Addict Nation (36 page)
Cue the Superbugs
When I was a kid nobody seemed to talk about allergies. Now it seems like every other kid has an allergy or asthma. You’d think we’d be healthier given all those antibacterials we keep using on our hands. But scientists now fear the exact opposite. Germs play an important role in helping our bodies build up their natural defenses. Doctors warn that babies, especially, must be exposed to germs so they can build up the antibodies needed to combat infection. It’s called building up a resistance. When we use hand sanitizers, we don’t just kill the bad bacteria but also the good germs that have a purpose. Even worse, when bacteria and viruses are constantly exposed to these unnecessarily strong cleansers, antibiotic-resistant germs crop up. They’re known as superbugs.
16
Microbiologists fear we are playing Russian roulette with the natural balance of microorganisms.
Being Pretty Is Getting Pretty Scary
For women, the notion of cleanliness is inextricably intertwined with definitions of beauty and sexual attractiveness. In the post– World War II era, as Rosie the Riveter retired her overalls, American business devised another ingenious way to separate women from their money. On top of preposterous standards of hygiene, they added impossible standards of beauty, developing innumerable cosmetics products to add to the growing list of de rigueur household and personal-cleaning products.
“The reality is that women are still doing about 70 percent of the housework in the average home and that means that they are—by default—being exposed to more chemicals in the home on a daily basis. In addition, we’re talking about exposure to chemicals from all sorts of different sources. On average, women tend to use more personal care products per day than men. On average, they use about 15 products per day, which could be exposing yourself to more than 100 different chemicals from those products at a time.”
—Erin Switalski, executive director of
Women’s Voices for the Earth
There’s a growing consensus among environmental watchdogs that female consumers are purposely kept in the dark about the hazards of what they’re slathering on their bodies. “Every morning across America, tens of millions of women apply from twelve to twenty ‘personal-care’ products to themselves, according to the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association. . . . American women might assume that somebody has been watching to ensure that potential toxins in those ingredients are kept away from intimate contact with the body’s largest organ, the skin. They would be wrong.”
17
So writes Mark Schapiro in his frightening but riveting book
Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s
at Stake for American Power.
I’m in the news media, and I was shocked to read his claim that “While the cosmetic companies assert that their products are safe, 89 percent of the ingredients used in cosmetics today have not been assessed by either the FDA or by industry.”
18
What? We thought they were looking out for us. Now we go into our bathrooms, read the labels on the back of our “beauty products,” and wonder, do any of us really know what all those long words mean?
“We don’t really know a whole lot about the chemicals that are put into our products. And there is no effective regulatory mechanism for really making sure that the chemicals we are using are safe before they are sold to us in products. We are basically sitting in this world of toxic soup and we have no idea what we are exposing ourselves to.”
—Erin Switalski, executive director of
Women’s Voices for the Earth
In the mid-1970s, the Toxic Substances Control Act was designed to regulate chemicals. But critics note, in a blanket move, the government grandfathered in about 60,000 chemicals already on the market. Another 20,000 chemicals have reportedly come on the scene since then.
19
It turns out Americans have a lot more in common with millions of forgotten, suffering laboratory animals than we think. In
The Hundred-
Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are
Destroying Your Health
, author Randall Fitzgerald suggests every American has been used—for decades—as a guinea pig in a vast chemistry experiment. He quotes a toxins expert as saying, “The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 allows chemicals to be sold and used unless they are proven to be a risk. The EPA, however, does not conduct its own safety tests, but relies on research conducted by manufacturers.” Well, what about the FDA? The author suggests, “When it comes to chemicals added to cosmetics and many other personal care products, the FDA knows as much about their safety as you do.”
20
Things have changed only slightly since that assessment. The FDA recently announced it was joining a government effort to predict how chemicals impact human health and the environment called the Tox21 initiative. This effort, led by the Environmental Protection Agency, claims to have screened 2,000 chemicals, with a goal of reviewing 10,000 by the start of 2011.
21
Even so, that would leave tens of thousands of unscreened chemicals in our everyday products. And so far, none of these screenings seems to have resulted in any change to what’s for sale on our store shelves.
Why is this such an urgent issue? Estimates are more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals enter American commerce every day!
22
And we are absorbing minute quantities of numerous chemicals on a daily basis.
Are We Being Slowly Poisoned?
If we take a massive dose of something, it’s relatively easy to tell if your body is having a bad reaction. But when we take in tiny amounts of chemicals on a daily basis, it’s harder to figure out if we are hurting ourselves. The chemicals build up over time and can have a cumulative effect. And who knows how all those different chemicals interact with each other within our bodies. The Environmental Working Group notes, “As people apply an average of 126 unique ingredients on their skin daily, these chemicals, whether they seep through the skin, rinse down the drain, or flush down the toilet in human excretions, are causing concerns for human health, and for the impacts they may have to wildlife, rivers, and streams.” Just in case you missed it, we apply an average of 126 unique ingredients on our skin . . . every day.
23
If you think that number is exaggerated, you may want to do a household and grooming products inventory. Count the number of personal cleaning, cosmetics, and household products you pour on your body or come into physical contact with every day. Then add up all the different ingredients in each of those products. You’d likely find that 126 is not such an outlandish number of ingredients after all. Today, most consumer products are filled with a long list of ingredients that, for the vast majority of Americans, are mostly incomprehensible and unpronounceable. My question is: why are we exhibiting such blind faith and assuming that every product we gulp down or pour on ourselves is A-okay for our health when we can’t even pronounce what’s in all those vials, jars, and bottles?
Is Europe More Advanced Than We are?
The book
Exposed
asks an even more disturbing question: “Is America itself becoming a dumping ground for products forbidden because of their toxic effects in other countries?”
24
The author’s argument is that the European Union has taken a leadership role in banning potentially toxic chemicals, with many other countries following the EU’s lead, leaving the United States increasingly isolated because of its short-term-profit-over-long-term-cost ethos. When are America’s biggest manufacturers going to embrace the reality that nontoxic, environmentally sensitive products won’t put them out of business and will protect their customers’ health? When we, as consumers, start demanding it!
Sobriety Is About Getting into the Solution
I am definitely
not
an advocate of requiring the government to test all these chemicals by torturing additional millions and millions of laboratory animals to death to determine just how toxic some of them are. We need to simply get rid of a lot of these chemicals! To a large degree, this all boils down to us,
the consumers,
not allowing ourselves to be seduced by manipulative marketing practices and making smarter, more compassionate choices that are in our enlightened self-interest.
For every single chemical-filled product on the market, there is already, today, as we speak, an alternative version without the harsh chemicals on sale at health food stores, cooperatives, Whole Foods, and other environmentally conscious retailers.
From detergents to dish-washing liquid, from toilet cleaner to talcum powder, from shampoos to sunblock, from oven cleaner to underarm deodorants, from lip gloss to eyeliner, you can find products that are cruelty free (meaning they are not tested on animals) and have no artificial colors, flavors, fragrances, or preservatives. Some products even explain the purpose and source of every ingredient on the label. These products are less harmful to the environment, tending to be biodegradable and, obviously, less toxic. If these alternative products can achieve the same results—clean clothes, clean floors, clean dishes, clean mouths, clean hair, pretty lips and eyes—why do we need all those chemicals? The answer is: WE DON’T!
I know those environmentally sensitive products work because I use them. Nobody’s accused me of having bad body odor or straw-like hair or a dirty toilet or soiled plates. However, as long as most Americans keep buying the chemical-filled brands, where’s the incentive for those manufacturers to change their products? THERE ISN’T ANY!
The List of Chemicals Entering
Our Bodies Just Keeps Growing
The Environmental Working Group did what’s called a “body burden” study, testing nine people for more than 200 chemicals. In those nine people, they discovered 167 different industrial and agricultural chemicals, among them: PCBs, dioxins, and insecticide components. Some of the chemicals found have been associated with cancer and birth defects.
25
The interesting thing is most of the test subjects were environmentalists. Even they are overexposed.
We Can’t Wait for Government to Act
Let’s face it. Thanks to pervasive lobbying and influence peddling, plus a revolving door between government and private industry, our government agencies are, for the most part, controlled by the very companies they’re supposed to regulate. It’s a morally bankrupt system. Oversight is a joke.
It’s time for consumers to take back the power and demand less toxic products. When the economies of scale kick in, alternative products will become as inexpensive as toxic ones. By using the power of our purse, we can all accelerate this trend. In the meantime, it would behoove all of us to examine whether we really need all the different types of products we accumulate in our cabinets and drawers.
Define Cleanliness
The tragic irony is, in our race to be superficially superclean, we have unnecessarily dirtied ourselves with unnatural substances and polluted the world around us. That’s the opposite of clean. The more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals that enter American commerce daily have to go somewhere. Ultimately, much of it ends up seeping into the ground water and polluting our rivers and oceans. Is this really the world we want to leave for our children and grandchildren? A world where the lakes, streams, and bays are off limits because they are too dirty to splash in?
26
“We have no idea what the long-term problems are. All we know is that there is a serious rise in health problems. We are seeing a 40 percent increase in women having trouble getting pregnant in the last 20 years. We don’t know why. We have a huge rise in autism. We don’t know why. There is a huge rise in learning disabilities. We don’t know why.”
—Erin Switalski, executive director of
Women’s Voices for the Earth
There Is Superficial Clean and There Is Deep Clean
Addictive, ego-based cleanliness is very narrowly focused. It’s all about keeping our personal property looking good. We don’t leave food to rot on our kitchen counter. We count on the city to pick up our trash each week. Our exacting standards are a source of pride. When people see how “neat” we are, we get a rush of pleasure. That’s the addictive hit. We might call this “keeping up with Joneses’ cleanliness.” What happens to our garbage—once it leaves our property—ceases to be our concern. We turn a blind eye to how our waste might be impacting the environment and wildlife.
Addictive Cleanliness Regards
Hygiene as a Zero Sum Game
Either the addict wins or the germs/pests/smells win. It’s rooted in fear and manifested by a desire to kill the offending object. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this I’ve experienced is when a swarm of bees landed on my balcony and some of my neighbors began insisting that I call an exterminator. I went online, did a little research, found that a bee swarm is likely to move on in a couple of days, and I did absolutely nothing and pleaded with my neighbors to be patient. The bees soon left with their lives intact. What a shock. We had managed to coexist. It turns out that honeybee populations are plummeting in what scientists call “colony collapse disorder.” Pesticides are among the likely factors.
27
Honeybees are a vital part of our ecosystem as they carry out pollination. Anyway, they’re God’s creatures. They deserve to live. Besides, when we mindlessly exterminate the “inconvenient” creatures in our midst, we bring dangerous pesticides and chemicals into our lives that can hurt us, our children, and even our companion animals.