Sunday, 25 March 2007

So good for you that you won't look like a burn victim

Ever since I've been teaching in Japan I've been amazed at the ammount of kids (seriously about 60%, sometimes higher) that have serious rashes, pealing or eczema on their skin (including arms, legs and face and even sometimes all over their backs and stomachs). From what I've gathered it's due to a combination of free radicals in the air and chemicals in washing liquids.

For the most part, parents here seem to have accepted all of these skin problems as a way of life. It's not until I tell them that I've never seen a child in Australia with any of these conditions that they begin to suspect that they should be trying to stop it.

It wasn't until I developed eczema on my leg a few years ago that I began to seriously think about this problem. I became so paranoid about Japanese products having different regulations to what I was used to in Australia (don't get me started on trying to find 100% dolphin safe canned tuna here) that I pretty much decided to buy as many imported food and products as I could.

Kaldi's Coffee Farm is a great chain store that sells food from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe at just a little over the home price. Unfortunately they've stopped stocking the Aussie Berri juices but they still got lots of Vegimite and Tim Tams.

Another great place to buy imported foods is the new convenience store chain, Natural Lawson (a spin-off of the regular Lawson chain). Not only do they sell imported foods, they also stock imported kitchen and bathroom supplies.

A great product line that I found through Natural Lawson was ECOVER. They use all natural ingredients to make laundry liquids, washing up detergents as well as softeners and now some shower gels. As soon as I started using these products I began to just feel better, you know? They're a little pricey, but if you want something to make your stay in Japan a whole lot healthier ECOVER is the way to go.

In retrospect this whole post looks like a paid advertisement for ECOVER but it's honestly something that I've been telling everyone to buy and try for a while now and just the other day when I suggested it to Cordelia, she told me that she had already used it when she was back in the UK so I though, "Hey this really is a great product that I should tell everyone about in a post" and here it is.

Hope you found this useful. I don't want you to look like a burn victim like all the kids here. ;)

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Labels: japan