1) 3 Reasons Beauty Kills
Allergies, hives, headaches, dry skin, eczema, irregular menses, brittle nails, acne, irritated eyes, thyroid issues, trouble conceiving… These are just a few of the side effects a person can experience by using commonplace personal care products and cosmetics. After years of chasing some of my own symptoms I recently discovered a major contributor could be the chemical exposure from daily use of my bath and beauty products.
This led me to learn three very important (and scary) things about personal care products:
• Major loopholes in federal law allow the $20-billion-dollar-per-year cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of chemicals into personal care products with no required testing, no required monitoring of health effects, and no required labeling.
• ‘Fragrance’ (much like the word ‘Flavors’) almost always contains complex mixtures of chemicals some of which are KNOWN toxins that can cause a variety of health issues including endocrine/hormone disruption, and birth defects if used during pregnancy.
• There are no standard definitions used in the cosmetics industry. Ergo, a phrase such as ‘Dermatologist Tested’ is basically meaningless. Essentially, the phrase MIGHT mean it was tested on an actual human, and even if it was, it doesn’t necessarily mean the product PASSED the company’s own self applied/self regulated testing.
With the average woman using around 12 personal care products per day (average teenage girls using around 17) that is a whole shload of toxic exposure that can (and probably will) come back to haunt us in the future.
Time to pay as much attention to what is going ON our bodies as what’s going IN them.
2) We all have Labral Tears
In between where the thighbone meets hipbone exists a small, thin ring of cartilage called the labrum. The labrum’s main purpose is to aid in the stability of, and decrease stress on the hip joint.
In cadaver studies 93-96% of hips had labral abnormalities, lesions, and/or labral tears. 96%!?! This radically high percentage should mean everyone is running to the doctor complaining of hip pain! However, the majority of people who HAVE labral damage are actually walking around, living life, completely asymptomatic.
Why do some people have pain and many others don’t? The punch line here is that damage does not necessarily equal pain. Eric and I believe that pain in the area has a whole lot more to do with position than damage… but that is a topic for a whole other article.
3) Pet Food is Fast Food
Cats, unlike humans, are obligate carnivores (meat eaters only) yet they wind up with some uncannily similar health problems to humans when fed commercial/processed foods lacking in proper, species-specific nutrition.
So, as a self-professed animal lover and as a lover of healthy living I was shocked to learn that DRY pet food is as bad for a cat as eating McDonalds every day is for a human.
Cats fed dry food only diets can wind up with some seriously concerning health issues such as diabetes, kidney disease, cystitis (bladder inflammation), urethral blockage, bladder/kidney stones, hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver disease), dental disease, asthma, and… obesity.
Same stuff happens to humans who eat a highly processed, carbohydrate dominant diet…
The bulk of dry cat food is made from cheap plant-based carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, corn (maize), peas, and other random grains.
These ingredients are ridiculously species-inappropriate.
To make matters worse, dry foods tend to sit on shelves in warehouses without temperature control where warmth assists in the proliferation of bacteria, provides a home for storage mites, and causes the fats in the food to go rancid. Recalls and random testing of dry foods almost always uncovers toxic mold and/or fungal mycotoxins that subsequently cause illness and death in the animals that have ingested the contaminated food.
Cats NEED to eat meat (muscle and organ), MUST have water with their food, and CANNOT live without taurine. Dry food also has limited moisture content (about 5-10%) whereas a cat’s natural diet contains 70-75% water. AND the taurine in dry food is almost always cheap synthetic taurine from China (as opposed to the natural taurine found in teeny tiny mouse hearts).
Point being, dry food is the equivalent of feeding your cat meat-flavored cereal and the ingredients have no business in his or her diet. While the correlate is far from perfect, I don’t think cronuts or Doritos (or whatever your preferred meat-flavored cereal is) could be considered ‘species-specific’ nutrition for you either.
Will your cat survive on dry food? Sure. Will you house a happier, healthier cat and avoid many vet visits if you switch to a canned food only or raw food diet – abso-f**king-lutley.
Solution? Feed your cat a canned food or raw food only diet. We opted to go raw food (‘cause why not?). And yes, I’m totally considering writing an article about our paleo kitties too…
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