ANATOMY LESSONS

摘要

In 2005, florence williams was a working, not-so-young mother with two little kids, Annabel and Ben. Having imbibed, as it were, the message "Breast Is Best," Williams was still nursing Annabel, then a year old, which meant that she was also carefully monitoring her own intake—lots of vitamins and organic produce, minimal alcohol and caffeine. But even as Williams was trying to safeguard Annabel, she kept coming across headlines that made her anxious. One in 17 women had enough mercury in her blood to risk causing learning disabilities in her children. The Environmental Protection Agency expressed concern that even low-level exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid, used in the manufacture of Teflon, could potentially lead to developmental problems. Flame retardants known as PBDEs, which were known to cause brain damage in rats, were increasingly showing up in human breast milk.