My guest today is Michal Gal, founder of Urthware. His wooden cutting boards are made with exactly the materials I would choose if I were designing a cutting board, and they are beautiful. Michael is a proud husband and father of three, who decided to look deeper into companies and their products. After a lot of researching outfitting his kitchen with more natural and safe cookware he found that there were no cutting boards that were up to his standards. So he made one for himself using no petroleum based finishes and no glues, just natural wood and oils. People kept asking him if he could make one for them, and Urthware was born. www.urthware.com

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing and Maintaining A Toxic Free Cutting Board

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Michal Gal

Date of Broadcast: October 01, 2015

DEBRA: Hi! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s Thursday, October 1st 2015. Wow! October 1st already. It’s almost Christmas. It just seemed like this year has gone by so fast.

We’re going to talk today about cutting boards. I know that might sound a trivial little thing around the house, but cutting boards are very important to people who cook. And when you put food on a toxic cutting board, those toxic chemicals get into the food and then you eat that food. So today we’ll talk about choosing a cutting board that is toxic-free and also caring for a cutting board in a way that isn’t going to add toxic chemicals to it.

My guest makes cutting boards. He started his own company because he wanted to live without toxic chemicals. And after he did a lot of research outfitting his kitchen with more natural and safe cookware, he found that there were no cutting boards that were up to his standards.

And I’m smiling as I say that because when I looked at his cutting boards, I said, “Yes, if I were designing a cutting board, this is exactly how I would make it.” And not only is it as toxic-free as I would specify, but they are also beautiful. I actually have one in my hand right now and it is just as gorgeous as I thought it would be after looking at the website.

So my guest today is Michael Gal. He’s the founder of Urthware. Hi Michael!

MICHAL GAL: Hello! How are you?

DEBRA: I am great! How are you?

MICHAL GAL: I’m doing great. I’m glad to be on your show.

DEBRA: And I’m so glad to have you. So let’s start out. Why don’t you tell us your story of why did you decide that you wanted to have a toxic-free kitchen?

MICHAL GAL: Well, like many people, when you have kids, you start to look around yourself and you start to see different chemicals in everything in the world. You’re trying to keep them safe, right? The more you research in the Internet age we are in now, there’s a plethora of information. And as you research more and more, it becomes more and more confusing on what’s safe and what’s not.

So I retrofitted my kitchen because I started eating organic and feeding my kids organic food. But then you hear about all the chemicals in all your pots, pans and everything in your kitchen. I wanted to simplify.

As I retrofitted my kitchen, I couldn’t find alternatives for cutting boards that didn’t give me pause, that didn’t give me any questions.

DEBRA: And I actually want us to talk about that after you tell us your story. We need to discuss what are those aspects that gave you pause.

But go on with your story.

MICHAL GAL: So, as I retrofitted my kitchen, I couldn’t find an alternative for cutting boards that either wasn’t plastic or coated with something I didn’t want in my kid’s food. And when you’re putting your food on a surface, you have to expect something is going to leech from it. So you want to know what that surface is.

I just couldn’t find any good information on anything that would fit the bill. So I made my own cutting board.

DEBRA: And I’m so glad you did.

MICHAL GAL: Oh, thank you. People liked it and family members liked it and I figured, “Well, you know what? I might as well try this out on the market.” They’re beautiful (if I may say so myself) as well as non-toxic. I can’t see why not. So that’s where I started.

DEBRA: That’s so wonderful. Okay, tell us about the chemicals. Well, off the top of my head, here are the cutting boards that I can think of.

I can think of plastic ones. I can think of all those plastics that are different colors. You buy a whole set because one is for vegetables and one is for meat, et cetera. I think those are used a lot in restaurants.

And then, you can buy glass ones actually. Then there are wood cutting boards, solid wood cutting boards. I’m looking at this and it’s solid wood. It’s a solid piece of wood. And then there are cutting boards that are made from strips of wood that are glued together.

Those are all the ones I could think of. Are there more?

MICHAL GAL: Oh, there’s bamboo as well. You could actually use rubber. I’m trying to think of anything else. That’s the general list of what people would use.

DEBRA: So in looking at those, what were the things that gave you pause that you didn’t want to use in those? What are the chemicals that you identified?

MICHAL GAL: Chemicals in plastics, there’s just so many of them and we all know they leech. They’re replacing BPA with BPS and BPF.

Who’s to say those are any better? And they’re finding out slowly that they’re not. They’re just to replace. In a couple of years, we’ll see BPS and BPS-free on the packaging.

DEBRA: Yes!

MICHAL GAL: So, plastic boards were just out of the question.

DEBRA: What type of plastic did they use to make cutting boards? I never researched that. I just eliminated.

MICHAL GAL: What’s that?

DEBRA: What type of plastic do they use to make plastic boards?

MICHAL GAL: Honestly, it’s been a while since I’ve researched plastic cutting boards because they seem off the table very early in my research of what I wanted to use.

DEBRA: Me too!

MICHAL GAL: I was retrofitting my kitchen to not have plastics in it because of all the questions surrounding plastics and what they’re leeching. They’re disrupting your system. You could get all kinds of plastics. I’m not a big chemist in the plastics field.

DEBRA: It’s okay.

MICHAL GAL: I disregarded plastics pretty much right away because that’s just not something I wanted to cut on. Plus, if you look into it, you can find out that there’s a study done by Dr. Cliver in UC Davis Food Safety Laboratory. And everybody else thinks plastic is more sanitary than wood. Well, it’s not actually the case.

People say if you can put it in the dishwater, the dishwater is hot and you must get rid of all the bacteria. But what they found is that when plastic cutting boards gets scarred, not even a dishwasher kills all the bacteria. Whereas woods, what they do is they actually absorb the bacteria. They starve it and the bacteria can’t procreate and they die.

So wood is what I wanted to have. It’s what I’m going with. It’s harder to make a one-piece wooden cutting board.

DEBRA: Why is that difficult?

MICHAL GAL: One of the reasons is they tend to have movement. They tend to warp.The larger you make it, the more propensity it has to warp. So what I’ve done is reinforce them is with food-grade stainless steel rod down the center.

DEBRA: Oh!

MICHAL GAL: The board you actually have is one of the smaller boards. It’s a light-duty board. It’s wide not enough to need them in my research.

DEBRA: Yeah, I was just picking it up for the steel rods. And then, I thought, “Oh, it must be only in the larger ones.

MICHAL GAL: Yeah. As boards get bigger, we added more reinforcing to stop any movement. Obviously, all wood boards can move. That helps a lot.

DEBRA: Yeah.

MICHAL GAL: Sorry, what was the question? I get off on tangents, so you got to keep me in line here.

DEBRA: It’s okay. The question was about – let’s see. I don’t remember. But here, let me ask you another question that’s related. And we need to go to break pretty soon, but let me ask you the question and even if we don’t have time to answer, we’ll get started to put the question.

So there are a lot of cutting boards that are made from pieces or strips of wood. I think what we were talking about was you decided that you wanted to use wood and then you said something about needing to reinforce it, that if you just had a solid piece of wood, that it tends to warp. So I think the next logical thing is to be looking at that a lot of wood cutting boards are made of little, small pieces of wood that are then glued together.

That’s where we start having a concern about adhesives and finishes on the wood, which we can talk about when we come back!

MICHAL GAL: Okay!

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Michal Gal. He’s the founder of Urthware.

They make the most toxic-free cutting boards that I’ve ever seen and they’re so gorgeous. The way it’s spelled is U-R-T-H-W-A-R-E, Urthware.com. We’ll be right back.

Okay! So Michal, tell us about how they actually make those cutting boards that are all those strips of woods put together.

MICHAL GAL: What they do is they take the smaller pieces of wood. My major concern when I was looking for a cutting board was when they were coming out of a foreign country, I don’t know what glues they’ve used or what coatings they’ve used on the board. A lot of the cheaper glues are phenolic resin. These are formaldehyde-based resins. I really didn’t want to be cutting on them.

Bamboo boards as well, they’re small strips of wood. They’re really small strips of [inaudible 00:14:56]. So they take a lot of glue to manufacturer. And of course, those glues are really cheap. They’re inexpensive glues. But they’re also toxic. So they can tout the ecobenefits of bamboo, but they’re negating it by putting in the toxic chemicals as glues.

DEBRA: That’s right.

MICHAL GAL: The other major factor was they’re not coating them – most manufacturers can’t tell you what they’re coating their boards in. Any wooden board, including bamboos, are going to need some sort of oil to keep them from cracking and drying out. A lot of manufacturers can’t tell you what oils they used in it. And normally, it’s either an undisclosed oil or most likely, it’s mineral oil.

Well, mineral oil is low on the toxicity scale. It’s still a petroleum-based product. It’s a byproduct of gasoline. So I really didn’t see the point of having to cut my expensive organic food on a petroleum-based product when there are natural alternatives as well as to the glues.

We do make some larger boards and they do use glue. We make them with FDA-approved glue made in the USA. It’s not a phenol resin based glue. It’s far more expensive to produce. But all the all-natural series contain no glue because of the wide pieces of wood.

The other reasons manufacturers make them out of small pieces of wood is because they’re a lot more cheaper to manufacture. And normally, they don’t care. They only care about end mark-up, what they could make on the board.

Whereas with those coatings, those glues, once they take them out of the equation – and I found an actual alternative, which I have. It’s the organic walnut oil and beeswax. It works just as well as the synthetic, it just costs a hundred times more expensive to coat a board. Mineral oil is so cheap and that’s why manufacturers use it because they don’t care. They’re just sending whatever will sell.

When you look into things, we can’t even find out what the coating was, which is why I decided I’ll make a product. And it’s hard to actually simplify things. It ends up being more expensive to make something simple than it is to make something more complicated for some reason. It’s harder to do, but you end up with a better, more solid product.

People that buy our boards, they’re always raving about the fact that they’re beautiful as well as functional. You can have both, right?

DEBRA: You can, you absolutely can. I read a quote by Buckminster Fuller many years ago. I can’t remember it exactly. He was a big sustainability designer. He said that he wants it to be functional and everything. And then he said, “If it’s also beautiful, then I know I got it right.”

You can just look around in nature and see that nature has designed all these beautiful farms and colors. Everything is just gorgeous in nature. It’s all part of the design. And so I feel like you’re really honoring the materials and that you have brought this element of beauty and carefulness and high quality to your product that goes along with it being also safe for use and nurturing of our senses as well.

MICHAL GAL: Well, thank you. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m a graphic designer by trade. I try to bring in my eye not just for function, but for beauty.

The other great thing about wood versus plastic is they’re biodegradable. So when you do eventually wear out your cutting board (because obviously, it’s a cutting surface, those wear out eventually), it doesn’t have an impact on the environment in the end of its life. It can go right back into the environment. And even down to the gum rubber feet, they’re not PVC or plastic-based feet that are natural products. So everything about the board is good for the environment in that respect.

Obviously, you have to use materials to make that. You try to be as eco-friendly as you can like using an FDA-approved mill to down trees.

I’ll use any woods that I know are clean woods that were harvested using good practices. I’ll do anything I can to get lumber that way. That’s hard too. Whereas most of the boards coming out of poorer country, you don’t actually know what the board is made of. It’s just whatever scrap from the company that had reclaimed the wood.

Reclaim work sounds nice. But really, I don’t want to be cutting on that since I don’t know where it was in its previous life.

DEBRA: Yeah, I totally understand. I like the idea of reclaimed wood, especially if you’re cutting food on it. If somebody was making something else and they just threw the piece of wood in a corner and someone came along with a cleaning product, wood is very absorbing and anything that it comes near will go into the wood and then it will come back out.

MICHAL GAL: Absolutely!

DEBRA: Anyway, we need to go to break again. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Michal Gal.

He’s the founder of Urthware. And again, that’s Urthware.com. We’ll be right back.

MICHAL GAL: Thank you. A lot of people say, “Uh, I don’t want to cut on this.” I say, “Well, then buy two. One for show and one for you.”

Obviously, because they’re not coated in anything toxic, they need to be taken care of a little bit more than a regular glass board or bamboo board.

DEBRA: Let’s talk about care. I, myself, have an old maple board. I don’t even remember when I got it. That’s how old it is, so it’s maybe 10 or 15 years old. I actually don’t do anythign to care for it. I’m chopping on it all day long and I just run a sponge over it.

So for those of who have wood boards already and for people who are about to purchase your beautiful wood boards, how should we be taking care of them?

MICHAL GAL: Well, in general, it’s not that complicated. Any wood board (this goes for any wood board), you can’t put it in the dishwasher. They have to be handwashed. You’ll end up with a very expensive piece of firewood if you put in a good woodboard into a dishwasher. But in general, you’re just using regular dish soap and warm water to wash a board.

To disinfect it, there are natural ways to disinfect things. There are natural ways to disinfect things. You can use vinegar and a coarse salt scrub, baking soda, a little bit of hydrogen peroxide. If you get some odors on (you know when you’re using onions, you’ll actually get a little bit of an odor on the board), half a lemon will clean the smell out of a wooden board. So there are natural ways to clean them.

After that, in general, normally, just soap and water clean-up if you’re just doing vegetables and meat on them. The only time you really have to use a vinegar is when you’re sanitizing and that can actually be done periodically or after you’ve used raw meat on the board.

DEBRA: So let’s talk about raw meat for a minute. What I do is that I kind of follow the lead of the restaurants where they have different colored plastic boards, but mine aren’t plastic. I have a big board that’s maple. That’s where I cut my vegetable. When I cut meat, raw meat, I have another smaller board hanging on the wall. I think it’s bamboo. I got it more recently. It’s just a little inexpensive wood board. And so I just take that off the wall. I cut my meat and it goes straight into the sink with hot water and soap. And then it hangs back up on the wall so that it’s air dried. So that’s what I do. But I think that it’s important that people not cut raw meat on their board. What do you think about that? You just sounded like you thought it was okay.

MICHAL GAL: I personally agree with wanting two cutting boards, one for non-cooked items like vegetables and fruits and one for raw meat, poultry, fish, raw red meat only because of cross-contamination. If you don’t clean the board well enough and it doesn’t have sufficient time to dry enough to kill all of the bacteria, you could run into cross-contamination issues. So it is bestto run two cutting boards, but that’s not necessarily a must. As long as you’re disinfecting a board after you’ve used it, you could use it for both purposes. I don’t recommend it. It’s a lot safer to do the other way. And that’s exactly what I do. I just have a different board for meat in my kitchen because then there’s no chance you missed anything.

DEBRA: That’s right, that’s right.

MICHAL GAL: And that’s the best way to do it because then even if you did mess up when you’re cutting raw meat again on the raw board, that gets cooked. You could kill off the bacteria by cooking. So that is definitely the best way to do it.

And wooden boards, you should be oiling your wooden board, your poor wooden board. Normally, the best way of taking care of a wooden board, a lot of people use the mineral oil, which is hypoallergenic and everything, but then again, it’s a petroleum-based product. So there are natural alternatives.

Don’t use normal oils like vegetable oil or olive oil. They will go rancid. You wil actually get a bad smell in your board from using those oils. I saw people using olive oil and stuff. After a time, it does go rancid.

So your best bet (and the best bet I’ve found) is walnut oil. It is actually a drying oil. It pulverizes. So it’s not a chemical process. It’s oxidizing. It ends up with you getting a semi-hard coating on the board. So basically, like your cast iron pan. You see this in a cast iron pan.

Over time, your board will become saturated and the walnut oil will harden.

DEBRA: Oh!

MICHAL GAL: That’s one of the reasons I really recommend walnut oil because it does dry. And because it’s a cutting board, it does get air all the time. So, it will oxidize and will polymerize and become a protective coating on your board. So over time, your board becomes seasoned just like your cast iron pan wood.

DEBRA: And you can use just regular, culinary walnut oil? I’m just being cautious to think. Would somebody go to a hardware store and they would have denatured walnut oil with lots of chemicals in it or something?

MICHAL GAL: Never go to the hardware store to get anything. See, I only use anything you could eat. People get confused on the terminology. Linseed oil is another one you could use on the board. It does have a smell to it. But do not ever go to the hardware store and get linseed oil because it’s going to have chemical dryers in it. That’s why it hardens in a day or two. It’s a chemical process now instead of natural oxidization process. It’s natural polymerization. If you use actual edible linseed oil, it would take 30-60 days to try. That’s why they add the chemical heavy metal dryers to it.

So always get food-grade things to coat your board. I recommend obviously walnut oil. For people with walnut or nut allergies, you can use coconut oil. It does resist rancidity. It has a really high saturated fat content. It takes a long time to actually go rancid. I never actually had a board go rancid because it gets washed all the time too.

DEBRA: We need to go to break again. We’ll be back and talk more about cutting boards and how to care for them (and other related items) with my guest, Michal Gal, founder of Urthware, Urthware.com. Your’e listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

We’ll be right back.

MICHAL GAL: Yup!

DEBRA: Tell us why you think that’s important.

MICHAL GAL: Because most companies either won’t disclose their materials or they don’t know what they are. Manufacturing has become so complicated that, honestly, if you call most companies on most products, they can’t tell you what the products are. There are so many thousands of chemicals getting into the flow of manufacturing every year, no one has an idea of their combination of those chemicals, how they’re reacting with their environment with you.

I just think it’s important if you’re using something, you know what it is. In generally, we’re obviously going to be exposed to tons of chemicals daily. But why do it when you have a choice. We have a choice, look into it and reduce the amount of chemicals you’re exposed to.

So if I tell everyone what’s in it or what’s actually not in it, that’s the major thing about my products, it’s very simple. You’re cutting on a natural wood and a natural oil. There’s nothing leeching in your food that you couldn’t eat.

And a lot of people, they just want to know what’s in something. It’s still hard to find out. I became really frustrated with this. I don’t want to frustrate a lot of customers. I just tell them what’s in it. I have nothing to hide about it.

DEBRA: Exactly!

MICHAL GAL: And when I was researching different cutting boards, some of them sounded really good on the surface. I don’t want to say brand names, but the skin cutting ones that you can put in the dishwasher and everything, hard surface, basically, you’re cutting on paper mixed with glue. So the surface you’re cutting on is basically just glue. It’s a plastic board with some wood product in it.

I just became frustrated when people through out the word ‘green’ and ‘organic’ and ‘eco’ when it’s not. In my opinion, it’s not when you’re using synthetics constantly and you don’t say that you are.

Like I said, some of my boards do contain glue and it’s totally disclosed. You can even get the MSDS on the glues.

DEBRA: And that’s the way it should be. I think that’s the way it should be. I’ve been a consumer-advocate for over 30 years. My most frustrating, the reason I like to talk about this so much is because if what you want to do is avoid toxic chemicals, it makes it very, very difficult to do so if you don’t disclose that they’re there on the label.

I’ve said many times on this show an example of if you have apple sauce, it has to be labeled organic apple sauce and instead, having the supermarket apple sauce be labeled apples and pesticides.

MICHAL GAL: Yes, yeah. It’s frustrating out there. It is. It’s just frustrating. The easiest way is to just simplify anything. Eat more raw food, organic food. The labels, most people can’t decipher those. The simpler, the better.

So back to simpler times, when people are adding all these things to cutting boards to make them better, it’s a trick. The natural product is just as good or better. There’s no reason to change what used to be how things were made.

Bamboo boards as well, the glue is in the coatings. If you can’t know what’s in those in whatever type of wood it is, it’s a problem. It should be labeled.

DEBRA: It absolutely should be. I think consumers can learn. I know that as a consumer, I’ve learned. But here, I’m just enjoying talking to you today so much because as I’m sitting here with your cutting board next to me, I know what’s in it, I know what the materials are, I now know the person who made it with his own hands. And when I use it, that’s what I think of. I know this product. That’s hard to say for most cutting boards.

MICHAL GAL: It’s comforting to know…

DEBRA: It is!

MICHAL GAL: …instead of the question mark there. The question mark, it gets frustrating especially if you have kids and you don’t want to add anything to their – you know, you want to be the helicopter parent. But one of the reasons I did want to cope is because it’s not something you come into contact with infrequently. It’s every day. Your food is on it constantly. So it’s not one-time thing. You’re using that all the time with your food and you’re actually cutting into it.

And that’s another big thing. When you’re cutting into something, you’re scarring the surface. It has toxins in it, you’re bringing them.

You’re adding liquid to it with the fruits and vegetables. You’re cutting into the board, you don’t want there to be anything in there. The cleaner, the better.

DEBRA: I appreciate you disclosing – well, first of all, that you’ve done such a great job and that you’re disclosing everything so that everyone can feel confident about what your product is. That’s really great.

We only have a few minutes left, about four minutes. What else would you like to talk about?

MICHAL GAL: I don’t know. Is there any questions you have?

DEBRA: Well, I asked all my questions about cutting boards, but we can talk about any message you’d like to get out in the world, especially your views as a toxic-free parent or as a manufacturer, anything you’d just like to say?

MICHAL GAL: Oh, I don’t know. Just simplify. We’re all going to come into contact with tons of toxins in this world. Just simlify everything, especially in your kitchen because it’s one of the major ways things get into your system.

DEBRA: Oh, I know! Tell us what you did to retrofit your kitchen.

MICHAL GAL: Oh, obviously, the first thing is to switch all your cookware over. I switched to glass and got rid of the plastics. One of the major things is taking all the plastic containers that we had and storing things in glass because glass doesn’t leech. A clean glass doesn’t leech. So, getting rid of all of that stuff.

And then cooking on cast iron was a major difference to me. Once you look into actually what’s on pans, you find the warnings, “Do not overheat. The pans causes toxic fumes.” it’s good to just switch over to things, to enameled cast iron if you need crock pots and stuff.

DEBRA: So did you change your dinnerware, plates and bowls and stuff like that?

MICHAL GAL: No, because I was already using glass for those things. I didn’t have to change those over. But changing from plastic spoons, plastic cookware utensils to wooden ones. Actually, that’s what started the cutting board thing because I didn’t know what the wooden spoons were coated in. I was wondering what the coatings were.

DEBRA: Well, yeah. There are a lot of wooden spoons for cooking and things. If you go to a cooking store, they’ll just have these wooden things. They won’t know what type of wood it is and if there’s any finish, where it came from. It’s just a wooden spoon.

But I love wooden spoons, but I’ve actually purchased a fair number of wooden spoons at craft fairs where I can talk to the person like you who is the artisan who has made the spoon and they know all about it.

MICHAL GAL: Absolutely! That’s probably the best. On FB, find someone. And then, just tell them either uncoated or coated in a preferred coating like a walnut oil or a coconut oil. Most people will use mineral oil to coat things. They’re calling it butcher block oil or natural oil. Technically, crude oil is natural I guess if you want to go there.

DEBRA: Well, petroleum is natural. Where do you live?

MICHAL GAL: Paris, Ontario, Canada. –

DEBRA: Oh, that’s right. You’re in Canada. In Los Angeles, there’s a wonderful place called the La Brea tar pits, which is a tourist attraction and museum. They have these natural tarpits. The animals would come in back in prehistoric times and they’d get stuck in the tar and so there are all these animal bones in the tarpits. They’ve been pulling them out and reconstructing them. That’s what you see in the museum.

But as you enter the museum, you see around the edges of where the sidewalk meets the grass, tar bubbling up. That’s natural tar. It’s natural. That’s a petroleum product. That’s what all these things are made of. You can actually see.

But the problem that I see is that the products aren’t being made out of natural tar. They’re being changed. They’re being chemically altered.

It’s these man-made things that our bodies don’t know what to do with.

MICHAL GAL: Absolutely! A lot of natural things our body doesn’t want to deal with either.

DEBRA: Sure! Like I wouldn’t eat tar, for example. Anyway, we only have about 20 seconds before the music comes on. So thank you so much, Michal for being on. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you and a pleasure to be sitting here with your cutting board.

My guest is Michal Gal from Urthware, Urthware.com. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

My guest today is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. I invited him to be a guest after watching his wonderful video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds (1.3 million views). The fact is that while there are toxic substances in the natural world and some poisons have been in use for centuries, the overwhelming presences of toxic chemicals we experience today is the result of widespread use of fossil fuels. But an end is in sight, because we’re running out of fossil fuels. Imagining life after fossil fuels is also imagining a life without most of the toxic chemicals we use today. We’ll be talking about the fossil fuel and toxic chemical connection and where we can go from here. Richard is the author of 12 award-winning books, including six on the subject of fossil fuel depletion. He has written for Nature Journal, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal, and has delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences around the world. His current book project, due out early next year, is Our Renewable Future, an exploration of how our economy and our daily lives will change as we phase out fossil fuels and adapt to wind and solar energy. www.postcarbon.org

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Wondering How We Came to Have All These Toxic Chemicals? Here’s the History..

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Richard Heinberg

Date of Broadcast: September 15, 2015

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Tuesday, September 15th, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it’s only 82° today instead of 95°, so I know that autumn is on this way.

Today, we’re going to be talking about something that we haven’t ever talked about on the show before and that is where do all these toxic chemicals come from? How come we have a toxic world now a hundred years ago, we didn’t and 200 years ago, we didn’t? What happened that now, we have toxic chemicals in every part of our lives in every consumer products, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink.

Everything has toxic pollution now. Why is that? Where did that come from?

My guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s a senior fellow at Post Carbon Institute. I invited him to be a guest after I saw a wonderful video that he made called300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds. It’s had 1.3 million views.

If you want to take a look at it and I hope you will, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for today’s show. I’ve embedded this video there.

This gives a summary of everything that’s happened in the past 300 years that has taken us from basically living within the resources of the planet to having toxic chemicals all over the place and living beyond our resources.

So I’m going to have Richard tell us about this in a little slower version and we’ll talk about it and find out where the toxic chemicals came from, but also what’s happening that we are getting to the end of fossil fuels and how we’re going to need the transition away from that. I think what’s going to happen is that as we lose our fossil fuels, we’ll also lose the toxic chemicals.

Hi, Richard.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Good morning Debra.

DEBRA: Thank you so much for being here.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Of course, it’s afternoon where you are, yes.

DEBRA: It is afternoon where I am and morning where you are in California.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yes.

DEBRA: I used to live in California. I lived out in West Marin in Forest Knolls. Do you where that is?

RICHARD HEINBERG: I do. Yeah, I’m a little bit north of there in Santa Rosa.

DEBRA: Yeah. And my father lived in Santa Rosa and I also lived in Inverness by the ocean, so I know your area where you are.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah.

DEBRA: I was born in California. Anyway, tell us how you got interested in the subject of post carbon and fossil fuels and everything that’s happening that is creating our situation now.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Right! I’ve always had a curious mind. By the 1980s, it was clear to me. I mean, a lot of other people have already picked up on this, but it was becoming clear to me that there were a lot of things going wonky in the world all at the same time. Our population was growing rapidly. The environment is being plundered in various ways. We are starting to see species extinctions at much higher rates than normal and so on.

So I was trying to figure out why this is all happening at once. I started applying all the kinds of answers that I could imagine. Was it something to do with politics? Was it something to do with economics? I looked into these areas. And clearly there were things going on that were at least partially responsible for these dramatic changes in human society. I started looking into anthropology and I saw how human societies have evolved from hunting and gathering through horticulture and agriculture up to our modern industrial form of production.

But it wasn’t until 1990s that I realized that the key to understanding the whole thing was energy. Energy is what enables us to do literally everything we do. Without energy, nothing happens.

And if you look through human history, our ability to harness more energy, whether it was in terms of planting food crops or literally harnessing horses and oxen, these things changed the society and enabled the growth of civilizations. But when we get to the industrial revolution and the unleashing of fossil fuels, we see suddenly the harnessing of energy on a scale that simply was impossible previously.

Fossil fuels carry energy that’s in a concentrated form that’s also portable and versatile. We’re able to use it to do all the amazing things that we’ve done in the last 200 years, everything from transportation and cars and planes and trains and ships to the production of electricity, to power all of our communications devices. None of this would have happened without fossil fuels.

So the fossil fuels obviously have given us enormous advantages. They’ve enabled the growth of industrial civilization, but we are also paying an enormous price because we’ve become addicted to energy sources that are inherently limited. I mean these are non-renewable resources that we are extracting as fast as we possibly can and burning them once and for all so future generations will not have access to them. And as we burn them and as we transform into plastics and chemicals, we’re also changing the environment. We’re doing a massive chemistry experiment with the oceans and the atmosphere.

DEBRA: And the humans.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Absolutely and human health and the health of livestock and wildlife and pets and everything else.

DEBRA: I remember when I’ve been studying toxic chemicals in consumer products for more than 30 years and I remember when I first started studying them and understanding that they came from fossil fuels and wanting to know these petrochemicals. Were they just digging them up out of the ground and making them into consumer products?

And one of the things that I learned early on by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica is that fossil fuels are the reason that we are – I’m not quite sure what the word is when you talk about obtaining them from the earth – extracting fossil fuels is for fuel. They’re being used for fuels. So they’re brightly named fossil fuels.

The reason that they’re being made to make plastics and pharmaceuticals and everything else that they’re being used to make is because when they come out of the ground in their raw state – you probably could explain this better than I do – is that they come out as raw materials and then they separate it out. I think it’s a distillation process or something and at different temperatures, different parts of the oil or coal or whatever turn into different things. So what they do is they take off the fuel, the gasoline or the oil or whatever and then there’s all this stuff left over.

In a way, the making of toxic chemicals that go into consumer products is very responsible recycling project. It’s recycling the waste from the making of fuel. And yes, it’s being recycled into us as poison and therein lies the problem. So it’s not being extracted so that we can have plastic. It’s being extracted for fuel and the waste is being turned into products.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Right. Maybe calling it waste is possibly a little misleading because we are talking about organic chemistry here and the fossil fuels are basically organic molecules. They were produced over hundreds of millions of years in some cases or at least tens of millions of years from ancient plant materials. In case of oil and gas, we’re talking about algae and plankton primarily and with coal, peat and in some cases forests. All of these materials are compressed and chemically changed again with time and pressure into long and short organic molecules, hydrocarbons…

DEBRA: Let me just interrupt you right there because we need to go to break. That’s what the music is about.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure. Yes.

DEBRA: You can explain that in more detail when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute and we’re talking about how we got all these toxic chemicals and we’re going to be talking about what’s going to happen when we run out of fossil fuels. He’s with the Post Carbon Institute at PostCarbon.org. We’ll be right back.

Before we go on with your chemistry explanation, I just want to mention that some time ago, I don’t know, a few years ago, I was watching on the History Channel a whole series of really excellent shows called The Men Who Built America”. And I remember it was talking about some of these things that you talk about in the video and especially there was a whole thing about the development of using fossil fuels and then showing how it was a really big environmental problem that they were taking oil and turning it into fuel for something. I don’t remember what it was. It was kerosene or something I think that they were making. And then the rest of it, they showed this scene of the rest of it just being dumped into the environment. I was just looking at all the stuff being dumped into the environment.

Of course it makes sense. Somebody came along, Henry Ford or somebody. Somebody came along who built the engine using this waste product. I know you don’t want me to say it’s a waste product and you’re going to tell us why. But the leftovers from the production of kerosene or whatever that turned into standard oil are like all there in these shows. They’re really, really well done and it really showed me how this whole industrial thing happened.

So you can just look up The Men Who Built America” and you’ll get to the page and all the shows are there on the History Channel. You can just watch them. Okay, go on.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. Most likely the one that talks about Rockefeller would explain the early history of the oil industry.

As I was saying, oil, natural gas and coal also are hydrocarbons, which means that they are varying linked chains of combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms. The simplest one is methane, which is the main constituent of natural gas, which is just one of these chains and one of these segments. And then you can add more octane, which is the main ingredient of gasoline. As the name suggests, eight of these kinds of molecules, hydrocarbon molecules linked together to form a larger molecule.

So the organic chemistry is all about splitting up these chains or adding to them to make longer chains or smaller chains. I think of it as a Lego set and by adding and subtracting molecules, it’s possible to make thousands, tens of thousands of different unique substances, molecular substances. That’s what basically all of modern chemistry is about.

DEBRA: Yes.

RICHARD HEINBERG: It got its start in the 19th century when we started using coal tar as a feedstock for organic chemistry. But then with oil and natural gas, it was possible to use even a greater variety or to produce an even greater variety of organic chemicals.

When the raw crude oil is refined in a refinery, depending on the demand of the sheet to produce certain blends of gasoline, diesel and other fuels, what’s left over often is a heavy gooey tar that ends up being used for building roads. Generally, what’s used for organic chemistry is actually more valuable use of fuel than for making gasoline or diesel. So the chemicals industries and plastics industries will buy whatever natural gas or oil refined products are appropriate for their uses and typically they’re willing to pay a higher price than the gas station down the road.

DEBRA: I think that that’s probably today, but I think in the beginning as I saw on TV that it started out being a fuel and then we started having all these other products because there was this leftover material and then now, the products are much more valuable than the fuel.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. What do we do with all of these amazing materials that we can refine from oil? Kerosene, which initially was used as lamp oil as a replacement for whale oil, is now what we use to fuel jet airplanes. Jet fuel is basically the old kerosene that we used to use in kerosene lamps.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting to think about what if we didn’t have fossil fuels? Where will we make all these things out of? I think that we’ve created – I think you used the term – fossil fuel civilization or fossil fuel society and it really is. All the things that we think are so wonderful and marvelous and time-saving and all these things really are based in the thought that we’ve made them from fossil fuels. We’ve created them from these miraculous materials and yet, there is a supply that is going to end and then it’s not going to be there anymore.

I do want to talk about that. We’re coming up on the break. We still have about a minute, but I don’t want to ask you a long question. Well, I’ll ask you a question. You can start.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure.

DEBRA: What I want to talk about next is that I’ve watched your video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds about five times now, but none of the listeners have seen it. When we come back from the break, what I’d like you to do is just give us the synopsis.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure.

DEBRA: And you don’t have to do it in 300 seconds. I’ll give you about eight minutes to talk about how we got from no fossil fuels to our present situation.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Okay.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Richard Heinberg. He is a Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute. Their website is PostCarbon.org. And you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and watch this video, 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds. We’ll be right back.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Okay. The story starts in the 19th century when we were using whale oil as a source of illumination. We were using whale oil as lamp oil to light our homes at night and of course whale oil is a renewable resource. Whales reproduce, but we were using at a rate that was causing the decimation of whale populations around the world. So whale oil was getting more scarce and expensive and we needed a replacement.

Meanwhile, there was a different kind of oil, rock oil, seeping out of the ground in various places around the country, including Western Pennsylvania. And this rock oil or petroleum was able to also be used with just a little refining as lamp oils. So somebody got the brilliant idea of drilling a well, like water well to see if they could get more of this petroleum out of the ground.

It worked and it resulted in a huge economic boom in Pennsylvania. People were going out in wild cat and drilling wells over the place.

Some people got rich. Some people of course lost lots of money. That’s been the story with the oil industry ever since of course. It’s a boom and bust industry because it’s based on resource extraction.

But anyway, along came a clever young chap named John D Rockefeller and he figured out how to turn this boom and bust crazy fast-growing industry into a more orderly and organized wealth producing machine, which became known as standard oil and he organized the oil industry very quickly.

Folks started looking for ways to put this oil to use in transportation. Very soon, the automobile was invented. As more and more people wanted automobiles with which to burn gasoline refined from oil, the problem was how to make the automobiles fast enough. So a guy named Henry Ford came up with the idea of an automated assembly line, in other words, a powered assembly line where automobiles could be produced in much higher numbers much more quickly. And powered assembly lines were then adapted to making other consumer products.

So with powered assembly lines, with cheap energy that could also be used to make electricity, which brought energy right into people’s homes so that all they had to do was plug in appliances. Anywhere in your house, you would have access to energy that would replace muscle power, with all of this, suddenly we had an economic boom like it had never been seen before. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, we’re all about increasing and manufacturing.

Manufacturing could occur at such a rate at this point that it actually led to the Great Depression. The problem was overproduction. We were making so much stuff so fast that people couldn’t absorb it quickly enough. So the solution to the Great Depression and to the overproduction was a couple of things – advertising, talking people into wanting more stuff and the other was consumer credit, helping people go into debt to buy stuff they couldn’t afford. With these two ingredients, we created the consumer society and the consumer economy that was continually growing depending on people going into evermore debt to buy evermore stuff so that they could keep the engines of production going.

And of course, more and more…

DEBRA: If I could just interrupt you for a second.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yes.

DEBRA: Here, until this point in time, production of everyday household goods was dependent on the need of people and the people made their own things. They would carve things out of wood. They would sew their own clothing. They would grow their own food and they would produce the amount that they needed and it was all driven by need.

And now, at this point when we’re starting to have advertising and debt, it’s not driven by need anymore. It’s driven by the machines, the need to keep those machines going and continuing the profits of those who own the machines. This is not the way nature works. It’s not at all.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah, right. Also, before our economies were mostly localized, we’ve always had trade and even long distance trade, but usually just for luxury goods. The stuff that people really needed is food, furniture and building materials. All of those came from their immediate regions and vicinities.

But with cheap transport fuel with airplanes and trucks and ships and so on, we began to have what came to be known as globalization.

Economists love this. It’s called economic efficiency if you can make something cheaper in China with cheaper labor and cheaper raw materials, then there’s more profit to be made. But of course, what this does is to create economic fluxes where people lose their jobs because they can’t compete with lower wage workers on the other side of the planet and economic disruption so that every generation where the economy is shifting to something different. One generation, it’s computers. The next generation, it’s iPhones. For the next generation after that, who knows what it’s going to be?

DEBRA: Yeah.

RICHARD HEINBERG: So parents and children speak in a different technological language. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. They lose the same cultural reference. They have musical taste and so on. So we’ve created a very fast-paced society that’s dependent on continual growth and of course it’s all based on the ever increasing extraction of non-renewable resources that are depleting in real time.

DEBRA: Yes. You did a very good job because you just said all of that in exactly the right amount of time.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Terrific.

DEBRA: When we come back from the break, we’re going to hear about Richard’s visions for what’s going to happen when the fossil fuels run out. And maybe you’ll tell us when you think that’s going to happen and how we can transition into a less fossil fuel, less toxic world, which is what I’m interested in, how to be less toxic.

RICHARD HEINBERG: I’ll be happy to talk about that.

DEBRA: That’s great. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s from the Post Carbon Institute, which is at PostCarbon.org. We’ll be right back.

RICHARD HEINBERG: We’re seeing the problems associated with depletion particularly in the oil markets. We’re starting to see signs also with coal and natural gas, but I think oil is leading the way. Oil is our most important fossil fuel. Virtually all transportation depends on it, global trade. So oil is really important and we have been searching for oil and pumping oil out of the ground for many decades now and we’ve used the low-hanging fruit principle. In other words, we’ve gone after the cheapest best, most accessible oil.

First, we are not about to run out. There are still lots of oil in the earth’s crust, but as time goes on, what are left to find and to pump is lower and lower grade resources. So we have to use more sophisticated technologies. Here in the United States, we’ve adapted hydraulic fracturing or fracking and horizontal drilling in recent years to go after pockets of oil that geologists previously would never have even bothered with because better resources were available. Well, better resources aren’t available anymore, so now we have to use this sophisticated technology. That means the cost of production is rising very rapidly.

Even though the price of oil fluctuates, it’s generally higher than it was a decade or two ago, but the cost of production for the companies themselves are rising faster than prices are. So this is a prescription for problems down the line. Probably before the end of this decade, we will be seeing another oil shock, another dramatic price increase or a big consolidation in the oil industry with lots of companies going bust or being bought up by other companies.

The oil industry really is showing the initial signs that it’s the end of the road. Over the course of the next few decades, this is an industry that will be going away.

DEBRA: I remember when I was 16 and I was first learning how to drive that gas was $0.25 a gallon and my mother would give me a quarter so I could buy a gallon of gas. And now, it’s $2.50 a gallon. I think that a lot of people who may be listening and are alive today weren’t even alive back in the 1980s when we started having the energy crisis. They didn’t experience this, but I did experience this and I think you probably experienced it too.

RICHARD HEINBERG: That’s right.

DEBRA: What happened was I was driving around in my 100 octane Firebird Formula 400 and I couldn’t get gas for it because they started diluting all the gas. And I couldn’t drive my car. This is at a time – for people who weren’t there at the time – that there was gas rationing.

We think that the supplies are going to just always be there, but if you were living then as I was, you were assigned a day at the week when you can buy gas. And the cars would line up. You have to spend an hour or more sitting in line at the gas station in order to get your ration gas. As I said, I couldn’t even get gas for my car because it required a 100 octane fuel and the octane was being diluted down to 85 or something like that. And I had to buy a different car because I couldn’t drive my car. So I have an idea that something like that is going to happen again.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. The energy shocks of the 1970s were mostly political in nature having to do with politics in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and so on.

DEBRA: Yeah.

RICHARD HEINBERG: What’s happening now is entirely different. We’re depleting the high grade resources that drove economic growth during the 20th century.

Getting off of oil is going to be an expensive and time-consuming process because the only real substitutes that we have are battery-powered vehicles, electric cars or bile fuels, making substitute fuels out of food crops. Both of these substitutes are problematic in different ways and neither of them is going to be a direct drop-in replacement for jet fuel or for the kinds of fuels that were in global shipping or trucking.

DEBRA: I see my vision. During the break, I was thinking, “Oh, I should refer to the Post Toxic World.” It’s like your Post Carbon. I should be Post Toxic. My Post Toxic vision is that the whole culture is going to be different because we’ll be using renewable materials instead of fossil fuels to make most of what we’re making and it will all go back to being more local, more artisan and those kinds of things.

And of course, there are technological things that people can’t make it home like televisions and cellphones and stuff like that. Those will probably still be around, but it will end up being a lot more local and natural and handmade than it was prior to fossil fuels.

Do you see that’s probably where we’re going? Or do you have a different vision?

RICHARD HEINBERG: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean people already are demanding less toxic materials like paints for example.

DEBRA: Yes.

RICHARD HEINBERG: So companies that make paints are looking for ways to reduce volatile organic compounds, VOCs, which are mostly from fossil fuels, organic paints.

The same thing is happening in the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry. They’re realizing that the days of fossil fuels are numbered. So they are going to have to start using plant-based materials, corn starch and other materials like that, carbohydrates to substitute for hydrocarbons.

And of course, in many cases, the substitutes aren’t going to be quite as good at least in the early days. In some cases, there will be more expensive. But one way or another, it’s inevitable that we’re going to have to shift the wave from using fossil fuels as the basis not only for our energy consumption, but also the chemicals industries and plastics and materials industries and all the rest.

DEBRA: I actually feel optimistic that the end is in sight. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve spent my entire adult life looking for products that weren’t toxic and telling people about them. But it looks like it’s going to run its natural course and that already we’re seeing or I mean I see over a 30 year period that there’s more and more less toxic products and nontoxic products and more organic things and all of that. It’s starting to emerge. It’s like a new phase, a new wave of what’s coming in the future.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Right.

DEBRA: Go ahead.

RICHARD HEINBERG: You see as a vanguard of this. Most of our industries, most of the people are still on the fossil fuel bandwagon.

DEBRA: Yes, they are.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Those of us who have decided to get off of fossil fuels before the party is really over, I think we’re performing an important function within society as a whole. We’re the growing tip of society leading into the inevitable future. It’s going to take experimentations. It’s going to take time and investment to get us to a toxic-free fossil fuel free future.

So we have to get started now. We can’t just wait until all the oils are gone and then try to figure out what to do.

DEBRA: Yeah. I think that somehow I managed to be able to look into the future and see that’s where it’s going. And I did that many years ago when nobody was talking about this. But I’m glad I did. It’s one of those things where something that was a lemon in my life of getting sick by toxic chemicals turned out to be lemonade on a larger scale because people like you and I need to be here being the visionaries and doing this and leading it all forward because that’s how things change. People have visions and then they say, “That’s what we should do. This makes sense,” and they start making it happen in life and society shifts.

I never had thought about the connection until I saw that show on TV, The Men Who Built America” and then I saw your video. It wasn’t even part of what I was doing to see the fossil fuels as a collaborative movement alongside what I’m doing from the health direction.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Right.

DEBRA: But I’m glad to see what you’re doing and I’m glad to know that you’re there and that people are working on this. So I’m looking at my clock here. We’ve got about a minute left.

RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah.

DEBRA: So any final words you’d like to say?

RICHARD HEINBERG: Getting off of fossil fuels in the early stages is going to require more effort and expense just like finding less toxic foods and paints and products of all kinds. It takes more effort and sometimes they’re more expensive. But in the long run, we are doing a service not only to ourselves, but also to the rest of society by creating demand for products that will ultimately be necessary for everyone, not just for a niche audience, but for everyone.

Sometimes, it feels lonely out there being the only one to be driving an electric car or whatever, but this is really important work.

DEBRA: It is. Thank you. Thank you. I’m so happy to meet you. I’m sure we’ll be talking again.

RICHARD HEINBERG: I hope so.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

My guest today is Greg Gordon, National Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau. As an investigative reporter, Greg has spent 38 years uncovering waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in Washington. I called him last week after his article about the FDA and mercury fillings was published and we had a great conversation about other stories he had done on toxics over the years. Today we’ll be talking about toxics from the viewpoint of an investigative reporter: why he writes about toxics and the investigative process. Greg has received so many awards I can’t fit them all in this space. Read more about Greg’s distinguished career at www.mcclatchydc.com/customer-service/contact-us/article24432826.html

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
An Investigative Reporter’s Take on Toxics

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Greg Gordon

Date of Broadcast: August 06, 2016

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It is Thursday, August 6th 2015, and apparently, we just had some technical difficulties with my microphone, but I think you can hear me now.

We’re going to be talking about something a little bit different today. Usually, we talk about toxic chemicals or we talk about products that don’t have toxic chemicals. We talk about detox, all kinds of things like that.

But today, for the first time, we’re going to be talking to an investigative reporter. We’ve never talked to an investigative reporter before, but I was very interested to talk to him. I’ve never even done this before either, which is I called up an investigative reporter after I read a really excellent article last week. We talked about this article last Wednesday.

I talked with Pamela Seefeld (my guest last Wednesday) about this article about the FDA warning dentists that if they can possibly help it, no patients of any kind should actually be having mercury fillings.

So today, we have the reporter who wrote that story, dug it up and put it all together. I’m just so excited to talk to him because I want to know all about how investigative reporters investigate and how do they find these stories and what do they do. It’s such detective work.

I know that, for myself, what I do is detective work in a way that’s finding those hidden toxic chemicals in the consumer products and then finding the products that work better. But this is a real investigative reporter.

His name is Greg Gordon. He’s a national correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau. He’s been an investigative reporter for 38 years covering waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in Washington.

Hi, Greg.

GREG GORDON: How are you, Debra? Thanks for having me.

DEBRA: I’m great. How are you doing?

GREG GORDON: Pretty well. Aside from a little emergency with my son’s eight month old Siberian Husky who bled all over the floor this morning. She probably punctured her digestive tract somehow. She’s in the hospital. We’re already at $1600 and just getting warmed up.

It’s been a stressful morning, but…

DEBRA: A little excitement today.

GREG GORDON: A little excitement. I hope it wasn’t a toxin that caused this. I don’t think so. I think it was more like eating a branch probably.

DEBRA: So tell us, how did you become interested in being an investigative reporter?

GREG GORDON: I guess that traces back to relatively early in my career. My career started at age five. That’s what my mother says anyway that I started putting out a penny newspaper in my neighborhood in a small town in Southern Minnesota.

I really shadowed my big brother into journalism because he worked on the student paper. So did I and that continued through college. In college, at the University of Minnesota (which has a very large student paper), the reading population at the University of Minnesota’s, the student paper, at the time was 70,000 or 80,000. So, I was really going to be a sports writer, but I got into digging.

And then, along came the Vietnam War and the sports just didn’t seem very important with what was going on on campus.

And so I decided that I wanted to try to be a regular news reporter, which was a big transition. Almost immediately, I wanted to dig deeper really when I was a young reporter, a wire service reporter in Minneapolis.

And really, investigative reporting, one of the definitions for investigative reporting is just finding out information that’s concealed from the public. And there’s what I call pure investigative reporting where you’re really doing original research. And then there’s leak investigative reporting, what the FBI investigation uncover and so forth.

I like the original research when I can. Really, I’d call the FDA story that I did a combination of both. But mostly, there wasn’t an ongoing investigation. I was trying to find out what an agency was doing and why. I only got part of the way frankly. I think there are more questions to be answered.

Just to recap, the story basically said that after all these decades of defending and allowing the use of what is known in the trade as amalgam fillings (we call them mercury fillings because nobody knows what amalgam is), the FDA finally, and really, in the face of a lot of people who have come forward and said that when they had the amalgam fillings taken out of their mouths, their health improved, in some cases, stunningly.

For example, some people had symptoms of and were diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis and it went away. It just went away. It’s astonishing.

Most of us probably (and certainly, older people like me), we know people who have died of multiple sclerosis. In fact, the wife of another journalist for one, the Houston Paper, just passed away this year that I know. She suffered horribly with multiple sclerosis. I’d like to know now how many mercury fillings she had in her mouth.

I don’t know if that’s the sole cause of multiple sclerosis symptoms. But in any event, I think that the FDA’s Director of Medical Devices and Radiological Health Division, which oversees, regulates these products, a guy named Jeffrey Shuren, whom I’ve never met, my impression is that he sided (whatever faction they had in his unit at the FDA) with those people in concluding that certain people are sensitive to mercury and vulnerable to significant, potentially disabling, even lethal health effects from mercury, either the vapors or the particles from when they chew gum and somehow break free some of the mercury.

Mercury is bound with other metals, silver particularly. That’s why we call them silver fillings. They’re often called silver fillings.

DEBRA: It sounds nicer than mercury fillings.

GREG GORDON: Yes, exactly. It was also a selling point. The dental profession calls them silver fillings.

In any event, apparently, Jeffrey Shuren sided with these folks (this is my speculation) and he got it through all the people.

And we had a big decision when we wrote this story about whether to mention that Margaret Hamburg (because there was a ruckus about her. She was the FDA commissioner at the time. She just left this March) had any role in this. And what I was told was no. And so ultimately, we took her out of the story.

And the reason I raised her is that upon joining the FDA, Margaret Hamburg, also known as Peggy, resigned her position as a member of the Board of Directors of the Henry Schein Company, which is the biggest distributor of mercury amalgam and a lot of other health care products. But in particular, they’re a distributor of mercury fillings, the components or the compounds, in the United States.

And their stock shot up in 2009 when the FDA decided not to do much of anything about mercury fillings and issued a rule that classified them in Class II, which are not the real dangerous products where the manufacturers are required to first prove that their product is safe before it goes on the market.

So Hamburg either recused herself, withdrew from any involvement in this or she said okay. She put her own perimeter on it and sent it on to HHS, Department of Health and Human Services.

To break this down, the FDA, its duty is solely to determine the safety and the effectiveness of the products that it regulates. The Department of Health and Human Services, they have the responsibility of doing cost benefit analyses.

And this is a process that really traces to the Reagan years when cost benefit analyses really became a big deal and there were a lot of environmental regulatory sites because sometimes, in fact, they would put a value on a human life and they tend to come down to $1 million. At the time, it’s okay to spend this much money on exposing this many people to this toxin or toxin, but not this much money.
They were heated. There have been, really, over the last 30 or 40 years, some heated arguments over class benefit analyses.

So what did HHS do? HHS did a cost benefit analysis and concluded that lower income people were going to be harmed by this regulation because it would raise the cost. The alternative fillings (principally, composite fillings. You can also use ceramics or even gold, gold being very expensive and ceramics being more expensive), composite fillings typically depends upon the dentist, of course. And a high end dentist, I’m sure, charges a lot more. But composite fillings typically cost maybe 100 bucks more.

So they concluded that low income people would then just let their teeth decay if the dentist said, “Look, I don’t want to put amalgam in your mouth because it could be poison you. It could harm you.”

DEBRA: It could poison you.

GREG GORDON: I neglected to mention one of the things that’s noted by the FDA is that mercury fillings constantly, continuously release very, very low levels of mercury vapor. I mentioned chewing gum, they found or if you grind your teeth at night.

I’m an older guy, so I have a few mercury fillings in my mouth. Not to get personal here, but I have to check out a few health issues that I have because they fit into the box of possible problems from exposure to mercury.

And of course, most of us eat fish. And there’s mercury in a lot of the fish especially sushi.

So bottom line is, the FDA was overruled and what really was troubling about this is that the FDA is overruled and here’s this public safety communication that they drafted at the end of 2011 and they had a little data on the top of it. We’ve now posted it on our website. It’s a link in the ‘stories’ if anybody wants to look. It says, XX12 (which is what’s the date in 2012) that they’re going to issue this public safety communication.

And here it is now, 2015. And finally, it becomes public, but not through the FDA but in a newspaper story. It was kept secret for three years and how many people had mercury amalgam implanted without knowing the potential risks in the interim?

The American Dental Association would go ballistic to listen to what I just said because they are as emphatic as you could be in citing what they say is definitive research demonstrating that mercury fillings are perfectly safe.

One of the issues, by the way, is that some people have mercury allergies. I think that showed up in some of the – we published on our website six case studies. I sent some more case studies. At McClatchy, it’s 29 papers. I did about 10 of them. A lot of these people said they had a mercury filling replaced. They would have an immediate reaction.

So you’re the dentist, 157,000 members of American Dental Association and the dentists are using these, especially in programs like Medicaid or the Veterans Administration, hospitals or facilities (I don’t know how much the VA does on dental, but I think they have some kind of coverage) and places where lower income people would have some sort of insurance coverage that only provides benefits if you use amalgam. And how many of these people didn’t get to know over those three years? Let alone, how long this battle inside the FDA has been going on because there are, pretty clearly, factions within the FDA?

Margaret Hamburg’s situation was fascinating because when she began the FDA commissioner, it was only about two months before the rule that classified mercury fillings as a Category II, not a III (not the most worrisome products). And that’s what the consumer lawyers have been fighting.

I didn’t mention the consumer lawyers who have been fighting this issue for 23 years, filing suits and challenging rules that are issued and trying to push the FDA towards something more protective of the public.

And the dentists are in an interesting position as I started to say before. Some people have mercury allergies. So, if the dentist says to the patient when you come in and say, “Well, I want to put a mercury filling in because it’s cheaper and it will last longer,” and they argue. The other side argues that composite now lasts just as long (I don’t know who’s right). But the dentists, are they going to say to the patients, “Well, I need to give you a test. I need to stick a needle in your arm” or whatever they’re going to need, “stick some mercury on your skin to see whether you have a mercury allergy,” how’s that going to go over?

DEBRA: The part that I don’t understand is (and this comes up not just in mercury fillings, but in every single product), when you go to the dentist, the dentist says –

Oh, wait! Before I say this, I want to say, you may be wondering where the commercials are. We’re having no commercials today and it’s because of a technical thing. They’re repairing the commercial machine. So we’re going to just talk right through.

So what I was going to say is that the thing that seems so odd to me is that in this country (and probably in most industrial countries in the world), there’s no information on the product. There are very, very few, relatively few products that have warnings on the product or even reveal what the ingredients are. So if your dentist says to you, “I want to put in a silver filling.” That doesn’t sound very dangerous. It’s the least expensive one.

Now, the patient has no reason to know unless they’re listening to this show or reading things I’ve written or other people have written or what you’ve written. The patient has no idea that there’s anything wrong with those silver fillings, and they go, “Well, composite is 100 more. I’ll go with this silver filling.” Because they don’t have information, they don’t have a choice.

And so if instead the dentists were required by law to say, “I want to put in a filling. Now, here are your choices. You can have the least expensive one, which has mercury in it. And it’s evaporating, vaporizing mercury in your mouth 24 hours a day. And mercury, by the way, is a toxic substance. And here is some information about the health effects of those toxic substances…”

I just had a funny thought. I was just thinking about all those commercials on television for drugs where they play the beautiful music and people walk through the meadow and they say, “And the side effects are death.”

GREG GORDON: The side effects are death. If you’re listening, the side effects on maybe these commercials are just jaw-dropping. They’re really saying this? Well, they have to. They don’t like it, but they have to tell you that because it’s on the label.

DEBRA: Because it’s a drug.

Now, we get to teeth and fillings, and they don’t have that requirement. Their dentist doesn’t have to say, “Here are the health effects of these mercury fillings.”

I think if any right-minded person were to have the choices laid out for them, “These are choices of your dental fillings” and they were to see the health effects of mercury and they were to see that it’s only $100 more to not have to be poisoned by mercury and have $100,000 worth of medical bills later on after you spent 20 years having mercury fillings, then I think that that would be a better choice.

GREG GORDON: Well, there’s that issue. There are a number of issues about amalgam. One of them is apparently, the – I just learned this recently. But apparently, the amalgam, the alloy that the mercury is bound to expands and contracts with cold and heat or whatever (I don’t know how much the temperature in the mouth changes). But in any event, these amalgams have been blamed for cracking teeth.

So how much is it going to cost to repair a cracked tooth? And when the tooth is cracked, what does that do for the life of the tooth?

Obviously, what happens when the tooth has to come out in the end, it’s extremely expensive because then you’re getting an implant, which can cost $5000 a piece, I guess, the number I’ve heard.

That doesn’t mention the cost to society because when they’re using the mercury in their offices, they may have to dispose of it. And if they dispose of it properly, that’s another expense.

So you have all of these downstream costs and you’re going to quibble over 100 bucks? Well, it seems suspect. And one of the questions, of course, that has to leap to anybody’s mind who is paying attention to this is, “What happened at the Department of Health and Human

Services? And was there more to it?”

And I am unable to get there yet. I’m going to try. It’s not an easy answer to find because I will tell you that I did search the lobbying records of all of the American Dental Associations lobbying team, I’ll call them, the outside lobbyists that they hire in Washington because everybody here has a lobbyist. They have several.

And I went through all the reports during the timeframe that this issue came up. I don’t know exactly what year the Department of Health and Human Services rejected this, but I’m assuming that it was a long process and it dragged out.

So I couldn’t find any reference. And that’s partly due to the limitations of the lobbying laws, the disclosure was. If you are a lobbyist and you only make, once a year, a big, big guy, a former house majority leader, some senior member of Congress or a guy who is a heavyweight lobbyist in D.C. who’s got connections, you saunter over to the Department of Health and Human Services and have a sit down with one of the senior people, and you make your arguments to get in the door because of who you are –

There’s illegal about this. What’s frustrating is that when the lobbyists make their disclosure reports – one if they only made one meeting, but they’re full-time lobbyists, they attended one meeting on this one subject, they technically don’t have to disclose it because there has to be a time threshold that you devoted to a particular subject before you have to disclose. That’s number one. And two, you can do it in a vague way.

So I don’t know, but I’d be surprised, really surprised given the stakes for the dentists who want –

And let me say that what the dentists’ stakes are for a moment if I can. The dentists face potential lawsuits. I know that we all signed these releases for procedures in medical offices. Next time, I go to my dentist, I’m going to read the one that I signed if I have to. I probably have a standing one that’s in the office there. But how many rights we’re giving away in terms of seeking recourse against the dentist if he hurts you? There are ways around that if you’ve got a good trial lawyer, but they’re hard to do.

So the dentists’ stakes or they might face lawsuits from patients in the past. But they certainly will be on notice that they better not use this stuff unless it’s the only way to repair a tooth, with amalgam. And apparently, there are certain situations where amalgam is clearly the better option.

One of the problems is everybody in the country has a unique health profile. We have a lot going on in our bodies. And when toxins are introduced by ingestion or inhalation (and in this case, it’s inhalation), when they’re introduced, they may or may not be disposed of, excreted by the body.

There’s a scientist that I wrote about in one of the stories in Colorado who is doing cutting edge research. He’s figured out a lot. He estimates that 20% of the people in the United States who have had mercury amalgams placed in their teeth have some sort of impairment, as a result, to their health. They’re under stress is the way he would put it. They may not have any symptoms, but they’re under stress. And then, he estimates that 5% to 10% of those people are seriously ill. That is a staggering statistic if accurate.

And what does he base that on? Well, one, he developed a test to determine – it’s called the tri-test. He tests hair, blood and urine to determine – let me back up a second.

He figured out a way to distinguish between inorganic mercury (which is the mercury in your teeth if you have these fillings) and organic mercury (which is the mercury known as metal mercury that’s in fish). And then, he developed this tri-test for hair, urine and blood. He’s able, he says, to see how much inorganic mercury you have in your blood, in your urine. And organic mercury, interestingly, excretes also in your hair. You never find inorganic mercury in your hair. Only the mercury from fish can get in your hair. It’s interesting.

DEBRA: That’s interesting. That’s interesting to know.

GREG GORDON: I have no idea why. But in any event, if he’s right…

DEBRA: I can see he’s been so thorough about it.

GREG GORDON: He’s taken blood tests of over 10,000 people. And so, his projection of the potential number of Americans who are impaired is based on a pretty large sample.

Now, it’s hard to know how many of those people came to him because they thought they had a mercury problem, which would skew the results. I pushed down on that point, but I didn’t really get any answer.

He’s not a scientist who is publishing research, so he is not subject to a peer review. He’s running a company. His name is Chris Shade, S-H-A-D-E. His company is known as Quicksilver Scientific. Quicksilver being another name for mercury [inaudible 00:29:23] over the decades or centuries even, probably.

So you have this issue of possibly pioneering research indicating a way to find out if you are being harmed or if your body is actually processing the mercury okay. And he says probably 80% of the population who have mercury fillings is okay.

Now, how big is that population? Well, the US Public Health Services stopped tallying figures, but they actually did up until 2004. How many Americans have mercury fillings and how many in their teeth? It was just pretty amazing. The last number was 181 million.

So what’s 5% to 10% of 181 million? Well, that could be up to 18 million people that he says could be seriously ill. Most of them don’t know that it’s mercury that’s doing the damage, mercury being perhaps the most toxic chemical on the planet or the most dangerous except for maybe plutonium, a non-radiation toxin.

So a lot more research needs to be done and it’s unclear. I haven’t explored how much funding the NIH is throwing at this, but a lot more research needs to be done.

DEBRA: Are you familiar with the precautionary principle? The precautionary principle, do you know that?

GREG GORDON: I may know it, but I don’t know the term.

DEBRA: It’s called the precautionary principle and it states that if something is known to be harmful that one should be cautious about using it. And people apply that as a principle in different sciences.

GREG GORDON: Common sense.

DEBRA: It’s just common sense. It just seems like that throughout the government and manufacturing and everything, we should be looking at these chemicals. It’s not a question that mercury is toxic. It’s just not a question.

But what I think is so difficult about this for regulators to make a decision or a manufacturer to make a decision – I mean, it’s easy for me to make a decision about what I’m going to allow in my body because I can do the research, I can look at an article like yours and say, “Mercury fillings cause all these illnesses. I think I’m not going to take a chance.”

But I think that other people who making decisions for the world at large or a country or something, they can look at this and they can say, “Well, here’s a population of people who may not be affected at all. And here’s a population of people who may be affected somewhat. And then there’s a smaller amount that are really going to be affected and get really, really sick.”

And instead of giving us information that says, “Okay, here are mercury fillings. Some of you are not going to be affected. And some are going to get really sick. And we know this,”why not give people that information so that there can be a choice?

I think that they’re looking at, “Well, this population over here isn’t going to get sick. And so that’s what we’re going to base it on” instead of looking into people who are going to get really sick.

GREG GORDON: And I neglected to mention that two FDA outside advisory panels were pushing the agency to do more. This is somewhat unusual to my wits and given that we’ve read so much and seen so much about how when the FDA appoints an advisory panel, it seems like a lot of folks on the panel, they have conflicts of interest or they either worked for or still work for one of the companies that has a big stake in the subject or they’ve done research at a university and have been funded by that company. That’s probably more likely.

I think the very, very direct conflicts of interest are avoided for obvious reasons. But what you find when you dig into it is that there are hidden conflicts of interest that come into play. Most of us know that the scientific world, it’s cut-throat.

Researchers are trying to get money from the NIH. They compete with each other. You really have to be in the 85th, I think, percentile (that’s what it currently is) to get any money. And if you don’t get money from the government, what’s your option? You’re going to have to turn to industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to the chemical industry, maybe it’s the dental products industry that’s funding your research. You need to put bread on the table, so you’re going to do that.

And some people do it for other reasons. I’m not saying that it’s always driven by not being able to get government money. But the point is, these panels are typically – you see exposés in the paper about this panel or that panel for the FDA, an outside panel that’s loaded up with people who have hidden conflicts of interest.

Yet here you have an FDA advisory panel that votes 15 to 7 (I said 15 to 6 in my story. It was actually 15 to 7) that they want the FDA to do more. They don’t accept the FDA’s write-up, white paper, on analyzing the health effects of mercury fillings.

Here, the FDA, its research is being spurn by its own outside advisory panel. So, the panel, that was in 2006 and then 2010. The FDA really got pushed in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health turned it around and actually does something. And then it gets shut down by HSS.

It’s, to me, startling. I’ve been here in Washington for 38 years and I don’t remember seeing many developments like this one at the FDA.

DEBRA: It seems to me like the priority is financial and that we have an FDA who, as you said at the beginning of the show, that their job is to find out what’s safe and what’s not safe and protect us and they can come up with a decision like this and then have the financial, a different agency, say, “Well, we can’t do this.” And so it all comes down to money. It doesn’t come down to health.

And I don’t see how we can create a healthy world unless health and the sustaining of the environment and those kinds of things are first.

And then, we see how to handle the finances.

GREG GORDON: That would be the idea, wouldn’t it?

DEBRA: It would be a very different world, wouldn’t it? But that’s what I apply in my own life.

GREG GORDON: When I came to Washington in 1977, Debra, it was a pretty sleepy town. Now, it’s a habiting place. There are neighborhoods after neighborhoods with these multimillion dollar homes. But you look around for industry – well, Exxon was here, but headquartered out in the Virginia suburbs. But they’re leaving on, I think, January 1st of next year.

The biggest industry in town, in this area, that’s boomed to population of four, five million people, six million (I don’t know the current population of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area), I can just tell you that it has been transformed over the last nearly four decades since I came here.

The biggest one, the biggest industry is lobbying. And while lobbyists convey a lot of valuable information, especially if there are two competing sides, both have equal access, they can make the arguments to inform and educate the member of Congress or regulatory person that they’re lobbying, one, when they have access and the other side doesn’t even know what’s going on, then the process is very tilted.

And so when you talk about toxic chemicals and changing the world, you really can’t do so, in my view, without bringing that into the discussion.

DEBRA: The lobbying?

GREG GORDON: Just the influence of the moneyed interest that you’re talking about. And that’s the manifestation of the money is the lobbying.

And these lobbyists get paid so much money. Some of them, basically, are people who just usher somebody else in. All they’re paid for is to enable that party to have access.

Going back to the FDA, when I came here, the FDA had this pristine reputation as being the premier regulator of public health and safety with respect to drugs and food products and so forth in the world. And typically, when the FDA approves something, that meant it was going to be approved quickly around the world.

Now, you look and you see that Norway and Sweden and Denmark, I believe, have all banned mercury amalgam. And there’s an international treaty called the Minamata Convention. It’s named, by the way, for a public health catastrophe that happened in the 1950s and early 60s in Japan at Minamata Bay. Along the coastline of that bay was a big chemical company and they dumped mercury along with other chemicals into the water for years and years and years.

The fish were heavily exposed to the mercury and got loaded up with the mercury. The fish-eating population surrounding the bay ate the fish. More than 1700 people died.

And so they named this treaty to try to get the nations of the world to eliminate mercury from use and to protect people everywhere from this horrible toxin.

The United States was the first country to sign it. It has prodded some action. The EU now has recommendation, I was just told yesterday, I think, phase out amalgam mercury fillings. And United States, there’s no teeth to this treaty. That’s what’s wrong with the treaty. It doesn’t have a timetable. It just says, “We agreed that we should get rid of mercury. Get rid of mercury.”

And it’s interesting because the President of the United States, Barak Obama, was a very strong advocate of getting rid of mercury during his brief time in the Senate. I think he spoke about it early in his presidency, publicly, and said, “We got to get mercury away from our children” or something like that. But yet, the FDA isn’t able to do anything because the HHS is in the way.

DEBRA: Well, I think that we need a big overhaul. We need a big overhaul in everything. I really see what the obstacles, why we continue to have toxic chemicals. The obvious question is, “If we know it’s toxic, why is it still on the market?” So many people have said, “Well, they wouldn’t sell it if it was toxic.”

There was just an article in a New York paper (I think the New York Post or something) where a woman was saying, “These people who are talking about toxics, they don’t know anything. We have government agencies that are protecting us. It would not be on the shelf if it wasn’t safe for us to use.” She actually said that. This was printed in a New York paper a month. This is still a prevalent idea. And yet, it’s just not true. It’s just not true.

GREG GORDON: Speaking of outspoken women, one of those who I interviewed is a remarkable lady named Freya Cose. She lives in suburb Western Philadelphia. She is the one who had a mercury filling put in, if I recall, by a doctor in New York who used an old formula where he actually mixed up –

Now, they come sort of premixed. But the dental industry likes to say they’re encapsulated, the mercury is encapsulated, which is debatable, at least debatable.

She had this dentist use liquid mercury where he actually mixed it in with a little powder of other metals before he put it in her mouth.

Seven days later, her big hobby in her life was going to the ballet and taking ballet lessons. She was at the ballet performance at the University of Pennsylvania. She felt a little dizzy. She walked out to her car, climbed in her car and suddenly, she saw multiple images of everything. And she sat there stunned, not knowing what was happening to her.

And finally, she figured out that if she closed one eye, she could see, so she drove herself home.

Well, this began as sort of an odyssey for her over the next year where she, really, over the next days, at the beginning, where she went on the internet, determined to find out what was happening to her because doctors were almost immediately diagnosing her with either lupus or multiple sclerosis.

And ultimately, she said at 3:20 in the morning on the fifth day as she was scouring the internet, she finds a posting by a woman in England who had written that she got a mercury filling. She had a mercury filling implanted in one of her teeth and a few days later, she got double vision. She sat there, her draw dropped and said, “Oh, my God! It might have been my mercury filling that caused this problem.”

And then she connected with mercury-free groups, groups of former mercury patients, campaigning, joining with the consumer lawyers in trying to get mercury out of dentistry. She had hers taken out. And what do you know? Her multiple sclerosis went away. She’s 73 years old now.

But one of the thing that she did along the way (which reflects her determination to do something about this) is to persuade the Philadelphia City Council to pass an ordinance requiring informed consent for all dental patients in the city, so that any patients who goes into a dental office in Philadelphia is told about the risks of mercury fillings.

DEBRA: That is so wonderful. And see, listeners, we can all do things like that. When we have this information, we can do things to make other people know about them and give other people choices so they know we’re not just walking around inadvertently, unknowingly, being poisoned and having experiences like this

Just because the government is not protecting us from these toxic chemicals doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. The information is there and we can make those decisions ourselves.

We only have just a couple of minutes left. We’ve been talking for almost an hour.

GREG GORDON: I’ve been talking a lot.

DEBRA: Yes, you have a lot of interesting things to say. So do you want to just give us some final thoughts for a couple of minutes?

GREG GORDON: Well, my big thought is that I hope to do more on this. But I’m also, right now, covering the Clinton e-mails and writing the story about the 10th anniversary of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina for our 48th page package that our paper down in Biloxi, Mississippi, is putting out.

But I hope to do more, so I hope that your listeners will plug into McClatchyDC.com and type in my name and look for stories about mercury fillings. I think there is a lot more to be done here. Without trying to take sides, I just think it’s really interesting what evolved during this rule-making process. It leaps out, there’s a strong possibility that there was some sort of influence that was wielded to persuade the Department of Health and Human Services to do what they did.

It may have been a totally pure process of cost benefit analysis and a hard decision to protect the poor. But those sorts of things are unlikely to me.

DEBRA: It seems unlikely to me as well. There could be things that – well, first of all, I think a lot of people who are poor, unless I’m mistaken, are now being covered by ObamaCare and so then would be covered by insurance. Also, people can learn to take care…

GREG GORDON: Does ObamaCare include dental insurance?

DEBRA: Yes.

GREG GORDON: It does? Okay. I did not know.

DEBRA: Yes. In fact, I have some ObamaCare Insurance myself.

GREG GORDON: So you have it?

DEBRA: I have dental care.

GREG GORDON: That’s terrific.

DEBRA: I’m waiting until I use up my huge deductible and then they’ll pay for my dental work. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I think there are things that could be done to help the poor not be poisoned because all they can afford is mercury fillings.

Thank you so much. This has been so interesting for me. Please let me know when you have another article about mercury fillings or any other toxic chemicals.

GREG GORDON: I will endeavor to do that.

DEBRA: Thank you.

GREG GORDON: It’s been a pleasure to be on your show. Thanks very much.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well.