Diabetes and POPS: Persistent Organic Pollutants

[Guest guest]

Many thanks to my friend Mary for this information!

More and more we are seeing the effects of environmental pollutants on our bodies, and not just with diabetes, but in many disorders as well...we need to learn to rid ourselves of these toxic substances we are exposed to on a daily basis.

 

Air Week of December 15, 2006

 

Dr. David Carpenter is a Professor of Environmental Health and

Toxicology at SUNY-Albany. (Courtesy of Institute for Health and the

Environment/ SUNY-Albany)

 

A recent study suggests that high body levels of persistent organic

pollutants, also known as POPs, may be linked to increased risk of

diabetes. Host Bruce Gellerman talks to POPs expert Dr. David Carpenter

of the State University of New York at Albany about the findings.

 

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GELLERMAN: Among the most pernicious substances ever created is a group

of chemicals known as POPs or Persistent Organic Pollutants. Among them:

DDT, dioxins, PCBs and Chlordane. And even though twelve POPs -- the

so-called "dirty dozen" were restricted or banned by international

convention in 2003, they continue to pose a threat to people and

wildlife because POPs accumulate in the food we eat. Virtually every

person on the planet has POPs in their body and the chemicals have been

linked to cancers, birth defects and disabilities. Now a group of

researchers in Korea have found strong evidence linking POPs and diabetes.

 

David Carpenter, Professor of Environmental Health and Toxicology at the

State University of New York at Albany, reviewed the Korean study for

Living on Earth. So, Dr. Carpenter just how strong a relationship did

the Korean scientists find between diabetes and POPs?

 

CARPENTER: Well, one considers individual pollutants the magnitude was

between three and five fold increased risk but the most striking

observation was when they considered the sum of all six pollutants that

they monitored and they selected pollutants that we all have in our

bodies so that very few individuals had levels below the level of

detection. Under those circumstances they were getting increased risk of

the order of thirty-eight fold which is absolutely enormous.

 

 

 

Dr. David Carpenter is a Professor of Environmental Health and

Toxicology at SUNY-Albany. (Courtesy of Institute for Health and the

Environment/ SUNY-Albany)

 

GELLERMAN: Well what does that mean? Does that mean the higher your

exposure to these kinds of chemicals the higher your likelihood of

getting diabetes is?

 

CARPENTER: Well the authors are very careful to not say directly that

the presence of diabetes is caused by exposure to these chemicals.

Clearly the authors think that that is the case, but no single study is

going to prove that. The most interesting observation in this paper is

that there was no relationship between being obese and developing

diabetes in those persons that did not have high levels of these organic

pollutants in their bodies.

 

GELLERMAN: Well, how do you explain that? I always thought, well, the

fatter you were the higher the likelihood that you'd get diabetes.

 

CARPENTER: Well that certainly is the general medical view because there

is a strong association between obesity and diabetes, but it may well be

that people that are obese eat much more animal fat than people that are

not obese and these persistent organic pollutants are all found in

animal fats. So the question really is whether it is the obesity that

leads to the diabetes or rather the presence of these persistent organic

pollutants. It may well be that it's the pollutants that cause the

diabetes, not the obesity.

 

GELLERMAN: Or it could be diabetes causes a higher buildup or retention

of these POPs.

 

CARPENTER: That is correct and the, the authors make that statement and

clearly don't expect that that's the explanation but their study does

not disprove that that's a possibility.

 

GELLERMAN: So what could be the mechanism by which these pollutants are

related to diabetes?

 

CARPENTER: Well, certainly there is nothing in this paper that

definitively identifies a mechanism. But we do know a number of actions

of these compounds that suggest possible mechanisms. When these

compounds bind to the liver they induce various genes. Some of those

genes are involved in regulation of glucose uptake into cells and we

think that it is that process that leads to this disruption of glucose

regulation and causes diabetes.

 

GELLERMAN: Now, 20 million Americans have diabetes and we all have these

POPs in us but how come not all of us get diabetes?

 

CARPENTER: Well, we don't have these POPs in our bodies at the same

concentration and that's the strength of this particular study. The

amount of persistent organic pollutants in each person's body is a

reflection of their diet, where they live, what the concentration of

these substances is in the air they breathe, and probably related to how

rapidly they metabolize these compounds.

 

GELLERMAN: Now, these compounds have been banned for many years by

international convention.

 

CARPENTER: That's correct, yes. The Stockholm Convention and, well in

the US for example PCB manufacture was banned in 1977 and DDT and these

other pesticides were banned even before that, however they are very

persistent. They have been continued to be manufactured in some parts of

the world until relatively recently and the dioxins are byproducts of

combustion so they still are produced. And in the human body these

compounds last about ten years before you get rid of half of them. In

the environment they're even more persistent.

 

GELLERMAN: So what can we do with this information?

 

CARPENTER: Well I think there are a number of things. We've got to get

these compounds out of our environment and that requires political

action and that's not easy to do and it's not inexpensive. We have many

contaminated sites filled with things like PCB's and dioxins that have

not been cleaned up and remediated. I've already indicated that reducing

our consumption of animal fats is an important thing that one could do.

 

GELLERMAN: You know Dr. Carpenter, as I hear you talk about this it

seems this is the revenge of Silent Spring. That Rachel Carson had it

absolutely correct 50 years ago.

 

CARPENTER: That's absolutely right. This is the same issue from Silent

Spring. We have not really appreciated how dangerous these substances

are to human health. The diseases most people of, diabetes, heart

disease, cancer, these are the chronic diseases of old age. All of these

diseases are aggravated, increased, we're more susceptible to them when

we're exposed to these compounds and now we're reaping the grim harvest

of the exposure that we all have to these compounds.

 

GELLERMAN: Dr. Carpenter, I want to thank you very much.

 

CARPENTER: My great pleasure.

 

GELLERMAN: Thank you very much.

 

GELLERMAN: Dr. David Carpenter is a Professor of Environmental Health

and Toxicology at the State University of New York at Albany.

 

Links to Related Stories

 

"A Strong Dose-Response Relation Between Serum Concentrations of

Persistent Organic Pollutants and Diabetes. Results from the National

Health Examination Survey 1999-2002" in Diabetes Care 29:1638-1644

<http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/7/1638?maxtoshow= & HITS=10 & hits=10 & RESULTFORMAT= & author1=lee & fulltext=POPs & searchid=1 & FIRSTINDEX=0 & sortspec=relevance & volume=29 & resourcetype=HWCIT>

 

"Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Burden of Diabetes" by M. Porta

in The Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9535, 12 August 2006, Pages 558-559

<http://www.fgcasal.org/fgcasal/database/eventos4/Miquel_Porta3.PDF>