EWG's Healthy Living 2.4.13

EWG gives you the information you can't get elsewhere to make safer, smarter choices.

How does your food score? How many personal-care products do you use in a day?

EWG’s Healthy Living provides mobile access to our our Food Scores and Skin Deep guides, providing on-the-go information on tens of thousands of foods and more than 72,000 personal care products

Healthy Living provides a simple, searchable on-the-go guide for consumers interested in making healthy, affordable decisions about food and personal care products that’s good for people and the planet.

About Food Scores:

How do we know what we’re eating, really? Food processors make so many claims these days. Supermarkets are loaded with foods that contain chemicals no one can pronounce.

The Food Scores database includes more than:
• 80,000 products
• 5,000 ingredients
• 1,500 brands
How did we come up with our scores? We combine these ratings into a single overall product score.
-- Nutrition. The nutrition scoring algorithm considers multiple factors, including calories, saturated fat, trans fat, sugar, sodium, protein, fiber and fruit, vegetable and nut content.
-- Ingredient concerns. The ingredient concerns algorithm focuses on factors such as the likely presence of key contaminants, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics and the health implications of certain food additives.

-- Processing. The processing score reflects EWG's best estimate of the extent to which a particular food has been processed. Scoring factors include modification of individual ingredients from whole foods and the number of artificial ingredients.

About Healthy Living:

Your grooming rituals probably include shampoo, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, lip balm, sunscreen, body lotion, shaving products, and/or makeup.
And what about your children? Sunscreen, diaper cream, shampoo and lotion are common kids’ products.
Most people use cosmetics and other personal-care items without a second thought, believing that the government makes sure they’re safe. Not so. No health studies or pre-market testing are required.
EWG’s Skin Deep® Cosmetics Database is the world's largest safety reference tool for personal-care products. EWG has launched this app to provide you with easy-to-navigate safety ratings at your fingertips for a wide range of products and ingredients on the market.
Americans’ frequent exposure to cosmetics and personal-care products raises questions about the potential health risks of the myriad under-assessed ingredients they contain. These ingredients end up in the bodies of nearly every American.
When you know what chemicals are in the products you bring into your home and how they may affect your health and the environment, you can make informed purchasing decisions — and help transform the marketplace.
This app has information and online safety assessments for more than 72,000 personal care products, 2,500 brands and 9,000 ingredients, culled from product labels and from the scientific and industry literature.

To calculate a product score, we tally the hazards of each ingredient and evaluate every product in relation to all the others in Skin Deep®. The safest products score well by both measures: a low hazard rating AND fair or better data availability. EWG’s ratings are the best available information you can find on the safety of personal-care product ingredients.