Are Parabens Worth the Risk?

Like many of you, at one time I was unknowingly putting harmful ingredients on my skin. About 15 years ago I started researching ingredients in products. My research started as a result of some health problems that my husband was having and breast cancer of a family member twice before she was 35. The first ingredient that I eliminated from my products was parabens.

If you are not aware of what parabens are, they are the most common preservatives used in many cosmetic and toiletry products. Parabens have been found to have an estrogen-like effect in the body, and estrogen is an established risk factor for breast cancer.

Parabens and their links to breast cancer have been in the news a lot recently. Yet, almost every personal care product you pick up has at least one form of paraben in it. Companies continue to argue that the amount of parabens they use in their products are so low they are at safe levels. Is there really any safe level? The average person will use 10-12 products every day and often times more than once a day. Ask yourself these questions. How many products are you using with parabens? How long have you been using products with parabens in them? How often do you use these personal care products? That ‘safe’ amount of parabens has now grown to an unsafe amount.

Keep in mind that what you put on your skin can be absorbed in as little as 26 seconds and goes directly into your bloodstream with no filtering.

Ninety-nine percent of tissue samples were found to contain at least one paraben and 60 percent of samples were positive for five of the most common parabens (methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben, butylparaben and isobutylparaben). Parabens come by many different names but they will end in paraben so they are easy to spot.

Dr. William Goodson, principal researcher at the California Pacific Medical Center says that methylparaben can also interfere with the effectiveness of drugs used to fight breast cancer. Dr. Goodman took noncancerous breast cells from high-risk patients, grew them in a laboratory and found that once the cells were exposed to methylparaben, they started behaving like cancer cells. Tamoxifen, a drug designed to prevent or treat cancer, slows down the growth of both healthy and cancerous breast cells and ultimately leads to their death. However, when tamoxifen was introduced in the lab, the cells exposed to methylparaben kept growing and didn't die.

“Methylparaben not only mimics estrogen's ability to drive cancer, but appears to be even better than the natural hormone in bypassing the ability of drugs to treat it,” Goodson said.

The FDA believes that “at the present time there is no reason for consumers to be concerned about the use of cosmetics containing parabens.” But, if parabens are winding up in breast tissue and parabens can interfere with chemo's ability to kill cancer, are parabens worth the risk? I know they weren't for me. And this is only one of the many ingredients you should seriously consider eliminating!

There are safe alternatives that work!!


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