Green authors put their bodies to the test

Geoff Nixon, CTV.ca News

Published: 2009-05-18

Link: ctv.ca

Rick Smith says it all started out as a joke.

The executive director of Environmental Defence, and his colleague, president Bruce Lourie, were trying to think of a way to demonstrate the dangers of environmental pollutants in everyday life.

"One of us said: 'Why don't we experiment on ourselves?'" Smith explained to CTV.ca in a recent telephone interview from Ottawa.

"And then the other person said: 'Yeah. Why don't we?'"

That's when the joke became a dare and the two environmentalists moved towards "methodically trying to increase toxic chemicals in our body," Smith said.

More specifically, they set out to start using everyday consumer products known to contain toxic ingredients, to see how the level of toxicity in their bodies would change.

The pair have since published their findings in a recently released book, "Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health" (Random House).

The experiment took place in March of last year and the rules were simple.

"Our experiments had to mimic everyday life, because obviously it would be very easy to raise your mercury levels if you were willing to chug a bottle of mercury," Smith said.

For two days, the men lived in the same Toronto condo.

They read, they watched TV and played some Guitar Hero, the video game that simulates being a frontline guitarist in a rock band.

Both men left the condo each night.

During the day, Smith showered and shaved with consumer products he didn't normally use, he drank coffee in a polycarbonate cup and ate meals that were heated in a microwaveable container.

Lourie ate tuna at every meal and drank tea.

Shortly into the first day, the carpet and couch at the condo were treated by a carpet cleaning company.

"All of the things we were doing were everyday activities that millions of people do every day," Smith said.

They hired a nurse to take regular blood samples on both days, and they collected regular urine samples to send to a lab at the end.

Their results were eye-opening.

Phthalate levels in the test subjects jumped as much as 22 times above normal levels, just by using common consumer personal care products.

Levels of bisphenol A, a chemical that Health Canada recently banned in baby bottles, increased more than seven fold, which the testers linked to eating canned food from a microwaveable, polycarbonate plastic container.

Triclosan, a chemical used in antibacterial products, jumped 2,900 times above its previous levels in Smith's body.

And Lourie managed to double his mercury level in only two days by gorging on tuna.

"We thought that there would be an increase, but the scale of the increase really caught us off guard," Smith said.

The toxins the two authors found in their blood are "not floating around in the air, are not coming out of big sewer pipes draining into the local lake or river," Smith said.

Instead, these toxins are more covert, lurking indoors, inside homes and offices, where Smith said Canadians today spend about 90 per cent of their time.

That's why he and Lourie believe it is so key for the public to know how critical it is to make greener choices when it comes to their health.

"Our experiments show that what people use in the home, what people buy...these choices can dramatically impact on levels of pollution in the human body," he said.

"If people start making different choices, better choices, they can very quickly, almost instantaneously start to reduce their exposure and their body levels of these things."

Another theme of Smith's book is how these chemicals affect the health of children, which is why the authors put a rubber duck on the front cover of their book.

"You couldn't ask for a friendlier, more familiar household item chewed on by kids across the country on a daily basis," said Smith, of the rubber duck.

"And it turns out that your average rubber duck is full of phthalates, which is a known, hormone-disrupting chemical."

Smith said the problem is "many of these friendly, innocuous things that fill our children's lives have not been properly safety tested and are full of toxic chemicals."