What do you think?
Rate this book
What Everyone Needs to Know
Children and Environmental Toxins: What Everyone Needs to Know®
More than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed and released into the global environment during the last four decades. Today the World Health Organization attributes more than one-third of all childhood deaths to environmental causes, and as rates of childhood disease skyrocket -- autism, asthma, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and even birth defects -- it raises serious, difficult questions around how the chemical environment is impacting children's health.Children and Environmental What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an accessible guide to understanding and identifying the potential sources of harm in a child's environment. Written by experts in pediatrics and environmental health and formatted in an easy to follow question-and-answer format, it offers parents, care providers, and activists a reliable introduction to a hotly debated topic. As the burdens of environmental toxins and disease continue to defy borders, this book provides a new benchmark to understanding the potential threats in our environment and food. No parent or care provider should be without it.
- GenresNonfictionParenting
232 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 2, 2018
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 9, 2018
One of the great follies of the human condition is not so much a penchant for short-term thinking, but the penchant for readily accepting cognitive dissonance. When it comes to children and toxins (book would be better served to replace ‘environmental’ with ‘manufactured’), such dissonance rears its ugly head and dips it into the sand ala the ostrich. People know about prolonged use of a newfangled product potentially causing health problems. Whether through history or logic, we’ve all absorbed stories of societies hit hard by a health crisis stemming from a previously imagined wonder product turning out to be a double-edged sword.
This axiom is the crux of what Children and Environmental Toxins concerns at its heart. The focus is certainly on the most vulnerable & cherished of all of us – many of the examples hearken to times when everyone alive today was a child in their own right and they partook in the collective dissonance. People’s capacity to ignore caution in favor of immediate gratification is nothing new, but what is new is a host of manufactured items containing a host of possible future health issues, those being in the form of added chemicals. Certainly, chemicals are added to products because they tend to solve an immediate problem with said products (ex. durability, aesthetics, singular health factors). Yet it is that immediate gratification from immediate solution, coupled with the dissonance needed to ignore the long-term angel on the shoulder, which gives this book its weight and salience.
Children and Environmental Toxins functions as a kind of one-stop-shop for a [hopefully] rigorously referenced dictionary of manufactured toxins and their adverse effects on children. Being smaller yet requiring more energy input & production for that size, children experience magnified effects from chemical brews not tested for their long-term impacts. Indeed, the long-term aspect thematically rules throughout the novel. Short-term wallops are too easy for even the most naïve among us to ignore. But the long-term, slowly burning, changing-the-cellular-foundation gradualism that wonder chemicals force us into dissonance over is the real challenge. The Landrigans are experts on what the case studies have revealed. Beyond highlighting the findings, they often suggest remedies that achieve much the same results the wonder chemicals advertise, with many doing so on the cheaper.
Nevertheless, the book reads out much like an FAQ you’d find at a website such as the Mayo clinic. To spend $15+ on a book that is little more than a tightly summarized set of blurbs may not be everyone’s cup of fair-trade tea. Flipping through the pages, I felt as though I was reading a semester of class notes from an A+ biochemist undergrad. Certainly, C & ETs is empirically taut, but even so, it feels unworthy of its price tag.
My biggest gripe, however, comes in the execution of sum total of the book. The execution forgoes sharpening of the headsman’s axe – by that I mean a lack of ranking the severity of the issues. The sheer amount of oversight expected by the Landrigans would be ridiculous if envisaged for every family – you’d need a paid servant to oversee all the workarounds, or at least forgoing sleep. Since that isn’t happening for the vast majority of the reading audience, a prioritization scheme would have been prudent. For instance: I imagine lead exposure is a far worse predicament than noxious houseplants, but there’s nothing in the pages to tell me otherwise, nor is there any measuring of words by the authors to even indicate severity between items. Sometimes there’s a lack of quantification of exposure amounts for certain harmful chemicals, a lot of hand waiving over warranted specifics, and even some backpedaling of severity (as long as one is not a smoker). Such languor in the prose is how experts can get unfairly labelled as alarmist, all because they did not take due care in laying out an overarching story instead of regurgitating abstracts.
This axiom is the crux of what Children and Environmental Toxins concerns at its heart. The focus is certainly on the most vulnerable & cherished of all of us – many of the examples hearken to times when everyone alive today was a child in their own right and they partook in the collective dissonance. People’s capacity to ignore caution in favor of immediate gratification is nothing new, but what is new is a host of manufactured items containing a host of possible future health issues, those being in the form of added chemicals. Certainly, chemicals are added to products because they tend to solve an immediate problem with said products (ex. durability, aesthetics, singular health factors). Yet it is that immediate gratification from immediate solution, coupled with the dissonance needed to ignore the long-term angel on the shoulder, which gives this book its weight and salience.
Children and Environmental Toxins functions as a kind of one-stop-shop for a [hopefully] rigorously referenced dictionary of manufactured toxins and their adverse effects on children. Being smaller yet requiring more energy input & production for that size, children experience magnified effects from chemical brews not tested for their long-term impacts. Indeed, the long-term aspect thematically rules throughout the novel. Short-term wallops are too easy for even the most naïve among us to ignore. But the long-term, slowly burning, changing-the-cellular-foundation gradualism that wonder chemicals force us into dissonance over is the real challenge. The Landrigans are experts on what the case studies have revealed. Beyond highlighting the findings, they often suggest remedies that achieve much the same results the wonder chemicals advertise, with many doing so on the cheaper.
Nevertheless, the book reads out much like an FAQ you’d find at a website such as the Mayo clinic. To spend $15+ on a book that is little more than a tightly summarized set of blurbs may not be everyone’s cup of fair-trade tea. Flipping through the pages, I felt as though I was reading a semester of class notes from an A+ biochemist undergrad. Certainly, C & ETs is empirically taut, but even so, it feels unworthy of its price tag.
My biggest gripe, however, comes in the execution of sum total of the book. The execution forgoes sharpening of the headsman’s axe – by that I mean a lack of ranking the severity of the issues. The sheer amount of oversight expected by the Landrigans would be ridiculous if envisaged for every family – you’d need a paid servant to oversee all the workarounds, or at least forgoing sleep. Since that isn’t happening for the vast majority of the reading audience, a prioritization scheme would have been prudent. For instance: I imagine lead exposure is a far worse predicament than noxious houseplants, but there’s nothing in the pages to tell me otherwise, nor is there any measuring of words by the authors to even indicate severity between items. Sometimes there’s a lack of quantification of exposure amounts for certain harmful chemicals, a lot of hand waiving over warranted specifics, and even some backpedaling of severity (as long as one is not a smoker). Such languor in the prose is how experts can get unfairly labelled as alarmist, all because they did not take due care in laying out an overarching story instead of regurgitating abstracts.
October 30, 2022
I sought out this book (incorrectly) assuming the author, highly lauded and responsible for the removal of lead in paint and gasoline in the U.S., would be a reliable authority on the subject matter. This couldn’t haven’t been further from the truth.
There were several verifiably false claims sprinkled throughout the book - with of course no direct references to said claims. On page 126 he purports “…organic produce is grown without any pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers.” On the contrary, organic produce absolutely is grown with pesticides - just different ones than non-USDA organic (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...)
Instead of directly citing these false claims, there’s a list of resources and the end of the book that don’t correlate to any specific statements he makes. …It’s giving college paper due at midnight so I copied and pasted related PubMed articles to my works cited list at 11:59…
Some of the claims made in the book are “true”, but wildly misleading. One worth noting is on page 114 “The W.H.O. has recently concluded that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen…” I find this an odd factual inclusion when this specific study (not cited or elaborated on in the book) tested if glyphosate at ANY level, even unrealistic high levels, is capable of causing cancer. Whereas fifteen other studies, including another W.H.O. study, all agreed that glyphosate used in a normal agriculture manner doesn’t pose a human health risk. (https://geneticliteracyproject.org/20...)
Overall the book is entirely alarmist while giving the impression of a concerned subject matter expert. In reality the author is not a toxicologist and he lacks a basic understanding of most of the “toxic effects” of chemicals mentioned in this book. It’s simply a list of synthetic chemicals and each has its own blurb that mentions vague possible adverse health outcomes based on an unknown exposure levels. “Levels detectable in blood” must be the most used phrase in the book. What levels? What effects? Saying synthetic chemical X is a human carcinogen is about as helpful as saying UV rays from the sun are a carcinogen. Is it safe to ever go outside your home during daylight hours? This book would lead you to believe it’s not.
Aside from the information specifically about lead (the only chemical that he actually mentions specific blood levels related to specific exposures) there is not much I found valuable. Seeing as how the book was published in 2016 and not 1980, none of that information was new or informative either.
Hard pass on this book as it’s written. I very much hope a toxicologist rewrites it with specific concerns related to actual exposure levels of various chemicals.
There were several verifiably false claims sprinkled throughout the book - with of course no direct references to said claims. On page 126 he purports “…organic produce is grown without any pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers.” On the contrary, organic produce absolutely is grown with pesticides - just different ones than non-USDA organic (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...)
Instead of directly citing these false claims, there’s a list of resources and the end of the book that don’t correlate to any specific statements he makes. …It’s giving college paper due at midnight so I copied and pasted related PubMed articles to my works cited list at 11:59…
Some of the claims made in the book are “true”, but wildly misleading. One worth noting is on page 114 “The W.H.O. has recently concluded that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen…” I find this an odd factual inclusion when this specific study (not cited or elaborated on in the book) tested if glyphosate at ANY level, even unrealistic high levels, is capable of causing cancer. Whereas fifteen other studies, including another W.H.O. study, all agreed that glyphosate used in a normal agriculture manner doesn’t pose a human health risk. (https://geneticliteracyproject.org/20...)
Overall the book is entirely alarmist while giving the impression of a concerned subject matter expert. In reality the author is not a toxicologist and he lacks a basic understanding of most of the “toxic effects” of chemicals mentioned in this book. It’s simply a list of synthetic chemicals and each has its own blurb that mentions vague possible adverse health outcomes based on an unknown exposure levels. “Levels detectable in blood” must be the most used phrase in the book. What levels? What effects? Saying synthetic chemical X is a human carcinogen is about as helpful as saying UV rays from the sun are a carcinogen. Is it safe to ever go outside your home during daylight hours? This book would lead you to believe it’s not.
Aside from the information specifically about lead (the only chemical that he actually mentions specific blood levels related to specific exposures) there is not much I found valuable. Seeing as how the book was published in 2016 and not 1980, none of that information was new or informative either.
Hard pass on this book as it’s written. I very much hope a toxicologist rewrites it with specific concerns related to actual exposure levels of various chemicals.
November 19, 2021
A really good book for any parent to read if they wish to raise their child in a way as free from as many toxins as possible.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews