Breast Cancer Awareness

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. To us, what that really means is an opportunity to learn and educate about prevention.

Did you know that 85% of breast cancer occurs in people who have no family history of breast cancer? That means that environment and lifestyle play a HUGE roll.

And that is good news, because that means we can take action towards prevention from breast cancer and many other health issues that share common links. These are effects of our environment, lifestyles, and behaviors via the three essential catagories for normal health, eating well, moving well, and thinking well.

One avenue you can focus on is removing hormone disruptors from your home. Hormone disruptors are synthetic chemicals that can mimic hormones and interfere with or disrupt the delicate hormonal balance in our bodies.

Many synthetic chemicals in our day to day routines are actually really toxic to our health. These chemicals enter our system via inhalation and absorption through our skin. This is a big deal because these chemicals block our body’s ability to regulate normal hormone function. For example, hormone disruptors that mimic estrogen are called xeno-estrogens. They compete with the natural estrogen produced by our bodies. Estrogen imbalance is a key component for people batteling many health issues like breast cancer. 

We see this disruption most in our food, our air, and the synthetic materials around us and those we put on our skin. Fortunately our bodies know how to detox and heal, we just need to apply the best principles of health; Eat well, move well, and think well all together for a period of time.

Unfortunately it is completely legal for companies to use ingredients linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, and reproductive harm in the home cleaning, personal care, and cosmetic products we use every day. Actually, there are no federal regulations requiring Home Cleaning Products to list all of their ingredients. Plus, only about 10% of the 10,000 chemicals commonly found in personal care products have safety data. Hard to believe right?

One great way to find out more about the saftey of the pruducts you are currently using is to check how it is rated by the Environmental Working Group. They even have an app to make it easy to check products while you are out shopping.

One of our community partners, Beautycounter, has been leading the path for clean beauty. Instead of the 30 ingredients banned in the US, Beautycounter does their own research for safety and has banned over 1,800 ingredients from their products so far!