Reducing our use of shampoos, hair dyes, shaving balms and make-up could cut the number of cancers in a generation. Haydn Shaughnessy reports
Walking past a poster one day, bearing the image of a slightly balding bare-chested man who'd apparently washed his hair in a stream, my girlfriend said: "Hmmm."
And happening on a thin grey haired man in a pub, a few days later, this one reading a book and looking philosophical, she again said "Hmmm."
That explains why I am one of the few men who looked forward to losing his hair and going grey.
Good thing too, according to Prof Samuel Epstein, formerly of the University of Chicago and an expert in the environmental causes of cancer. Shampoos and hair dyes routinely contain many obvious and hidden carcinogens, and endocrine (or hormone) disruptors, says the professor. These include formaldehyde, acrylamide and coal tar dyes, but there are many more.
Despite the appearance of progress on the issue (Europe leads on cosmetics legislation, having already regulated a whole class of chemicals out of the cosmetics chain), Epstein characterises our efforts as "grossly inadequate and a compete failure to address hidden carcinogens".
Call me smug but modern hygiene has passed me by anyway. In the past 15 years I haven't once balmed my cheeks (shaving products contain numerous potentially harmful products such as sodium laureth sulfate which allows other chemicals to penetrate the skin and blood). Being clumsy I'd always spend half the morning mopping blood from my chin.
That clumsiness and vanity should be life preservers is pure happenstance but I recommend both if they lead you to use fewer toiletries and cosmetics.
The same girlfriend, by the way, also said hmmm to a man's sweat and so I also recommend not washing too often. Wave goodbye to male pampering. Smell slightly of being human.
Epstein has been in Ireland the past few days to give a talk on the avoidable causes of cancer as part of a national conference organised by Neways, a multi-level marketing company that manufactures and sells cosmetics and household-cleaning products that specifically exclude known carcinogens.
Epstein has devoted his career to arguing that reducing environmental carcinogens is as important as seeking cures for cancer. The way he puts it is, if we'd addressed these carcinogens as energetically as we have, latterly, addressed smoking, we would cut the number of cancers radically in one generation, whereas we are currently increasing the rate of cancers in Ireland by 1 per cent a year. Whereas we start smoking in our teens, we begin absorbing harmful chemicals in the womb, when mum puts on a face, washes, bathes or does the nails. And we carry on doing it. By the age of five, kids are gelling up.
Neways is one of a new breed of company that is legitimately turning our fear and experience of cancer into a profitable business.
The British investor Gavin Davies has developed a portfolio of investments in companies offering healthier ways of eating and in these pages we have featured the fastest growing franchise in the US, Dinners by Design, a company that offers working parents a convenient and healthy way of preparing family dinners. Neways is in good company. The techniques of multi-level marketing (MLM) - products are sold by an agent and each agent recruits more agents and grows a network that sells for him or her - however fill me with caution. In the past MLM has been associated with the unscrupulous exploitation of naive people who buy the product not for its intrinsic worth but in the hope and expectation of getting rich.
Why not market Neways products the traditional way, with lots of advertising and celebrity endorsement? Well, Epstein is the celebrity. His argument is simple enough. The very things that we take intimately into our lives are killing more and more of us. These include talcum powder, implicated in ovarian cancer, shampoo, hair dyes, washing-up liquid, nitrates in our meats, and chlorinated pesticides in other food. Those we do not consume directly, we absorb through the skin.
Alarmingly Epstein also quotes mammograms as a major cause of breast cancer. He says they over-expose women to radiation risk and are not a better alternative to skilled breast examination. But aren't mammograms the major reason that breast cancer survival rates have increased? No, says the professor. The awareness of women and their self-examinations are the risk-free reason breast cancer survival rates have increased.
The problem of course is that Epstein's argument on breast cancer is too counter-intuitive, even though it is supported now by a growing number of American scientists. When the confidence of a critical audience is broken, even temporarily, we go looking in the cracks for more dirt.
Epstein's celebrity is being used to sell products and that, we might think, has to be wrong too. On the other hand, is there a risk that in judging experts such as Epstein and products like Neways, we either apply the wrong standards or else set the ethical bar too high?
We know now, thanks to reports last November in the Wall Street Journal, that Merck pharmaceuticals exposed thousands of people to the risk of heart disease from the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, we know also there are question marks around some anti-depressants, and, as Epstein points out on his website, the anti-cancer drug Tamoxifen was developed by the same company that makes carcinogenic pesticides.
We live in a highly compromised medical world. My biggest problem with that is it engenders mistrust even when we're faced with options that may be ethical and effective. The problem extends to our own sense of judgment.
My question after talking to Epstein is also simple: in a world dominated by health concerns and health science, have we lost our ability to judge between right and wrong?