I’m always looking for ways to become healthier in my life. One of those ways is to decrease the amount of toxins that I incur in my life whether that be my food or products that I use every day. One of the products that I’ve wanted to change for some time is my shampoo. Finding a shampoo that is “healthy” and works can be a difficult task. After all, nearly every shampoo these days is natural and enhanced with this or that. If you strictly read the labels, it can be very confusing figuring out what is healthy and what is not. However, there is a wonderful resource online (http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/) that rates products based on their health risks. It rates products on a scale of 0-10 in terms of potential health risk. A 0 means no risk while a 10 is high risk. You can also go to their homepage http://www.ewg.org/ where they have additional ratings for everything from food to water filters to household cleaners.
The shampoo product that I previously was using was Suave for Men 2 in 1 Shampoo + Conditioner. When you look it up on the EWG website, it has a score of a 5 (Link to EWG Score). They consider 0-2 to be low hazard, 3-6 to be moderate hazard and 7-10 to be high hazard. The thing I like about EWG is it goes through every single ingredient in the product and gives it the 0-10 rating. It then also shows how much research there is on that ingredient in terms of giving it its rating. It rates the research from none to limited to fair to moderate to robust. That way you can make your own informed decision about whether that product is healthy. I made an informed decision that I needed to switch to a shampoo that had less potential harm to my body system so thus I began my search using EWG.
I searched through a ton of products on EWG looking for a shampoo that had a low risk. My trick is to search for the product on amazon so I can read the reviews of people who have used the product so that I can not only find a healthy product but one that will work well. I find that while some products may be healthier, they don’t work nearly as good as the “unhealthy” products. In my search I came upon ACURE Shampoo Moroccan Argan Oil + Argan Stem Cell (Link to EWG Score). According to EWG, it has a rating of 1 and when I looked at the reviews on Amazon (Link to Amazon page) it looked like it was a product that worked well in comparison to some of the other healthy shampoos that I also looked at. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and I’m very happy with the product.
EWG is an excellent resource and if you haven’t used it before, I suggest you grab a couple of products that you use on a day to day basis and check out how healthy they are. Health is a journey that never ends just like learning. We need to continue to always be proactive about our health and seek ways to become healthier in our lives. Stay healthy my friends!
-Dr. Brian Damhoff
