Toxic Feminine Care Products

Tampons.  There are just not enough blogs about tampons.  I never considered blogging about tampons until they started to scare me.  Did you know that most mainstream brands contain trace amounts of dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical?  Here I've been concerned about eating organic foods and using earth-friendly soaps and detergents.  I never once thought about introducing nasties in other ways. 

That is, until the nice people of Maxim sent me a trial pack of feminine products and some lovely cotton pads, puffs, and Q-tips all made from certified organic cotton.  

According to their product literature, conventionally-grown cotton uses an unbelievable amount of pesticides.  Here are some other interesting tid-bits on cotton that I found:

• Cotton covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land yet uses 16% of the world's insecticides, more than any other single major crop.
• China, India and Pakistan alone account for almost 60% of the global cotton harvest and more than 70% of the world's cotton growers.  
  
•  In California, it has become illegal to feed the leaves, stems, and short fibers of cotton known as ‘gin trash’ to livestock, because of the concentrated levels of pesticide residue. Instead, this gin trash is used to make furniture, mattresses, tampons, swabs, and cotton balls. 
• The average American woman will use 12,000 tampons or sanitary pads during her lifetime (can you believe that?!?).  With puberty starting in children as young as 7 years old these days, that means even more tampons used over a lifetime. [Note to self...buy stock in organic tampon company....and Midol...an Xanax]

I tried all of the products and I can sum them up in one word: equivalent.  By that I mean I think they just as good as the regular products I was using...sometimes natural products may be of inferior quality.  Of course like any good Dr. Dork, I quickly scanned the scientific literature to see if there's ever been a study done on organic vs. conventional tampons and presence of dioxin level in the blood.  Couldn't find anything.  But sometimes even scientists have to make a personal decision based on theory and not hard evidence...I'll take my tampons without toxins, thank you.

For a free trial pack to see if you like them too, check out the Maxim website where you can also see their fun tag lines like, No Toxins in our Vaginas. A free tampon out of 12,000 is a good deal any way you apply it!