The doctor is in the house

Our basic repertoire of baking soda, ACV and EVOO is fine but personally, I think we should add a couple of items to our list. We don’t have to go far, just our local health food store! You can even find some of these items in your drugstore (if it’s a really good one, like my little Russian drugstore on the corner that stocks health food and herbs and such) or your supermarket, again if it’s really good, and there are really good places all over!

The main reason why I’d recommend making a trip to your local health food store is because as good as baking soda is as a shampoo (I use nothing else), let’s face it, there are parts of your body that don’t have enough oil to use it effectively. And they're our stinkiest bits, of course so the first item on the list is:

Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile soap: It’s all natural! It’s SLS free! It’s paraben free! It comes in many flavors! It’s easy to use! If you get the Baby Mild (i.e. unscented) version you can add your own EO (essential oil) blends for their health benefits or simply because you like the smell. But first, why is commercial soap bad? And what in tarnashun is SLS???

SLS
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) is a cheap, harsh detergent used in garages to clean oil off the floor. Cosmetics companies love it because it’s cheap and it foams like the dickens, which makes consumers happy because we tend to equate foam with effectiveness. It’s very alkaline (which we don’t want our skin to be, remember?) It strips the skin of protective oils and is very harsh and drying. It’s irritating – it actually corrodes the skin (!) For this reason scientists to create an allergic reaction for their studies. Some effects of SLS:

Skin irritation / skin corrosion
Hormone Imbalance
Eye irritation / eye deformities in children
Protein Denaturing
Carcenogenicity (potential to cause cancer)

It’s protein denaturing. This means that the proteins of which your cells are largely made up are damaged. Besides aging the skin this can lead to skin cancer.

Parabens
What are parabens? Parabens are presevatives. They are also toxic and, like SLS, can speed up the aging process of the skin. Studies have shown that they react with UV rays in particular to speed up aging of the skin. They contribute to the formation of wrinkles, age spots and skin tone by killing off skin cells.

And besides SLS and parabens commercial soaps contain all those wonderful carcinogens and mutagens mentioned in the previous post. Bad soap! Lucky for us we have Dr. Bronner, who makes it easy for us to be sweet smelling without giving ourselves skin cancer or contact dermatitis or, worse, wrinkles (*gasp*)! And with scents ranging from almond to lavender to the ever popular peppermint who needs their stinkin’ SLS! So what if Dr. Bronner's doesn’t foam as much as commercial soaps! He beats ‘em hands down… and provides hours of hilarious bathroom reading to boot!