Intoxicating. Literally.

I was in the men’s locker-room the other day, preparing for my daily cardio challenge, when someone passed by, leaving behind him a trail of one of the most splendid scents I had ever smelled. I deeply inhaled it, feeling like I was floating over a magnificent garden.

I knew I was taking in a load of hormonal disruptors, but, boy, that perfume was unbelievable.

Having only positive thoughts, I reminded myself that within a few months, half of this chemical load would be broken down and excreted from my system (this is the expected half-life of many of these chemicals in the human body).

I looked up articles to listen to. In a few moments, I would be climbing full-speed, two stairs at a time, on a Stairmaster, gasping for air for long, interminable minutes. The little bit of oxygen left in my brain I would burn on learning, to take my mind off my cardiovascular stress.

A specific study immediately caught my eye, I guess because of the lingering scent. It was an article about exposure to chemicals in hair-care products. The thrust of it revolved around indoor concentrations of chemicals like decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5), which are considered by the EU to be “very persistent and very bioaccumulative.”

Although volatile, these chemicals are so persistent that people in neighboring buildings end up inhaling them. In lab models they were shown to affect the respiratory tract, liver, and nervous system, as well as causing fatal liver and lung damage.

With such a long name, equally long persistence, and a lot of potential harm, I was wondering why the authorities were still permitting the use of D5. Perhaps the science showed that these chemicals were not so bad after all.

I found a review of multiple studies by a professor of Toxicology from the University of Würzburg, Germany and an American professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health from the University of Indiana.

They started their abstract describing D5 as having a “very low uptake due to rapid evaporation,” with “rapid clearance,” an unlikely “potential for bioaccumulation,” and other such innocuous features.

If I were a busy science writer or a rushing NIH investigator, I would have moved on at this point.

But these professors totally contradicted the findings of the first study I had read, and I couldn’t just ignore it. How could they be so contradictory?

A few sentences later they started mentioning respiratory tract effects, increased liver weight, and even tumors, but proceeded to poopoo these effects as a mere “adaptive response.” Nothing to see here; nothing to worry about.

As they reviewed the actual studies, it became clear that there was quite a bit to worry about. D5 was definitely causing a whole slew of medical problems.

Nevertheless, in their conclusion, the professors repeated their relaxed tone from the abstract, that essentially everything was fine, that D5’s toxic effects were not meaningful.

Wait, what? Did they read their own descriptions of the studies’ results? How could they come to such a patently wrong conclusion?

At the very bottom I discovered the answer. They were paid by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group of manufacturers of this toxic stuff.

For the right pay, they did their bit to suppress awareness. Let the populace continue to merrily shorten its life.

I have read about the deleterious influences of business and industry, but it always struck me as tinged by conspiratorial outlook.

Here, though, for the first time, I encountered indisputable, first-hand evidence of that. It was truly disheartening, something to make my breathing even shorter on the Stairmaster.