Hopefully you have a couple of New Year’s resolutions you haven’t broken yet. If one of them is to “eat healthier,” you have an opportunity to not only confirm that pledge whole-heartedly, but contribute to help others at the same time in a way you might not have thought about.
If you’ve been selling promotional products for any time at all, you’re familiar with the alphabet soup of chemicals determined to potentially place end-users at risk. BPA (Bisphenol A) and BPS (Bisphenol S), for example, have both been previously used in plastics and food and beverage containers in our industry, but are now listed under California’s Prop 65 as some of the 800-plus chemicals the state has determined to potentially cause cancer.
While you may have stopped selling drinkware to clients with BPA or BPS, have you given any thought to how much is actually in your body? Now, you can find out for sure. The non-profit Silent Spring Institute wants you to participate in a crowd-funded research project, and in return, you will find out just how much exposure you’ve experienced to ten toxic chemicals that accumulate from everyday household products. When you reserve a “Detox Action Kit” as part of this campaign, you will submit your own sample and receive a personalized report that compares your results with all other participants in the study.
According to the folks at Silent Spring, “We’re crowdfunding this study to get a better sense of our collective exposure to harmful environmental chemicals. Taking part in the study not only will empower you to live a healthier life, you will also be helping us generate new scientific knowledge about everyday chemical exposures. These data can support stronger policies that protect people from dangerous chemicals in consumer products.”
The cost for the kit is $299, but it gives you a chance to participate in the first-ever study on individual exposure to household chemicals. For the money, your report will provide the following:
1) Indication of your level of exposure to particular toxins as well as an overview of how you compare with others, both in the study and in the U.S.
2) Information about what is known about the health risks associated with each chemical.
3) Some information that will help identify the likely sources of your exposure.
4) An alert if your exposure is much higher than others in the study.
5) Instructions on how to use Silent Spring’s Detox Me™ smartphone app to help reduce your exposures and see how low you can go.
Silent Spring’s mission with this undertaking is a healthier environment for all. With the results gleaned from the study, the nonprofit hopes to help find new ways of reducing exposures and to also lead to better public oversight of the use of chemicals in consumer products. There’s not much to find fault with when it comes to that, now is there?
General research findings on these toxins are far from definitive. The Detox Me™ Action Kit, according to information provided by the Institute, tests for 10 common endocrine disruptors – chemicals that mimic and interfere with the body’s naturally occurring hormones. Hormones regulate many important activities in your body, so endocrine-disrupting chemicals raise concerns, ranging from effects on fertility, to child development, to cancer.
Why these 10 chemicals? They have been detected at different levels in people throughout the U.S., but detecting these chemicals in your urine alone doesn’t necessarily mean you will get sick. There are other factors that come into play, such as whether exposure levels in the general population are above or below levels that cause health effects. It’s also important to take into consideration the fact that some people are more sensitive to effects than others, as well as the fact that the chemicals can act together, producing effects as a mixture that are not predicted from concentrations of each chemical on its own.
So, while you may not ever be an “Action Super Hero” of detoxing, the Detox Me™ Action Kit is still probably a much better bet than either fad diets, cleanses claiming to rid the body of toxins or spas claiming to do the same – offered (of course) with expensive price tags. But, if you must insist on a different detox for your body, you can always check out Shape Magazine’s irresistible “8 Simple Ways To Detox Your Body.”
Either way, good luck with that — and Happy New Year!
Jeff Jacobs has been an expert in building brands and brand stewardship for more than 35 years, working in commercial television, Hollywood film and home video, publishing, and promotional brand merchandise. He’s a staunch advocate of consumer product safety and has a deep passion and belief regarding the issues surrounding compliance and corporate social responsibility. He recently retired as executive director of Quality Certification Alliance, the only non-profit dedicated to helping suppliers provide safe and compliant promotional products. Before that, he was director of brand merchandise for Michelin. As a recovering end-user client, he can’t help but continue to consult Fortune 500 consumer brands on promo product safety when asked. You can also find him working as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, traveling the world with his lovely wife, or enjoying a cigar at his favorite local cigar shop. Follow Jeff on Twitter, or reach out to him at jacobs.jeffreyp@gmail.com.