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Why "Non-Toxic" Information Is So Confusing Right Now

Why is non-toxic information so confusing right now? Because we are seeing how chemical regulations in the US have not adequately protected us at the same time that general public trust in all types of institutions, including health institutions, is eroding. There is no federal law keeping harmful chemicals out of US consumer products, and confidence in health agencies has fallen from 61% in 1976 to 26% in 2024. This combination of factors means that we are all trying to figure out who to trust about chemicals in our everyday lives. Without one authoritative source, the scattered information is conflicting and confusing. This section walks through how we got here, how, in some ways, we’ve been here before, and gives hope for finding our way out.

By Dr. Meg Christensen | Physician-founder of Interior Medicine, a non-toxic home resource built on her background in medicine, biochemistry, epidemiology, and clinical research.

Published May 11, 2026 | Updated September 1, 2026

Welcome to What "Non-Toxic" Actually Means, a free course on how to read product claims and navigate healthier materials more clearly. Stay here, or if you'd like the full arc, the Intro is the best place to start.

Part 1 takes ~16 min to read

In a perfect world, the answer to "what does non-toxic mean?" would already be settled by a group we collectively trust to protect us. Our products should be safe and non-toxic by default, so you’re free to spend the time you spend on this question, on something else. But two reasons explain why it isn’t: weak chemical regulation and society’s collapse in trust in health agencies. This starts a little dark, but ends on a hopeful note.

Is There a Federal Law That Keeps Harmful Chemicals Out of Consumer Products?

No. There is no federal law that keeps harmful chemicals out of consumer products in the US. TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act, is the closest thing we have. But, it is essentially just a notification system, not a safety law. Companies have to tell the EPA before bringing a new chemical to the market, but the burden is on the EPA to prove harm, not on the company to prove it’s safe.

Moreover, TSCA is weak. The chemical industry spent $77 million in 2025 lobbying to weaken TSCA even further than it already is. Now, there are more than 86,000 chemicals registered, and only a small fraction have undergone any sort of testing for human health. Two examples of chemicals that have evaded TSCA and negatively affect our health are PFAS and formaldehyde.

PFAS "forever chemicals". Used in stain-resistant upholstery, carpet treatments, and non-stick cookware, PFAS are now in the blood of more than 99% of Americans, even though DuPont's own internal research linked them to liver damage and cancer as early as 1961. The EPA finalized drinking water limits for six PFAS in 2024, then rescinded the limits for four of them in 2025.
Formaldehyde. Used in everything from particle board to furniture glues, it took the EPA more than two decades to formally classify formaldehyde as a carcinogen in 2024. Then the EPA reversed that in December 2025 and proposed a "safe threshold" instead. This new exposure limit aligns with what the chemical industry has been requesting for years.

Even if you personally trust the government to protect us, 85% of Americans don't. A 2025 poll found that most Americans think large corporations, including chemical companies, have too much influence over decisions that affect their health.

Why Has Public Trust in Health Agencies Fallen So Much?

Trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect us has been falling for decades. Beyond TSCA, the US is facing a broader collapse of authority that extends across medicine and ingredient safety.

Here are two graphs showing how Americans' trust in health agencies and food safety has fallen over the last 50 years. (I used food safety because it’s the best long-term data we have on how we feel about chemicals in everyday products, and polls don’t exist for furniture.)

Confidence in the People Running Medicine

Share of Americans with "a great deal" of confidence, 1974–2024

1978Love Canal: a Niagara Falls neighborhood built on a toxic chemical waste dump becomes a federal health emergency, sparking modern awareness of industrial chemicals in homes.

2008BPA congressional hearings bring endocrine disruption in baby bottles into mainstream awareness.

2014Flint water crisis exposes widespread lead contamination from regulatory failure.

2018PFAS contamination from Teflon and stain-resistant coatings reaches mainstream coverage.

Confidence in Federal Food Safety

Share with "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence, 1999–2024

2007Salmonella in peanut butter and E. coli in spinach trigger the first major drop in confidence.

2020PFAS contamination of food packaging widely recognized; FDA begins phase-out.

2023California becomes the first state to ban specific food additives, including Red Dye 3 (FDA follows nationally in 2025).

Sources: National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Survey, 1974–2024 (2022 and 2024 readings reflect a methodological shift to mixed-mode data collection). Gallup Consumption Habits Poll, 1999–2024.

The Void: What Fills the Gap When Institutions Lose Authority

Authority collapse leaves us with a void. We no longer collectively trust an institution to evaluate chemicals, set standards, and tell us what is safe. But we still have questions and are still looking for guidance. Here’s what’s happened as a result:

Then

Most people trusted government and major health institutions. There were always some dissenters and some commentary, but they were a smaller cast.

Now

A vacuum where unified authority used to be. Many advocacy groups, scientists, and influencers attempt to fill the void. An abundance of journalism and conversation about it all.

The void is being filled by thousands of people doing all kinds of work, some of it honest and some of it not. There are scientists, advocacy organizations, physicians, brands with real third-party certifications, and wellness influencers explaining things carefully. On the other hand, there are also medical experts being condescending, brands using healthwashing in marketing, influencers making confident claims they haven't researched well, and people selling expensive detox protocols without evidence.

What this all adds up to in daily life is a mix:

There is doom-scrolling, hand-wringing articles and podcasts about the collapse in trust of medicine, family disagreements, and awkward tension when you find out your friend trusts someone you completely disagree with.

But there are also conversations about products and ingredients that weren't happening twenty years ago, friends sharing what they've learned, communities forming around shared concerns, and a generation growing up more thoughtful about what's in their environment.

Solutions: What History Teaches Us About Moments Like This

We won't stay in this mess forever! History gives us precedent for moments like this, when external authority collapsed, and people had to figure out what to do next. I wanted to see if patterns emerged in the ways we’ve handled this before, as a way to understand where we might be headed.

And indeed, there is a pattern: experimentation combined with discernment. Here are three examples. One is ancient, one is recent, and one is personal.

The Roman Empire

I hope someone asks you what you’re thinking about right now, so you can answer, “The Roman Empire.” ;)

The Roman Republic started collapsing around 2,000 years ago. Leaders lost their authority because they hoarded wealth, displaced farmers, relied on enslaved labor, resisted reform, and were generally considered corrupt. Civil wars and assassinations followed. The institution collapsed, and eventually gave rise to the next thing, the Roman Empire.

But what’s relevant to us today is that during the institutional collapse, experimentation of ideas flourished, and discernment grew. What resulted is still with us today. While the collapse was happening, people openly debated about how to live in the absence of a stable or fair society. Philosophical schools sprung up, including the Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Cynics. These schools became more and more popular as the Republic declined and more people were looking for answers. Each school of thought put forward a different way to live well despite bad external circumstances. Stoicism has stuck around: it is actually the basis for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), the most popular form of therapy. CBT teaches you to evaluate your thoughts carefully before reacting to them, and how to be discerning about what is true.

The collapse of the Roman Republic isn't the only time this pattern has happened historically:

A few moments from the last 2,000 years

Past

1st century BCE

Roman Republic

Republic institutions failed, giving rise to Stoicism as a personal framework for living well in chaos.

220 CE

Han Dynasty

Dynasty collapsed, opening the centuries that produced Buddhism, calligraphy, woodblock printing, and gunpowder.

1346–1353

Black Plague

Church and crown authority faltered, ending serfdom and clearing the way for the Renaissance.

1500s–1600s

Reformation

Catholic authority fractured, driving mass literacy and eventual religious pluralism.

1972–1974

Watergate

Trust in government collapsed, producing major oversight laws and a generation of investigative journalism.

Now

We don't have time to get into all the historical examples, so let's skip ahead to the 1990s and the collapse of the encyclopedia.

How Wikipedia Replaced the Encyclopedia

For over two hundred years, Encyclopedia Britannica was the trusted reference. If you’re my age or older, you probably remember using it. When the internet arrived in the 1990s, attempts were made to make a computer-friendly version: Microsoft had a CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica tried to hang on to their institutional authority and came out with a $995 version that was a total marketing disaster. Other companies tried, too, and then finally, Wikipedia launched.

Everyone was skeptical of Wikipedia when it started: how could anonymous strangers writing an encyclopedia together produce something reliable? But, here we are! It is now the largest reference work in human history. We know it isn’t perfect, meaning it also has taught us discernment: we ask, is this true? by checking edit histories, looking at the citations, and pausing when we see a sentence with "citation needed.”

Both patterns showed up here too: many ideas tried to fill a gap left behind by a single authority, and alongside that, discernment grew through the practice of evaluating what we read.

Parental Authority Collapse

If the Roman Empire and Wikipedia examples don't quite do it for you, the pattern still shows up in something almost everyone goes through: at some point, your parents lost their authority over your life.

Most people try a bunch of things in the wake of that realization: avoidance, rebelling against them, reading self-help books, long conversations with friends, a spiritual phase, sometimes therapy. Not everyone goes to therapy, and not everyone needs to. But for the people who do, one of the central tools you learn is discernment: the practice of separating your own thoughts from the inherited ones, evaluating whether your parents' beliefs actually serve you, and pausing before you react. Once again, many things are tried, and alongside that, discernment grows.

How This Applies to Today’s Non-Toxic Conversation

The collapses that led somewhere better and give us something enduring all have two things in common: lots of people trying lots of different things (and what sticks is usually a surprise.) Alongside that, the people who lived through these get better at discernment.

Both of those are happening right now when it comes to conversations about chemicals, environmental medicine, and non-toxic living. There's regulatory reform, attempts at rebuilding trust in old institutions, advocacy organizations, independent journalism, citizen science, non-toxic blogs and influencers, doctors and scientists writing books, people doing their own product testing at home. One or two might of these approaches might stick, and we don't know which. It's possible we can't even imagine it yet (have you seen the drawings from 1900 of what people thought 2000 would look like? They're funny, and the internet definitely wasn't foreseen in any of them.)

Whether you’re involved in any of the above or not, something we can all do is get better at discernment and evaluating health and non-toxic claims. We don’t do this by adopting more lists or trusting different people more confidently, but by learning the underlying frameworks well enough that we can read any claim, from any source, and see what's actually being said. That's what the rest of this course is about!

Before we go on, I want to be clear about what discernment is and isn't. That’s because it gets mixed up with two other approaches that sound similar, but are actually very different.

What is Discernment in the Context of Non-Toxic Living?

Discernment is the practice of evaluating health claims carefully, rather than automatically accepting them on authority, or automatically rejecting them on suspicion. When you read a study, or see a brand claim, you pause to ask who’s saying it, who funded it. It’s also holding uncertainty when the evidence is mixed, and updating your view when something new comes in. It works on any claim, from any source including medical experts, influencers, your family, and especially what's running through your own head.

Discernment is also the only response to the current confusion that gets stronger over time. Top 10 non-toxic product lists go out of date, trusted sources change, and new chemicals of concern will continue to enter the market. But the skill of evaluating claims with discernment just gets sharper over time.

The reason I want to spend time here is that discernment gets confused with two other approaches that are common in the non-toxic conversation. Neither is what I'm recommending, even though they look almost identical to discernment from the outside:

What is Wellness Individualism?

Discernment is not Wellness Individualism.

Wellness individualism is the view that staying safe from harmful exposures is mostly your own job, done through better shopping and ever-more careful choices at home. It's reading every label closely, swapping every product thoughtfully, and treating our individual choices as the long-term solution.

The activity itself is fine! Lots of us, including me, do versions of it every day.

The problem is in the framing, when it's positioned as the final answer to our problem, instead of as a meaningful step along the way.

Most chemical exposure issues aren't solvable one shopper at a time. Safer products are often expensive and inaccessible to many people. And when the work is placed entirely on us as individuals, pressure on the companies and regulators who could change things at a public scale can potentially ease. Some advocacy groups argue this is the most damaging part: that wellness individualism actually slows down the kind of structural change that would protect everyone.

So, discernment isn’t a substitute for the collective protection we deserve. It works while that protection is being slowly worked out, and it's the skill that makes each of us a better participant in eventually building the kind of structures that let individuals put their burden down.

Discernment is not Distrust as Method

Distrust as Method is a phrase I use to describe the view that institutional sources are inherently suspicious and that the truth is found only in alternative voices, contrarian takes, and online communities outside of the mainstream. It treats expert agreement as evidence of corruption, considers a popular social media post the same as a peer-reviewed study, and often reaches for the opposite of the mainstream view by reflex.

This one looks a lot like discernment from the outside. Both involve questioning sources, and both involve being skeptical of confident claims. The difference is what you do with the skepticism. Discernment truly evaluates each claim, including claims from sources you don't usually trust. Distrust as Method has already decided which sources (the conventional ones) are wrong before actually evaluating the evidence.

Rejecting one group of sources just moves your trust to a different group, and the question becomes whether the new group does more careful work than the old one. Often, they don't. And ironically, at its worst, distrust as method pushes people deeper into wellness individualism. If you can't trust any institution, the only place left to put the work is on yourself.

Back to Discernment!

Discernment means evaluating your own mind as carefully as you evaluate other people's.

It's hard, and I've fallen into both individualism and distrust myself, usually when I'm tired or frustrated. They're easy traps, and it happens. The point is to notice when you’re there, and to come back.

Here are the three approaches, summarized side by side:

Discernment

What it is

A skill for thinking through any complicated claim. Weighing evidence carefully, separating facts from feelings, sitting with uncertainty when the evidence is mixed.

What it looks like

Reading the study, not just the headline.
Acting reasonably when something seems risky, without deciding it's definitely poison.
Knowing when a question is still open versus when most experts agree it's time to move forward.

What makes it useful

It works right now, while we wait for systems to catch up.
It pairs with anything else you're already doing: advocating for change, supporting groups working on it, or making careful choices at home.
It's a skill that lasts beyond non-toxic claims and helps you think well about everything else.
It is not an endorsement of wellness individualism. It is a way to act wisely while the burden still sits on you.

Wellness Individualism

What it is

The view that staying safe from harmful exposures is mostly your own job, done through better shopping and careful choices at home.

What it looks like

Safer shopping treated as the destination, not as a meaningful step along the way.
Health treated as a personal project, not a shared one.
The bigger systemic problems treated as someone else's job, or no one's.

What it misses

Many exposures cannot be solved one shopper at a time.
Safer products are often expensive and out of reach for many people.
When the work is placed on individuals, pressure on companies and regulators eases. Some advocacy groups argue this lets the institutions that should be acting off the hook.

Distrust as Method

What it is

An approach that treats official sources as suspicious by default and looks for the truth only in alternative voices, contrarian takes, and online communities outside the mainstream.

What it looks like

Treating expert agreement as proof of a cover-up.
Weighting a viral post the same as a peer-reviewed study.
Reaching for the opposite of the mainstream view by reflex.

What it misses

It swaps a distrustful attitude for the harder work of discernment.
It tends to push people deeper into wellness individualism.
Rejecting one group of sources just moves your trust to a different group. The real question is whether the new group does better work.

Next: Part 2

I wanted to start by giving us all some birds-eye view context for why we’re in the situation, and why learning to navigate our confusing wellness world well matters right now. The next section turns to the facts: it lays the foundation for the entire rest of the course.

As a side effect, it'll also immediately start to clear up for you why hazard isn’t risk, Prop 65 warnings, why “Group 2B Carcinogen” isn’t always scary, sunscreen toxicity, and a lot more.

Start Part 2 now ➜‍ ‍