How Fast Can Children Detoxify from PCBs?

Though mothers continue to expose their babies to toxic pollutants, breast is still always best. But say earlier in life, we were, God forbid, eating the Standard American diet and end up breastfeeding a certain amount of toxic waste to our child. If from then on out, after the birth or weaning of our child, we swear we’ve learned our lesson, we want to start a fresh page in our lives, start to eat healthy, and feed our new child only the best. How long might it take our children to shed the industrial toxins they may have gotten from us in the womb or from the breast?

A recent study followed a cohort of children exposed at birth to PCBs from their mothers tested at age 8 and then again at age 12 to get a sense of the half life of these toxins within the body. Depending on which chemical pollutant the estimated half lives ranged from about 4 years to 9 years, so if our children eat a healthy diet, don’t go play around in any toxic waste dumps, by the time they’re between 20 and 45 years of age they will have eliminated more than 95% of the PCB inheritance we gave them at birth.

A problem they found in doing the study, though, is that they had to throw out a lot of data, exclude children who had obvious PCB reuptakes because their levels were even higher at age 12 than 8, so regardless what kind of start our children got, it’s never too late to improve our families’ diets to prevent additional intakes of these pollutants into their bodies.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Kerry Skinner.

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Images thanks to: hall.chris25, Stephen Cannon via flickr. Images have been modified.