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Starting Off: Breast milk is still nature''s best infant food, but it is vulnerable to persistent contaminants. (Children & Health).

Article Excerpt
A bag of breast milk sits frozen in my freezer. Chances are it contains trace remnants of the chemical contaminants that I was exposed to in the several decades before my son was born. That didn't stop me from nursing him until well past his second birthday. But it was a worry and, it is a significant issue.

In discussions about how to protect children from exposure to environmental toxicants, nowhere is there a greater intricacy of issues and the need for assiduous weighing of risks and benefits than when one talks about exposures through breast milk. (1)

Researchers have known for some time that human breast milk carries environmental contaminants. In the early 1950s, DDT was first detected in breast milk samples in healthy US women. Many different contaminants have since been detected in milk samples from women around the world. (2)

The greatest concern centres on the persistent organochlorine pollutants (the so-called POPs) such as DDT, PCBs and dioxins. Current and historical industrial emissions have put these POPs into the air, water, soil and sediments in virtually all corners of the planet, and from there they have found their way into the global food chain.

When ingested, these substances aren't easily metabolized and they become stored in the fatty tissues of living organisms. When predators consume their prey, they take in the stored contaminant load of those animals lower on the food chain, a phenomenon known as biomagnification.

Contaminants in breast milk ultimately result from a woman's lifetime cumulative exposure, starting with exposure to tiny amounts in utero and to larger amounts through her mother's milk, if she was breastfed. All of us are exposed via our diet, particularly those who eat foods with a higher animal fat content such as some fish, meat, eggs and dairy products.

With the exception of dioxin and polybromo diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), (3)...