Toxic Chemicals and the Future of Environmental Health & Justice with Dr. Leo Trasande

For this year’s Giving Tuesday, Defend Our Health partnered with Dr. Leo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU’s School of Medicine, to offer a free copy of his book Sicker, Fatter, Poorer along with qualifying donations.

Last week, Dr. Trasande appeared alongside Defend Our Health’s Communications Director, Taylor Moore, for a Facebook Live interview to promote the giveaway and discuss his comprehensive research on the impacts of chemicals on hormones in our bodies.

Dr. Trasande’s work has been revolutionary in the field of environmental health. He has conducted groundbreaking studies that explore the various health impacts that phthalates have on humans. Phthalates—often dubbed ‘the everywhere chemical’ due to their presence in everything from shampoo to vinyl flooring—disrupt our endocrine systems. Dr. Trasande’s work also highlights the severe societal and economic costs of legislative inaction on regulating these chemicals. Nonetheless, he has hope for the future.

“We’ve seen so much more attention to this issue in general than we have two decades ago, and policies are starting to change,” he told Moore. “Just look at the attention that President Biden has put into PFAS… You’re seeing something other than climate change come into consciousness. That, to me, represents huge progress.”