The average umbilical cord has over 200+ toxins in it.

Nobody Gets a Clean Start Anymore

By Victoria | Rational Body — Engineer, Herbalist, Mother

The average umbilical cord now contains over 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants. Before a baby takes a single breath, before they taste food or touch the ground outside, they are already carrying the chemical signature of the world we've built.

Nobody gets a clean start anymore. And each generation, that burden is getting worse. Your child has a worse start than you had, and much worse than that of your grandparents. The problem is compounding until we do something about it.

Something Doesn't Add Up

The United States is the most medically advanced, most well-resourced, most thoroughly insured society in human history. We spend more money on healthcare per person than any other country on earth — by a wide margin. We have the best hospitals, the most specialists, the most pharmaceutical options. We are GREAT at emergency care.

And yet we have the highest rate of chronic childhood illness in the developed world.

We spend the most and get worse outcomes. We invest more in medicine and watch our children get sicker. That contradiction should be making more people angry than it currently is.

Just one generation ago, the diseases now reshaping childhood were rare enough to have special names. "Adult-onset diabetes" was called that because children didn't get it. "Adult-onset" had to be quietly dropped from the name when children started getting it too. Autism was so uncommon it wasn't on most pediatricians' radar. Childhood obesity was unusual enough, instead being was being too skinny was more of a concern- while both are signs of malnourishment. More calories does not equal nutrients.

Pediatric depression, food allergies, developmental delays, inflammatory bowel disease in children — these existed, but they were exceptions.

They are no longer exceptions. Now they are the norm.

Today, more than half of U.S. children have at least one diagnosed serious chronic health condition.

That is not just better diagnosis catching things we used to miss.

That is a generation of children who are measurably, documentably sicker than the generation before them — and that generation was sicker than the one before that.

Something is happening. And the question of what is no longer fringe. It is, finally, becoming impossible to ignore.

We have hit an asymptote of wellness, where we were doing better, living to longer ages, until our generation. We are the first generation expected to live a shorter life span than our parents. It is well past the time to start paying attention.

The Numbers

The scale of what we're seeing is worth sitting with.

Autism affects approximately 1 in 31 children today (depending how you measure it, this can vary widely). In the 1970s, it was estimated at fewer than 3 per 10,000. That is roughly a 50 to 100-fold increase in fifty years. Even if you account generously for improved diagnosis and expanded definitions — which researchers have done — the increase is still real, still massive, and still accelerating. Ask any teacher who has taught more than 20 years, and they will tell you they recognize a huge shift in children’s behavior.

Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents over the last three decades. More than one in five children over age six is now obese — a 270% increase compared to the 1970s. You can look at photographs from the 1960s and 1970s and see with your own eyes that this was not what childhood looked like.

More than 1 in 8 children has asthma. In African American children, it's closer to 1 in 6.

More than 1 in 14 children has a life-threatening food allergy. Between 1997 and 2018, childhood food allergy prevalence rose 88%.

More than 1 in 4 teenage girls reported a major depressive episode in the past year. Teenage depression rates nearly doubled in a single decade, from 2009 to 2019.

Young girls are reaching puberty at much younger ages. It has been shown for delayed puberty accounts for better health outcomes- as if our bodies need that time to finish growing themselves before putting effort into the massive task of creating life. Early puberty has major long term (negative) side effects.

Childhood cancer incidence has risen nearly 40% since 1975.

The prevalence of children aged 5 to 17 with a chronic condition or functional limitation rose from about 1 in 4.4 in 1999 to 1 in 3.3 by 2018. That's roughly 130,000 additional children per year crossing into chronic illness — every single year — for nearly two decades.

Less than 2% of children in 1960 had a health condition severe enough to interfere with daily activities. By 2010, that number had climbed above 8%. A 400% increase in fifty years.

The costs are staggering too. They’re not an important measure for understanding suffering, but many don’t care until they see economic value in acting. Autism alone costs the United States $268 billion per year. Asthma costs $56 billion. Childhood obesity generates $14 billion in direct medical costs every year. ADHD runs upwards of $100 billion per year.

These are not small problems on the margins of public health. They are the defining health story of our era.

"But Isn't This Just Better Diagnosis?"

This is the most common rebuttal, and it deserves a direct answer: no. Not entirely. Not even mostly.

Better diagnostic criteria explain some of the increase in autism. Growing awareness explains some of the increase in ADHD. But the numbers are too large, and too consistent across too many different conditions, to be explained away by the sensitivity of our measuring instruments.

Consider: if improved diagnosis were the primary driver, we would expect to see similar increases in adult populations, where the same diagnostic improvements apply. We don't see that. The increases are concentrated in children.

Consider: obesity is not a diagnostic category that changes with awareness. You can look at a child and see that they are or are not obese. There is no hidden population of obese children that previous generations of pediatricians were missing. The increase is real.

Consider: when pediatrician Dr. Christopher Forrest began his career roughly 25 years ago, he described it as genuinely uncommon to see children present with chronic conditions. That is a practicing physician describing a change he witnessed with his own eyes over the course of a single career. He is not the only one.

Consider: the timeline. The major acceleration in childhood chronic illness began in the 1980s and 1990s. What else happened in that same window? The widespread introduction of glyphosate-based herbicides, starting in 1974. The rapid proliferation of processed foods and plastic food packaging. The introduction of flame retardants into furniture, mattresses, and electronics. The expansion of synthetic fragrance into nearly every consumer product category. The era of "better diagnosis" and the era of dramatic chemical expansion in daily life are the same era.

This is not coincidence. It is correlation at minimum, and the mechanistic pathways are increasingly well-understood.

How Toxins Actually Work: The Total Load

Here is the piece that most public health conversation misses, and it's the piece that matters most.

When regulators assess the safety of a chemical, they test it alone. One chemical, one endpoint, one dose, one outcome. If it doesn't cause acute harm at the approved level, it passes.

But that is not how human beings encounter chemicals. We don't encounter one chemical at a time. We encounter hundreds simultaneously, continuously, from conception onward — in our food, our water, our air, our skin care products, our furniture, our clothing, our cookware.

Three principles explain why this matters more than the single-chemical testing model acknowledges:

Total load matters. The more toxins a child is exposed to, the worse their health outcomes. This has been confirmed repeatedly. Minuscule amounts accumulate, and small, consistent exposures can in some cases be more harmful than single large exposures, because the body never gets a break from processing them.

Toxins and stressors multiply each other. An individual chemical at a dose too small to cause observable harm on its own may, when combined with ten other chemicals at similarly small doses, produce effects far larger than any simple addition would predict. The interaction is multiplicative, not additive. No one is studying what happens when you combine pesticide residue in food, synthetic fragrance from laundry detergent, off-gassing from new furniture, PFAS from cookware, and BPA from receipt paper — all on the same day, in the same body, in a developing child.

Timing is everything. Exposure during critical developmental windows — prenatal development, infancy, early childhood, puberty — has effects that the same exposure during adulthood does not. A developing nervous system encountering endocrine-disrupting chemicals is not the same as an adult nervous system doing so. The damage can be permanent in ways that adult exposure is not.

The insidious part is that chronic, low-level exposure doesn't make a child acutely sick. There's no dramatic event to point to. There's just a slow accumulation — of dysbiosis in the gut, of inflammatory signaling, of hormonal disruption, of neurological noise — until one day there's a diagnosis. And by then, the exposure that contributed to it is long gone and impossible to trace.

Our children are the canaries in the coal mine. They are showing us, first and most clearly, what the chemical environment we've built is doing to living systems. And the warning is not subtle anymore.

Where It's Coming From

The 200+ chemicals found in umbilical cord blood include things that were banned before many of today's parents were born.

DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States in 1972. It is still being detected in newborns today. This is because DDT is extraordinarily persistent — its half-life in the environment is measured in decades, not years. It binds to soil, accumulates in plant matter, moves up the food chain through bioaccumulation, and concentrates in fatty tissues. It passes from mother to child through the placenta. A ban fifty years ago did not end the exposure. It merely began a very slow, very incomplete process of reduction.

Glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — is now the most widely used herbicide in the world. It was introduced in 1974 and is sprayed on lawns, parks, school grounds, agricultural fields, and roadsides throughout the country. We were told it was safe because humans don't have the enzyme it targets.

What we weren't told is that more than half of our gut bacteria do have that enzyme. Glyphosate attacks beneficial gut bacteria — Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium — more aggressively than it attacks harmful bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella. Pathogenic bacteria show significantly higher resistance to glyphosate than beneficial bacteria. The herbicide designed to kill weeds is selectively dismantling the microbial ecosystem that governs our immune function, our mental health, our ability to absorb nutrients, and our protection against disease.

Research shows that mice whose grandparents were exposed to glyphosate at doses similar to the average American diet developed colitis. The damage is not contained to the individual. It passes down.

Switching to organic food reduced glyphosate levels in adults and children by 70% in just six days. That is the good news. The body does eliminate these chemicals when the exposure stops. But the exposure, for most Americans, does not stop.

PFAS — the class of synthetic chemicals used to make things nonstick, stain-resistant, and water-resistant — have been detected in all 40 umbilical cord blood studies reviewed by the Environmental Working Group. They are in cookware, food packaging, water-resistant clothing, and tap water. They are called forever chemicals because they do not break down — in the environment or in the body. They accumulate. They are in most Americans' blood right now, and the levels in our children are determined in part by what their mothers carried.

Phthalates, flame retardants, heavy metals, synthetic fragrance chemicals — all present in cord blood. All with known mechanisms of harm to developing systems. All entering through pathways that regulatory agencies have largely underestimated or ignored: dermal absorption, inhalation, the accumulation of simultaneous exposures, the vulnerability of the developing fetus.

This Is Not the Future. This Is Now.

The generation of children being born right now will live their entire lives inside the chronic illness statistics we're discussing. The children already diagnosed are in classrooms and pediatric offices and therapy waiting rooms in numbers that would have been unimaginable to a pediatrician practicing in 1970.

None of this is inevitable. None of it is simply the price of modern life. It is the result of specific decisions — by chemical companies, by regulators, by legislators — that prioritized speed to market and trade secrecy over safety testing and transparency. It is the result of a regulatory framework that grandfathered tens of thousands of chemicals into "presumed safe" status in 1976 and has been slow to revisit that presumption ever since.

And it is something that individual families can meaningfully push back against. Not by achieving perfection — that is impossible in the current environment. But by reducing total load. By removing the highest-exposure, most controllable sources one at a time. By understanding that every change matters, because total load is cumulative, and every reduction is real.

Your water. Your cookware. Your laundry products. Your child's pajamas. The receipt at checkout. The herbicide on your lawn. The air inside your house.

These are not abstractions. They are the actual inputs that are building — or not building — your child's body, right now, today.

Start somewhere. Start today.

Resources: EWG.org/tapwater · EWG.org/foodnews · EWG.org/skindeep · documentinghope.com · beyondpesticides.org

Victoria is a mechanical engineer, certified community herbalist (California School of Herbal Studies), and founder of Rational Body, a Danville, CA-based brand built around clean, ancestral-inspired skincare and wellness education.

The number of child illnesses have been linked to number of environmental stressors (duh), but these toxins include things we think of as harmless, like shampoos, [non-organic] clothing and food, diapers, mattresses, carpet/paint/cheap furniture off gasses, etc. Basically everything in your home or that you put on your baby’s body that is not natural is causing harm, ESPECIALLY in the doses we use. Nothing we do is in moderation, as much as we like to tell ourselves so.

Key Highlights:

1. Total load matters. The more toxins a child is exposed to, the worse their health. This confirms the “total load” hypothesis. Minuscule amounts add up, and small, consistent exposures can even be worse than single mega exposures.

2. All stages of the life matter. Exposures at all stages of a child’s life make a difference — prenatal, neonatal, childhood, adolescence and yes, even as we grow into adults.

3. Toxins and stressors multiply off each other. While an individual toxins on their own may not make a child acutely sick, when combined with other toxins, their effect can be multiplied. Most published studies only look at one thing at a time, but fail to imagine a real life scenario of thousands of chemicals introduced all the time. The cumulative effect of constant exposure to the SMALLEST amounts of toxins or stressors can be insidious (go unnoticed) and slowly overwhelm a child’s body. This is when symptoms MAY start to emerge.