Ditch the Toxic Household Products: Part 3 - Personal Care

​This is part 3 in my series of blog posts about toxic household products. You can catch up on post one here about laundry products and post two here about household cleaning products. 

This third post in the series is about personal care products and how they are negatively affecting our pet's health and their human caretakers.

We tend to use a lot of different products on our bodies during our daily routines. We shower and use soap, shampoo and conditioner. We apply lotions, make-up, lip care, various hair products and scents to our bodies.
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Most of the commonly used products used in our personal care routines have hazardous toxins lurking within them.

You would think that these products would be checked for safety. But only the worst of the worst and the most clearly documented harmful ingredients are banned. Many very harmful substances are allowed in personal care products at certain levels. Even though they are known carcinogens or hormone disruptors. I guess a “little bit” of the toxin will only cause a “little bit” of cancer or fertility problems….right.

With most large companies profits clearly trump safety. It is up to the consumer to choose products that are safe for use.

The products which we spray onto ourselves are inadvertently dispersed through the air, so everyone in the household will be exposed on some level. All of the soaps, lotions and other products we use on our skin are transferred in small amounts to our pets when we pet or cuddle them. This may not seem like much of a concern, but over time it can be a problem. Like children who are much smaller, toxins affect our pets much more quickly. It takes less time for harmful levels to build up in their bodies. Things can get even more complicated when we consider the interactions that all these different chemicals have upon each other and how that can affect us and our pets.

In both humans and canines sperm quality has been sharply declining over the last 50 years. Phthalates and PSB’s have been found in canine semen, both are known to cause fertility issues and birth defects.

A 26 year long study with canines showed a 2.5 percent decline per year between 1988 and 1998 and a 1.2 percent annual downfall between 2002 and 2014. Human statistics are very similar.  A study of more than 26,000 French men, for example, found that sperm concentrations have dropped by nearly 2 percent each year from 1996 to 2005. That’s almost a 20% drop in less than 10 years!

When selecting products, look for ones that only use natural ingredients. Can you read the ingredient list and identify what each item is? Or are they long chemical names that are hard to pronounce? The one ingredient to be especially wary of is “fragrance”. It may sound harmless enough but the ingredient can contain nearly anything as it is completely unregulated. Skip any products that contain “fragrance”.

I will be hosting a free class coming up in April on this very topic. Please subscribe to our mailing list (in the right hand column on this blog) to be sure you don't miss the notification of when this free class will be.