Book review: Slow death by rubber duck

When I first started using fertility awareness (and subsequently studying to become a teacher) I got really obsessed with reading everything even tangentially related to fertility awareness, meaning I did a lot of reading on women’s health and hormonal health.

One of my favorite subjects ended up being endocrine disrupting chemicals. I remember the first full book I read about them, which was Hormone Deception (excellent book, btw) and I kept reading parts out loud to my husband because it was all SO INSANE.

Since then, I have read a few more books on the topic and recently read one I want to share with you. It’s called Slow Death by Rubber Duck. This book goes less into depth about all of the crazy chemicals and why they are bad (though it includes that, too) and has a little more about how much your blood levels of these chemicals can actually change and what kinds of things might make them change.

To tell you the truth, endocrine disrupting chemicals sometimes freak me out so badly that I don’t like to think about it too hard. I always try to avoid plastics, bad personal care products, and eat organic, but some other things are pretty darn hard to control! That’s where this book came in.

The really cool thing about this book is that it is written by two guys who decided to do some self-experimentation with these endocrine disrupting chemicals. They took blood samples as a baseline after trying to avoid them for a few days, THEN they had a few days of normal to slightly high exposure (the main thing that seemed like a higher exposure than a person would normally take in in a day was the amount of tuna fish one of them ate) and took blood levels again.

With the exception of one chemical they were testing their levels for their results were all astounding. Most of their levels absolutely skyrocketed. Yeah, there is an element of that that is scary, but I like to think about how low they (mostly) got their levels by attempting to avoid endocrine disruptors. It makes me take heart that there really is something I can do.

So, here is the nitty gritty about this book:

The chemicals they cover are phthalates (stuff that makes plastics flexible, amoung other things), PFCs (they specifically talk a lot about teflon, you know, that non-stick stuff on pans), PCBs (that’s flame retardants, sadly put in everything from your mattress to babies’ PJs), Mercury (not really a chemical at all, but an element), and triclosan (used to make things “anti-bacterial”), 2,4-D (a commonly used herbicide), and BPA (a hard plastic).

Each of these chapters contains information about their own experiment and/or others that have already been executed. They also include a section about how to get a lot of these substances out of your home and body. I enjoyed that part of this book because it was slightly less terrifying than other I have read, which have recommended that basically every single thing around you is going to kill you ASAP.

If you are looking for a good book to read about endocrine disrupting chemicals, and possibly something to give to someone in your life that says “what I do isn’t going to make a difference,” than I definitely recommend checking out Slow Death by Rubber Duck.

I’d love to know if you have read any great books on endocrine disrupting chemicals or if you have any advice or tips of your own. Let me know in the comments!