Bruce Lanphear

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176 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Bruce Lanphear’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Ground Truths · Bruce Lanphear: Chronic Lead Exposure, a Risk Factor for Heart Disease · 17 Aug 2025 podcast

Thank you, Eric.

It's great to be here.

So we really focused on the things where we feel like there's a definitive link.

Things like lead and diminished IQ in children, lead and coronary heart disease, lead and chronic renal disease.

As you mentioned, we've typically thought of lead as sort of the overt lead poisoning where somebody becomes acutely ill.

But over the past century, what we've learned is that lead is one of those toxic chemicals where it's the chronic wear and tear on our bodies that catches up.

And it's at the root of many of these chronic diseases that are causing problems today.

Well, as adults, if we go back in time, all of us, if you go back to the 1970s, when lead was still in gasoline, the median blood lead level of Americans was about 13 to 15 microgram per deciliter.

So we've all been exposed historically to those levels.

And part of the reason we've begun to see a striking decline in coronary heart disease, which peaked in 1968.

And by 1978, there was a 20% decline.

190,000 more people were alive than expected.

So even in that first decade, there was this striking decline in coronary heart disease.

And so in addition to the

Prospective studies that have found this link between an increase in lead exposure and death from cardiovascular disease and more specifically coronary heart disease, we can look back in time and see how the decline in leaded gasoline led to a decline in heart disease and hypertension.

So this is Ayurvedic medicine.

And in fact, I just was on a Zoom call three weeks ago with a husband and wife who live in India.

The young woman had taken Ayurvedic medicine.

And because of that, her blood levels increased to 70 microgram per deciliter.

And several months later, she was pregnant and she was trying to figure out what to do with this.

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