RFK Jr. Special: What Are Endocrine Disruptors and Why Are They So Bad?

The second part of a two-part series to coincide with RFK Jr's historic endorsement of Donald Trump

Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s decision to retire and endorse Donald Trump has electrified a presidential race that was hardly lacking in excitement. Donald Trump had already come millimetres from having his head blown off, and Joe Biden was deposed in a carefully orchestrated palace coup, to make way for Kamala Harris. This has been a campaign of shocks and firsts, and now we can add another first to that list: a member of the Kennedy family supporting a Republican ticket.

In his announcement on Friday, before he joined Trump on stage in Arizona, Kennedy said that he would work with the Trump administration to “make America healthy again.” He described watching a generation of children grow up “damaged” as a result of poor diet and environmental pollution, and said that four more years of Democratic rule will “complete the consolidation of corporate and neocon power, and our children will be the ones that suffer most.”

“For 19 years I prayed, every morning, that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic-disease crisis was one of my primary reasons for running for president, along with ending the censorship and the Ukraine war.”

Now Kennedy is in a position to do that, and Trump has confirmed that he will head a task-force to investigate, and hopefully solve, America’s unprecedented health crisis.

The prevalence of obesity, diabetes, autism and AHDH, cancer, auto-immune conditions, infertility and reproductive issues, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is exploding across the Western world, but especially in America, which leads the world, or once did, in virtually every single metric of ill health you could care to name. Over 40% of adults in the US are now classified as obese, and 1 in 36 American children have an autism-spectrum disorder.

On Friday, Kennedy identified two major contributors to this health crisis: ultra-processed food and toxic endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These are things Kennedy has talked about, at length, for years—decades, actually—including in the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which I’m proud to say I featured in prominently, alongside him.

The harmful effects of ultra-processed food and endocrine-disruptors are no longer fringe topics for discussion, but you may still be confused or unsure about what they are and why they’re bad. That’s where I come in. I’ve not been writing about these things for quite as long as RFK Jr. has, but I have been raising awareness about them for the last four years, including in my book The Eggs Benedict Option and my various media and podcast appearances.

Yesterday I told you everything you need to know to understand what ultra-processed food is and why it’s so bad. Today, I’ll be telling you about endocrine disruptors.

These two primers can be shared with family and friends to help educate them and give them an incentive to improve their health by reducing their dependence on and exposure to ultra-processed foods and toxic chemicals.

WHAT ARE ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS?

Worry about endocrine disruptors is a relatively new thing. The first use of the term appears to date to 1991, and one of the earliest uses in the scientific literature was in a paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, two years later. In 2013, the World Health Organisation and the United Nations released a detailed report on endocrine disruptors that called for more research into their effects.

So what are endocrine disruptors?

In simple terms, endocrine disruptors are substances that can interfere with the body’s hormonal (endocrine) system, in a variety of different ways, from mimicking the body’s hormones, to preventing them from working properly or even disabling them.

Hormones govern more or less every single process in the human body, which means, worryingly, that endocrine-disruptors can affect—well, more or less every single process in the human body. There’s been a lot of focus in recent years on endocrine disruptors and sexual health, but as well as causing reduced fertility, genital deformations and demasculinisation, endocrine disruptors have been linked to altered immune function, cancers, diabetes, obesity, respiratory problems and neurological disabilities. Again, like with ultra-processed food, we’re finding out that these nasty chemicals seem to be one of the principal causes of all the prevailing chronic diseases of modernity.

Endocrine disruptors have been around for as long as humans have been around. There are lots of natural substances, mainly plant substances, that can interfere with or mimic bodily hormones. Soy, for example, contains natural endocrine-disrupting compounds. For thousands of years, in the Far East, Buddhist monks have consumed unfermented soy because it dampens their libido and helps them extinguish their worldly desires, which is a prerequisite for achieving enlightenment and Nirvana.

Soy does this because it contains phytoestrogens—literally, plant versions of the sex hormone estrogen—that alter the body’s natural testosterone-to-estrogen ratio, which governs sexual differentiation. Men have more testosterone than estrogen, and for women it’s the other way round. Alteration of that sex-specific ratio can affect everything from mood and libido to growth of the sexual organs, depending on the time and extent of the alteration. Exposure to endocrine disruptors during pregnancy can be absolutely devastating for the developing fetus, causing lifelong changes, as I’ll explain a little later.

Of course, Buddhist monks who were doing this didn’t know anything about phytoestrogens. They were simply working on the basis of observed cause and effect. Eat unfermented soy: no desire for sex, or anything else for that matter.

Another plant that was used medicinally in a similar way was hops, which are used to preserve beer and also contain powerful phytoestrogens. For centuries hops were used to treat women’s problems, including hot flushes and other symptoms of the menopause.

Natural endocrine disruptors are important, especially when you’re considering the effects of diet on health. The presence of large quantities of natural estrogens in foods like soy is one of the many reasons plant-based diets, especially vegan diets, are a bad idea. But it’s a different class of endocrine disruptor we should be more worried about. These are artificial chemicals that have only existed since the modern industrial age, but have come to be so ubiquitous we simply can’t escape them, wherever we go. They’re in the food, the water, the air, the soil, consumer products, perfumes, soaps, sunscreen, clothing—pretty much everything. Microplastics now carry endocrine disruptors into the deepest recesses of the human body and to the farthest-flung corners of the planet.

I want to say before I go any further, that it’s very easy to become disheartened—or “blackpilled,” in internet slang—when it comes to the ubiquity of these toxic chemicals, and others, in the modern world. I won’t lie to you: you’re going to be exposed to them. But there are simple things you can do as an individual to lower your exposure significantly, not least of all reducing your use of plastic in all its forms, eating organic food and filtering your drinking water. The bigger, more important, question, I think, is what the government and corporations are going to do to eliminate these chemicals from the environment, the food and water supply and consumer goods.

THE SCALE OF EXPOSURE TO ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS AND THEIR EFFECTS

In the 1960s, in the book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson suggested that mankind might be poisoning and polluting the environment on a scale and in a way that had no precedent in history. The very air, water and food supply, she claimed, were becoming toxic because of the widespread use of new industrial chemicals whose safety had not been properly established.

Carson focused particularly on the pesticide DDT. She documented the harms it caused to soldiers during World War II and claimed that the chemical industry was involved in a systematic campaign of disinformation about DDT’s effects, which scientists and government were only too ready to believe. The book received furious pushback from chemical manufacturers, as you’d expect, but the public, and eventually government, listened. DDT was banned for agricultural purposes in the US, and less than a decade later, the US Environmental Protection Agency was created by President Richard Nixon.

Despite the success of Silent Spring and the campaign against DDT, Rachel Carson’s broader warning went unheeded. We are now exposed, on a regular basis, to a huge number—actually, an unknown number—of chemicals with hormone-altering effects. Scientific studies have substantiated their effects rigorously and in detail, but a full reckoning of the effects of these chemicals, and of their interactions with one another in the bodies of living creatures, is a long way off if it will ever happen at all.

The reason for this, in large part, is the insane system of chemical regulation in the US, which operates on the assumption of “safe until proven otherwise,” much like the FDA’s system for licensing food additives, which I discussed in Saturday’s piece on ultra-processed food. Simply put, we allow chemicals to be used whose effects we take no real care to establish beforehand. And so it’s only much later, years or decades later, that we start to discover that something might be wrong, by which time there are huge vested interests against establishing the toxicity of these compounds and regulating them or even taking them off the market. I’ll come back to this at the end of the piece.

Many, but not all of these endocrine disruptors are estrogenic, meaning they mimic the hormone estrogen or interfere with the proper functioning of androgenic hormones like testosterone in the body. It seems to be a strange kink of industrial chemistry that so many modern chemicals, especially plastic chemicals but also pesticides and herbicides, turn out to be estrogenic. I like to joke sometimes that, were these chemicals androgenic—if they mimicked testosterone instead—world governments would have done something about them a long time ago, because all of a sudden they’d have a very muscular, pumped-up citizenry to deal with. But as such, because most endocrine disruptors we’re exposed to have estrogenic effects and make us put on weight, shed muscle, lose our motivation and libido and make it harder for us to reproduce, governments don’t have quite the same incentive for regulation.