A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. Who was it who said that ignorance produces interesting arguments? Anyway, regardless of who was originally response for those particular words of wisdom, it was ignorance that initially propelled me along a rather odd path. One that ended with me discovering the joys of fresh organic food and keeping a healthy lifestyle.

It started with, of all things, what I later entitled The Great Deodorant Scare. At the time I was living in Florida and had received from a friend an email that went into great detail about how antiperspirants were directly linked to breast cancer. It continued with the theme that it was the evil oligopolies that owned the deodorant companies who were not allowing this information to be disseminated to the general public because they’d lose billions in revenue. A conspiracy!

Good Lord! I thought and promptly forward the message to everyone I’d ever met in hopes of saving them and their loved ones from an untimely death. Within moments I received in return a rather caustic reply from someone who’d already had that mail about a thousand times.  He requested that in future I take the time to verify which emails were genuine and which were hoaxes before sending them on to people who may have limited mail box space, and no time for drivel.

A search of the net revealed there are sites dedicated to hoax busting (such as www.hoaxbusters.ciac.org), and it appears this particular hoax has been around a long time (go to http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBSearch.html and search “breast cancer” if you want a version the whole letter). The gist of the letter is using antiperspirant causes breast cancer by plugging up the ducts under your armpits and not allowing toxins to escape. The American Cancer Society claims this is untrue. Trouble was there was something about what this hoax was saying that stirred something in me. Surely blocking up ducts that allow toxins to escape can’t be a good thing. Can it? Thus was born a strong desire to know what was in the products that I was using every day.

What do all those meta-hoxy-poxy things DO? And what the heck were they anyway?

One thing I learned was that sodium laureth sulfate (SLS has many other versions of its name, and no, none of them are “rose”) was in my shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, liquid handsoap, moisturizer, cleanser, and so on. Environmental Working Group www.ewg.org did a study and found SLS to a moderate health risk and listed concerns such as:

1) potentially contaminated with or breaking down into chemicals linked to cancer or other significant health problems.
2)amine: can form carcinogenic nitrosamine compounds, on the skin or in the body after absorption, if mixed with nitrosating agents
3) penetration enhancer: alter(s) skin structure, allowing other chemicals to penetrate deeper into the skin, increasing the amounts of other chemicals that reach the bloodstream.

And this stuff is in practically every so-called beauty product in my bathroom? Oh joy!

So I took myself off to an organic food shop for the first time in my life, and started scanning the shelves for products that didn’t contain SLS or other dodgy chemical compounds. It was the day I met my first deodorant crystal. And golly, did that experience test my resolve to go natural wherever possible!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Environmental Issues . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.