“I am a research engineer that works primarily with materials. PVC is used because it is the cheapest durable plastic, and its properties can be customized with additives. Not only is PVC harmful, the additives are harmful too (if not worse). For women and mothers everywhere, pay close attention to the use of PVC in anything that touches you or your child, especially when it comes to baby’s toys and sex toys. Visit wikipedia for a very thorough discussion on this plastic.”  ~Mr. Engineer

Mr. Engineer,  

Thank you for your comments. I thought your insightful post needed to be the focus of our next discussion.  I seemingly meet people with priviledged information all of the time. While vacationing one year, I met a researcher who had found a connection between hair dye and cancer. When their research was really starting to make strides, she said the FDA came in, collected everything, and said they’ll be taking over the study…and then she never heard anything more of it. She said that this was typical when researchers find something that could cause a lot of concern and the FDA gets wind of it. By the way, from what she said, it might be a good idea to avoid every color but brown.

Another time, a doctor of mine mentioned that during his residency, he was helping with a study on artificial sweeteners and their effect on rats. He said that every one of the rats got cancer during the study, and that they were instructed to surgically remove the cancer, and then the rats were considered “cancer-free”. Nevermind that they all got cancer from the sweeteners, with the cancer removed they could pretend it never happened. ***Did you know that in breast implant studies, often times the women that remove their implants (for whatever reason) are automatically dropped from from the study altogether?  Now I’m sure the public would be curious to know WHY they removed their implants (personal choice, health problems, capsular contracture, rupture, etc.).  That’s information that would be HELPFUL to a study, I would think.

These are just examples of a small amount of the information I’ve been exposed to by the professionals that have been involved with research. I wish we could all know what is really going on, from the people who see it happening every day. The best tool we have in this day and age is the Internet, as free-speech can truly prevail and companies are not able to stop our messages (or at least for the most part).

Thanks again for giving us a heads up. I encourage others to do the same, as we should all help each other to be as safe and healthy as possible. You’d think the FDA was looking out for us (they can barely keep up with produce by the way), but that’s just something we tell ourselves at night to help us sleep better.

Any other things we should look out for, readers?

~Kacey