human toxome project

i remember watching a special on dateline nbc earlier this year about the toxic chemicals found in humans. dateline compared the levels of a "normal" family to those of one which did not eat fast food/ready made food and only used natural, chemical free products. much to the green family's dismay, the levels of toxicants in their blood were, for the most part, equal to those of the conventional family.

while looking for something else online today, i stumbled on the environmental working group's (the same organization that developed and maintains the skindeep database) human toxome project. the goal of the project is to really see the effect of industrial pollution on the human population by measuring how much of what chemicals are in people's blood. EWG took blood samples and tested them for 100s of different chemical compounds. the results are sorted by sex, geographic location, and age group. it's pretty interesting to see what chemicals are in, say, older people versus younger people...or even men versus women. you can also see the human health and environmental effects of the chemicals. it's pretty interesting stuff.

check out the study at http://www.ewg.org/sites/humantoxome/