Your feminine hygiene products may be poisoning you (1).
According to a study done by the University of La Plata, in Argentina, 85% of tampons, cotton and sanitary products tested contained glyphosate (2). What does this mean? Your tampons are contaminated.
These pharmacy-bought samples also included American-made products.
Glyphosate has been linked to risk of fertility problems in women, such as infertility, miscarriages and birth defects (3).
It’s the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular “roundup” herbicide. It’s also on the World Health Organization’s list of carcinogenic chemicals (4).
According to Dr. Damian Marino, the study’s head researcher: “Eighty-five percent of all samples tested positive for glyphosate and 62 percent for AMPA, which is the environmental metabolite, but in the case of cotton and sterile cotton gauze the figure was 100 percent[…]”
“The result of this research is very serious, when you use cotton or gauze to heal wounds or for personal hygiene uses, thinking they are sterilized products, and the results show that they are contaminated with a probably carcinogenic substance,” said Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, president of the 3rd National Congress of Doctors for Fumigated Communities.
Surprisingly, the purpose of the study was not glyphosate testing. Researchers were curious about how far chemicals sprayed by aircrafts can spread. This method is often used in commercial farming to quickly spray pesticides or herbicides on crops.
Initially, the group was only interested in testing feminine hygiene products. Gauze wasn’t meant to be part of the targeted group.
“There is a basic premise in research that when we complete testing on out target we have to contrast it with something ‘clean,’ so we selected sterile gauze for medical use, found in pharmacies,” he said.
“So we went and bought sterile gauze, opened the packages, analyzed and there was the huge surprise: We found glyphosate! Our first thought was that we had done something wrong, so we threw it all away and bought new gauze, analyzed them and again found glyphosate.”
Products available in the USA aren’t much better. In 2014, 96 percent of cotton produced in the United States was genetically modified, according to the US Department of Agriculture (5). This means that they were engineered to survive toxic chemicals. Monsanto sells both these GMO seeds and the herbicides they are meant to withstand.
In the USA, the chemical has been considered safe since 2013. The US Environmental Protection Agency recently approved Monsanto’s request to allow higher levels of glyphosate in consumer goods. It was even said that glyphosate could be “used without unreasonable risks to people or the environment.” (6).
However, The chemical has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism and cancer (7). It is also partly responsible for the decline of 90% of the total population of the Monarch butterfly. That’s equivalent to 900 million butterflies (8). How could these two facts not be considered “unreasonable risks to people or the environment?”
For women concerned about their reproductive health, there are other options. Reusable menstrual cups made of medical-grade silicone serve as a great tampon alternative. You can also find organic non-GMO menstrual products at your local health store.