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I was going to list here in part two of habits to prevent cancer 3 more things. However I found this subject to be long enough for a post alone! So this post is dedicated to number 4 on the Habits to Prevent Cancer series.

photo by: piX1966’s

4. Clean up your cleaning act!

Our skin is essential to our health. It has a big job to do. Our skin works constantly for us to:

• protect our internal organs
• detoxify our bodies
• prevent bacteria and viruses from entering
• store vitamin D for our immune system

Almost all commercial name brand toiletries and household cleaners contain hidden carcinogens. Our favorite shampoo, body wash and floor soap all leave a lingering smell that we have learned to associate with a good clean feeling. We entrust that these companies surely wouldn’t put chemicals that would harm our health in their product that we rub into our skin and surrounding environment daily. But the truth is these products usually contain a few of the following:

• VOC’s
• PCB’s
• Chlorinated Dioxins
• Pesticides
• The list goes on and on

In her booklet Why are you poisoning your family?, Kare Possick writes:

“Seventy thousand new chemicals that have been introduced since World War II were developed out of the extensive research in chemical warfare! That’s 250 billion pounds of synthetic chemicals produced each year in the US (according to the California Public Interest Research Group)!”

If we guck up our skin with these chemicals, how can we assure it can continue protecting us? Also, the more it’s protected and taken care of the more beautiful and young we look. The more chemical laden products we rub on it, the faster our skin ages and it is a contributing factor to causing cancer and many diseases we are plagued with today.

It hasn’t yet exactly been proven that prolonged exposure to household chemicals can cause cancer and other illnesses. I am looking for evidence that says it actually causes it (cancer and other diseases). It is kind of comparable to how long it took us to find out Global Warming was real! However there is evidence that these chemicals build up in out bodies! read on…

I’ve concluded companies get away with “hidden carcinogens” in their cleaning products (for body and home), perhaps because the chemicals they include, used alone, do not cause cancer.

However, it is known that when one of these chemicals reacts with another chemical it can become cancerous. Who is to monitor which chemicals these chemicals react with? Labels don’t tell us not to use product a with product b.

Over time, we are exposed to all these various chemicals. They are directly absorbed through our skin easily and quickly into our internal system, and they build up inside our bodies as one big chemical cocktail. This build up of chemicals in our body not only contribute to cancer, but also contribute to:

• cancer
• birth defects
• brain and nervous system damage
• allergies
• ADD
• migraines
• asthma
• Alzheimer’s

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) US analyzed 2983 chemicals used in personal care products. The results were as follows:

• 884 of the chemicals were toxic
• 314 caused biological mutation
• 218 caused reproductive complications
• 778 caused acute toxicity
• 146 caused tumors
• 376 caused skin and eye irritations

That, in my opinion, is proof enough that these indeed are contributing factors. With all the other factors we don’t have control of, I think it’s wise to control the ones we can and lessen our risk of cancer and other nasty diseases!

For further evidence, The Environmental Working Group is working to test the levels of chemical build up in humans. It is called the Human Toxome Project. All of their findings are available on their website: http://www.bodyburden.org

Perhaps the most shocking evidence and most prominent chemical found in humans in their studies were PCB’s!

Here is a description of PCB’s from their website:

“Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are toxic, persistent, bioaccumulative, and lipophilic (”fat-loving”). This means that PCBs build up and are stored in fatty tissues and fluids, such as breast milk, and can be passed on to fetuses and infants during pregnancy and lactation. In humans PCBs are linked to increased rates of a number of cancers, including malignant melanoma; non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; and brain, liver, and lung cancer. PCB poisonings in humans have caused fetal and infant death, birth defects, and brain damage in children exposed in the womb. PCBs are known to interfere with hormonal processes. In 1976, the manufacture of PCBs was banned in the United States because of concern for human health impacts, but are still widely found in the general population of the U.S.”

Why would companies include these chemicals?

There are lots of reasons why using chemicals are beneficial to the companies that produce them. Most of these chemicals act as a preservative which means these products have a long shelf life. They are also cheap, so they can make a big profit. These chemicals can create “good” smells and create lots of foam that we associate with cleanliness. They are allowed to market their product as “natural” and “dermatologist tested” and “hypo-allergenic”.

They are allowed to make you believe their product is really full of that nice fresh picture of fruit on the front label, and we want to believe that! However, the ugly truth is that they just used chemicals instead to make that smell (like the fruit on the label) and they want you to believe they might of actually gathered that piece of fruit for their product!

I still fall for marketing, even after all I know. Marketing can be so persuasive, that we actually trust that the product is safe! I often get fooled and think if something is expensive and marketed as natural, that I shouldn’t really have to read the label!

What you can do?

You can buy truly natural products that don’t contain these chemicals. You might have a hard time finding a major commercial brand without these chemicals in most major stores. Fortunately they are widely available in health food stores or Whole Foods super markets.

Become a label reader and avoid these ingredients:

• Mineral Oil, Paraffin, and Petrolatum
• Parabens (used as a preservative, linked to cancer)
• Propylene glycol
• Acrylamide (linked to tumors)
• Sodium laurel or lauryl sulfate (SLS), also known as sodium laureth sulfate (SLES)- these are in 90% of products!
• Toluene also known as benzoic and benzyl
• Dioxane

Helpful resources to clean up your cleaning act:

• There is a huge database (compliments of our friends, Environmental Working Group) of almost every product out on the market that have been tested and you can look up your favorite products and see just how dangerous they are: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com
• Download this free PDF from WWF full of tips
• You can also tell when a product is truly as natural as it advertises when the first 3 ingredients are that of the actual ingredient they claim to include, and not a chemical.

Say Something!

I want to hear about products that you know to be safe and trust and list them here in the comments.

Similarly, I want all my readers to go to the cosmetics database
and search their favorite product and share what they found out in the comments!