When my daughter Stella celebrated her first birthday in the spring of 2005, we had her checked for lead, and her level was dangerously high. Here I was fretting about the type of plastic used in her baby bottles, cooking homemade organic baby food, and obsessing over the quality and contents of all that she and I consumed, and I didn’t even think to wonder if she was being exposed to known neurotoxin like lead. If she hadn’t been tested – further – if no research had ever been done on lead - I wouldn’t have been able to protect her. But because of that test I was able to protect her, and she’s totally healthy. Words cannot express how thankful I am for that test. 

Just around the same time that we went through our lead scare, I started to hear about flame-retardants and bisphenol exposures and effects in children, and I started wondering what Stella was being exposed to that I didn’t know about - that there was no test for yet. And what would be the ramifications of that exposure. What is the next lead, or arsenic or thalidomide or DDT? Do you wonder about environmental health issues like these?