Dr. Yvonne Burkart
speaker
48 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Yvonne Burkart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This study is literally groundbreaking in that there's a long-held belief in common culture as well as through the cosmetic industry itself that beauty and personal care products don't contribute to our toxic load. They don't contribute adversely to our health and they don't increase rates or risk of disease. This study basically completely shut that down.
For the first time, we have been able to see exactly what certain ingredients are doing in the humans, in the human model. Because we ethically cannot study chemicals in humans. We can't subject people to toxic chemicals and see what happens. That typically happens in animals. Unfortunately, a lot of these chemicals are being released into our personal care products, into our consumer goods.
And it isn't until after decades of use that we start to see correlations and associations with disease. And this study basically asked 41 women to switch out their beauty and personal care products for a very short time, for 28 days, just 28 days.
Switch out your beauty and personal care products and stick to a list of approved products that does not contain parabens, phthalates, and other phenols, which are endocrine disruptors. Just to give you a background on endocrine disruptors, these are chemicals that are xenoestrogens that interact with estrogen receptors in the body.
They can cause a host of health issues ranging from cancer, infertility, miscarriage, cognitive decline, and so much more. when these women switched out their products. So what they did was they took measurements by injecting the breasts of these really, really brave participants. They took breast cancer cells, measured breast cancer genes before and after the intervention.
So the intervention, like I said, was very simple. Only switch out your beauty and personal care products, avoiding certain ingredients, parabens, phthalates, and phenols. After 28 days, they saw a significant reduction in breast cancer gene expression which is huge. This is in humans.
So this is, we're not talking about rats that were subjected to extremely high doses, which is what you normally see. This is doses that you would see in products that are being sold on store shelves that people are using day in and day out as we speak. They have not been banned. They haven't been outlawed. They are still very much prevalent in the marketplace.
The implications would be that even though there's 41 women, this study showed that the breast cancer genes were activated when they started, meaning that the products that they were using with those ingredients were responsible for activating those genes. Once they took those ingredients away, breast cancer genes turned off. What does this mean?
This means that once you stop using products that contain parabens, phthalates, and other xenoestrogens, that breast cancer genes turn off, meaning you reduce the risk of developing breast cancer. One of the risk factors for developing breast cancer is the activation of breast cancer genes. That's the first step in the process of developing cancer is the genes need to be turned on.
Something needs to be turned on because estrogen is actually a carcinogen. It's naturally occurring in the body, but what it does is stimulate growth. Stimulate growth in estrogen responsive tissues. The breast, the brain, the uterus, the cervix, the gut even has estrogen receptors in it. So these estrogen receptors are all over our bodies.
And when we're putting products on our skin that have estrogenic ingredients, they're getting absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream and traveling to areas of the body that are responsive to estrogen, clearly the breast.
Absolutely, parabens being one of them. So there are several different types of parabens, and you can find these on your personal care products just by turning the bottle around and looking at the ingredients list. And you can see methylparaben, butylparaben, propylparaben, those tend to be the most commonly used parabens.
There's a long-held belief within the cosmetic industry that these parabens are innocuous, that the amount absorbed is so low that it doesn't matter, but clearly the study shows otherwise.
This is an excellent question. And I set out to do research myself. I walked into a store and I picked up several products to see how many out there still have parabens. What are the major products that I see being promoted online that still contain these ingredients? One of them being CeraVe. CeraVe is one of the major brands out there right now.
Some of their face washes still have parabens in them. For no good reason, parabens are completely unnecessary. They're basically used to extend the shelf life. They're preservatives. They don't need to be used. There are plenty of other safer alternative preservatives out there. And it's basically because they're extremely effective in sheep. So they're not being phased out as of yet.
Other products that I found were Nivea body lotion, which I personally used for quite a long time. And the issue with body lotion is that you apply it generally over large parts of the body and you don't rinse it off. So the chance for toxic absorption is greater than any other type of product.
There could be several reasons for this. One of them is definitely profit driven, simply because of the effectiveness and the low cost, but also the higher cost of having to substitute their ingredients. but it isn't until consumers become aware of these problematic ingredients and demand safer ingredients that some of these companies will actually start taking action.
So that's really the purpose of why I felt it to be so important to share this information, because most people who are using cosmetics these days are young women. There was a study showing that up to 70% of young girls below the age of 12 are actually using cosmetics.
Being lotions, fragrances, makeup, any of those type of products that are to enhance physical appearance, those are considered cosmetics. And kids are starting to use them at younger ages these days. And this is something that we really need to pay attention to. since disease rates are skyrocketing among younger populations. So they're not disconnected, I think.
Absolutely. When it comes to understanding the safety or the toxicity of a chemical, let's say, Most studies are done in animal models, so rats and mice, and they're given extremely high doses for short periods of time, maybe longer periods, but when it comes to doing these studies, it could be a million dollars. It could take two or three years to study.
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