You strive to lead a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps you exercise regularly, are on the lookout for healthy recipes and read product labels before you buy? It’s time-consuming to stay well-informed and do all of this legwork. But – you’re not done yet. If you want to keep your family safe and healthy, you’re going to need a Ph.D. and find a way to gain access to trade secrets. Think you can fit that into your already hectic schedule?
Here’s why: Many common products – your sofa, food containers, household building materials, electronics and more – are made using chemicals that you’re not likely to find by reading labels, technical manuals, or anything else. Scientists have linked some of these chemicals to serious diseases like cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, reproductive disorders and more.
For example, certain phthalate chemicals are linked to breast cancer and improper development of the male reproductive system. A host of chemicals are thought to damage the nervous system, including some potential contributors to autism, which many researchers think results from both genetic and environmental factors. Another group of chemicals, called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), increase the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s, among other diseases. And PCBs, once used in TV sets, were banned from commercial production in the United States in the 1970s, but are still detected in our bodies and the environment today.
Wait, doesn’t the law protect us from toxic chemicals?
Intuition would tell you that it doesn’t make sense for potentially toxic chemicals to be allowed unchecked into the marketplace, where they end up on store shelves. But the record speaks for itself.
The vast majority of more than 80,000 chemicals available for use in the United States have never been adequately tested for safety. You’d need a mobile chemistry lab, a couple of Ph.D.s and a lifetime to sort out this chemical mess on your own.
Why are we in this situation? The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), passed 35 years ago, was meant to give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to obtain information on chemicals from their manufacturers. The EPA was to then use this information to evaluate the safety of each new chemical and regulate those chemicals found to be dangerous.
Unfortunately, roughly 62,000 chemicals were “grandfathered in” when TSCA was passed allowing manufacturers to keep producing these chemicals without any evaluation of their safety. Today, most chemicals on the market are among these original 62,000, and information on their safety remains incomplete and inadequate.
Keeping secrets: Under TSCA, chemical companies can claim virtually any information submitted to the EPA about a chemical is “confidential business information.” As a result, the information is kept secret from the public and even our government.
Tell me the good news – there is good news, right?
While there isn’t an instant solution, there are some things we can do. Sites like Healthy Stuff, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Household Products Database and resources found on this list can help you prepare for your next trip to the store.
However, being a savvy shopper is only a part of the solution. Such an enormous amount of chemicals has made it into the marketplace and the environment, that we need a large-scale solution in order to truly protect our health and the health of future generations. The Safe Chemicals Act of 2011, recently introduced in Congress, would be a big step forward. It would require that chemical manufacturers prove their chemicals are safe before being allowed into your home.
Some in the chemical industry are lobbying against this new law, so we need concerned citizens to help it pass. Please speak up! Urge your senator to strengthen our toxic chemicals law. Click here to email your senator.
Test your knowledge
What chemical carcinogens (chemicals that cause cancer), endocrine disruptors (chemicals that disrupt the function of the hormone system and impair normal development), and obesogens (chemicals that disrupt normal metabolism functioning and are linked to obesity), can be found in products we come into contact with everyday?
Here’s a quick brainteaser to get you prepped for your next trip to the store. Match the synthetic chemical to the product you can find it in:
Sofa Nonylphenols
Electronics PBDE’s (flame retardants)
Shoes Formaldehyde
Photocopiers Styrene
Carpet Hexavalent chromium
Nicole Shore is the Communications Director of the Not A Guinea Pig campaign, an Environmental Defense Fund initiative. The Campaign works to raise awareness for the unchecked chemicals in our society and to foster a system that ensures chemicals are demonstrably safe before entering the marketplace.
Some people who eat a very clean diet think that a “perfect” diet = perfect health.
It would be easy to believe that if you just maintain an extra clean diet most of the time, all bodily ills can be avoided. Unfortunately this is just not the case. While what you do and don’t eat plays a huge role in how good you feel, it is not the only factor in staying symptom- and disease-free. Aside from a poor diet, here are three things that can be a recipe for illness:
1. Stress
2. Emotional pain
3. Not supporting the body to remove waste and toxicity
All three are often overlooked, but today we are going to discuss the first two. Mental and emotional stresses are hugely influential in how healthy and happy you feel, and yet so often management of these very vital aspects of health can fall to the wayside. We can forget that truly wonderful health is experienced when all of these components of our well-being, along with diet, are given attention.
In small amounts, stress can be useful. It can give you the buzz, motivation and focus to get things done. But more often than not, stress just gets ugly. When the stress that gives you the kick in the bum to keep moving changes to tension throughout your body, irritability, or reduced physical, mental, or emotional health, then you know it has gone too far. Stress is extremely acidic in the body. Our bodies need to maintain an alkaline state to remain or become healthy.
Emotional stress will have the same impact, as will working far too long and exhausting yourself, and not having a balance of rest, movement, play and work.
So other than maintaining a very clean, alkaline diet that will help to minimize acidity in your body, what can you do? Here are a few suggestions.
1. Create a balance of work and playtime every day by setting boundaries of what time you will work and (just as important) not work. Allow time to exercise, meditate, juice, cook, connect with loved ones, get fresh air, have sex, buy fresh produce and whatever else is important to you.
2. Make the time you do work as efficient and productive as possible. Don’t procrastinate or multi-task. Focus on one task at a time and do it with your whole focus. You will get a better result.
3. Pick the most challenging, important or profitable task to do first in your workday. Once this is achieved, the other tasks can be more easily managed and with less stress. You will find it much easier to switch off the stress beast with your biggest tasks behind you.
4. Breathe deeply. Even if it’s just taking 10 deep breaths where you breathe in through the nose for four counts and then out through your mouth for four counts, it will help to calm your mind, bring you back into your body and center youself. You can take it further by noticing where you are holding tension in your body as you do your deep breathing and actively releasing it.
5. Meditate regularly. Even if it’s just by paying attention to your breath with the breathing exercise above, meditation can completely transform mental and emotional stress. Guided meditations are particularly helpful if you find it hard to turn off mind chatter. Having a voice guide you into a state of meditation can be easier than trying to get yourself there.
6. Get enough sleep. How can you expect yourself to feel calm, centered, balanced and happy when you are running on only a few hours of sleep? You know what I’m talking about. ‘Nuff said.
7. Release to your journal. If you are feeling emotional, releasing your thoughts and feelings to a page can shift emotional energy out of you. It can also help to clarify your thoughts and feelings by having to become consciously aware of them to express them on paper. Your journal is a safe place to release; it won’t judge, talk back or criticize you.
8. Get out, connect with friends and loved ones, and laugh! Forcing yourself to get outside, particularly into nature, can completely shift you out of your own pain and back into the world. Seeing people walking around, animals, beautiful scenery and a world outside of your own can remind you that there is more than what’s in your head, and there is a lot to be grateful for. The same thing applies to seeing friends or loved ones. It reminds you that there is more out there than your own stress. There are other people to connect and laugh with.
I know I said we are talking strategies to cope with stress and emotional pain that aren’t food and movement related, but well, they are so important that I’m putting them here anyway!
9. Eat whole foods. If you are eating a diet full of processed foods, sugar, stimulants (coffee, cigarettes, chocolate and caffeinated tea), then you are going to be causing your body serious amounts of stress, imbalance and moodiness.
10. Move your body! Of course, moving your body is also an amazing stress reliever and extremely alkalizing. Exercise is stimulating in a natural and nourishing way, unlike processed foods and chocolate, which are acidic and falsely stimulating.
Casey Thomas, Raw Lifestyle Coach and Detox Counselor, publishes “Bloom Time,” a free monthly eZine for health and energy seekers and raw food lovers around the globe.
In June 2010, the Environmental Defense Fund and its partners in the campaign to reform U.S. law to regulate chemicals made an impassioned plea for American consumers not to be treated like “guinea pigs.” I’d like to remind our friends and colleagues in the environmental and consumer protection communities that advocates for animal protection – while respecting the interests of all animals and believing that none of them should be treated like disposable lab equipment – also care about protecting human health and the environment, and that we all must work together to achieve a future that is both safer and more humane.
It goes without saying that informed decisions regarding chemical safety cannot be made without adequate information (including testing to detect hazardous properties, and information concerning the levels to which humans and wildlife may be exposed). However, simply calling for more data is not the answer; it is also vital that the inadequacies of the current testing paradigm be acknowledged and overcome.
Today’s chemical testing entails animal poisoning studies, most of which were designed decades ago, and which tell us a lot about how large doses of single chemicals affect small animals with short life spans, but very little about how mixtures of chemicals at typically low exposure levels affect larger, longer-living human beings. A rat force fed a chemical for his or her three-year life – often causing painful symptoms such as tumors and organ failure – cannot reliably predict the effects of a human lifetime’s worth of low-level exposure to a “cocktail” of environmental chemicals, which is the situation we’re faced with in the real world.
Animal tests are expensive and time consuming, and their relevance is often questioned by stakeholders on one side or the other. This leads to disputes over which chemicals represent a real threat, and a seemingly bottomless pit of animal testing to “prove” that a chemical is harmful or safe. (Remember the decades-long battle over whether cigarette smoking causes cancer? Today, history is repeating itself with Bisphenol A and other chemicals.) Even in optimum conditions, regulating chemicals on the basis of animal data takes years, and relies heavily on guesswork and unproven assumptions. And at the end of all that, the results can still – rightly – be called into question.
So instead of dealing with chemical safety and animal suffering as two separate issues, The Human Society of the United States (HSUS) and its affiliates are addressing the “guinea pig” problem with one ambitious project.
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy.” In it, a team of eminent scientists (including HSUS staff member Martin Stephens, PhD) established two guiding principles: first, animal testing is of limited value in predicting real-life human health effects of chemicals or for dealing with the current backlog of tens of thousands of chemicals that are being inadequately regulated; and second, a new approach – a paradigm shift – is needed. The Academy advocates moving away from conventional animal test requirements toward a combination of modern computer-based and human-relevant systems biology approaches that can deliver results in days rather than years, and at a small fraction of the cost of animal testing. In fact, many of the participating scientists envision the complete replacement of animal tests, and see this work as prompting a long overdue, and desperately needed, revolution in the regulation of chemicals.
The Human Toxicology Project we are promoting in the United States and globally is, like the Human Genome Project before it, a solution-oriented scientific program that will overhaul the current antiquated testing paradigm so we are no longer treated as guinea pigs – and neither are guinea pigs. It will prevent the horrible effects of testing toxic chemicals on millions of animals, greatly advance our understanding of the effects of chemicals on human biology, and lead to more reliable risk assessment decisions.
On days like today, it seems actually possible that we can make the world a safer and healthier place. Or at least, we’re going to have a lot of fun trying!
On that note, I invite you to watch and share Annie Leonard’s awesome new 7-minute film that reveals the toxic truth about the products we put on our bodies – and shows us what we can do about it. As Annie explains in The Story of Cosmetics, it’s not the choices we make at the store, but the choices made behind the scenes – by industry and the government – that will determine the health of our families and the planet.
And that brings me to the really good news. This week, we are also celebrating the introduction of the federal Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 — the first attempt in more than 70 years to overhaul cosmetics regulations to eliminate the use of cancer-causing chemicals and other harmful ingredients.
This legislation is a major step toward the day when baby shampoos don’t contain cancer-causing chemicals, and teenagers don’t have a dozen hormone-altering cosmetic chemicals in their bodies – and toward the day when we can walk into any store and buy non-toxic products that are safe for our health.
Sometimes, it feels like change is not possible. But then there are days like today – when mainstream media from Parents magazine to Pittsburgh Post Gazette run major stories about protecting our health from toxic chemicals; and we are launching a new film with the fabulous Annie Leonard (who was just featured on the front page of LA Times); and we are finally about to see the introduction of safe cosmetics legislation that has been in the works for almost a decade.
Please join us in celebrating today by doing two things right now:
Blog, Facebook, Tweet and tell all your friends about The Story of Cosmetics with Annie Leonard: www.storyofcosmetics.org
And take action to support the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics website: www.safecosmetics.org.
Together, we can give the beauty industry a makeover and create a healthy, more beautiful future for us all!
