Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Could You Eat It?

The first things people do as they try to get healthy or ensure health is to look at food.  What are you eating?   Whole foods, no chemicals, no preservatives, get rid of crummy oils, no sugar, most everyone will agree on that.

 I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to the next part, absorption.  Your skin is the largest organ in the body.  What you put on it can matter.   In fact,  because it doesn't go through the digestion process, the body doesn't break it down.  It enters pretty much unchanged.  What you put on it can be good or bad.  

Don't think it can have that big of impact?  Men with low testosterone are often given a cream to rub on them to boost this hormone.  Think of all the baseball players busted in the past decade, most of these performance enhancement drugs were lotion or cream based.  

Enter a chemical called Parabens.  In lotion the ingredient will be "-paraben."  Used as a preservative, for the most part it doesn't even need to be there.  It has been shown to be a xenoestrogen, chemicals that can mimic some estrogenic properties.  They have shown that you can have paraben build up in the bodies tissue.  No one is saying that it increases cancer risk outright, but the question becomes why risk it.  

Most people use lotion at least once a day.  Over 5-10 years, that's a lot of chemicals that your bodies tissue is absorbing and holding on to.  There are lots of options out there now that are paraben free, in fact, many are able to be ingested if for some reason you had to.  (Not saying do this)  but there should be that level of safety when it comes to the thought process.  Could I Eat This?

We care about what we eat, lets care about what we absorb on our skin routinely.  

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Never thought about this, J. Thanks, I'll never look at lotion the same way again!

BK