CHAPTER TWELVE
Causes Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution
For every summer of my childhood and my teenage years, I was banished from my home in suburban London to a place that seemed as alien to me as the rings of Saturn. My dad had been born in a wooden farmhouse on a mountain in the Swiss Alps. “You must go to the farm,” my father yelled, “it will teach you how to be a man!” And so, for six weeks of the year, I would be woken up every morning by the crowing of a cockerel, in a fog of deep confusion, in the tiny room my father had shared as a kid with his four brothers.
The first summer I spent alone with my Swiss grandparents was when I was nine years old. I learned that all through their lives, they had mostly eaten food that they had grown, raised, or killed themselves. They had a huge garden, where they planted their own fruit and vegetables, and they raised their own animals for meat. But when they put their food on the table in front of me, I stared at it and struggled to recognize that it was even edible. Back home, my mother and my other grandmother were working-class Scottish women, and they had raised me on a diet of chips, fried food, supermarket-bought processed meals, and vast amounts of Kinder Egg chocolate. We got a microwave when I was about seven, and from that point on I lived primarily on radiated pizza and zapped French fries. So for the first few weeks I was in Switzerland, I pleaded for chips, pizza, anything that I saw as food, and I refused to eat what my grandmother prepared. “Ce n’est pas nourriture!” I said sincerely: “It’s not food.”
My grandparents were baffled. One day my grandmother caved in and took me into the city several hours away for McDonald’s. She didn’t order anything for herself, and she watched me eat my Big Mac and fries with a look of compassionate disgust. Years later, in Las Vegas, I stumbled one day upon a very mentally unwell homeless person who was eating rotting maggot-filled food from the garbage behind the Rio casino. I realized my facial expression was exactly the same as my grandmother’s had been that day in the McDonald’s in Zurich.
In the two generations that had passed from my grandparents to me, there had been a dramatic transformation in one of the most basic elements of being a human—what we put into our bodies for fuel. All over the world I interviewed experts who said that we all know this change has been bad for our waistlines and our hearts, but we have been neglecting another key effect: it is stealing large parts of our ability to pay attention.
Dale Pinnock is one of the best-known nutritionists in Britain, and when we sat down together for a meal in London, I tried not to look at the juicy hamburgers on the menu, and ordered tofu and vegetables instead, just to impress him. He told me that if you want to understand why so many of us are struggling to focus, you might want to think about it this way: “If you put shampoo into a car engine, you’re not going to scratch your head when the thing conks out,” he said. Yet every day, all over the Western world, we are putting into our bodies substances “which are so far removed from what was intended for human fuel.” Achieving sustained attention, he said, is a physical process that requires your body to be able to do certain things. So if you disrupt your body—by depriving it of the nutrients it needs, or by pumping it full of pollutants—your ability to pay attention will also be disrupted.
Dale, and other experts on this question I spent time with across the world, went on to outline three broad ways in which how we eat now is harming our focus. The first is that we currently eat a diet that causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes. If you eat (say) a Twinkie, he said, your “blood sugar is going through the roof, and then crashing back down again. That’s going to affect how you can actually physically focus, because if your energy is through the floor, you’re not going to be able to give things your full attention.” But most of us now start the day with the equivalent of a Twinkie, though we don’t realize it. “Think about that typical pattern. People will eat maybe a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast in the morning. It’s usually Frosties and white bread.” Because there’s very little fiber in there, glucose—which gives you energy—“will be released very, very rapidly. So your blood sugar goes really high, really quickly, which is great—for about twenty minutes.” Then “it crashes down, and when it crashes down, that’s when you’re knackered,” and at this point “you get brain fog.”
When that happens, you sit at your desk and you struggle to think. Your child experiences that crash sitting at school, and she isn’t able to listen to the teacher. This is where “you have very, very low energy, and you constantly feel like you need a pick-me-up…. That is the blood sugar crashing.” When this happens, you and your kid want more sugary-carby treats in order to get another short burst of focus. “If every mealtime you’re consuming those cheap, shitty carbohydrates, then you’re going to be going on that roller coaster over and over again.” He added that if you’re consuming those kinds of foods with caffeine, the effect on blood sugar is exaggerated even further: “If you had a croissant on its own, your blood sugar will obviously spike, but if you had it with a coffee, it would spike even higher, and you would get a much more aggressive crash.” These spikes and crashes take place throughout the day, leaving us so depleted that we can’t focus well for long stretches. He said that all this—shifting metaphor slightly—is “like putting rocket fuel into a mini. It would just burn out and bust very quickly—because it can’t handle that. But put in the petrol it’s designed to take, and it’ll go along nicely.”
There is such a strong scientific consensus that our current diets cause these energy crashes that the British National Health Service’s carefully fact-checked official website warns about it. So, Dale said, if we want to improve our kids’ focus and attention, our first step should be to “stop feeding them fucking Coke for breakfast and a bowl of sugar and milk. Try giving them proper food first.” If we do, he said, we’ll see rapid results, because “the developing brain is so responsive to change.” (He later explained that, at the moment, parents have to fight against an army of advertisers trying to get their kids to eat badly, and a food-supply system that is designed to hack our weaknesses—I’ll come to that soon.)
The second way in which our diets affect our focus is that most of us now eat in a way that deprives us of the nutrients we need for our brains to develop and function fully. For almost all of our history, human beings ate, roughly, like my grandparents—they consumed fresh food that they knew the origin of. As the great food writer Michael Pollan, who’s a big influence on Dale, has explained, in the two generations between them and me, food went through a profound degeneration. In the mid-twentieth century there was a rapid move from fresh food toward precooked, processed food that was sold in supermarkets and created in order to be reheated. This food had to be prepared for sale in a completely different way. It was pumped full of stabilizers and preservatives to make sure it didn’t go bad as it sat on supermarket shelves, and this industrial process has, it turns out, stripped food of a lot of its nutritional value.
Then, as we became more accustomed to food that was radically different from what had gone before, the food industry began to find more and more sophisticated ways to directly target our primitive pleasure centers. They pumped our foods full of sugars in quantities that never occur in nature, and trans fats, and various unprecedented new inventions. In the U.S. and Britain, most of what we eat now falls into the category of “ultra-processed food”—which is, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, so removed from anything in nature that it’s very hard to figure out what the original ingredients even were.
There’s some uncertainty about precisely how this has affected our focus, but we have some pretty strong clues. Since the 1970s there have been several scientific studies designed to figure out what happens to your attention when you change your diet. To give one example, in 2009 a team of Dutch scientists took a group of twenty-seven children who had been identified as having trouble focusing, and they split them into two groups. Fifteen of them were assigned to an “eliminationist” diet, which meant they couldn’t consume the junk most of us eat every day—preservatives, additives, synthetic dyes—and so instead they had to eat the kind of food my grandparents would have recognized. The other twelve carried on eating the usual Western diet. The team then monitored them for several weeks to see what happened. It turned out that more than 70 percent of the kids who cut out the preservatives and dyes improved their ability to pay attention, and the average improvement was a remarkable 50 percent.
But this was a small study—so the same team decided to follow up. This time, they took a hundred children, and they did the experiment again, following kids over five weeks. Once again, it turned out that most of the kids who stuck to the eliminationist diet saw a big improvement in their attention and focus, and more than half got dramatically better.
The scientists doing these studies have mostly been investigating the notion that these kids can’t focus because they are allergic to something in our everyday diets. That’s possible. But their experiments seem to me more likely to fit with this wider way of thinking that I was learning about: that when you consume the kind of foods we evolved to eat, your brain will function better. In New York, I went for breakfast with Dr. Drew Ramsay, who’s one of the pioneers of “nutritional psychiatry”—a new field that is teasing out the connection between the way we eat and our psychological challenges. He said if anyone doubts these insights, he would ask them where “they think attention comes from…. The brain gets built from foods. So there’s that very fundamental connection.” Your brain, he told me, can only grow and thrive if it gets a broad range of key nutrients. To give one well-studied example, if you eat a diet that’s deprived of omega-3s—which are largely found in fish—your brain will suffer. And it’s not good enough to replace these foods with supplements—your body absorbs nutrients much more effectively from real food than from capsules.
The third reason our food harms our focus is different. Our current diets aren’t just lacking in what we need—they also actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains almost like drugs. For example, in 2007 a group of scientists in Southampton in Britain got 297 normal kids, who were either three years old or between eight and nine, and they split them into two groups. One group was given a drink containing common food additives that appear regularly in our diets, and the other group was given a drink that didn’t contain them. They were then monitored to see how they behaved. The kids who drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive. The evidence for this was strong and decisive enough that in the aftermath of this discovery, many European countries banned these dyes—but the U.S. regulators refused to, and they are still being consumed every day in some of the country’s most popular cereals and snacks. I wondered if this could help to explain some of the gap in ADHD rates between Europe and the U.S.
Dale told me that if you want to understand what’s really going on here, you should look out across the world at the places where people are physically and mentally fitter than we are, with lower levels of diagnosed ADHD and dementia. If you do that, he said, at first it’ll seem puzzling, because the diets they eat are actually very different—some of them are heavy on fish, some have very little fish; some have a lot of plants, some don’t have many plants; some have lots of carbohydrates and some have none at all. If you’re looking for a magic ingredient, you won’t find it. But “there’s one thing that unifies every single one of them. They’re all leaving out the crap that’s making us sick in the first place. They’re all leaving out the refined carbohydrates, the processed food, the junk oils. They’re all building their foundations on whole foods…. That’s the key. That’s the magic bullet—just go back to whole foods. Foods as they were originally intended.” He quoted Michael Pollan, who says we should eat only food that our grandparents would have recognized as food, and we should shop primarily around the outer edges of the supermarket—the fruit and veg at the front, and the meat and fish at the back. The stuff in the middle, he warned, isn’t really food at all.
Yet instead of promoting healthy food to children, we often push the worst food on them. In Boston another nutritional psychiatrist, Dr. Umadevi Naidoo, told me that a few years before, the funding for school lunches in the U.S. had been cut, and “the food companies moved in and provided vending machines.” Now, “the obvious connection is that if they’re getting candy bars and cookies, which were processed,” there will “definitely” be a link to the rise in attention problems in children. These reasons—and many more—are why Professor Joel Nigg, the ADHD expert I interviewed in Portland, has written: “A sea change is under way…. If you think your child’s ADHD may have something to do with food, science now agrees with you.”
I liked all the people I was meeting—but part of me felt really uncomfortable as I had these conversations. So many of my emotions are tied up with the foods that they were explaining to me are focus-killers. I was raised to find comfort in unhealthy food. I pine for it when I feel down. As I reflected on how this diet might be affecting me, I started to think again about my time in Provincetown. There are no fast-food chains there—no McDonald’s! No KFC! Not even Burger King! There’s only a single pizza place, Spiritus Pizza. So for three months, I ate almost nothing but healthy, fresh food—which is two months and thirty days longer than at any other point in my life, other than those long Swiss summers. I wondered if that too had played a role in why I focused so easily and so well there.
As I investigated all this, I kept thinking about the last time I ever saw my Swiss grandmother. She was in her mid-eighties, and we walked up her mountain together, with her walking faster than me. She led me into her huge garden, and she tended to it—ripping out weeds, observing the progress of her carrots and leeks—while her chickens scratched freely all around us. Then, with brisk hand movements, she picked out the food we were going to eat together that night, and I watched her cook it. To her, this was as natural as breathing. To me, I realize now, it should have been a revelation.
Yet I can imagine presenting this evidence to people in a way that reeks of cruel optimism. You can picture Instagram influencers taking these points and posting: Look! Just change what you eat and your focus will return! I did it! Now you can too! But the truth is that this—like so much of what I was learning about for this book—is primarily a structural problem. Nobody I know has a mountain and a farm like my grandparents did—they have to get their food at supermarkets. Those supermarkets are full of cheap processed food, which is promoted to us from the moment we are born by enormous advertising budgets. If we are going to overcome this problem, there is some role for each of us making individual changes, but there’s a bigger need to deal with the larger forces behind it. Today, just like—as Tristan had taught me—every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers behind the screen trying to get you to pick it up again, every time you try to give up processed food, there’s a team of expert marketers trying to get you to crack and come back to it. From long before you were even consciously aware of it, they have been working at getting you to associate positive feelings with unhealthy food. They programmed me perfectly to feed their profit margins rather than my brain health, and I’m not alone. That machinery needs to be turned off, so it can’t distort the tastes and steal the focus of another generation.
The next cause of our attention crisis is, out of all the factors I have written about in this book, potentially the biggest. We all know that being exposed to pollution and to industrial chemicals—in the air, or in the products we buy—is bad for us. If you’d asked me when I started researching this book, I could have explained to you, in pretty basic terms, that air pollution causes asthma and other breathing problems, for example. But I was startled to learn that there is growing evidence suggesting that this pollution is seriously damaging our ability to focus.
To understand this, I read widely about the science surrounding this question, and I interviewed scientists who have been at the cutting edge of discovering these effects. Professor Barbara Demeneix—a prestigious scientist in France who has won several major awards, including the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest civilian prize—explained to me: “At every stage of your life, different forms of pollution will affect your attention span,” and she has concluded this is a factor in why “we’ve got neurodevelopmental disease increasing exponentially…[including] ADHD across the board.” She said that we are now surrounded by so many pollutants that “there is no way we can have a normal brain today.”
The form of pollution we, as ordinary citizens, know most about is in the air all around us, so I interviewed Barbara Maher, who is a professor of environmental science at the University of Lancaster in England, and has been carrying out potentially game-changing research on how it is affecting our brains. She explained to me that if you live in a major city today, every day you are breathing in a chemical soup—a mixture of many different contaminants, including those spewed from car engines. Your brain did not evolve to absorb these chemicals, like iron, through the respiratory system, and it doesn’t know how to handle them. So just by living in a polluted city, she said, you are experiencing a “repeated chronic insult to your brain,” and it will react by becoming inflamed. I asked her: What happens if that goes on for months and years? She said it “is going to lead to damage to the nerve cells, to the neurons. Depending on the dose [i.e., how bad the pollution is], depending on your genetic susceptibility, eventually, over time, your brain cells will be damaged.”
She has found that the worse the pollution, the worse the damage to your brain. After soaking up this damage for years, you are more likely to develop one of the worst forms of brain degeneration, dementia. In Canada, a study found that people who lived within fifty meters of a major road were 15 percent more likely to develop dementia than people who didn’t. But I asked Barbara: What does that inflammation do to your mental functioning earlier in life? “It’s probable that if there’s a chronic impact, that can cause aggression, loss of control, attention deficit.”
The evidence is especially worrying when it comes to children’s brains, which are still developing, she said. “We’ve now seen evidence for the onset of these degenerative diseases in really, really young children in highly polluted environments. That’s your next generation…. My colleague in Mexico [has] been doing MRI scans, and they can already see shrinking volumes of brain tissue in badly affected young people.” The more polluted an area is, the worse the harm—to the point where some have “lesions. You can actually see plaques and tangles [in the brain, like in dementia patients], even in very young cases.” A scientist in Barcelona, Professor Jordi Sunyer, tested schoolchildren’s ability to pay attention across the city—and found that the worse the pollution, the worse the kids performed.
This seemed really daunting. It told me there’s a focus-killer literally all around us, and I felt overwhelmed. How can we fight it? I began to get some clues once I had learned some history. I started by looking at the effect of one specific pollutant on our attention: lead. As far back as ancient Rome, it was known that lead was poisonous to human beings. The architect Vitruvius, for example, begged the Roman authorities to not use it to build the city’s pipes. Yet for centuries lead was used to paint homes and in water pipes, and then in the early twentieth century it was added to petrol, which meant it was pumped into the air of every city in the world and breathed in by its inhabitants. Scientists warned almost at once that leaded gasoline was likely to produce disaster. When in 1925 General Motors announced that putting lead in gasoline was a “gift of God,” its CEO was warned by Dr. Alice Hamilton, the leading expert on lead in the U.S., that he was playing with fire. “Where there is lead,” she said, “some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops.” It was clear this could have a terrible effect on people’s brains: in high doses, lead poisoning makes people hallucinate, lose their minds, or die. The factories where leaded petrol was developed had outbreaks of staff members going violently insane and dying because of their exposure to it.
There was always a non-leaded form of gasoline available that didn’t carry these risks, but the big corporations resisted it fiercely, seemingly for a commercial reason: they could patent the leaded version, and so make more money from it. For forty years, the lead industry funded all the scientific research into whether it was safe—and assured the world that their scientists had discovered it was.
It turns out this decision to allow leaded petrol to dominate the market stole a large amount of focus from people all over the world. I went to interview Bruce Lanphear, who is professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He explained that as a young academic in the 1980s, he was offered a position in Rochester in upstate New York to study the effects of lead on children’s cognitive abilities. He knew that kids were still being exposed to a lot of lead, even though lead paint had been banned in 1978, because millions of people still lived in homes full of it, and leaded petrol continued to be used everywhere. He wanted to know what this was doing to them.
As part of the project he worked with, all the kids in Rochester were given blood tests to see just how much lead they were carrying in their bodies. When Bruce saw the results, he was taken aback. One in three of the children in the city had lead poisoning. For Black children, it was one in two. Rochester wasn’t unusual—separate research a few years before found that modern Americans by the 1970s were carrying more than six hundred times more lead in their bodies than preindustrial humans, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 68 million children were exposed to toxic levels of lead in the U.S. from leaded petrol alone between 1927 and 1987.
Bruce and other scientists showed that lead severely stunts your ability to focus and pay attention. If you are exposed to lead as a child, he explained to me, you are “two and a half times more likely to meet criteria for ADHD.” The effect becomes even bigger if it is combined with other forms of pollution. For example, if your mother was exposed to lead during pregnancy and she smoked cigarettes, you are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
Before Bruce arrived, the mothers of Rochester—like mothers across the United States—had been warned about the dangers of lead poisoning, and then told that it was their fault. The authorities said to them: Your kids are being exposed in this way because, as mothers, you have failed to dust your homes enough. Do more housework and get your kids to wash their hands more. This was part of a wider push. The lead industry itself claimed the problem lay mainly with “uneducable Negro and Puerto Rican” parents who “failed” to protect their kids from the lead in their homes.
But when Bruce studied it, he found that all this dusting and handwashing made no difference at all. He could see that a whole city, and a whole generation of children, had been poisoned, and the families had been told it was on them because they weren’t clean enough. Some scientists went even further in blaming the victims. They said the problem wasn’t that the families were living with high levels of a brain-damaging metal, but that the children had a mental illness. They said the kids had a psychological disorder named “pica,” which was making toddlers irrationally stick chunks of lead paint in their mouths. These children were labeled as having a “perverted appetite,” and it was (again) claimed that this problem seemed to be suffered mainly by Black and Brown children.
At every stage, right from the 1920s onward, the lead industry created and encouraged these diversionary tactics. They also bought the loyalty of some scientists, who systematically cast doubt on the evidence that lead harmed people’s brains. Right at the start, in the 1920s, one scientist, named Thomas Midgley, announced at a press conference that it was perfectly safe to use leaded products. He didn’t tell the gathered journalists he had just recovered from a terrible dose of lead poisoning himself, caused by the very products he was now promoting. At every stage, the lead industry insisted, in effect: If there is any doubt about the danger, we should be allowed to carry on pumping lead into people’s bodies.
All through the research for this book, I had an ongoing struggle to hold clearly in my mind the structural nature of our attention crisis. We live in an extremely individualistic culture, where we are constantly pushed to see our problems as individual failings, and to seek out individual solutions. You’re unable to focus? Overweight? Poor? Depressed? We are taught in this culture to think: That’s my fault. I should have found a personal way to lift myself up and out of these environmental problems. Now, whenever I feel that way, I think about the mothers in Rochester whose kids were being poisoned by lead, and they were simply told they should dust their homes more, or that their kids had a “perverted” desire to suck on chunks of lead paint. We can see clearly now there was a huge problem with a deep cause in the environment—and yet the primary response was to tell people to throw all their energy into a frantic individual displacement activity that made no difference at all, or (even worse) to blame their own poisoned children.
When the problem was blamed on isolated individuals, and they were told to solve it by simply tweaking their own behavior, the problem only got worse. So I investigated—what did end it? I learned it was one thing, and one thing only. It stopped when ordinary citizens learned the scientific evidence and banded together to demand their governments change the law to stop these companies from poisoning them. In Britain, for example, the campaign against leaded petrol was led by a housewife named Jill Runnette, who succeeded in getting the government to cut the amount of lead in petrol by two-thirds in 1981. (It was later banned altogether.) She did it to protect herself and the children of her society.
In a way, this felt to me like a metaphor for our whole attention crisis. Our attention and focus have been raided, pillaged, and poisoned by huge external forces—and we have been told to do the equivalent of dusting our homes and washing our hands more, when we should have been doing the equivalent of banning lead paint and petrol all along. In many ways, the story of resistance to lead poisoning is a model for us to follow now. The dangers were clear for decades—Dr. Alice Hamilton accurately documented them in the mid-1920s—but things only changed when there was a dedicated democratic movement of ordinary citizens taking on the forces that stole their focus. In 1975 the average American had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. Today it’s 0.85 micrograms per deciliter. The IQ of the average preschooler is estimated by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have risen by five points as a result of the ban. It’s proof that it’s possible to make dramatic progress on fighting an attention-killer.
But Barbara Demeneix warned me that since then, “there are so many other [attention-damaging] chemicals that…are increasing on the market” that she fears this is now dwarfing the benefit of ditching lead. So I asked her: What chemicals are we being exposed to today that have potential effects on attention? “Let’s start with the main culprits: Pesticides. Plasticizers. Flame-retardants. Cosmetics.” She said, “Of over two hundred pesticides on the market in Europe, about two-thirds affect either brain development or thyroid hormone signaling.” When monkeys are exposed to the same level of the common pollutant polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as humans currently are, they develop serious problems with their working memory and mental development. A team of scientists studied the amount of a pollutant named bisphenol A, or BPA—which is used to coat 80 percent of metal cans—that mothers are exposed to. They found that exposure to the chemical predicts which of them will have kids with behavior problems.
Barbara has been engaged for nearly twenty years in developmental neurotoxicity testing—the science that figures out how the chemicals we are exposed to, both in the products that we buy and in the food that we eat, affect the development of fetuses and babies. She was commissioned by the European Parliament to do major research on this question, and she has coordinated many other research projects—in the course of her research, there was one area in particular that worried her most. She explained to me that from the moment you are conceived, your development is shaped by hormones, which “regulate early development.” So she began to research whether these chemicals have any effect on these endocrine signals. What she discovered is that many of them create an effect that’s like “radio interference,” screwing with the system that guides how a human should develop, especially the brain, and making parts of it go astray. This affects attention, she explained, because this whole system guides how a person’s brain will develop. If your brain doesn’t develop normally, your attention can seriously suffer.
Between 2005 and 2012, she tested many common substances that are all around us—and the more substances her team tested, the more evidence she gathered that the endocrine system is being messed with by our current environment. She warns that all children today are being born “precontaminated” by a “toxic cocktail.”
This is disputed. Some scientists believe that these dangers are being hugely overstated. For example, the American Council on Science and Health has ridiculed Barbara’s claims, arguing that you would have to be exposed to a massive dose of some of these chemicals for them to have the effects she describes. This group has been funded by chemical companies and large agricultural corporations with a vested interest in this debate, which means we should handle their skepticism with some skepticism of our own—but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong. There needs to be more funding to study these questions in detail.
It sometimes seems like the same story that played out with lead is now happening with other attention-damaging chemicals. The industries that profit from using them fund the vast majority of the research into them; they systematically promote doubt about the possible harms; and they argue that if there’s any doubt at all about the danger of their products, they should be allowed to carry on using them.
I felt tempted, when I heard all this, to keep asking the scientists I interviewed: Okay, what products contain these pollutants, and how do I cut them out of my life? You say BPA coats metal cans—should I avoid metal cans? But Barbara Demeneix told me that trying to personally avoid pollutants today, at an individual level, is largely a fool’s errand in a landscape so filled with them. “We can eat bio [i.e., organic]. We can air our homes as often as possible. [We can] live in the countryside.” But when it comes to these endocrine disruptors, “there’s no escape. There’s no escape.” Not at the level of the isolated individual.
To understand what we can actually do to solve the damage pollution is doing to our attention, I went to meet up with Bruce Lanphear by the rocks in Horseshoe Bay, on the West Coast of Canada, on a foggy day. He had just been out kayaking, and in the water in front of us, there were seals flapping around and vanishing under the waves. “Look at that,” he said. “The clouds. The water. The greenery.”
From our conversation, I learned that there were two ways we need to respond now. Firstly, when it comes to new chemicals, we need a new approach. He told me that at the moment, “chemicals are assumed to be innocent until study after study shows they’re toxic.” So if you want to put a product on the market containing a new chemical, you can use whatever you want, and, in the years that follow, poorly funded scientists have to scramble to figure out if it’s safe. “That’s because who’s calling the shots? Industry.” We need to do it differently, he said. “Basically, we should treat new chemicals, new pollutants, as though they are like drugs.” The chemical should have to be tested for safety before it starts being used by ordinary people—and only if it passes stringent tests should it end up in your home and in your bloodstream.
Second, for the chemicals that are already widely used, we need to do these tests, and this research needs to be carried out by scientists who are not funded by industry. Then, if we discover that any of them are harmful, we need to band together as citizens and demand that they be prohibited, like lead is—finally—today. Barbara Demeneix later told me bluntly: “We’ve got to get this under control very soon.”
Barbara Maher told me that when it comes to her area of expertise, air pollution, we need to pressure our governments to bring forward the transition to electric cars by law, because they massively reduce this problem. She stressed, in addition, that there are interim steps we can push our leaders to take: if we plant trees in pollution hotspots, they will soak up a lot of the contamination, and clean the air of many toxins.
As I absorbed all this, I kept thinking about what Barbara Demeneix said to me: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” It’s possible that a hundred years from now, when they look back at us and ask why we struggled to pay attention, they will say, “They were surrounded by pollutants and chemicals that inflamed their brains and harmed focus. They walked around exposed to BPA and PCBs, and breathing in metals. Their scientists knew what it did to their brains and their ability to focus. Why were they surprised they struggled to pay attention?” Those people in the future will know whether, after learning this, we banded together to protect our brains—or whether we allowed them to continue to degrade.