All anti-perspirant products us aluminium as an active ingrediant. Is there any danger of Alzheimers disease from using such products?
Not all anti-perspirants use Aluminium. If you are concerned about it for health reasons there are alternatives.
Purely because normal a/p make me itch ( which I eventually discovered was caused by the Alumunium) I looked around for one without it. Here in the UK they sell one called Bionsen which does the trick for me. You might find it sold where you live too. It’s manufactured by Guaber.
V
Since we’re on the subject, how can I make my own deodorant? It’s such a rip-off.
This isn’t strictly on-topic, but Cecil mentions in the first article linked above that aluminum is often added to water as a clarifying agent. This is true, but the amount of residual aluminum is quite small. I’m not sure how it compares to other sources of Al, but the latest water quality report for my city mentions that the average amount of residual aluminum was 0.13 mg/L, compared to a guideline level of 0.1 mg/L. Most of the aluminum added to water is removed during the treatment process. Alum (potassium aluminum sulfate) is added to raw water as a ‘flocculating agent’ – it causes particles in the water to coagulate into larger masses that are easily removed by filtration.
That’s interesting, I wonder if it’s used here too.
I used to get itchy after a shower, but fitting a shower filter has improved things a lot. Perhaps some of that Al. used to sneak through into my domestic water.
V
It’s not aluminum, but…
Ripped from today’s headlines:
Concern over deodorant chemicals
A tablespoon of alum in a pint of water in a spray bottle.
Antiperspirants make me itch too (and really badly), so I had been using deodorants, which IMHO do pretty much nothing. Then I found the Greatest Product Ever. I tried one of those crystal deodorants you sometimes see, often in the health-foods section of a grocery store.
The crystal works not by keeping you from sweating, but by keeping the bacteria that cause the smell from living. Apparently, it’s some kind of a salt that the bacteria can’t tolerate. I first tried this about ten years ago, and my wife was the first to praise its effectiveness. Plus, a single crystal will last four or five years of everyday use. The downside is that if I’m going to be going out in the evenings, I need to re-apply it, because it lasts maybe ten hours.
The current thinking is that copper may play a much larger role in Alzheimers than aluminum. Perhaps much larger, as no causative link has been demonstrated with aluminum.
This may be good news if you have modern, plastic-like water lines at home. Perhaps bad if you have acidic water and/or copper pipes, and if you supplement that with a one-a-day vitamin with trace copper in it, which is common. (That’s why some vitamin manufacturers now produce copper-free vitamins.)
For more information on the hypothesized copper-Alzheimers link, do a little Googling.
BTW, I believe the crystal deodorants are alum-based.