On Tuesday October the 7th, Dr. Folami Iderabdullah gave a talk at Catawba College on the consequences of living with chemicals, for better or for worse. Dr. Iderabdullah is an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hills Nutrition Research Institution (NRI) in Kannapolis working in the departments of Genetics and Nutrition. According to Dr. Iberabdullah, the UNC NRI have a goal of exploring personalized nutrition and discovering how an individual’s diet contributes to disease and wellness.
However, her talk was on the importance of understanding the role of chemicals in our lives and the research that is being done at NRI and around the world to help everyone understand toxic and nontoxic chemicals better. For instance, when the government bans a chemical, the company then must create or use a chemical that will provide the same function. For example, the ban on BPA in most plastics because of the fact that it mimics estrogen was just replaced by BPS, which does most of the same things as BPA, including mimicking estrogen, but just has not been proven that it is harmful. Almost like an “innocent until proven guilty,” but with chemicals, and with guilty being that it can be directly linked to a harmful disease or mutation.
Dr. Iderabdullah’s studies mainly focus on toxicants that are Endocrine Disrupting Compounds, meaning that they disrupt the Endocrine system, which is composed of all the hormone secreting glands in the body including the kidneys and thyroid. One of the most interesting things she discovered in her research is that adding certain nutrients to her test subjects’ diets can help alter or depreciate the effects of toxicant exposure.
Therefore, some of the best things we can do to help stop the effects of toxicants are to continue studying the effects of what they do, to insist on the testing and regulation of chemicals, and to determine more ways to counteract the effects.
For more information on the research going on at UNC NRI, they are more than welcoming to visitors and even simplistic nutrition questions. Their website is uncnri.org and you can also reach them at their twitter @unc_nri.
