There are lots of rumours these days of female hormones in city tap water due to the widespread use of the contraceptive pill. The average sperm count has halved since my grandfather's generation and hermaphrodite fish are found in polluted rivers, so this is cause for concern.

Water filter companies do not and will not claim that their products filter out hormones, so it is reasonable to presume that filtering your water would not stop hormones entering the body. The environmentalists who campaign against gender-bending pollution also tell us to drink tap water because of the ecological wastefulness of bottled water, so bottled water isn't the answer. Softening chemicals in plastic are said to mimic female hormones and leech out into food and drink products (I think it's actually these chemicals that are thought to be gender-bending the fish, rather than the pill). It is advised that water is kept in glass rather than plastic. What to do?

It's because of the mixed messages from the environmental movement that I would like to discuss this issue here- there's a lot of scientifically minded people on here, many with chemistry or even biology as interests, and I feel I'd get a more rounded discussion here than on an environmental forum. I'd be really grateful to hear your views, particularly on these three questions:

1. Is there a potential gender-bending risk from tap water?
2. Does filtering water with a home filter (Brita, Kenwood etc) remove hormones and hormone-mimicing chemicals?
2. Does boiling destroy hormones? If yes then tap water could be boiled before filtration, using a renewable energy source of course

Most of these hormones are steroidal like compounds. Meaning they are very insoluble in water. However they are getting diluted in massive amounts of water (our drinking water) so the fact that they are there is true they are someone has detected them. Are the levels high enough to cause damage? Probably not. If the authors of the study have not posted the amounts of the chemicals present in the water then they are too low to matter (and they didn't want to post the concentration because people would have laughed and said it was insignificant, realize you can detect almost anything these days with modern analytical equipment ppb etc pico mole concentrations). If they have posted the amounts what are the amounts on average detected?

However I would not be concerned about people pissing out these compounds because after going through the body they get metabolized usually into an inactive form thats even more water soluble so it doesn't make a difference. The concern is that people are throwing out so many pharmaceuticals raw before being used. Then they enter the water in an active form. It would be easy to avoid if people just don't flush there stuff down the drain. However some of it is coming out in the feces too etc theres no way to truly avoid small amounts of drugs getting into the water.

Can the water be filtered yes but it needs to be filtered by either some membrane that sticks non polar compounds like these hormones or some other similar filter. Its possible but until someone proves its necessary it wont happen. I can't say anything about brita filters as I never use them and I dont know how they work what kind of material is in the brita?

Are they responsible for low sperm counts and hermaphrodite fish? No one has even come close to proving that so don't work a sweat over it. Theres barely anything wrong with drinking tap water even if it has chlorine in it. I would much rather drink water with trace amounts of chlorine and other chemicals in it then water with traces of raw sewage in it.

Interesting point... I've only ever read about it in the press and environmental documenaries/literature, and either they never bother to publish amounts or I don't realise when they do- I'm no scientist so the data would be meaningless to me anyway without doing some research first to understand it.

I think the home filters are just charcoal granules, not even block, they say they filter out limescale, metals etc and even pesticides I think.

Are the levels high enough to cause damage? Maybe not (hopefully not), but some think so... I read that doctors are blaming junk food and tap water for the increase in men getting that embarrassing condition when they grow man-breasts. Junk food because cheapo meat in McDonalds etc is pumped full of hormones. I have little faith in conventional scientific wisdom so I won't believe the established consensus when things like this are brought up ... phalidomide babies and asbestosis spring to mind, and it wasn't that long ago that the scientific community were laughing at the hippy dissidents among them that were talking about climate change. SOMETHING has to be lowering sperm counts, that's a pretty massive change that hasn't yet been explained. But yeah I hope you're right.

http://www.brita.net/uk/...L=1&p_id=16&cat=



http://www.amazon.co.uk/...Cartridges/dp/B0002Q9IIW
(the Kenwood website didn't have a description but here's the link in case it's working in future http://www.kenwoodworld....Water-Filter-Cartridges/ )

So now i have to worry that taking a shower will make me grow breasts everywhere!!!

what about that whole fluorine conspiracy theory?

^^Minor amounts of flourine are not harmful. You get more flourine in your system from your toothpaste.

Anyway I had a thought last night. The hormone issue. Bovine growth hormone (they put it in milk, monstanto claims it safe but fuck them) could be part of this. Actually really any estrogen like compounds could be responsible. Even plants that contain certain phytosterols could all influence male sperm count.

As far as the man growing tits thing don't worry about that. Those incidences are very rare and who knows what those people were eating/doing/genetic make up.

Scientists are very well aware that many environmental pollutants can actually act as sex hormones, albeit the fact that the mainstream scientific community would prefer to call such toxicological subjects as "controversial" or "exaggerated". Sadly enough, scientific findings of such cases almost never make it to the media and mainstream people never hear about them. There must be pretty good reasons for obscuring such data, I wonder what that may be....

Anyway, a "suspect" list (certainly not exhaustive!) is:

1) DDT, or else dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, the famous pesticide with a hald life of 100 years.

The evidence suggests that both DDT and its metabolite, DDE (dichloro-diphenyl ethane) can act as estrogenic compounds either by mimicking estrogen o rby inhibiting androgen effectiveness. DDE is even more effective and it had a big impact on the environment (e.g. feminisation of fish, increase in breast cancers, and declined sperm counts)

2) Dioxin, which is a by-product of chemical processes used to make pesticides and paper products has also been linked with reproductive anomalies (at least in rats)

3) p-nonylphenol. This one is the scariest. This compound as well as a related compound, 4-tetr-pentylphenol have been demonstrated to have feminising activity.

The funny thing is that p-nonylphenol is used as a polymer stabiliser in the production of many plastics, especially the ones used in food and water processing and packaging. The effects are pretty well known to people who do experiments doing cells cultures. In a recent discussion a guy was telling me that certain types of plastic used as a container for his cells would knock his results off. The thing is (and it is a well but hidden documented case) many cell cultures will show abnormal behaviour which mimicks the effect of estrogen when kept in certain plastic containers!

4) Finally, polychlorinated biphenyls, again having widespread use in plastic manufacture, pesticides etc etc have well documented actions on sex steroid receptors (like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone receptors.)

So, everyone has every right to feel scared by drinking some water out of a plastic bottle. We've fucked up almost everything, now we fuck ourselves

That's why I boycott plastic whenever I can. My foaf has an all pyrex and stainless steel setup!

I forgot to say that the demand for ED treatment has rocketed too, psychological not just people wanting to get their hands on Viagra. Of course this isn't hard evidence as there could be cultural explanations, the sperm counts, hermaphrodites and man-boobs are more telling.

So would boiling destroy these nasties?

(P.s. I read up on the fluorine thing a while back, they put an amount in statistically weighing up pros vs cons... so some poor kids get dodgy overfluorinated teeth thanks to the government, so that the majority are saved from dental problems caused by ignorant parenting. Not fair in my opinion, reeks of utilitarianism... next they'll be piping in prozac eh?)

This issue concerns me immensely, and has for quite some time. I do not like using plastic anything, but everything that is bought in the store is used or has touched plastic in some way, it is nearly impossible to get away from!

Anyway, for the layman, what is an easy way to get rid of these hormones? Would distilling the water work? Or do the hormones evaporate and condense along with the water? If distillation does not work, what are the alternatives for someone in the home to filter these hormones out?

I sometimes feel ashamed at how boldly we as humans pollute the earth without remorse.

Well drinking distilled water is dangerous. It has no or little ions and since your cells are loaded with ions they flow out of your cells trying to create a balance with the distilled water. This can be not good if you drink too much.

As far as removing the hormones well yea I have no data on what filters can filter them out. There must be a way.

One thing I want to point out though is that tons of plants contain phytosterols which also have an estrogenic like effect but most of the time these compounds are considered completely harmless. Just because something has an estrogenic effect in vitro doesn't mean it will make you grow tits by drinking small amounts of it.

As far as a trend towards lower sperm counts could be a result of many many things. Tight underwear, laptops sitting on your balls for hours at a time, hot water, in other words it might not be these chemicals.

Infibiulum I thought PCBs were banned now?

As much as it is a concern that all these environmental pollutants are out there and yes they are dangerous and yes we should do more to prevent it (mainly courts need to start enforcing personal property rights and stop just always giving the rights over to companies that pollute, i mean people sue each other over spilled coffee and they allow that but when someone wants to sue a company for polluting their river or water supply its impossible, this is half the problem) anyway what I wanted to say is don't go through your entire life worrying about everything that could be out there that could harm you. Just stay healthy eat as well as you can and you will be fine most of the time.

Does anyone know if boiling the water would destroy these chemicals? I was thinking of having a setup whereby I filter my drinking water with the Kenwood, then boil it, then decant it into a glass jug for drinking.

Do people think that would make a difference? I don't have to worry about the extra energy used because all my energy is from renewables. I already eat healthily and buy with as little packaging as possible and avoid plastic etc, so this is the icing on the cake for my 'health fetish'! But I don't want to go through all that bother if boiling doesn't actually make any difference.

If a Kenwood/Brita filter is insufficient, maybe I'll look into getting a ceramic or reverse osmosis filter fitted to my drinking water tap. I'm presuming these chemicals don't get absorbed through the skin from showering? Thanks for the advice.

I worry about this too.

Just get a simple filter.

Brita can absorb organic compounds.

Anyway the doses tend to be very low that are found in drinking water.

Also you should realize that you are exposed to many kinds of estrogenic compounds in milk and vegetables.

Furthermore you gotta realize analytical technology is AMAZING right now. Pico grams of compound can be detected in large amounts of drinking water these days (pico gram/L). So when you see a report on some website find the study and see what the levels really were.

Finally there is a lot of data out there to indicate that the few compounds that tend to show up in drinking water are present at levels that are not considered to be harmful to human health. Also many sewage treatment processes are starting to look at this issue to reduce levels in the cases where it might be a problem.

http://www.iwaponline.co...07/wio200907AF91238F.htm

http://www.ehponline.org...2009/0900654/0900654.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19244989

http://www.iwaponline.co...01/wio200901AF91228F.htm

I think it was in rätchs encyclopedia that it said humulus (hops) realeases eastrogen. Beer titties anyone?

Not considered harmful... by whom? The scientists who said smoking was harmless? Or that global warming didn't exist? Now, I have an open mind either way, but you don't seem to be questioning the status quo at all, particularly since hindsight shows a little scepticism to not be unfounded.

Burnt, what's your thought on the lowered sperm counts? And gender-bending fish? Are we and the fishes eating too much unfermented soy?! (Not that it has been proven to do so to my knowledge) No. So what's doing it?

That's good news. Do you mean all of them? Are all gender-bending compounds organic?

To add my 2c...there have been many rumours about many drugs in the water(prozac, adderall, etc. etc.) because kids don't want to take their 'scripts and put them down the faucet. This is the same case with the pill i believe. From my experience(and i would love if someone could back this up with a source) that pills going down the drain and comming back in our water supply is a rumor.


How DOES our water supply get contaiminated?
And if you believe in homeopathy, wouldn't those minisquel doses actually be very potent?

Homeopathy is fraud.

Anyway ohayoco. Greenpeace is a terrible organization to get information on these kinds of things. Look at scientific peer reviewed articles. Greenpeace always deliberating exegerates things to make their cause look strong.

I am an environmentalist but I can't stand greenpeace. They generate confusion and lies that kill people. There radical campaign against GMO crops is directly responsible for death and starvation is certain parts of africa where they scared the leaders of countries away from GMO crops that could be feeding people who can't grow food in their climate right now.



This issue with fish may very well be an environmental contaminant. But you gotta understand the compounds may react much differently in fish then in man. But anyway no one really knows for sure there could be many many reasons.

As far as sperm counts again it could be a million things. Seriously drinking milk and pytosterols also has estrogenic effects. Its not like birth control (which has slight diff mechanism) but it still has that overall estrogenic effect.

Unfortunately I'd neither know where to find them nor understand them nor be able to judge whether they are correct or not without expert knowledge myself. They are not written for the layman.


I could just as easily say that it was the manufacturer's fault for producing sterile seed so that the poor farmers will be slaves to their supply forever once they start using GM seed instead of growing plants that renew themselves. The leaders made their own informed choices based on information presented by all sides of the argument. Maybe they chose freedom over slavery to America.

And actually you don't need GM seeds to farm their climates successfully, you just need education on how to farm optimally. It has even been proven that you can turn desert like the Sahara back into farmland, but it doesn't happen because the people who live there don't know how to do it, only the scientists do. Plant barriers blocking wind enable soil to form again etc. This is off-topic, though, so let's not start arguing about GM here.


Well it can't be the milk because we've drunk milk for thousands of years. The decrease of sperm count has occurred with a generation or two. Any other suggestions?