A March 2016 article in Environmental Health Perspectives highlights the role that consumers play in managing their exposure to toxicants. Personal body care products including fragrances, soaps, and cosmetics can be daily source of exposure to harmful endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) such as phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and benzophenone-3 (BP-3). EDC's are chemicals of concern due to their impact on normal hormonal function. Adolescent women are of particular risk to these exposures due to the large number of products they use, at an average of 17 a day.

EDC’s have been found in young children. A recent innovative study worked with one hundred Latina teenage girls on a youth-led, community based participatory study to determine whether switching personal body care products for three days would impact the concentration of urinary metabolites of the aformentioned EDC's. Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley, who worked together with the girls to develop the study, measured a 45 percent reduction in levels of several chemicals in the urine samples following the switch to products without the target chemicals. Interestingly, researchers also noted an increase in the concentrations of two rare parabens and were unable to determine why this occurred.

The Healthier Hospitals Safer Chemicals Challenge provides hospitals with resources to support their efforts to remove EDC’s from their institutions, such as a recent list of furniture and textile companies who are making a commitment to using safer materials in their products.

[Source: FairWarning]