by AJ Lumsdaine | Sep 8, 2012 | About Eczema, Solveeczema.org
What? Detergents in water softener salt?!
Alert for SolveEczema.org users: TAKE CARE TO USE ONLY WATER SOFTENER SALT PRODUCTS IN THE SOFTENER THAT ARE PURE SALT, AND NOT A SALT PRODUCT WITH ADDITIVES!! Read on.
Soaps work better, they clean better, in soft water than in hard water. Soaps perform better than detergents in soft water — one reason detergents were invented in the first place was to perform across different water conditions including hard water. Detergents perform better in hard water than soaps do , though nothing performs what I could call well in hard water, soap or detergent.
Because soaps perform so much better in soft water, I recommend mechanical water softeners to people who otherwise have hard water. Soaps work better, it takes less time to wash out old detergents from clothing, it takes less soap by far to get things clean, white fabrics stay white and don’t grey as they do in hard water, and hair and skin stay soft. It’s easier to keep bathroom surfaces clean without so much scale on surfaces. There are many advantages.
As I mention on the website, several studies have looked at water hardness versus eczema, and found that people living in areas with harder water have more eczema. For example,
Atopic eczema and domestic water hardness
Ecological association of water hardness with prevalence of childhood atopic dermatitis in a Japanese urban area,
As a result of these studies, a group in the UK did A randomized controlled trial of ion-exchange water softeners for the treatment of eczema in children. In contrast to the studies above, which simply measured water hardness and correlated with eczema prevalence, here mechanical water softeners were installed in some homes and the results to the eczema of the children with and without assessed. Participants were told not to change the way they bathed or washed their laundry. The results: No benefit was found from the softeners, although interestingly, over 50% of the parents chose to buy the water softeners at the conclusion of the study.
Given that the water softener study protocol asked families to maintain their washing and washing product habits through the trial, it’s not surprising to me that they found no benefit from the softeners.
What do SolveEczema.org users take from these studies? Very little, because the study designs don’t take the type of washing products used by the families into account, and in the study of installed softeners, the researchers specifically asked families not to adjust the type or amount of products they used. (They have eczema, they’re using detergents!)
I have recently become aware of a another potential concern for SolveEczema users. SOME WATER SOFTENER SALTS HAVE DETERGENT ADDITIVES!
Additives help keep the ion-exchange resin in the softener clean, and prevent inconveniences like “bridging” of the salt, and since water softener companies are unaware of the connection between small amounts of detergent and eczema, and believe the amount of detergent introduced by the additives is small, they believe it’s all good.
But taking a look at the Morton web site, I found this frequently asked question (with answer): “After using Morton water softening products why does my skin itch? …Even though it is unlikely that the additives in the salt product could be the cause of the skin itch, you may wish to try a product with no additives, such as Morton®White Crystal® products or Morton® Potassium Chloride Pellets. …”
Because of the additives, Morton also does not recommend using the water softening salt with additives in aquariums. As mentioned above, they do sell water softener salt products without additives, and I called their corporate office recently to suggest they pay attention to the issue of detergents and eczema, since much potential future growth in the water softener business will likely come from families whose kids have eczema (from detergents).
Another parent wrote to me with this information from the Cargill site regarding Diamond Crystal salt pellets with an additive called Softener Care:
“What exactly is “Softener Care” additive?
The Softener Care™ additive is a surfactant called sodium hexametaphosphate. In the pellets, it provides added durability, thus reducing the tendency towards mushing and bridging which can interfere with normal softener operation.”
It appears that Diamond Crystal/Cargill also sells products without the additives.
Our local hardware store always sold only pure salt for the water softener, but when this came to my attention, my husband told me he had just bought a bag that was different because the hardware store stopped carrying the old kind we had been using. Lo and behold, it had detergent additives in it! Luckily, he hadn’t yet poured it.
It gets exhausting keeping after all the many sources of household detergents, but this one is particularly important to get right, since it would introduce low levels of detergents in the household water supply.
I still recommend water softeners for those wishing to try the strategies on SolveEczema.org, because of so many benefits to skin and household, and because it takes so long to get results with hard water — hard water results often are never as good as with soft water. So, if you are trying to follow the SolveEczema.org site strategies —
TAKE CARE TO USE ONLY WATER SOFTENER SALT PRODUCTS IN THE SOFTENER THAT ARE PURE SALT, AND NOT A SALT PRODUCT WITH ADDITIVES!!
by AJ Lumsdaine | Jul 30, 2012 | About Eczema, Solveeczema.org
I received a letter recently with a request to better explain how to find products that meet the SolveEczema site criteria. I get product questions enough that I thought I’d just post my reply here on the blog:
My letter:
I’m glad the site helped! I know it’s confusing to tell which products meet the site criteria and not — if it helps, I have difficulties evaluating product ingredients myself! (Unfortunately, the majority of products available on store shelves do not meet the site criteria, which is why so many people have problems finding ones that do.)
First, you researched your daughter’s problem and implemented something that helps — so you are a problem solver, and that’s what’s important here. I come across many moms who are very systematic, determined, and smart, many of whom have no science background whatsoever — and they’re as and sometimes even more effective than someone whose training might at first be a barrier to looking at the problem a new way. So don’t feel like it’s you. It’s just the position we are all in because of what’s in our environment, how ubiquitous that influence is, and how poor the information we have is to assess it.
I have had friends who told me, “Just tell me what to use” — which works up to a point, but getting the best result takes understanding what is going on and problem-solving in your own environment. Often people think they are detergent-free yet miss even very obvious influences until they do understand.
Plus, products are different everywhere — I get letters from all over the world — and companies change their products all the time. I just got a letter from another mom who ordered some products from a company I recommended, Eco-Me, and there were sugar detergents in the products she received. I looked on the company’s website, and they had different pages on their site for those same products with completely different ingredients. I remember when I first checked them out, everything they made was okay per the site, but no longer. They may be in the process of reformulating. Worse, they have used the word “soap” in the INGREDIENTS list for something that is not a traditional soap. It’s the first time I’ve seen “soap” used in the ingredients for something that isn’t a true traditional soap. However, if you understand, you should be able to figure that out when you evaluate even those products.
One of the most important reasons to understand is for parents to really see the problem as environmental and not a “defect” in their children. There’s a huge difference, psychologically, between needing a chronic treatment and knowing the problem isn’t you, especially for kids.
The video slideshow overview explains everything fairly simply, in case you haven’t already watched it. You may want to take a look again at the slide showing the difference between soap and detergent chemical names, it may help.
So, everyone has trouble assessing ingredients. I have trouble assessing ingredients. If this were easy, more people would have figured it out.
The underlying principle is this: I believe “normal” eczema and allergies are a signal from the immune system to the conscious brain, the way pain is for the nervous system. Whether the “signal” is expressed or not depends on whether a certain threshold is crossed, and that depends to some extent on the state of the immune system, genetic factors affecting skin and immunity, environmental factors affecting skin (such as local humidity, but also whether the skin is damaged because of long-term exposure to detergents, etc), the state of the gut and whether certain proteins are crossing into the bloodstream (and, I suspect, necessitating increased circulating biological detergent to denature those proteins), etc. But by far the greatest influence now comes from the effect of modern synthetic detergents, which (because of how they are designed) dramatically and unnaturally increase the permeability of skin. In my experience, the expression of the eczema is proportional to the effect on the permeability.
Removing detergents is not very successful with water alone, residues are incredibly persistent. As the site says, it’s necessary to use something else to get them out. Plus, people need a way to get clean in the normal course of life.
So, what else can be used? Something that doesn’t increase the permeability of the skin beyond a certain point. The major class of washing products that work appears to be, empirically, traditional alkaline soaps. Luckily, because they are made in such a narrowly defined way per the relevant characteristics of the end products, they’re pretty much all okay (provided the individual ingredients aren’t allergenic for a given person).
The rise in eczema, asthma/atopy around the world in the latter half of the 20th century has coincided with the increased use of detergents. Many of the observations that led to the hygiene hypothesis take on new meaning when looked at in that light. For example, people in many rural areas have less eczema than in urban areas. One proposed interpretation is that people on farms are less clean and are around certain germs that challenge the immune system. I’d make the separate observation that soapmaking is traditional in rural environments, farmers spend more time out-of-doors (instead of in indoor environments with the greatest exposure to detergents and detergent dusts). Amish farm families have an even lower rate of eczema than farmers in the same regions; the Amish still make and use their own soap.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand…
As I describe in detail on the site, words like “soap”, “detergent”, “surfactant”, “emollient” and others, are used very differently in different consumer contexts. Common definitions have changed over time. I define the words in a way that allows people to get results with my site, and my definitions are definitely supportable on technical grounds. However, that’s not how those words are necessarily used when labeling products you buy.
The word “surfactant” just means surface active agent — substances used to reduce the surface tension of water — and covers both traditional soaps AND detergents (by my definition of those words). HOWEVER, on ingredients labels, the word “surfactant” is invariably used to describe synthetic detergents. Often it is used to avoid using a name with more negative connotations for consumers. Lots of products containing SLS or similar detergents describe them as “coconut-based surfactants”.
So, to be very technical about it, no, you don’t have to avoid all surfactants, because soap is a surfactant, but you probably do need to avoid anything LABELED as having a “surfactant” for the time being, because invariably it means it contains a synthetic detergent.
To use the site, you can use borax, baking soda, vinegar, or other non-surfactant washing products I mention. And you can use any traditional alkaline soap (so long as you don’t have an individual allergy to the ingredients and it’s not so alkaline as to be badly drying). There is a short list of the most commonly used soaps and their chemical names on my slideshow. If the label says “saponified [oil]”, that’s soap, or if the label lists an oil and potassium or sodium hydroxide, and no detergents, that’s soap. Castile soap is soap made with olive oil. Fortunately, the number of pure soap products seems to be growing.
Sometimes products list only the oils in the ingredients, and it’s not clear whether the products are traditional soap or not. In that case, if you want to try the product, it’s better to call or write the company first to verify what the product is. Is it just oil? Is it saponified oil? Or is it something else made from those oil ingredients (which would make it a detergent by my site definition).
Natural products companies in the last few years have begun to heavily use sugar detergents, which seem to be more mild than other syndets (a “syndet” is a synthetic detergent), and at first I cautiously recommended them. But I’ve heard from too many people for whom they did not work, so I’ve conditionally withdrawn my recommendation and am hoping for a better sense of these over time. (I generally suggest problem-solving only with products you can be very sure of, and experimenting with things like these later once you know what you may be dealing with.)
As I say on the site, check ingredients. I do have one caveat, though. I tell people to ignore the front label, and to read the ingredients label, which tends to be more accurate and precise. The front of the product may say “soap” but the product may be entirely detergent. Usually the ingredients label, however, will be more clear. If it says something is a “saponified” oil or a “soap” it’s usually traditional alkaline soap.
IMPORTANT NOTE: However, another mom brought to my attention recently those Eco-Me products I mentioned above, that used to all be non-detergent — they used the word “soap” on the label of their dish soap product for a detergent. It’s the first time I’ve seen that. The label (Suzy dish soap) includes: ” Coconut-base Soap (Decyl Glucoside)” — “Decyl glucoside” is a sugar detergent.
Given the trend in the “natural” product industry, it’s probably a good idea to search the names of the most common sugar surfactants and know what they are. You’ll generally see the roots of the words for sugar in the names (glucose <=> decyl glucoside). And also to just know the chemical names of the most common soaps.
The only reason I mention charge properties (anionic, nonionic) is that soap is anionic, so if a surfactant ingredient is described as an amphoteric or nonionic surfactant, you know it’s not soap. However, many harsh detergents are anionic, too — sodium lauryl sulfate is anionic, as are many problematic syndets.
Additionally, it’s important to realize just how problematic hard water can be. Few people really appreciate just how much of a factor water hardness is to getting results. Soaps clean so much better in soft water, far less product can be used, and everything rinses better. Skin and hair feel so much better, too. Soaps don’t work very well in hard water. Nothing rinses well. Very hard water can mean the detergent removal process effectively takes months rather than weeks or days. Many if not most of the people who contact me with problems, it turns out, have hard water.
I do my best to give a list of products that will work, and I check the ingredients very carefully. But most companies that sell soap products also sell some or many products that don’t meet the site criteria. Products change, and there’s no way for me to keep up on everything. I go to a great deal of trouble to describe how to figure out products on the site, but unfortunately, the difficulty is just because of the situation we are all in, it’s not you, and it’s not for a lack of scientific skills.
I know you asked for a “dumbed down” explanation; please let me know if anything is still unclear. It will help me know what I need to do a better job explaining for the book.
I hope it helps. Good luck to your family and your baby for a regular no-eczema childhood!
Kindly,
AJ
by AJ Lumsdaine | Jul 2, 2012 | About Eczema
Better Than the Washing Test — “Diagnosing” Detergent-Reactive Eczema
Now here’s a word I never thought I would use in mixed company: PATHOGNOMONIC
From Medicine.net:
“Pathognomonic: A sign or symptom that is so characteristic of a disease that it can be used to make a diagnosis. For example, Koplik spots in the mouth opposite the first and second upper molars are pathognomonic of measles.”
Although I must always warn that 1) I am not a doctor, and 2) these are my ideas and not yet established by scientific study, I am ready to go out on a limb with this usage of the above hopefully correctly-spelled word:
I believe now that a persistently clear diaper area — when disposable diapers are used — for a child who otherwise has generalized eczema, is PATHOGNOMONIC of detergent-reactive eczema.
(It pays to be familiar with why the washing test is helpful for understanding the site information and future prevention, and the washing test does have its uses, but it can also have a lot of false negatives, so to speak.)
Now, it’s possible that the problem could be detergent-reactive eczema yet the diaper area not be entirely clear, such as with diaper rash or yeast-infected rash, so having a rash in the diaper area doesn’t necessary rule out detergent-reactive eczema. However, having a CLEAR diaper area when disposable diapers are used, despite generalized eczema, is pathognomonic for detergent-reactive eczema.
Although this is probably no surprise to SolveEczema.org readers — it makes sense given the basis for the eczema — I wasn’t willing to, well, go out on a limb until I knew more. And, until there is a scientific study or studies, I am open to finding out that I am wrong. But I don’t think so.
Hopefully that insight is helpful to new users and doctors who refer patients to the website. SolveEczema.org
by AJ Lumsdaine | Mar 2, 2012 | About Eczema, About Products, Solveeczema.org
I am reposting a part of reply I just wrote to a comment, since not everyone reads the comments (and I tend not to even read what comes in frequently, because of all the spam). It covers the issue of myths about dry skin, from my perspective:
With eczema, dryness is almost a separate issue. You won’t hear that from anyone else, because the accepted view is that dryness causes the eczema, which I have found in my experience of actually eliminating eczema is not the case. I say “almost”, because dryness is a modulator that can make people more susceptible with lower levels of detergent exposure, as described on the site. I hear (more than I care to think about) from SolveEczema.org users who use products I find unacceptably drying, who are nevertheless happy because they get rid of the eczema.
I’m going to write more about the dryness issue in my book – which, thanks to the crowdfunding, I can describe as “upcoming”! My bar soap experiments ended up bringing me to an entirely different idea about dry skin and how products cause it than I expected. Perhaps given the experience with detergent, I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
Again, I believe dryness alone isn’t the reason for the eczema. After seriously experimenting with over a hundred different bar soaps, I also eventually came to the conclusion that dryness associated with the use of the products was not the result of stripping the skin of oils. I came up with a general rule and gave it a name (with some apologies for the presumption, but in hopes of making it more memorable):
Lumsdaine’s Law: For most people, under most conditions, eczema and dry skin are more the result of what is left on the skin than what is stripped from the skin by washing.
Adding too many moisturizing ingredients to soaps seems to backfire. We all think – as I thought before I did these experiments – that skin gets dry from washing because oils are removed, so adding moisturizing ingredients should help, right? As with so many things, our assumptions trip us up.
What I found is that immediately after washing with a “moisturizing” product, the skin feels soft – just as it feels soft right after washing with water or moisturizing with a creamy, absorbed moisturizer – but if I only used that product (which I was fastidious about doing while I tried each soap), over time, my hands became horribly dry. It happened over and over again with different “moisturizing” products, the opposite of what I expected.
The surprise came when I got fed up with how dry my hands were from one product and just went back to my regular soap before my “trial” was over. My hands went back to normal almost immediately, far faster than could be explained by the typical view of how they became dry and how they might have normalized. I was able to repeat this with other products – which led to the lightbulb moment.
I describe this in my talk – water, alone, a small layer of water on the skin, increases the permeability. Not enough to create eczema, but enough that if one, say, doesn’t dry the skin well enough after washing in the winter (with all the dry air), the hands chap. Increased permeability leads to water loss, leads to dry skin. I warn about absorbed, creamy (what I call “emollient”) moisturizers in my site, in part because they seem to create these same conditions. The skin feels more hydrated immediately after applying – just as it does with small amounts of water, right in the moment – but over time, the skin loses water (among other things). I think this is what is happening with very “moisturizing” soaps. (By the way, this is also why I recommend drying well, with a soap-washed towel, after a shower, NOT patting lightly and moisturizing over too much water – the opposite of the traditional recommendation.)
I’m not saying some moisturizing ingredients aren’t good or are always going to create these conditions. One of the most lovely soaps I have ever used is the Luxo Banho Creme, which has sweet almond oil in it. But overusing moisturizing ingredients – which results in the kinds of products that make the skin/hands feel very moisturized immediately following usage, perhaps to the point that they don’t even feel clean – seems to create the conditions that lead to water loss over time and dry skin. The Luxo Banho – and every soap I have used that I consider the best – leaves the skin feeling clean and normal, not overly moisturized. On the other end of the spectrum, I think soaps can be drying if saponification is too complete and the end result may thus be far too alkaline – there’s a couple of products where I believe that may be the case – but that’s just a guess.
Sadly, people with dry skin buy the “moisturizing” products which are in turn going to make their dryness worse, and assume it’s about their skin, not the products they are using!
Image credits: Dry land/water excerpted from freedigitalphotos.net photo by prozac1. (I can’t seem to force WordPress to directly subtitle the photos anymore, no matter what I do, sorry!) Soap dish by A.J. Lumsdaine.
by AJ Lumsdaine | Feb 1, 2012 | About Eczema, Must Reads, Solveeczema.org
http://www.indiegogo.com/solveeczema
Eczema itches. Quality of life studies say even mild eczema can be as miserable as severe eczema, because no one sleeps. Babies don’t sleep, siblings don’t sleep, parents don’t sleep. It affects health and development. None of the studies quite hits home like this 2-minute video, sent to me by a mom who used the web site to help her son. I’ve edited out a long segment where baby Zack just digs at his neck, but it’s still hard to watch. Stick with it ’til the “after” photo, though (note: it’s silent, there’s no music):
Please help me to help more babies like this one. If you can, please make a donation to my crowdfunding project. The hope is to fund a medical study, but that level of funding would take high visibility on the crowdfunding website. If you can’t afford much, even $1 will make a huge difference in whether the project gets the visibility to attract other contributors, and you can keep your name and amount anonymous. You can donate at:
http://www.indiegogo.com/solveeczema
It ends February 29, just weeks away. Thanks so much for all the moral support and support so far!
by AJ Lumsdaine | Sep 17, 2011 | About Eczema, Solveeczema.org
We know this stuff, and yet, why don’t we add it up?
Even my sleeping bag label tells me to wash it in mild “non-detergent soap,” because the makers know the high-tech fabric will lose its water repellency — become more permeable — from detergent residues.
Some researchers use detergents for transdermal drug delivery (getting drugs to absorb through the skin).
Here’s something I just stumbled across on an environmental company’s web site:
“Detergents also add another problem for aquatic life by lowering the surface tension of the water. Organic chemicals such as pesticides and phenols are then much more easily absorbed by the fish. A detergent concentration of only 2 ppm can cause fish to absorb double the amount of chemicals they would normally absorb…” (Photo of detergent pollution thanks to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)
Read more from the above company site at: http://www.lenntech.com/aquatic/detergents.htm#ixzz1YCiQinWP
It’s not difficult to see that under such conditions, the skin is also a less capable barrier against pathogens.
Lastly, here’s a detailed and alarming study looking at concentrations of synthetic detergents and pesticides in surface and groundwater in India: “The synthetic detergents (or surfactants) and pesticides are the two most common group of chemical compounds that are increasingly being used in modern civilization. Surfactants are common contaminants of aquatic environments due to their large consumption in all types of washing and cleaning operations”. [NC Ghose, D Saha, A Gupta, Synthetic Detergents (Surfactants) and Organochlorine Pesticide Signatures in Surface Water and Groundwater of Greater Kolkata, India, J. Water Resource and Protection, 2009, 4, 290-298 doi:10.4236/jwarp.2009.14036 Published Online October 2009.]
I could go on. We know all this stuff, and yet … it’s as if we don’t remember the minute we’re in a different sphere of life or work.
(Thanks to Free Nature Photos for the image of the Aussie Tree Frog
http://www.freenaturepictures.com/frog-pictures.php)
