Is your Shampoo or Other Personal Care Products Making you Fat?

Paula Baillie-Hamilton, an expert on metabolism and environmental toxins, was one of the first to make a link between the obesity epidemic and the increase in environmental chemicals. Baillie-Hamilton argued that exposure to chemicals can damage your body's natural weight-control mechanisms. She calls toxic chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors "chemical calories."

Environmental researchers now call these chemical calories "obesogens." These organic pollutants can derail the hormonal mechanisms that control your weight.

According to Grist:
"... [I]t is impossible, now, to tease out how much of obesity is caused by chemicals, and how much by energy balance. They're intertwined, anyway, with imbalances in appetite-regulating hormones like leptin and ghrelin causing us to want to eat more of the available food ... [S]teer clear of Bisphenol-A ... [and] shampoos, cosmetics, and soaps containing phthalates."

Even buying organic shampoo and other personal care products may not protect you. As the Center for Environmental Health recently reported:

"Dozens of shampoos, lotions, toothpastes,and other personal care products sold by national retailers including Target, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Whole Foods and other stores are mislabeled as organic, in violation of California law, according to a lawsuit filed … by the Center for Environmental Health (CEH)."

Several of the products contain potentially toxic ingredients, including disrupting hormones, despite being labeled as organic.

Sources:
Grist June 28, 2011
Obesity Reviews April 4, 2011
Center for Environmental Health June 16, 2011

Comments from Janis at JESorganics.com

It may sound like a joke to think about your shampoo or any of your personal care products making you fat.  However, the majority of personal care products contain a host of toxic chemicals in addition to endocrine disruptors.  Endocrine distrupors cause premature puberty, obesity and increased risk of cancer, just to name a few.  As far as your shampoo is concerned, the primary endocrine-disrupting chemical culprits are phthalates. Phthalates are used as plasticizers in everything from vinyl flooring to detergents, hoses, raincoats, adhesives, air fresheners, and toys, but they're also found in some soaps, shampoos, lotions and nail polish. One 2002 study by the Environmental Working Group detected phthalates in nearly three-quarters of personal care products tested, noting that:

"Major loopholes in federal law allow the … cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of phthalates into many personal care products with no required testing, no required monitoring of health effects, and no required labeling."

Phthalates are not only being linked to weight gain … they are the same group of "gender-bending" chemicals also causing males of all species to become more female.

We founded JES Organics because of our research into ingredients and toxic chemicals.  Toxic chemicals are everywhere and they have an accumulative effect on our bodies.  Over time, our bodies start breaking down from the toxic onslaught. 

Please become an educated consumer and read your labels.  It is highly unlikely that you will find non-toxic quality products at large high end or low end stores.  And if you think you are getting quality by buying expensive brand name products or even products promoted by doctors, think again!

Read the label, don't be fooled by false marketing on labels (natural, organic, dermatologist tested or recommended, hypoallergenic, etc).  These words are not regulated and have no standards.  We joined the Compact for Safe Cosmetics immediately upon starting JES Organics and we continue to be a company in full compliance with full disclosure of our ingredients. 

Meditation halts age-related degeneration throughout entire brain

Friday, July 15, 2011 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

(NaturalNews) Getting older means you will not be as mentally sharp and, in fact, your brain will shrink. It's just the way life is and there's nothing you can do about it, right? Wrong. Now it appears we can take control of brain changes and even make our brains larger, not smaller, as we age and cause electrical connections to zip along at a faster rate to improve thinking and memory. The key is meditation.

Back in 2009, UCLA scientists made an amazing discovery -- they found that the brains of people who had meditated long-term were different than those of non-meditators. To be specific, the researchers found evidence that particular regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger. They also had more gray matter than the brains of people who didn't meditate.

This was startling-- and important -- because brains normally shrink with age, a process they may explain memory and other cognitive problems experienced by elders. More recently, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) concluded that an eight week mindful meditation practice produced measurable changes in participants' brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress (http://www.naturalnews.com/031228_m...).

Now comes even more proof that meditation does something profound, and beneficial, to the human brain. A follow-up study by the UCLA team just published in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage shows that people who meditate have stronger connections between brain regions. What's more, they have far less age-related brain atrophy.

What's the significance? Stronger connections increase the ability of electrical signals in the brain to work rapidly -- suggesting a whole host of thinking and memory benefits. Also, these effects were not just found here and there but throughout the entire brains of meditators.

The study involved 27 active meditation practitioners with an average age of 52, along with 27 matched control subjects. Both groups consisted of 11 men and 16 women. Over all, the meditators had been practicing various styles of meditation, including Shamatha, Vipassana, Zazen and others, for five years or longer.

Eileen Luders, a visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and fellow researchers conducted their research using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a relatively new type of brain imaging that reveals structural connectivity inthe brain.

The investigators found that the differences between the brains of research subjects who were meditators and the brains of non-meditators in the control group weren't limited to a core region of the brain but instead involved large-scale networks of the entire brain, as well as limbic structures and the brain stem.

"Our results suggest that long-term meditators have white-matter fibers that are either more numerous, more dense or more insulated throughout the brain," Dr. Luders said in a statement to the media. "We also found that the normal age-related decline of white-matter tissue is considerably reduced in active meditation practitioners."

"It is possible that actively meditating, especially over a long period of time, can induce changes on a micro-anatomical level," Dr. Luders, herself a meditator, continued. "Meditation appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain at large."

In other words, there now appears to be a way to take control of changes in the brain which, up to now, have been regarded as an inevitable part of aging. Meditation may keep the brain younger, more fit and make it literally larger and faster working, even as we grow older.

As NaturalNews previously reported, other research has shown additional health benefits of meditation. For example, it beats drugs in treating depression (http://www.naturalnews.com/024986_m...) and has been found to effectively treat bladder control problems (http://www.naturalnews.com/026233_i...).

For more information:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033005_meditation_brain_health.html#ixzz1SBOv0YSs

Tell Bath & Body Works: No marketing toxic triclosan to teens!

Please join Beyond Pesticides, Center for Environmental Health and The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics in asking Bath and Body Works to stop selling triclosan-containing products that claim to “Spread Love, Not Germs.” Consumer products, especially those that are marketed to and used by preteens and teens should not have harmful chemicals in them. This is unacceptable.

As you know, triclosan is not only a hormone disruptor found at increasing concentrations in human urine and breast milk, but also contaminates waterways and possibly even the water we drink. To add insult to injury, triclosan is not even effective against harmful bacteria, including those found in hospitals.
We need to hold companies accountable for the safety of the substances they put into their products and take action against stores that are still selling many triclosan-containing products. Bath & Body Works, the body care chain popular with teens and young children, uses the triclosan in a vast array of their body care products, even boasting that the products will help “Spread love, Not germs.”

Join us to take action to make Bath & Body Works products safer. Tell Bath & Body Works CEO Diane L. Neal: “Stop using toxic triclosan in your products.”