Do you remember agreeing to be part of a vast chemical experiment?

I sure don't. Yet I am, and we are, living in the midst of a vast chemical experiment that none of us ever agreed to.

I was part of the first generation of kids to grow up in and around swimming pools. My family jokingly referred to me as 'the fish', because I spent as many hours as I could in the community pool each summer, being on a swimming team, learning how to dive, playing Marco Polo, and on and on.

At the age of 23, I was one of the first cases of what is today called Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (I was so early, it didn't even have a name). 10 years later, I was told by an MD, who was also trained in Chinese medicine, that "there's always an adrenal problem" in CFIDS.

25 years later, John Gray ("Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"), who is amazingly widely read, and very knowledgeable on many subjects, told me privately that adrenal problems are always the result of thyroid dysfunction (hypothyroidism), because when the thyroid doesn't work, the adrenals step in to do the work, work for which they aren't intended, and burn out. Further, he said these cases almost always have to do with exposure to chlorine (swimming pools), and/or fluorine (fluoridated water), which displace iodine, which is critically necessary to adequate functioning of the thyroid.

So did spending all that time in the pool create the CFIDS 15 years later? I'll never know for sure.

And now we have these two studies, which link air pollution to lower IQs:

Education Week: Kids' lower IQ scores linked to prenatal pollution

Smog Linked in School Study to Lower IQ Scores

Every time you gas up, heck, every time you time you drive, you're adding to the vast chemical experiment, since most of the myriad of compounds unleashed were never tested in any way for safety. Scrubbing Bubbles? That stuff goes down the drain and into our water. Hair spray? Goes into the air we all breathe. And the residue gets washed down the drain and into our water. Nail polish? There are fumes when you use it, and when you later clip your nails, the polish goes into the waste bin, which decomposes into who-knows-what that percolates into our soil and ground water. The drugs you take? I'd guess that whatever isn't absorbed by your body gets flushed down the toilet and into our water, too.

So think each time you use a chemical product: the brain you save may be your own -- or your kids'.