GMO Free Beauty Products: An Impossibility?
If you want to know how to avoid GMOs in everything –not just your food, but also your personal care and beauty products – you have to stay informed. We already know, thanks to the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association and the biotech industry, that GMO crops have infested more than 80% of the foods we purchase in our grocery stores, but did you know that this same unfortunate phenomenon has affected your shampoo and hand soap, too?
Choosing to go totally GM free is a personal prerogative. It certainly isn’t possible to avoid all GMO ingredients, and it probably isn’t worth the stress to try and do so. But if you’d like to further reduce exposure to GMOs, other than those found in food, you’ll need to avoid shampoos, moisturizers, soaps, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc. containing GMO ingredients.
If you are already rejecting anything that isn’t organic, along with products containing ingredients like sugar, fructose, dextrose, glucose, caramel color, mannitol, maltodextrin, etc., then you are doing great, but there’s another step to consider.
Some surprising things make your beauty essentials GMO-toxic:
- Soy and canola oils, almost all of which are GM.
- Amino acids
- Xanthan gum
- Vitamin E
- Lecithin
- Vitamin C
- Citric acid
- Sodium citrate
- Lactic acid
- Vegetable protein
- Alcohol
- Glycerin
- Corn starch (often in makeup)
- Papaya enzyme (often sourced from GMO papaya grown in Hawaii)
Read: 10 Tips for Achieving Healthy Hair Using Natural Solutions
Opportunely, there are a couple of choices when it comes to boycotting GMO’s completely. You can make many of your own personal care and beauty items with fresh organic ingredients that you grow yourself or source from a trusted gardener or farm, or you can look for brands like Andalou Naturals, listed as one of the Non-GMO Project’s verified distributors of organic beauty items.
Dr. Bronner’s soaps is also in the process of being non-GMO verified, and there are many other brands you can look for at stores like Sprouts, Whole Foods, and local organic grocery stores or health food stores.
As the above information and list might suggest, it may be hard to buy anything if you’re trying to avoid everything. For most people, it simply isn’t worth the stress or even effort to go to such lengths to avoid potential toxins, but the information is there if anyone wants to do so. The easiest, most stress-free way is to just find non-GMO project-verified companies which offer organic products.
That will go a long way in reducing exposure to toxic ingredients.