Welcome to The Rise. Your weekly dose of circadian sunshine and decentralised health wisdoms designed to empower you to be healthier, stronger, smarter and truly unstoppable.

In the last 2.5 years, the 7,000+ people in this tribe have been reading something the other 99% of health newsletters won’t cover – the science your GP hasn’t read. Here’s what’s in this week’s issue and why it matters:

  • The 28 day experiment that switched off breast cancer genes
  • Why doctor’s should be prescribing sunlight as part of autoimmune disease treatment
  • How not all sitting is equal – and which one is better for you
  • Learn what xenoestrogens are (and don’t be put off by the word – it’s important)
  • How to create a healthier bathroom

This one’s a goodie. Grab your cup of tea, perfectly brewed, and let’s go.

Much love and sunshine, ☀️

Sandy xx

P.S Have suggestions or something you’d love to see covered here? Help me better serve this vibrant community of health rebels and send me your feedback here.

Issue #124 • 14 June, 2026

🌅 Rise Report

28 Days Without Parabens Switched Off Breast Cancer Genes

The word fragrance on a personal care label may sounds harmless. Legally, it is anything but. In Australia, as in the US and EU, “fragrance” is a single listed ingredient that can conceal dozens of undisclosed chemicals, including parabens and phthalates. Manufacturers are not required to name them individually and most of us have no idea what’s actually in our daily products.

A pilot study published in Chemosphere set out to find out what happens when we remove them. A group of women with no cancer diagnosis swapped their usual personal care products for certified paraben- and phthalate-free alternatives for 28 days. Nothing else changed, same diet, same lifestyle, same everything.

The results were striking. Breast tissue samples showed that 19 of 26 cancer-associated genes had shifted back toward normal expression patterns. And urine samples confirmed that paraben and phthalate metabolites had dropped significantly.

“…we demonstrate a striking reversal of cancer-associated phenotypes, including the PI3K-AKT/mTOR pathway, autophagy, and apoptotic signaling networks within breast cells of REDUXE compliant subjects.”

REDUXE = reduce xenoestrogens

Whilst this was a pilot study, it still has a very important message worth noting. What changed was gene expression in healthy tissue, the biological signalling that nudges cells toward or away from cancer-like behaviour. That distinction matters as does the speed of the reversal.

The takeaway? Check ingredient lists on your most frequently used, leave-on, personal care products: moisturiser, deodorant, body lotion. Paraben-free and phthalate-free options are widely available now so take the time to choose wisely.

Here’s a snapshot of a Redken Shampoo with the nasties highlighted.

* Personally, there are many more ingredients in that bottle of Redken Shampoo that I wouldn’t touch, but these are just some of the ingredients of concern from our first story today. 

 

Sunlight May Be the Best Treatment for Autoimmune Disease

Around 1.4 million Australians are living with an autoimmune disease, and that number is climbing. In the US, estimates range from 15 million to 50 million depending on which conditions are counted, a variation that itself speaks to how poorly tracked and understood this disease category remains. Globally, new cases are rising by around 19% every year across more than 80 recognised conditions, the most common being rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, lupus, and coeliac disease. Around 80% of those affected are women. The standard response is lifelong medication, immunosuppressants, biologics, steroids, all aimed at managing symptoms rather than addressing cause. What most doctors aren’t discussing is something free, accessible, and increasingly well-evidenced: sunlight.

For years we thought the sunlight-health connection and story was simple: the sun makes vitamin D, vitamin D prevents disease. Turns out, vitamin D is just a tip of the iceberg.

Australian immunologist Prue Hart from the Kids Research Institute Australia has spent over 30 years studying what UV light actually does to the immune system. The short answer: it resets it. UV triggers the skin to produce a cascade of molecules, melatonin, nitric oxide, lumisterol, urocanic acid, that collectively signal an overactive immune system to stand down. Effects last months after the exposure ends.

The numbers are hard to ignore. MS rates in Australia for example, climb from 12 per 100,000 in Townsville to 76 per 100,000 in Hobart, six times higher – the further south you go. In Hart’s own clinical trial, eight weeks of narrowband UV therapy produced a 13% drop in disease-severity scores whilst the control group’s rose 14%.

The takeaway? You can’t put sunlight in a pill, and decades of research are confirming that. If you have an autoimmune condition, prioritise daily outdoor time, especially gentle morning light. For Australians in southern states, winter sun exposure is a genuine health intervention, not an afterthought. As Hart says: you can’t supplement the sun.

You can read the full “Can Sunlight Cure Disease?” story from Scientific American here for more fascinating insights.

Can sunlight cure disease article

 

Not All Sitting Is Equal. Which Sitting Is Better For You?

‘Sitting is the new smoking.’ We’ve all heard it, and like most sweeping health declarations, it turns out to be a significant oversimplification.

A 19-year study of 20,811 Swedish adults, by researchers from the Karolinska Institute and Deakin University, found that what we do while we’re sitting matters just as much as how long we sit. Mentally passive sitting, the kind that looks like hours watching Netflix, was linked to higher dementia risk. Mentally active sitting like when reading, learning, writing, working, creating, was linked to significantly lower risk. And crucially, the effect held regardless of how much participants exercised. Moving more didn’t cancel out the cost of passive sitting, and it didn’t diminish the protection of active sitting either.

The brain, it turns out, is very much like muscle, it responds to the demands we place on it. Two hours of passive scrolling asks almost nothing of its higher-order systems. Two hours lost in a book, a craft, a language app, or even a challenging conversation quietly exercises the very neural networks that protect against cognitive decline. The lead researcher put it simply: how we use our minds while sedentary may matter as much to our future brain health as whether we move at all.

The takeaway? This isn’t permission to sit more – daily and regular movement remains non-negotiable. But it is a powerful reframe for the hours you spend off your feet. If you’re sitting down enjoying something stimulating, keep enjoying. What you’re doing matters more than whether you’re up or down.

 

 

🤓 Smarty Pants

Xenoestrogens

You’ve just read about parabens and phthalates, often hidden under the word ‘fragrance’, doing something rather alarming to breast tissue gene expression. What you might not know is that parabens and phthalates belong to a class of chemicals called xenoestrogens. And understanding what xenoestrogens actually do in the body is what makes that 28-day reversal so significant and so empowering.

Xenoestrogens, from the Greek word for ‘foreign’, are synthetic or natural chemicals that mimic oestrogen in the body.

Your own oestrogen works by fitting into oestrogen receptors like a key in a lock. Xenoestrogens do the same, or close enough that the receptor can’t tell the difference. The problem is they arrive unnaturally, in quantities the body wasn’t designed to handle, without following the natural rhythms your endocrine system depends on.

When xenoestrogens land on oestrogen receptors in breast tissue, they trigger overstimulation, telling cells to behave as if oestrogen is higher than it is. Since oestrogen drives cell division in breast tissue, chronic overstimulation means more division, more opportunity for errors, and a tissue environment that starts resembling early cancer signalling. This is precisely what the REDUXE study measured, and reversed, in 28 days.

The empowering part? Unlike your genetics, your xenoestrogen exposure is something you are very much in control of. Parabens, phthalates and fragrances in personal care products are among the most common sources, but plastics (BPA and BPS in food containers) and conventionally grown produce also carry xenoestrogenic activity. The cumulative load is what matters. Your body handles occasional exposure fine, it’s the daily, layered drip from a dozen products that tips the balance. Start with what you use daily, what you apply and leave on skin, what you use most of, and work from there.

 

☀️ Sandy’s Sunshine 

Clean Up Your Bathroom Act

Today, we’ve done some great work and taken a big step towards making healthier everyday choices. We’ve pulled back the curtain on xenoestrogens – what they are, why they matter, and how something as innocent-looking as a word on a shampoo label could be influencing our breast tissue biology. Knowledge like this is genuinely empowering. But only if we do something with it.

So this week, we act.

To get the full story, including what ingredients, please visit my Substack here.

Project: Ditch the Drip

Your project this week is to carve out an hour and go through the main products you use in your bathroom. Here’s the exact list of products from the REDUXE study – these are what the researchers targeted, and they’re what we’re auditing too:

  • Shampoo
  • Conditioner
  • Shower Gel
  • Body Wash
  • Deodorant
  • Bar Soap (hand and body)
  • Liquid Soap (hand and body)
  • Body Lotion
  • Facial Moisturiser
  • Facial Cleanser
  • Lip Balm
  • Toothpaste
  • Dental Floss
  • Hand Cream
  • Sunscreen
  • Makeup (all of it!)
  • Silicone Product Containers

 

What we’re looking for:

Scan each ingredient list for any of these: the xenoestrogen and endocrine disruptor hall of shame:

  1. Methylparaben
  2. Ethylparaben
  3. Propylparaben
  4. Butylparaben
  5. Parfum / Fragrance
  6. Phthalates (often hidden under ‘fragrance’)
  7. Diethyl phthalate (DEP)
  8. Dibutyl phthalate (DBP)
  9. Bisphenol A (BPA)
  10. Bisphenol S (BPS)
  11. Oxybenzone / Benzophenone-3
  12. Triclosan

 

Method:

Start with the products you use every single day and leave on your skin: body lotion, moisturiser, deodorant, and sunscreen (if you still use this) are your priority. These have the highest concentrations and the longest skin contact time. Rinse-off products like shampoo and body wash matter too, but your daily leave-on products are where the biggest wins are.

The ingredient lists can be long, complicated, and frankly overwhelming – that’s by design. So here are a couple of little tricks.

 

The Ingredient List Hacks

Option 1: Google
Head to your product’s website and copy the ingredient list directly from there – much faster than squinting at the back of a bottle and typing it out letter by letter. Then paste it into Google with this prompt:

“Here is the ingredient list from my (insert product name). Please identify any parabens, phthalates, xenoestrogens, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals present”. 

One very important caveat. Google is going to do something predictable here. It’s going to tell you the levels are regulated, that some department somewhere has assessed the risk, that the science is inconclusive, that your product is perfectly safe. Ignore all of that. We are not using Google for its opinion. We are using it purely as an ingredient decoder. If a concerning chemical is in there, the product is of concern. Full stop.

Repeat after me: we do not rely on Google for health information.

Option 2: Your phone’s AI assistant
Download Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok on your phone and use the same prompt above. But this time, take a photo of the ingredient list directly and send to our preferred app. With this option, there’s no typing or copying – simply point, shoot, paste the prompt, and you’re done. This is even quicker and takes a few minutes per product.

Look, we can all debate whether AI is good or bad, but when I type something into Google these days, I’m getting an AI answer anyway. We may as well use it intentionally, for something that actually matters.

Here’s what the results look like from the Redken Shampoo above using Google and my Shampoo using an LLM.

One last thing before you go:

Don’t get overwhelmed by this project. It’s not about a frantic bathroom clear-out or spending a fortune replacing everything overnight – it’s about awareness, and then making one better choice at a time. If a product you love turns up on the concern list, make a note of it. When it runs out, buy something better. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

Small, consistent swaps – that’s how we ditch the toxic drip. You’ve got this!

 

🔢 Number Crunch

28: The number of days it took for 19 of 26 cancer-associated genes in healthy breast tissue to shift back toward normal, just by switching to paraben- and phthalate-free personal care products. And just removing what shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

 

 

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional for personal health decisions. This post may contain affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.