Word: toxicants
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...films but to unearth some good ones and sing hallelujah. So all praise to Paolo Sorrentino's The Family Friend, a mordant Italian comedy about a gnarled moneylender and the beautiful young woman he hopes to corrupt and conquer; it's the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale with a toxic twist, and the smartest entertainment at Cannes...
...Eric Schlosser's non-fiction best-seller Fast Food Nation suggested that, if Big Macs and Whoppers weren't killing the average American (who consumes three burgers and four orders of French fries a week), they were stuffing him with toxic waste. The book, and Schlosser's kid-friendly sequel Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, might have made for a stinging documentary film. But that was too simple for him and director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock); or maybe they thought that Morgan Spurlock's Super Size...
...krypton, xenon, tritium, and argon, all of which can cause genetic diseases and gene mutations, not to mention iodine-131 (which causes thyroid cancer), strontium-90 (which causes leukemia and bone cancer), and cesium-137 (which causes muscle cancer). Then, of course, there is plutonium-239, which is so toxic that just one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. The United States has over 100 nuclear reactors, each of which produce about 200 kilograms of plutonium-239 per year. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 6.2 kilograms of plutonium...
...everything from brake fluid to hair dye. Although the MSDS measures workplace exposure, which can be far greater than the amount one would encounter at home, the Hazardous Substances Data Bank toxnet.nlm.nih.gov warned that "results of limited repeated dose oral work reported suggests that material may be rather toxic when inhaled or absorbed through skin in repeated small doses." Eek. And that's just one ingredient...
...Association, a spokesman assured me that cleansers have never been proved to be carcinogenic (which doesn't mean that they've proved not to be) and that alkylphenols, which can imitate estrogen in the body and are commonly used as surfactants, have a "negligible" environmental impact. "All chemicals are toxic at some exposure, including salt and water," he told me, emphasizing, "The most important thing consumers can do to ensure the safe and effective use of a product is to read the label...