Your search for healthy, safe products just got a lot easier

Talk about cherry picking! The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit corporation, is on a mission… “to empower you with breakthrough research to make informed choices and live a healthy life in a healthy environment.” This website and app offer amazing tools to help consumers make better choices and I have been all in for quite some time. The app is amazing because “it puts ratings for 120,000 food and personal care products at your finger tips.” All you have to do is scan a barcode with your phone and you get a rating for that product if it’s in the database. Every time I want to research the ingredients in a product I visit EWG first. What is new to me, is that there is a section on their site which you can use to build a report for products not already in their catalog. I have used this many times recently and it’s pretty amazing. I checked out some of my make-up and household products and was amazed at the details the reports offered – all for free! You don’t even need to sign up for a free account with your email, but if you do, you’ll receive the EWG free newsletter.

Who is behind EWG?

EWG has an office in Washington, DC and in Sacramento, California. As stated on the website, “EWG’s team of scientists, policy experts, lawyers and communications and data experts work tirelessly to reform our nation’s broken chemical safety and agricultural laws. We push industries to adopt our standards and stand against chemicals of concern. We educate consumers with actionable information and inspire demand for safer products. When government and industry won’t stand up for our public health, we’re there…Since 1993, the Environmental Working Group has shined a spotlight on outdated legislation, harmful agricultural practices and industry loopholes that pose a risk to our health and the health of our environment.” 

What areas does EWG cover?

The group focuses on following areas:

• Food & Water
• Farming & Agriculture
• Personal Care Products
• Household & Consumer Products
• Energy
• Family Health
• Toxic Chemicals
• Regional Issues

EWG offers multiple consumer guides including a tap water database, skin deep, which is a guide to personal care products, a guide for parents and caregivers and a meat and dairy label decoder. This summer, the guide on sunscreens came in very handy. The guide to healthy cleaning is very useful as well. I can’t recommend these tools enough! EWG also offers a food scores database for over 150,000 food products, which can tell you what is in that food and how it was produced and processed. It’s a food shopping game changer. I simply cannot say enough about these guides or this site.

Sometimes, I get so frustrated by how big companies seem to care only about their profits and nothing about the consumers who use and trust their products. Groups like the Environmental Working Group remind me that there are people out there who care and can make a huge difference in how we live our lives. I don’t know if anyone from EWG will ever read this post, but if someone who works there does, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the work you’re doing. It’s because of people like you that people like me can more easily make better, healthier choices for ourselves and our families, which means so much. 

Readers, you now have the tools. Use them! Here’s to shopping for healthy, safe, quality products!

Enjoy!