Hormones. We all know what hormones do – they make men masculine and females feminine. They make us fertile, support pregnancy, make us crave chocolate, put pimples on our teenager's chin, and bring about The Change. How about those first copies of Playboy you find underneath your son's bed? What's at work here? Hormones. Or one reason it's harder for women to lose weight than it is for their husbands? Hormones. Hormones play our lives like instruments, constantly influencing and fascinating us. Hormones tell our bodies when to start developing breasts or producing sperm. Hormones direct the cells in the fetus, guiding them to become cells of the reproductive organs, cells of the brain or the various glands, cells of all the particular tissues of our bodies.

Betsy says she's living in hormonal hell. "My daughter is picking fights then locking herself in her room like she does every month right before her period. My sister is staying with us and she's an emotional wreck because she just had a miscarriage. I'm starting to have hot flashes and my doctor wants me to take hormones because my mother had osteoporosis. I sit down to relax with a magazine and I'm reading that maybe I should take testosterone to restore my fading sexual desire. I'm beginning to think hormones rule my life!"

In a way, Betsy is right. Hormones (which are named from a Greek word meaning "to urge on") do exert a powerful influence over many facets of our growth and development, our sexual and reproductive capability, our behavior and intelligence, our energy, and memory and aging. Hormones regulate puberty, fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. There's a reason the ancient Greeks called the main female hormone "estrogen." The word estrus – when a female animal goes into heat – comes from oistros, meaning "frenzy."

When our hormones send us into a frenzy, they can do more than urge us to sidle up to that cute cowboy at the bar or to eat another handful of chocolate-covered almonds. Hormonal imbalance can contribute to diseases like endometriosis and breast or prostate cancer. However, it's not only our natural hormones that can wreak havoc with our lives. Sometimes the pharmaceutical hormones we take for birth control, fertility, and to stop those @#! hot flashes can also disturb our hormonal balance, leading to health problems. As if this wasn't already confusing enough, now there's another aspect to hormones that we must learn to take into consideration if we're going to stay healthy ourselves as well as raise healthy families.

Certain man-made chemicals, many of which are found in the household products we use regularly and in the foods we consume every day, are under suspicion. We are exposed to these compounds through the air we breathe, the food and water we ingest or absorb through our skin. Called Hormone Disruptors, these particular compounds can mimic our natural hormones, creating imbalance, or they can alter the way our natural hormones are supposed to work in the body.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Certain chemical compounds can act like hormones once they get inside our bodies. This means that our health is now influenced by hormonal factors that come from outside our bodies. Therefore, in order to have a thorough understanding of your own hormonal situation or any hormonal treatments, you now need to take into account your exposure to hormone disruptors. This information is particularly important if you are planning to become pregnant, are caring for young children, or are thinking about taking birth control pills, fertility treatments, or Hormone Replacement Therapy. It appears as though exposure to hormones, particularly estrogen or estrogenic compounds (or others not yet studied), can affect many of the factors that are involved in your child's growth and development. Even very low dosages of estrogenic chemicals can irreversibly alter the programming that takes place in the womb that will ultimately play a major role in how your child's body, mind, and emotions will turn out in later life.

Who else cares?
The question of hormone disruptors has become so important that Congress mandated the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to examine the issue of hormone-disrupting chemicals. Over 500 studies are in progress on different aspects of hormone disruption.

Hormone disruption has become such an important issue in the U.S. and throughout the world that various groups and agencies have made the study of endocrine-disrupting chemicals a top priority. Congress has begun by mandating the EPA to come up with ways to identify and test hormone-related toxicants which are already on the market and in the environment for their potential to disrupt the endocrine system. The EPA responded by creating EDSTAC (Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee, see Chapter 12) in October, 1996. An estimated $5 billion will be needed to carry out EDSTAC's recommendations. Endocrine disruption is one of the five priority research areas for the Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources within the Executive Office of President. In other words, our government is taking the threat of hormone disruption very very seriously.

World-wide interest in the topic has given rise to a number of gatherings of eminent scientists and researchers. In 1991, a group of international experts gathered to look at the problems which hormone disruptors pose for all life on earth. They concluded, in the Wingspread Statement: "We estimate with confidence that: Some of the developmental impairments reported in humans today are seen in adult offspring of parents exposed to synthetic hormone disruptors released into the environment."

Another gathering in 1995 in Erice, Sicily, for a work session on endocrine-disrupting chemicals, issued a statement which said (in small part): "A variety of chemical challenges in humans and animals early in life can lead to profound and irreversible abnormalities in brain development at exposure levels to that do not produce permanent effects in an adult." The Erice consensus statement continues: "Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can undermine neurological and behavioral development. . . and may be expressed as reduced intellectual capacity and social adaptability as well as impaired responsiveness to environmental demands," all of which can "change the character of human societies and destabilize wildlife populations."