| If you thought prescription drugs were dangerous, just take a look at the toxic chemicals found in personal care products used by virtually all Americans every single day. Americans bathe themselves in toxic chemicals and they do it by buying and using products made by brand name companies that have premier shelf positioning at convenience stores, grocery stores and discount clubs.
One of the more curious personal care products on the market is Herbal Essences Shampoo by Clairol. |
Stacy Malkan
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 In 2002, David Steinman started buying personal care products that contain ethoxylated ingredients and sending them to a lab to test for 1,4-dioxane. The lab found the cancer-causing chemical in 18 of two dozen products tested, including 15 popular baby shampoos and bath products.8 The contaminant was not listed on any of the labels.
The manufacturers claim the levels are too low to cause harm. However, low levels of exposure can add up. |
| Removing toxic chemicals from personal care products is "a battle of fertility too," she explained. "It's all about, will we have healthy families? Will we be able to have healthy daughters and sons when we choose to? This is fundamentally about our ability to have healthy and fulfilling lives."
Company Roll Call
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics' first goal, to get cosmetics companies to stop using chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects, fit right in with Lisa's vision. But it wasn't going to be easy. |
| But in their paper they speculated on many possible sources, including a wide range of cosmetics and personal care products.
"As soon as I read that, I thought wow. Here's this chemical, a potent reproductive toxicant, in our bodies, and it's possibly because of cosmetics," Jane Houlihan said. She knew cosmetics had labels on the back, even though she'd hardly bothered to read them because they're so difficult to interpret. So she decided to do a little detective work. She headed across the street to the Rite Ad in Dupont Circle and started reading labels. |
| But as Jane Houlihan noted, "Manufacturers seem to be following the pattern they established with conventional chemical ingredients — put poorly tested chemicals into personal care products and do the science later, if at all."
The by-now familiar debate about cosmetics safety played out in the press coverage of the Friends of the Earth petition, as illustrated in a San Francisco Chronicle story.28 "I don't think there's anything to worry about," Dr. John Bailey from the cosmetics industry trade association told the Chronicle. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Avoid smoking and don't use conventional fragrance, cosmetics and personal care products -- virtually all of them contain cancer-causing chemicals.
Preventing cancer is actually quite straightforward. Even the World Health Organization says that 70 percent of all cancers can be prevented with simple changes in diet and lifestyle. The truth is that most people give themselves cancer through the foods, drinks and products they choose to consume. In my opinion, over 90 percent of cancers are easily preventable. |
Kevin Trudeau
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 This particular ingredient has been found in over 600 home and personal care products. These products include shampoos, conditioners, bubble baths, lotions, cosmetics, soaps, laundry and dishwashing detergents. It is just one of an estimated 125 ingredients used in home and personal care products that have been proven to cause cancer. Dr. Samuel Epstein, author of The Safe Shopper's Bible, and founder of the American Coalition to Prevent Cancer, is considered the world's leading authority on toxicology. He believes that DEA categorically causes cancer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It requires a wholesale shift to a healthy lifestyle that includes raw foods, superfoods, extreme juicing of vegetables, sunlight therapy, and a complete lifetime avoidance of cancer-causing foods, medicines and personal care products.
I'll say it as bluntly as I can: If you are not willing to radically change your diet, take up exercise and eliminate all the poisons from your home, then your outcome is already determined. I've had people literally tell me, "I'd rather die than give up eating my steak." And sure enough, they're already dead. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It's time to stop censoring these solutions and start healing the American people through things that really work: nutrition, herbs, sunlight, exercise and avoidance of toxic chemicals in their foods, homes and personal care products.
It's time to end the quackery of modern medicine and the profiteering from human suffering. End the patent protection for medicines, ban television ads, prosecute the criminals running the FDA and end the censorship of nutritional supplements.
I say let's teach America how to heal and end this business of disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In a sane country where health really mattered, these cancer-causing chemicals would be illegal to use in personal care products. But in America today, nobody even blinks an eye (not even the one good eye they still have left) at the routine practice of poisoning customers with dangerous chemicals. And every day, consumers who don't know any better apply these cancer-causing products to their hair, skin, fingernails and hands.
#12 Launch public service ad campaigns that teach consumers how to tell the difference between healthy vs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If you're interested in supporting a company that really "gets" the big picture on personal care products, check out Pangea. Five stars. Available in salons and at the Pangea store: www.PangeaOrganics.com
About the Health Ranger: Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger" is an independent consumer advocate focused on helping people improve their health through information about nutrition, diet, supplements, disease prevention and natural therapies. He's the Executive Director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (www.ConsumerWellness. |
| Headed by Joshua Onysko, Pangea goes way beyond the norm in creating eco-conscious, fair trade, health-friendly soaps and personal care products ranging from soap and shower products to skin cleansers, toners and creams. They never contain artificial fragrance chemicals, and 100% of what goes into these products is plant-based, cruelty-free, and honest. No hidden ingredients, no playing games with the labels to trick consumers. Just honest, healthful products.
Pangea understands what it means to be truly dedicated to ethical corporate practices. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Don't slather your children with personal care products made with industrial chemicals. Most sunscreen products, for example, are loaded with toxic chemicals that actually cause liver cancer and skin disorders. (A little sun is healthy for babies anyway. Vitamin D is essential for healthy bones and normal cell division.)
Don't feed your babies sugary or salty processed foods, or they'll grow up craving those things. Avoid anything with high-fructose corn syrup (like sodas), and don't feed them sweets made with refined sugar. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 However, treating outer blemishes with expensive, chemical-laden beauty products does little to address the root cause of the problem: poor nutrition and exposure to toxins in dietary and personal care products.
"Your skin is the fingerprint of what is going on inside your body, and all skin conditions, from psoriasis to acne to aging, are the manifestations of your body's internal needs, including its nutritional needs," says Dr. Georgiana Donadio, founder of the National Institute of Whole Health. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Buy wine from the wineries, buy cacao from a farmer-owned cooperative, and seek out ways to get your food, clothing, personal care products and other items from a source that actually supports local farmers rather than driving them into bankruptcy.
Many macadamia nut farms in Hawaii that used to exist five years ago just gave up and either sold their farms to the large nut processing companies like Hershey's or turned them into coffee farms in order break even. Some of the farms opened up bed-and-breakfasts to try to rent out their rooms just to make ends meet. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Nothing will cure your cancer if you keep giving yourself cancer by eating processed meats, taking pharmaceuticals, using cosmetics and personal care products with toxic chemicals, spraying pesticides on your lawn and using sunscreen. There is no therapy in the world that can compensate for all the pro-cancer things most people do to themselves. Eating processed meats with sodium nitrite is almost as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. |
Stacy Malkan
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| Skin Deep's findings in 2005 included:
• V3 of personal care products contain at least one ingredient linked to cancer.
• 45% of products contain an ingredient that may be harmful to the reproductive system or to a baby's development.
• 60% of products contain chemicals that can act like estrogen or disrupt hormones in the body.
• 56% of products contain "penetration enhancer" chemicals, which help other chemicals penetrate faster and deeper into the body. |
Mark Schapiro
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 This is not an abstract question for the hundreds of millions of people who use cosmetic and personal care products every day. In the United States, the very absence of the FDA in regulating cosmetics suggests (to the public anyway) its implicit endorsement of their safety. The United States relies on industry to determine otherwise. In Europe, the government has thrown those very same ingredients up for independent review and mandated that industry adjust its formulations accordingly.
Long had spent fifteen years as a toxicologist at Procter & Gamble before shifting into his current position. |
Devra Davis
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 In America and Canada, personal care products still contain chemicals that are known carcinogens, like the 1,4-dioxane we learned about in children's bath products in Chapter 9. I hadn't realized how insidious exposures of this sort could be until I met Chandra Tiwary, a distinguished, recently retired endocrinologist from the Brooks military base in Texas, where in the 1990s, he couldn't figure out why he kept seeing black babies with breasts. Girls as young as one and as old as three were showing up with breast growth and pubic hair, a condition called premature puberty. |
| From studies conducted over the past three decades, we know that personal care products such as lotions, dyes, nail polishes, skin treatments, hair products, oils and creams can contain hormones and substances that act like hormones. Some hospitals sell discarded placentas to companies that put them into cosmetics that are marketed as creating especially soft skin and hair. The placenta, through which all nutrients pass from the mother to the growing fetus, is packed with pregnancy hormones. |
| What about personal care products popular in the black community that can contain hormone-mimicking agents? Do they play any role in the increased amount of breast cancer in young women, and the greater death rate of older black women? Scientific studies of risk suggest that the longer lifetime exposure to estrogen the greater the chance that breast cancer can develop. The earlier a girl begins to menstruate and the later a woman enters menopause, the more hormones she is exposed to and the greater the odds are that she may develop breast cancer. |
| The European Union bans it from personal care products. The United States does not have the authority to do so, does not monitor levels in baby shampoos and bubble baths, and does not recommend limits for this substance in these products.
David Steinman, leader of the Green Patriot movement and author of a new book Safe Trip to Eden, is also the father of young children. As an environmental journalist he knew enough to ask about complicated long-named chemicals that could be in children's bubble baths. |
| She spoke often and vociferously, on radio and television, about the need to reduce the toxic materials found in personal care products. Her efforts to bring public attention to vinyl chloride and its dangers did not go unnoticed.
"After I began talking to the media about what I'd gone through, the company threatened me and said that if I discussed this publicly, they would sue me for slander. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 In our quest for beauty we use untold synthetic personal care products loaded with hundreds of untested chemical combinations. These are applied to the skin and immediately absorbed into the human body. What is the price for vanity?
For years, we have prepared food using Teflon® surfaces to make cooking and cleaning easier and faster only to find that the manufacturer has known for years of its ill effects on humans. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The FDA has no interest in protecting the public from cancer-causing personal care products, and that simple fact is made abundantly clear by the FDA's 29-year delay to establish basic safety guidelines.
As is increasingly the case, non-profit groups are now doing the job the FDA should be doing but refuses to do. In this case, the Environmental Working Group (www.EWG.org), one of my top recommended non-profit organizations, has compiled a list of 700 name-brand sunscreens along with the toxic chemicals they contain. You'll find the list at http://www.ewg. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 I am glad you mentioned that because recent studies have shown that chemicals in personal care products do enter the blood stream in very high detectable amounts. But for a long time the chemical industry and the Food & Drug Administration have insisted that these products do not really need to be safety regulated because they are not for internal use. They make that interesting distinction.
Minka: Especially because they use many transdermal patches to administer medicine, so it is contradictory.
Mike: Indeed it is. How does nicotine get absorbed but not cosmetic chemicals?
Minka: Exactly. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This alone saves me from exposure to hundreds of cancer-causing toxic chemicals added to personal care products. I refuse to use chemical laundry detergent and, instead, use natural laundry soap that grows on trees: Natural soap berries that we sell as a replacement for chemical laundry detergents.
Corporate-controlled U.S. government doesn't want to prevent cancer
The U.S. government doesn't want the population to be free of cancer. That's a strong statement, so let me offer you an undeniable piece of strong evidence to back that up: The artificially low RDA numbers for vitamin D. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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| This company offers natural personal care products made without artificial or animal ingredients or chemicals.
Wholesomebabyfood.com www.wholesomebabyfood.com
Nutritional guidelines and instructions for parents on making all-natural, homemade baby food. |
David Steinman
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 Leadership and Activism
Safe Cosmetic Campaign
Be sure to support their campaign to eliminate harmful ingredients from cosmetics and personal care products. www.safecosmetics.org
FIVE
Plant a Tree
Flooring
Cork and Bamboo www.sustainableflooring.com
Marmoleum www.marmolelumstore.com
Recycled Wood Flooring www.oldgrain.com www.vitangelumber.com www.trestlewood.com
Uncommon Goods www.uncommongoods.com
Paper Companies
International Paper www.ip.com
New Leaf Paper www.newleafpaper.com
Pot Latch www.potlatchcorp. |
| They've always been the safest cosmetics and personal care products available. www.aubrey-organics.com
Avalon Organics
Avalon Organics' cosmetics are helping to make the organic concept part of the mainstream supermarket shopping experience. This makes them an important player for now. But, although the company was selected to be part of the Green 100, the Organic Consumers Association warned the company's use of floral waters was literally diluting the integrity of what it means to be organic. |
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