After December finals, I had my first naturopathic preceptoring experience. At CCNM, we are required to sit in on a total of 100 patient visits with a practicing naturopathic doctor. From these visits comes the kind of learning that one can only obtain through experience. This particular session, however, served to be a pretty big eye-opener for me.
In Paraguay, South America there is a village, called Cateura, whose main industry is collecting and recycling the waste from the rest of the country. Being from a poor village that acts as Paraguay’s dumping grounds, the citizens of Cateura subsist mainly on sorting and recycling garbage. The documentary Landfill Harmonic, tells the story of Favio Chavez, a music teacher in Cateura, who decided to create a school music program using instruments made entirely of recycled garbage.
It drives me crazy when we find that the things we once thought were so complicated are actually incredibly, insanely simple and that the truth of their simplicity is not common knowledge. This turned out to be the case for deodorant.
Most people who seek natural alternatives to their cosmetic supply have a problem when it comes to deodorants. All women’s deodorants are anti-perspirants, which contain high levels of aluminum, natural deodorants don’t work and make me itch and men’s deodorant, which I’d resorted to using for a while, is still full of chemicals and smells like, well, “antifreeze man”, for lack of a better description, and actually contains propylene glycol, which is, in fact, antifreeze. So there you go.
I started shunning women’s deodorant at summer camp when a hippie friend of mine (wise at her 14 years of ago) explained that it caused breast cancer. I don’t know why I was worried about breast cancer at the age of 14 (maybe it was my early naturopathic doctor self, shining through) but I got scared and starting using men’s deodorant, which, because it’s not an anti-perspirant, doesn’t contain aluminum zirconium. So, does anti-perspirant actually cause cancer? Studies are inconclusive, but we do know that it blocks lymph nodes, which are plentiful beneath our arms, and which contain the specific lymph nodes that drain the breast tissue and chest. Clogged lymph nodes are just bad news in general because our lymph nodes are responsible for clearing out the debris and toxins that our body is exposed to. Good health can only ever be attained when our lymphatic system is operating to its full potential.
After entering the world of natural health products, I started shelling out $8-$10 a tube for natural deodorant. It was an expensive experiment as I tried a grand total of 4 different brands, all to discover that, firstly, none of them worked, and secondly, some of them even gave me a weird allergic rash under my arms, which made me scratch myself like a gorilla throughout the day. Not exactly attractive.
So, my deodorant choices ultimately boiled down to: a) blocking the lymphatic drainage in my underarms, causing edema of my arms, aka “Bingo Wings“, or possibly increasing my risk of cancer b) forever living with allergic dermatitis like I’m back in my eczema-tainted childhood days, c) searching through the men’s deodorant section of the grocery store, trying to find the most “feminine”-scented anti-freeze available or, even, d) going “au naturale”, and thus, probably spending the rest of my life alone. What would you choose?
So I went back to smelling like Old Spice for a while. That is, until I found and developed this recipe for homemade deodorant. This recipe is so simple, so easy and so cheap to make that it irks me to the bone that making deodorant at home isn’t common practice. Our consumer-driven society dis-empowers us to the point where we can’t even take care of ourselves. We are forced to either apply toxic substances to our bodies or cough up huge amounts of cash for inferior “natural” products full of natural substitutes for the very chemicals we’re so certain are necessary. Can’t we do anything ourselves anymore? We had over our cash and our bodies so willingly we – alright, enough political banter; it’s time to take action!
Allow me to be the bearer of excellent news: you can create natural deodorant that smells great, contains no harmful chemicals and is made of only 3 ingredients, all of which can be found in your kitchen. You can even eat this deodorant, if you were so inclined. And it takes about 1 minute to make. Not kidding. Oh, and it works really well, too!
DIY Natural Edible Deodorant
You need:
A small mason jar or glass container (using an empty soap container or recycled cream jar works well too)
2 tbs baking soda
2 tbs arrowroot (or cornstarch)
2 tbs coconut oil
*This recipe makes about enough for one person to last them quite a while (about as long as a regular stick of deodorant would last you). If you are making multiple amounts of deodorant, you know, to share the lymph node-love and gift to all your family and friends, simply add more of all the base ingredients in a 1:1:1 ratio.
Optional:
A few drops (~10) of your favourite essential oil
1-2 probiotic capsules
Directions:
Soften coconut oil by putting it in the microwave for 10-20 seconds. Mix in the baking soda and arrowroot. Mix the three ingredients thoroughly and then scoop into the container of your choice.
Optional: Add in your essential oils. I used a little bit of vanilla extract, but I found that the coconut oil gives the recipe a delicious coconut scent already. For your male or sweat-prone loved ones, I would recommend adding in an antibacterial essential oil, such as peppermint, tea tree, sage, etc. You can also break open a capsule of a probiotic (1-2 capsules per batch of deo) to add in for extra bacteria-regulating power. Also, some people are sensitive to the baking soda. If so, just decrease the amount of baking soda and increase the arrowroot. Problem solved.
Allow the mixture to cool at room temperature. This takes about a day. If you’re in a rush you can just stick it in the fridge.
There. That’s it. To use, I just scrape a pea-sized amount with my fingers and apply it directly to my underarms. No itching, no lymph node clogging, no weird chemical-man scent, no anti-freeze. Just soft, healthy underarms that smell like coconut.
It should be enough to put Speedstick out of business.
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Happy New Year, everyone! I took a much needed computer fast for a few days and thus left this blog for a little while, but I’m back now. The world didn’t end in 2012, and it was an interesting, productive year. Here are some highlights!
If we weren’t broke before coming to this program, after about 2.5 years you’ll bet we are now! There’s no time to get a job and no money to be spent on expensive, luxurious gifts. So, what’s a naturopathic student to do? In order to partake in the materialism of the holiday season (and I actually do love giving gifts), here are some very cheap, fun, healthy and easy gift ideas for the entire family that will actually be used and enjoyed!
Christmas fruitcake. I’ve always hated that dry, brown loaf with its bitter, plastic-tasting chunks of “fruit”. Only my dad would eat it; I guess nothing says Christmas like dipping a piece of dry, tasteless plastic/bread into an espresso cup, and then picking the gummy fruits out of your teeth for days afterward. It’s all a part of the holiday cheer! This Christmas fruitcake, however, is not like that. It’s even (dare I say it)… good!
Now that my family is gluten-free, it seems like the skies have opened and baked goods (baked at home) have become reinvented. Old, store-bought staleness has reinvented itself as warm, moist deliciousness.
Since puberty I’ve had fine, oil-prone hair that used to require daily washing. However, washing hair on a daily basis can be time-consuming and expensive. It’s also not recommended that we wash hair often (it’s better to cut shampoos down to once or twice a week) to avoid stripping our scalp and hair of their moisturizing, natural oils. If I don’t wash my hair often, however, my head becomes a limp, dull greasy mess that only looks partially presentable when pulled into a pony tail or buried under some kind of hat. Hence, the magic of: dry shampoo!
I realized it one day, while spending a particularly delicious Saturday in one of the armchairs of the living room, feeling the sun warm my back as it streamed through the shutters: for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel stressed. Coco was draped across my back, lying on the back of the chair. As if on cue, he let out a long puff of a sigh, his eyes closed. Coco is never stressed, I thought to myself. And then I realized it: Coco is more naturopathic than any doctor could hope to be. As Dr. Stargrove said, at The Gathering in Chicago, “nature knows more than doctors ever will.” And Coco, with is furry body and leathery paws is much closer to nature than any of us will ever be.
Oh man, is it ever easy to make things taste good using bread and cheese. Especially cheese. It seems like all the covers of artfully designed cookbooks feature simple-looking recipes that you just know are absolutely delicious because of the presence of one magical food: cheese.
Even when it reflects your passions, it’s not often you find yourself in a truly inspiring lecture while studying for a post-graduate degree; hey, it’s sad, but true. So, imagine my excitement at feeling completely touched by our third year Clinical Nutrition professor, Dr. P’s, incredible Thursday lecture.