Is There Birth Control in your Drinking Water?

An estimated 12 million women in the United States are on some form of hormonal birth control. This is a huge number. It is such a large number, in fact, that it led many researchers in environmental science to conclude that birth control pollutes the water supply.

Estrogen levels in drinking water have risen by the thousands in recent decades. If birth control is to blame, we have a very big problem on our handss.

Studies have shown that estrogen can wreak reproductive havoc on some fish. It causes them to develop as “intersex” – being neither male or female – and to have reproductive organs that are a mixture of male and female parts. These fish cannot reproduce. It is a very serious concern for ecologists all over the country, as fish populations are currently dying out faster than scientists can count them.

Moreover, estrogens in the water supply may be a serious concern for human health. Environmental estrogens can cause estrogenic symptoms in men – like breast tissue growth and low libido – and can cause fertility disruption in women. Simply drinking tap water may be enough to cause this kind of disruption. Moreover, researchers at the University of Pittsburg found that human breast cancer cells grow more quickly when they are exposed to estrogen taken from catfish caught near untreated sewage overflows.

Obviously there is a lot more at play here in this scenario than simple estrogen in a glass of water, yet this warning merits serious attention. Consuming estrogen-exposed fish continually over a lifetime may have major consequences for women’s health.

Is birth control to blame for an environmental calamity?

Actually, no.

This is so odd (and disheartening) to me – though not at all surprising. Estrogen shows up in the water supply and the first thing researchers think to blame is birth control. I suppose it may be the most obvious source of estrogen at first glance, but there are many other options, and it took several years for any of them to even be considered.

Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation’s drinking water supply, at least according to this study. This report indicates that most of the estrogen enters drinking water supplies from other sources. The researchers could fairly easily figure this out because the estrogen found in birth control pills is a synthetic form of estrogen made in labs called EE2. Yet EE2 accounts for a very tiny amount of all of the estrogen in water. Other synthetic forms of estrogen (of which there are thousands) – particularly those given to livestock to increase milk production and which runoff into the water supply via livestock manure – are much more problematic.

In fact, livestock production appears to account for more than 90% of the estrogen found in the environment and in the water supply. The remaining 10% appear to come from industrial chemicals commonly used in manufacturing (like BPA) and synthetic estrogens in fertilizer spread over crops.

So the pill isn’t to blame…

Great news is that the birth control pill is not to blame.

Of course, the birth control pill does cause women to excrete somewhat higher levels of estrogen than they would otherwise, but it is still entirley natural for women, men, and children to excrete hormones in their urine. Urine is, after all, where all the molecules in the body end up when they are no longer useful.

If you are on the pill, I encourage you not to feel guilty. Your hormone excretion rates might not be all that much increased compared to what they were before. Even if they are, the contribution you make is miniscule, absolutely miniscule.

Moreover, you may wish to think of it this way: your contribution to the ‘environmental calamity’ in this tiny way is just one tiny part of an enormous flushing crisis of medications across the world. Every single medication and supplement that people take ends up in the water supply to some degree or another. It’s a simple fact of life today that the water supply is an extention of our diet and lifestyles.

…but there’s still estrogen in our water

Even while we can breathe a sigh of relief that women’s reproductive choices are not susceptible to attack from yet another angle, we still have to deal with all of the estrogens that appear to be in our water supply.

Water filtration facilities do have the ability to remove a significant portion of toxins, including hormones, from rivers, lakes, and resevoirs.

Nevertheless, hormones pass through the filtration systems much more easily than pretty much anyone would be reasonably comfortable with. It is a very real fact that just about everybody’s tap water has estrogen in it, composed of up to 2000 different synthetic varities of it.

My recommendations: How to Deal

What do you do about it?

Well, you could simply go about your life not thinking about it, which I honestly think is a decent option. You’ve made it this far in your life without apparent health consequences, and most people appear to be just fine… but we really have no idea what kind of underlying effects this estrogen actually has.

The safest thing you can do for yourself and your family is install a filtration system in your tap water supply.

The best systems to use are reverse osmosis filters. They are the only in-home water filtration systems available today that have been shown to filter out (some) drugs. It is possible that activated carbon water filters filter out drugs, too, but research conducted by scientists not affiliated with these company’s sales teams have yet to verify these claims. The most safe thing to do then would be to use a combined carbon-activated and reverse osmosis filter, though anything reputed to use good reverse osmosis should do the trick.

This is the filter I recommend: The Five Stage Reverse Osmosis APEC Filter – as it is the one I personally used (before moving into a dorm). One of the five stages is activated carbon processing. Here is a more budget-friendly option.

 

And that it is for this week’s post! What do you think? Of birth control and the environment? Of livestock production? I want to hear all of it!!! 🙂

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