you're saying, we can individually do stuff and feel a little bit better about limiting some of our exposure, but ultimately it has to come through regulation. And I actually just read this fascinating book about serial killers and how they all lived near these industrial plants, spewing toxic vapor into the air it's a theory that it altered people's brain chemistry. It also gave lots of people cancer. Like everyone was not healthy living near these industrial plants. And there is a reason that the Clean Air Act was passed and that these industries were regulated and shut down. It's because it was actively killing people and I feel like we've simply circled back to that type of situation again.

Gillian Goddard: I mean, I think it's as big as that problem. The challenge is, and I alluded to this earlier, is it's really difficult in this situation to collect data. So let me give an example of another similar situation, and then we'll circle back to why that kind of study wouldn't work in this particular case. I had an epidemiology professor who was instrumental in having lead removed from gasoline. And the study that he did was he sampled lead levels in children and then was able to correlate the lead levels with the distance that the children lived from highways. So, if you lived super close to the highway, on average, your lead level would be higher as a child and the further away you live from like a big interstate, the lower your lead levels would be. And so, he could then show that it was the lead in the exhaust from cars on these highways that was raising the lead levels in the children. And by then we knew that lead was not good for kids because we had all the lead paint studies and that kind of thing. So, we already had the data that showed that the lead was a problem and we were able to tie in this case that a specific action and product was causing higher lead levels in these kids. We don't have the equivalent of living near the factory or living near the highway in this situation, everyone is exposed. Everyone is exposed. And so, the challenge that scientists face and that they talk about is if you want to take this data in rats and translate it into a study in humans,

Erin Stein: Right. Right.

Gillian Goddard: You can't even find a placebo group because the background exposure is so high that you can't ethically give the treatment group enough of these chemicals to see whether there is an effect because the background chemical level is too high. There are no unexposed people and that is really limiting our ability to study these things. The other thing that's really limiting our ability to study these things in humans is rightfully, if we have a high suspicion that something is harmful, it is unethical to give it to some people and not to others and watch what happens. And so, then that's when you want to start looking for natural experiments like the lead levels in the kids with the highways, because they've naturally sorted themselves out into groups that are more or less exposed to the thing that we're interested in. And nobody's been able to figure out or devise a way to develop a natural experiment that would be something ethical that we could do.

Erin Stein: However, I think that these substances have been tested enough that we know they're not good in many cases.

Gillian Goddard: I think that the details of what they do in humans at the levels that people are exposed to in real life, it's more, because we talked about this already, it's not so much that we think that high levels of phthalates or BPA or whatever are good for us, but it's difficult to set the threshold. Because that's what we need to do, probably, at this point, is figure out what the threshold is.

Erin Stein: I think this is maybe the bigger issue. It's not just the phthalates. It's not just the BPA. It's everything in combination. So even if you set a level for one of them, what if you're also getting the other 10 things during the day? There was an interesting documentary that Netflix just put out called The Plastic Detox, which I watched. I told Gillian to watch it, but she's too busy, so she hasn't done it yet. But there, it was very interesting. I thought it actually did a very nice job of explaining the endocrine disruption with a nice little visual of how that works.

Gillian Goddard: Not yet, I will. It’s hard to have visuals on podcasts.

Erin Stein: It is, it is, but I thought they did a decent job explaining that. But they feature a scientist who has studied the effect of some of these chemicals on sperm counts specifically. And the documentary was interesting because she did a test case as she says at the end that she's going to use it to try and get a grant to do an actual research study. She used couples who were trying to get pregnant. She tested their blood levels for specific EDCs and then helped them remove a lot of plastic and things out of their home, out of their lives, and then tested their levels again and, of course, also tested sperm count and motility. And it was very interesting, know, anecdotally she did see a lot of improvement in five of the six couples and some of them did go on to have babies can't prove that it was from this obviously I found it at least reassuring that you could affect the level in your blood by removing some things from your home at least you know it it's easy to feel powerless to do anything. I don't think you can drive yourself crazy trying to do all the things. I've personally have tried to remove a lot of plastic. I'm trying to buy only natural fabrics and not wear polyester because who needs to be shedding extra micro plastics. when I go to the grocery store, everything's packaged in plastic. I can't buy food that does not come in plastic. So, I can have glass containers at home and God forbid, do not microwave plastic, people. We've known this for a really long time. Don't do it. It's very bad.

Gillian Goddard: Or leave your plastic water bottle in the car. We've taken similar steps in our house. And when we talk about why, my feeling is it's as much about not contributing more plastic to the plastic waste already in existence in the world and sending a signal to the people, you know, selling us these things that we want non-plastic options.

Erin Stein: Yeah, one of the biggest things I did was plastic bags. I mean, we live in a place where they've now outlawed plastic bags at the grocery store anyway, but even just garbage bags at home. And again, this is something I can afford to do. That's the other piece of this. If you want to make some of these changes, it usually costs money to make these changes, which is another insidious thing about it. But we've switched to all compostable garbage bags so I'm not throwing more plastic bags in the landfill. I stopped using litter liners in the cat boxes because that was just another plastic bag I was throwing out. I switched to a different kind of litter that's more supposedly more sustainably produced but just that one thing made me feel like I was throwing away a lot less plastic, just not throwing out four plastic bags a week. And when we can, we take our other plastic bags and recycle them at Target, whether they do it or not, I don't know. But I'm trying. that's the other thing. mean, all the recycling is kind of a sham, apparently.

Gillian Goddard: I know it's so hard to know. A lot of it, unfortunately, just goes to the landfill.

Erin Stein: Which apparently, we were then shipping to China half the time and they finally didn't want it anymore. And you can't just burn all our trash, everybody. That creates toxic fumes.

Gillian Goddard: The real answer here is that having all these cheap items made us into voracious consumers. And some of the answer is that we need to reconsider our attitude.

Erin Stein: I mean, fast fashion. Don't buy all the polyester shit you see on Instagram. I've done it. I've done it. I've bought the cheap bathing suits and cheap dresses on Instagram. And then I was like, why, why did I do this? Don't do it. Don't do it. It's just made out of plastic. Yeah. And it's not going to last long.

Gillian Goddard: Me too. It is made out of plastic. It's not even that comfortable.

Erin Stein: It's not that comfortable, it's not going to last long. You don't need throw away clothes. You need clothes that will last a long time. We've gotten away from just making quality items. Says this old timer.

Gillian Goddard: I know, sometimes when I talk about this I feel like I sound like a back in my day.

Erin Stein: Back in my day! I mean, we also have plenty of plastic crap as kids.

Gillian Goddard: We did. We did.

Erin Stein: So much but you get older and you realize higher quality items cost a little more money for a reason because they do last a lot longer. And I buy a lot of vintage now. I mean one of the best things is buying vintage stuff online is so much easier and a lot of stuff I buy now is just vintage stuff from 20 years ago. Marc Jacobs, early 2000s, was the best, everybody.

Gillian Goddard: This is an area that people are really concerned about. Every time I write about it, it's like goes to the top of the most popular list. It's interesting to everyone and it's concerning to everyone because it literally affects everyone. More than so many of the other things that we might talk about from a hormonal point of view.

Erin Stein: That's true. This is equal men, women, children, probably cats and dogs. We're just not checking them. We're not checking them for that spoonful of plastic in their brains. 

Gillian Goddard: And we don't even know what it's doing there. If anything, it could just be sitting there inert. It's not like it's in big chunks. 

Erin Stein: Right, it's not like an actual spoon.

Gillian Goddard: It's not like there's a tablespoon somewhere in your head, right?

Erin Stein: It just generally seems not great to have that much extra something in there, not knowing what it's doing. It's the not knowing. And I think...

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, but we don't know. We don't know. Yeah. I think that's what gets at people so much.

Erin Stein: Yes, but our bodies are built to process chemicals to a certain extent. We are built to deal with mild toxic exposures. The earth gives out radon. Our food has formaldehyde. Like, we process chemicals on a regular basis, including low levels of toxic chemicals on a regular basis, just fine. And the concern is if we're attacking ourselves on all fronts all the time with high levels of very toxic things then we're not going to be able to process all of them and it's going to affect things.

Gillian Goddard: Exactly. I think that's exactly right. even if we figure out a way to get some of this plastic out of our environment, out of our food supply, how will we know when we're done? Like, what is the level at which we could get that to that we could be satisfied as a global population that we had done what we needed to do.

Erin Stein: We don't know that yet, but I think we gotta start somewhere.

Gillian Goddard: You're preaching to the choir.

Erin Stein: I saw this when I was Googling some stuff before we had this conversation. know, the BPA in the cans thing, again, in my mind, I know that that was a bad thing. And so now you see cans that say BPA is free and blah, blah, blah.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, linings, but they're still lined in something.

Erin Stein: I did not realize that they are still lined in plastic, just a different kind of plastic, and it might have the same problem. Like, it could have one of the other acronyms in it, and I thought cans were better because they weren't plastic, but they're still plastic. They're lined in plastic. So yeah, that was my little existential crisis that I had.

Gillian Goddard: That's what finally got me to stop drinking diet coke actually. So, there is some data that shows that the more acidic the contents of the can, the more you leach the chemicals out of the plastic into the food. And diet coke is very acidic. So are tomatoes by the way. that is what finally got me to stop drinking Diet Coke was the idea that it was like so acidic and it was leaching plastic out of the can lining.

Erin Stein: Wasn't it coke can like dissolve rust off of...?

Gillian Goddard: No, that didn't bother me that much. [laugh]

Erin Stein: We all choose pick and choose. ⁓ I have my glass Pellegrino bottle that I'm chugging out of. So that's what I do, buy the glass Pellegrino bottles. It's Gillian's fault I drink Pellegrino so it's appropriate for us to discuss that here. It's finally warm enough to go back to the farmer's market, try to buy some produce, not packaged in plastic.

Gillian Goddard: Yep. Yeah. That's what we do now too.

Erin Stein: The other thing I think about a lot is diapers. It's just so much plastic. Full of organic material that then has nowhere to go to break down. It's gross. But I often wonder what percentage of our landfills are diapers?

Gillian Goddard: That's a thought I don't even want to contemplate. I know how many diapers we used to go through when we had kids in diapers

Erin Stein: I know, you go through so many. I've just observed other people and I'm like, my God, that's so much plastic waste. Not that anyone wants to trade in their disposable diapers, which I totally understand. But that's a lot of plastic garbage for creating right there.

Gillian Goddard: One teeny little person.

Erin Stein: For one tiny little person who poops constantly. For a couple of years.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah, usually three on average.

Erin Stein: Yeah, yeah, think about how many diapers it is. And I actually know personally a couple of hearty souls who went with cloth diapers. God bless them. Because that, that is some fortitude right there.

Gillian Goddard: Hahaha!

Erin Stein: I can't say I would have been able to do the same. Add to my list of complaints about this, the ingredients in our cosmetics are not regulated by the FDA.

Gillian Goddard: That is correct.

Erin Stein: And as you often talk about with supplements not being regulated, what we are putting in cosmetics which we apply directly to our skin and to our lips which we eat like lick constantly.

Gillian Goddard: You eat pounds of lipstick over the course of your life.

Erin Stein: Yes. And so, we could at bare bones have some regulations over what crap is going into that. Like Europe does, Europe has so many more substances that they've banned in their products and why don't we just start there?

Gillian Goddard: So, you know my solution to this is just to order European.

Erin Stein: European products but not everyone can afford to do that. Sometimes, but that's pretty rare, I would say. And then you gotta pay for shipping. Or you have to pay to send your child on a trip to get you some. She recently did. 

Gillian Goddard: I didn't pay to send her on the trip to get the cosmetics. Let's be clear. It was a happy accident. 

Erin Stein: But you did pay for it, to be clear. Petroleum Jelly. Vaseline. Thoughts? Is it safe to slather all over yourself?

Gillian Goddard: It is a great emollient. Probably. I don't think we think it isn't. We slather people in it in medicine and it's in a lot of the things that we slather people in like when they have open skin like burns and that.

Erin Stein: I mean its petroleum. Yes. That's why I'm asking.

Gillian Goddard: I think that if it was that awful, we would have data from burn victims that showed how, because when you're talking about caring for a burn victim, you're not putting it on intact skin, obviously. You're putting it on open skin, which is more direct exposure. I mean, the good news about cosmetics, lipstick that we eat, notwithstanding. Our skin actually does provide a pretty good barrier and many of these chemicals are not getting absorbed through our skin in any significant amounts. 

Erin Stein: Well, that's informative. Look at us coming up with something informative right at the end. So endocrine disrupting chemicals, how are we generally getting them? Are we eating and drinking them? Is that the main way they're getting in there? 

Gillian Goddard: Yeah. We're eating them. We get the most, our biggest exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals is the water supply, and food, but really the water supply.

Erin Stein: Do you like these disappointed noises? When we talk about clothing, then we talk about shedding micro plastics, but it's really when you wash them in the washer, you're putting plastic into the water.

Gillian Goddard: Exactly. It's not that you're absorbing microplastics through your skin while you're wearing a polyester shirt. It's that when you wash your polyester shirt, the fabric breaks down and pieces of the fabric go out in your wastewater from your washing machine. And then when that polyester shirt looks like hell and you're ready to get rid of it, even if you donate it, someplace, most often it's still ending up in a landfill and then it's breaking down in the landfill. And we talked about runoff from landfills and that cheery prospect. 

Erin Stein: It's all so cheery, all of it.

Gillian Goddard: And so, yeah, so a lot of times and this is again why it's so difficult to limit our exposure. A lot of our exposure from endocrine disrupting chemicals in the world is not necessarily direct exposure from the things that we are using. It's what happens to those things when we're done using them. So, I just said you're not absorbing much endocrine disrupting chemical is in your cosmetics, but what do you do at the end of the day? You wash those things off and they go down the drain. And some of them probably evaporate into the air too, but you wash those things off, they go down to the drain and they end up in the wastewater. That's why I think it's beneficial to think about reducing these things even in cosmetics. But also, to remember, it's not you directly necessarily putting it on your skin that is going to be the biggest effect that it's going to have. It's going to be when it ends up in the wastewater and then ends up in the water supply.

Erin Stein: That is helpful and unhelpful at the same time.

Gillian Goddard: This is why I think at this point in time, right, at this point in time we can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Erin Stein: You do what you can, but the government's going to have to do some. I say the government because I don't see companies doing it on their own, right? There are some great companies out there doing some stuff. They're generally smaller companies. They're not the big conglomerates. The big conglomerates are making too much money. They're going to have to be forced to change.

Gillian Goddard: I think that's right. I think that's right. And there will need to be some systemic changes in certain types of industries like medicine, where we look for interesting and innovative ways to reduce plastic consumption that doesn't increase costs prohibitively.

Erin Stein: Yeah, I would be very curious what kinds of solutions some probably brilliant young people could come up with to replace all of that and keep things sterile.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah. We have to do what we can and vote our conscience and that includes not just literally voting, which you should do.

Erin Stein: Everybody vote. Register to vote. Make sure you're still registered to vote. Vote.

Gillian Goddard: Yes, vote.

Erin Stein: Write to your representatives. Talk to the government. Say, hey, we don't want to be poisoned all the time. We need regulations, people. I know they're not popular with certain billionaires, but we need them.

Gillian Goddard: Yeah. For some things, they serve an important purpose.

Erin Stein: They do, they do. Yeah, I think this is one of those topics that most people actually agree on and yet we cannot get anything happening for whatever reason.

Gillian Goddard: Also how do you spend your dollars and, you know, sending a message with your buying power?

Erin Stein: Yes, which sometimes feels like it doesn't make a difference, but it can. And if you share with other people and they see these other companies and categories of products taking off and making money, the bigger companies will get in on it.

Gillian Goddard: Collectively it does.

Erin Stein: I don't think we've solved any problems here. And I don't even know how much information we gave you. Some.

Gillian Goddard: I don't think we've solved anything, but it's because there's a lack of information.

Erin Stein: There's a lack of information.

Gillian Goddard: I know, I always have mixed feelings about addressing this topic. I think it's an important one and I think that there's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there and so I think it is important to talk about. It's also just a little bit of a letdown.

Erin Stein: Do all the things you want to do and that you're comfortable with doing that you can afford to do, but…

Gillian Goddard: Don't drive yourself crazy.

Erin Stein: Don't drive yourself insane trying to eradicate every molecule of every chemical because it's not possible. And so, you need to fight your battles where you can. Especially, I want to say especially if you have kids because I've talked about this with my friends who have kids and so much product for children Like the majority of it is plastic. All these food pouches and snack pouches, all the toys, all the little tchotchkes they get at birthday parties. Give them a nice water bottle that's not plastic and consider it a triumph.

Gillian Goddard: When my kids were in the birthday party years, you'll love this on so many levels, we started doing paperback books as party favors instead of the plastic tchotchkes. So, you know, it, for a three-year-old birthday party, a board book of our family favorite Truck, you know, it's only a few dollars a kid. It's not any more expensive. And it just felt like something that, wasn't cluttering up people's houses and wasn't just going to get chucked out and added back to the environment. there are choices we can make, decisions we can make. But at the end of the day, you do what you can do.

Erin Stein: Buy the kids all the books. again, send us your questions. We wanted to do an overview, which I think we've done. Sorry it was so depressing, but I would like in the future to do more of a deep dive into some of these categories. So, if you guys have specific questions about specific chemicals and or products, let us know because then we'll know what to do some homework on. And thanks for listening. We'll try to do one less depressing next.

Gillian Goddard: Thanks for listening.