David Steinman and Dave Asprey examine pesticide contamination in drinking water, focusing on Louisiana's Cancer Alley, where 1.3 million residents are exposed to atrazine and other chemicals. Atrazine, an herbicide used on sugarcane, persists through filtration and disrupts hormones even at legal levels, causing hermaphroditic development in frogs.
What are the worst sources of pesticides for adults and kids?
One of the worst sources can be your drinking water. And I want to talk about that for a moment because folks may not realize that's a constant and chronic exposure. And let me just give you a few real life examples. I run a nonprofit group called Healthy Living Foundation. We're very active in California and enforcing consumer laws, and we also work in other states. We work, for example, in Louisiana in Cancer Alley. And Cancer Alley, if you're for your listeners who might not know, is a stretch of river that's about 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. There are about 200 chemical plants in that stretch. They're all along the river. And it's primarily the chemical plants tend to be concentrated in black communities. If you look at the water quality, which we have for about 1.3 million people living in Louisiana alone, their water every day contains residues of a pesticide called atrazine, another called Simazine. It will also contain phthalates, benzene, hexachlorocyclopentadine, and the the list goes on. Those are some of the major ones we found. So you're drinking water. Let's take atrazine, for example. Atrazine is an herbicide. The reason why it's used, why it's being found in the water in Louisiana, for example, is it's being sprayed on all the sugar cane that lines the banks of the Mississippi and that runs off into the surface water. And then when it's delivered to the 1.3 million Louisianans who get their water from the suppliers, it's not well filtered. And levels of atrazine remain even after the filtration. Atrazine is what we call an endocrine disrupting chemical, a big one. It's huge. It's huge.
I posted a while ago on Instagram about a study that found that the amount of atrazine that is legally allowed in water is enough to turn frogs into hermaphrodites. And I've even seen RFK Jr talk about that. He's running for president, as most listeners know, although there's an almost media blackout lately where they don't talk about him, even though he's got polling numbers that put him up there in the top three. And he's been talking about something in the early 90s happened in the environment. And since that time, incidence of everything bad in our children has gone up and obesity has gone up. And it's like we have enough science to figure out what it is. And he says it's likely one of the eight big polluting chemicals, and I think atrazine is pretty high up there.
