Well today I am going to share with you a dirty little secret called "rendering plants". I had never heard of such places and when I first learned of them I was a little suspicious and decided to do my own research on the matter. Rendering plants, do in fact, exist. What is so disgusting about them?
A rendering plant is a place where animals, not in our food chain, are taken to be ground up and "cooked". These animals include roadkill, euthanized pets (including their collars, tags etc), farm animals, spoiled grocery meat (including the packaging) etc. As you know when you cook a chicken, the sticky fatty stuff comes to the top. This is called tallow. So when they boil these animals, they take the tallow and sell it. The first people to buy tallow? Cosmetic and skin care companies.
Tallow is used in cosmetics because it is cheap. It is also a binding agent and makes products smooth and creamy. You average bar of soap is primarily made of tallow. Look at the ingredients in your medicine chest. Alot of times it comes up as "sodium tallowate". Lipstick is often a major culprit - almost entirely tallow in many cases.
Another thing to be aware of is that anything you put on your skin takes an average of 26 seconds to reach your blood stream. What you put on your body can be found in your blood and organs. This never had occurred to me, had never been something I had cared about. But now I have small kids and these things are starting to matter. The FDA does not control what we put in our skin care and cosmetics. That means it is up to us to determine what is healthy for our lives.
If you want to do your own research, and please do, go ahead and google "rendering plants". Or you can take a look here.
I had someone ask about products without tallow, and of course, Arbonne is one of those companies. If you want to know more, please let me know.
