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Dozens of lipsticks and lip glosses are put to the test.

“Over the past years, using cosmetic products has increased worldwide at an alarming rate due to unending pursuit for individual beautification…” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that unless cosmetic products contain ingredients that may be linked to disease—ingredients such as toxic heavy metals like lead.

As you can see at 0:28 in my video Flashback Friday: Is Lipstick Safe Given the Lead Contamination?, lead has been found in a wide range of cosmetic products, from eye shadow to skin cream, and foundation to blush. You may recall that I talked about lead in henna in my video Is Henna Safe?, but in looking at the data, “important warnings can be recognized”: the presence of lead in lipsticks. This is concerning because lipstick wearers may actually swallow a little bit of it. In fact, it has “been estimated that a woman inadvertently ingests 1.8 kg [about 4 lbs] of lipstick during her lifetime.” “Moreover, lipsticks can be used by pregnant women or women of child bearing age.” (I mean, obviously.) Yes, lead is highly toxic, but how much lead can there be in lipstick? Surely, it is “a very minor source….Nonetheless, one should not exclude the fact that lead accumulates in the body due to over time and repetitive lead-containing lipstick or hair dye application, which lead to significant exposure levels.” You don’t really know, though, until you put it to the test.

Thirty-two lipsticks and lip glosses were tested, and lead was detected in 75 percent of the products, which “suggests potential public health concerns.” But how much lead did the researchers actually find? About half of the samples exceeded the FDA-recommended maximum level set for candy.

That limit is set for something kids may eat every day, though. Kids are not going to eat tubes of lipstick each day. “Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that there is no safe level of Pb

intake,” and, ideally, we should get contaminant levels down to zero. As a consumer group pointed out, a quarter of the lipsticks were lead-free, so we know it can be done. Maybe we should better regulate toxic metals in cosmetics to protect women’s health in the United States, as has already been done in Europe. Fair enough, but it wasn’t well-received.

The billion-dollar lipstick industry wasn’t happy. In an article that tried to downplay the risks, the scientists-for-hire firm that once played villain in the real-life Erin Brockovich case concluded that, even though lipstick may contain lead, the concentrations are so low that they “are not expected to pose any health risks to adults or children.” Children’s blood lead levels are influenced more by background lead exposures, such as lead in the air, dust, water, and food, than by lipstick exposures, but just because our environment is so contaminated doesn’t mean we need to add to the problem. In fact, because there’s so much lead around anyway, maybe there’s that much more reason to cut down on additional exposures. But in that article, the scientists-for-hire calculated that an adult would need to apply lipstick more than 30 times a day to raise their blood lead level to even the most stringent limits and 695 times a day to get blood levels up to more concerning levels.

However, as you can see at 3:13 in my video, this was based on an assumption that lipstick would only have about one part per million lead or, at the extreme end, maybe two or three parts per million (ppm). But by 2016, about ten times more lipsticks were tested, and they averaged nearly 500 ppm—with 10 percent exceeding 1,000 ppm—going all the way up to 10,000 ppm, with more than one out of five exceeding FDA and even Chinese safety limits on lead in cosmetics.

As you can see in the graphs below and at 3:42 in my video, lip gloss was worse than lipstick; orange and pink colors had more lead than brown, red, or purple; and all of the really contaminated cosmetics were the cheaper ones, sold for less than five dollars each.

Hold on. The highest concentration found was 10,185 mg/kg. That’s 10 grams per kilogram, which means the lipstick was 1 percent pure lead. That means a single application could expose a grown woman to perhaps 12 times the tolerable daily intake.

And if a woman is interested in having children, that poses a “particular concern,” as lead accumulates in our bones and “may be released into the bloodstream during pregnancy,” where it can slip through the placenta or into breast milk.

The good news is that the FDA is considering lowering the maximum allowable lead levels in lipstick from 20 ppm to 10 ppm, something Canada arrived at a decade ago. But without enforcement, it doesn’t matter. As you can see in the graph below and at 4:39 in my video, moving the legal limit from 20 ppm down to 10 ppm would just mean that instead of 23 percent of lip products exceeding legal levels, 27 percent would be exceeding legal levels. Right now, the limit’s 20 ppm, but what does it matter if there still may be products on store shelves that violate the legal limits?

Is Henna Safe? is the video I mentioned.

I think the only other cosmetic safety videos I have are Flashback Friday: Which Intestines for Food and Cosmetics? and Avoiding Adult Exposure to Phthalates.

Most Americans get less than half the recommended minimum daily fiber intake, which is problematic as the benefits of fiber go way beyond bowel regularity.

“Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, believed that all disease begins in the gut.” Of course, he also thought women were hysterical because of their “wandering uterus.” So much for ancient medical wisdom.

Even though a condition like constipation can have a “major impact…on physical, mental and social well-being,” it’s “often overlooked in health care.” This may be because poop-talk is “taboo,” but constipation can have “a severe influence on…everyday living,” both psychologically and physically. Constipation can literally hurt, causing “abdominal discomfort and pain, straining, hard stool, infrequent bowel movements, bloating and nausea.”

No wonder “laxatives are among the most commonly used drugs…Most are quite safe when used judiciously, intermittently,” but because people use them so frequently, laxatives end up being one of the most common causes of adverse drug reactions. Perhaps treatment should instead address the underlying problem that causes constipation, such as lack of dietary fiber. You probably don’t need a meta-analysis to demonstrate that “dietary fiber can obviously increase stool frequency in patients with constipation.” I discuss this in my video Friday Favorites: Is Fiber an Effective Anti-Inflammatory?.

“Populations in most Western countries must be considered on world standards to be almost universally constipated.” In the Western world, constipation is an epidemic among the elderly, but among those centering their diets around fiber-rich foods, it’s simply not a problem.

Where is fiber found? As you can see at 1:37 in my video, a patient summary in the Journal of the American Medical Association sums it up with an illustration of whole, unrefined plant foods. For those of us who may be smug about our hearty intake of fruits and vegetables, we need to realize that “fruits and leafy vegetables are the poorest source of plant fiber.” Why? Because they’re 90 percent water. Root vegetables have more fiber, but the real superstars include legumes, such as beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, and we can’t forget whole grains. What about fruits? Gram for gram, fiber from fruits does not seem to have the same effect. It may take 25 grams of fruit fiber to double stool output, something just 10 grams of whole-grain fiber or vegetable fiber can do, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:08 in my video.

And that’s not all fiber can do. If you eat some whole-grain barley for supper, your good gut bacteria are having it for breakfast the next morning. This releases butyrate into our bloodstream, a compound that seems to “exert broad anti-inflammatory activities.” This could help explain why researchers found that “significant decreases in the prevalence of inflammation were associated with increasing dietary fiber intakes for all group.” As you can see at 2:44 in my video, the group with the highest fiber intake in the study had decreased inflammation—and that was with getting just the minimum recommended daily intake of fiber. So, if you have knee pain, for instance, should you eat more fiber-rich foods?

“Dietary Fiber Intake in Relation to Knee Pain Trajectory” is a study that followed thousands of patients. Researchers found that a high intake of dietary fiber, which is to say just the minimum recommended intake, was “associated with a lower risk of developing moderate or severe knee pain over time.” What’s more, two Framingham studies found that higher fiber intake was related to a lower risk of having symptomatic osteoarthritis in the first place.

Don’t a variety of diseases have an inflammatory component, though? How about “fiber consumption and all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortalities”? Researchers found that, compared with those who consumed the least amount of fiber, those who consumed the most had 23 percent less cardiovascular disease mortality, a 17 percent lower risk of dying from cancer, and 23 percent lower mortality from all causes put together. “Unfortunately, most persons in the United States consume less than half of the recommended intake of dietary fiber daily.”

Researchers suggest all sorts of potential mechanisms for which fiber could be life-saving, such as improving cholesterol, immune function, and blood sugar control, but it may also have more of a direct cause. If you ask people to bear down as if they’re straining on stool, they can experience a rapid increase in intracranial pressure—that is, pressure inside your skull. And, if you look at trigger factors for the rupture of intracranial aneurysms and ask hundreds of people who had strokes or bleeds within their brains, one of the biggest trigger factors noted was “straining for defecation,” multiplying your risk by seven-fold.

This is one of the reasons legumes and whole grains are emphasized in my Daily Dozen checklist, which compiles all of the healthiest of healthy foods to ideally fit into your daily routine. It’s available (for free, of course!) as an app (Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen) on [iPhone] and [Android], and you can learn all about it in my video Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen Checklist.

If you buy processed grain products, how do you know they contain enough fiber? Check out The Five-to-One Fiber Rule.