Environmental toxins may decrease child IQ
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 09, 2014 10:16 AM

Thanks to industrialization, our world is full of toxins. From flame retardants to lead, American households are full of (mostly) small amounts of a variety of chemicals. While parents may not think about such chemicals because they are present in miniscule amounts, those little bits add up, and can have a negative impact on kids. Bruce Lanphear is an environmental health expert from Simon Fraser University who has been studying prior research on chemical exposure and child IQ. His findings suggest that all the toxins floating around the air or in our food could decrease the intelligence of kids. 

In a presentation video he co-produced and shared at an environmental health conference in Ottawa, Canada, Lanphear laid out exactly how harmful various chemicals are for kids.

Chemical cocktail, neat please
Lanphear's video, called "Little Things Matter," focused on six toxins: mercury (exposure through eating fish), organophosphate pesticides (exposure through food), lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) (a common chemical flame retardant) and bisphenol A (BPA). According to the video, this is percentage of the U.S. child population exposed to these chemicals:

• Mercury: 89 percent
• OP pesticides: 83 percent
• Lead: 100 percent
• PCBs: 100 percent
• PBDEs: 100 percent
• BPA: 96 percent

Lanphear noted that exposure to these chemicals doesn't happen in isolation, meaning that most kids have a bit of all of them running through their blood streams.

Impact on intellect
Though most kids are exposed to toxins at low levels, the chemicals can still cause harm. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that no level of lead exposure is safe. What's more, Lanphear's research revealed that the more exposure pregnant mothers had to the various chemicals, the lower their child's IQ would be. For example, if a pregnant woman is exposed to 100 parts per billion of PBDEs, her child's IQ will drop by 5 points. Just 75 ppb of OP pesticides also decreases IQ by 5 points. The greater the exposure, the worse the damage. 

Once exposure occurs, the damage on intellect is permanent. As such, children who experience high amounts of toxins prenatally won't reach peak IQ development, causing them to fall behind peers who had less exposure. What's more, toxins can impact intelligence on a larger scale, causing a shift that puts more children on the challenged end of the IQ spectrum and fewer on the gifted end.

Lanphear urges that the way we regulate chemicals should change. Companies should be required to prove the chemicals they use aren't harmful before they use them.