Toxic Personal Care Products Promote Disease Through Daily Useby Rebecca Ephraim, Common Ground, AlterNet.org
Emerging science suggests that untold numbers of cosmetics and personal care ingredients may be silently and insidiously promoting cancer, ravaging women's reproductive functions and causing birth defects.
It's the day-in-and-day-out [use of personal care products] that's of most concern, since these toxic ingredients leak their poisons through our porous skin and into our bodies bit-by-bit. "There's not one smoking gun that we can point to and say 'it's that personal care product, that deodorant, that nail polish that is going to give you cancer," said Jeanne Rizzo, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund. "We can say the cumulative exposure - the aggregate exposure that we all have to a myriad of personal care products containing carcinogens, mutagens and reproductive toxins, has not been assessed."
Categorically, the giant, mainstream personal care products companies continue to use known or suspected toxic ingredients in their product formulas. There are literally thousands of substances that have been used for decades without the slightest hint to consumers that they may be doing something more than making us squeaky clean and smell good. As activist Charlotte Brody points out, "Neither cosmetic products nor cosmetic ingredients are reviewed or approved by the Food and Drug Administration before they are sold to the public. And the FDA cannot require companies to do safety testing of their cosmetic products before marketing."
Hence, chemicals such as acrylamide (in foundation, face lotion and hand cream) linked to mammary tumors in lab research; formaldehyde (found in nail polish and blush) classified as a probable human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency; and dibutyl phthalate (an industrial chemical commonly found in perfume and hair spray) known to damage the liver, kidney and reproductive systems, disrupt hormonal processes and increase breast cancer risk, are widely used in beauty products.
..."The public, bless our little democratic good government hearts, believes that there is some federal agency that makes sure that dangerous chemicals aren't put into the products we put all over ourselves. Sadly, it's just not true," quips Brody, who's executive director of Commonweal. It, along with Rizzo's Breast Cancer Fund and dozens of other social profit groups, are waging the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. They're banging the drum to rouse consumers from our slumber of ignorance to realize the dangers lurking in personal care products and the failure - or refusal - of any power to change it.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
So, after reading this article, I went into the kitchen to check to see if acrylamide is in my hand lotion. Nope, there wasn't any by that name anyway, but I was astonished to find that the lotion contains ALUMINUM! What in the world is aluminum doing in hand lotion? Aluminum is toxic to the human body in any amount. No amount is safe. And aluminum is found in almost every brand of deodorant and therefore absorbed through your skin on a daily basis. PLUS, if you use aluminum cookware and drink out of aluminum cans, you're just absorbing even more of it through your food/drink. Have you heard about the connection between aluminum and Alzheimer's?
We use only stainless steel or glass cookware. Copper is good. Cast iron is good, too, if you've got an old frying pan that was purchased before they started treating the new pans with chemicals. And, of course, stay away from that non-stick coating!
Go over to your local health food store or shop online for deodorants that do not contain aluminum. You might have to try a few different kinds before you find one that works for you.
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