What Can We Learn From Mennonites’ Pee Samples?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/13484951@N00/4839739320/">Eric Parker</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For an industrial chemical released into the environment at more than 1 million pounds a year, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that bisphenol A also shows up in humans. Four years ago, researchers discovered that BPA, which is used in plastic manufacturing, was present in nearly 93 percent of the US population’s urine.

So it’s disturbing that a growing body of scientific literature suggests that BPA disrupts the body’s hormones. Exposure to the chemical has been associated with risk for obesity, breast cancer, prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, infertility, diabetes, thyroid dysfunction, and neurological problems.

But the worst part for researchers can be trying to narrow down confounding factors and figure out how BPA makes its way into the body. If these chemicals are everywhere at once—in can linings, soft plastic, as well as leaching into the air and food—how can we even begin to study exposure?

One way is to study people whose lives are isolated from the normal barrage of potential sources. Today, University of Rochester and Mount Sinai Medical Center researchers published a pilot study in journal Neurotoxicology that was conducted with 10 pregnant women from an Old Order Mennonite community in upstate New York. Researchers hypothesized that because Old Order Mennonites—who, similar to the Amish, eschew modern technology—eat more fresh, home-grown foods, don’t use pesticides, and keep personal-care-product and automobile use to a minimum, their levels of industrial chemical exposure would be lower. They were right: Results showed that the median BPA level in the women’s urine was nearly four times lower than the national number. 

There are lots of ways to look at these results. One of them, as the Rochester researchers concluded, is the need to emphasize home environment and lifestyle factors in the discussion about exposure to industrial chemicals. Avoiding canned and prepackaged foods, they argue, would be helpful. So would eating organic.

Of course, preaching organic alone hardly addresses the larger issues of social inequality and outsized environmental harms. Earlier this year, a study published in Environmental Health found that concentrations of BPA were 54 percent higher for children who came from families that received emergency food support than for children from families that didn’t. Under circumstances like these, telling people to quit cans and eat organic seems about as effective as telling people living near the equator to quit T-shirts and wear more sweaters. Banning BPA, on the other hand, seems like it could significantly decrease exposure. It’s too bad the FDA still thinks it’s okay to keep BPA in your food.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate