Many of us who are concerned about our health read labels. For some of us it’s food labels, and now for more and more of us it’s the label on our soap, shampoo, and air freshener. The front of the package may say organic, natural, herbal, or some other advertising, but the really important information is…or might not be… on the ingredient label. There are over 3,000 chemicals used in personal care and cleaning products in the U.S. Many of which are banned or carefully labeled in other countries. There are regulations about what goes in there but they are not as strict as you might hope. Most of us assume that if it’s on a supermarket shelf and designed for use by babies it would not have anything harmful in it and certainly not anything that can cause cancer. We would be wrong. Completely. Dead. Wrong. Grab any personal care product in your bathroom and check the ingredients label, look for the word fragrance, or parfum. It’s usually towards the bottom of the ingredient list. That one word can be a cover for hundreds of chemicals blended together and included in the product. Those chemicals might be endocrine disruptors which means they mess with your hormone levels, they might be toxic to your cells and the environment, they might be dangerous to inhale, and they might cause cancer. I don’t mean possibly maybe they could once in a million exposures increase your cancer risk a little bit. I mean absolutely scientifically PROVEN to cause cancer, and it’s in your baby shampoo. I am serious. How could this be? The companies who can make more money off products using these cheap toxic ingredients spend a lot of that money to lobby and make sure the regulations we do have are either too weak, or not enforced. This keeps their profit margins high and us sick. To learn more and find products without these ingredients you can check out EWG.org and safecosmetics.org.
Please consider joining us for a Documentary and Discussion of the film Stink! October 13th at 5pm at the Blue Ridge Library, Pennsylvania to learn more.