Have you looked at ingredients in your daily use products? Teenager Ankita shares her opinion with Lakshmi Sankaran

Awareness is the key for an average Indian household for the well-being of their family and environment. However, the accuracy of this sentence can be checked with a quick look into one’s grocery list. Let’s take a look at our usual habits as a consumer, and then check the validity of the above statement.

Apart from food essentials, our grocery lists largely consist of personal hygiene products and household cleaning products. We ensure that we pick up the most well-known brands and best quality products, be it shampoos, detergents, soaps, dishwashing liquids, floor cleaner, Toilet cleaner etc.

While buying such items, one doesn’t have the awareness to check ingredients on the label of the product for they tend to be beyond our understanding, made up of chemical names that seem foreign to
us.

The advertisements and endorsement by celebrities/doctors/Medical fraternity definitely is a trust factor to
believe that these products are completely effective for a person’s use in their homes and on themselves. The ignorance/innocence about what goes into us and to the environment definitely takes a hit leading to our own compromise on the wellbeing of ourselves and our environment.

These products that we use everyday contain a bunch of chemicals like Phospates, Phthalates, SLS, SLES, Parabens, Flourides, formaldehyde etc. which are known to cause various health effects like Allergies, Nausea, Cancer, lung issues etc. These chemicals which eventually end up in our bodies through the pores present on our skin, saliva, etc. Toxins enter the body in 3 ways. A. Ingestion B. Inhalation C. Skin Contact. From our bodies these chemicals gets washed into our soil and water thus polluting them and making them lifeless. These chemical cleaning products also tend to have detrimental effects on the environment. The foam and froth produced by soaps and detergents end up polluting our water bodies. Lot of natural resources/fossil fuels is used in manufacturing these chemical products which are mostly packaged in Plastic. Do you know there are minimum 15-20 types of chemical laden products on a day to day basis a single household person comes across.

The problem is in our hands and so is the solution. Altering our consumption with a conscious approach and beginning to adopt more environmental-friendly alternatives benefiting our personal health and hygiene is a definite step ahead for a bright future for us and environment contributing to a clean water and soil.

An activity for readers: Please read out the ingredients of the products you use in day to day life and research about the ingredients used in it and its effect.

Do let us know in your comments