How EWG is Transforming Transparency in Beauty and Personal Care

0:00Hey guys, welcome back. Before the episode, I wanted to go check out Timeline if you haven't already. Timeline is a brand that is absolutely revolutionizing the skincare space via their approach to longevity science and using the cutting-edge breakthroughs that we've discovered in the longevity space. Their compound known as MitoPure is the first postbiotic nutrient shown to trigger a crucial recycling process within our cells that's called mitophagy or metophagy. And what mitophagy does is it targets the dying mitochondria and allows them to be replaced by new and healthy ones. Now, for those of you that don't know, mitochondria are responsible for about 90 % of cellular energy.

0:44And cellular energy is the whole reason why we are able to produce more proteins such as collagen, elastin, anything that's required for our cells to remain healthy and basically work. So I really urge you guys, check out their entire lineup. I'm really loving all of the products. I use their supplement. I also use their topical products. I think they work so well together in conjunction, so I really recommend the whole routine. But even their skincare products, if you're looking for an amazing serum or an amazing moisturizer, all of the benefits of MitraPure are packed into every single product, and I really recommend it for pretty much anybody and everybody, because at the end of the day, skincare is supposed to be a reflection of healthcare for our largest organ.

1:29And I couldn't think of a better way to do that than really kind of repower ourselves and allow them to do what they do on a normal basis. But, you know, kind of give them the boost that they need. So check it out. Let me know what you think and stay tuned for this awesome episode.

1:46Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Skin Anarchy. This is your host Ekta and wow, do I have a guest for you today. I am so honored and just so excited to be hosting him and just being able to talk to him about his work and the immense contributions that have come from him and his organization over the years and really led us to where we are today, you know, in the OTC product space. I mean, without saying anything, I think all of you can recognize the work that EWG has done over the years. And so today I want to welcome Ken Cook, who is the co-founder and president of the EWG. Welcome, Ken.

2:20It is truly such an honor to host you. Thank you, Doc. It's great to be here. Yeah, no, it's really cool to be able to talk to you because for many years, you know, even before I started this podcast, I was always following the EWG, you know, following what you guys are doing and just so amazed by the progress you were able to make, you know, in the years. And I can't wait to dive into that, but I'd love to learn about you, Ken. Like, where did it all start? You know, where did everything begin and the ideas? I mean, where did it come from to create this organization? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on.

2:51And I'm tickled to be able to spend some time with you and talk about this issue that we're both so deeply concerned about. You know, I started off getting interested in the environment in high school and did an independent study semester in high school, which was very unusual. Where I went to high school, there were two of us who did it, where we read books and wrote stuff. And the two books I read were The Closing Circle by Barry Commoner and The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, the sort of 1969 hot books that you would read if you were interested in environmental stuff. And I was interested in environmental stuff because I liked thinking about issues from, I didn't know it at the time to describe it this way, but from an interdisciplinary perspective, I liked the idea of having a basic knowledge set that would allow you to explore economics, science, you know, in all its dimensions, politics, policy.

3:57I just like that synthesis that environmentalism to me represented much more than regulating rogue industries or even documenting problems and complaining about them. It was more this search for solutions in a ecological way, looking at systems, looking at all different perspectives. So that that was high school. I continued it through college. And then when I graduated and got my master's degree in soil science, I went to Washington, D.C. and started working on policy issues. And over time, I worked for the government for a while, a library of Congress. Then I started EWG after a stint at other nonprofit groups, started what became Environmental Working Group in the early 90s.

4:47And the whole idea of EWG was to bring this appetite for fresh sources of data, a fresh look at information, making it newsworthy and understandable to people. and from there I just I was lucky to hire a bunch of really smart people smart people that started skin deep smart people that started verified smart people that helped us work on pesticide issues and farm subsidies so I've just I've been I've been privileged to be able to work with this incredibly talented group of folks over now 31 years so that's how it started. Wow, that's really cool though because I think when you started this work, I can tell you my father went to school and got a PhD in environmental sciences as well.

5:44He worked a lot in his PhD with a lot of environmental things and dairy science especially. I remember him talking to me that there were not a lot of things in place in terms of regulations. There were not a lot of, a lot of understanding wasn't there, you know, just like for scientists, even like it was a lot of stuff that you had to kind of navigate through to try to understand. And so I guess one of my biggest questions is, you know, what were some of the big holes that you saw at the time, especially when you started working on the federal level? You know, what were some of the big policies that you really wanted to shape and bring forward or anything that you can remember that started?

6:24Oh, of course. I mean, well, you know, going back to the to the theme of doing original work. I mean, one of the things that we sort of developed early on as a perspective is what's the understanding that we've gained as a result of the passage of all these environmental laws that produced, before they produced regulations or anything that was incumbent on industry to comply with, before that, they produced information and data. One of the great accomplishments of the environmental movement is that the laws that were passed in the 70s and 80s, we kind of stopped after the mid-90s and didn't pass, don't modernize environmental laws anymore.

7:11But those bedrock laws, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, Superfund, go on and on, Endangered Species Act, they all collected by law the information that was required to make regulatory decisions. And that repository of information under each one of these statutes, sometimes administered by different agencies or different parts of the same agency, water, air, and so forth, all compartmentalized at EPA. When you step back from it, it goes to, I think, probably your dad's dilemma, which early on, we didn't have these data. As scientists, we always want more.

7:52We never have enough. I'm sure he probably, you know, even with advances, he probably felt like there was more that was needed. But that data became very important to the founding structure of EWG because we hired database programmers and we started building databases. I'm going to get to our topic here, I think, our central topic, because one of the databases we decided to build was on personal care products. Now, I wish I could claim that this was my insight. In fact, not only was it not my insight, I wasn't sure it was a good idea. It was the insight of a great scientist on our team in the early 2000s where she was with us for many years.

8:34But in the early 2000s, she decided we needed to build a database of ingredients in personal care products. And the reason she decided we needed to do that was a study that came out of the Centers for Disease Control. several scientists did a study of phthalates and found them in elevated levels in the blood of women of childbearing age and the cdc scientists speculated in their paper they didn't know for sure again back to your dad's point right we never we never quite fully know but back to your dad's point once you dig into it a little bit what we found out was that it likely came from personal care products.

9:16Now, I, as an environmentalist, I think of smokestacks. I think of effluent coming out of factories. I think of runoff farm fields. That's the environment, right? But Jane's insight and backed by her research was that, hey, you know, there's an exposure route here that comes through our drugstore or, you know, comes through our favorite place to shop for shampoo or nail polish or whatever, that's the source of the contamination. And it's worrisome enough that the CDC did a study on it, population study, and found reason to be concerned about women of childbearing age with this chemical in them.

9:57So she said, why don't we find out what personal care products these phthalates are in? So we did that. We built a database. I think it had maybe 10 ,000 products in it. We found it mostly was in nail polish. A lot of products had already gotten out of the phthalates chemistry, but we found a concern. But then she looked at the label on these personal care products and asked the very logical scientific question, what's the rest of this stuff? What about these chemicals? And it's a short hop from that question to how are they regulated? And that's when we learned that for personal care products, like food additives and like cleaning products and a lot of other consumer-facing environmental exposures, the system behind them is largely one of self-regulation.

10:48You could put pretty much anything into a personal care product. And I'll send you a link so you can read it directly on the FDA website. FDA does not do pre-market testing of ingredients or products. They don't have safety limits on ingredients. They don't even really review all of these chemicals that go into personal care products. It's largely up to the industry to decide what to put in, in what applications, which ones can be used near the eye, which ones can be used on hair, which ones wash off, which ones don't. This whole world was amazing to us that you could have this intimate contact with thousands of chemicals, hundreds for most people in the course of a year, and not even have robust dossiers on individual chemicals, much less the combination of them that were present, right?

11:45You might have four or five neurotoxic agents, chronic exposures, low level risk in the short term. But we're thinking about the long term, which is what the CDC scientists were concerned about with phthalates. So we built this database. Jane built it with my colleague, Chris Campbell, and several others on our team. We had the ability from the early 90s when we hired database programmers to build databases. So we created what is now Skin Deep with 100 ,000 products and I don't know how many thousand ingredients in it. And we started rating the ingredients and the products as best we could with, you know, again, if you don't have a regulatory system that requires submission of data to support the inclusion of an ingredient in a product, or you don't have to look at the final product and see what its hazard profile might be, That's not required by any law.

12:47Don't have data as a result. You know, you have a lot less. And that's how Skin Deep came about that we. And so we have this big database. Now we have an app. And I think that's what brought you to our doorstep. Yeah. That's the story. And just one more thing. the hardest problem we had to solve when we first launched Skin Deep was convincing journalists that this was the regulatory, in quotes, system in place, that FDA, in fact, did not review ingredients, did not, in fact, set safe limits, did not do pre-market testing of products at all. And it was really hard for reporters until we sent them to the FDA website that said all those things.

13:35Show them the light, you know, like, you know, cause like us, or at least like me, I mean, Jane Houlihan was, was the woman, the person with the insight, you know, I didn't think of this as an, as the environment. And now of course, and skin deep was a big part of it. We think of the environment as the environment of everyday life and the exposures that we experience food, personal care products, things off-gassing in the home, home cleaning products that you have under your sink, all of those to us are now fundamental areas of interest and concern. How can we focus on that, even as we're concerned about air pollution and drinking water contaminants and all the rest?

14:24It's this environment of everyday life and consumer products that has been one of the areas that we've really pioneered. And again, I think that's, you know, thank you for your great work and your including this podcast, because it really is worth realizing as an expert, a leader in the personal care product world, head of a trade association said to me one day, she said, you know, before Skin Deep came along, Ken, and you're really good at your work. But before Skin Deep came along, women thought they were putting on makeup and now they think they're putting on chemicals. Yes. Oh, I love that.

15:07Right? That's so true. Yes. I would second that a hundred percent. You guys, I mean, Ken, the work that the EWG has done, like for me, I will tell you personally speaking from a consumer standpoint, You know, also, obviously, with a science background, it's even more meaningful, right, for me, because I look at it and I'm like, how did we, like, how did people not realize, you know, that you were having literal chemicals that were creating these products? I mean, yes, beauty and all these wonderful spaces that we like to indulge in, you know, they're wonderful and they're playgrounds for exploration and creativity, but health is at the center of all of it.

15:47And it's at the end of the day, consumers, like for me, it was always like that. Even when I was a child, I used to think like, well, what is this stuff? You know what I mean? Like, what is it? You know, like a little kid exploring chemistry. Like, I mean, that's really what it comes down to. And I think that the EWG, like what you guys did and how you've innovated the space, it's really done exactly what you just said. But also, I think it's made it a lot more interesting also as consumers. You know, like we can now look at a product and say, I want to know, you know, what do these words mean?

16:20Like the organic chemistry terms, you know, and the ingredient list. Like you want to explore and understand why do these things matter? Why do they have to be in my formulation? And if they don't have to be in there, get them out of here. You know, like that whole movement. I mean, I can't even put into words how meaningful that is. That's you really you guys completely changed the game. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's just the truth. I mean, and I want to ask this as a follow up is how do you see us now? I mean, I know we've made a lot of strides like, you know, in the industries of beauty and skincare and, you know, these OTC products that we love.

16:58But how do you see it evolving even further, especially now we have AI, we have all these things. So you have all these databases that you guys have created and these wonderful resources. But how do you see this evolving even further? It's a great question. I think if you think about it as a series of steps that a newcomer to this issue might encounter, one would be the awareness moment that you just described so well. What is all this stuff? And do you need it? And, you know, we try and be very careful about not judging people for personal care products they use, how they use them, how they make them feel.

17:37I mean, you used a great word. It's kind of a playground. is one of the best ways I've heard it described as something that should be playful, should be a source of creativity and enjoyment in the partaking of these personal care products, right? I love that, the lightness of that, right? So, but at the same time, and that's the second step, once you see all these things, do you, you know, what do you do? Do you wanna continue using things that have ingredients in them that may have raised concerns, may even be banned in some countries? and that maybe you just don't need, right? So how do you get the playfulness, the experimentation, the choice wedded to health?

18:19And that step is really interesting because what has happened with clean beauty over the years, even though there's no definition, we have our own definition at EWG. It's in our EWG verified program, very rigorous set of standards for what we consider to be really clean beauty. and it's been amazing for us to discover how many entrepreneurs how many companies out there they can be in a small startup setting they can be part of a big corporation how they want to do things differently they don't want to continue to make the kinds of products with the kinds of ingredients that they've used in the past and there's enough technical advance there's enough official curiosity informed by scientific know-how and the ability to formulate all the other elements to making a great personal care product, they're launching these things into the marketplace in a way that's shifting the whole thing.

19:19And you don't have to shift a huge percentage of the marketplace in order to see an impact. And we have seen it time and time again, where, you know people come to our website we get about a thousand people an hour come deep right and and more come to the app um so we didn't know that that was going to happen that people were going to shop according to our databases we thought we were going to build databases and go to capital and say does this look right to you that all these things are in cosmetics and they're not adequately regulated separate story on how that process unfolded but but the the immediate impact we started seeing people on Amazon listing the EWG rating when they were commenting on a product they had purchased.

20:04Oh, this is green on EWG or don't buy this. It's yellow or red or whatever it might be. Once we saw that happening and saw companies then responding to it and saying, hey, you know, we're not a nonprofit, we're a for-profit, but we're pursuing the same mission. We don't want sketchy chemicals in our products. And once that started unfolding, and there have been many pioneers that preceded EWG that felt that way anyway. I don't mean to suggest that we were, you know, that it was all us by any means. But I think what Skin Deep did, it gave people an outlet to be evaluated against all the other products in a way that incentivized people to try for something that was better or encourage people to ask the question, do you really need to use this product every day or do you need to use it at all?

20:57You know, I just did an interview with a pediatric endocrinologist who recently studied the effect of certain chemicals on the brain cells that help determine the onset of puberty. And, you know, a very nerdy, detailed, interesting, fascinating study. But at the end, when I asked her, what do you say to like a a girlfriend of you know who has kids or um comes to you and says well you've just done this study that suggested that maybe some chemicals could be implicated in early onset of puberty and those that early onset is um sometimes has health effects associated with it and her answer was well maybe just use soap and water yeah right yeah that's so you know we're we're not anti We're not anti-fragrance.

21:48We want it disclosed. We urge caution. We're not anti any particular ingredient to the extent that we think it's going to cause an acute problem, unless you already know you're sensitized to it. It's more like, you know, if you stand back and look at these products full of chemicals that absorb in your body, your largest organ, your skin, and we now have biomonitoring studies. We did some of the early ones that found these chemicals in teenagers and women, just like the CDC did. Maybe you want to think about what you're applying to yourself, whether you need it, weigh the playfulness, the benefit you get from it, how you feel, how you feel you look, whatever these things may be, all human, very human dimensions of, you know, everyday experience.

22:39Maybe you want to think about simplifying. Maybe you want to use up the product that you've got and then try something that scores better at EWG or is one of our verified brands that really passes through the ringer because we ask for all kinds of information that's not on the label from these companies. That to me is the progression we're seeing, doctor. It's really spreading. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's remarkable. I mean, what you said is so hard hitting because it really does boil down to, well, you have to make a choice at one point, you know, in terms of consumer, consumerism to me is like, it's really fueled a lot by just impulsivity, you know, and that's okay.

23:18I think. I know mine is. I know mine is. I know mine is too. And that's why I'm like, okay, I get it. You know, we're human and we have the human nature. That's how it is. But at the end of the day, it really is about what you were saying where what do you want on your skin like it is going to impact your health it is going to matter at the end of the day and the fact that i mean for me i think the ewg has introduced transparency on a level that never existed before that's really where i get very very enamored by what you guys are doing and have done because consumers i think personally speaking i think that the problem that we are facing even now is that we truly want transparency like we want to understand what is that chemical what is it you know what i mean where does it come from why do we need it yeah like is it for the texture of the product is it for the efficacy of the i mean tell us you know and so that's where i think it it becomes more of like not just on a brand level which it obviously should be because brands should take a lot more responsibility in my opinion in terms of what they're putting out there but also for consumers to take responsibility of I don't need that in my product you know what I mean like I don't need that extra whatever you think this is adding to my experience I'll take just if I'm buying makeup I'll take it as long as it has the pigment that I want and you know what I mean like it's a lipstick if it's doing its job and giving me that red shade I want I'm happy with it I don't need the extra crap you know like I don't need it so that's where I think you've handed us options you know what I mean and It's like giving options to people and saying, you have more than one choice.

24:59You know, there are ways to go about it. So from that, I think, you know, I'm very intrigued with the skincare aspect. I won't lie. You know, you had mentioned this earlier in the interview where in terms of how ingredients interact. And I really want to ask you about this. When it comes to profiling these ingredients, I mean, what is the process of trying to figure out how they interact? Because I know the data, like I know the publications that exist right now. If you go on PubMed, there's not a lot of information out there. No, not at all. Yeah. Not in any realm of chemical regulatory policy, whether it's pesticides or toxic substances that are regulated, that come out of industry that might be used in construction or automobile manufacturing, whatever.

25:46We are still at a very primitive level where we're looking at chemicals one at a time. Sometimes we don't look very hard, even at those. And we never look at the combinations. We tested umbilical cord blood some decades ago and found, you know, in a group of 10 cord blood samples, we found hundreds of chemicals. And in some instances, there were, you know, dozens of neurotoxic agents, dozens of carcinogens. Are they ever added up? Obviously, you're exposed before you even come into the world to all of these at very low levels. But still, we don't look. It's considered to be sort of impossible.

26:31We now have with AI and machine learning and computational methods that are utilized in endocrinology and increasingly in epidemiology. You know, we're getting a little bit closer to understanding the potential of mixtures to perhaps be of concern, but we're not there yet. There's no regulation, no regulatory system out there that looks at these chemicals in combination. And so from our standpoint, when we evaluate personal care product ingredients, we, you know, we've sort of developed our own system and we were the first to admit it has shortcomings. The first shortcoming is if you're not required to submit data that's public to an agency or some other source that is accessible about the hazardous properties of the chemical or the lack of them.

27:24If you're not required to have that data, it's pretty hard in some cases to evaluate a substance that's in a personal care product. We do our best to look at the independent literature. Sometimes, you know, we're looking at an exposure study that was an oral dose and we're concerned about the ingredient in a skincare product. So there's a leap there. We're not happy with that, but there's no data on the skincare application in many cases or fill in the blank. If something washes off, what you know, what's the effect of of that versus something you keep on your skin all day? Sometimes there's better information on that.

28:02Sometimes it's proprietary. There's no requirement for a company to provide that data to any publicly accessible source. So you put your finger on it. Transparency. We do try and be transparent, including transparent when we don't know. Like when we say, we just don't have data. We have a score, an element of our scoring system. And it's tricky because sometimes we don't want to condemn chemicals we know nothing about. And we don't want to condone. Right. Yeah. The right call. And, you know, increasingly we're thinking, well, maybe we just decide if that chemical is important in that formulation.

28:41Maybe we for the first time and we're playing around with this right now. I'm breaking news here. Maybe maybe we'll just designate a product as unscorable by us. Right. Just to let people know that there are gaps that would be nice to have filled, but aren't likely to be filled anytime soon and aren't required to be filled. by government regulations. So transparency, super key alternatives, simplification. Those are other elements where we like to think we're not finger wagging. Yeah. Judging. We're saying, look, whether it's pesticides in produce, some worrisome ingredient that's under regulatory scrutiny in personal care products or in food or whatever.

29:31We're just saying you should take Take a look at the possibility of avoiding exposure. Yes. Because the likelihood that we'll do a full-blown risk assessment that is fully accurate and timely is slim for a lot of these substances in a lot of their applications. Again, whether it's food or cleaning products, something you rub on your countertop. There are just so many data gaps. Your dad would be right at home with the data gaps, right? Oh, yeah. I know he already, he already, you know, tells me, honestly, I think you two would have a great conversation. So what do you do in the absence of data?

30:09Right. Yeah. There's nothing you can do. And it's like, it's just guessing at that point. And that's, that's another thing is like, you know, I think when it comes to certain things, I mean, now, as you know, can we have Mocra, you know, and they're trying, I think, but I don't know. I mean, I'm not fully sold. I mean, nothing against the FDA. I know they know what they're doing, obviously. but I just, it's because of what we were just talking about. There's not enough data. You know, how do you regulate an area that you simply don't have studies? You don't know the toxicology around this stuff.