Why are Children so vulnerable to toxins in the environment?
Children have greater exposures to environmental toxins than adults. Pound for pound of body weight, children drink more water, eat more food, and breathe more air than adults. For example, infants in the first 6 months of life drink seven times as much water per pound as does the average adult. Children ages 1 through 5 years eat three to four times more food per pound than the average adult. The air intake of a resting infant is twice that of an adult. The implication for health is that children have substantially heavier exposures pound for pound than adults to any toxins that are present in water, food, or air. Two additional characteristics of children further magnify their exposures: 1) their hand-to-mouth behavior, which increases their ingestion of any toxins in dust or soil, and 2) their play close to the ground, which increases their exposure to toxins in dust, soil, and carpets as well as to any toxins that form low-lying layers in the air, such as certain pesticide vapors.
