Health and Wellness and Nature.

Last Wednesday I attended the Health and Wellness Expo at the Student Recreation Center. Among many vendors for various products and services related to every facet of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, there was a specific display that caught my attention. Shaklee, a company specializing in all-natural products of all sorts, had a stand overflowing with all sorts of cleaning products and personal care products, each one of which was completely devoid of any unsafe chemicals. When I approached the woman behind the display, she immediately started into her spiel about the benefits of using her products.
My interest in this sort of information begins at home. My mother suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is extremely sensitive to any and all fragrances and chemicals in every form you could possibly imagine. When the saleswoman plugged her products with the statement “Your baby could literally drink this entire bottle and you wouldn’t even have to call poison control.”, I knew immediately that this was something that would be extremely beneficial to my mother. Not only do the ingredients in these products frighten me because of my mother’s hypersensitivity to them, they frighten me because I have spent a lot of time looking at the damage that can be done by exposure to the chemicals within the products. The same poisonous chemicals that are sprayed on crops and are linked with countless illnesses are the chemicals that we willingly spray into the air in our homes and rub into our skin.
So, along with efforts to stay closer to nature in other ways, it is important to remember to stay close to nature even in ways that you wouldn’t normally consider “natural”.