News Coverage
Testing for Toxins
Women are taking environmental health into their own hands
Published June 7, 2005
Becky Allen is the kind of glamorous woman whose fiery red hair announces her presence like an exclamation point. But her luxuriant locks can also be a red flag, a warning of the toxins in her body.
Today, in her sunny Mission District apartment, she's letting her friend Nina Luttinger snip wantonly at the back of her scalp -- definitely not the kind of haircut Allen is accustomed to. "Hey, that looks like a lot!" Allen says as Luttinger places the cuttings in a plastic bag.
Meanwhile, across town in her apartment overlooking Golden Gate Park, Susan Kim-Stuart, who is pregnant, is also chopping at her tresses. Both women are sending their hair samples to a lab at the University of North Carolina, where it will be tested for the presence of mercury. Like many women, they have special concerns about chemicals in their bodies.
"Women have more body fat than men, so our bodies can store more toxins," says Tina Eshaghpour, program officer for the Women's Foundation of California, a Bay Area organization that gives grants to nonprofits working on women's issues in the state. The natural changes women experience as part of their menstrual cycles and during pregnancy also increase their susceptibility to toxins, she adds. "With each of these hormonal fluctuations, different toxins keep getting re-released into our bodies, so we're constantly getting re-exposed even to chemicals that have persisted for many years or many decades in our bodies."
And this exposure is important not just for women themselves but also for fetuses and breast-feeding children. "A woman's body is the first environment for everybody," says Heather Serantis, program manager at the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, one of many Bay Area organizations looking closely at toxins in women's bodies.
Potentially toxic chemicals pervade our environment. They come to us in our food and in the personal-care products we use. Toxins of special concern to women include industrial pollutants such as mercury, but also common ingredients in body-care products that many women use routinely. In both cases, lax government oversight has left the responsibility for reducing exposure in women's own hands.
Serantis says that few regulations exist about what can and cannot go in body care products and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees cosmetic safety, rarely enforces its own rules.
"A lot of the ingredients in personal-care products -- soap, shampoo, hair dyes, nail polish, perfumes, etc. -- are known or probable carcinogens, reproductive toxins or mutagens," she continues, listing substances that government agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have identified as health risks. "It's perfectly legal for them to be used in products that we put on our bodies every day, day after day."
Similarly, most of the mercury coursing through our veins is a legally permitted pollutant from coal-fired power plants. It is released into the air when coal is burned, then falls into our waterways, where it is taken up by the aquatic food chain and concentrated in large, tasty fish such as swordfish and tuna.
Fish is the primary source of mercury in most peoples' bodies, which is why Kim-Stuart, who is expecting her first child in July, decided to have her hair tested. "I do try to avoid environmental toxins," she says. "We try to buy natural dish soap and use environmentally friendly house-cleaning products. We eat organic and grass-fed beef. I've been avoiding swordfish steaks for the past five or 10 years, but I eat a lot of other fish."
The hair-testing program is coordinated by Greenpeace, which is offering volunteers the chance to have their hair tested at cost. With the help of other groups such as the Sierra Club, the program will collect 10,000 samples by the end of the year as a way to draw attention to the Bush administration's foot-dragging on regulating emissions from coal plants. The samples are provided to scientists at the University of North Carolina, who do the testing and use the data in their studies on mercury exposure.
"It's a way to point out that the environment is a health issue, too," says Casey Harrell, coordinator of Greenpeace's mercury-testing program. "In many ways it's the next lead -- something that everyone knows is not good for you, and that shouldn't be in our environment."
Though Kim-Stuart hadn't been too concerned about mercury, she does worry about unregulated chemicals in body-care products. "Even before I was pregnant, I researched products, looking for the safer ones," she says. "I've been using more environmental shampoos and lotions and soaps, trying to use the purest things available, for the last year or two."
Becky Allen, who isn't planning on having a baby in the near future but would like to someday, says she eats whatever she wants without really thinking about it. She uses a range of body-care products but adds that she prefers products marketed as "natural." Even so, Allen could be unknowingly exposing herself to questionable chemicals.
For example, Allen's naturally red hair is helped along a bit by Clairol's Natural Instincts Hair Color, a product the Breast Cancer Fund's Heather Serantis says is a deception. "Clairol Natural Instincts has a nice little leaf on the box and a fresh-faced white woman with a bright white shirt, and she looks crisp and clean and healthy and natural," she adds. "But it's one of the worst. There's no regulation on the use of the word healthy, on the use of the word natural or anything to that effect. People have to do a lot of their own research, because there's a marketing scheme to make things seem safer than they really are."
The box of Clairol Natural Instincts Serantis showed me listed ingredients such as the cancer-causing chemicals 4-amino-2-hydroxytoluene, p-aminophenol and p-phenylenediamine, as well as a number of other questionable substances.
"I'm such a sucker!" Allen exclaims when I tell her about the ingredients. "I just used it last night!"
Recent research has shown that phthalates, chemicals routinely used in body-care products, could harm developing fetuses and young children. (The effects on adult bodies are less clear but may include male-fertility problems.) Beyond simple questions of poisoning -- the sort of tests the cosmetic industry usually looks at -- exposure to small amounts of chemicals such as phthalates at just the right moment in development can lead to consequences decades later. Researchers point to the experience with DES, a synthetic estrogen prescribed to millions of pregnant women before it was banned in 1971. Horrifyingly, it turns out that the grown daughters of mothers prescribed DES are up to 40 times more likely to develop certain cancers, and often have complications in their own pregnancies. There is even evidence that a third-generation effect may exist.
Though many consumers have long had a visceral aversion to ingredients they can't pronounce (say "THA-lates"), it is only recently that this kind of conventional wisdom has coalesced into a political movement. Last year, the European Union passed legislation requiring manufacturers to reformulate body-care products without potentially harmful chemicals. An effort to pass similar regulations in California stalled after vigorous lobbying by cosmetic companies. A new bill, sponsored by state Sen. Carole Migden, would require cosmetic companies to report the presence of chemicals such as phthalates that are known to cause cancer (they are often hidden under the rubric of fragrance).
Into the breach have stepped advocacy groups. The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group has created an online database that rates the ingredients of various personal-care products. Similarly, the Breast Cancer Fund's Campaign for Safe Cosmetics asks companies to pledge to adhere to the European Union rules in their worldwide operations.
Some companies have been working to address these issues as well. Aveda, for example, is working with Greenpeace's mercury-testing program; its training salons have proved the perfect place to collect hair samples. The company has also removed phthalates from all of its products, including packaging, says Mary Tkach, Aveda's executive director of environmental sustainability. "We're trying to be a different kind of company," she says. "We have to really think ahead."
Still, inertia in the sector is difficult to overcome. Even some of Aveda's products score poorly in the Environmental Working Group's database, and the company has yet to sign on to the safe-cosmetics pledge. (Tkach says Aveda's parent company -- Est
