Reduce Your Toxic Load, Improve Your Health!

We all know that the quality of our water, the air we breathe, and the food we eat can have massive impact on our health in the short and long run.  Food additives and pesticides can wreak havoc on the body. While much attention is paid to doing everything we can to improve the quality of the things we put in our body, are you paying attention to what you put on your body?
There are hundreds of chemicals that are approved for use in the United States in body care and cleaning products that are known immune toxins and carcinogens. Many of them can also block the absorption of nutrients, or impair our skins ability to perform crucial conversions to activate vitamins and hormones. Unfortunately some of the most expensive ones are the biggest offenders!  So are the storebrand products.  Read This!

Although I know it can be an overwhelming task, it is very important to start cleaning out your bathroom cabinet and making sure that the products you’re using are safe. This is especially important if you have any health problems, or family history of cancers and autoimmune diseases.

The Environmental Working Group is a wonderful resource for looking up products, foods, and other environmental impacts on our health. They have a database called Skin Deep, which allows you to look up products by name to see how they score on a scale of 1-10, I like to stay below 4.  EWG also has an app for smart phones called EWG’s Healthy Living, so you can check products while you’re in the store by simply scanning the bar code.  EWG has been around for several years and has really dedicated themselves to educating the public on all matters of toxins in our food and products.
There is another new app called Think Dirty which focuses primarily on beauty products, where you can scan the barcode of an item to check for safety and toxicity. It appears they are still building their database but they do have a number of items in there already that you can check.  You can also save lists to your app for easy reference, and submit items to the app that aren’t already there.

So take a moment to download the apps, and look up the things you use on a regular basis.  This is a great way to reduce your toxic load.  In a world where there is so much going on we can’t control, this is a place where we can take the bull by the horns!