Pick up any product and take a look at the ingredients listed on the back. Most contain a long list with even longer words unknown to our vocabularies and with unknown effects on our bodies.
In recent years, consumers have followed all kinds of green movements with an aim to use organic products with natural ingredients to reduce the risk of exposure to harmful chemicals.
However, chemistry professor James Martin said the real problem lies in a lack of scientific literacy among the public.
“As a chemist, when people are making the claim that something is organic or all-natural, I find that ironic at best and misleading at worst,” Martin said. “There are a lot of natural products that are really pretty toxic, and there are plenty of man-made chemicals which are made based on discoveries from natural products. For example, there may be some leaf used as some ancient medicinal tea from which the active compound can be identified and synthesized such that its manufacture can be accomplished without necessarily growing it in the tree.”
Based on this reasoning, it becomes difficult to draw the line between natural and synthetic products, according to Martin. Additionally, some organic pesticides cause the same amount of harm as synthetic pesticides.
What to watch out for
The toxicity of a chemical depends on many factors, including its form, Martin said.
In Erin Brockovich, a film that tells the true story of a lawyer who exposed a water contamination cover-up in California, poisonous chromium-6 had leeched into the water supply, causing residents to become ill. Pacific Gas & Electric, which caused the contamination, claimed chromium posed no threat to the community by basing its evidence on the harmless chromium-3, according to Martin.
Aluminum follows a similar story.
Hydrous aluminum chloride, the active ingredient found in most deodorants, has a low risk of causing problems as a topical agent, despite the claim some websites such as NaturalNews.com make about the link between aluminum absorbed through the skin and breast cancer, according to Martin. On the other hand, anhydrous aluminum chloride, a chemical Martin said he uses in the lab, does irritate the skin.
In terms of unwanted chemicals seeping through the skin, products with nanoparticles in them have a higher risk for absorption due to the smaller size of the particles, Martin said.
According to Ken Kretchman, director of Environmental Health and Safety, unintended interactions between chemicals may also pose problems.
“There is an example of one person who had a pool and mixed two chemicals together,” Kretchman said. “In this case, there were two different pool chemicals that needed to be added to their pool, and to basically save some time he decided he’d mix those two chemicals together and handed it to his child, actually, to carry out and dump into the pool and, as you might imagine, the container exploded on the way to the pool and it splashed onto the eyes of the child. The parent threw his child into the pool and flushed out his eyes there…”
Linseed oil, another harmless product by itself, is used as a coating on furniture to protect it from the sun. It will result in the spontaneous heating of rags used on the surface of furniture, and if the heat cannot dissipate, it may ignite the rag after some time, according to Kretchman.
Other cleaning products consumers should use carefully include coil cleaners for air conditioners containing hydrofluoric acid and drain cleaners containing various caustic and corrosive liquids, with some even containing high concentrations of sulfuric acid, Kretchman said.
Inhaling chemicals
Another problem arises when people inhale chemicals, such as methylene chloride found in paint strippers. This is because inside the body, methylene chloride metabolizes into the hazardous gas carbon monoxide, according to Kretchman.
“There’s an old case where someone came out of the hospital after some heart surgery and stayed away from work based on doctor’s orders to stay home, take it easy and do something non-strenuous, which in this case was refinishing furniture,” Kretchman said. “He smeared a lot of paint stripper containing methylene chloride on his furniture in his poorly ventilated garage and ended up through that conversion to carbon monoxide, with tissues starved for oxygen. The body’s reaction was to move more blood and increase breathing rate, increasing his vapor intake, converting to more carbon monoxide, and due to this vicious cycle resulted in readmission to the hospital with a relapse of his heart problem.”
Even fragrances from artificial odorants, such as perfumes, scented lotion, air fresheners and candles, create problems for people with sensitivities, such as allergies and asthma, according to Kretchman, causing the
University itself to discourage their usage.
Part of the problem is that these products can contain anywhere from 50 to 300 chemicals to create the fragrance, according to “The Safety Assessment of Fragrance Materials,” a 2003 article in the journal of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. According to the Federal Drug Administration, it does not regulate all of these chemicals.
In one case study, the Environmental Protection Agency discovered an air freshener containing a pheromone that attracts cockroaches, Kretchman said.
“The people that sold the odorant also sold roach traps, so that was a wonderful little marketing ploy,” Kretchman said.
Some consumers also burn candles in the home that create both indoor air pollution and soil surfaces that the particles come into contact with, according to Kretchman.
In some cases, fragrances produce the same effects as secondhand cigarette smoke, according to an article by Christy De Vader and Paxson Barker presented at the 2009 American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences conference.
“It’s just creating indoor air pollution that doesn’t need to be there,” Kretchman said.
Like anything in life, every product provides benefits and consequences, according to Martin.
“There’s risk to everything,” Martin said. “Choose your risk and be smart about it.”
