Dr. Leo Trasande, one of the nation’s leading experts on environmental health and toxic exposures, warned this week that plastics pose “a multidimensional and urgent threat to human health,” with children facing some of the greatest risks.
Speaking on “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast,” Trasande — a pediatrician, professor at New York University and director of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Division of Environmental Pediatrics — described mounting evidence linking chemicals in plastics to developmental, hormonal, metabolic, reproductive and neurological harm.
“The impacts run from cradle to grave and womb to tomb,” he said.
The discussion comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launches STOMP — Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics. The $144 million initiative aims to measure, study and eventually remove microplastics and nanoplastics from the human body.
The program will develop standardized testing methods, map how plastics accumulate in organs, rank plastics by biological harm and pursue future removal technologies.
Trasande said the growing concern extends beyond visible plastic waste to microscopic and chemical exposures embedded throughout modern life.
“We know that there are 16,000 chemicals — synthetic chemicals — that are in plastic,” Trasande said. “We don’t know anything about 10,000 of them.”
Among the chemicals with the strongest evidence of harm are bisphenols used in plastics, phthalates found in food packaging and personal care products, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — also known as “forever chemicals” — used in nonstick and stain-resistant products.
Trasande said the evidence is “extremely strong” that many of these chemicals disrupt hormones, which in turn regulate metabolism, reproduction, growth and brain development.
‘A silent epidemic of kids with lower IQs in the U.S.’
As a pediatrician, Trasande repeatedly emphasized that children are uniquely vulnerable.
“Pound for pound, they eat more food, drink more water, breathe more air, so they’re uniquely susceptible,” he said. “Their organ systems are also just being primed. And so if you disrupt that, there are lifelong and permanent consequences.”
He pointed to evidence linking phthalate exposure during pregnancy to roughly 50,000 premature births in the U.S. each year, along with impaired brain development and poorer educational outcomes.
Trasande warned that some of the most damaging effects may be subtle and population-wide, rather than immediately obvious in individual children. Even small disruptions to thyroid hormones during pregnancy are associated with cognitive deficits, autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), he said.
“What you see is a silent epidemic of kids with lower IQs in the U.S.,” Trasande said. “Just to put this in context for the audience, a kid loses an IQ point, mom doesn’t notice, pediatrician doesn’t notice.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the issue to the impact of lead exposure on the national average IQ before leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1980s.
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