The wrong kind of soap is bad. Very bad.

I thought I was getting ahead of the curve for once, but The Wife one-upped me.

It seems that a triclosan and triclocarban, common additives to hand soap, dish washing liquid, toothpaste and hundreds of other common household cleaners, has been linked to all sorts of scary stuff, including dermatitis, affect sex hormones (and not in a good way), interfere with the nervous system, possibly be a cause of autism, toxify your liver and inhalation system, and poses a danger to fetal and childhood development.

According to Dan Chang, PhD, "a professor of environmental engineering at U.C. Davis and one of the researchers involved, says he doesn't want to cause a panic, but ""the public should be aware of some of the concerns.""

Gee, that's reassuring.

Triclocarban and triclosan were initially used as antiseptic cleaners in hospitals in the 1950s and 60s. Freaked out germaphobes, helped along by articles like this, turned antibacterial soaps into multibillion dollar businesses starting in the 1990s. The claim by the EPA and the soap industry (what I like to call "Big Bubble") that the products are safe are based on testing done on animals in the 1960s and 70s, when testing standards were quite looser than they are today. But the old products got grandfathered in.

According to an article on WebMD, the UC Davis researchers suspect that any harmful effects from these agents are most likely to occur during pregnancy, in early childhood, and adolescence. You know, the times when everyone is always freaked about about washing hands and stuff.

The stuff also has a nasty habit of sticking around. White coat-types at Johns Hopkins have reported that 75% of triclocarban survives wastewater treatment plants and ends up in water used on food crops. found triclosan in the urine of 75% of people aged 6 and older.

In addition to all this, it's been widely reported that common use of antibacterial soaps are no better than regular soap, and are likely contributing to more drug resistant bacteria.

Okay. No antibacterial soap (although purell and the like are a different story).

The Environmental Working Group provides a handy mouse-over map of your home showing where triclosan may be lurking. Basically, it's in everything from soap to shoes to shower curtains. They suggest running naked through a hidden grotto drinking naturally purified rainwater and eating free range spores.

So, all of this had convinced me to start looking in horror at my bottle of cheapo dishsoap. It seemed like such a bargain at 98 cents! Okay, off to Trader Joe's to buy some human and earth friendly crap. Hey, here's a nice one: lavender scented. We used to calm Cinderella with lavender oil when she was a restless babe.

This is when the wife one-upped me.

Her: "Lavender? Are you out of your mind? Haven't you read about lavender????"

Me: "Ha ha! No. Is orange okay?"

Her: "Of course. What could be bad about orange?"

Me: "I'll be right back."

Turns out, some white coat types have discovered that lavender and tea tree oil have been found to cause young boys to develop breasts. Spurs estrogen growth or something. In a culture obsessed with boobs, pretty much everyone can agree that nobody wants them on prepubescent boys. Not sure what it does do 4 year old girls like mine, but we're not about to find out.

FDA Is Worried About Cough Syrup

The Food and Drug Administration is about to revise regulations on over-the-counter children's cough syrup. The FDA's review may even lead to the disappearance of the drugs from store shelves, making them available only via prescription.

The trouble, it seems, is twofold. First, the stuff doesn't work. Second, it may cause some unwanted side effects (which makes me wonder if you can call something a "side effect" if it doesn't actually have a primary effect...). Side effects include hallucinations (cool!), seizures (not cool), trouble breathing (very bad), heart problems (uh oh), and death (very not cool and very bad).

In response to an FDA-panel report back in October 2007, drug companies yanked all cough medicines for kids 2 and under off the shelves. The FDA let the companies keep selling the drugs for children older than that, however, despite the fact that the panel had determined that there was no evidence that the medicines actually worked.

The FDA had declined to stop the sale of the drugs, even though averse reactions to cough medicines led to over 7,000 ER visits, two-thirds of which involved children aged 2-5. The panel agreed that the drugs don't do any good for children age 6-11 either, but a majority of the panel members thought that parents "wouldn't have any good alternatives" (translation: It would be bad if drug companies would stop making money from this worthless and sometimes harmful product).

How were the companies able to push these harmful products for so long? It turns out that the drugs were first put on the market before proper drug testing was the norm, and then got grandfathered in. And then, hey, people were buying hundreds of millions of dollars of them a year, so what was the problem?

What's a worried dad (or mom) to do? Try a teaspoon of buckwheat honey (but not in children under 12 months as it may cause botulism in infants).

Restaurant Food Isn't Good For Your Kid

Put this in the "hardly shocking, but still good to keep in mind" folder:

A new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report that showed that of the 13 largest restaurant chains, 93% of the possible kids' food combos contained a third of the total calories that kids 4-8 should consume in a day. Not too terrible in itself. However, for many of the places, though, almost all of the value-priced kids combos packed an entire days calories into a single meal.

The fast-food joints did about as poorly as you might expect (with the exception of Subway, mostly because they push milk instead of soda--ahhh!! milk!!!), but the big chains like Chili's and Denny's were some of the worst offenders. Many other chains don't make their nutrition info public.

We're bummed because one of our favorite neighborhood burrito joints, Boloco (with lots of cheap, fresh food on the menu), just closed the shop closest to our house. And, of course, it was the one location with a kids play area.

How are you supposed to feed your kid on the run without packing up half the fridge in your pack?

My inability to get my kid to sleep early will make her fat

My daughter, Cinderella, has so far been the victor in the ongoing bedtime battle. It doesn't help much that The Wife and I are night owls (actually, I'm a night owl, she's descended from vampires).

I'm not so good with the whole setting strict limits thing, for the most part. The family motto is "Put the [insert dangerous object] down and nobody gets hurt." Apparently, this isn't good enough to get me a fatherhood medal. It seems that my inability to turn Cinderella into Sleeping Beauty is dramatically increasing her chances of joining the national childhood obesity craze that's sweeping the nation.

Several studies by people in white coats from New Zealand and England point to what appears to be a clear link between the lack of sleep and the rise of childhood obesity. In one study, researchers following 13,000 children made the shocking discovery that children who sleep less tend to spend less time playing outdoors and have less energy for active play. More worryingly, they say that it appears that lack of sleep may alter children's hormones, leading them to overeat, and seek out the worst kinds of food.

Another smaller study of 591 children found that "children who slept an average of less than nine hours a night had a 3.34% increase in body fat compared with those who slept more than nine hours." The researchers noted that shortchanging your kid's sleep led to a three-fold increase in their risk of becoming obese, independent of the amount of exercise they got or the amount of television they watched.

Your wild youth messed up your kid's genes

How your kid turns out is a result of nurture and nature. As far as I've been concerned, Cinderella can blame me and the Wife for all our parental sins to the therapist, but she can't blame us for the genetic stuff. We put in all our chips and spun the wheel.

Or so I thought.

New research in the field known as epigenetics by people in white coats suggests that our behavior can affect our genes. The jury is still out, but the evidence is mounting that youthful indescretions can mark our kids and grandkids. Drowning your sorrows in Ben & Jerry's today means fat camp for junior tomorrow, and so on.

Rather unhelpfully, one study noted that the grandsons of men in an isolated Swedish village that had survived starvation during war lived longer than men who hadn't. Doesn't it always work out that way?

Kids Jewelry Is Still Bad

Remember the lead toy scare from a little while back? It doesn't get mentioned in the papers anymore, so I guess our friends at the CPSC have sorted it all out.


Uh oh. Perusing the CPSC recall list for July, we find the following (all made in China):

Bead Bazaar "It's a Girl Thing." "The jewelry features a variety of charms including flowers, shoes, letters and butterflies." Oh, and lead. Lots and lots of lead.

A nice little book by Parragon Books called The Magic Ballet Slippers comes with a necklace with a silver-colored chain with a silver-colored charm consisting of a pair of ballet shoes and a bow. And lead. Lots and lots of lead. Still for sale on Amazon -- I just posted a warning.

Action Products International puts out a neat series of craft kits for making shoelace and necklaces charms. "The craft kits contain components (i.e., charms, beads, wire, clasps) to assemble necklaces, jewelry accessories, or charms that can be hooked on shoelaces, backpacks, or used as zipper pulls." And lead. Lots and lots of lead. The kits are aptly named "Curiosity Kits," because, you know, curiosity killed the cat. With lead.

Kids Food Is Bad

According to a new study by a British scientific journal, 89% of food in supermarkets specifically targeted to kids have low or no nutritious value. To confront this, it appears that food marketers have decided to increase the number of dubious nutritional claims about their products. The investigators spotted a pizza carton labeled "Source of calcium" but made no mention that it was loaded with salt, and a jar of peanut butter mixed with chocolate was claimed to be a "source of six essential nutrients" (sure, peanut butter and chocolate, but what are the other four???).

Then again, the journal was called Obesity Reviews. I bet they say that about Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs too.

Children's Jackets Can Strangle Your Kids

The CPCS issued a warning that kids' jackets and hoodies made by Coolibar Inc. pose a strangulation hazard. The suggested remedy is to

immediately remove the drawstring from the jacket or hoodie to eliminate the hazard.