why does low-tox even matter?
Chemicals - we’re buying them, eating them, putting it onto our skin, bringing them into our homes, but what are they? Most of the time we have no idea. In a lot of cases, the actual products we are using are not what is harmful to us - it's the additives, the preservative, the flavoring, the dye, the propellant, the thickener, the fragrance, etc. These added ingredients are put into our everyday lives, and most of us probably don’t even know it’s there.
“If it is on store shelves, it must be safe, right?”
I used to think the same thing, but this could not be farther from the truth.The truth is that over the past 50 years, more than 80,000 chemicals have been introduced into our environment, and the vast majority have not been tested to see if they were safe for human contact. On top of that, more than 1,000 of those chemicals are shown to cause cancer.
“But, if they cause cancer, doesn’t that mean it is automatically banned for human use?”
If we’re lucky. A manufacturer is not required to prove that a product or chemical is safe before it goes into use. It is only when there is enough evidence of its danger and it is impossible to ignore that there’s the possibility that the government will ban it. It takes a lot of time, effort and study before something that is proven to be bad for us actually goes away. In the meantime, we are eating it, applying it, feeding it to our family, cleaning our homes, and breathing it in, totally unaware of the actual harm it’s doing. More often than not, these chemicals are in the things we use every day. And when a chemical is banned, we’ve already been exposed to it for years, if not decades.
The truth is we don’t know exactly what is in the items we use on an everyday basis. We just cross our fingers and hope that if anything was really harmful or poisonous for our health, we’d know about it. But marketing is brilliant, green washing is real and we want to believe that everything sold in the supermarket and drug stores is safe.
“Well the dose makes the poison! A little bit of it won't matter.”
While there’s too many variables to measure the damage done by all the harmful chemicals we encounter every single day, our body is not getting a small dose of these chemicals. We get a storm of toxins, piled up, and are thrown into a chemical soup. It is a fact that we are exposed to multiple hazardous substances all day every day. So where does the line end? When is enough, enough?
This is termed as the cumulative body burden. In other words, it is the combined effects of all the substances we come into contact with during the course of daily living. This is a way of showing how our health is affected by all the substances together, and how they stay in the body.
Some chemicals only last a few hours in our body, but since we are constantly exposed to them, they never really go away. Other chemicals stay in our body and store in our fat tissue, and as long as they are there, they are causing more and more damage. In addition, when these different toxins come into contact with each other, they become even more concerning and can alter our DNA, which can be passed down to generations.
When our body is chronically overloaded with toxins it can lead to obesity, inflammation, heart disease, neurological conditions, cancer, autoimmune disorders, hormonal imbalances, reproductive issues, organ failure - toxins are quietly affecting our entire body and we don’t know the true effects until our health is impacted.
In 2015, a study was conducted testing 85 commonly used chemicals found in everyday products to see if they could trigger cancerous tumors. 50 of the 85 chemicals were found to affect cancer-causing processes in the body, even at low levels found in the environment.
Researchers at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), found 287 chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in U.S. hospitals during the summer of 2004. Of these chemicals, 180 cause cancer, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests.
The EWG then conducted research on the total body burden on teenage girls in 2008. 16 substances found were linked to cancer and hormone disruption and found pesticides that were banned in 1972.
My goal in helping you switch to a low-tox lifestyle is not to scare you. I’m not trying to scare you away from using the things you love, but I will expose the ones that are damaging us and show that it is possible to find products that actually work and are not harmful to ourselves and the world. Knowledge is power and you don’t need to be a medical professional to know how your body works or a scientist to understand what is in your food/products.
References:
Houlihan, J., Kropp, T., Wiles, R., Gray, S., & Campbell, C. (n.d.). Body burden: The pollution in newborns. Environmental Working Group. https://www.ewg.org/research/body-burden-pollution-newborns
Teen girls’ body burden of hormone-altering cosmetics chemicals. Environmental Working Group. (n.d.). https://www.ewg.org/research/teen-girls-body-burden-hormone-altering-cosmetics-chemicals