A Look into Sunscreen

Wear your sunscreen.

We hear this advice all the time. If you're going to be out in the sun, wear your sunscreen.

Let's look at two aspects of this advice that we may often overlook: our need for Vitamin D and the chemicals in most sunscreens that may do a lot more harm than good.

Vitamin D

When considering whether to put on sunscreen or not, remember that our body produces Vitamin D when we're exposed to sunlight. This can't happen if we coat ourselves with sunscreen every time we step out of our front door. We all need a certain amount of sun exposure to stay healthy.

Here's more about Vitamin D from the article Lack of Sunshine Causes One Million Deaths a Year:

Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, is different from other vitamins in that it influences your entire body -- receptors that respond to the vitamin have been found in almost every type of human cell, from your brain to your bones.

Optimizing your vitamin D levels could help you to prevent as many as 16 different types of cancer including pancreatic, lung, breast, ovarian, prostate, and colon cancers.

On the MedlinePlus website, they give quite a detailed list of things that Vitamin D is good for.

Basically, it's important for your overall health. Certainly some amount of sun exposure is healthy and necessary!

Sunscreen

But okay, there definitely are times when you'll be out in the sun for long periods and need to protect your skin. Can you just grab any old bottle and assume it's safe and effective?

One big thing to look for is to make sure it protects against UVA rays as well as UVB (not all protect against both). UVB is what helps to produce Vitamin D, but UVA penetrates deep in our skin and causes damage. So don't just look at SPF, but make sure it covers both types of rays.

Another consideration is whether or not there are harmful chemicals in the product that will defeat the purpose if you're trying to keep yourself healthy and cancer free.

We certainly can't rely on label claims that the product is "natural," "safe," "organic," or anything else along those lines, because what they claim can be completely false (there is no regulation on using those terms).

Since most of us can't look at a long list of ingredients in a commercial product and be able to identify every single one as either safe or harmful, then we should turn to those who can.

I often go to the Cosmetic Database when I need to look up information on a product or ingredient. This database was put together by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Today, I came across their sunscreen guide:

2013 Guide to Sunscreens

They give lots of wonderful information, including 9 Surprising Facts About Sunscreen, and also a list of "184 beach & sport sunscreens (that) meet EWG's criteria" for safety and effectiveness.

Another one of my main go-to sources, Dr. Mercola's website, has many articles about sunscreen and its damaging affects (the sunscreen itself and the Vitamin D deficiencies it leads to).

In one of his articles, Four Out of Five Sunscreens May be Hazardous to your Health, he gives a list of the common harmful ingredients in sunscreens. This is a good list to have when looking at your current bottle of sunscreen at home and when you (most likely) need to purchase a new one.

Examining My Family's Sunscreen

After deciding to write on this topic, naturally I was going to pick up my own family's bottle that we've been using for a couple years and research its safety.

Our bottle at home.
(Don't buy this.)

I looked up our NO-AD Spf 60 Sunblock Lotion (recommended by the Skin Cancer Foundation as it says on the label) on the cosmetic database to find out it has a score of 7.

That's 7 out of 10...10 being the worst.

Here are the specific rating it gives:

Overall Hazard: moderate to high

Cancer: low to moderate

Developmental and reproductive toxicity: high

Of the ingredient list, five of them enhance skin absorption (so all the chemicals get absorbed really well) and six of the ingredients have a score of 7 or 8 (remember that 10 is the worst).

Of these six ingredients with bad scores, three of them are parabens (preservatives) that are endocrine disruptors, one is the generic ingredient fragrance (which is a blanket term for plastic chemicals that smell good), one is the active ingredient oxybenzone (which "absorbs through the skin in significant amounts," can cause cellular level changes and is an endocrine disruptor), and one is Retinyl Palmitate (which "when exposed to UV light, retinol compounds break down and produce toxic free radicals that can damage DNA and cause gene mutations, a precursor to cancer"*).

I also looked up my bottle of sunscreen on Good Guide. It gets a health score of ZERO...(0 out of 10, zero is the worst).

* This ingredient seems to have some controversy over it. Some sources say that the EWG is wrong about this claim, but those saying that seem to be tied to the sunscreen industry. You just have to decide who you will believe.

***

After finding all of this out about our only bottle of sunscreen in the house (and being quite horrified by it), I realized that I needed to replace it immediately.

I went out that evening to two stores and scanned the backs of all the sunscreen bottles. I couldn't buy anything out of probably 40 products. They all had basically the same nasty ingredients.

I can only assume that most other drug stores, grocery stores and big box stores will all be the same way. So I'm forced to search for the needle in the haystack (which sadly, most Americans won't bother doing...or even know that it's necessary in the first place). It shouldn't be that way. We should have better choices readily available.

There are healthier sunscreens out there, you just have to know which ones they are. Here are a few places to start looking:

EWG's Guide to Sunscreens

Good Guide's Best Sunscreen Ratings

SafeMama's Safer Sunscreen Cheat Sheet

Be smart about the sun, but also about what you put on your skin.

Is Fluoride safe?

In the past, I have heard things here and there about fluoride not being safe for us. But until now, I have never looked into it. I now see that there is quite a controversy over this topic, especially whether it should be in our drinking water or not (I must be living under a rock, but I didn't know there could be anything wrong with it in our water supply). But fluoride in our water is a separate issue; so let's just focus on toothpaste.

First of all, the warning on all toothpastes should give us a clue:

Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away.

With a warning like that, why is everyone not questioning whether or not this should be in our toothpastes - where swallowing can occur, especially for our children?

As we all know, the purpose of fluoride is to prevent tooth decay. Whether it does this or not (there is evidence that it might not even fight tooth decay very well...see article linked below), we are ignoring the fact that it is toxic for us and can have many negative effects on our health.

A very informative article was written by Dr. Mercola just a few months ago:

You’re Still Told Fluoridation Prevents Tooth Decay, but Science Proves Otherwise

I would recommend reading through it for comprehensive information on this. He goes into great detail about the harmful effects and how the bad vastly outweighs the good.

Towards the bottom of this article, Dr. Mercola posts a video of an interview with Dr. Osmunson, who is a dentist fighting against the use of fluoride. This is a very informative video. Please watch...


I'm only siting from one source, so I encourage you - if you have never researched it - to look further into this. To me, fluoride seems to be something to stay far away from, but it's only from hearing the studies which show that it's not effective on our teeth and that it's harmful to our bodies.

The FDA and Triclosan

Back in February, I wrote a blog post about hand soap. It was a long post, describing in detail the toxic ingredients contained in most hand soaps, one of which is triclosan.

Triclosan is used for its antibacterial properties. But it also has harmful effects on the human body, mainly that it's an endocrine disruptor.

According to Wikipedia, endocrine disruptors "are chemicals that at certain doses, can interfere with the endocrine (or hormone system) in mammals. These disruptions can cause cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Any system in the body controlled by hormones, can be derailed by hormone disruptors.

Skin Deep's Cosmetic Database gives triclosan a score of 7 (10 being the worst). Reasons given for the score are that it's an irritant, an endocrine disruptor, and has organ system toxicity. But to top it all off, when triclosan is mixed with the chlorine in tap water, it forms chloroform gas. The Cosmetic Database gives chloroform a score of 10 and it's "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen."

You can read more about triclosan here: PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS: Triclosan Comes under Scrutiny

Bottom line: DON'T USE ANY PRODUCTS CONTAINING TRICLOSAN

***

The FDA

Most Americans are probably under the assumption that all products and ingredients on the store shelves have been thoroughly tested for safety and given a seal of approval by the FDA. Because they are certainly watching our for our health, right?

Well, yesterday I came across an article on the home page of naturalnews.com:

FDA finally gets around to conducting safety review on toxic antibacterial chemical triclosan, already in consumer products for four decades

I encourage you to read the whole article, but I will take a few excerpts from it:

After more than 40 years of complete inaction in evaluating the potential side effects of the antibacterial chemical triclosan, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finally getting around to conducting a review of this pervasive chemical additive, which is now found in more than 75 percent of all conventional hand soaps. 

A 2007 (University of Michigan) review found that, based on independent data compiled from 30 different academic sources, triclosan is no more effective at preventing illness or reducing bacteria on hands than plain hand soap. "At this point, it's just looking like a superfluous chemical."

...the FDA never actually approved the chemical for use in consumer products. In fact, a draft review compiled by the agency back in 1978 stated that triclosan was "not generally recognized as safe and effective."

Even though it lacked the proper safety data to do so, the FDA did, in fact, approve the use of triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste back in 1997. But to this day, the agency has never shown that triclosan actually works as claimed, and its website even admits that the chemical still has not been shown to work in soap as an effective sanitizer.

Going back again to the Cosmetic Database, triclosan is in 91 of their products. Good guide has it in over 450 products, including in hand soap, hand sanitizer, body wash, facial cleanser, bar soap, toothpaste, moisturizer, dish soap, lipstick, eye shadow and many others.

Thanks for keeping us safe, FDA. Keep up the good work.