Understanding the Chemical Body Burden

How many products do you use when you’re getting ready in the morning? This may seem like a question designed to make you think about where you’re spending your money or how long it takes you to be ready to face the day, but actually this question is directly related to your health. Read on to find out more about this question, your health, and how your answer could put you at risk.

Written by Lisa Powell

What Does ‘Chemical Body Burden’ Mean?

So how many personal care do you use in a day? On average, women use 12 while men use 6. The 12 products women use also contain a total of 168 chemicals on average. These chemicals easily penetrate the skin and are carried into our blood streams and become stored in our bodies.

The number of external chemicals we store and carry around in our bodies is what scientists call our chemical body burden, or simply our body burden for short.

Body burden can be measured through a process called biomonitoring, in which samples of blood, urine, breast milk, and other bodily substances are taken from a person and then tested to see if they contain chemicals, what kind of chemicals they contain, and at what levels.

Through biomonitoring studies of people living in the US and in other countries scientists have discovered that every person alive today carries at least 700 contaminants in their body, and many carry more depending on how many chemically-laden products they use on a regular basis.

Why Is the Body Burden Important?, Part One

Your body burden is important for many reasons; all of them related to the health of you and your family.

First of all, the body burden is important because some of the chemicals we carry in our bodies are known to be dangerous, some are even toxic. For example, DDT, a pesticide that was banned from use in the 1970s because of the danger it posed to human health, is still present in the bodies of many adults!

This means that the threat that DDT poses is still not completely eradicated because it could be wreaking havoc on the bodies of the people who still have DDT in their systems.

Toxins like DDT are ticking time bombs we carry inside of our bodies every day. These toxins may simply float freely in our blood without causing excessive harm, or they may trigger genetic mutations that can lead to cancer or less troublesome concerns like wrinkles, but the fact is we can’t say for sure which will happen to you.

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