The New Year is a time of renewal – looking ahead, visualizing, and anticipating positive changes and developments for our selves in the year to come. This time-honored tradition takes on many forms: new year’s resolutions to lose weight, get fit, stop smoking, find ways to reduce stress in our busy lives; give away or recycle old possessions that have outlived their usefulness; and clear out all manner of clutter to make room for new and better things.
If you’ve resolved to take better care of yourself this year and be healthier, there’s never been a better time to give the medicine cabinet in your bathroom a New Year’s Makeover. I’d like to encourage you to take a closer look at what’s inside yours. Even the most seemingly innocuous items can contain a veritable of soup of chemicals that may be doing you more harm than good.
Read the labels and familiarize yourself with the ingredients. Start with the products you use daily – toothpaste, mouthwash, antiperspirants or deodorants, talcum powder, face creams, lotions, and cleansers, over-the-counter cold and pain medications, “anti-bacterial” soaps, and traditional cosmetics. After all, these are products you routinely apply to your skin or your teeth and gums – both the fastest routes for substances to be absorbed into the bloodstream. When substances are absorbed into the body this way they often by-pass the liver – your body’s principle detoxifying organ or worse, clog and congest it. That means many toxic substances aren’t properly eliminated and often take up residence in the fatty tissue of our organs where they build up over time, turning into a virtual “thorn in your side” that can compromise your immune system and leave you susceptible to a host of health problems. A congested liver is also one of the fastest routes to inflammation in the body.
Ironically, many of the chemical ingredients in personal care products are there to improve the texture and consistency, appearance, or shelf-life stability of the product and have no functional purpose. To add insult to injury, many are primarily there to speed up or enhance the penetration of the other ingredients into the skin; increase the thickness and intensity of the lather (making it harder to rinse off); or make the product more visually appealing.
Eliminating products made with ingredients that are at worst, toxic and potentially harmful to your health, and at best, irritants or allergens that do not serve you on your path to more healthful living, will greatly reduce your risk of exposure and may even rid you of persistent unexplained health problems. Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally), many of the ingredients that are harmful to you, are also harmful to the environment, both on the manufacturing and production side and on the back-end as they make their way down toilets and drains and into our riverbeds and streams altering the ecological landscape.
While it may not seem like that big of a deal, transforming your bathroom cabinet is actually a very good first step toward “greening” your lifestyle. If being “greener” is one of your new year’s resolutions then stay tuned as I offer some tips and advice on how to do that over the next week or so.
If you have sensitive or perpetually dry skin, discontinue using liquid soaps or body washes that contain Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES). These surfactants (foaming agents) are among the most commonly used foaming agents in shampoos, cleansers, body washes and even toothpastes and mouthwashes, because they are extremely cheap. They work by lowering the surface tension of water, which unfortunately, also dissolves your skin’s natural oil and strips it of its protective layer. SLS, particularly in shampoos, penetrates very easily through the hair follicles on the head, and assists other chemicals to more readily penetrate as well. It can cause skin damage, flaking, drying, cracking, roughness, and breakdown of the skin’s protective barrier.
Coconut oil for soap making has been around practically since the invention of soap. Coconut oil is the most logical and efficient oil or fat to use in manufacturing soap because it creates the best soaps –both liquid and bar soaps with a rich lather that cleans your skin while protecting it. Most commercial soaps today have coconut oil as their primary ingredient or one of their main ingredients.
Among the three oils, coconut oil was the only one found to reduce the protein loss for both undamaged and damaged hair when used as a pre-wash and post-wash grooming product. Both sunflower and mineral oils did nothing to reduce protein loss from hair. It turns out that coconut oil, being a triglyceride of lauric acid (its main fatty acid), has a high affinity for hair proteins. Because of its low molecular weight and straight linear chain (again being a little technical here …), it’s able to fully penetrate inside the hair shaft. Due to their chemical composition, the other oils were unable to penetrate the hair shaft and as a result, failed to protect the hair from protein loss.
In continuing with my monthly review of natural ingredients for the skin, this month’s focus is on the tremendous benefits of coconut oil – another miracle of nature! The word coconut usually conjures up an exotic tropical locale or a frothy pina colada in a tall glass with a brightly colored paper umbrella in it, with the soothing sounds of the surf in the background. But the coconut and it’s various parts are more than exotic … the list of health benefits and ailments that can be alleviated or even cured by coconut oil, both when ingested and when applied topically, is extensive!
The trees can grow up to 15 feet in height and have a very long lifespan of 100 to 200 years. As far back as the 1700s, Father Junipero Serra, who established the missions in California, wrote in his diary that Native Americans used the material they pressed from Jojoba seeds for its “mystical” treatment of cuts, scrapes, sunburn and dried out skin. As it turns out, they also chewed on the seeds to suppress their appetite. So don’t be surprised if you see a weight-loss supplement made from Jojoba in the not-too-distant future!
