Travel
Real Food Thanksgiving Dinner
Today we’re talking about how to make a traditional, but healthy, Thanksgiving dinner with my guest nutritionist Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD. She’s the Vice President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, on the Board of Directors of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, and received the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Integrity in Science Award in 2005. Kaayla has been a guest on The Dr.Oz Show, PBS Healing Quest, NPR’s People’s 
Pharmacy, and many other shows. Kaayla is the author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food endorsed by leading health experts, including Drs Joseph Mercola, Larry Dossey, Kilmer S. McCully, Russell Blaylock and Doris J. Rapp. Her next book is Nourishing Broth coauthored with Sally Fallon Morell. (Grand Central, Fall 2014). Kaayla is known as The Naughty Nutritionist™ because of her ability to outrageously and humorously debunk nutritional myths. You can read her blog at www.drkaayladaniel.com. Please join her on Facebook. www.facebook.com/DrKaaylaDaniel
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Real Food Thanksgiving Dinner
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD
Date of Broadcast: November 23, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lyndd Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. I’m here every day, Monday-Friday at 12 noon Eastern because we do live in a toxic world. There are many toxic chemicals, but we do not have to get sick from them if we know what they, where they are, how to avoid them and how to have much, much better, healthier, more beautiful, more delicious, more pleasing things in our lives that create health. That sounds good.
Today, we are going to be talking about Thanksgiving dinner. We are going to be talking about having a delicious Thanksgiving dinner that you make yourself from real, whole, organic food that is absolutely the most delicious thing that you’ve ever tasted.
My guest today is Kaayla Daniel, PhD. She is the Vice President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and is on the Board of Directors of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. She’s received the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Integrity in Science Award in 2005. She’s been on Dr.Oz, on PBS Healing Quest, NPR’s People’s Pharmacy and many other shows.
She’s also the author of The Whole Soy Story which is an excellent book about the dark side of America’s favorite health food. I learned a lot about soy from reading that book.
So today, we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving. Hi Kaayla.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Hi Debra.
DEBRA: How are you today?
KAAYLA DANIEL: Great. Looking forward to Thanksgiving and talking on this show.
DEBRA: Me too. First, would you tell us about your personal interest? How you got interested in all these real food, soy, all the things that you do?
What was your personal story?
KAAYLA DANIEL: Yes. Well, like many, many people, I was a seeker. I wanted to be supremely healthy and I was not. Of course, like many people, I was reading the plant-based diet and the vegan diet, so we’re healthy. And soy was the healthiest food of all.
So many newspaper is talking about soy is the miracle food and the joy of soy. I got really curious, in part because I was seeing a whole lot of vegetarians who did not look all that healthy and many of them wear eating soy. I was just very curious about that and started investigating. I thought it would be a fairly simple project, but it went on for a number of years before I finally learned everything I needed to know to write the whole soy story. Yes, there is a dark side to soy.
DEBRA: I know. This show is not going to be about soy. We can talk about that in another show because I really want to get to Thanksgiving. But I do want to say that I had my own personal experience with soy where I was eating a lot of veggie burgers, protein bars and things like that.
And also, prior to doing that, I had a thyroid problem and I was taking thyroid supplement. I was taking my thyroid supplement and then I would immediately eat protein bar, immediately. I would go back to the doctor and he would say, “You’re not taking your supplement.” I would say, “Yes I am.” He says, “No you’re not. Your blood test shows nothing. You’re not taking it.”
And then, I realized that I was eating this soy bar and there’s no reason for me to connect the two except that I was just looking around to see what might be cancelling out my thyroid medication. I stopped eating the soy bars and my thyroid supplements started working.
I then later on in life could associate all kinds of hormonal problems. When I ate soy, my hormones would be imbalanced. When I didn’t, my hormones would be fine. I just finally stopped eating soy altogether. Everything that you say in the book has happened to me. So, that’s something to consider.
But today, we’re going to be talking about Thanksgiving dinner without soy.
Tell us about the Weston Price Foundation and what it does. I went to a Weston Price conference a few years ago when I was invited to speak and that was the best food that I have ever eaten anywhere. I just want to tell everybody that usually, you go to a conference and you eat whatever the hotel prepares. And when you go to a Weston Price conference, you eat the food that they are advocating. It’s organic and it’s handmade.
We had, when I was there, handmade tortillas that were made in the traditional way. We had coconut cream that had been [inaudible 00:05:56] from Hawaii. It was the most delicious food that I had ever eaten.
So tell us about the Weston Price Foundation.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, we’re a non-profit, educational foundation based in Washington D.C. We’re advocating for real food, whole food and slow foods, particularly, as our ancestors would’ve eaten. We’re supporters of small farmers. We’re supporters of locavorism and the right to eat real food.
Sadly, we’re losing that right in many, many states. It’s becoming harder and harder to buy directly from farmers and more and more farmers are going out of business. We’re just supporting farmers and the right of consumers to get access to that real food that is so healthy for us and so good for the environment too.
It’s also non-toxic which is what we all need as you well know.
DEBRA: Right. Yes, I do know. The food that you’re talking about in the Weston Price Foundation is exactly what we all should be eating. Not only does it not have artificial sweeteners, additives, artificial colors, flavors, all those things, BPA from can linings and toxic from packaging, not only that it does not have any of those things, but those foods, those locally grown organic, grass-fed whole foods, they have the most nutrition.
And one of the things we’re really lacking that is causing us to respond so negatively to the toxic chemicals that we were exposed to is that our bodies are just undernourished. We’re eating a lot of food but we’re undernourished.
And that’s what the Weston Price Foundation is doing. It’s fighting for us to still have the right to have those traditional foods as they’re supposed to be from nature not agribusiness kind of foods that are not industrial foods, they’re natural foods.
We’re going to be talking about the basic principles of eating that way as we talk about Thanksgiving dinner. Kaayla, tell us what you’re having for Thanksgiving dinner next week.
KAAYLA DANIEL: I have a very small family so I’m going to be having a good free range chicken, vegetable sweet potatoes, plenty of butter. Of course with that chicken, the skin is going to stay on. It’s going to be a really most and delicious chicken.
And if I had a really large family, I think I’d be going for one of those heritage turkeys. They are those turkeys that get to run around in the great outdoors. They see the sun and basically, they get to hunt and peck.
Something a whole lot of people don’t realize is that chickens and turkeys are not vegetarian. They eat a whole lot of insects, grubs and dum. You should see some chickens fight over a little bit of hamburger if it comes their way. They are not vegetarians naturally.
DEBRA: Yes, I think that most animals out in the wild – I’m trying to think of a vegetarian animal. Are calves vegetarians? No, they’re eating bugs too and worms. Hmmm… interesting question.
Tell us a little more about, you mentioned butter and skin on the chicken and things. What’s the importance of eating fat?
KAAYLA DANIEL: That is a such a great question because we’ve all been mislead that fat is dangerous and we should be low fat. But Mother Nature put fat in a whole lot of tasty foods. What I have to say is, “Did Mother Nature make a mistake? Was she out to kill us?” Of course, not.
In regards to chickens or turkeys, what a whole lot of people don’t realize (and you just see it in article after article and internet blog that all talks about)…
DEBRA: Wait a minute. I have to stop you because we have to have a break. You can tell us after the break what all those internet blogs say.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Okay.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Kaayla Daniel, PhD from the Weston Price Foundation and we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner. Stay with us.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner with my guest Kaayla Daniel, PhD. She’s the vice president of The Weston Price Foundation. We’re talking about how the Weston Price principles apply to Thanksgiving dinner.
Before we go back to Kaayla who’s going to tell us something that I interrupted her about before the break, I just want to say that I now have a food blog which I’ve been wanting to have for a very long time. Today is actually the first day I’m announcing it to the general public. You can go to my website. You can go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and across the top, there’s a menu. One of those buttons is Food. Just click on that button.
I’ve got lots of Thanksgiving oriented recipes – not every dish, but I have so many cranberry recipes for how to make cranberry sauce and relishes that I actually had to write a little free ebook to get them all in because they wouldn’t fit in a blog post. That’s the first thing that you’re going to see.
That’s free and you can share it with your friends.
I also have a recipe for really delicious gluten free corn bread that you can make into corn bread stuffing (and I tell you how to do that too) and how to roast a pumpkin, how to cook beans, all kinds of things, pumpkin (there are really great pumpkin muffins. Oh, my God. You’ll love those) and a pumpkin pie recipe that has no sugar in it, but it’s sweet. It has no crust, but you don’t miss it so anyone can eat this pumpkin pie.
I just want you all to know that there’s Thanksgiving recipes on my website. If you want to take a look at those, you can. Just go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and click on Food at the menu across the top.
Okay Kaayla, back to you.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Okay. Well, we’re being delighted with blogs and articles about how to have a healthy turkey day. There is just so much misinformation out there.
Many of those writers are often registered dietitians. But right across the board, most of the articles all talk about turkey. They recommend, of course, that we don’t eat the skin. They talk about the evil saturated fat, but the fact is it’s not mostly saturated fat. Chickens and turkeys are mostly monounsaturated, 44% and about 23% for the Omega-3 and Omega 6’s. So saturated fat is comparatively low.
In fact, there’s nothing wrong with saturated fat anyway, but they’re always talking about that. They’re also recommending white meat because the fat is lower and the calories are lower. First of all, I don’t think that matters either.
But here’s the thing, there’s a whole lot more nutrition in the dark meat. There’s more iron, zinc, riboflavin, thiamine and other B vitamins and especially vitamins B6 and B12. That’s the trade-off that maybe we don’t want to make. We probably should be eating white meat and dark meat.
The most important thing might be actually that we eat the skin. Why should we eat the skin? Because of all that good collagen. That’s what we need to feed our own skin and our joints. Collagen is such an important part of a healthy whole foods diet.
DEBRA: One of my basic things about food has – I was going to say “has always been,” but it hasn’t always been because like everybody else, I started out with industrial food. I as learned more about nature, health, what my body needs and what nature provides, what I figured out was that we really should be eating all the parts of everything. And so, obviously, you can’t eat the bones. But what you do is you make broth out of the bones. So, you eat the skin. You eat the dark meat. You eat the white meat. The whole animal altogether has all the different things that are needed.
And one of the things that industrial food does is that it fractionates things so you only get bits and pieces and of what nature has to offer instead of the whole thing. So that makes sense to me and what you said about the joints.
You see, what I do is I roast the chicken. In the winter time, I roast two chickens every week on Sunday, two little chickens (because that’s enough to feed me). And then, I eat roast chicken and then the rest of the week, I put it in soup, in my salad or whatever so I have that protein that’s already there.
I roast them on the bones. I don’t buy chicken breast. I roast it on the bone with the skin. And the first thing I do when I pull it out of the oven is I just rip that hot skin off and eat it. I know some people are going to gasp when they hear it, but it feels right in my body.
KAAYLA DANIEL: The skin is so delicious. Keeping the skin on and cooking chicken that way makes it moist, it makes it delicious. There’s so much taste from that.
DEBRA: It does, it does. It does.
KAAYLA DANIEL: We should also be chewing on things like the drumstick because right along the bones, there’s all that cartilage. Like feeds like.
The cartilage helps feed our bones.
I’m doing a new book which is coming out next year which will be called Nourishing Broth, I learned about all these research on cartilage that actually indicates it’s wonderful for balancing out our autoimmune system, modulating the immune system, preventing autoimmune disorders, preventing infectious diseases, even some history of healing cancer for example.
So, we don’t want to ignore those parts of the animals. We certainly don’t want to think that they’re not healthy for us because they are.
DEBRA: I totally agree. Do you eat stuffing with your turkey when you [inaudible 00:20:28]?
KAAYLA DANIEL: That can be wonderful. Of course, that fat is what gives all the flavoring to it. Many people will probably be looking at gluten-free stuffing this Thanksgiving because more and more people are discovering that gluten is a problem for them. The good news about the gluten free bread that’s in stuffing is with all those other flavorings in it, it’s going to actually taste good.
DEBRA: It’s going to taste better that it tastes by itself.
We need to go to a break again. But when we come back, I want to talk about gluten free bread and stuffing more. I have some things to say about gluten-free.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Kaayla Daniel, Vice President of Weston Price Foundation.
We’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll be back and talk about stuffing.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner with my guest, nutritionist, Kaayla Daniel, Vice President of the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can visit Dr. Daniel’s blog at DrKaaylaDaniel.com. Her name is spelled K-A-A-Y-L-A, DrKaaylaDaniel.com.
We’re going to be talking about gluten free now. She’s got an article, the first blog post on the page today is about how soy can interfere with things being gluten-free and the healing of your body. If you want to read about that, you can go to her website, DrKaaylaDaniel.com.
Here’s what I want to say about gluten free (and I want to hear what you have to say about gluten free too, Kaayla). My objection to gluten free – first of all, I’m gluten free. There have been time periods in my life when I went off gluten and I really struggled with it. I’ve been not eating gluten at all. I haven’t had one morsel, one crumb of gluten since about June, I think, of this year. I haven’t struggled with it at all because I have wonderful other things to eat that I’m not sitting there saying, “Oh, I can’t eat this. I can’t eat that.” I have cookies to eat made out of different things.
But the problem that I have with most of the gluten free products that are on the market is that they’re made up of all kinds of industrially processed ingredients. So there may be no gluten in it, but there are all these starches. When I eat all those gluten free products, it just sends my blood sugar out of the roof.
My philosophy about gluten free is that if we’re eating natural, whole foods, organic (the kind of real foods that we’re talking about), that we can just eliminate whatever grains we want to eliminate and we can still use whatever ingredients were left to put together to make anything.
I use a lot of almond flour, but you can also use coconut flour and all these different things. I make really great muffins. On my food blog, I’m starting to post all these gluten-free things that I’m learning to make from whole real foods instead of going to a store and buying a package of industrial ingredients that are labeled gluten free.
KAAYLA DANIEL: I’m certainly with you on that Debra. I think we can make some really delicious gluten free products ourselves at home with, as you said, almond flour, coconut flour and so many other options.
And the truth is what we’re finding in the stores besides the fact that there’s often soy in those products, there’s a whole lot of other inferior ingredients. It’s overpriced and not really that healthy for us.
In some ways for many people, just removing that type of food from our plates is healthy too rather than to seek all these substitutes that never taste as good and leave us craving for the real thing.
DEBRA: I agree with that too. I don’t even try to make something that resembles wheat bread because I love wheat bread. Nothing is going to substitute for that. But I find that I can eat other things that I enjoy just as much. I agree with you on that point, that whole real foods are just so delicious that I don’t even miss anything on those gluten foods. The gluten-free package foods just don’t taste that good. They taste like cardboard to me. In addition, they’re not really healthy.
KAAYLA DANIEL: They really don’t. So many of my clients, when they’re trying to go gluten free, they keep trying to substitute. They keep trying to make bread, muffins, pasta and all of those things. You’re just never going to be happy.
DEBRA: Yes. It’s just not the same. But if we appreciate the foods for what they are and find something else to enjoy, that’s really what’s been successful for me. Let’s see. What else is on the table?
KAAYLA DANIEL: In terms of that chicken or turkey, in terms of the stuffing, as I’ve already mentioned, even if you’re using a gluten-free bread in there with all of the broth, the fat and the other flavors and spices, it’s going to be moist and it’s going to be delicious.
Jenny Mcgruther who does the outstanding blog, Nourished Kitchen, she has a roast turkey that involves things like lemon and onions in the cavity.
Of course, that’s gluten-free and giving it a powerfully, wonderful flavor.
She has a tip that I think is really great for a Thanksgiving dinner when we’re using a heritage turkey or heritage hen. They need to be cooked very slowly for a long, long time at a low temperature. That’s what’s get them really, really moist and juicy because sometimes these leaner chickens and turkeys can end up very dry.
And of course, so many people, even if they’re using supermarket chickens, they end up very dry. Dryness is often a problem. The answer is long, long cooking.
DEBRA: I have a friend who – she doesn’t cook heritage turkeys, but the way she cooks turkey (just the regular organic turkey or natural turkey) is that she puts it in the oven when she goes to sleep at 250 degrees and it stays there all night. When she wakes up in the morning and takes it out, it’s falling off the bone. She says that that is her favorite way to cook turkey.
KAAYLA DANIEL: That is so delicious and what a wonderful way. Of course, the food police get very alarmed at the idea of cooking at such a low temperature, but we’re starting off with really healthy, clean chickens and turkeys that are not likely to contaminate us.
DEBRA: Yes. Okay, so what else do we have? Green Bean Casserole. What can we do with that?
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, as I recall from way, way back, isn’t that kind of thing often made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and other…
DEBRA: Yes. Cornstarch and french fried onions on top. It’s just a lot of package foods. I have found that I really like – I love Green Bean Casserole, but I don’t want to eat all that garbage. I’ve taken to making green beans in cream sauce with onions and mushrooms. It doesn’t taste exactly the same because it’s not all goopy like cream of mushroom soup is, but it’s delicious.
And it’s very easy to make. I can get grass-fed cream at my natural food store. I just take the green beans. I get frozen organic green beans and I put them in a skillet. I’ll heat them [inaudible 00:34:37].
I’m going to have to tell the story after the break. I’m so interested in talking about this subject that I’m not even watching the time.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, we’re talking about Thanksgiving dinner with my guest nutritionist Kaayla Daniel PhD. She is the Vice President of the Weston Price Foundation.
Before the break, I was in the middle of giving instructions on how to make Creamy Green Beans instead of Green Bean Casserole. It’s actually very simple. All you do is sauté some onions, sauté mushrooms in butter and sauté your green beans until they’re all cooked. And then, you pour in a little cream (like heavy whipping cream) – not too much, just enough to not even cover them. You just let the cream cook down and it thickens into cream sauce.
You don’t need to put any thickener or anything in it. The cream will do it by itself. It’s absolutely delicious and a wonderful substitute for Green Bean Casserole.
Kaayla, I think we should talk about dessert. What’s your favorite Thanksgiving dessert?
KAAYLA DANIEL: I’m a big fan of gingerbread with lots of whip cream.
DEBRA: I love gingerbread.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Most people for Thanksgiving, they’re looking for pie. That’s a very important thing to make a healthy version of particularly the crust.
Now, a traditional crust is flaky and wonderful will involve lard. Many people are surprised to find out that lard is a very healthy fat, mostly a monounsaturated fat. And so, it’s coming from pastured pigs, it’s rich in vitamin D and very good for us. It makes a wonderful crust.
But when people go by a ready-made refrigerated one from one of the big food manufacturers, what they’re going to get instead, probably partially hydrogenated lard which is not a good thing (spoiling the good fat). And besides that, there’s going to be enriched flour with a whole lot of synthetic vitamins put in as well as water preservatives and even things like citric acid, yellow dye no. 5, and red dye no. 4. Why should these be in a pie crust? I’m not sure, but they are. So it’s really a good plan to make our own, healthy pie crust.
DEBRA: It’s actually pretty easy to make pie crust. If people are eating wheat, it’s very easy. I found it’s a little more difficult to make pie crust out of other flours, but that’s something that I’m experimenting with. That’s going to be coming up on the food blog.
I just want to say again that you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Up at the top, there is the main navigation menu. Click on Food. And I do have a Pumpkin Pie recipe with no sugar. It’s very sweet just by itself and it has no crust. So, that’s the way that people – everybody that I’ve given this to loves it. I put whip cream and freshly grated nutmeg on top and it’s fabulous.
And again, I also want to mention that cranberry sauce is a big thing. Everybody has cranberry sauce on their table. And yet cranberry sauce has pesticides and BPA from the can. Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor. Endocrine disruptors disrupt every part of your body because it’s about the hormones. Hormones go and communicate with all your different body parts, doing basic things like whether you gain or lose weight. You can get that from your Thanksgiving dinner just by eating canned food because of the hormone disruptors of Bisphenol A in the can lining.
And it’s also sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Tell us about high fructose corn syrup.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Well, the short answer is you don’t want it.
DEBRA: Yes.
KAAYLA DANIEL: It’s much worse than regular fructose. Some people even have too much fructose. We’re not designed for these things.
And among the other problems with high fructose corn syrup, there’s actually a lot of mercury in it. Talk about toxic metal we don’t want.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t know that. Wow! That’s not something you want to eat for Thanksgiving dinner either.
So, I’ve put together some recipes that I have been developing over the years for a cranberry sauce and cranberry relish, put them in a free ebook (which you can pick up there, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and then click on Food). It will take you to my new food blog. You can get that free list of cranberry sauce and relish.
I just want to tell you how easy it is to make cranberry sauce, just plain old cranberry sauce. You just boil some water, you throw in some cranberries, you bring the water back to a boil. And then, you boil it until the cranberries pop which is about two minutes.
And then, you stir in whatever sweetener you want. You could use honey. You could use coconut sugar. You could use evaporated cane juice, anything you want to use. Or you could use sweet fruits. You could use apples, you could use apple juice. There are so many ways to sweetened cranberries.
And then, you just let it cool off. And as it cools off, it gels by itself. There is no mystery. It’s one of the easiest things to make, cranberry sauce. So, there’s really no reason why you should be using cranberry sauce.
And then, you can put anything you else you want in there like oranges and walnuts. Ah, I love cranberry sauce.
And you can make your own relish. You can just get raw cranberries, put them through the food processor, chop them up, pour a little raw honey on it and you’ve got raw cranberry relish. And you can add all kinds of things to that too.
So, for me, cranberry sauce and cranberry relish is a way to be really creative at Thanksgiving. This is one of my favorite things to make.
What else would you like to say that we haven’t said? We’re almost at the end of the hour, but we still have a few more minutes that we could talk.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Very briefly, the Sweet Potato Casseroles that so many people make with marshmallows – marshmallows, typically if you’re lucky, there’s sugar in there. It’s more likely going to be corn syrup and factory farm gelatin and all sorts of artificial flavorings. So, that’s definitely something I would want to avoid. Just to point out that people who want to…
DEBRA: But sweet potatoes are good for you.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Oh, yes.
DEBRA: Sweet potatoes themselves, it’s just all the sweet stuff that they put on top. See, here’s another opportunity where you could just start with the sweet potatoes. And if you roast them in the oven, just put them on a baking sheet and leave them in the oven at 350 degrees or 400 degrees and just leave then in the over until they get really, really soft and they start bubbling sugar out of it (you’ll see these bubbles of sugar), they get really sweet. You don’t need the marshmallow. You don’t need those things. And I just sprinkle nuts on top, put a lot of butter on it. It’s so much better than those marshmallows.
KAAYLA DANIEL: And so true with any of the vegetables. If there are people wanting to keep things really simple, plenty of butter makes everything better.
DEBRA: I agree.
KAAYLA DANIEL: It also allows us to get the full benefit of the beta-carotene converting it to vitamin A. That’s where a lot of nutrition in sweet potatoes comes from.
DEBRA: Good! So the butter on the sweet potato actually helps the nutrition in the sweet potato?
KAAYLA DANIEL: Yes it does.
DEBRA: Wow, I didn’t know that.
KAAYLA DANIEL: It not only makes everything taste better, but we get more value from the beta carotene because we are able to convert it with the fat added to true vitamin A.
DEBRA: I’m always in favor of putting butter on everything myself.
I once read a book (I forgot what the title was), it was talking about how we know what’s good for us to eat. I noticed that for myself. My body feels good when I eat certain foods and butter is one of them.
So to have some sciences tell me that butter is not good for me doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t listen to science. Science proves things. But we also have our own intuitive ability to know that our taste buds are drawn to eating foods that our bodies need that has the nutrition that our bodies need. I think we should eat what taste good to us.
KAAYLA DANIEL: I think so. I feel really sorry for a whole lot of vegetarians who are going to have Tofurky this Thanksgiving.
DEBRA: I agree with you.
KAAYLA DANIEL: Although the name is so wonderful and laughter is good medicine, but what a funny name. I mean, brilliant marketing.
But what a whole lot don’t realize is the main problem with Tofurky is not the tofu; it’s the soy in there. It’s that a huge part of it is wheat gluten.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought it was mostly soy.
Well, see? For me, I was a vegetarian for nine years. At the end of the nine years, I was not healthier. I ate some meat and I went, “Ah, I need to be eating meat.” It really made a difference.
The problem that I have with vegetarian is the same problem that I have with gluten free which is if people say, “I want to be a vegetarian” or “I want to be gluten free” and so they go buy a vegetarian product or gluten-free product and then what they’re eating is industrial food. I think it’s wonderful to eat a lot of vegetables. I think it’s wonderful to eat gluten-free. But when you stop eating real food and you go buy a gluten-free product in a box or a can or a vegetarian product in a box or a can, then you’re not eating real food anymore.
KAAYLA DANIEL: That’s very true. When you’re trying to approximate the flavors of real food, our manufacturers tend to use a whole lot of MSG and other artificial flavorings. And now, the obsession for low salt, they’re using salt substitute that are genuine health hazards. The real thing is always so much better for us.
DEBRA: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you again because we actually have reached the end of the show. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest has been Dr. Kaayla Daniel. You can go to her website DrKaaylaDaniel.com. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Is Down Contaminated With Toxic Chemicals?
Question from comforters
My mother will not use any down comforters because she fears the ducks/geese may have been contaminated from sources; ex. radiation from Japan’s disaster, etc. Is there any way to assure her these products are safe to use?
Debra’s Answer
I have never seen any reports on toxic chemical exposure from goose or duck down, however, down and feathers are porous materials, which means they can easily absorb anything they come in contact with. So this is one of those cases where I can’t guarantee they were not exposed to anything, but there have been no reports that I know of regarding toxic exposures from this source.
Spray Paint
Question from Tanya
Is spray paint toxic after it dries and the smell is gone?
Debra’s Answer
I would need to look at the ingredients of any specific product. The greatest risk is inhaling the product while you spray. If you do use it, I would certainly use a painter’s mask when applying. The solvents will eventually evaporate off once it’s fully cured.
Odor can be an indicator of toxicity but it is not entirely reliable.
Polyester and Nylon in Socks
Question from Stephanie
All the socks I like to workout in have either polyester or nylon included in them. I know you can’t wash the formaldehyde out of polyester. Is that also true of nylon? Do you, or readers, know of a good, thin sock to run and/or workout in?
Debra’s Answer
First I want to clear up about formaldehyde in polyester.
This is true only on woven polyester fabrics. It is from a formaldehyde-based resin applied to keep the fabric from wrinkling.
Pumpkin Hummus
Hummus is an ancient Middle Eastern mash, traditionally made with garbanzo beans, ground sesame seeds and olive oil.
Today many other ingredients are added to hummus to give a variety of flavors to this staple food.
The other day I made some roast carnival squash and had some cooked garbanzo beans, and thought I would try the two together. Delicious! Autumn in a bowl.
Here’s how I made it.
Of course, all ingredients should be organically-grown.
- 1 cup cooked garbanzo beans
- 1/2 cup roasted carnival squash, or other winter squash
- 1 tablespoon tahini
- 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
- ground ginger
- raw walnuts, chopped
- raw honey
- natural salt
- Place the garbanzo beans, roasted squash, tahini and garlic in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth.
- Place the mixture in a serving bowl, sprinkle with chopped walnuts, and drizzle with raw honey.
- Sprinkle a pinch of ground ginger on top (or more to taste).
I just ate this with a fork, but I think cucumbers or celery would be great, or a gluten-free cracker.
Ecos Paints
Question from Joe
Debra, Are you familiar with ecos paints? They are a South Carolina paint company that produces paints that they claim are water based, VOC Free paint. Solvent-free, Glycol-free, Eco-friendly, Allergy-safe finishes. Totally free of all pesticides, herbicides and toxins.
I recently purchased some from painting my basement floor and was holding off while i do more research. Do they seem as safe as the ones you are familiar with?
Thanks,
Joe
Debra’s Answer
According to their description, these paints are BETTER than most of the paints I’m familiar with that come in a can.
Can’t wait to try them.
Readers, any experience with these?
The Dangers of Antimicrobials and How to Choose Products Without Them
My guest today is Larry Plesent, Founder of Vermont Soap. We’re going to talk about why you shouldn’t use toxic antimicrobials, which products contain them and where you can find antimicrobial-free alternatives, and some toxic free ways to kill germs. Vermont Soap makes “100% natural and non-toxic alternatives to the chemical based personal care products now in general use, including; handmade bar soaps for sensitive skin, anti-aging products, 100% natural shower gels, castile liquid soaps and non-toxic cleaners. Most products made by Vermont Soap are certified to USDA organic standards.” Larry is also a writer,philosopher, restaurateur and farmer. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/vermont-soap
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Dangers of Antimicrobials and How to Choose Products Without Them
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Plesent
Date of Broadcast: November 14, 2013
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 we need to talk about that because there are a lot of toxic chemicals out there.
There are a lot of chemicals that can harm our health and well-being, that can affect how we think, and how we feel, as well as how our body operates. There are chemicals that can make us fat, chemicals that affect our sexual drive and performance, and chemicals that do all kinds of things to our bodies.
And in fact, when I was writing my latest book, Toxic-Free, I researched all the health effects of toxic chemicals. Again, I’ve been researching them for more than 30 years. And I found that every single illness or symptom can now be associated with exposure to toxic chemicals. There are studies which show this.
And so, it’s not just about one body system. Every single body system in your body is being affected by toxic chemicals. And some chemicals are affecting more than one body system.
It’s something we really need to know about. And we really need to know how to protect ourselves from those exposures or eliminate them.
So today is Thursday, November 14th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida on a beautiful autumn day. And today, we’re going to talk about antimicrobials.
You’ve probably seen the word antimicrobial on all kinds of products now—everything from shoes, to toilet seats, to cutting boards. And we’re particularly going to talk about antimicrobials as a group of chemicals and how they affect your body.
But we’re also specifically going to talk about how we can eliminate the need for using antimicrobials to wash our hands.
My guest today is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap. Larry has been on before. And the reason why I asked him to come on again is because I received an e-mail from him a few weeks ago where he said, “Recently, a customer asked if our castile soap was antibacterial, which led us to dig into the science of getting your hands clean. And the results may surprise you.”
And at the same time, I went to a webinar where the whole webinar was on antibacterial. This question comes up so much on my Green Living Q&A blog. “What about this antibacterial and what about that antibacterial?” So, I thought it’s time to do a show on antibacterials.
Hi Larry. How are you?
LARRY PLESENT: Hi, Debra. Thanks for having me back again.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.
LARRY PLESENT: [inaudible 02:56]
DEBRA: We just need to do a little test because I’m not understanding you on your phone. So could you talk right into the phone?
LARRY PLESENT: Okay, can you hear me clearly now?
DEBRA: That’s a little better, better than before.
LARRY PLESENT: A little better? Okay.
DEBRA: That’s even better.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s even better, all right. I’ll talk very near into my telephone.
DEBRA: Talk boldly into your telephone.
LARRY PLESENT: Thank you! Thanks for having me on.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I know that you told us your story before. But why don’t you tell us your story again of how you came to be interested in toxic chemicals and how you came to have a soap company?
LARRY PLESENT: I’ll give you the cliff notes. I was a window cleaner [inaudible 03:45]. I was a window cleaner. I jumped off buildings with a safety line. And my life [inaudible 03:51] Spidey, like Spiderman. And we made our own cleaning chemicals to clean buildings. And we were doing commercial work primarily.
These were just common cleaning chemicals that came right out of the supermarket, every one of them. And I got very, very, very sick. And what people used to call multiple-chemical sensitivity, what I like to refer to as “having a reactive body.” I became highly reactive to pretty much everything that was in that window cleaning mix which included fake color, fake scent, methanol and detergents.
So, rather than be depressed about it, I took action. And I started a non-toxic soap company. We make a wide variety of products now, including non-toxic cleaners, pet products, oral care, anti-aging.
We’re actually going to be releasing very, very soon (we’re working on the labels for) some new sanitizer sprays which are organic ethanol-based, organic alcohol and essential oils.
DEBRA: Oh, great! Great! I really think that would be a really needed product.
LARRY PLESENT: I agree. Our first in the series, our first sanitizing spray, once we got our Homeland Security-cleared license to work with cosmetic alcohol—which actually was quite a process.
DEBRA: Wow!
LARRY PLESENT: Yeah! It wasn’t easy. It took us over a year.
So, the first product we did was toothbrush sanitizer. I wanted to illustrate that there are over a trillion germs crawling around on your toothbrush right now. And that’s not good. And these aren’t good, happy germs. These are the germs that cause tooth decay and gum disease. And you’ve been working really hard to clean them off, so we need to stop re-inoculating ourselves.
So, the first step to regaining the health of your gums is to sanitize your toothbrush.
Now, alcohol is nature’s sanitizer. Alcohol and soap and water are really all that you will ever need. The reason I like alcohol is that it evaporates off. And if you’re highly asthmatic or reactive, you’re going to have issues with that. So open a window or go outside when you do it. We don’t want you getting alcohol sensitive through over-exposure when you’re in a reactive state. I like alcohol.
DEBRA: I’m just going to add something here because I know some people will hear the word alcohol, and they’ll say, “Oh, no, no. No, not alcohol.” But there’s a difference between alcohol like in isopropyl rubbing alcohol and the alcohol that you’re talking about, correct?
LARRY PLESENT: Oh, boy! Let’s talk about alcohol.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about alcohol for a minute. Go ahead and tell us.
LARRY PLESENT: Okay, okay. In hand sanitizers, alcohol, as you know, is a liquid. Hand sanitizers are a gel. And I discovered that the commonly used gelling agent for alcohol—there are very few things that will gel alcohol when it’s at 64.5%– 62.5% or better of that which is what you need to make a germ-killing sanitizing or disinfecting claim. So, you have to have a product that’s mostly alcohol.
Now, the thing that gels it up is something called carbomer. And I found time and time again in my tests on our focus groups that carbomer dried people’s hands. And they didn’t like it. So, right there, it gives alcohol-based sanitizers a bad name.
So, we looked at that and said, “Wait a minute. We’ll make little spray bottles, little handy sprays you could keep, you could carry, tie around in your pack or your bag. And then, you can quickly sanitize your hands, rubbing around in 20 seconds or so.
You kill the germs and it’s evaporated. And you’re not all dried out as you would from the carbomer.” So, you greatly reduce reactivity. I’m not going to say none.
Now, let’s talk about alcohol. In order for alcohol to be—not drinking alcohol. Drinking alcohol is taxed at 90%, first of all. And the cosmetic alcohol or non-drinking alcohol is taxed at a much lower rate, probably state sales tax. I don’t want to get into it. It would be different everywhere.
But in order for something to be non-drinking, it has to be poison or something. It has to smell bad and make the air be bittering.
So, typically, you would use what are called bittering agents. And the commercial product is called bitterant. You can look it up.
I’m unable to find anything negative about it. But certainly, the internet wasn’t able to know anything about bitterants—other than if you are artificial scent sensitive. If you don’t like artificial fragrances, we stay away from that.
The other thing […], methanol can be used in low-grade rubbing alcohol. Rubbing alcohol will be immediately suspicious, especially the cheap ones you get on sale.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. It’s a good place to take a break. We’ll be right back. And we’ll talk more about antimicrobials and their ingredients.
This is Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Mnd my guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap. And you can go to his website at VermontSoap.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap. And that’s VermontSoap.com. And we’re talking about antimicrobials and safe personal care products that are good for you and don’t have these toxic chemicals in them.
Larry, I was just, during the break, looking at—I happen to have a bottle of your toothbrush sanitizer here. It smells really good.
I really like it. It says certified organic alcohol.
And I know that isopropyl alcohol, which is probably the kinds that’s used in most hand sanitizers, is a petroleum product. And so I’ve been telling people for years that instead of using that distilled alcohol from petroleum, that they should just use vodka.
At least the vodka is from a natural source—much more expensive.
But now, tell us, you started with—
LARRY PLESENT: Hold on now. Your vodka is 40%. And to make a germ-killing claim, it needs, it needs to have over 62.5%.
DEBRA: Oh, good point.
LARRY PLESENT: But maybe if you use something stronger, probably a 60% vodka or something a little stronger, 80% vodka, that would certainly kill [inaudible 11:19].
DEBRA: Oh, great! That’s really good to know. So then your alcohol would be certified organic alcohol. It certainly wouldn’t be made from petroleum because you can’t certify that to be organic.
LARRY PLESENT: There are two sources of this. It’s from the Brazilian sugar cane, which is fermenting the alcohol. There’s a whole industry built around that. And some of it is from midwest [grains]. And we traced that, that there’s absolutely no gluten or wheat residue of any kind in it. We made absolutely sure that was [inaudible 11:58]. Our operations manager is gluten intolerant. And so, it was a top priority for her [inaudible 12:04].
DEBRA: That’s very good. So that’s very different. This certified organic gluten-free, natural-based alcohol is very different from what you think of as the alcohol they put on a swab in the doctor’s office for when you get a shot or if you use isopropyl alcohol that you buy for a dollar for a bottle in the drug store. Even though they’re both called alcohol, they are two very, very, very different things.
LARRY PLESENT: I gave a bottle [inaudible 12:45] back when we had a video rental (you know, a CD rental, or DVD). And they said, “Hey, do you have anything that we can use to clean these DVDs coming back from the rental?” So I said, “Well, all I have is this toothbrush sanitizer. Try that.”
And I got a cryptic call from the manager of the place who wanted to know why was it that our toothbrush sanitizer cleaned those DVDs better than anything else. It’s because the properties of the ethanol were different from any of the alcohol that they had been using previously.
Of course, I didn’t tell him that. I said, “Oh, you just have to keep buying it, I guess.”
DEBRA: So, you could also use it as a cleaner for anything else, anything else you want to sanitize?
LARRY PLESENT: Yeah, to really clean and sanitize, yeah, you absolutely can. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing. With a slight adjustment to essential oils, we’re coming out with additional sprays that are being marketed for that. We have the product we were calling universal sanitizers. We’re thinking galaxies and other I don’t know. But we’re working on it. It’s coming soon.
Sign up for our e-blast, so that you’ll be right on top. In the meantime, the toothbrush sanitizer works pretty good.
DEBRA: Absolutely! Llisteners, you should go to VermontSoap.com and sign up for their newsletter because they send out interesting things. And whenever they make something new, you’ll find out about it if you’re on their newsletter mailing list.
So, let’s talk about triclosan.
LARRY PLESENT: Triclosan. See, you’re right there. But I want to give a little background as part of talking about triclosan because we’re of one mind here, Debra.
What does the word “antimicrobial” mean?
DEBRA: Oh, yeah. Let’s talk about that.
LARRY PLESENT: We’ve got to do that because that’s how we lead into triclosan.
So, antimicrobial has a legal definition. There is an FDA legal definition. It’s called the 30-second kill rate. And it means that within 30 seconds, 99.999% of all germs (nearly 100% kill rate) will occur—within 30 seconds. Now, there are no natural products on earth that can match that.
However, according to the Harvard Review, they’ve done some studying by an FDA panel in 2005, if you wash your hands with, hey, pure natural soap and water for 30 seconds, you will kill 99.99% of all germs—not enough to make an antimicrobial claim. So, you get where we’re going.
So, soap and water, the message is—your grandmother was right—put alcohol in the cut, and use lots of soap and water.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m a member of Toastmasters. In fact, this weekend, I’m going to a Toastmasters Conference to get the highest award of Distinguished Toastmasters. And that’s a big deal for me.
What I wanted to say is that at a Toastmasters’ meeting, one of our members was a registered nurse. And we get all kinds of speeches on all kinds of subjects at Toastmasters. And she gave a 5-minute speech on how to wash your hands. And she gave us all handouts about exactly—and she had us sing the alphabet song.
LARRY PLESENT: Oh, you didn’t do happy birthday. You did the alphabet song.
DEBRA: No, we didn’t do happy birthday. We did the alphabet song. And that you really need to wash your hands for that 30 seconds, or whatever it is, because it’s the rubbing action, it’s the friction, that does the job as much as the soap. You need to have the soap, but you need to combine it with the friction. And if you do that, that’s what doctors do in hospitals. They’re washing their hands with this soap and friction.
LARRY PLESENT: I’ll answer that. The foamy action acts upon the cell membranes of the bacteria. And so there, you’re making sure that the soap is being worked into the bacteria and having enough time to actually kill it.
DEBRA: I think it’s very interesting. There are so many things. There was a big shift back in the ‘50s where, suddenly, everybody thought, “We need to use all these toxic chemicals.” Prior to that, people were disinfecting their hands without triclosan.
We need to take a break again.
LARRY PLESENT: And then, we’ll talk more about that dangerous drug.
DEBRA: Yes, we will! You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap. And that’s VermontSoap.com.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap. They’re at VermontSoap.com. And we’re talking about antimicrobials.
So Larry, can I tell our listeners what the health effects are of triclosan now?
LARRY PLESENT: Let’s talk about it. Do you want to start or would you like me to?
DEBRA: Let me start, and then you can fill in.
LARRY PLESENT: You got it! [inaudible 18:18]
DEBRA: So, this is the latest that I got from a webinar that I attended on antibacterials.
So, what triclosan is is what’s called an endocrine disruptor. And the endocrine system communicates all parts of the body via hormones. And one of the most important one is your thyroid gland. It sends thyroid hormones all over your body to tell your body what to do.
And triclosan blocks your thyroid function. It alters metabolism and makes it difficult for the thyroid hormones to go through your body and communicate. It also increases the action of estrogen, another hormone, so you get more estrogen than you need. And it blocks testosterone, so there is less testosterone and less sperm production. Those are the major things that they brought up in this webinar.
So Larry, you tell us whatever else you know.
LARRY PLESENT: I’m way more excited [inaudible 19:28] not being able to reproduce, I’m buying a lot of shoes. That was a joke, was it? Now, you got it.
Okay, those things are bad, but I’m afraid of triclosan for reasons way more serious than that.
DEBRA: Okay, tell me.
LARRY PLESENT: And here it is. I got a call from a guy looking to reach out. And he had gone as an adult into an autistic feud where he actually became autistic. And the only thing he had changed in his life was that he had changed his underarm deodorant. He had stopped using it because of a comment his son made. The man was suicidal at that time. And his son said, “Gee, pop. How can you use that stuff? It makes me all sad and stuff.” And he said, “It makes you all sad? Well, I’m all depressed. And I’m showing all these autistic symptoms.”
So, obviously, he was extra sensitive. He stopped using that underarm deodorant, and it cleared up. He then started using it.
After 10 days, he started using it again. He went back into an autistic feud, if you will, sitting and rocking in front of the TV. He stopped using it, it went away again.
That’s when he called me to see if I could help him identify what it was in that product that caused him to have that reaction.
And I learned to research that that product (which had been around a long time) had recently reformulated using triclosan as an added ingredient. Obviously, he was highly sensitive to it. That’s a true story.
And I would say triclosan also is only one carbon atom, one methyl group away from Agent Orange defolient. Agent Orange, I had watched some vets come down and die a horrible death as a result of exposure to Agent Orange. This product is one carbon atom away from it. EU considers it highly suspect. And I know it’s considering banning it all together.
And you’re absolutely right. When it’s mixed with something, it creates dioxin. Do you remember what that is, Debra?
DEBRA: I don’t remember when it’s mixed with something, but I was—
LARRY PLESENT: I have a note here. It just says it can react with other chemicals to form dioxin and chloroform. That’s all I know on my notes here.
DEBRA: It’s just that it’s only this one little link away from dioxin.
Anyway, I want you to tell our listeners some other places besides disinfecting hand soap where they might find triclosan because it’s really something that you want to be aware of and stay away from.
So, it’s in hand soap. It’s in lotion, mouthwash, detergent, shampoo. It’s in clothing to reduce odors. So they have triclosan in socks and things like that. And your skin can absorb it very, very easily. It absorbs it immediately. It’s in toothpaste, cosmetics, kitchen supplies (like I mentioned before, chopping boards), in furniture, toys, school supplies, sports equipment, and much, much more.
Now, here’s the good news.
LARRY PLESENT: And there’s one more, and it’s the first place I would look. If anybody listening or finding us on the web has a plug-in air freshener of any kind that makes an antimicrobial claim, please get rid of it and treat the product as a toxic waste.
Please don’t do that particularly in children’s room. Plug-in air fresheners or plug-in germ-killers in children’s rooms are a really bad idea. Please don’t do that.
DEBRA: I totally agree. Now, here’s the good news. It’s required by law, it’s regulated by the FDA as an over-the-counter drug, triclosan is. And so it must be listed on the label.
So, if you’re buying any of those kinds of products that I just listed, look at the label and see if it says triclosan. And if it says triclosan, don’t buy it.
Sometimes, it’s getting used so ubiquitously in some products. I got an e-mail from a woman who was trying a buy a toilet seat.
And every single one of them in the store had triclosan in it.
LARRY PLESENT: As far as that goes, there’s a human issue there. There’s an epidemic of staphs in human population. And it can be spread by toilet seats. So there might be an advantage to that.
DEBRA: Let me say this. I think that there’s way too much attention on antimicrobials and disinfectants and all of these things.
It’s like people think we need to use these toxic chemicals because, otherwise, we’ll get sick.
But here’s the thing. A lot of these disinfectants harm your immune system. And the best defense that you can have from flu, viruses, or any of these things, the best defense you can have is a strong immune system.
LARRY PLESENT: Thank you for saying that.
DEBRA: Larry and I both went through this thing of having multiple chemical sensitivities. And we both recovered from that.
And that’s an immune system thing. It’s a thing where your immune system breaks down from chemical exposure.
And so, what you want to do, part of the survival in today’s toxic world, is to boost your immune system—not to kill all the germs in sight with chemicals, but to boost your immune system, so that you could be walking through a world with a lot of germs, and your immune system will know what to do with them.
So, that’s I think a better solution than using triclosan or taking flu shots.
And we have another break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with my guest, Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap, which is at VermontSoap.com. Stay with us!
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And if you’ve been listening to that last commercial over and over and over again, listening to my show every day, about the water filter, I just want to let you know that that company is running a special right now until November 22nd. And there’s a discount on top of their sale prices especially for my readers and listeners—just for you guys.
So, if you’ve been wanting to buy one of those water filters, the kind that I have in my own home—and I even took out my old water filter and put in a new one—if you want to buy one of those water filters, then this is a great time. And it would also make a great gift. You need to have pure water in order to remove the toxic chemicals from your body.
I’m about to put up a post on one of my blogs after the show that talks about what’s in bottled water—and and you don’t want to drink it. So, get yourself a water filter.
Okay, Larry, do you have a water filter?
LARRY PLESENT: No, I live on a mountaintop. And it’s beautiful.
DEBRA: That’s right, so you don’t need it. Lucky you!
LARRY PLESENT: I actually use carbon filter with some minerals in it, but I’m okay.
DEBRA: So now, I want to go back to the e-mail that you sent out originally, the one that got me to get you on the show. And it says, “Here’s the big question. Which product cleans your hands better—plain soap or antibacterial soap?”
“First of all, the labels on plain soap may not say antibacterial, but they eliminate germs just as well as those soaps that are antibacterial—sometimes, even better. In fact, the FDA even stated”—the FDA statement—“that antibacterial soaps show no evidence that they prevent infections more effectively than plain soap.”
And I’ve read that. I’ve been reading that for years.
LARRY PLESENT: Plain soap is not [inaudible 28:15].
DEBRA: Yes! So, tell us about your soaps because it is getting harder to find. And I have some of your soaps. They’re just lovely soaps.
LARRY PLESENT: You are already addicted, so you’re a customer for life. And by that, I mean that if you or somebody that you care about has sensitive skin—and this can come from everything, genetics or I don’t know—we make products for people who have sensitive skin.
We make products for people who have reactive bodies, who cannot use the common chemicals. Some people are detergent-sensitive. They say, “Every time I use shampoo, I itch all over… every time I do my laundry, I itch all over.” This is your body saying, “Hello! Get these molecules away from me. I cannot tolerate them.” And it’s important, so listen.
And there are alternatives out there. A lot of the alternatives are, “Okay, we have a different kind of detergent, and we’ve taken the scent out.” And you go, “Oh, that’s better.” But you still have some problems where they go to a lower level.
There’s no need for that. You have to identify the molecules you are sensitized to and locate the alternative.
And for me, I looked around, I couldn’t find the alternatives. And because I really did not like to hear myself whine, I went out and started making the alternatives. Fortunately, I was an amateur chemist. It worked out fine for all of us.
So, as we’d like to say, if you or someone you love has sensitive skin, check out our stuff. You’d be glad you did.
DEBRA: One of the things that I noticed when I started using your soap is that it’s very soft—that’s the word that comes to mind—and it doesn’t dry my skin out.
A lot of soaps use coconut oil. I remember the first time years and years and years ago, I was looking for any unscented soap that I could find, I went to a popular brand of coconut soap because that was all that was available. And my skin got really, really dry.
LARRY PLESENT: Yeah, and turn red, and little bumps perhaps even if you kept using it. And that’s because if too much coconut oil is in soap, then—let’s put it this way. The more coconut oil in soap, the better it lathers, but the more drying it becomes.
So, there’s a sweet spot where a little bit of coconut oil does a really good job, you get over that sweet spot, and you start drying people’s skin.
There is a very rare reactivity some people have which is a coconut-oil-turned-into-soap reaction. And stay tuned. I hope to be able to do something for you, folks, too one day. But it’s a very, very small group.
So what you do is—
DEBRA: Go ahead! Tell us more about your soaps.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, we’re a soap company. Oh, it’s really cool. We have all kinds of oils from around the world, coconut and palm, certified organic. We’re very careful about where we trade from. Our palm oil supplier just won a Greenpeace Award. So, that’s the level we are sourcing at.
And we want to support the good guys. We don’t want our money to go to the bad guys. We want to support the good guys, so the good guys do better.
And that’s where you can vote with your dollar. Every purchase you make of a yummy product made by good people, people close to home, people maybe in your own town, that money just keeps circulating. Every dollar you send out, that money is gone. It’s not in your circulation. It’s not creating new economy and new jobs.
And that’s the importance of shopping local, or as we used to say here in Vermont, “Keep your money in the valley.” We knew every dollar that stayed in the valley created more prosperity. Everybody wins!
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely! That works that way. So I see on your website that it takes nearly a month to handcraft a bar of your soap because—
LARRY PLESENT: [inaudible 32:31]
DEBRA: You use a 200-year-old process. And I can tell, this bar of soap feels different. I’ve tried a lot of handmade soaps and yours feels totally different.
LARRY PLESENT: We’ve been working on this for 21 years now, Debra.
DEBRA: Wow! You obviously know what you’re doing. And your soaps, they’re certified to USDA organic standards. And they’re free of artificial colors, fragrances, preservatives or any synthetics. And they’re just very good. Well done, Larry.
LARRY PLESENT: [inaudible 33:15] You love the butter bar, right? That’s your favorite.
DEBRA: I love the butter bar.
LARRY PLESENT: I know! It’s so good.
DEBRA: Now, this is unscented. This is unscented. Anybody can use this.
LARRY PLESENT: We get more just rave reviews on that.
So, if you’re looking for one product, you’re saying, “Okay, I’ll try Vermont Soap,” buy a butter bar. But we also make a lot of unscented hand cleaners. We make a very interesting soap-based shower gel. So, if you absolutely have to have the shower gel, we have a good alternative for you there. But if you have the most sensitive skin, try the butter bar. That’s the mildest that I have.
We also make moisturizers like Green Gold, right, Debra? Have you gotten the unscented Green Gold?
DEBRA: I have some of that, and I like it a lot. It just goes right into your skin.
LARRY PLESENT: Hemp and shea are the two main ingredients. But both of them, for a very special reason, are a green organic hemp seed oil. And then, into that, we infuse anti-inflammatory herbs, calendula and Saint John’s Wort. Those are the most anti-inflammatory herbs I found from over 20 years of working these herbal soaps—I don’t say, as a medicine, but for their soothing value when people are hurt.
And we make pet care products, oral care products, anti-aging and moisturizing products, sanitizers now.
And our goal is to replace all of the yucky stuff in your world with yummy, safe, non-toxic, yummy alternatives. When you buy from Vermont Soap, you’re buying factory direct. We cut out the middleman. Because we’re factory direct, if you find something you really love, like you can’t live without Liquid Sunshine, our non-toxic cleaner, we run specials in gallons, and sometimes even five-gallon containers […] that you buy in. You can really get your price down because we’re making it and we’re selling it right to you.
DEBRA: And also, if you sign up for the newsletter, then you get notified when they have special deals.
We only just have a couple of minutes left. So I just wanted to ask is there anything else that you want to say that you haven’t said?
LARRY PLESENT: I do. I have a message and a philosophy about natural products that I feel compelled to express whenever given the format. And that’s that all of us arose on this earth, as part of a very long evolutionary process that’s at four billion years, with everything being in balance, there is no waste in the ecosystem, everything is reused and recycled for billions of years—and eventually, we came along.
And we started creating new and novel substances that never existed before. They’ve never been part of the ecosystem.
Nothing has been exposed to it. And we go along like simpletons, just making stuff that never existed and putting it all over the planet as if it’s all “It’s got to be just fine,” thinking that the world is our dump ground and it will all magically get cleaned up somehow when mommy comes home. This is just ridiculous thinking.
And we have to look at the implications of the products we all use every day. Yes, it’s been multiplied by 7.5 billion people on this planet. But it starts with you and your household and making your home a non-toxic household and making your body a non-toxic body.
This will build up your immune system. You’ll be able to fight things off better. You’ll be more clear-headed. And you’ll make better decisions in your life.
And that’s all we can do. We’re given a hundred years, and all we can do is live our hundred years as well as we can.
DEBRA: And with that, I’m going to say thank you for being with us because the end of this show is going to happen momentarily. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And you can find out more about this show in the archives, and listen to this show again, at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Choosing Cosmetics Without Synthetics
Today my guest is Marj Melchiors, Founder of Cosmetics Without Synthetics. We’ll be talking about what she’s learned about dangerous and safe cosmetics in more than fifteen years of choosing and creating cosmetics. After a professional career for 13 years as an interior designer, Marj Melchiors founded her natural cosmetics company as a mail order business in 1997, to meet the needs of others who were seeking cosmetics without synthetics. Two years later her company went online. Today her site sells all kinds of cosmetic products (and more) that are fragrance-free, 70% or more organic, vegan, gluten-free, carmine-free, and, of course, synthetic-free. Long before the current craze for mineral makeup, Marj developed her Earth’s Beauty® line based on arrowroot, to meet the demand of customers wanting even lesser ingredients in makeup than what was being offered in the natural cosmetics realm in the late 1990’s. Marj has many years experience evaluating and creating cosmetic products. www.allnaturalcosmetics.com and www.earthsbeauty.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing Cosmetics without Synthetics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Marj Melchiors
Date of Broadcast: November 13, 2013
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 the reason that we do that is because there are so many toxic chemicals out there, and we need to be able to find our way through all of that maze of products, toxic and not toxic, and be able to choose the ones that have the least health effects and the most benefit.
And that’s a skill that requires having information, that requires knowing how to apply that information. And I choose my guests for this show because they are doing these things out in the world to make the world a safer place to live in, to provide products, to provide information.
Today is Wednesday, November 13th 2013. And it’s a beautiful autumn day here in Clearwater, Florida, a little overcast, windy, cold, which it isn’t usually. I have my flannel shirt on, and so I know it’s getting to be winter.
And we’re going to be talking today about cosmetic products with a woman who—actually, I should put my mute button on because I’m going to sneeze, or maybe not.
Anyway, my guest today has not only chosen cosmetics that don’t have toxic chemicals to sell on her website, but she actually is a pioneer in creating her own non-toxic, toxic-free cosmetics. So we’re going to talk about all of that today.
Her name is Marj Melchiors. And she’s the founder of Cosmetics without Synthetics.
Hi Marj! Thanks for being with me today.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Hi, Debra. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Thank you so much for being here. One of the things that I love about doing this show is that I know about a lot of businesses from all the many years that I’ve been working in this field, evaluating products, and choosing the ones that are safest. And I’ve known about your business for many years. But this is the first time I’m actually talking with you, and the first time that I’m actually finding out about you.
And it’s so interesting to me to see what I find out about people and their businesses that I would have never known otherwise.
So, I’m so glad to be having you and my other guests on the show. I’m so happy to have this show and to be sharing all this information with everybody because you actually have a very interesting background.
So tell us! Let’s start out with you just telling us how you got into doing this. Why do you do what you do and about the things that you’ve done along the way to get to where you are now?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Sure, I’d like to tell you everything. I grew up in the Midwest, and I had allergies as a child. So when I became a little older, I was starting to also have more sensitivities and more sensitivities.
So I became aware of the fact—and this was in the ‘70s, so I’m dating myself here. I became aware of preservatives and artificial food colorings as a teenager. And so, I started to shop at a health food store. And in those days, as you know, health food stores are not very common. So my mother and I would have to travel at least 45 minutes away just to reach the only health food store that was as close as possible. So I grew up trying to eat as healthy as possible.
And so, shopping at a health food store, I would realize that there some things, other than foods there, that were very interesting to me—and one of them was natural make-up. And at that point in time, there were very, very few companies that were making all natural—
DEBRA: I remember that! I have one those moments that you never forget. When you were talking about this, this is popping up. I was in a health food store. And in those days, it was mostly packaged foods and vitamins and these natural cosmetics, soap and things like that.
And I remember one day I was in a particular store where I looked at the fresh produce, and it was just so wilted and horrible-looking. It was organic, but it was so wilted, I didn’t want to eat.
And then I went and looked at the make-up, and they had all these lipsticks in a row on a display. I opened one, and it was this Pepto-Bismol pink and all chalky-looking. And it didn’t look like anything I wanted to put on my lips. It didn’t look red and luscious like all the other toxic lipsticks are.
And so, I understand. And all of the brands that exist today, I don’t think any of them existed when you and I started looking at this.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Actually, yes, there is one brand, which I would get to later that was around. It’s called Penders. And I am now their U.S. distributor.
There were very few brands out there in those days. I think Rachel Perry, Paul Penders, and some that have fallen by the wayside.
Anyway, I used some of those cosmetics. Maybe they didn’t perform the best, but I just thought it was interesting that they were made with so-called natural ingredients.
So, I did that and still carried on the health food scene when I was in college. I went to college to become an interior designer.
And so I did accomplish that. I got my Bachelor’s Degree. And then I got married. And I was practicing as a professional interior designer.
And years later, in the ‘90s, I had my two daughters. And I decided that I really didn’t want to work away from my home anymore now that I had my two wonderful daughters. So I was reading Mothering Magazine. It’s a great magazine! And I noticed that there were a lot of people that had home businesses that were advertising in there such as cloth diapers and handmade wooden toys.
And I realized that there really wasn’t any company out there that was promoting natural cosmetics, which I thought, “Well, this would be a great place to advertise because it’s all women reading the magazine” or pretty much all women.
So, I thought, “Well, maybe I would try doing this. It would be something that I could do from home.”
And so, I did start my business then as a mail order business in 1997. And the only way to advertise in those days was through major magazines because, let’s face it, the internet was not anything like it was back in 1997. So, I had to put in ads in national magazines, which is extremely expensive.
And I built my business around a book that I read called The Safe Shopper’s Bible. And that book was written in, I believe, 1995. And it was a consumer’s guide kind of a handbook. They took products in there—anywhere from household cleaning products to paint and cleaners and cosmetics—and they rated them as far as dangers go. And I thought, “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
And so, I built my business around the products in there that they said were safe. And I based it on just the body care and make-up products.
So, I had this business, a little business, mail order. And it just was really slow-going. And I actually almost gave up because the orders were just few and far between. And so I almost gave up until almost two years later, 1999, and the internet was starting to become popular. And so I decided, “Well, what the heck, I might as well just try having a website.”
So, I bought the domain name AllNaturalCosmetics.com, which right now, you can’t touch anything like that, anything even close to that. Now, the natural cosmetic industry has become huge.
DEBRA: We need to take a break (as long as you just stop right there). We need to take a break. And so we’ll continue right after this.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Marj Melchiors, founder of Cosmetics without Synthetics. And we’re going to learn more about how you can choose natural cosmetics when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking about natural cosmetics today with my guest, Marj Melchiors. She’s the founder of Cosmetics without Synthetics.
So Marj, you got a website. And then what happened?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Well, a lot happened after that because now, I had worldwide exposure. And I really didn’t have to pay a lot of money and advertise in little magazines now because now, everyone in the world could find me basically because of the name of my company, my domain name, All Natural Cosmetics. So, someone would just have to type in those words, and basically, they would find my website.
So I now had companies coming to me who wanted me to represent their lines in the United States. So that was pretty exciting for me because, at that point, there weren’t a huge amount of companies out there. I had to really search and search to find things now to set the criteria that I was establishing because of reading the Safe Shopper’s Bible.
So, it was really exciting for me to be able to offer things to customers that they couldn’t get in the United States.
DEBRA: Well, let’s talk about your criteria. What is it that you’re looking to avoid and why?
MARJ MELCHIORS: What we’re looking to avoid are:
The first thing would be the synthetic preservatives. And that would be your parabens. And we also want to avoid synthetic fragrances, synthetic colorings, and ingredients that are carcinogenic, such as DEA, TEA, talc and lanoline. And just a host of other chemicals that are hard to pronounce, we stay away from.
DEBRA: So, you’ve figured out what those chemicals are, and you have a list. And if it’s on the list, then you don’t use that product.
MARJ MELCHIORS: That’s correct, yes.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s about what I did. When I started out, there weren’t any lists of toxic chemicals that I could find. And so I went and as you did with Safe Shopper’s Bible (I started doing it before that book was written. So I had to just go and find whatever studies I could find to figure out that this was toxic or that was toxic.
And I had to laugh today because, at that time, when I started more than 30 years ago, I had a list of 40 chemicals that I was looking to avoid. And now, the lists are just hundreds and hundreds of chemicals of things that we know about that are toxic.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, exactly, because when the Safe Shopper’s Bible was written, the studies were not out about the dangers of parabens. So, for a while, the products that I sold did contain parabens because we just didn’t know about the harmful effects of the parabens.
And as recently as 2004, there was a study that showed that they found a huge variety of parabens in [inaudible 13:27] to what they’re using on their body because [inaudible 13:44].
DEBRA: We’re just going to take a break. You all listening may have noticed that my guest, the sound was breaking up. So we’re going to call her back and have her back again.
I think that we may have a commercial, yes. So, we’ll just go to commercial break now and we’ll be right back. And we’ll have her say what she said again.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is Marj Melchiors, founder of Cosmetics without Synthetics. And we had a bit of technical problem with the telephone line. So Marj, are you there with us now?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, I am.
DEBRA: Okay, great. So I think the last thing you were starting to tell us about, the last thing I heard was about a study in 2004 about the danger of parabens.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes. In 2004, they did a study that showed that there was a large concentration of methyl paraben in some breast tissue samples that they had examined. So that is part of the paraben [inaudible 15:03] preservative used in […] body care and make-up and health care products. [inaudible 15:16]
So, that, I think opened the eyes of a lot of companies that were making natural products already and forced them to have them look for other […] products.
DEBRA: We’re still having the sound break up. I’m trying to figure out what to do here because I do want to talk to you about this. We still have half of the show to go, but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
Marj, if you have another line that you can call in on—oh, you know what? Todd, would you play another commercial? I think I have another phone number for her.
DEBRA: Okay, I think we’re back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I think we now yet again have Marj on the phone. Technology, this is what happens when it is live radio.
MARJ MELCHIORS: I know! Of course, it would.
DEBRA: Why don’t you say what you just said for the third time? Third time’s a charm,
MARJ MELCHIORS: Third time’s a charm.
Okay, parabens. In 2004, there was a study conducted on parabens found in—actually, they did a study on breast tumors. And they found a high concentration of methyl paraben in these breast tumors that were removed from women’s bodies. And methyl paraben is one of the paraben families.
So, I think this really opened up the eyes of a lot of natural body care and cosmetic companies because they were using parabens all these years, thinking that it was safe ingredient.
DEBRA: I thought it was a safe ingredient. It wasn’t on my list. In the beginning, I was trying to avoid artificial colors, artificial fragrances, and preservatives. And I thought parabens were fine because they were in every natural cosmetic or beauty product that there was on the market. And I couldn’t find any studies about them.
But this is, I think, an important point to make because there are a lot of ingredients that still have not been studied. And so this is where part of the difficulty is, that there’s so much that’s unknown, that if we know something, like this about parabens, we should at least be acting on the things that we know about. And then, we should be continuing to study to find out if there are more things that we didn’t know about.
When I started, we didn’t know about Bisphenol-A, we didn’t know about any of the endocrine disruptors, we didn’t know about the parabens. And as all these things were coming to light, what’s happening is that the products are getting purer and purer as the manufacturers take out these ingredients that we find to be toxic. So, it’s an evolutionary process.
MARJ MELCHIORS: That’s true! It’s leading customers to just demand more and more because now, customers are demanding organic ingredients. And there are some ingredients that you just can’t get in an organic form right now (or that you may never be able to) such as some of the natural colorings that are used in cosmetics like the iron oxide. But the consumers are just really being educated and just demanding more pure products.
Actually, that is what led me to create my own line of cosmetics. And actually, that was just a couple of years after I started my business. So in the year 2000, I created the brand, Earth’s Beauty.
DEBRA: And tell us about that. That’s a very different product than you find in any other place. Tell us your whole story about that one.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, well, I had a group of customers that were ultra-sensitive. And they said to me, “We like what you’re selling, but we need something with even less ingredients.”
So, that led me to do a lot of research. And I came up with a line of products that are based with arrowroot. An arrowroot is actually something you can use to bake with or cook with.
DEBRA: I cook an arrowroot, and it’s wonderful.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Do you?
DEBRA: I use arrowroot because I eat gluten-free. And arrowroot is, it does a couple of things. One is that you can use it instead of wheat flour to thicken gravy, and it works beautifully because it just dissolves and it doesn’t lump.
And the other thing it does is that I had a recipe I don’t eat anymore because it has wheat flour in it. But it was a way to use whole wheat flour so that it wasn’t so dense. You could take a tablespoon of flour out of a cup of flour, and replace it with a tablespoon of arrowroot, and it would make your whole wheat flour light.
And so, I’m very familiar with arrowroot. It’s in my cabinet, and I use it frequently.
And it’s very, very soft. So, when I saw that your cosmetics are based in arrowroot, I thought, “That must be really good on the skin.”
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, it does feel really good, and it gives a very nice fine appearance to the skin as well. And many women who are ultra-sensitive can use this product line.
And it was actually ahead of its time because, maybe about five years after that was when the mineral make-up started becoming popular. And how we differ from that is that many mineral make-up uses titanium dioxide as the base, and that ingredient is questionable in the loose form.
It’s used a lot in sunscreens because it has natural sunscreen properties. And when it’s in a liquid form, it is safe. But it’s questionable now. When people inhale that, if you’re applying a loose powder all over your face, you’re going to get a dust in the air. And if you’re doing that daily, it’s just questionable whether that is really healthy for the lungs.
So, our product is much different than the typical mineral make-up out there that will contain a base of titanium dioxide and sometimes mica.
DEBRA: So when you take a basic titanium dioxide, I just want to clarify, that’s a lot of titanium dioxide. And then you put in a little bit of iron oxide for color, right?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Right!
DEBRA: I mean, not you, but the other manufacturers. When you say a base, that’s a lot of material.
MARJ MELCHIORS: That’s the base. That’s the majority. Now, some will have titanium dioxide with mica. So it’s not like it’s all titanium dioxide. Very few of them are going to be 100% titanium. But there’s going to be a huge percentage of titanium dioxide in the base, which means that’s probably 70% to 80% of the actual product will be a mica or a titanium dioxide.
So, we do not have that in our products as far as the large majority.
And so we began with that. And it’s exciting because nowadays, just as you mentioned, a lot of people want to stay away from gluten. And they’re even wanting to stay away from gluten in their body care and make-up products and their skin care.
So, we have many customers who will call us and say, they’re looking for such-and-such product, and they want to make sure that it’s gluten-free. And so we can say without any question that the Earth’s Beauty line is gluten-free.
DEBRA: Because you’re making it yourself, and you know what’s in it.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Right, we’re making it, and we’re using safe ingredients. And we have some other items that we’ve expanded upon. We have mascara now. And the mascara is actually made in a certified gluten-free laboratory.
DEBRA: Wow, that’s great.
MARJ MELCHIORS: And we also have a line of pencils that are handmade. We also have some lipsticks. And so we can just guarantee that our Earth’s Beauty line is gluten-free.
DEBRA: And then, also, I’m looking at your website right now, EarthsBeauty.com, for this product. And it says that it doesn’t contain nanoparticles, which is another thing to be concerned about in mineral make-ups because if they’re using powders that have been ground as fine as nanoparticles, then those nanoparticles, you can breathe them in, they can get through your skin.
MARJ MELCHIORS: That’s another problem with that titanium dioxide, most of the titanium dioxide out there is in the nanoparticle form. So, besides inhaling it, if you have it on your skin, even if it’s in a skin care product, and it’s a nanoparticle titanium dioxide, there’s a very good chance that that can actually be absorbed by your skin.
DEBRA: Also, on your site, I noticed that you have make-up for women, and make-up for teens, and make-up for girls. And I think that that’s wonderful. Tell us what the differences are.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Well, the make-up for the adults, for the women, that would be our traditional Earth’s Beauty line of products. And we decided that we wanted to start women out or girls out early, so we came up with two other lines. And the one line that we’ve had for the longest time is the Little Earth Beauty.
We came up with a plain make-up set. And many women just really appreciate that it’s great for the holidays, or for birthdays, to give a totally safe, non-toxic product line of plain make-up to your favorite little girl because if you just go look in traditional stores, discount stores, and you see little girl play make-up sets, and you look at the ingredients, I can tell you, you are going to see it’s just totally filled with chemicals.
DEBRA: It’s horrible! It’s horrible. I think this would make such a great holiday gift for little girls. I love seeing that on there because, children, as we’ve discussed many times on this show, are much more susceptible to the harmful effects of all these toxic chemicals than we are as adults simply because their bodies are smaller.
And so, if you have an exposure of, say, one unit of a toxic chemical, and there’s an adult and a child, because the child’s body is smaller, they’re twice as susceptible just because there’s half as much body present.
In any home where you have children, you need to be even more careful about what’s in your house and what you give them to play with.
So, well done. Well done!
MARJ MELCHIORS: Exactly, exactly. Well, thank you. Thank you. We’re proud of that particular set.
And so then we decided to expand on that. And about two and a half years ago, we came out with a line for teenagers. And that line is called Meisha. And it’s an eco-friendly line of make-up and the fact that it has compacts that can be refilled.
So, you can buy, for example, an eye shadow. And then once you’re finished with it, you can pop it out and just buy the inner replacement. So that is just really setting a good example for that generation to not only be eco-friendly, but look at the ingredients that you’re putting on your skin.
DEBRA: So, I noticed that in the Meisha line, you have a cream eye shadow. And in the women’s line, it’s a powdered eye shadow. Can you tell us the difference?
MARJ MELCHIORS: In the women’s line, Earth’s Beauty line, all the products are in the loose form (unless, of course, they’re a mascara, the liner or the lipstick). So those are more of a mineral make-up. If you think of a mineral make-up where it’s in a loose form, which means, when you apply it, you would need to dampen your make-up brush, and then dip it in the powder, and then apply it.
In the teen line, we made it a little bit more convenient. Let’s face it. Teenagers are going to want convenience. We have pressed or caked eye shadows. And we also have cream eye shadows and cream blush. So, those are easier to transport.
And they are in the compacts, magnetic compacts, so those are a little bit more convenient.
So, instead of having a loose powder, you would have it pressed or in the cream form.
DEBRA: Thank you. Tell us about some of the other products that you’ve chosen that don’t have synthetics, and your criteria. I know you have a whole lot of different products on your AllNaturalCosmetics.com website, including things that have 70% or more organic ingredients that are fragrance-free, some are vegan, some are gluten-free, carmine-free.
Tell us about carmine. What is carmine and why do people want to be free of it?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Carmine is technically actually a natural pigment. Some people are fine with using it. But if you are vegan, you may want to stay away from it because it is actually derived from the shell of a beetle.
So, it’s a personal decision on carmine. We don’t totally say it’s terrible, but it is a way to get some nice pink tones in cosmetics. So if you are looking for a brighter pink tone, unfortunately, at this time, that is what the best choice is to use. If you want to go with more earth tones, then it’s very easy to create cosmetics without using carmine.
DEBRA: I just want to point out that carmine isn’t toxic to the best of my knowledge. I’d never seen anything that says it’s toxic.
MARJ MELCHIORS: No.
DEBRA: But it would be a choice, if you’re vegan, to be aware of that.
So, what are some of the other products, what are some of the brands that you’ve decided are non-toxic enough for you to carry and what kind of range of products could people find on your website?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Well, we have a wide variety of natural skin care products. We have Aroma Bella, and we have Lotus Moon, Miessence, which is a certified organic line from Australia, Mukti from Australia, which is certified organic as well.
And we have Paul Penders. And as I mentioned earlier in the interview, Paul Penders has been around since the 80s. And in 2008, he looked me up, and he said he wanted me to be his U.S. distributor. So we are now distributing his products. We are pretty much the full source of where you can buy his wonderful, wonderful skin care and hair care products. He has lipsticks as well and mascara.
DEBRA: I remember when I used to be able to see them in the natural food stores, but I haven’t seen them.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, you can’t find them readily now. Through me is the main source of Paul Penders. And his products are just absolutely wonderful.
DEBRA: And what other brands do you have?
MARJ MELCHIORS: We carry hair coloring.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about that because a lot of people are interested in hair coloring. So what makes natural hair coloring?
MARJ MELCHIORS: The basic thing about natural hair coloring is that it’s going to be derived from henna—either henna alone or henna with some additives such as herbs and [cossy]. For example, we carry the Logona Herbal Hair Coloring line.
And you can buy it in the powdered form or you mix it yourself like traditional henna or you can actually buy it pre-mixed in a tube.
This brand is a wonderful brand. And it will cover the grey, believe it or not.
It’s the safest line other than just straight henna that you can find. Even at a health food store, you’ll see some brands, and they’ll say that they have natural pigments. Well, the pigments might be natural, but if you look at the ingredients in there, if it has TTD or if it says, “Will cause blindness if you get this in your eyes,” then stay away from it because there are chemicals in it.
But if there is a line that is out there that—if it’s on our website, it’s without chemicals basically. If they would be more available, we would have it. But right now, this is the best that we have.
DEBRA: I think that that’s an important point. I know for myself and others that I’ve talked to a bit, it’s easy to get into saying, “Well, I want this perfect product. I don’t want any of this and any of that.” And for some products, that means that you just don’t use that product at all because it doesn’t exist.
I know, for myself, I don’t remember the last time I wore nail polish because I can’t find a nail polish that’s not made from acrylic. And I don’t want to put acrylic on my fingers. That’s it! They can take out all the formaldehyde and everything that they want. But as long as it’s still acrylic plastic, I’m not going to put that on my fingernails.
So, I just get a buffer brush, just buff my nails, and they get shiny. And that’s what I do for my nails. So, no red nail polish for me.
We really need to be thinking about, sometimes, is it really necessary to be using these toxic chemicals because we’ve decided that we have to have nail polish, or whatever the product happens to be, we decided that we have to color our hair, or we have to wear perfume, or whatever.
I remember actually a long time ago when I was removing toxic chemicals bit by bit from my life as I could identify them, the last thing to go was my red lipstick. It had taken me so long to find the perfect shade of red. And I was absolutely dedicated to my brand of red lipstick, and exactly that color of red. I was like, “No! I’m not going to give this up. I’m not going to give this up.”
But it was more important to me to not have the toxic chemicals in the lipstick than it was for me to have red lips. I finally had that breakthrough to say, “Okay, it’s more important to be healthy. It’s more important to feel good. It’s more important to take that toxic stress off my body that this lipstick is giving me.”
So, it’s really wonderful that you and other people are offering these less toxic, non-toxic, organic alternatives so that we can have replacements for those toxic products that we’re so accustomed to having and have them be much more helpful.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes, I totally agree. Some women are just addicted to that certain shade of lipstick, as you said, or having to have their hair look a certain color or a certain way. And I agree that we need to choose our health first. We try our best to find those substitutes in natural form, and we are very particular on what we sell.
DEBRA: Yes, and I appreciate that very much. We only just have a couple of minutes left to the show. Is there anything that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
MARJ MELCHIORS: Well, I just love your philosophy. And I just give you so much credit for doing this all these years.
DEBRA: Thank you.
MARJ MELCHIORS: And I just think it’s great that we’re educating everyone out there so that they can become more healthy.
And there are just so may incidences now of people getting sick, and it just makes me wonder, if people would just look at what they’re eating, and what they’re being surrounded by, and what they’re putting on their body, maybe if they would think twice, perhaps they could have better health.
DEBRA: I’m sure that they would have better health. I know that I’ve seen that and I think you’ve seen that in your life too. So I think that anybody who wants to be health, eliminating toxic chemical exposures, I think is the first step across the board.
One of the things that’s great about what you’ve done, Marj, is that it’s really so difficult to take that leap into trying to figure out what’s toxic and what isn’t, for there to be websites like yours, and websites like mine, where those of us who have taken the time to learn all this and be able to evaluate the toxicity of products, that we have a list of toxic chemicals that we know we want to avoid.
The consumers can just go to our websites and know that what they find there has already been evaluated.
So listeners, if you’re looking for some natural cosmetics, you can just go to Marj’s site and choose anything she’s got, and know that you’re getting the best that’s out there, the least toxic products that are available at this time. And I’m sure that as there are more, even less toxic products, that they’ll be on your site too.
MARJ MELCHIORS: Yes. We’re always searching, and we always have companies approaching us, and we very carefully evaluate what is being shown to us. And sometimes, we have to turn it down and say no. I’m sorry, it’s not quite pure enough.
But we are always searching and looking for the best products possible. And you can always trust us because we are very concerned for other people’s well-being.
DEBRA: Thank you so much for being on the show, and I apologize for the technical difficulties, whatever they were. It’s been lovely to talk with you.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And to find out more about this show, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
What Do I Do About Toxic Chemicals in Clothing?
Question from Diana
Dear Debra – I typed in toxins in clothes and read the article provided.
It answered one of my questions that had to do with whether more expensive clothes had less toxins in them. Might have known! I just bought some jeans and a warm-up outfit at Kohl’s. They are all outside, day and night.
I’ve read that soaking them in baking soda and later water diluted with vinegar will take care of the smell. However, I’m wondering if the toxins are still there doing damage to the wearer. I’m guessing they are.
If so, this rules out all department stores and leaves only organic clothes (haven’t found many of those) and consignment shops where clothes have been washed many times.
Could you comment on this?
To me it seems like a silent holocaust — aimed especially at juniors. Mudd and So manufacturers are two that have cute jr. clothes but the smell on them is enough to knock you out. Just bury your nose in them and inhale. Then taste the inside of your mouth. Next, run for your too toothbrush.
Debra’s Answer
Yes, average clothes DO contain a lot of toxic chemicals that we need to watch out for.
The best thing to do is wear organic. There are many online sources of organic clothing, some of which are on Debra’s List: Textiles: Clothing.
I have to say, though, I find this to be easier said than done. It’s difficult for me to find suitable organic clothing in my size, style, and budget. And so I do what I’ve been doing since before organic clothing was available, and that is, wear ONLY 100% natural fibers.
I find of the clothing I purchase if I wash them before I wear them, I have no problem. But I am wearing very simple clothing. I have a drawer of 100% cotton tank tops and a drawer of 100% cotton capri pants and mostly I wear those. I can just reach in the drawers and pick any top and any bottom and they all coordinate because I stick to neutral black, beige, brown, blue, and cream for the bottoms and buy both neutrals and colors for the tops.
I also have a couple of 100% natural fiber jackets.
All clothing usually has “sizing” on it, which is made from scented cornstarch. I find this washes right out.Beyond this, if clothing smells bad to me in the store, I just don’t bring it home.
Pumpkin Muffins
These low-carb, gluten-free muffins are moist, delicious, and easy to make. Almond flour instead of wheat flour gives them extra protein.
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup pumpkin puree
- 1/4 agave or other natural sweetener of your choice
- 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
- 2 1/2 cups almond flour
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/4 cup currants
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
- Place all the ingredients EXCEPT almond flour, walnuts, and currents in a large bowl. Use an electric hand mixer to combine (or a stand mixer).
- Mix in the almond flour until well combined.
- Add the walnuts and currents (break them up as you add them) and mix by hand with a silicone spatula.
- Spoon the batter into the muffin cups.
- Bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.
How to Make These Great Muffin Papers
You can use unbleached muffin cups for these muffins, but I like these parchment papers so much better! They take a little longer to make, but give such a dramatic presentation, especially if you are taking these to a party, serving them to guests, or giving them as a gift. It’s like a little gift in itself that you unwrap to eat. You can also tie ribbons around them for even more festiveness!
You’ll need unbleached parchment paper, which you can buy at any natural food store. Cut 5-inch squares, and then place one square in each opening in your muffin pan. Push the paoer down inside with your fingers to fit and crease any folds. They won’t sit flat when empty, but when you fill them they will be perfect.
Tools
I use a 2-Tablespoon scoop when I make muffins because it gives an even portion. This results in all the muffins baking evenly.
You can use this tool to portion ice cream, cookie dough, meat balls and many other foods.
They are usually available in three different sizes wherever kitchen gadgets are sold.
How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- The Basic Principles of Toxicology
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Determine Your Risk of Harm from an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: November 12, 2013
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.
Today is Tuesday, November 12, 2013. And the reason that we talk about this is because we live in a very toxic world. There are toxic chemicals all around us, and they’re making a lot of people sick in a lot of different ways.
But we don’t have to get sick from them. We do need to clean them up. We do need to be choosing the right products, so that we’re not exposed to toxic chemicals. But there’s a lot that we can do to make those right decisions, and to protect ourselves.
And there are a lot of people who are doing good work in the world, in order to help us understand these things, to change regulations, to make good products.
And those are my guests on this show—people who can help us make sense of this crazy toxic world, and learn what it is that we can do to protect ourselves and others.
Today, we’re going to be talking about risk.
Now, I didn’t even think of associating the whole field of risk management with toxic chemicals until a few years ago when I was invited to give a seminar at a conference for insurance agents.
And as a good public speaker, I thought, what could I possibly say to insurance agents that would make a connection for them between their interest and my subject?
And as I started looking at it, of course, a whole field of risk management because what insurance is about is determining what is the risk that they’re taking in insuring somebody against some harm that’s going to come to them.
And there actually is a whole methodology to figuring this out, and a whole logic of how to think of this. And when I looked at that, I thought, this absolutely applies to toxic chemical exposure so much so that I included it at the time I was writing my book, Toxic-Free, and I wrote a whole chapter about risk management.
So today, toxicologist, Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT, is going to be back with us, and he’s been on before a couple of times, so please go look up his other shows and listen to them, as well as this one, because he knows so much about toxicology. And I’m having him on regularly to share all of that with us.
And today, we’re going to just talk about this piece of risk management, so that we can reduce the risk of having harm from toxic chemical exposures.
Hi, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: Hey, Debra. Thanks for having me back.
DEBRA: You’re welcome! It’s my pleasure to have you on the show. So where should we start with risk management?
Before you say anything, I want to also say that you’re the author—Dr. Gilbert is the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And you can go to his website, which is Toxipedia.org, and get this book for free. And it’s a very, very good introduction to toxicology, the whole field of toxicology, and you’ll understand a lot more about what we need to be concerned about in making decisions as consumers, if you take a look at this book, and it’s free.
So go to his website, and get this free book.
Okay, Dr. Gilbert, it’s your turn.
STEVEN GILBERT: There’s actually a chapter on risk assessment and risk management in the book.
DEBRA: I have that right in front of me.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s great. And each chapter, we’ll come to the PowerPoint presentation that you can download if you might want to do that.
DEBRA: I love reading it out of the PDF.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s good! So, risk is really interesting. We manage risk all the time. I bet you drove into work today?
DEBRA: I work at home. I have no risk in walking from my bedroom, or my kitchen, into my office.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s great. I work at home also most of the time.
But risk, if you think of automobiles, we drive automobiles, there’s a lot of risk in automobiles. And we use seatbelts to mitigate some of that risk. That mitigation was actually enacted into law.
So, sometimes, we do a very good job at managing risks. we get great benefits from wearing seatbelts. It’s just a little bit of a hassle. But we know about the risk. And the first thing about risks is you’ve got to know what the end point is, what risks you’re worried about, and what kind of exposure you have. So, you’ve got to know what hazard you have, what’s hazardous.
Automobiles, it’s pretty straightforward, it’s injury with that. But with chemicals, it can be a wide range of potential hazards and complications. And then you manage the exposure to that.
DEBRA: That’s a very good summary of what I understand risk management to be.
STEVEN GILBERT: So really, the second most important words in toxicology is dose response or exposure response, what’s the dose that causes the response. In toxicology, you’re really dealing with adverse response. And then, hazard times exposure equals risk. So, is there a hazard? What is that hazard? How much exposure we have? And that will help us define the risk.
You really want to factor individual susceptibility into that. Some people will be more susceptible than others, like children, for example, who eat more, breathe more and drink more than adults do. So therefore, they have a small amount of exposure that translates into a much bigger dose which increase their risk.
DEBRA: I totally agree. I think that one of the most difficult parts of this is determining what is the hazard and also the individual susceptibility part. I’ve been doing a lot of research on toxic chemicals lately, and there’s not always agreement on how harmful something is—or maybe I shouldn’t say it’s not as people aren’t in agreement as to how harmful it is, but there sure is difficulty in sometimes getting people to understand that there is a harm—that you can look at a lot of studies. You can look at how you feel in your own body, but there’s a lot of toxic chemicals that are in products and easily available for exposure that shouldn’t be.
And they could be taken off the market, they could be banned, all those things, and they aren’t yet being.
And so there’s that whole question of where is the hazard, which is one thing, like what is the inherent toxicology of something.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, you raised a really good question. I think I’d carry it just a little further than that. Sometimes, the hazard industry or other interests create a lot of uncertainty around a potential hazard.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to say.
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s a real key part of this discussion. Those industries and tobaccos are great example of that. Our tobacco industry, for years, created a lot of uncertainty about the potential health effects of tobacco, clouding the issue, raised the issue, “Does cigarette smoking really cause lung cancer?” It’s clear it does, but they clouded that issue. They did a lot of things to create a lot of uncertainty, so that delayed a lot of regulations on that.
And that’s been a problem with many different chemicals.
One of the most recent ones is Bisphenol-A, which some of your listeners might be aware of. And many of us are exposed to Bisphenol-A. We excrete it in our urine. And did we ever give consent? Did we ever consent to be exposed to Bisphenol-A?
No.
And then, we’re just learning more about the low-level effects, low-level endocrine disruptor effects, of something like
Bisphenol-A.
But I think it really is rying to understand the hazard, what potential hazardous health effects are, but it’s also trying to learn about exposure. Industry is not required to even disclose that some of these chemicals are in the products we’re using.
Pthalates is a great example of that.
DEBRA: Yes, a lot of these chemicals aren’t on the label. And so then if we’re trying to do a risk assessment and follow those guidelines that you offered earlier of knowing what is the hazard, knowing where the exposure is, factoring your individual susceptibility, and the considering what you could do instead to reduce the risk, we don’t even have the data a lot of times.
And this is part of why I wanted to talk about this today is because if we could look on a label and see, for example, that in a jar of apple sauce, there are apples and there are pesticides, then we could say, “Well, I’m going to choose this one that has no pesticides over the one that has pesticides.”
But what we have in the world today is that the jar says apples, and then another one says organic apples. And they don’t tell you that there are pesticides in the one with the apples. They just tell you that this other one over here is organic.
And I really think that if there were requirements, even if none of these chemicals got banned, if they were on the label of every single product, especially the most toxic ones…
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I really agree with you. I think we need more transparency and more disclosure of what chemicals are in a product. Washington State just voted—and California the year before—on a proposition to label genetically modified food. And it was defeated by industry pouring tens of millions of dollars into the [inaudible 09:40].
But that’s an example where I think we have a right to know. We have a right to know what’s in our products, what’s in our cosmetics, what’s in our personal care products, what chemicals we are being exposed. That’s the first step to figuring out what the hazard might be and how to reduce exposure to these chemicals.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back with Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist, and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. And we’ll be talking about how we can assess the risk of different toxic chemicals in our consumer products.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist, and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And you can get that book free on his website at Toxipedia.org.
Dr. Gilbert, let’s talk about—take us through risk assessment for something, a product or a chemical. What are the steps that you would do?
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a great question. And to lead off to that question, a risk assessment is a formal process where you gather data on exposure and response, and then you try to bring all data together to come up with some potentially least harmful levels of exposure to that chemical.
But I want to read a quote from William Ruckelshaus who was the first administrator of the US EPA in 1984. And he said, “We should remember that risk assessment data can be like the captured spy. If you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to know.”
And I think that has been a real problem. We were just discussing the uncertainty that some people create around a chemical and the potential hazard. And that’s a real problem.
So, it is that you take risk assessment data, but it is very malleable. It’s very tough to come to an agreement on exactly what kind of exposure would be acceptable.
DEBRA: I think that these decisions are being made at different levels, like the government is deciding, and they’re not exactly objective because they’re being influenced by a lot of factors. But the government is deciding what do they think are chemicals that—what is the risk factor for how much you can be exposed to, to a chemical, in order to allow it in certain things.
There are regulations that say, “This amount of chemical can be allowed in our tap water” because the government has decided that they think that that’s the risk.
Now, I personally don’t think that I’m willing to take on that risk. And so I, for example, reduce my risk of exposure to those toxic chemicals in tap water by putting a water filter on my water, so that I can drink water that has fewer or none of those chemicals that the government thinks that it’s okay for me to risk being exposed to.
Different governments around the world incidentally have different opinions about what is safe for their citizens to be exposed to. And in my many countries, the regulations are much different than they are here in the United States.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s very true. In some countries, Europe in particular, takes a more precautionary approach to looking at chemicals and potential risk of chemicals. So that means that they are putting the burden of demonstrating safety on the proponents of an activity.
And we do that. When we put drugs out in the marketplace, the Food and Drug Administration requires that the pharmaceutical and biotech industry provide significant data that show efficacy of the product that we’re being exposed to, and is it safe or what is the potential hazard for that product.
We don’t have similar process for industrial chemicals. We do some of that with pesticides, but our Chemical Policy Reform Act really needs to be moved forward. Right now, we’re governed by TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 which is basically broken. And we consequently end up being exposed to a number of chemicals.
The other thing I want to mention was that risk assessment deals with one chemical at a time, but we’re not exposed to just one chemical at a time […]
DEBRA: We’re not just exposed to drinking water too, which has a range of chemicals in it. We’re exposed to—how many products are we exposed to during the day, hundreds? And each one of those has its own combination of chemicals.
So by the time you put them all together—a part of chemistry is that scientists are looking at the reaction of one substance with another, and what else does it make. We’re not looking at that as consumers. Nobody’s looking at that as consumers. Nobody is saying that once you mix even two or three products, the chemicals that are in two or three products together, what is going to come up with that. And then when you put all the chemicals we’re exposed to in our bodies, how are they interacting with each other?
Until I’ve decided for myself, after more than 30 years of study of this, that this is way too big a risk to just be wondering around in the world, being exposed to all the possible chemicals that are out there.
I just decided that I’m just going to do whatever I can to reduce the amount that I’m being exposed to because by doing that, that reduces the risk of harm.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think that’s very wise and a precautionary approach. I think we do need, as much as possible, to reduce our exposure to chemicals to mitigate the risk.
And if we learn more about some chemicals, we recognize the risk as greater. Lead is a great example of that. The more we studied lead, we recognized that there is no safe lead exposure. And yet, a few years ago, we had toy products coming in from overseas that had lead-based paint on them. And who plays with these toys but kids. So we’re putting our most vulnerable and susceptible population at risk for very silly things, like having a brighter colored paint, and not being aware of the manufacturing process in another country.
So, it’s very important that we manage these risks. And we often have the information and knowledge to do that, we just don’t take the precautionary approach to manage these risks well.
DEBRA: Well, I think that this whole thing about risk management is actually a skill that everybody needs to learn. I didn’t know until I went to speak at this insurance seminar, insurance conference, that risk management even existed as a field, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about it today, just to make more people aware that there is a tool for assessing risk, so that you can make wise decisions about what your exposure is to toxic chemicals.
And I know we have a break in just a few seconds, so let’s talk more about that after we have the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about risk management with my guest, Dr. Steven Gilbert, and he’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And you can get a copy of that for free at his website, Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. And he is also the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. You can get that book for free on his website at Toxipedia.org.
I want to read just a little paragraph from the risk management chapter of my book Toxic-Free. And I was trying to describe this. I had to figure out this whole thing about risk management—how does it work? What’s going on with it?
And I came up with a little example.
Here in Florida where I live, we have alligators in the water. This is definitely a hazard because if you go in the water with alligators, there is a high probability that alligators will attack your body. But here’s the important thing to grasp. An alligator in the water is not a risk until you put your body in the water.
Likewise, a toxic chemical is not a risk until you put your body next to it, or put it next to or on or in your body.
So we could be living in this whole toxic world, but it’s really not affecting you until it comes near your body, or you put your body near it. The number one thing in treating poisoning, the first thing that you do is you take the person away from the poison.
And so this is what we need to be looking at, is how we determine what’s a poison, and then where is it, and how can we stay away from it.
Those, I think, are the two biggest key questions that we need to be able to answer, and there are difficulties in answering both of them.
STEVEN GILBERT: And you’ve got to know that there’s an alligator in the water.
DEBRA: You have to know there is an alligator in the water. And then you need to know where is the alligator. Where’s the water with the alligator?
STEVEN GILBERT: There’s another route around it. And I think that, with toxic chemicals, we often don’t know that toxic chemicals are there. We’re not given sufficient information to know that that’s a potential hazard.
DEBRA: This is the number one thing that I think that we need to be fixing in the world because it’s not that there’s no field of toxicology. Certainly, you’ve been working in the field of toxicology for all these years. I’m not a toxicologist, but I’ve studied a lot of it for more than 30 years as a consumer advocate.
And so we know that there are dangers, we know how to assess risk and stuff, but what we’re missing is just that data about how products can affect us, and where are those toxic chemicals in our daily lives.
Dr. Gilbert, could you tell us—I’m looking at your book, and there’s this really good part starting on page 258, where you just give more details about each of the steps of risk assessment, hazard identification, and those—could you just start with hazard identification? I know we’ve been talking a lot about that, but I think that most people listening don’t have any idea what’s going on behind the scenes in the world of toxicology to assess the hazard.
Can you just explain part of that?
STEVEN GILBERT: Toxicology, a lot of toxicology is driven by risk assessment. And hazard identification is a big part of that.
So, one of the first steps of hazard identification is to look at structure/activity relationship. If it’s a new compound (or an old compound), does the compound look like another compound that we know something about?
And then you look to see do we have data, human or animal data, that would help us determine if an agent has a biological effect.
You can also look for cell culture data, and then do cell culture experiments to learn about mutagenicity and the potential for carcinogenicity.
And then, really, you’re trying to identify the hazard, but the trick with identifying the hazard is looking at what the end point might be. Is it a carcinogenic compound that’s going to cause cancer? Is it going to affect the immune system? Is it going to have reproductive effects, alter reproductive function, or cause transgenicity which is a malformed infant?
Is it going to be organ-specific? Is there ecological effects? Is it going to affect something in the wildlife? Is there a neurobehavioral effect? Is that going to affect the central nervous system development?
So, you have to go through a range of these things, of these types of questions. And I think the big problem with risk assessment is we end up doing risk assessments with the data we have, not necessarily the data we want.
And then, we are getting through all these hazard identification, the next step is characterizing the risks and looking at exposure—in particular, in doing dose response studies—to look at is there a low-level effect or you’re just seeing it at very high doses. So, that’s very important.
And now, we want to focus on which effect is the most likely outcome that you want to study and really focus on and do additional studies to understand.
Along with that, you want to understand susceptibility. There is some population that’s more susceptible. Are children more susceptible? Are the elderly more susceptible? Or are women of child-bearing age more susceptible? Are the developing fetus more susceptible? You’ve got to ask some important questions about that.
And then, the next thing is to try to bring all this data together to help you understand the risk that you’ve got. You’ve got to actually throw specific numbers about that and try to establish, through dose response experiments, specific numbers that might be a safe level of exposure.
DEBRA: Doesn’t that sound really complicated?
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s complicated. It can be very costly. But I think this is what needs to be done with frequent high-volume chemicals that we’re exposed to a lot of. Industry is not required to do or release a lot of this data. They have confidential business information, so a lot of data did not come out.
As I’ve mentioned before, the EPA’s response to many industrial scale chemicals, they don’t have the regulatory authority like the FDA does to require additional testing.
DEBRA: One of the things that has struck me over the years is that there is no one standard for how all products are evaluated, that different groups of products, pesticides, are regulated by a different agency than cleaning products, for example, and personal care products are regulated by a different agency than drugs.
And each one has a different standard by what needs to be revealed on the label, how things get labeled. And for example, in food products, you have to put on the label all the ingredients, and in the order of how much is in it is first.
And in cleaning products, which are much, much, more toxic, you don’t have to list all the ingredients at all. You just need to put a warning label on it.
So it’s really, really inconsistent and even within something like particle board, which is emitting formaldehyde, which is a toxic chemical, if it’s in a big sheet, it requires a warning label. If you cut it up and make furniture out of it, it doesn’t.
And so these are all really, really inconsistent, and if we just had one regulation that said that every product, no matter what it is, needs to put down all its ingredients. I think the world would be a very different place. We would be able to assess much better instead of having all these things, hidden away by all these regulations.
We’re going to talk more when we come back from the break with Dr. Steven Gilbert. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking about risk assessment today.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology, which you can get for free on his website at Toxipedia.org.
And that has a very good chapter about risk assessment. You can also read more about risk assessment in my book, Toxic-Free, and you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and over in the right-hand columns, scroll down a little bit, and you’ll see a picture of the book cover for Toxic-Free, and it says underneath “start here” because it’s a good place to start on this whole subject is to read my book and Dr. Gilbert’s book too.
So just click on Toxic Free, it will take you to the page where you can order the book and read about risk assessment, and everything else.
Dr. Gilbert, since this is our last segment, I’d like to talk a little bit about managing risk by considering ways that we can reduce it. Number one would be something like just avoiding toxic chemicals all together, but we can also even reducing our exposure to toxic chemicals reduces our risk, and we can also share the risk with somebody else.
Give me your thoughts about how we can reduce our risk to toxic chemicals.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think the first thing is to learn a little bit more about the chemicals and what we’re exposed to and what chemicals are in the product, and then try to find out less toxic chemicals, less toxic products.
There are some very good websites out there. If you look at cosmetics, for example, there’s a website on cosmetics. It’s very good. They’ve been trying to figure out what chemicals are used in cosmetics and trying to find out the least toxic, potentially toxic products. So, I think that’s a good place to start.
And there are websites on toys. I think we really need to work to protect our children to have less toxic toys like the famous rubber ducky that have phthalates to keep it squishable. And so, we’re trying to reduce exposure to known hazard, the known potential chemical-laden products.
Trying to buy more organic products is always a good idea for the food area.
So, it’s really a matter of trying to control exposure. And you just have to constantly be looking at that. I think it’s unfortunate we don’t have a better system, a regulatory system, that makes that process a lot easier.
DEBRA: It would be a lot easier if our regulatory system did it for us, so that I wouldn’t have to do this.
So I’ll just mention on my website, you can go to Debra’s List, if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Near the top, there’s a button that says “shop” and it will take you to, on my website, Debra’s List, where I’ve been looking for all those toxic-free products for all these years, all the toxic-free products that I could find.
And even though I didn’t understand risk management, I knew that if I could identify where the hazard was, and then find something that didn’t have that toxic chemical in it as an alternative, then that would be better.
And so you can go there and you can find non-toxic cleaning products, and organic clothing, and just anything that you’re looking for is probably there.
You can also go to my Q&A section on my website because lots of people have been asking exactly these questions—“Where can I find a toxic free shampoo?” things like this.
And a lot of my readers have been just pouring information into this Q&A blog for years. And there’s a lot of resources there that will help you find the products that don’t have these toxic chemicals.
I want to say that for me, it’s been a process of looking for—trying to understand where are the hazards, what are the toxic chemicals, just making lists of them, and saying, “I want to find products that don’t contain this and this and this.”
And for everybody, I think that list is going to be different—that some people are willing to risk being exposed to some lesser toxic chemicals where I’m not willing to be.
Here’s an example. If you look on a material safety data sheet, that only tells you the most toxic chemicals that are on a certain list that was determined to be the hazardous list. But there are other things like for example, food colors. I don’t eat food colors. I tell people not to eat food colors. They’re made from petroleum, from coal tar, but they won’t show up on a material safety data sheet because they’re not toxic enough for that list.
And this is where we need to be making the decisions for ourselves.
STEVEN GILBERT: We really do. I really encourage your listeners to talk to your legislator folks about the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Safe Products Act. We need to have a better regulatory system that helps consumers. And one of the key provisions of that was having more of a precautionary approach as well as more access to data about what’s in our product, more transparent.
We really do have a right to know what we’re putting on our skin, what we’re ingesting, and what we’re close to, and what we’re being exposed to. And that’s not being respected by industry right now.
DEBRA: No, it’s not. And we didn’t sign up for this experiment. And it is an experiment. We don’t even have a choice, and we need to have that choice and have this regulation.
Dr. Gilbert, tell my listeners more about TSCA and what needs to be reformed.
STEVEN GILBERT: TSCA was, in fact, in 1976. And the idea was they would help provide data about industrial chemicals that were going to be widely used. And the problem was that EPA has to clear these chemicals for use. Industry has to report to EPA that they’re going to use a certain chemical. And there’s a very short timeframe for EPA to revise it.
And they would control those chemicals. There are 80,000 chemicals now that are potentially out there, many of them high volume production of about over a thousand chemicals at a million pounds per year. And then we don’t know all we need to know about potential hazards.
The bill really broke down over a court decision about asbestos. So the EPA lost a lot of its authority to really require industry to provide sufficient data to gauge the potential safety and hazards of a compound.
So, there’s been a big push over the last few years to try to amend that. That’s going on in Europe called the REACH Program, Registration, Evaluation, Authorization of Chemicals. Europe is actually quite a ways ahead of us in trying to provide more data on these chemicals.
There have been some efforts at the state level. And so a lot of the states, we’re working on that. For example, Washing State banned lead, cadmium and phthalates in baby toys. But that goal was taken to the federal level. And they prevented a lot of our rules and regulations around that.
So we need national regulation that really provides more of a precautionary approach that requires industry to demonstrate the safety of a product, and not have the burden on the public to show the hazards of products in commerce.
That’s really where we are right now. We, being the public, and the government have to show that a product is hazardous before it regulates it. And it really should be in reverse where industry has to demonstrate safety before the product is released.
DEBRA: How would this one demonstrate safety?
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, that’s a good question. So we have a lot of experience with doing that. We know how to do that through [unintelligible 00:33:45] to the FDA. There’s a wide range of very carefully quantified tests, toxicology tests. There’s a thing called Good Laboratory Practice, rules and regulations that require very strict protocols for doing the studies, careful data evaluation, and review of the information. So it’s all above board.
So, we know how to do this. We just don’t do it. Like you mentioned before, there’s a lot of contradictory rules and regulations about this.
I also want to mention we have a thing called the Safety Factor that when we find a level of exposure that we think is safe, that number is usually divided by 10.
So there is some effort to make things safe, but we really don’t follow through with that in a lot of situations because we don’t know the end point that we really need to be looking at. Endocrine disruptors are a great example of that where we found that, at low level of exposure, there are hazard there that we didn’t expect.
So, we really need to be very vigilant and really do more studies to understand the potential hazards of a product and the chemicals that were used in the product.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. And at the same time, I’m just looking at the decisions that I’ve made over the years for myself. And again, I’ll just say, I’m not a toxicologist. I’m not even a chemist. I’m not a scientist. I’m a musician.
So I stopped being a musician in order to write about this because I saw that toxic chemicals were making me sick. They were in my house, and nobody was talking about it. And I thought, “Well, they made me pretty sick. It took me a lot to recover from that, but I did. And I didn’t want other people to be sick.”
And my logic has always been to find whatever data I could find, and then make a decision to find a product that doesn’t have those things in it. With food, for example, it’s pretty easy to see there are pesticides, there are food colorings, there are artificial flavors, there are preservatives, there are nitrates—all of those things. And even refined ingredients—sugar, white flour, all those things, they all have known health effects.
And so then on the other end of the spectrum, I can just say, “Well, let’s go to organic food. Let’s eat whole foods that aren’t coming in plastic packaging that’s leeching plastic into the food.”
Why can’t the government look at it this way? It’s so simple. It looks so simple to me.
STEVEN GILBERT: It does seem so simple, doesn’t it? A lot of countries are talking about that. But a lot of people make a lot of money off of these products. And we subsidize a lot of farm bills and all kinds of policies that has really promoted cheap food that’s not always healthy food.
DEBRA: We’re actually coming up to the end of the show, so I need to say thank you for being here. And we’ll have you back again because you have so much great information. Thank you very much.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Pumpkin Pie for Everyone
I say this pumpkin pie is for everyone because the ingredients are so simple, practically everyone can eat it. There’s no crust (though you could add one if you want) so there are no grains, and there is no sweetener of any kind (though it tastes remarkably sweet!). And it’s so delicious you won’t miss the usually-soggy crust or the sugar. It’s my favorite pumpkin pie ever!
A thoroughly satisfying dessert for any day of autumn or winter!
I have made this with pumpkin and butternut squash and carnival squash (my favorite) they tasted almost exactly the same (except the carnival squash had more flaor and was sweeter. I think you could use any winter squash. And I’m also going to try sweet potatoes, and see how that works.
- 2 1/2 cups pumpkin puree (or other winter squash)
- 3 tablespoons softened butter (or oil of your choice)
- 3 eggs
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspooon salt
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- Place all ingredients in a food processor and process until smooth and creamy.
- Pour into a 9″ pie pan or baking dish.
- Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes. I bake mine until really set, but not brown.
Allow to cool before serving. Once cooled, store in refrigerator.
I cut this in wedges, like a pie and top with vanilla whipped cream and just a sprinkle of coconut sugar. Yum! Yum! Yum!
How Recycling and Buying Recycled Products Helps Reduce Toxics
My guest today is Brenda Pulley,Senior Vice President, Recycling, for Keep America Beautiful. Brenda joined Keep America Beautiful in October 2010 to develop, execute, and expand America Recycles Day, an annual event that is happening this Friday, November 15. Keep America Beautiful is collaborating on this campaign with the Ad Council—the nation’s largest producer of public service advertising. Brenda also supports other recycling programs and connects with Washington-based stakeholders. In this role, she identifies and develops strategies for policy issues key to Keep America Beautiful, its mission and members. Brenda began her nearly 30-year career working for the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Environmental Small Business Committee. In addition to her work on Capitol Hill, she has also worked for both corporations and trade associations. Brenda also serves on the Board of Directors of R2 Solutions – the organization charged with promoting environmentally responsible practices throughout the electronics recycling industry. www.americarecyclesday.org and www.kab.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Recycling & Buying Recycled Products Helps Reduce Toxics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Brenda Pulley
Date of Broadcast: November 11, 2013
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.
Today is Monday, November 11, 2013, and we’re having a beautiful autumn day here in Clearwater, Florida.
Today, we’re going to talk about something a little different. Usually, we talk about toxic chemicals that we’re being exposed to in our own homes, or as we’re going about our daily lives, and how they’re toxic, how they can affect our lives, and what we can do instead.
Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s a little less direct, but is affecting us nonetheless. And that is about how recycling and buying recycled products can help reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals.
Now, that may sound like, “What’s toxic about recycled products, or what’s safer about recycled products?”
But the thing is that there are things about recycled products that actually involve toxic chemicals, which we’re going to find out about today. And that by doing these things, whether it’s recycling something that you could recycle instead of throwing it in the trash or the landfill, or by buying a recycling product, you can help reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that are in our environment that may come back to you in breathing the air, drinking the water, or eating food that has been grown in the environment.
Now, we’re going this today because this Friday, November 15th, is America Recycles Day. It’s an event that happens every year to educate Americans about recycling because it seems that not everybody is yet recycling, so we’re going to learn about this today.
My guest is Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful.
Brenda joined Keep America Beautiful in 2010 to develop, execute and expand America’s [inaudible 00:02:01].
Thanks for being with me, Brenda.
BRENDA PULLEY: Debra, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.
DEBRA: Well, tell us more about—let’s start with tell us about Keep America Beautiful.
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. Keep America Beautiful has been around for 60 years. In fact, we’re celebrating our 60th year anniversary this year. We started as an anti-litter organization back then, and took on those issues for several years.
We have affiliates located in communities across the country and various partners, so we have over a thousand affiliates and partners that we work with. And we’re all about bringing people together in their respective communities, and working with them, engaging them, to help make their community, what I call, their common environment—cleaner, greener and better.
DEBRA: I remember when I was a kid—I’m almost 60, so I remember when I was a kid, and I remember those commercials about not littering, and I remember that phrase, “Keep America beautiful.”
So when I heard it again in association with recycling, I thought, “Well, this is just the newer version of what you’ve been doing for a very long time.”
So thank you so much for having that organization, and being part of it, and making less litter on the highways, and in our towns, and all those places, and whether it goes into the garbage or whether it goes into recycling.
It’s all about putting our trash in the right place, and not just throwing it around the environment.
BRENDA PULLEY: It is exactly like you say it. We still need to work in every community across the country to make sure that litter is picked up, and that litter is prevented. And that’s one thing I say about recycling and waste production or recycling.
It is what I call a preventive maintenance to littering, so you’re exactly right. Thank you.
DEBRA: Yes, I see the connection. And I’m thinking about particularly all those soda cans. Those are something that could easily be recycled. But I think that a lot of people, especially people of my age, that saw those commercials [inaudible 00:04:14] they really stuck.
I just want to let you know that they really made an impression on me. And in fact, I have a friend, one friend in particular, who, every time she sees a piece of litter, she picks it up. And she picks it, and she recycles is or puts it in the trash because she’s just taking responsibility for other people not doing that.
And as we walk down the street, she’ll just pick up the litter. And I think that’s very admirable and something other people could be doing as well.
BRENDA PULLEY: Those are the ambassadors we rely on, frankly. And there’s nothing like creating that example that she has. That’s actually exactly what we want to do with the recycling these days, is how do you create that example that social norm where recycling is just the natural thing for all of us to do.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I learned a number of years ago, I went to Germany for the first time. Germany is an interesting place because I went there in 1990, before we had anything green here. And in Germany, I was very surprised to see that there are recycling bins on every street corner.
So where we have public trashcans, and in some places we have recycling bins, but they have them everywhere, and they’re divided into glass, paper, metal.
And when you’re done with your soda can or your paper plate, or whatever, it just goes straight into the recycling bin.
I would like to see more of that in America because I think that the reason that some people don’t recycle is that they may be have more to recycle, but it’s difficult to do that.
BRENDA PULLEY: Well, I share that objective with you. And there are a lot of reasons we can talk about why other countries have much more infrastructure and much more of a culture recycling than we’ve developed here in the United States.
But I would like to say it’s one of those things that we, Keep America Beautiful, and I think even as a country, are working on.
DEBRA: I think so too.
BRENDA PULLEY: First and foremost, it’s about making recycling convenient. And that means having that recycling bin, whether it’s at home or at work or at school, or as we say, you just point it out, when you’re out and about.
Particularly, we’re much more on-the-go society. And so we’re generating that soda can, that fastfood packaging. We’re generating it when we’re out and about. And so we want to be able, in those locations, to make it very easy and convenient for people to recycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. And I just want to mention because this is something that I found out recently—the other day, I went to Best Buy, and I mentioned this on the show before, but I want to say it on this show.
I went to Best Buy, and when I just walked in the door, they had all these banners, very clearly marked about being able to recycle electronic-oriented things like cords and cell phones and things like that.
You can just walk in the door, and put it in the bin.
And I happen go there because I needed to buy a new mouse for my computer. And so I brought it with me, and even though there wasn’t a bin for mice, when I bought the new mouse, I gave the old one to the cashier, and she took it for recycling.
And I think that’s a wonderful, responsible thing to do. And I also had another guest on when we were talking about taking back pharmaceuticals, and keeping those out of the environment, and how we need to have more programs for recycling pharmaceuticals.
So this whole thing about recycling, really, as we will see today, will keep toxic [inaudible 00:07:46] out of the environment.
Brenda, before we go to the break, could you just tell us for a minute about how you personally got interested in recycling.
BRENDA PULLEY: I think similar to you—growing up in the 70’s, I would say, was when we really saw that first Earth Day come about. In fact, Keep America Beautiful and [inaudible 00:08:06] were both engaged in that—releasing one of the most famous commercials of the crying Indian.
DEBRA: I remember that.
BRENDA PULLEY: And I [inaudible 00:08:11] also, when my own home life, just being part of that culture, and being exposed to nature, and preserving, and the things that we could do to be much more conserving. I think it was instilled in me early on, and then having it reinforced from a society standpoint in the 70’s. I think it really made an impression on me.
And so my work—I worked for the US House of Representatives for years. And then since then, there are significant energy, environmental issues, that we have as a society. But having said that there’s so much opportunity, of things that we can do to become more energy-efficient with things like recycling where we can really preserve our natural resources and things like that.
So I think, for me, that was the personal passion, and then seeing the opportunity of how to make a difference.
DEBRA: Great. Well, we need to go to break in just a few seconds. And so we’ll talk more about this when we come back. My guest today is Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about how recycling and buying recycled products can reduce the overall toxics in the world. They may not make a difference to us much, although sometimes, it can, in the particular products we’re being exposed to, but how it can make a difference in the overall environment.
And my guest today is Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President in Recycling from Keep America Beautiful.
Well, Brenda, let’s talk about recycling now.
So the biggest thing that I think is the thing that’s related to toxic chemical exposures is the fact that if you collect material, and then recycle it into a new product, there’s a tremendous amount of energy savings. So could you tell us about that?
BRENDA PULLEY: There is a tremendous amount of energy savings. When we think cumulative—so just take, we’re at EPA estimates, that we’re at a national recycling rate of about 34%. If you take out, what we call green waste, so grass clippings and things like that. So think of packaging and other things, and electronics you talk about, we’re at a 24%/25% recycling rate.
But of that 34% recycling rate, that’s energy equivalent of savings of nearly 230-million barrels of oil.
DEBRA: That’s huge.
BRENDA PULLEY: It’s huge. And it’s hard for me to comprehend that. So good old EPA even translates that into—but that’s really the equivalent of an annual energy consumption of nearly 15-million homes in the U.S.
So I know I throw a lot of numbers at you, but it is just what I believe people with the impression of, if there are in almost every situation of what can be recycled. There is significant energy savings by recycling.
And I would say, I worked for several years in the aluminum industry, and that aluminum can that you referred to earlier, when you recycle that aluminum can, there is literally going from can to can, it’s 80% energy efficiency saved there from doing this.
It’s a much easier streamline system to take a can and re-melt it down versus mining all that raw material and processing all that raw material into finish aluminum.
So a lot of facts, but [inaudible 00:11:48] point significant, significant energy savings.
DEBRA: So if people are saving energy, would you happen to know what are the toxic chemicals that are not being released into the environment?
BRENDA PULLEY: I would just say, I’m not sure which ones to label toxic or not. So please, you can name some of them for me.
DEBRA: Pollutants, whether they’re toxic or not.
BRENDA PULLEY: Yes. Look, where do you get your energy from? It’s either oil, or it’s generated by using coal, or natural gas. All the emissions, as many as [inaudible 00:12:27] that there are these days, all the emissions related to that can occur on a much significantly lower level.
That’s one. But for aluminum, it’s literally—there’s a lot of box site mining that must go on. And again, whether all kinds of control is in place from the mining and the processing, all those natural resources that don’t have to be mined and certain air emissions released, or just even the ground disturbed. Think of the dust that’s released, or the electricity that has to be generated, and all the releases related to that.
That’s how I think about all those different points in the manufacturing process that now don’t have to take place because we’re recycling materials.
Now, having said that, we’ve got to look at the recycling process, and there are certain controls and measures in place to make sure that the recycling process is also done in a very safe and efficient way.
DEBRA: Now, tell us about that.
BRENDA PULLEY: Well, let’s take electronics. You referred to that earlier. And we all have—it’s estimated 60-million to 100-million phones that we all have stored in our drawers, or in the cabinets, or in the basement [inaudible 00:13:48] just cell phones annually that are not being recycled.
And they have short, useful lives these days, since we all like the newest and greatest phone.
But electronics recycling is really one of those things that not only all the emissions that we just talked about that have to be generated when you manufacture new electronics. So it’s a lot of metals—it’s lead, it’s cadmium, mercury in some instances, so that’s less and less.
But it’s also more precious metals, if you will, that when they’re recycled, one of the things the industry have made great advancements in over the last five-plus years is making sure that they are now particularly globally, and more controls in place, to make sure that when those recyclables are processed—sometimes, many of the equipment can be refurbished and reused.
But now, they’re going to recycle it.
There are many instances where particularly in developing countries, there are not the appropriate controls in place, and there can be burning, for example, uncontrolled burning if you will, to extract some of the metals and things out of that.
So the industry is taking great strides at not only in the U.S., but developing global standards to put in place protections and criteria [inaudible 00:15:00] no longer happens.
So it is important for all of us, [inaudible 00:15:05] we’re going to recycle your electronics, so taking them to somewhere like Best Buy, or Staples, or your community electronic collection day. Those are instances where you can [inaudible 00:15:16] pretty assured that they’re being handled properly. But if there are other avenues that you want to get your material recycled, it’s very important to check and make sure that they’re validated and they’re licensed—there are some third party certifiers out there now.
And it’s important, and I encourage all your listeners to make sure a) to recycle, particularly your electronics, but to make sure that they’re turning them over properly.
And therefore, I would also say not only all the emissions that we just talked about, but proper data management is another issue.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. And I think that part of it, about switching to having what we could probably call a recycling mindset, is to get out of the habit of just tossing things in the garbage can, and paying attention to what it is that we are actually throwing away.
And I found that as I have more awareness of that, then it’s not difficult to decide—I have a basket that’s just for paper, so that I don’t even have to sort my trash. This is the paper basket, and I have a bin that the city gives me, and I just put my recyclables that go to the city like a can—I have hardly any cans at all, but like a plastic tub from yogurt or something.
It just goes straight into the recycling bin, and I think that part of it [inaudible 00:16:43] with awareness and changing our habits.
We need to go to break again, but we’ll be right back. I’m talking with Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling from Keep America Beautiful. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful. And we’re talking about how recycling can reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals.
Let’s see. What else should we talk about?
Let’s talk about recycling some other kinds of products that may be related to toxic exposures. One would be plastic, and another would be motor oil.
BRENDA PULLEY: Again, in each of those instances, there are many benefits to reusing and recycling them.
So let’s take our plastic bags. It took me several times, walking into that grocery store to remember to go back in my car and get that reusable bag. And it’s something I wanted to do. So it is something that we all have to work on and to be encouraged to.
And so where we can reduce and where we can recycle, I do want to encourage all your listeners, there are many benefits to doing it. And you’re pointing out one of the great aspects of how it really reduces emissions and toxics that we get exposed to every day.
So if you think of used oil, for years, it’s actually an issue I worked on when I worked for the U.S. House of Representatives.
People commonly would take used oil and pour it to kill certain kinds of weeds and things like that. And frankly, it’s one of the worst things that you can do because it leeches into the water system, which we drink.
And so the good news is over the last 20/30 years, there have been big messages for people that still—and there’s a large percentage of people that still recycle their—or I should say, change their own oils from their automobiles, from their lawnmowers, so those kinds of things, but at least there are many more places where they can take that used oil back, and get it recycled.
And in fact, it is now common for it to be re-refined into new used oil.
It’s taken years for that to happen, a lot of effort, but that is now used for used oil.
DEBRA: I think that that’s what we need to be changing our minds—the way we view this whole thing. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book—I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, called “Cradle to Cradle.” It’s been around for a long time, by William McDonough.
And in this book, he explains how nature, the environment, is just one huge recycling factory because everything, if you just think of it in terms of a tree, then in the spring, a tree grows new green leaves, and the leaves do their thing, photosynthesis and all these things.
And then in the fall, if you have a citrus tree, the leaves turn colors, and they drop off the tree.
But what happens next is that those leaves, when they go down into the ground, is that all the little microorganisms and the earthworms and everything come and break down the leaves into nutrients, which then go into the soil, which then feeds the tree to be able to produce a new crop of leaves.
That’s recycling.
BRENDA PULLEY: It absolutely is.
DEBRA: It’s inherent in nature. And so what William McDonough and his co-authors are saying that is that we should be doing like trees do, and that everything should be able to go back into the system and get recycled into a new product.
Now, we’re a long way from that. But if we start thinking in those terms, then we would have an abundance of materials to make into products instead of depleting our resources.
And certainly, recycling also includes, as you said, reuse and reduce, as well as recycle. That’s the first thing that we want to do. What’s even better than recycle is to reuse something, whether that’s—just like I cut up the backs of papers, if I print something out, and I don’t send it someplace off my computer, then I just put it in a pile, and if I need notepads to take notes, write down messages from a telephone or something, I just cut those pieces of paper in quarters, and I have a little basket that I put it in, and that’s how I make my notepads.
I don’t go to a store and buy a notepad. I can make the notepad. I reuse my jars.
All of these things, every time we reuse something in our houses, or any in our places of work, we’re, again, cutting back on the amount of energy even more because it takes zero energy to make a notepad out of a piece of paper that would have gone in the trash.
And then the more uses you get out of these things, the less and less energy we’re using, and the cleaner and cleaner our air will be, the cleaner our environment will be, just by taking these simple steps at home.
BRENDA PULLEY: And I would say that’s a great example. It’s all of us thinking about what we can do, what steps we can take, and knowing that those small steps cumulative help truly make a big difference.
So we talked about the energy benefits of recycling, and one more I would put out there are climate change related issues, such as carbon dioxide. Just the recycling that occurs today in the U.S. with that 34% recycling rate, believe or not, that recycling avoids emissions of greenhouse gases that are equivalent to taking 35-million cars off the road for a year.
So again, you’re talking about all the reduction that doesn’t have to happen, all the releases of various emissions and those kinds of things, [inaudible 00:23:07] air, in our water, or the land that don’t have to happen when we recycle and recycle properly.
DEBRA: I also want to mention, again, from Cradle to Cradle, that when people are designing products, it’s important to design them in a way that all the materials can be recycled, and for us, as consumers, to think about, are we buying products and packaging that can be recycled, for example.
I think, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, I think those aseptic boxes, those juice boxes, I think they can’t be recycled because there are layers, and they would have to be taken apart, the aluminum part, taken off the plastic part that something like a glass bottle, you just take the lid off, and you drink it or eat it or whatever, and then toss the glass bottle into the recycling.
But something like an aseptic package is very, very difficult to recycle. And if we start thinking about, at the beginning, how we’re going to recycle and reuse that material at the end, that’s something to consider. And I think that as we all start becoming more aware of these things that the world will change for the better.
This is just the right thing to be doing.
BRENDA PULLEY: You touched on so many points that I want to address, and one is, again, we have conversations all the time with manufacturers. They’re starting to look now more, what we call, a life cycle of a product. And your point about now, not only looking it in the life what happens, and what can be reclaimed and reused, but also, looking at the front end when designing that product or packaging to be thinking of what materials, what designs do you use, so they can be recycled at the end of life.
So there’s a plastic bottle out there right now that has full plastic wrap, but the recycling process can’t read and know where to put that recycled bottle. So the industry is working on how they can change that so the recycling process can, in fact, read it.
Or if you look at products, like you said, and there’s more and more effort looking at how can we better label products, so all of us when we go to purchase something, know that [inaudible 00:25:23].
DEBRA: I’m a big one about changing labeling, but we’ll talk about that more after the break.
BRENDA PULLEY: I’d love to.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking about recycling with Brenda Pulley from Keep America Beautiful. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Brenda Pulley from Keep America Beautiful. And we’re talking about recycling.
Brenda, you wanted to say something about labeling.
BRENDA PULLEY: I think you raised a couple of products that when you go to purchase, having that information about—one is, is it recyclable or not. But also, we know from surveys that individuals are interested in knowing if it has recycled content or not.
There’s so much that needs to go on a label, but like you, it’s a topic that truly interests me, so that consumers are aware when they go to purchase something, how to recycle it, and if it contains recycled contents, so we can close that loop you mentioned.
DEBRA: We do need to know about both ends. We need to know if it can be recycled. We need to know how much recycled content there is, so that we can make that choice.
I just think that consumers should have as much information as possible, and I think there are critical things, and I think the recycling information is one of those. The other thing is that I think we need to have a big revamp of how toxic products get labeled.
And I know that’s not a recycling issue here. But I think in terms of labeling, we just don’t have enough information. And I think that if the toxic ingredients of consumer products will really put on the labels, the people would stop buying them in droves because they would know instead of just looking at a label, and seeing nothing.
BRENDA PULLEY: You raise a very good point. Particularly, toxics, the way that you’re researching them and looking at them, it does get very complicated. But we do know some information that can and should [inaudible 00:27:39] be shared with the general public.
And frankly, we have some of that in recycling. It happens to be a complicated issue and very local issue. And so part of the task is encouraging people, so that they want to recycle, making it convenient, and then making the information for their unique community easily available for them, so they know how to recycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree. So I want to ask you a toxics question actually about recycled products because recycled content sounds like a good thing, and it is a good thing to recycle. But what if you’re recycling something that’s toxic?
Now, some of those recycled things, those plastic containers like, I think it’s #5 PVC. PVC is a toxic plastic. And you can recycle it, and it can be recycled any number of times. But it’s still a toxic plastic.
So do you have any comment about toxics in recycling like that? That’s just an example.
BRENDA PULLEY: I’m not as familiar, and I probably should be, with that one particularly. But I think also, as we talked earlier about manufactures looking at how products are made, and what goes in the products, that on their radar screen—I come, very specifically, from a recycling angle. You come in also from the toxic angle.
But if they can look at a host of those issues, and look at how to reduce things like toxicity factors that are going into them, or other factors that create all kinds of air emissions or other things, if they can reduce the use of those, and advocating for that, it’s an important thing to do.
So in my industry, it’s also not just about recyclability, but it’s also about light weighting, so it’s the use of less material to begin with.
So those are some steps that are being taken, but I know when you look at it particularly from a toxicity angle, are there ways to look at, can you avoid use of a certain material or not, and to continue to push for that and get it on the radar screen, I think it’s very important.
DEBRA: I think so too. And another one that falls in that category, for me, is recycled paper. What I want to say about this first is that sometimes, the issue is that we just don’t have enough information, as you said. And so my question that comes up about recycled paper often is, well, paper itself is just cellulose from trees. There’s nothing about paper that is a problem.
But then there are bleaches and there are inks. Some of those inks have lead in them, especially the colored ones. There are VOCs, all kinds of things in ink that is a big problem.
So then you recycle that paper, and what happens to those inks and metals and things? Are the recycling processes for paper set up to remove those kinds of things? I just don’t know the answer to that. And you may not either.
BRENDA PULLEY: But I actually have some familiarity with that. And you’re right. That is part of the process that we should think about. It’s not just the recycling benefits, but making sure the recycling process is also properly handled.
I can tell you that 20/30 years ago, it was not as much as it needed to be. And today, [inaudible 00:31:00] and emission controls, as I’ve said earlier on, air or water releases, or land releases—not that there’s not more to do, but I can tell you that there are many more controls than there were 20 and 30 years ago because we have had agencies, both the Federal EPA, and local governments, that now have looked and put in place controls on those kinds of things.
I used to represent the solvent recyclers. And so there were all kinds of air emission controls on them, as there should have been when it came to recycling, to make sure that those VOCs were captured.
DEBRA: Yes, they should be. And this is one of the things that, again, in Cradle to Cradle, they talk about that there may be a place for toxic chemicals. As much as it made me cringe when I read that, I have to agree with them.
That if toxic chemicals can be contained so that we’re not being exposed to them—and I think an example would be Freon or something, that would be used as a coolant. If it was contained, if it was collected, and if it was recycled, then use of that toxic chemical wouldn’t affect health or the environment, and it would be able to be used in a beneficial way but that’s not what we’re doing now.
So we just need to be, I think, as a culture, we need to be thinking about what kinds of steps do we need to be taking, so that we can all be living in a more responsible way, and have an agreement between consumers, regulators, manufacturers, and organizations, so that these things happen all down the line, whether we’re talking about recycling or reducing toxics, or any other issue that benefits our health and the environment.
It really is a cooperation between all those different levels, and that sometimes, like I know for example, I want to have chickens in my backyard, but I can’t because it’s illegal where I live. And astonishing as that sounds, I had some chickens. I [inaudible 00:33:00] and put chickens in my backyard, and the police came and took them away.
So that’s not a support of law. That law does not support life. But that’s what we need to be looking at, is are our regulations, our laws, our actions, are all the pieces of our society agreed and aligned on getting these kinds of things in that help all of us.
BRENDA PULLEY: An interesting point you raised because it is, how can we all work together and partner, so that we can figure out how to minimize or to find complimentary way. [inaudible 00:33:35] is generated, it can be positively used.
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. Well, Brenda, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. We only have just a few minutes left of the show. Are there any final words that you’d like to say? Anything that you haven’t said that you want to say?
BRENDA PULLEY: I appreciate the opportunity. One thing is—to reassure people that materials, it is worth recycling for all the reasons that we’ve talked about, whether it’s energy and environmental and the toxics reduced in our society, the waste that’s reduced. It really is worth recycling in so many instances.
And in those materials where it’s not yet, progress continues to be made, technology gets sophisticated more and more to where materials can be economically and environmentally safely recycled.
And so that would be my one thing of encouragement to share with you and your listeners, is the importance of, and that it’s beneficial too. You can really give new life to something when it is recycled.
And if they need more information, we did just launch a new ad campaign with the ad counsel, so if they can go to IWanToBeRecycled.org, and there’s information there on what can be recycled, and where to find recycling.
DEBRA: I went to that site. It’s really cute. There’s one about—there’s a picture of a plastic, a bench or something, and it says, “I want to be recycled.”
BRENDA PULLEY: Yes, it does. And that is to show people how it really is worth doing. You’re raising a set of unique issues about why it’s important. At the end of the day, there’s just a multitude of benefits to recycle, and we encourage people to do so.
DEBRA: There are. And do you want to give a plug for America Recycles Day? People can go to AmericaRecyclesDay.org to find out more about that, but there is anything special happening on the 15th?
BRENDA PULLEY: Listen, there are events across the country happening. That’s wonderful. It’s great to see all people that are very interested, and they want to share recycling in their community.
Literally, there are events going on across the country. From Washington D.C. tomorrow, we’re going to be on the National Mall, and down on the Business District, getting people caught in the act of recycling and inviting them to take the “I Recycle” pledge.
Or LA Live out in Los Angeles, there are going to be big events out there all day long with electronics collection, and at the game that night, there will be people getting caught recycling.
So literally, across the country, there are wonderful events occurring, and we encourage people to go to our site and take the America Recycles Day pledge, please.
DEBRA: Yes, I encourage that too. I think it’s a great idea.
Thanks so much, Brenda, and have a wonderful America Recycles Day and thanks for being on the show.
BRENDA PULLEY: Thank you, Debra. Keep up the good work. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you’d like to know more about this show, if you’d like to listen to other shows with other guests, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Every Monday, I post the new guest for the week, so you could go there right now, and find out who else is going to be on this week.
And you could go to the archives and listen to—there’s more than a hundred shows archived there. You can also, across the top, there’s a menu where you can find out more about how to find non-toxic products. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Ceramic Glaze on Xtrema Cookware
Question from Mick
Dear Debra,
Thank you for this very useful website and your book. I have been using xtrema cook wear for the past two years. I was about to purchase an additional pot when I got interested in the ingredients that are using for the ceramic and the glaze. I could not find this information anywhere. It is true that their pots don’t leach metals but since it is such a highly sophisticated technology maybe there is another toxic chemical in this mix that is not tested for??? Since nobody knows what is in it, then nobody actually know what to test for. They tested for metal leaching but that was kind of pointless since they don’t use metal in the manufacturing. So while it is a good marketing tool, it would have been more useful to the consumer if they disclosed what is the material that they are using and then provide tests that these materials are not leaching to the food. Did anybody see the list of material that they are using and the method they use to manufacture? Maybe I didn’t look well?
Debra’s Answer
Here is the response I received from Rich Bergstrom, Founder of Ceramcor, the makers of Xtrema:
I would also add that after more than thirty years researching products I have found that the integrity of the company makes a big difference. There are those who are dedicated to things being toxic free and those who are just making claims. Rich is dedicated to making a healthy product and has decades of experience in the industry. So he knows what to do. I’ve been using his cookware for several years with no ill effects or concerns. In fact, I just bought their new 10 quart pot so I can finally make soup in a ceramic pot.
I’ve also studied glazes and lead and cadmium are the two ingredients to be concerned about. But as Rich says, if there are no added metals in their glaze, no synthetic chemicals and no synthetic materials, it isn’t toxic.
Finishes on Faucets and Drawer Pulls
Question from Tara
We are putting in a new kitchen faucet and new cabinet pulls. Do you have any advice on the best finish for these items? I will be handling the faucet and the door pulls often while handling food so I want to be sure nothing toxic will rub off onto my hands. I thought stainless would be the safest, but for the door pulls, I can only find a nickel finish in the size we need. For the faucet, I found a stainless faucet from Moen and one from Delta, but Moen’s faucet has a Spot Resist finish and the Delta faucet has a Brilliance Finish. Moen’s website didn’t have much on the Spot Resist finish, but Delta’s Brilliance Finish said they embed molecules deep into the finish through a process that uses various gasses and zirconium. Would I be better off going with a chrome finish for the faucets? The chrome faucets don’t seem to have these special finishes.
Thank you so much for your advice!
Debra’s Answer
I am at a loss at the moment as to how to respond to this.
Let me just tell you my thought process.
When I first became aware of things toxic, it was about products that offgassed toxic fumes into the air. And so I was just looking for products that didn’t offgas.
It wasn’t until only a few years ago that I began to be aware of metals, their dangers, and exposures.
While I don’t wear costume jewelry because the nickel gives me skin rashes, all my faucets are brushed nickel. I have had no problem with them at all.
Now, because lead can be released through touch and absorbed through the skin, I am now questioning other metals. OK I just looked it up. “Nickel is poorly absorbed through the skin.” If you want to know about other metals, search for “[name of metal] skin absorption.”
How to Roast A Pumpkin . . . And Other Winter Squashes
First I want to tell you about pumpkins.
I used to make anything “pumpkin” with pumpkin, which is a winter squash. And then one day I was watching a cooking show on television and it was suggested that one make pumpkin pie with kabocha squash instead because they had more flavor than pumpkin squash. So I immediately went and bought a kabocha squash and made a pumpkin pie, and was very disappointed. I didn’t like the flavor at all.
But that got me thinking. Maybe there was a winter squash that was better than pumpkin for pumpkin recipes, and after trying many I found one: carnival squash. It’s denser than pumpkin, creamier in texture, and sweeter.
You can learn more about winter squash at About.com Local Foods: Winter Squash & Pumpkins. They have a whole list of winter squashes with links to individual pages for each one. No carnival squash, alas, but I have it at my local natural food store.
Carnival squash is now my winter squash of choice for all those pumpkin recipes.
If you want to use pumpkin pumpkin, choose a smaller “pie” pumpkin rather than a large pumpkin like you would carve for a jack-lantern. The smaller pumpkins have better texture and flavor.
Now, if you are going to make a pumpkin recipe, you’ll need to roast the pumpkin and process the meat, in order to get a pumpkin puree that is like what you would get out of a can. Please don’t buy canned pumpkin! Roasting your own is so easy and tastes so much better and there’s no BPA from the can lining, which can disrupt your whole endocrine system.
How To Roast a Pumpkin or Other Winter Squash
First you need to cut the pumpkin open.
For that, you need tools. Ideally a good cleaver and a rubber mallet. If you don’t have one in your kitchen, go down to your local home improvement store and buy one, because you can use it for all kinds of things around the kitchen. They are about $5.00. If you don’t have a cleaver, this might be a good time to buy one of those too, as you will use it often.
If you have these tools the job is easy. Just sit the squash on it’s bottom so it’s stable, position the sharp edge of the knife on the top point, and whack the knife with the mallet. The squash will crack open. You’ll probably need to continue to whack the knife on the ends as it is stuck in the squash until the squash cracks completely into two pieces. If you want quarters, do the same again.
If you don’t have a cleaver and mallet, use the biggest knife you have. Position the sharp side of the knife on the point of the squash and put a folded kitchen towel over the knife to protect your hand. Hit the knife hard with your hand or a heavy object. You’ll be able to open it, but if you want to make winter squash frequently, as I do, you’ll go buy a mallet and cleaver.
Then you want to scoop out the seeds. Again, easy.
I find roasting to be the best way to cook winter squash because it concentrates the flavor and you can easily scoop it out of the cooked shell, rather than trying to peel off the tough skin.
Once you’ve cut the squash in two, place the pieces cut-side down on a baking sheet lined with unbleached parchment paper. I always add a little water to make steam in the oven. Not much, maybe 1/2 a cup.
Bake the squash at 350 degrees F for an hour or more. Let it get good and soft. Don’t rush it. You’ll know it’s done when your tray looks like this:
When the pieces are cool enough to touch, scrape the squash out of the shell with a soup spoon.
Then puree the squash meat in a food processor and you are ready to make any delicious recipe that calls for pumpkin puree. I like to just keep this puree on hand during the season because there are so many sweet and savory dishes to make with it.
Root Canal Chemicals
Question from Bonnie Johnson
I may have to have a root canal. I go to the DDs tomorrow and will find out. Do you have any info on that? I know there is some sort of stuff they use to disinfect the root area and I have such bad reactions to that kind of stuff. I am just worried and wonder if anyone here has had one.
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any advice on this?
Organic Playmat
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra, I am looking for an organic playmat for my baby.
I found one by Nook Sleep Systems. The fabric is made from eucalytus and organic cotton. The interior of the playmat is made from PETE (recycled water bottles). Supposedly, the eucalyptus is antimicrobial.
Other playmats I have found are cotton but with polyester fill, or completely polyester. I did find one that is completely organic but is very expensive.
I also found playmats made of “high density foam,” supposedly phalate and lead free, and/or mats made of “high density non-recyled, EVA foam.” They are much cheaper, but would you use these for children/baby? Could these contain flame retardants? Thanks again!
Thanks so much for the great information!
Debra’s Answer
Well, first, I wouldn’t put an infant down on a eucalyptus cover. I haven’t seen one of these, but if they claim it is antimicrobial, there must be enough eucalyptus oil present to have that effect. I grew up in California where there are a lot of eucalyptus trees, and the smell often made me sick. I am of the belief that we should support and strengthen our immune systems to fight bacteria, not put antimicrobials, even natural ones, all over everything.
I’m curious why you think the 100% organic cotton playmats are expensive. I’m looking at one here that is 100% GOTS certified organic cotton with organic cotton fill. It’s only $68 and the Nook one is $120.
I would get the one that is 100% organic cotton.
Hair Color Ingredient
Question from HairCare
I understand the chemicals in standard hair dyes are not great to use. However, while pregnant the colorist put in TCA drops into the dye mixture to reduce free radicals.
It looks like the TCA drops are all natural (they contain Mineral Oil, Vitamin E, Jojoba Oil), however, do you know if this would be safe to mix with hair dye…would any other chemical mixture result that would be unsafe.
If this was used 1 time during my last trimester do you forsee this causing any issues? Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
First, mineral oil is made from petroleum, so that’s not a “natural” ingredient.
I looked at the website and I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
Birth Control the Natural Way
My guest today is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health. We’ll be talking about a method of natural birth control called the sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness that Hannah teaches online. Hannah is passionate about letting women know that they don’t need to resort to toxic birth control, even if they want a highly effective method. She writes about many things related to fertility awareness on her website. holistichormonalhealth.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Birth Control the Natural Way
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Hannah Ransom
Date of Broadcast: November 7, 2013
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 because it is a toxic world out there. It seems like sometimes everywhere we look, there are toxic chemicals, and all the consumer products that are on the shelves, and the water we drink, and the food we eat.
But not here—here we talk about what’s not toxic, how to create a toxic-free home, how to remove toxic chemicals from your body, how to not put them in your body in the first, and everything else that you might need to know about how to live a toxic-free life.
One of the things that I’m trying to do on the show is to bring in a lot of different viewpoints, and if what you’re wanting to do is move away from a toxic life, there are a lot of different ways that you can move away from a toxic life. And one is to simply buy a product that is less toxic than the ones that you’re using. And that’s a great first step.
And there’s a lot going on in the world right now about manufacturers and retailers wanting to move in that direction, to see what are their toxic products, and what can be done to have less toxic products for their customers.
And then it just goes on up the scale, where you can get less toxic, and less toxic, and less toxic, and less toxic. And then what I found in my own life, I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years, but what I found in my own life is that at a certain point, you fall out of the industrial consumer world, and you say, “Well, how can I do something that is just completely in harmony with nature that follows natural laws, and that it’s just me and nature?”
And if you get to that point in any subject—of course, I want to say no toxic chemicals, but I don’t want it to sound like there’s nothing toxic in nature because there are things that are toxic in nature. But for the most part, everything about nature—nature is a system that is designed to support life. The industrial system is designed to, well, to make money.
We won’t even talk about the industrial system right now.
What I want you to know is that nature is a system that is designed to support and perpetuate life, and the more we can do things that are according to nature’s ways, the better off we are, the healthier we are, the happier we are.
And my guest today fits right in that category. What she does is that she teaches women method of natural birth control that is a method of fertility awareness, and it is by becoming aware of your own fertile cycles, and she teaches these classes online, it is effective for birth control if you know how to do it, and do it right, and actually do it, it’s as effective as any other type of birth control, including taking hormones, which are toxic to your body.
And we’re going to talk about all this today, so that you can make your own decisions about what’s going on with your body, you make your own decisions about becoming pregnant or not becoming pregnant, and doing it all in the way that brings you more aware of the nature of your own body.
Hi, Hannah, are you there?
HANNAH RANSOM: Hi, Debra, yes. Thank you for that introduction.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thank you so much for being with me today. Many years ago, I learned this method and used it, and I have used it, and since have not used any, what I’ll call, commercial birth control. And the results were exactly what I wanted them to be.
And so first, tell us, how did you become interested in this subject?
HANNAH RANSOM: I personally began looking for some kind of long-term birth control. And I was, at first, one that did not go with this. I actually had a copper IUD when I first wanted a long-term method of birth control. And I always knew that hormones weren’t for me. I was always kind of a more eco-conscious, health-conscious kind of a person.
But I went with this copper IUD, and at the same time, I read a big, fat book on fertility awareness called “Taking Charge for Your Fertility.”
DEBRA: That was the book I learned from many years ago.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, it’s been around for a while now. And it’s much, much more popular with those who are using the method to get pregnant rather than for birth control. But it has all the information in there.
And I read that at the same time as I got that. And I was just blown away that wow, this is what my body does, and this is—I can’t believe I can do this. I can have so much control.
But at the same time, I also told myself stories about it being too hard. And I think that a lot of people don’t want to take all of that responsibility with something as important as birth control especially.
So it’s something that people have to warm up to a little bit, but it’s something that is amazingly effective. And I personally, when I decided why am I putting up with these side effects from the IUD that I have, I ended up transitioning to the fertility awareness method. And I absolutely loved it.
And I decided, because there aren’t enough teachers around, and most people who practice it do end up wanting to take a class at some time, or needing advice from a teacher. And there really aren’t a lot of qualified teachers
DEBRA: I would agree with you.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes. I decided pretty much immediately, “Okay, I’m going to teach this,” and I ended up taking a two-year certification course to do that.
DEBRA: Well, I think it’s excellent. I’m very happy that you’re offering that online because a lot of times, in local communities, we don’t always have the resources for these natural things. And so now, anybody can get trained in the proper way to do it, and that you have all of these resources.
I just want to mention that, or maybe ask you, it’s my impression that doctors, gynecologists, don’t offer this, or clinics, birth control clinics, that they don’t really encourage women to use this method—that they want them to use the other methods. Do I have the right impression?
HANNAH RANSOM: For the most part, that is correct. There are some doctors that perhaps have used it themselves, or are very familiar with their own patients using it. And they know that the method works, and they are very encouraging of it because it is also a great way to track your health, be more in tune with your body.
But a lot of them, unfortunately, because of the misconception surrounding it, do not feel good about it because it’s been branded fertility awareness method, and of course, the umbrella term for everything having to do with methods that you use periodic abstinence or periodic something else, is called fertility awareness base method.
So that even includes the rhythm method, which, of course, isn’t great because it’s calculation-based on past cycles rather than what’s going on with your hormones today, and [inaudible 00:08:44] and if you’re actually capable of getting pregnant that day.
So because the rhythm method has such a low effectiveness rating, that’s one reason that there’s that bias against it in the medical community, just because of the confusion with all the methods.
And then also, there is the fact that it does take that consistency responsibility. You do have to be a relatively committed user if you’re using the method, and taking risks with it. Then it’s something that can be worth than taking risk with other methods because by definition, taking a risk, you’re having sex at a potentially fertile time.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. I have something else I want to say on this subject, but we’ll do it after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health, and she’s at HolisticHormonalHealth.com. And we’ll be right back after this to talk more about fertility awareness and having natural birth control that you take responsibility for.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health. That’s HolisticHormonalHealth.com. We’re talking about birth control, and specifically, fertility awareness.
But before we get into the method, we’re going to talk about the other options—the toxic options, and why you would want to not use them.
But first, I want to say, before the break, I asked a question about whether or not doctors recommend fertility awareness method, and specifically, this method that Hannah is going to tell us about.
And the reason that I asked that question is because all women go to a gynecologist at a certain point in their life, and get their exam, and the doctor talks to them about birth control. But my doctor did not talk to me about this. He gave me the birth control lecture, but he didn’t tell me about this method.
And I found out about it from a girlfriend of mine, who didn’t want to take the hormones. And so she found out about it, and she was using it herself, and she recommended it to me as a satisfied user.
And yes, it requires some abstinence at certain times of the month, but it really is about all those other days that doesn’t require abstinence, and knowing when those are. So it’s not restriction as much as it’s freedom.
And the other thing I wanted to mention about this is that I actually met a man who had learned the method himself, so that he could tell when women that he knew whether they were ovulating or not, and he could take responsibility. And I thought that was great.
So I think that men need to learn it too. That’s my recommendation.
Okay, Hannah. Let’s talk about toxic birth control methods.
HANNAH RANSOM: I think, of course, the hormonal methods are the most common, and obviously, the most recommended as well.
DEBRA: Because, of course, they’re a drug with a prescription.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, of course. And those are really the very worst culprits, in terms of our health. And they’re something that are designed essentially to take one of your healthy bodily processes, your cyclical fertility, away.
They’re taking that out.
And so without that, we do see side effects. Generally, there are longer term ones, there’s the increased risk of cancers like breast and cervical cancer. And a lot of people will just have low grade or even high grade depression, lower sex drive.
It’s really something that also eats up a lot of vitamins and minerals in your body. And taking these hormones all the time is using up more of that nutrition just to detox because your body is trying to get rid of them.
DEBRA: I agree.
HANNAH RANSOM: So hormones are something that they’re definitely not good for you, and a lot of people though, they will come into it even from a non-contraceptive standpoint. They will take birth control pills to so said regulate their cycles. But the thing is that they have hormonal imbalances from one thing or another, and what they’re doing is they’re just [inaudible 00:14:10] with these hormones.
DEBRA: The thing that I think really is striking for me about this is that women have a natural cycle of fertility. And what these hormones do is they impose an artificial cycle. And so you don’t have your natural body function anymore.
I’ve never taken them myself, but I have taken, in the past, other drugs that make your body do something according to what the drug tells it to do, instead of you being able to have your own body doing what it does.
And that’s my biggest concern, is that it takes your body out of its natural state into a constantly-drugged state.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, it’s plenty of perfectly healthy women will pick a drug every day because that’s what they’re told is the responsible thing to do for contraception. They think that maybe even if their cycle is 36 days or something, “Oh, no. It’s not the 28th day cycle, but it’s supposed to be,” which it doesn’t need to be. But they’ll take it.
So we’re tricked into believing we need this, and we always hear the benefits outweigh the risks. But do those benefits outweigh the risks if there are other viable alternatives?
DEBRA: Exactly, and with anything else in your body that if you have a regular period, and then your period becomes irregular, that’s a sign that something is going wrong with your body, and if you just take a pill to make the symptom go away, then you’re not addressing what is the underlying cause of why you’re having that symptom.
And it’s the same thing if you take a pill to not have a headache, or you take a hormone pill to regular your period. It’s the same thing. You’re handling the symptom instead of handling the cause.
And those symptoms are there to warn us that we need to do something to improve our health. And that’s another reason not to take them because then you just don’t ever see if there’s an irregularity in your body.
So talk about some of the other forms of contraception.
HANNAH RANSOM: So commonly, a lot of hormones are used, obviously, but then there are also condoms that are commonly used. And some of them aren’t terrible options, but most of them that people end up getting are, and they have the spermicides on them that if you’re getting common spermicides, they’re not good. And they’ll have lubricants as well.
And a lot of these are just made just like every other product in our life. If you’re getting this common, generic stuff, it’s made with terrible, terrible ingredients—the chemical stuff.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. We need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Hannah Ransom. She’s at HolisticHormonalHealth.com, and we’ll be back right after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health. And she teaches classes about a specific method of fertility awareness at HolisticHormonalHealth.com, so women and their partners can be responsible themselves for their natural fertility.
Hannah, let’s talk about the actual method now.
HANNAH RANSOM: So I don’t know how much you want to go into it.
DEBRA: Just start at the beginning. We have some time. You can go into it. First, tell us how the method developed.
HANNAH RANSOM: Well, the method was originally started with them trying to figure out when women ovulate. And it was found that women ovulated about 14 days before their last period. And with that, they developed the rhythm method.
And then they started learning more and more about women’s menstrual cycles. And so they figured out that with ovulation, there was associated cervical fluid, and this cervical fluid was actually keeping the sperm alive, helping them swim, and actually, preparing them to fertilize the egg. If the sperms don’t go through the cervical fluid, they can’t fertilize an egg.
And then they also found that there is the temperature increase after ovulation.
And these are the two main signs that we use in this method, and they are associated with the hormones of the cycle, instead of calculations based on how long your previous cycle was, or anything like that because your cycle can change, even if you have very healthy cycle. What happen is you get stressed out one month, you have a lot on your plate, and your body will hold off on ovulation, like, now is not the time to get pregnant.
So it’ll hold off, and then make it longer. And if you’re going off, “Oh, I always have a regular cycle,” and think you already ovulated, that could be a problem.
And that’s why the rhythm method has really been a less effective method. But now, we have other things to track that are associate with our hormones, and we know what hormones happen around ovulation, how our body works, and what signs that are producing in our body.
DEBRA: Good. It does require responsibility, but talk about what are the steps that somebody needs to do in order to do—obviously, we’re not teaching it here because there’s more to it than just the whole outline.
But I want my listeners to get an idea of what it would be like to do the method.
HANNAH RANSOM: So it’s actually something that does generally [inaudible 00:20:59] but overwhelming at first for most people. So I just want to warn you that if it does sound overwhelming to you, you’re not alone. Most people do think, “Wow.
That sounds difficult. Could I really do that?”
DEBRA: Let me tell you. Yes, you can do it. Actually, it becomes second nature.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, it’s so second nature once you start doing it. But what you do every day is you take your morning temperature. Like I mentioned, that is something that goes up after ovulation. So it’s something that’s only telling you after you ovulate. But it’s the second sign that we use.
And then you also check your cervical fluid. So that’s fluid of your vaginal opening. And those fluids tend to come in a cyclical pattern, and if they don’t, then it’s possible that you might have an infection, or something like that, which is another reason that this method is great.
It’s just being familiar with what your body is like in a normal state. You really have a lot more info for when something funky happens to you, knowing immediately if that it’s off. But you check that and I personally recommend that you just notice it every time you go to the bathroom because you could have days you’ll have a lot of cervical fluid at just one time.
But it’s something that becomes so second nature, and you just notice it, and especially when you’re already going to the bathroom. You’re ready to check it.
Those are the two main signs. There is another optional sign for if one of those things is different, if you’re not sure. You can also check your cervical position, and your cervix is at the bottom of your uterus, which is at the top of your vaginal canal. So it does require you to check internally your cervical position. But that is something that will [inaudible 00:23:15] and raise around ovulation, while your cervical fluid is getting wetter, and more like egg white, rather than either there being nothing, or being a white, more dry kind of secretion.
DEBRA: And my experience has been that when you start being aware of those hormonal changes, that there are other indicators that you might become aware of. It’s just a matter of how much awareness you start to develop about where you are in your cycle, how you’re feeling. There could be changes in how things taste when you eat certain foods.
You might notice, “This tastes different. Chocolate tastes different,” or whatever.
Or you might have more or less energy, or things smell differently, or your body smells differently.
There are just all kinds of changes going on because as you go through the cycle every month, it’s this big change of hormones. It really is a major change of hormones, almost like black and white. It’s so different.
And as you start tracking what’s going on with that, you just become so much more familiar with your body, and how your body changes on a day to day basis.
And I really like that awareness that you start seeing in nature, everything is different at any moment. If you look at the environment, every moment is different—the air is different, the light is different, the plants are different, and yet, this is a very different orientation than our industrial orientation where everything comes out of a factory exactly the same.
And so part of this is just getting accustomed to that beautiful variation of nature.
I just think it’s a beautiful experience, and I think that it’s a totally viable method of birth control that is worth exploring.
We need to take a break, and we’ll be right back again with Hannah. And we’ll be talking more about natural fertility awareness. This is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health at HolisticHormonalHealth.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Hannah Ransom, founder of Holistic Hormonal Health, and that’s at HolisticHormonalHealth.com.
Hannah, during the break, I was looking again at your website, and I just want to tell the listeners that if they go to your website, the first thing they’re going to see on your homepage is the opportunity to register for a free live webinar to learn more about this. The next one is December 10th, at 6:00pm, PSD.
So you can register for that.
And then right below that, there’s a link that says, “What I Teach Here and Why It’s Amazing.”
And it will explain all of the things that we were just talking about in the last segment and more.
And at the bottom, there’s a list of pros and cons.
So let’s talk about those.
HANNAH RANSOM: So obviously, big pros are that there are no side effects. And then also, what we were getting into was the positive things about it that you really can become more empowered using this.
I think, personally, and my experience has been with working with other people who have used this method, it gives women another reason to appreciate their body. We’re so much focused on looks, especially, with women’s bodies. I think that getting in tune with your body that way and having another thing to care of, seeing your health in that way rather than, “Oh, I just am focusing on the looks of my body,” I think that that can be a super empowering thing for women.
DEBRA: Another thing too—I totally agree with you because I’ve experienced that. Another thing about it is that what you’re doing is that you’re taking the responsibility for finding out what’s going on with your body, so that then you can make a choice about what your actions are going to be.
And if you’re doing something that supports the health of your body by doing that, particularly, the hormonal contraceptives, they’re harming your body, and it’s about, “Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get pregnant.”
And you’re taking those pills even on days when you wouldn’t get pregnant anyway.
And so there’s all this attention on don’t get pregnant, and now, we have huge amount of infertility in our culture today. And to take on a daily basis something and have that intention to not get pregnant, not get pregnant, that goes against what life is about.
Our bodies are designed to continue to perpetuate [inaudible 00:28:48] species, to have the pleasure of doing the activity that does perpetuate the species, that we’re supposed to be having children unless we decide that we don’t want to have them.
And so this method supports that intention of life rather than working against it. And that’s, I think, a beautiful, bigger picture.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, it’s interesting that you mentioned the infertility and that aspect of it. Of course, there are the parts of it that are related to perhaps young girls who are having hormonal imbalances and problems with their cycles taking these pills to mask that. And then they come off the pills, ready to get pregnant, and while they still have that hormonal imbalance, plus all the years of taking the hormones.
But there’s also that emotional aspect to it.
If you’ve subconsciously, your whole life, been thinking, “Don’t get pregnant. This body is not a place for babies. This body is not a place for fertility,” no matter how much you want a kid, there could be—and I’m not saying this is everyone, but there could still be a little bit of subconscious thought in you like, “Don’t get pregnant. This is not a place to get pregnant.”
So yes, there is so much to it.
DEBRA: And then another point that you made is that it’s good for the environment because artificial hormones are getting into our waterways, and they are affecting—the water that we drink that comes out of our tap, those hormones don’t get removed at the water treatment plant.
So not only are all the animals and birds and insects and everything in the environment, now, drinking water with those artificial hormones in them, which they don’t need at all, we’re getting them in our tap water whether we want them or not, unless we filter them out.
And that’s not good. That’s just not good.
These drugs are designed to be given to women by prescription, by a doctor, and because there are inadequate ways to control what happens after they flow out of the body, and into the system of life, everybody’s getting them now.
And that’s something that we need to be concerned about.
So let’s see. What else? What are some other benefits?
HANNAH RANSOM: I think one of the big benefits is that control and personal responsibility, even though as we covered, it does tend to be one of the things that holds people back. Having that amazing amount of control and intention with everything really did lead to birth control and your reproductive choices can be a really amazing experience for people.
DEBRA: I think so too. I think it’s good for couples, for them both to know what’s going on and when is the fertile time for the couple, and not just the woman, but the fertile time for the couple, and for the man to be aware of that too, and cooperate with the women when they have sex.
I think it’s a beautiful thing for two people to make that decision together, and not to have a woman feel like she has to be available all the time.
HANNAH RANSOM: Yes, it’s definitely something that can enhance communication in a relationship because there is both that more open door of communication with every cycle, having the intention of conceiving or not.
And also, being able to talk about where you are in your cycle.
And those are intimate things that some people will just choose not to get into with their partners if they can handle not getting into it with some other method.
DEBRA: Well, it requires some willingness to communicate for sure. So what are some of the cons that people object to about this?
HANNAH RANSOM: I would say that the biggest one is just that you do need to use it correctly and consistently. It’s something that you should learn well and you should also make sure that you are very conscious about your choices around it.
A lot of times, if you are a little more unsure about whether you want to have a baby or not, that could translate into taking risks.
And this is a method that if you are taking risks, you are having unprotected intercourse in the time that you’re likely to get pregnant.
So basically, just having that and also taking the time to learn it, it’s something that as we talked about, it becomes second nature for sure. But it’s something that in the beginning, it can seem a little overwhelming, and you want to wait generally at least a couple of cycles until you use it as a birth control method because you want to make sure that you know what’s going on in your body and that you have a handle on the rules that you need to apply and all of that stuff before you really use it.
So it’s something that you want to learn well, and you want to take some time to get to know before you use it. And a lot of people are impatient.
It’s definitely something that can be [inaudible 00:35:08].
DEBRA: Hannah, tell us more about the various resources you have available on your website.
HANNAH RANSOM: I write every single week about things related to birth control, effectiveness, fertility awareness, getting more into it. Right now, I’ve also been running some books giveaways, also fertility awareness and birth control resources. And
I have a free webinar coming up that you talked about.
And you can see that right on the homepage.
I also have resources in terms of books, really great books in terms of learning more about your fertility, about hormonal health, since many people [inaudible 00:36:04] to getting of those hormones is really upping their hormonal health.
And I’m sure people listening to this radio show, they’ll probably have that pretty covered since they’re toxic-free folks.
DEBRA: Well, maybe, maybe not, despite [inaudible 00:36:25] for some people. We’re almost to the end of the show. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show. And I’m so glad that we could talk about this, and let more people know about it.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And you can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeRadio.com. You can listen to other shows in the archives, or listen to this show again. Thank you for being here.
Cyanotype on a T-shirt
Question from Cecilia
Dear Debra, My daughter participated in a Photography class recently and they used a technique called “cyanotype”. In this case I am talking about a t-shirt. Would it be toxic for my daughter to wear a t-shirt with a design made using this technique and this chemicals? Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
This wasn’t hard to find.
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print that we know as “blueprints.” The process uses two chemicals:
It’s basically ammonia and iron. The ammonia smells bad in blueprints and is toxic there, but in a t-shirt, once you wash it there should be no ammonia remaining.
I think it’s fine once it’s washed.
All About BioPlastics
Today my guest is Brenda Platt, Director of the Sustainable Plastics Initiative, Co-Chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, and co-director of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Washington, DC. She has worked 26 years on waste reduction, recycling and composting issues. Today we are talking about complostable bioplastics, made from renewable resources instead of fossil fuels. Brenda is the author of several groundbreaking reports including Beyond 40 Percent: Record-Setting Recycling and Composting Programs and the U.S. EPA’s Cutting the Waste Stream in Half. Her 2000 report for the GrassRoots Recycling Network, Wasting and Recycling in the United States 2000, includes a 10-page zero waste agenda for action. Her 2003 report, Resources up in Flames outlined the economic pitfalls of incineration versus a zero waste approach. Her report, Stop Trashing the Climate, documents that aiming for zero waste is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective strategies available for combating climate change. She currently directs ILSR’s Composting Makes $en$e project and Sustainable Plastics project and co-chairs the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, a coalition spurring the use of biobased products that are sustainable from cradle to cradle. The Collaborative has developed environmentally sustainability criteria for biobased plastics, and recently released purchasing specs for biobased compostable food service ware. www.sustainablebiomaterials.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
All About Bioplastics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Brenda Platt
Date of Broadcast: November 06, 2013
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.
We need to talk about this because there are so many toxic chemicals out there in so many places – in the food we eat, the water we drink, even in our bodies from past exposures – that we need to know what to do to make good choices. We need to be able to tell what’s toxic and what’s not, and to choose the less toxic things to have in our homes, how to get those toxic chemicals out of our bodies, and all those kinds of things. It’s a big subject and there’s a lot to learn.
So I’m here every day, Monday through Friday with people from different parts of the whole field of what’s toxic and what isn’t in order to share their information and knowledge with you so that you can make better decisions.
Today, it’s Wednesday, November 6th, 2013, and it’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. We’re going to talk about plastics. I actually heard my guest speak about the subject that we’re going to talk about today on a webinar. She explained everything so clearly that I wanted to have her on.
Her name is Brenda Platt. She’s the director of the Sustainable Plastics Initiative, co-chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, and co-director of the non-profit, Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She does a lot of things.
Now, the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, let’s see if I get this right, has developed environmentally sustainable criteria for bio-based plastics. And they recently released a purchasing spec for bio-based compostable food service ware.
So when you see that a label says bio-based plastic, we’re going to learn about what that means today, and what’s the difference between bioplastics and plastics that are made from fossil fuels. And if you are looking at a product made from bioplastics, what kind of criteria should you be considering and looking to see? Is it really bio-based?
Hi, Brenda, thanks for being with me.
BRENDA PLATT: Hi, Debra. It’s a pleasure.
DEBRA: Thank you. Well, first of all, tell us about all these organizations you’re part of.
BRENDA PLATT: Well, the one that butters my bread is the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We have offices in Minneapolis and D.C. and Portland, Maine. We’re a national organization, we’ve been around since 1974 and we provide research and technical assistance on recycling, zero waste planning, renewable energy and other policies to protect local main streets and other facets of what we call a homegrown economy.
So we have a staffer fighting big-boxed stores like WalMart. We have another staffer who’s working on community-owned internet broadband networks. The overall work that we do is focused on really supporting local economies and healthy communities.
So your topic of healthy community is certainly one of the key criteria of being a healthy community that’s free of toxic. So I’m delighted to be here, joining you.
DEBRA: Absolutely. I totally agree.
BRENDA PLATT: And I’ll just say that I’ve been a huge fan of yours since 1986 when I first read your Non-Toxic Home book.
DEBRA: Oh, my God! Thank you. A lot of my guests say that, that they’ve been familiar with my work for a long time. So I’m very happy to hear that from you because I admire your work as well. When I heard the webinar, you just made it so clear. But of course, I already understood a lot of what you were talking about.
So tell us more about what the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative is doing.
BRENDA PLATT: Yes. The Collaborative is a network of organizations and we’re working together to spur the introduction and use of biomaterials that are sustainable from cradle to cradle. And what we mean by that, let me just say first, what is a biomaterial?
Well, a biomaterial is a material or product that’s made from biomass, let’s say, or what we might call plant matter. So you might have seen corn-based plastics on the market. If you’re lucky enough to be in a community that has food waste collection for composting, a lot of those communities like San Francisco, Seattle have been moving away from Styrofoam, polystyrene, which is one of what I consider a bad plastic from a toxic perspective, to compostable food service for items.
So we’re seeing really the growth of plates and cups and forks and take-out clamshells and things of that nature. That would be an example of a bio-based material. Not all of them are made from corn. Some of them are paper-based. Some of them are made from the waste of sugarcane production. And there’s potato starch. There’s a wide range of materials, plant matter-based materials that can go into these products.
But what we mean by sustainable is that they’re sustainable from the field or forest. So if we’re growing corn, which as we know is a monoculture crop that uses genetically-modified organisms as feedstock and conventional corn-growing uses a lot of toxic herbicides and pesticides, we would like the biomass to be growing sustainably according to certain criteria. And then when it’s manufactured – just because it’s a bio-based plastic, let’s say, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t additives or softeners or plasticizers or other chemicals that might be added to the material to enhance its performance characteristics.
So during the production, you can have chemicals added. And then at the end of the product’s original intended use, we want to make sure there’s an end-of-life recovery option.
DEBRA: We can talk about all of that throughout the show. But let’s just start. I just want to have you introduce yourself to our audience so that they know what organizations you’re working for, and how did you get interested in this subject.
BRENDA PLATT: Good question. I’ve actually been at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for 27 years. I cut my teeth in the organization in the ’80s fighting trash incinerators. There were almost 200 planned around the country. And some of them were built, but most of them were actually defeated. In their stead, we promoted reducing trash, of course, but also we used recycling and composting.
I helped institutional curbside recycling. I documented some of the best programs around the country. Now, we’re helping cities with zero waste planning. And I’m doing a lot of work on composting, particularly, locally-based composting.
The work on plastics is just really, really important now because so much of the plastics that we produce are really for single use products or packaging. And if you look at what we set out of the curb, probably one-third of what we set out of the curb every week as trash is packaging. And a lot of that is plastic.
So one of my recent mottos is single use has got to go. We have to really move away from single use products.
DEBRA: I recently – well, not recently, but some time ago, I have been no longer married and no longer having a husband to take the garbage out. I’m pleased to report that living by myself, I – they usually come and pick up the big garbage can. The city comes and picks it up twice a week. But mine doesn’t get filled twice a week. Mine takes me almost a month before my garbage can is full enough that I’m willing to drag it out to the street and have them pick it up. And I think that’s much, much less waste than most people are producing.
BRENDA PLATT: Yes, and congratulations. That’s good news. It underscores the ability for all of us to reduce our trash. Florida is not exactly leader in this area where you’re based because the state has really embraced new trash incinerators.
But other areas of the country are really passing –I would say really at the local level, which is just very exciting. A number of cities have passed restrictions on the use of Styrofoam, particularly for food service ware.
Seattle is probably the leader in this area. Not only do they ban Styrofoam but they’re in phase 2 of their packaging regulations. They require that all food service ware has to be reusable, recyclable or compostable. And anywhere you go in Seattle, even if you’re buying food at a food truck, you’ll see the recycling bin and the composting bin. And it’s pretty much institutionalized.
So I think it really is important to not only lead by example. There’s a lot people can do on their own, certainly like you, but I think what we really need is also policies at the local level to enforce that, yes.
DEBRA: Totally agree, yes. We need to take a break. But we’re going to talk a lot more about plastics after with my guest, Brenda Platt. I’ll just make it shorter and say that she’s from the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative and that’s at SustainableBiomaterials.org because that’s what we’re talking about today. And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, my guest is Brenda Platt. She’s co-chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative. And you can go to her website at SustainableBiomaterials.org.
And we’re mostly going to be talking about bioplastics. But first, Brenda, could you give us a general overview of plastics? I know that that’s a big question but I’ll tell you a little more about –
BRENDA PLATT: Absolutely!
DEBRA: Yes. When I have been writing and learning about plastics, I found that there were two – basically, there are fossil fuel plastics and there are bio-based plastics. But if you’re looking at plastics that biodegrade, some fossil fuel plastics biodegrade, some don’t. And some bioplastics biodegrade and some don’t.
So if you could just give us a general idea – I think most people are familiar with different types of plastics. If you say Styrofoam, they think of a Styrofoam cup or they know PVC is a pipe. So if you could just tell us which ones are the toxic ones that are made out of fossil fuels that we should be concerned about, if there’s any fossil fuel ones that are less toxic, and then get into which ones are the bio-based ones.
BRENDA PLATT: Absolutely! It might be helpful to actually start with the common dictionary definition of plastics, if you will.
DEBRA: Yes, let’s do that. I really want people to understand.
BRENDA PLATT: If you look up what is plastic, you will find a definition something like, “capable of being molded or shaped into different forms under pressure or heat,” as opposed to non-plastic materials, which must be cut or chiseled.
But chemically, plastics are polymers which mean they’re substances composed of long chains of repeating molecules, which are the monomers. So you have the monomers and you repeat. You get a plastic that’s a polymer, and they’re usually, largely made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms. And there can be other elements in there too.
So to have a plastic, you have the conventional fossil fuel-based plastic, as you mentioned, Debra, made from carbon and hydrogen. And then you might have the bio-based plastics. And really, the only difference is that the carbon comes from new sources, renewable sources like plants that are grown every year, renewably every year, whereas fossil fuel is old carbon, dinosaurs, let’s say.
Probably the most widely-used bio-based plastic in the market today is Coke’s Dasani water bottle, single use water bottle. Some are not a big fan of it. But that, the Dasani bottle is made in part from some bio-based material. Not 100%, but made in part.
That bottle is, number one, PET, which is the most commonly collected type of plastic in our Curbside Recycling Programs. If you have a Curbside Collection Program, more than likely, that’s something you can put in.
Now, that P-E-T or PET water bottle is the same as a PET that’s derived 100% from fossil fuel plastics. So it can be recycled like other fuel-based PET, but it is not biodegradable.
And there’s a big difference between something that’s bio-based and something that’s biodegradable.
DEBRA: Yes, explain the difference.
BRENDA PLATT: What’s really interesting is that you can have a product that’s biodegradable that is made from 100% fossil fuel plastics. So the fact that it can biodegrade, which means it’s food for microorganisms basically, eventually, then it doesn’t have to do with where the source of the carbon is coming from, whether the source is new or old. It has to do with the chemical structure, whether it can break down and become food for the microorganisms.
So if you see a product that’s labeled as compostable, it doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s made from 100% plants. And if you see something that says it’s plant-based or bio-based, that could mean it’s made from some plants, but it’s not biodegradable, like the Dasani water bottle.
So it is confusing and I think for the everyday person, if you want to be promoting more composting and more composting for organic materials, and you don’t like Styrofoam takeout containers because you can’t do anything with it when you’re done using it – and like I said in Seattle and San Francisco and other communities that have moved to compostable products like those clamshells – then look for the compostable label. That would be the thing to look for. I think the bio-based label is interesting, but from an end-of-life perspective, it does not indicate that it’s compostable just because it says bio-based.
DEBRA: I think that there’s a natural tendency to think that fossil fuels are not biodegradable in general and that renewable resources in general are biodegradable. And so you think plastic made from fossil fuels versus biomaterials, they’re going to be the same in terms of biodegradability. But they aren’t. When I found that out, that was really a surprise to me.
What is a compostable? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a compostable symbol. What does that look like?
BRENDA PLATT: Well first, let me just say that the Biodegradable Products Institute, so anybody can Google that, they list something like a catalog of 3000 products that meet their Third Party Certified Compostability Process Certification. It used to be a few hundreds, just even two years ago. And now, there are thousands. So this field is really growing.
The Biodegradable Products Institute is an independent third party certifier of products to ensure that they are compostable. And let me just clarify, compostable in a commercial composting facility, not necessarily in somebody’s backyard system.
But I will tell you that the key thing is for a commercial composting facility is that they optimize the conditions for composting. They get it to the right temperature, they have the right moisture, they know how to blend the materials to ensure that the microorganisms are really happy. And we don’t always do that when we do it in our backyard.
But you can. You can do it correctly in your backyard instead of just being a rot pile, if you will. You can actually do active composting.
But the certification, when you see that logo on there that says BPI, certified BPI, being the Biodegradable Products Institute, that indicates that it will break down under optimum composting conditions.
DEBRA: We need to take a break in a second, but I want to ask you. So I’ll ask you the question and you give me the answer after the break. If something is certified compostable, does that mean it’s also non-toxic or could toxic plastics be compostable? That’s the question for after the break.
We’re talking to Brenda Platt. She’s a co-chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, SustainableBiomaterials.org. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be back in a minute.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Brenda Platt, co-chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, which is at SustainableBiomaterials.org. And we’re talking today about bioplastics.
Brenda, during the break, I did go to the Biodegradable Plastics Institute website, and I do see that they have a compostable logo. It’s a really tiny picture. But it does say compostable on it and it has a logo that looks like a tree bent over, like an arrow going around to be recycled, and a little leaf on the other side of the circle going around. So that’s something that you can look for and it’s on all kinds of products – basically, the ones made out of plastic like food service ware, films, bags, things like that.
So my question before the break was, are there are any toxic plastics that would be compostable?
BRENDA PLATT: That’s such a great question. Yes, let’s get into the toxic question.
So compostable products that are third party certified, one of the things I advise people whether you’re a hospital or a school and you’re buying these products or an individual like you and me, is to look for that third party certification because to meet that third party certification, the product has to meet three different aspects of a test. And one of them does relate to toxicity.
Now, it may not cover all of the toxic chemicals in the world, but it does cover certain heavy metals and part of the test is that the product that’s made into compost, the compost has to be able to sustain plants.
So let’s say you have a sugarcane-based plate and it’s compostable, it breaks down. But if that plate then is in compost and it won’t allow, let’s say, a tomato plant to seed or germinate because it’s toxic, then it does not meet the standards. So it’s pretty robust.
DEBRA: I like that standard.
BRENDA PLATT: Yes. So if you see a claim that just says compostable or biodegradable, and it’s not third party certified, it’s not going to be as good.
But one thing I really want to emphasize is that these compostable-based products are really replacing a wide range of conventional plastics that have a much more toxic profile. Just the production of fossil fuels, petrochemicals to make our plastics throughout the total lifecycle, involves so many toxic chemicals. And I’m certainly not an expert on that, but I think you asked earlier in the program what are the ones folks should stay away from.
One of the worst is vinyl, PVC, polyvinyl chloride. If you’re familiar with the resin number identification codes that you might see within a chasing arrow symbol that’s very small, that’s number 5. So vinyl is number 5. And that, I think, people should stay away from. It’s the most toxic plastic for children’s health and the environment. It’s manufacture uses and releases hazardous chemicals including vinyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, mercury and dioxin, which we know are harmful to communities and the workers who make it.
There was just actually a study that was released a few days ago by the Center for Health Environment and Justice which has a big –
DEBRA: I saw that.
BRENDA PLATT: Yes. And it showed elevated levels of phthalates in Spongebob Squarepants’ vinyl rain ponchos. And the studies were seven times above the Federal Safety Standard.
Vinyl is one of the bad ones. The other one I mentioned several times already is polystyrene, which is number 3, which is Styrofoam. Styrofoam is the expanded foam version of polystyrene but what people don’t know is that polystyrene can look like a clear plastic. If are on a college campus and you go to one of your local campus keg parties and you’re drinking beer in one of those solo cups, the blue, red or yellow cups, those are polystyrene. Polystyrene is produced from styrene, which is a known human neurotoxicant and known animal carcinogen. It was up until a few years ago, a suspected human carcinogen and it was elevated a couple of year ago to reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, which basically means there’s a huge body of evidence now tying it to human cancers.
And we’re eating off of this stuff and we’re letting our kids in the schools eat off of this stuff.
On the positive side, there are dozens of communities that have restricted polystyrene use.
So those are two that I consider among the worst types of polymers, especially when we’re exposing our kids to them. I would say that even number 1, PET, which is what we see in water bottles, that there have been some health issues potentially associated with those. Antimony is a catalyst that use in its product that type of polymer and there has been a number of studies that have shown that in water that’s been on the shelf in those types of water bottles have an order of magnitude higher antimony in them than in natural spring water. And of course, it’s below all considered safety standards but we know often how inadequate our safety standards are. It wasn’t even 20 years ago, it wasn’t widely recognized that bisphenol A could impact – be linked to a whole range of health issues at the parts pavilion levels.
I actually do not let my kids drink out of single use water bottles if I can help it, out of PET, for that reason alone, for the health reasons.
DEBRA: I actually don’t drink out of them at all unless it’s the only source of water. If I’m traveling and I have a choice between tap water and water in a PET bottle, I’ll drink the water in the PET bottle but whenever I can, I’m drinking my water at home or carrying it in a glass bottle because it’s toxic.
BRENDA PLATT: I think there’s been very little study on that issue for the PET, the number one type of water bottle in this country, but the Switzerland Office of Public Health has done some studies, and in Germany, there has been some studies at the university level. And I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years, it’s more widely recognized as an issue.
DEBRA: I think so too. I think one of the things that I’ve seen over the past 30 years of doing this work, 30-plus years of doing this work, is that there are a lot of things that were not known to be toxic, and then now we know 30 years later that they’re toxic. And we didn’t know that 30 years ago. And so there’s a lot of things that I suspect are going to turn out to be more toxic than people think as the studies come in. But at least I see over the years, this growing body of tests being done and studies, and that we’re finding things out, that even though we know a lot more about what’s toxic now, it’s still in a lot of products, these chemicals are not regulated, and it’s still something we need to watch out for as consumers.
We’re going to talk more about bio-based plastics as a safer alternative when we come back from the break. My guest today is Brenda Platt from the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative. That’s at SustainableBiomaterials.org. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Brenda Platt, co-chair of the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, and we’re talking about bioplastics today.
Brenda, give us an overview of what are the bioplastics. How do we recognize them? What are their names and what are they made of?
BRENDA PLATT: What a good question. Well, one thing – let me just start by saying that the first plastics were bio-based plastics. A hundred years ago, most of our products and materials were based on plants. Think celluloid film, that’s cut and dried celluloid. So that’s made from – and that’s a plastic. Horn and amber have been used and molded into many different shapes for centuries. Those are probably the oldest, natural plastics.
One of the things I found interesting looking into plastics was this long history of bio-based plastics. Some of them might include ones that might be like natural leather. Gutta Percha is a relative of rubber. It comes from trees native to Malaysia, and it could be shaped by softening over heat and pressed into mold. And it has excellent insulating capabilities. And one of the things it was used for in the mid-1800s was it was used for the first transatlantic cable that was laid.
This gives your listeners some examples of how long we’ve been using bio-based plastics.
Another great example, and I think it was probably the first ubiquitous plastic product was the gramophone record. And the gramophone record was used to make 78R RPMs back in the late 1800s, is in part derived from shellac.
You and I may have heard of shellac but you may not know it’s based on the secretion of a beetle which lives on certain trees in India, Burma and Thailand. Shellac has been harvested since ancient times.
And then, of course, I mentioned celluloid. There has been a whole range of cotton cellulose-based plastics that was first developed in the mid-19th century. And there are some interesting stories there, but really, it wasn’t until after World War II that plastics really became available to the ordinary public. And in fact, after World War II, there were huge queues that formed when the first nylon stocking appeared in British shops after the war. And that of course – what was it, in the ’50s, where Earl Tupper made Tupperware.
And that’s when we really began to see these kinds of plastic use in everyday uses.
Following the 1950s, of course, we had this explosion of fossil fuel-based plastic.
But one of the things I find interest in looking at the bio-based industry today, as I do think the pendulum is swinging back now to bio-based products, with climate change and cities and countries and businesses really taking the lead on reducing the carbon footprint and moving away from fossil fuels. We’re seeing a really skyrocketing interest in bio-based products, which is why with the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, we’re really interested in helping to push that market towards sustainability and non-toxic products.
An example of one bio-based product that I think is really exciting and it gives people a flavor of this emerging new, more modern industry, is a new building block. There are new bio-based building blocks that are being developed. And one company [inaudible 00:42:29] that is doing a new bio-based building blocks, so a whole range of polymers and products based on levulinic acid.
And what levulinic acid is, is they’re hydrolyzing cellulose, which right now, is coming from corncobs, of all things. But they can use other sources of cellulose. And they’re forming levulinic acid to through this process, and it’s showing really broad utility as building blocks of all kinds of chemicals and materials, and think trademark under the Javelin name.
But what I find interesting is that some of the product lines include plasticizers and solvents and polymers. And it’s basically a new molecule that could substitute, for instance, bisphenol A and bad plasticizers which are showing up in the vital products.
So it’s a good solvent. It has low volatility. And so these are the kinds of, I think, what we’re going to see in the near future, these new bio-based chemicals that are more toxic free, have a less carbon footprint because they’re made from renewable carbon and are going to be introduced in some conventional products. But they’re going to overall have a less toxic [cross-talking 00:43:50]
DEBRA: I think that’s where we’re going too. I see that as well. But now, I want to ask you because I’m not a chemist but I think you might be able to answer this question. So in the beginning of the show you said that the plastics whether they’re bio-based or fossil fuel-based, are basically made up of carbon and whatever else. And that it doesn’t matter to the plastic if the carbon comes from a renewable source or a fossil fuel source because fossil fuels are just ancient, renewable resources anyway. So if there are so many toxic chemicals that are coming from fossil fuels that are turned into chemicals, why is it that the renewable counterparts would be less toxic? Do you understand what I’m asking?
If the manmade chemical is, for example, not to name any chemicals, but a chemical that is a chemical formula that doesn’t exist in nature and is toxic and it’s made from fossil fuels, if you were to just replace those fossil fuels in that same chemical with renewable resources for the carbon, would that make that chemical not toxic? Or are these entirely new formulas being made from these renewable resources that would be less toxic?
BRENDA PLATT: Let me first say that I am not a chemist either, so I’m probably not the best person to answer this question but let me take a crack at it anyway. My understanding of this is that –in fact, I think the example, the levulinic acid is probably a good one, the one that’s trademarked under the Javelin name. That’s a new chemical. That’s made from bio-based materials. And that chemical has a lower toxic footprint, if you will.
Now, if you take something like polyvinyl chloride, vinyl or polystyrene, that chemical, in and of itself, is – that polystyrene is produced from styrene. So that chemical has issues and is toxic no matter where the carbon comes from, the nature of that chemical.
DEBRA: That’s what I was asking.
BRENDA PLATT: So I think it really does depends. So if, for instance, the polystyrene industry says, “Okay, we want to move away from using petroleum or natural gas, both fossil fuels, to make polystyrene,” or, “Now, we’re going to make it from corn or sugarcane waste.”
If it’s polystyrene, it still needs to be avoided.
DEBRA: Right. That was the point that I wanted to make.
BRENDA PLATT: Yes, and the same with polyvinyl chloride. Now, the thing with polyvinyl chloride is, that’s a little different. So this is a nuanced answer to your question is that one of the things that makes PVC toxic is that phthalates are added to it. Softeners.
The irony there is that the harder polyvinyl chloride, that’s stiffer, has less softeners added to it. And the ones that have more softeners added to it, the ones that used to be use for everything from baby bottles to pacifiers, or tubes for floating in the pool. Those are the more toxic.
With a chemical like PVC that needs softeners to improve its performance or their physical characteristics of it, if you can substitute a non-toxic softener – and that’s actually another use for this levulinic acid, then it can make PVC less toxic.
So it depends is the short answer. It really depends.
DEBRA: So we’re getting near the end of our hour. We only have a couple of minutes left. So I want to make sure that we do mention one thing, and that is that you do have on your website, and I’ll give that again, SustainableBiomaterials.org. You have a report called Guidelines for Sustainable Bioplastics. And anybody that wants to go to the website and take a look at this, there was so much to talk about today. We didn’t get in to all these things. But I’ll just say that there are guidelines here for what a bioplastic should be. And one of them, for example, is how the material was grown. Is it organic feedstock, or is it organic corn, or is it non-organic corn, is it GMO corn?
There are all these different steps down as you go through the process of making a bioplastic where you can be asking questions about how toxic it is or not toxic, and what ends up happening at the end.
And so you can go and read these guidelines, and they’re quite detailed as to all the different things that you might be looking for in a bioplastic.
So not all bioplastics are the same, and there are some questions we can be asking as consumers. But I think that we’ve gotten a good overview today.
We have less than a minute. Are there any closing words you would like to give, Brenda?
BRENDA PLATT: Well, I’ll just end with thank you, Debra, for having me on the show. And again, I’ll just emphasize that I think no matter what products we’re using, aim for durable products, aim for ones that can be reusable, recyclable or compostable, and do what Debra does. Reduce your trash and stay away from single use products no matter what they’re made from.
DEBRA: I totally agree. Thank you so much for being with me today, Brenda. And I think everybody should go to SustainableBiomaterials.org and see what’s going on. Check out Guidelines for Sustainable Bioplastics.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and you can find out more about this show or listen to this particular show again or any of the past shows by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Fabulon Floor Finish
Question from HG
I recently read an article about a 2008 study conducted by the Silent Spring organization suggesting that floor finishes, particularly one called Fabulon, used in the 1950’s and 1960’s contained high levels of PCBs that continue to out-gas and contaminate home dust for decades. Do you know if it is possible to identify floors that could have been treated with finishings that had PCBs and if there is something people can do to mitigate this exposure pathway?
Debra’s Answer
Here’s the entire article from Environmental Health journal: “PCB-contiaining wood floor finish is a likely source of elevated PCBs in residents’ blood, household air and dust: a case study of exposure”. It says:
I don’t know how one would identify such a floor.
If you have a wood floor with a clear finish and your home is vintage 1950s or 60s, you might have a Fabulon finish. If you are concerned and want to remove any possible danger, put a layer of foil over it and put down an new floor.
Trisodium Phosphate
Question from Irene
Hi Debra, Is trisodium phosphate a natural additive? Is it safe? I see it listed as an ingredient in cereal. Thank you very much for your help!
Debra’s Answer
It’s natural in that it is a naturally occurring mineral, it’s not manmade. But it is considered a poison and is found in many cleaning products. It is commonly used to clean walls before painting.
But there is also a food grade trisodium phosphate that is used as a food additive. Apparently trisodium phosphate is added to cereals that go through an extruder–that’s anything that has a shape, like chex– to help them maintain their shape. Better to just eat the whole grain if you’re going to eat cereal (I don’t eat grains at all).
Is this Water Filter as Good as a Berkey?
Question from Matthew
Hi Debra, I am wanting to buy a Berkey water filtration system, but won’t be able to afford one for a while. I found this one online: http://www.homespunenvironmental.com/Bucket_Drip_Filtration_System_p/sk-1001.htm. Could this work as an alternative to the Berkey? Thanks and looking forward to your insight!
Debra’s Answer
What are you wanting to remove from the water? This ceramic filter removes on dirt, debris, and bacteria. So it isn’t removing any toxic chemicals, and would not be useful for tap water because tap water has already been processed for these pollutants.
Proper Disposal of Pharmaceuticals
My guest today is Heidi Sanborn, Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council, a powerful network of local governments, non-gocernment organizations, businesses and individuals who believe “people should be able to enjoy safer products made without the harmful and toxic components which jeopardize the safety and health of our children, families, and communities.” Today we’ll be talking about how pharmaceutical collection sites can safeguard the environment and our water supply, and help prevent drug abuse by children and teens. Heidi has been a leader in the solid waste industry in California for 22 years, working with industry, government and the public to reduce waste, improve product design and recyclability, and implement cost-effective policies which protect the health of communities. Collaborating with local government leaders, Heidi was one of two original co-directors of CPSC in 2007 to change the way product waste is funded and managed in California; she has since become a nationally recognized thought leader and driver for innovative product stewardship programs across the country. Heidi’s collaborative, tenacious problem-solving approach has delivered unprecedented success in developing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) public policy at national, state and local levels. She has engaged diverse stakeholder groups to create and promote best-in-class product stewardship programs for pharmaceuticals, mercury thermostats, carpets, paint, fluorescent lights, and batteries. Heidi speaks throughout the world to raise awareness about product stewardship. She teaches about EPR for the California Resources Recovery Association, and has been frequently published on the topic. Heidi earned a B.A. in Political Science – Public Service from the University of California at Davis and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She lives in Sacramento with her husband Brad and three rescue dogs and enjoys adventure travel. www.calpsc.org/products/pharmaceuticals
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Proper Disposal of Pharmaceuticals
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Heidi Sanborn
Date of Broadcast: November 4, 2013
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.
It’s Monday, November 4, 2013. And we’re having a beautiful autumn day here in Clearwater. There’s actually a breeze. I went out for a walk this morning. It’s so nice to walk and have the wind blowing around me, and have it be cold, and wear a flannel shirt, and all those things that are nice about autumn—just a really nice morning.
Today, we’re going to talk about the proper disposal of pharmaceuticals. And this is very important for a lot of reasons.
Pharmaceuticals, when they’re disposed of improperly, can get into the environment, into our water supplies, and children and teens can get them and abuse them as drugs.
And so, in order to solve these problems, there are some things that can be done, and our guest today is going to tell us about those.
My guest is Heidi Sanborn. She’s the Executive Director of the California Products Stewardship Council—a powerful network of local governments, non-government organizations, businesses and individuals who believe that people should be able to enjoy safer products, maybe without the harmful and toxic components which jeopardize the safety and health of our children, families and communities.
I totally agree.
Hi, Heidi.
HEIDI SANBORN: Hi.
DEBRA: Thanks for being with me today.
HEIDI SANBORN: I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. First, can you tell us what product stewardship is?
HEIDI SANBORN: Product stewardship is when the manufacturers of products look at the entire life cycle of the impact of those products and take some share in the responsibility for those impacts.
DEBRA: Good idea! So the California Products Stewardship Council, how long has it been around, and how and why did it get started?
HEIDI SANBORN: Well, we just had our 6th year anniversary. And it actually started because other recycling organizations in California really were focusing on just recycling, but we weren’t turning off the spigot. The waste was still coming, it was getting more toxic than ever. And we realized there needed to be approaches that dealt with greener design of products.
And so we started looking at different policy approaches. And that point, I was a consultant. I was actually writing a report to the State Waste Management Board at the time—it’s now CalRecycle—on what we should be doing with hazardous waste and policies that would be better fitted for those products that have no market, and that are dangerous and toxic and banned from disposal.
So, I did the research. And after looking at 60 different policy approaches around the world, I found that producer responsibility and product stewardship approaches were by far the most successful, and were in many different levels, not only in collection, but more importantly, in greener design and reducing toxic source.
DEBRA: I see on your website—which is C-A-L-P-S-C (California Product Stewardship Council), CALPSC.org—I see that you work in several different product areas with batteries, carpets, fluorescent lamps, paints, pharmaceuticals, thermostats and others. And today, we’re going to specifically be talking about pharmaceuticals. But if anybody is interested in this subject (as I hope you will be), there are other products that you can be looking at, what this organization is doing with.
And of course, this whole idea of looking at solving the problems of toxic waste by re-designing the product in the beginning is something that’s being talked about by a lot of people and a lot of manufacturers nowadays. It’s really good to see that trend, and I’m very, very happy to see your organization working on this.
So, how did you become interested in this subject?
HEIDI SANBORN: Well, when I became adviser to the chair of the Waste Management Board back in the year 2000, one of the first things she did was send me to a national conference called the National Recycling Coalition Conference.
I went and the first presentation I heard was [unintelligible 00:04:27] from the Product Stewardship Institute talking about producer responsibility and product stewardship and what that was. And I came back and told the chair we need to be focused on this in California because we can’t get to zero waste if things are continuing to be designed without end of life in mind.
We are not designing things to be recyclable, to be more durable, to be repairable. In fact, it’s going in the other direction. I can remember my Hoover vacuum, I would take to the Hoover repair store, and when I took my Hoover vacuum there a few years ago, they said, “No, it’s cheaper for you to buy a new one.” And I thought something’s going wrong here. We’re not doing this right. It’s creating huge amounts of waste.
So, we actually got, by 2002, into the state’s Strategic Plan for Waste Management. It included, not only getting to zero waste, but doing so, in part, to reproduce the responsibility policy models, where the producers have to pay some of the costs that they have externalized onto the public sector because right now, the economics are that they make a product, they sell it, they profit, and walk away. And the rest of us are left holding the bag.
DEBRA: That’s exactly how it is. Are these regulations in effect anywhere, where producers have to pay for the end?
HEIDI SANBORN: In fact, we’re one of the last major industrialized countries to embrace this policy model. It was started in Italy and German back in the 80’s, and they did it. It started as a packaging result. The citizens were so tired of over-packaging, they started leaving all their packaging in the grocery stores, and the store owners asked for some policy to stop this.
DEBRA: I love it.
HEIDI SANBORN: So it really is as sign of public demand, and when the public rises up to address an issue, the governments respond. Well, the first response of the government was to say, they should have a more of commanding control model. The producers should be in control, but they’ll be told how they’ll be in control.
Over years, that evolved away to what we call now, the true producer responsibility approach, which Canada and others have followed.
It’s really a performance-based system.
So if we hand the keys over to the industry to manage the product and end of life, we also give them all the power to control the how, and they keep their costs down, but it is performance-based, so the government will set the performance standard on the recycling rate—it’s normally a recycling rate or a convenience standard.
And then the industry just figures out how to get there. And they’re very, very good at it. They have reversed distribution systems, they know marketing well better than government, and can penetrate far deeper than government ever could.
It really is a much more private sector model, less government model. And it is the economic model that conservative economists have used for years, which is, make the polluters pay because once they have to pay, they’ll get those costs down.
If they have externalized them on to the public sector, there is zero financial incentive for there to change behavior.
DEBRA: I actually had never heard of those, and this is making me feel happy that you’re here today and talking about this because this really is the direction that I think that it needs to go—that if we take responsibility, if we know—I think, as individuals, we take responsibility for our own actions, but these corporations need to take responsibility for what it is that they’re making, and what effects it has on people and the environment. And I think if everybody did that then everybody would be thinking in the beginning, what it is that I’m creating, and what are the effects that it’s going to have out in the world.
I know that’s an issue that I’m always thinking about when I make something—even dinner. If I make a salad for dinner, I think, well, do I make a salad which will make my body healthy, or do I make junk food, of whatever your favorite food is, that won’t make my body healthy?
And in a way, that’s just a microcosm of the bigger question—it’s what are the end results going to be of our actions, and making those choices.
We’re going to take a break pretty soon, so I think what we’re going to do is when we come back, I’ll ask you the next question, and we can go on because otherwise, we’re only going to have a few seconds. We’re talking to day with Heidi Sanborn. She’s the Executive Director of California Product Stewardship Council, and they’re a network of local governments, non-government organizations, businesses and individuals who are doing things to have companies be more responsible for the products that they’re making, so that there is less waste, less toxic waste, and less problems in the world.
And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be back right after this to find out more about product stewardship, in particular, pharmaceuticals.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Heidi Sanborn, Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council. And we’re talking about pharmaceuticals, and Heidi and her organization run a program called “Don’t Rush to Flush,” which collects unused pharmaceuticals, so that they can be disposed of safely.
Well, Heidi, I have a lot of questions about this. First of all, could you tell us about the program, and what is the problem that the program solves?
HEIDI SANBORN: Well, the problem, as most people know, is we’ve got a huge drug abuse epidemic in this country, to the point now, we’re losing more young people to prescription drug overdoses than we are to illegal drug use, or car accidents.
And it has now become a major reason for collection of medications, so that we make sure they’re not sitting around the house where kids can get at them, dogs or small children could be poisoned.
The National Drug Control Strategy of 2013 indicates there are four major interventions, one of which is safe drug disposal, to increase return and take-back programs.
So what our organization did, and we just talked a lot about producers being responsible, in this area, we’ve not yet to date had a lot of support from the industry itself to collect medications. In fact, they’re still saying in the press that the best thing to do was put them in the trash with kitty litter and coffee grounds.
But we know that there are issues with that because landfills, they have water come through them that we call leachate. And even when it goes into a landfill, that leachate can [inaudible 00:11:33] and still goes to the same water treatment plant as though you might have flushed them. That still can’t get them all of them out.
There’s a lack of science on how much and what exactly chemicals. As you know, there are thousands of medications—what is getting through at the water treatment plant. And we can have a lot of arguments and discussions on that all day long.
What we know is that the low-hanging fruit is the pills that are getting flushed and put in the trash. And we know that according to EPA, the safest thing to do with these medications is send them to an EPA-certified incinerator, maybe down the road. That won’t be the best model based on the science. I don’t know. But today, that’s what they’re telling us.
So what we did was we started a program called “Don’t Rush to Flush” here in Sacramento and Yolo County, so we’re thankful to the Rose Foundation for giving us the grant to do it. And what we call producer responsibility was impossible because we were not getting support from the manufacturers of medications to pay for the program. But we did get the grant, and we did ask the local pharmacists if they would be willing to host a bin, if we paid for the bin, and then they paid for the disposal.
So it’s what we call producer responsibility transitional—in that others in the product chain are paying some of the costs for the end of life.
And thankfully, these pharmacists, we found six that were willing to do it. I will say that none of them were chain stores. They were all independent pharmacists with their own store. They were wonderful people that cared a lot about their community, and they agreed to host the bin and the pay disposal cost because every pharmacist has unused medications that either expire or for some other reason they have them, and they back call them through proper channels.
So they already add these new ones from the public to their existing back calling, and we’ve got a program. And then we just did all the PR and the billboards and the press around it.
And our goal is to prevent people from flushing them because we know we can’t get them all out at the water treatment plant, and also, to educate people that you really need to be careful. Medications have become extreme powerful and dangerous.
And we need to lock them up like guns—they can be that deadly.
And people are not treating them that way. They keep them in their medicine cabinet—it’s unlocked. And the kids are getting them. They get them from their grandparents when they visit on the weekends. They get them from all kinds of sources.
In fact, one study I saw said 70% of children that start on drug abuse path are getting them from family members unknowingly.
So it’s important for all of our safety to make sure that medications are locked up when you’re using them properly at home, and you’re making sure other people are not getting access to them. They’re also driving crime because seniors are taking the vast majority of medications. They take a lot of pain pills, and they’re not getting targeted for crime because of it because the people on drugs want to get those medications—in other words, good money on the streets.
This is an interesting topic for me because as we talked about in the last segment, I got into this from the waste management side. But really, with pharmaceuticals, they ended up in hazardous waste facilities but because there was no place else for them to go.
But is that the right place for them?
And in Canada, the manufacturers actually do take back and pay for it. It’s all done at pharmacies—all of it.
DEBRA: Did I understand you correctly to say that pharmacies themselves, the pharmacists have their own way of disposing of outdated pharmaceuticals? So they go to the correct place. It’s just us as consumers that are disposing of them incorrectly?
HEIDI SANBORN: Right, and we’ve been told—it’s interesting because different federal departments are saying different things. So the EPA says the safest thing is to put them into these controlled incinerators where they’ve got monitoring.
Then we have the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, saying that for the controlled substances, the 10% of drugs that are really the most dangerous and addictive, that they should be flushed because they’re so dangerous, we don’t want them getting into the wrong hands.
So that’s counter to what EPA is saying. There’s been this back and forth.
And then we’ve got the Fish and Wildlife Service saying the best thing is to put them in the trash with kitty litter and coffee grounds.
So the public is getting mixed messages. In fact, we did a survey in our Don’t Rush to Flush program of the people, the doctors and the consumers. Doctors are telling us that they just don’t tell people what to do with them unless they’ve been asked because they don’t know what to tell them, so not even the doctors know.
But generally, most people understand they’re not supposed to flush them. The water districts don’t want them flushed. In fact, they call them emerging contaminants that medications are now starting to show up, and some of them in pretty high levels.
But they’re not even testing for most of them, so we don’t know what’s in the water.
DEBRA: We really don’t know what’s in the water. We need to take another break. My guest today is Heidi Sanborn. She’s the Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council, and their website address is CALPSC.org. California Product Stewardship Council dot org.
And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be back after this with more.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Heidi Sanborn, Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council, and they are working on manufacturers taking responsibility for the end results of their products, and how they get disposed of, and having there not be toxic chemicals in them—very good thing to do.
Heidi, can you tell us what has driven this issue to the forefront now?
HEIDI SANBORN: What’s really driven it is the drug abuse prevention issue, and seniors really wanting better options for their medication than to flush them, or put them in the trash.
So that’s how it came to the forefront. And for us, as I’ve said, our organization focuses on dangerous and toxic products that are more traditional like batteries and fluorescent lamps, and things like that.
So this was an interesting area for me to get into because it’s really more of a water issue than it is a waste issue. Pills take up very little volume in landfill, and we haven’t found yet huge amounts of them in the leachate, although there are new studies going on as more and more medications are being distributed. We can assume more will end up in the leachate, and in the water.
There’s so much more study to be done on that.
So really, it came from the drug abuse area. And that was not an area I was familiar with, but we are familiar with pharmaceutical take-back in other countries like France and Spain, where it actually started because the return of packaging, where they do have a producer responsibility model, the packaging for pharmaceuticals still had drugs in them, and they decided to start an actual collection program for the drugs that were coming back with packages.
So that’s how this started back in Spain and France.
DEBRA: Are a lot of other countries around the world, are they already doing this, and we’re the last ones to catch on?
HEIDI SANBORN: We just saw that Brazil, this last week, introduced a producer responsibility approach and asked the pharmaceutical industry to come back in 120 days with a whole plan on what they’re going to do not just with the drugs, but with the packaging, and also, how are they going to stop over-prescribing and getting more source reduction, so drugs really only go out when they need to, which would reduce how many end up having to be managed.
And so we really are behind as a country in this approach.
Canada, which is part of North America—and North America shares many of the same companies in all of North America, including manufacturers of drugs—they’ve have the stewardship model for 13 years in British Columbia.
And it’s very cost-effective. It’s less than $1000 a year per pharmacy to run the program. They collect the pills and have prepaid shipping pails that then get shipped straight to the incinerator. This is one of the simplest and most cost-effective programs that we know of.
You can imagine all the rules and how hard it is to move around big screen TVs or mattresses, but these are little, teeny, tiny pills. And unlike batteries, they don’t start fires. Unless mercury-containing lamps, they don’t have mercury.
It’s a very simple and cost-effective program when implemented correctly. And you wouldn’t even notice the change in the price to do. It’s less than a penny a prescription based on what we’ve seen up in Canada. In fact, they’ve told us these costs have never been passed on to the consumer.
So we are looking towards the exact same model that has been done in Canada. We assume the industry would like to do that model here because it is so effective and cost-effective. But yet, we have not seen industry support for that program yet, which is why the Alameda County Government passed the first in the country ordinance making the manufacturers of drugs take them back.
And then it was soon followed up by King County, Washington, which adopted the same ordinance June of this year. And we saw a lawsuit. Pharma sued Alameda County in the 9th Circuit Court saying that this was interstate commerce breach, in that it wasn’t fair to make people in Georgia pay for the program in Alameda. But the Judge found that their argument didn’t hold water, and found for Alameda. And then pharma appealed, so it’s now in the Appeals Court.
But this is a very important legal task, not just for pharmaceuticals, but for any problem product, thus, local government have the authority to go ahead and regular the manufacturers that sell into their jurisdiction if the state and the federal government fail to action, and the industry fails to step up.
We’ll see.
DEBRA: That is a very important question because we should be able to have some control over what comes into our areas. As a community, we should be able to say, “Don’t put these toxic things in our community. Don’t put these toxic things in our cities.”
And as individuals, we have the right to—I have the right to not buy something toxic and not bring it into my own home.
I think, as I’m looking around—I’ve been doing this work for more than 30 years, and when I first started, nobody was talking about it, about anything toxic way back more than 30 years ago. But now, there’s so much discussion about what we should be doing in order to make the world less toxic in our own homes, in our communities, in the manufacturing of products.
It’s just, I’m really, really happy to see the direction that that’s going.
So you talked about Canada. I was thinking when you say that that it’s probably easier in Canada to do the collection because they have centralized medical care, don’t they? They do.
HEIDI SANBORN: They do. But the collection points—the system of distribution is exactly the same in that they distribute drugs through the mail, and through pharmacies, just like we do. And so it’s the same exact program to return them.
And there, the medical companies, the pharmaceutical companies, I should say, have chosen to use pharmacies because they’re already accessed by most of the public. Most people do go to a pharmacy at least once a month. And they’re very conveniently located, and they have handicap accessibility.
So that’s where they chose in Canada to have the return system. And in fact, the DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency again, has proposed regulations to make it easier for these collection programs. And they’re indicating in the draft regulations that they’re going to want to see these come back only at pharmacies.
So it may be dictated the where, it could also be mailed back, but that is the convenient place for people to go, and that’s where people with the credentials to manage those drugs because they distributed them.
DEBRA: It makes sense to me that if you buy your drugs at a pharmacy that the pharmacy should take them back. Here in Florida, when I just recently went to Best Buy, and you walk in the front door of Best Buy, and they have all these bins where you can return your cords and your cell phones and all kinds of electronic things that you buy at Best Buy. You can just bring them back, and the bins are right next to the door.
And I happen to be going there because I needed to buy a new mouse. My mouse had croaked. And I brought my mouse with me, and I also had some computer cables that were no longer working because I had seen that collection spot the last time I went in Best Buy.
And so I put those in the bin, and I bought my new mouse. And when I went to the register to buy it, they took my old mouse.
I think that this idea of being able to return the products to the point where they’re purchased. I think is fantastic and it needs to be applied across the boards.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be back after this to talk more about pharmaceuticals and safe disposal.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Heidi Sanborn, Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council. And we’re talking about pharmaceuticals, safe disposal and the effects that they have if they’re not disposed safely.
Heidi, what is the federal state and local government doing about the disposal and return of pharmaceuticals?
HEIDI SANBORN: Well, it’s interesting. This is one product type where we actually have activity at all three levels of government. As I mentioned, the federal government is currently reviewing their regulations from the Drug Enforcement Agency because they previously would not allow collection of controlled medicines, which are some of the really dangerous and addictive ones, unless there was a police officer or law enforcement present.
That simply is not cost-effective, and it can’t be done on a broad scale.
So the DEA has drafted regulations out that would allow for co-collection and at pharmacies. So we’re very excited and hopefully, those will be finalized in the next few months, which would open the door for a lot more cost-effective collections across the country.
There’s also discussion of a national producer responsibility bill being introduced, again, once those regulations are out.
Congresswoman Slaughter out of New York had introduced the bill before, but without those DEA regs, it made it very challenging to discuss. But they have had discussions at the national level on the water committees.
At the state level, there has been several states that have introduced various pharmaceutical bills doing different things from talk about retail take-backs and talk about hospitals and safe disposal. In fact, Wisconsin just introduced the bill, I guess, that would make it easier for them to allow local take-back because the feds haven’t moved fast enough.
The State of California, our organization, the California Product Stewardship Council, is a co-sponsor with the City of San Francisco, Alameda County, the Association of Retired Americans, and Clean Water Action of SB727, which is authored by Senator Hannah Beth Jackson from Santa Barbara. And it would do exactly what’s happening in Canada—just allow a producer-run and designed program with oversight from state government.
And that bill currently is in discussions and having negotiations. It’s still alive, and we look forward to hopefully seeing that through next year.
But in lieu of that, the local governments were tired of waiting. And that’s why Alameda, in July of 2012, passed the first ordinance in the country making the manufacturers pay. And as I said, they did win in the first court challenge by pharma.
We’re hopeful that the industry is realizing that it’s really in their best interest and the public’s interest to work together and find solutions together.
The do nothing option really needs to be off the table. It’s something that needs to be addressed, and there’s public demand for it, quite frankly, across the country.
We’re getting calls from county supervisors across the country that are interested in adopting the same ordinances. So if there’s anybody out there who is interested, just let us know, give us a call. We’d be happy to give you the model, and share with you how Alameda did it.
And then you can also follow Alameda’s Facebook page where they post a lot of information, including the ordinance itself, and all about the hearings, and what they learned in their investigations over many years. So they have Alameda Safe Medication Disposal Facebook page.
And CPC, our organization, has a newsletter, and a LinkedIn page, and Facebook, and we post a bunch of information as well.
You can also go to our website pharmaceutical page, and find all of these links, including to our Don’t Rush to Flush page, and how we’re working that program where the pharmacies actually pay for the disposal, which is another model.
DEBRA: And on my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I have a link to the pharmaceuticals page on the California Product Stewardship Council, so you can just go there and look for Heidi, and you’ll see the link there at the end with a description of the show.
So what can consumers do now at this point if anybody has some drugs that they need to dispose of who are listening? What should we do?
HEIDI SANBORN: Well, you need to locally at what is available. If you go to Earth 911 website, dot org, they are also posting where there are pharmaceutical collections. On our pharmaceuticals page, there are links to several other national organizations on drug abuse and prevention, and the DEA, that link to different local collection locations.
But you can go back to your own pharmacist and ask them why they aren’t if they’re not collecting. Because if they hear enough consumers asking for the service, they’ll realize it’s good business. That’s very important.
You can ask your doctor. The doctors need to be thinking about this because they really want good public health. They don’t want to see people getting sick maybe in the future because we haven’t addressed this issue at the source.
So they’re very interested in this. Keep them aware and educate them if they don’t know. I know many doctors don’t know what to tell people. So if you find out where collections are, let your doctor know, so they can tell other patients.
DEBRA: That would be a great idea.
HEIDI SANBORN: Even veterinarians.
DEBRA: Veterinarians, yes.
HEIDI SANBORN: Because they have drugs too, and here in Sacramento, the veterinary group was very interested in this, and has actually written the State Association of Vets that supported the legislation at the state level.
Law enforcement is very, very important. They’re very, very interested in this because of the public safety impacts. And they have been extremely supportive of take-backs and, in fact, have been hosting many of the bins.
We have five sites here in Sacramento and Yolo County that are at pharmacies, but one is also at a sheriff’s station.
So that’s another group to talk to and see if they would be willing locally to start a take-back program in lieu of waiting for the federal government to get it together on this issue, and get those DEA regs out and finished.
But you can also talk to your local legislators and ask them, “Why don’t you consider doing something like Alameda did?” or go to your state legislators and ask them because it really is going to take us all working together, and having those conversations in a public way.
In fact, that was just on public radio, and it’s supposed to run nationally. And pharmaceutical companies and Supervisor Miley from Alameda were interviewed.
So we hope that this is a big public discussion, but we all need to be careful and keep those drugs locked up. Make sure nobody is accessing them who shouldn’t be, and then work towards the solution on the final disposal [inaudible 00:33:21] public health and safety issue first and foremost.
DEBRA: I just wanted to go back to the water. You mentioned about water, and the pharmaceuticals getting into the water.
During the break, I was looking at a page, and I think I changed the page. Here it is.
So it says on the Don’t Rush to Flush page, it says, each year, $225-billion in medications is prescribed with that number expected to grow to $550-billion per year by 2017.
So it’s going to double in the next four years. That’s amazing.
HEIDI SANBORN: It’s mindboggling.
DEBRA: It is. Nearly 40% of prescribed medications aren’t taken and end up being improperly discarded or flushed. And then it says, studies have found that up to 80% of streams in the United States have measurable concentration of prescription drugs. And there have been studies that show that there are prescription drugs also in our tap water, that it’s all throughout the water system, correct?
HEIDI SANBORN: Yes. It is becoming pervasive. Europeans are looking at this. They had introduced some ideas that pharmaceutical companies might be made to be paid for the upgrades to water treatment plants because of it.
They backed down on that because of the opposition, but this is a big public discussion. And as we age, and our country is aging, we’re going to have a lot more medications prescribed. And we know that some just goes naturally through the body, and maybe excreted. That’s something we have to deal with as well, but making sure people get the right amount of the right drugs and only get what they need.
But one of the issues is that people are getting prescriptions for things with automatic renewals through the insurance company. And maybe they had a reaction to that drug after a few pills, and they don’t want it anymore. But they’ve got 30 pills in the first one, or maybe 90 days.
Not only does our health care costs go up because we’re paying for drugs we don’t need, but now, we have the cost of the waste.
And it’s not to say—we all appreciate our medications. We appreciate the medical community for providing these medications and making our lives better. We don’t necessarily with this particular product—our goal is not re-design. That’s unusual because most of the time, it is re-design for many products, like electronics. But that is not the case with this product type.
We don’t want them to feel hindered trying to make us better on how to design the drug. We just want a system that is only prescribing what is needed, and having a safe collection, so that we don’t have unintended consequences for those drugs that were left over.
DEBRA: Very good. I so appreciate your being on the show today because this is something that really needs to be talked about. And I learned so much about the responsibility throughout the supply chain that people should be doing.
We have about 30 seconds left. Is there anything short and quick you’d like to leave us with?
HEIDI SANBORN: That the power really is with the consumer, and that joining organizations like ours, donating to organizations like ours, being a good advocate, talking to those that you buy products from, no matter what the product, leaving your packaging where you buy it.
Sending the consumer signal that you don’t like over-packaging, you want safer return systems, you want the end of life thought of at the design phase, that’s what’s going to change corporate behavior because they want to make you happy. You actually have all the power.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. I argue with you, Heidi. And thank you for being on the show. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Doctor’s Warn Against Flu Shots
Flu shots are still being heavily promoted here in Clearwater, Florida.
But it wasn’t difficult for me to find articles from doctors recommending that we NOT get flu shots. FYI, I have never gotten a flu shot in my life.
For one thing, they don’t seem to be effective. “Studies have shown that if you vaccinate every single healthcare worker in a hospital, it doesn’t decrease the numbers of cases of flu at all … zero decrease,” says Dr. David Brownstein MD. (Forced Flu Shots are Outrageous: Top Doctor)
Apparently The effectiveness of the vaccine depends on a person’s immune response (Beware of High-Dose Flu Vaccine: Top Doctor). So the vaccine will not be as effective for people whose immune systems have been weakened by age or toxic chemical exposure, which is just about everyone, unless you are doing something to reduce your toxic chemical exposure.
Another reason not to get a flu shot is they are vaccines, and vaccines can contain some pretty toxic ingredients. They are not just sterile water and antigens. According to the Center for Disease Control’s Pink Book, some toxic substances that may be in your flu shot include formaldehyde (a common preservative in vaccines), phenol (another preservative), 2-phenoxyethanol, antibiotics, disodium phosphatem glutaraldehyde, MSG, sodium borate, and aluminum.
It’s much better to bolster your immune system throughout the year and particularly during cold and flu season.
Here are some tips for supporting your immune system, so it can defend your body from foreign invaders of any type.
- Minimize your exposure to toxic chemicals. Many damage the immune system in particular.
- Take liquid zeolite to immediately lessen your body burden of toxic chemicals. Liquid zeolite is also known to decrease the viral load in your body. Once the concentrations of heavy metals in your body are reduced, zeolite attaches itself onto viruses, dismantling the parts that form the complete virus, thus preventing viral replication.
- Take zinc. Zinc is vital to your body’s immune response 15-20 milligrams will help boost your immune system and help your body fend off the flu in the first place.
- Take at least 1000 units of vitamin D daily (I take 5000) and get some sun when you can (be careful not to burn your skin).
- Get enough sleep to support your immune system.
If you support your immune system throughout the year with these and other natural means, your body will have the best chance to fight whatever comes it’s way.
Here is a great blog post about why you shouldn’t get a flu shot that contains peer reviewed literature: What Science Says About Getting a Flu Shot.
Our Toxic World and Why We Need to Do Something
My guest today is Catherine J. Frompovich, author of Our Chemical Lives and the Hijacking of Our DNA. This book is so full of information on toxic chemicals and their health effects, I can hardly describe it. While I usually talk about solutions, today we’re going to be talking about the problem, so you can understand WHY we need to protect ourselves. As a result of her lifelong interest in nature and the natural way, Catherine J. Frompovich enrolled in holistic modalities and natural nutrition. During her studies that led to advanced degrees in Nutrition and Holistic Health Sciences and a Certification in Orthomolecular Theory and Practice, she came to realize how important it is to follow the “owner’s manual” that comes with the human body – Nature’s intended way of life, living, and healthcare. She spent numerous years in practice as a consulting nutritionist and has written many books. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, her books were used by teachers in elementary schools to teach nutrition, a subject – and lifestyle – that she feels truly is imperative in maintaining one’s health from its prenatal stage and throughout life. During the 1980s, she had a cooking show on cable TV, devoted to the natural way of preparing food. For five years, she was the editor of The Healthcare Rights Advocate, a 32 page quarterly newsletter centered on the politics of healthcare in the 1980s. In the 1990s she represented alternative healthcare interests on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. Now that she’s a widow and retired, she devotes her time to writing books; consults with aspiring writers to get their works into publication, and helps in the design phase of authors’ books. Catherine also continues her several decades-long research in consumer health and its care, plus the politics of healthcare issues. Her work is published online. www.catherinejfrompovich.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Removing Paint Odor
Question from Betty
We had our stippled ceiling painted in May with a ultra flat alkyd calcimine recoater and I am still smelling gaseous fumes. Would repainting with AFM Safecoat transitional primer solve this problem. We have tried baking soda, vinegar, lemons, vanilla, charcoal, air purifier, fans. The area is a loft and the air flow is not the best as there is not a direct window that can be opened. Can you help?
Thanks
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any experience or ideas?
I don’t have any personal experience with AFM Safecoat transitional primer. I would suggest that you call them and see if they think this or another one of their products would be appropriate.
If this paint was applied in May and it is now November, there is something wrong. Even the worst paint should have no odor by now.
One thing you can do is cover the ceiling with aluminum foil and tape all the seams and edges with aluminum foil tape. This will block any fumes. Then put up a new ceiling by covering the foil with sheetrock or any other material of your choice.
Heat and moving air should outgass it. If not, after all these months, I would just cover it with foil and be done with it.
Compact Fluorescent Lights May Save Energy but Can Harm Your Health
My guest today is Paul Wheaton, who is well-known in Permaculture circles. I invited him to be a guest on the show because he wrote a great article about why we shouldn’t use compact fluorescent bulbs, even though they are being heavily promoted by environmentalists to save energy. Paul believes, as I do, that we shouldn’t do something toxic to achieve some other goal, but rather find a solution that supports the entire ecosystem, including the humans. So today we’re going to talk about how CFL’s can harm your health and what else you can do to save energy that is toxic-free. www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp#CFL-bulb-toxicity
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Worried About Toxic Chemicals in Furniture
Question from Anonymous
Dear Debra,
We recently ordered a lot of new furniture from Ashley Furniture store (bought in CA, made in China) and I am nervous about all the chemicals that may be in my air. We got a dining room table and hutch, and kitchen table that have a chemical smell. I did order a test kit from ACS and I am going Safe seal the wood furniture. However, what can I do to protect myself from the chemical exposure from the sofa’s and loveseats? My husband and I have a 4 year old and we’re currently “trying” to have a baby. Any advice would be appreciated. I recently ordered some zeolite drops as well.
Debra’s Answer
Yes, definitely the zeolite drops.
If you had asked me before the purchase, I would have said “Don’t purchase this furniture.”
I don’t know any way to “protect” yourself from standard synthetic sofas and loveseats with fire retardants. I personally had my sofa and chairs custom upholstered years ago with natural fiber fabrics and filling.
Readers, any suggestions?
Aluminum Foil Melted in Oven
Question from RP
Someone lined my oven with aluminum foil that melted on the bottom the next time I turned my oven on.
Debra’s Answer
I’m not aware of any toxic exposure from aluminum foil heated in the home, though manufacture of aluminum produces greenhouse gasses and fluoride emissions (Aluminum: The Element of Sustainability). At any rate, the amount of aluminum foil is so small the emissions would be negligible.
Toxic household exposure from aluminum is generally from contact of food or water with aluminum pots or aluminum foil.
I would try just soaking it, aluminum itself shouldn’t stick to your oven, perhaps it stuck to some other substances that was spilled on the oven during baking or roasting.
I don’t see any problem using the oven if there is a little bit of aluminum permanently melted there. There are many other things to be concerned about that are much more toxic.
Honest Shampoo
Question from Michele
I am looking for hair care products for me and my daughters and came across shampoo and conditioner from the Honest company. Looks like it is ok, but I remember reading somewhere about orange oil that can act as formaldehyde. Would you recommend this brand?
Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
Some good things…it’s made in the USA, it’s free from SLS, sulfates, parabens, phthalates, fragrances, dyes, sodium chloride, formaldehyde, MEA, DEA, TEA, petrochemicals & most common allergens
So it’s better than some that contain those ingredients.
Here are the listed ingredients. I’ve rearranged them in groups.
Industrial natural (natural raw material, but industrially processed)
Decyl Glucoside
Lauryl Glucoside
Cocamidopropyl Hydroxysultaine
Coco-Glucoside
Glyceryl Oleate
Glycerin,
Natural
EWG’s List of Dirty Dozen Endocrine Disruptors
Environmental Working Group just released a new report listing a dozen chemicals, how they affect your endocrine system, how you are exposed to them, and some simple suggestions on how to avoid them.
The twelve chemicals listed are:
- BPA
- Dioxin
- Atrazine
- Phthalates
- Perchlorate
- Fire Retardants
- Lead
- Arsenic
- Mercury
- Perfluorinated Chemiclas (PFCs)
- Organophosphate Pesticides
- Glycol Ethers
You can download a copy at Dirty Dozen Endocrine Disruptors.
New FDA Regulations Could Put Small Farmers Out of Business
The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a set of regulations that, if implemented as written, will negatively affect many small farmers and could put some of them out of business.
These proposed regulations fall under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the first overhaul to food safety rules in 75 years.
Read what Local Harvest has to say about how it could impact small local farmers, and what you can do.
Kitchen Cabinets Certified for Low Formaldehyde Emissions
Question from Toby Zallman
Some cabinet Manufacturers (over 100) are ESP certified, which means they adhere to the California standards for plywood emissions of formaldehyde. Does anyone know how good these standards are? We are finding that solid wood cabinets are super expensive and out of our price range. There are many good companies that are certified, but I was uncertain how good this standard is.
Debra’s Answer
The ESP certification on kitchen cabinets comes from the [Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association (KCMA).
The simple way to answer this question is to say that all of the certified cabinets must meet the requirements of the California law for formaldehyde emissions from cabinets.
The standard is 0.05 – 0.13 ppm formaldehyde emissions. This is consistent with OSHA standards.
So many cabinet brands are listed because they can’t be sold in California unless they meet this standard. By law.
The question then becomes, is this a safe level? It depends on your body condition and how much time you are exposed, how much ventilation in your houe (will levels build up in the air or ventilate out?).
My personal rule of thumb is always get as close to zero as possible when it comes to toxic chemicals.
Using Sunshine to Disinfect
Question from J in Va
Hi Debra, I am interested in learning more about disinfecting with sunshine. I have a few questions: Does sunshine just disinfect clothing/fabrics or is it useful on other objects as well (i.e. plastic, books, etc). How long does something need to be in the sun? Does it need to be outside or is through a window also effective? Does sun disinfect against cold/flu/stomach viruses? Thanks for everything. Your website provides very useful info.
Debra’s Answer
Well, here is a reference I found on the subject.
SF Gate: Natural Alternatives to Bleach for Disinfecting
Perhaps the most surprising natural disinfectant is sunlight. Ultraviolet radiation of the sun kills pathogens that cause diarrhea. In fact, scientists have found that exposing a bottle of water to sunlight for 6 hours is an economical way to provide developing countries with safe drinking water (see References 2). The disinfecting properties of sunlight can also be useful around the house. If you have an object that you can move outside, the sun’s rays can help disinfect it. A stained piece of white laundry can be effectively brightened and disinfected by spraying the stain with lemon juice or vinegar and then hanging it in the sun (see References 1).
1. Idaho Department of Health and Welfare: Safe Alternatives to Hazardous Household Chemicals
2. “Environmental Science and Technology”; Solar Disinfection of Drinking Water in the Prevention of Dysentery in South African Children Aged Under 5 Years: The Role of Participant Motivation; Martella du Preez, et al.; October 2010
I think that answered all your questions.
How to Protect Your Body From Your Cell Phone
My guests today are Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang from Pong Research, I use Pong cases on my cell phone and ipad to block harmful radiation. We’ll be talking about the health effects of radiation from cell phone and how you can protect your body. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/pong-research.
Dr. McCaughey is the Chief Technology Officer for the company. He leads the technical team that designs and tests the Pong technology. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Manchester (UK) for his thesis on Laser Stimulation of Nerves. He also received a Masters in Physics with Technological Physics from the University of Manchester. Dr. McCaughey grew up in Northern Ireland, before moving to the United States in 2007 for a research position at the Beckman Laser Institute, University of California, Irvine, where he researched laser surgery of the bones in the ear. In 2009, Dr. McCaughey joined the International Foundation for Science, Health and the Environment (IFSHE) in Los Angeles, where he worked on development of a plasma centrifuge for isotope separation and the genesis of the technology that became the foundation for Pong Research Corporation.
Dr. Rong Wang joined Pong in 2011 as Chief Science Officer. She is responsible for the oversight and scientific integrity of all research, published content, and documentation related to the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation emitted from cellular and Wi-Fi devices (including cellular phones, tablets, laptops, routers, and Bluetooth accessories). Rong reports directly to the CEO as lead technical writer, editor, and media representative on all scientific issues related to mobile health, wellness, and environmental topics that pertain to Pong’s technology. As a co-inventor of Pong’s internationally patented technology, Rong also continues to participate in product research and development and helps identify and qualify new technologies and applications for the company.
Rong received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a joint degree from Harvard in Health Sciences and Technology. She is a specialist in radiation biology, and her doctoral dissertation focused upon human cellular responses to radiation. She also earned two bachelor’s degrees in Physics Engineering and Economics from Tsinghua University in China.
Prior to Pong, Rong is originally from the Sichuan Province of China.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Protect Your Body From Your Cellphone
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Ryan McCaughey & Dr. Rong Wang
Date of Broadcast: October 23, 2013
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 we talk about this because there are toxic chemicals all around us, in the water we drink, in the food we eat. In fact, you’re probably being exposed to toxic chemicals unless you’re doing something to be aware of where they are, and choosing toxic-free alternatives.
But in addition to chemicals causing harm, we also are concerned about electromagnetic fields, radiation and other things that are in consumer products that cause harm besides toxic chemicals.
And today, we’re going to be talking about cell phones—cell phone radiation, how it affects your health, and what you can do about it.
My guests are Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang from Pong Research. And what Pong Research does is that they make cases for cell phones and other wireless devices that block the cell phone radiation up to 95%.
So we’re going to be talking with them today about Pong, as a company, what their technology is about, and how it can protect you.
I have Pong cases on my iPhone and my iPad. And while you can’t really tell that it makes a difference, you can’t feel a difference, I have confidence in these products. And so I feel good that I’m protected.
I actually had an experience a few months ago. I was at a conference. I was walking through the parking lot, and this woman called out to me, and she says, “Are you Debra Lynn Dadd?”
And I said, “Yes.”
And she said, “Oh, I bought those Pong cases because you recommended them, and I feel so much better. I bought them for myself and my family. All my children now have Pong cases, and it’s so wonderful that I feel that they can be protected.”
And she was so happy that I had recommended them that she stopped me in a parking garage—a perfect stranger—to tell me this.
So, welcome to the show, Dr. McCaughey and Dr. Wang.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: It’s a pleasure!
DEBRA: I’m going to get this all right. Dr. Wang, right?
DR. RONG WANG: That’s right.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Well, why don’t you introduce yourselves? Dr. McCaughey—I’m going to write this down. I’m going to make sure that I get it phonetically.
Dr. McCaughey from Ireland, and Dr. Wang from China. So Dr. McCaughey, tell us something about yourself. Let’s start with you. You’re the Chief Technology Officer for Pong Research.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right. Pong Research is a mobile technology company dedicated to advancing the performance and safety of mobile devices. And as you mentioned, I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Pong Research.
I’m originally from Ireland. And I’m now based here in Virginia with Pong Research. I’ve been here in the United States for about five years. I have a background in Physics, a PhD in Physics, from the University of Manchester in England. That’s how
I’m able to provide expertise in this realm of electromagnetic interactions.
As you rightly introduced, cell phones and other wireless devices emit wireless radiation or electromagnetic fields. And the Pong cases are uniquely designed to interact with those fields, to re-distribute the energy in a much safer way, so to redirect it away from you.
In your introduction, you actually mentioned that the Pong cases block cell phone radiation. And really, an important distinction is that we don’t block radiation, we re-direct it.
DEBRA: I apologize.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Oh, no. It’s just something I want to tell you to clarify. As you’re probably aware, it’s essential for the communication ability of the device that the signal has to get in and out of the phone, so we don’t actually want to block it. And what makes Pong cases unique is that we direct it. So it’s not something directed towards your head when you’re on call, for example. It’s not sent out the back of the phone.
DEBRA: Good! Okay. We’ll talk a lot about that during the course of the show.
So, Dr. Wang, tell us about your background. You’re the Chief Science Officer for Pong.
DR. RONG WANG: Yes. Hi, this is Rong. And I’m currently the Chief Science Officer for Pong. And my background, I received my PhD from MIT’s Nuclear Engineering in the Science & Technology Department with a joint PhD degree in Health Science & Technology from Harvard.
So basically, I came to a lot of knowledge about radiation and how radiation interacts with human bodies—human cells, to be specific—from my PhD research.
And before I joined Pong, I worked in research team in Los Angeles. We did basic research to look for innovative solutions for a wide variety of problems facing us today.
And one of the technologies we developed in the laboratory is—I created the prototype of the current Pong technology, the re-directing technology for the wireless device.
Right now, I’m based in Kansas City. And it’s a great pleasure to be here with you, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m very happy to have both of you. You have just impeccable backgrounds, so I’m very interested. And I’m sure my listeners are interested to hear what you still have to say on this subject.
So, Dr. McCaughey, could you tell me something about the company? How did Pong get started? What was the motivation that led the founders of Pong to decide that they needed to start this company?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Sure! Really, in the mid to late 90’s, at that time, Dr. Henry Lai—he’s a researcher at the University of Washington—found that radiofrequency radiation, similar to that emitted from cell phones can cause damage to DNA in the brain cells of rats.
This was really at the time when cell phones were becoming more prevalent. It was really when people started—the general population, everyone, started getting a cell phone mid 90’s.
That was a very concerning research that came from the University of Washington, and we at Pong wanted to use our knowledge of radiofrequency antennas and electromagnetic interactions that we developed through research at UCLA and the company that Dr. Wang mentioned before. And we wanted to provide cell phone users a way to protect themselves.
It’s still a matter that’s under considerable research, exactly what the impacts of cell phone radiation are on health. But until such time as there is a conclusive evidence that they’re safe or otherwise, we want to be there to provide consumers just an option to protect themselves, a way to reduce the unnecessary exposure from a cell phone.
DEBRA: Thank you. We need to take a break, and we’re going to be back in just a minute. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, I’m talking with two scientists from Pong Research about cell phone radiation and what you can do to protect yourself, Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang.
And when we come back, Dr. Wang is going to tell us the health effects of radiation from cell phones and other devices.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about cell phone radiation and what you can do to protect yourself with two scientists from Pong Research, Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang.
Now, before the break, Dr. McCaughey said that in terms of health effects, that there is not complete agreement about what those health effects are yet. But there’s something called the precautionary principle which I apply all the time and have been applying for 30 years, which is if there is some question about the health effects of something, it’s better to be precautionary about being exposed to it rather than be in danger, and be exposed to it, and then find out later that it causes cancer, or could kill you, or something like that.
So I feel there’s enough evidence so far to bring into question the safety of talking on cell phones all day, or even carrying them around with you.
So Dr. Wang, tell us what you know about the health effects of cell phone radiation.
DR. RONG WANG: Before I give into the topic of the health effects of cell phone radiation, I would like to first explain what cell phone radiation is.
DEBRA: Thank you. Good. I would like to hear that.
DR. RONG WANG: As you know, cell phones, and essentially all wireless devices, use radio waves to communicate. The radio waves emitted from cell phones is a form of electromagnetic radiation, commonly referred as the cell phone radiation.
When you hold your cell phone next to your head or wear it on your body, you can absorb over 50% of the transmitted energy.
While cell phones bring enormous convenience to our modern lives, the possible health consequences of exposure to cell phone radiation have aroused a considerable—it’s a topic of concern and scientific debate.
So, when we talk about the cell phone radiation, the first thing people should understand is that it is different from x-ray which is an ionizing radiation and a known cancer-causing agent.
On the other hand, the cell phone radiation is a type of non-ionizing radiation, which means it does not carry enough energy to break the DNA bonds directly. And it is the same type of energy used by microwave ovens to heat up food […] except that it has much lower power compared to a microwave oven.
So a typical cell phone emits about 100 mini-watts or 1/10 of a watt average power with a peak power somewhere between half a watt to two-watts.
So many people assume that this low-level, non-ionizing radiation is safe for humans. But the fact is that we don’t know yet.
The existing scientific findings on this subject are mixed and conflicting. So that means about half of the studies showed some kind of effect, while the other half showed no effect.
And the reported effects from cell phone radiation include cancer, especially brain cancer, impaired brain and the nerve root functions, sperm damages in men, and behavioral problems in children, just to name a few.
So, let me give you an example. In 2011, a U.S. study showed that safety limits of cell phone use changed the human brain’s glucose metabolism in the region of the brain closest to the cellphone antenna. Although the health outcome from this change in glucose metabolism is unknown from the study itself, at least we know that cell phone radiation starts to interact with our brains, and that they said one hour of exposure is enough to change our brain activities.
So, that’s a very interesting finding.
DEBRA: Yes, I would agree.
DR. RONG WANG: With regard to the health outcomes, the relationship between cell phone use and the brain cancer has been the subject of several large studies in the past decade or so. Those studies normally in scientific terms called epidemiological studies, they normally involve a large number, sometimes up to hundreds of thousands of human subjects, and compare the cell phone use pattern, and the actual brain tumor incidents among the studied population.
If we look at those studies, while no study was able to say for sure that there is a definitive link between cell phone use and brain cancer, many studies observed increased risks for subgroups of heavy cell phone users or people who use the cell phone for long periods of time. We’re talking about at least five years or longer, sometimes more than 10 years.
DEBRA: I had an experience where I know a good friend of mine is one of those people who are on the cell phone all day long. He’s a business executive, and he just carries his cell phone with him all day long. And he had a brain tumor.
Now, I can’t say that it was related to his cell phone, but I can tell you that he literally talks on his cell phone at least eight hours a day. And he got a brain tumor.
So when I heard that, I thought about these studies about brain cancer and cell phones, and what you said earlier, there are studies that show that there is a change in the brain when the cell phone is near the brain.
We need to take a break, but we’re going to continue to talk about this when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re talking today about cell phone radiation with two scientists from Pong Research. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about cell phone radiation, how it can harm your health and what you can do to protect yourself. My guests are from Pong Research.
I want to just suggest that you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the description of this show. And on there is a link to my listing on my link to Pong Research on my website on Debra’s List. You can also just go to any page of my website, and type in “Pong Research,” P-O-N-G Research into the search box, and it will take you to the listing that I’ve written for it.
And on that listing, there’s a very dramatic picture of looking at how much radiation emits—you can actually see it on the picture, and how much there is with Pong device. And it’s virtually nothing without it, and you can really see the radiation in this picture.
And I’ve seen other pictures. I don’t have them right here in front of me, but there are other pictures that maybe you’ll find on the internet, or I’ll find them and put them up here too, where you can see the radiation from the phone on the ear penetrating into the brain area.
So it’s not just the phone is just out here doing nothing. It’s emitting these radiation rays, I guess they are, and they’re going into your brain.
Now, that’s not something that was designed by Mother Nature to have us be exposed to, and there are plenty of evidence that there is some harm. It’s just not completely proven yet.
So Dr. Wang, go on with what you’d like to say about the health effects.
DR. RONG WANG: Thank you, Debra. So basically, I was talking about some studies showed some evidence of increased brain cancers, while others do not. But still, the limited evidence of increased cancer risk from those studies led the World Health Organization to classify cell phone radiation as a possible carcinogen to humans in 2011. We all know that.
And I do want to emphasize that, when it comes to children, we believe—and health experts, they generally agree—that children are more vulnerable to cell phone radiation because they have thinner skull and skin which allows a deeper penetration of the cell phone energy as you just mentioned.
And also, they have a smaller head, and still, their nervous system is still developing (they’re not yet mature). So it’s more susceptible to any damages.
Besides, children, they start using cell phones at a very young age. They have the potential of accumulating many, many years, or even decades, of cell phone exposure when they are old. So that is a concern.
And again, the search data for the effects on children is very limited.
DEBRA: That’s a big thing in my field when we’re talking about toxic chemicals or electromagnetic fields or radiation, any of these things, is that all these things are being used, and yet, there’s limited data on their safety. And we need to do more research. We need to be finding out definitely what the dangers are, and if there is any indication that there is a danger, we need to be applying the precautionary principle.
I really believe that even if adults don’t use these cases, anybody who has children, the children absolutely should be using the cases because some of us—I didn’t start using a cell phone until well on in my life, but if somebody starts using a cell phone when they’re five years old, they’re going to have a lifetime of exposure to this.
Especially since there is technology available, it is relatively inexpensive for what you’re getting. You buy a case and it lasts—since there’s nothing being used up, this case would just last as long as it lasts. You could it use it for years?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Absolutely! We strive to make our cases as durable and sturdy as possible. We want our technology to stay on the phone and be used.
DEBRA: So considering how long it could be used, the investment is very small, and the amount of protection that you’re getting, it’s just a very high value product, especially when you’re looking at the health of your children.
I wanted to ask you, Dr. Wang, so as long as the cell phone is on, it’s getting off radiation whether it’s in your pocket or in your purse or up next to your ear.
DR. RONG WANG: That’s right.
DEBRA: So even if you’re just carrying your cell phone—you don’t even have to be talking on it. If you’re carrying your cell phone, you’re getting that radiation in your body.
DR. RONG WANG: That is correct.
DEBRA: But if it’s in your pocket, it’s not next to your brain—so how far away—I know with electromagnetic fields that the further away you get, it diminishes exponentially. So how far away do you need to be from your cell phone in order to not be feeling the effects of radiation?
DR. RONG WANG: Really, there is no—because the radiation, they don’t just disappear. The intensity goes down exponentially over distance. So that means if you hold the cell phone further away from your head, the less radiation exposure you are going to get.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: The cell phone manufacturers provide warnings in their manuals in small print, which most people don’t read, that advise you to keep your cell phone at least half an inch away from your body.
And that’s something that we also agree with. We often advise people not to keep their cell phones in their pockets particularly because, as you mentioned, the proximity to the body is a big factor. So if possible, try not to keep your device in your pocket.
But that’s somewhere where that the Pong case can be a benefit. If you have to keep it in your pocket, the Pong case will reduce exposure in that instance. But of course, the less exposure is always better.
DEBRA: The less exposure is always better. We need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking with scientists from Pong Research today about cell phone radiation, its health effects, and what you can do.
And when we come back, Dr. McCaughey, I’m going to have you explain the Pong technology. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guests today are from Pong Research where they make cases for cell phones and other wireless devices in order to protect us from the cell phone radiation.
So Dr. McCaughey, explain to us how the technology works.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: When you normally talk on your cell phone, it’s emitting energy in all directions really. And that’s next to your head, and half of that is being absorbed in your head. Not only this has health implications, which we just discussed, but you’re also wasting the signal.
What the Pong case does is when it’s applied to the phone, it has a built-in antenna technology that pairs with the antenna inside your phone to re-direct the wireless energy away from your head.
So essentially, it draws the energy towards the back of the phone and away from your head, so it provides you with a reduced exposure to the cell phone radiation, and at the same time, providing a greater cellphone signal to the tower for improved [unintelligible 29:39] which is dropped calls.
So really, it’s multiple benefits from one solution.
DEBRA: Yes, it improves performance and increases battery life too.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Yes, simply by less waste of your signal in your head, you have a more efficient device for communication. And we made these cases slim line cases that sit on the phone snuggly. We make them for a range of devices, including I guess the iPhones, Samsung Galaxy products, and tablets including the iPad and the iPad mini.
Just this week, it’s available for pre-order now on our website, our case for the iPhone 5S, which was recently released.
DEBRA: And I find it to be that they’re very attractive cases, and particularly, the one in my phone, it actually makes it easier to hold. It just wraps around the phone.
I did a little research. Some people asked me, “Well, aren’t they made out of plastic?” all these kinds of things. But I talked to the company when I first started became aware of these, and I found out that the cases are made of polycarbonate, but it’s all bound up in the plastic.
The problem with polycarbonate, people know about BPA and polycarbonate, is that you actually have to have something like a polycarbonate water bottle, though BPA will leech into the water because—it leeches into the water. If it’s just there around the phone, it’s not leeching into the air.
And it’s not anything like handling a cash register receipt, which gives off BPA.
If there is any BPA coming off of this case, it’s so minimal that—you would be exposed to more BPA in just going shopping, and handling the cash register receipt, or eating canned food. And the benefits of this are so astronomical just in every way that we just need to be protecting ourselves from this radiation.
Is there more you want to tell us about how the technology works, or anything innovative?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Sure! So, the technology itself is an embedded technology—an embedded antenna, I’m sorry. It’s wafer thin, thinner than a human hair which is very important. We don’t want to make a huge, bulky case that you’re not going to want to carry around with you.
And how it works is that it attracts the electromagnetic energy towards it. And it’s precisely engineered and designed to function at the frequencies that your cell phone operates on. Your listeners may not be aware that your cell phone operates at many different frequencies.
DEBRA: No, I didn’t know that.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Over a range of about 1 Ghz, which is a large variance, but the Pong case is designed to work at any of the frequencies that your cell phone can operate at, not just here in the U.S., but worldwide as well.
So a lot of engineering goes into making sure that it pairs precisely with the cell phone antenna.
DEBRA: This is an amazing thing. I’m looking on your website right now, and it says that it’s been tested in FCC-certified laboratories. That’s the Federal Communications Commission, and that Pong is the only mobile device case proven to reduce your exposure to radiation while still protecting your signal strength.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right.
DEBRA: And I think that that was the thing that impressed me was—because I’ve been looking at other technologies, and that you have such a high rate of reduction, and that it also—there’s performance instead of decreasing it.
So that’s just between those things—it was just—why not have this on my phone? That was just so obvious.
We only just have a few minutes left. But I wanted to ask you, is there anything you want to make sure you get to say that you haven’t covered yet?
DR. RONG WANG: Yes, Debra. I do want to resonate with your previous comments on the precautionary principle. The reason is, just last week, WHO classified air pollution as a leading cause of cancer to humans. And it actually took the Director of IARC, an international agency for research on cancer, to come into the [desk].
It actually takes two, three, or four decades, once the exposure is introduced and before there is sufficient research data to show a relationship to the cause.
So, if you look at cell phone radiation, I think it’s—we’re talking about the [unintelligible 35:34]. So right now, we only have widespread cell phone use for about 10 to 15 years, so we are still at a very early stage compared to three, four decades time period that it normally takes to define a carcinogen or a cancer agent.
So, it’s really the uncertainty and the time. I think they all justify the application of precautionary principle which we definitely support. At Pong, we support the worldwide call for precaution.
And lastly, just last Tuesday, the French National Agency for Food, Health, and Environmental Safety issued recommendations to limit exposure to cell phone radiation, essentially, for children and the heavy cell phone users.
Again, really, I think it’s all early evidence and the worldwide call for precaution. They are, I think, a good cause of concern on this issue.
DEBRA: I agree with you. And yes, I do see as well that as time goes by, there are more and more recommendations by intelligent people who have done research and looked at the research to say, “This is something that we should be watching out for.”
In history, there was a time when we thought that cigarettes were safe. And now, we know that they cause cancer. If there are indicators that we should be watching out for something, why not watch out for it if we can?
Dr. McCaughey, any final words from you?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: I think until we reach that time when there is conclusive evidence, we should adopt this precautionary principle. And one way to do that is to use a Pong case.
For any of your listeners that would like to get one, we’d like to offer you a discount. If you enter Pong, P-O-N-G, PONG10, in the checkout, you’ll get a 10% discount just for your listeners, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. So that’s P-O-N-G 10, the number 10. 1-0.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right, yes.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. And until when is the discount good?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s available for up until the end of the month, October 31st.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Thank you very much. I’ll announce that on my website as well.
So now, we really do only have a few seconds left, so I just want to thank you both so much for being with me. I learned some things, and I’m sure my listeners did. And thank you for providing such a great product that can protect our health.
If you want to learn more about Toxic Free Talk Radio, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, where we have a list of the guests that are coming up this week. And also, every single show is recorded and archived, so you can listen to this show again, you can tell your friends to listen to this show, you can listen to yesterday’s show. You can listen to the 200-something shows that we’ve done, and find out what’s going on in the future.
You can also find out more about my website when you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top, there’s a navigation bar that will take you to various places where you can find out about where to buy non-toxic products, how to get toxic chemicals out of your body, et cetera, et cetera.
So tune in tomorrow, and we’ll have more. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Healthy Halloween
My guest today is Annie B. Bond and we’re going to talk about how to reduce toxic chemical exposure on Halloween—everything from candy to costumes. I met Annie many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). She has been the editor of a number of publications, including “The Green Guide.” Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Healthy Halloween
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: October 22, 2013
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 we need to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals in the world today, all around us, in the food we eat, the water we drink, consumer products and even in our bodies from plastic exposures.
So, on this show, we talk about what’s toxic, what’s not, where are the toxic chemicals and where are things that are not toxic? And today, we’re going to talk about the scary toxic chemicals that are in our Halloween traditions and products that we buy at Halloween.
My guest today is my friend, Annie Berthold Bond. She has written five bestselling books about toxic free living. And she has experienced, as I have, many, many toxic-free Halloweens. Hi, Annie.
ANNIE B. BOND: Hi, Debra. It’s so nice to be here. Thanks for having me again.
DEBRA: Thank you. And Annie has been on before and if you enjoy today’s show or a fan of Annie’s books, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and just type her name into the search and all of the shows that she has been on will come up and you can listen to all of them. I’m sure she’ll be on again since we’re such good friends. We have known each other for so long and are so in agreement on this subject.
ANNIE B. BOND: […]
DEBRA: I know you’ve written about Halloween in the past. You’ve written so much in so many ways. So we’re going to talk about some specific things. I have some information specifically about candy and costumes. But we just start out.
Tell me just some tips that you would give somebody about how to have less toxic Halloween and then we’ll talk more specifically about candy and costumes. Tell us some of the things that you did with your daughter Lily to make her Halloween less toxic.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s an interesting question. When I was thinking about this show, I still to this day remember Halloween mask I wore. I must have been eight or nine maybe or six, I don’t know. And the taste of it and how it bothered my face, it must have been absolutely saturated with fire retardants or something. The chemical exposure I had that evening from that mask must have just been unbelievable. And I, to this day, remember it.
DEBRA: I remember that too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. It’s just an incredible. With my daughter, my main focus usually was around the candy. So we can talk about that. I have a lot of alternative thoughts about using candy that doesn’t have fructose in it because I think…
DEBRA: Let’s just start out talking about candies. I have some things to say too. Let me just talk a little bit about the toxic chemicals in candies that children are likely to encounter and then we can go into talking about our alternatives because I’m sure we both have a lot of experience with this.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: There was just an article. I was just searching this online and there was some article just a few days ago in the Huffington Post that said, “Halloween warning, watch out for neurotoxic artificial food dyes in M&Ms candies.”
This article is about the health effects of artificial colors, which are made from petroleum. And it says that if you know a child with ADHD, you know hyperactivity can make it difficult for parents and that many food and candy companies use unnecessary ingredients that can trigger hyperactivity and petroleum-based artificial food dyes are found in everything from cereal, yogurt and granola bars to candy chips and even children’s medicine.
So they’re making the point here that even though it’s Halloween, you’re going to get a lot of artificial colors in that bag of candy. If most people are giving away candy that just comes in the bags of Halloween candy that is sold cheaply at this time of year and it’s not the best quality candy. And M&Ms and other common brands do use these artificial flavors.
I mean ADHD is only one of the things that can happen when you consume artificial colors because it’s a neurotoxin and it affects your entire nervous system. So anything that has to do with the nervous system, mood, depression, all those things, even moving your fingers, I’m sitting here moving my fingers while I’m talking. Moving your fingers is something that your nerves do and message is going through brain and all of those kinds of things are all part of your nervous system. And so that’s one thing to watch out for.
Another article that I found, let’s see what else I have here, there was another one about lead. I have so many articles open on my desk right now. There was another one about lead in candy and I can’t find that one right now.
ANNIE B. BOND: One of the things when you’re talking, in England, the physicians have gotten together and urged all parents to not feed their children food with artificial color. And this is what started maybe three to four years ago. It was so impressive that the pediatricians got together to say this because it was so strong.
I think also the other thing that I just wanted to throw in there is my personal experience, which was that my daughter didn’t really have much exposure to chemicals, but I always let her go to birthday parties and eat whatever they had and of course they were always loaded with toxic food dyes. She was a sweet little girl, but she has come home as the most belligerent little human being you ever, ever wanted to be around. And it was just awkward. She’d have that kind of food and she would be so belligerent with me.
So it’s so sad because the kids get into bad behavior and parents punish them and they don’t know what’s the cause. It’s just a real tragedy.
DEBRA: It absolutely can be something as simple as eating M&Ms. Let’s also talk about dangers of sugar and then we’ll give our safe alternatives because I actually consider sugar to be a toxic chemical now. I do.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s interesting.
DEBRA: And I didn’t use to think it was a toxic chemical because most of the toxic chemicals I knew were made from petroleum. But when I wrote my most recent book, Toxic Free, I really researched everything anew because I had a lot of ideas about what was toxic from the past many years ago when I first started working in the field. And so I researched everything again.
One of the things that I realized is that there are certain chemicals that are inherently toxic. There are certain like dioxin or something like that. There are naturally occurring toxins like food poisoning kind of things like botulinum toxin.
But there’s also a whole category of things that are toxic because they’re refined. And if you look at something like salt, like natural salt versus refined salt and natural salt is actually vital to life, yet refined salt can give you high blood pressure and all kind of things. It’s actually an industrial chemical.
And so when I look at refined sugar – I’m not talking about all sweeteners, but I’m talking about that refined white sugar that most candy is made from, especially Halloween candy that acts in your body like a toxic chemical does. It’s not something that occurs in nature. It’s something that is an industrial product that’s been refined. So I actually consider it to be a toxic chemical now and something that people shouldn’t be eating and it’s not necessary to health. So I put it on the list of dangerous poison.
ANNIE B. BOND: Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. There’s a website and I’ve forgotten the name of it, but it listed 134 ways or something like that that sugar hurts your body and especially one of it is that it depresses the immune system.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, interesting.
DEBRA: And especially what happens here is that we’re in the cold and flu season and we’re eating Halloween candy or eating Thanksgiving desserts or eating Christmas desserts. And all through the whole cold and flu season, we’re depressing our immune system when our immune system should be at top form to be fighting all those bacteria and viruses.
ANNIE B. BOND: And all of those holidays celebrate the…
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s right. So alternative is – I just have a general statement here and say that there are many other sweeteners that are not as bad for you. And I hear my little cue of music that it’s time for break and I could just keep talking about all this stuff with you.
But we’ll take our break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie B. Bond. When we come back, we’ll talk more about Halloween and how to have a healthy one.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond. We’re talking about healthy Halloween. So Annie, tell us what you’ve done about candy with Lily.
ANNIE B. BOND: I was thinking about this when you were talking about sugar because there are increasing number of products in the market, candy products on the market that are actually made without FD&C food dyes. The health food stores have them. They can have M&Ms that don’t have that problem.
You still get the sugar. Sometimes with kids, you want to be able to give them what everybody else has and make it look like what everybody else has. And you get into one of these classic slippery slopes where is it better to give them something fun that they feel great about that also isn’t as toxic as something else? So this certainly still includes the sugar.
We should also probably throw in corn syrup as something that is increasingly…
DEBRA: Absolutely, absolutely.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s on my list of things I would want to avoid because of the GMOs if nothing else.
DEBRA: Right.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s just a really serious, serious, serious problem that I think is – I read a book called The Autism Revolution by Herbert, MD that just blew my socks off about how she’s actually healing autistic kids and making their lives completely normal and she’s doing it in a myriad of ways. But one of the main focuses is on gut bacteria.
We know that sugar throws gut bacteria off, corn syrup and the GMOs in Roundup, no researches are showing that it’s actually affecting gut bacteria in a really negative way. So it’s horrifying that these little kids ¬– healing their gut bacteria is helping to bring them back to health. And why is their gut bacteria so badly off? And one of the reasons may just well be corn syrup and chemo corn products. It’s terrifying when I started researching this. It’s just absolutely terrifying.
And the same GMO, gut bacteria problem can be linked also to some problems with the honeybees because they’re getting the corn syrup because a lot of the honeybee farms use corn syrup-based seed for them and so it’s just a horrible, worrisome problem that’s just beginning to reveal itself in more detail. So I pay a lot of attention to corn syrup now.
DEBRA: Yes. That’s something I eliminated a long time ago. Actually if I had to eat something and I had to choose between corn syrup and sugar, I would eat sugar in a minute before I eat corn syrup.
ANNIE B. BOND: Me too. Yeah, I completely agree.
DEBRA: And I think that there are actually for me gradient different sweeteners being more preferable and less profitable.
Corn syrup is way at the bottom. And sugar is actually somewhere near the middle. And then there are artificial sweeteners.
But then there are other much better sweeteners near the top like honey and coconut sugar and unrefined cane sugar and things like that. And I know, I’ve seen in natural food stores that there are many candy products that are using these better sweeteners as well as not having the artificial toxins.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s right, exactly, totally.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: So you become a label reader and it becomes incredibly valuable at this time of year to go browse around the biggest health food store you can find because the prices tend to be cheaper. And just look at the widest variety of materials of candy, you can, and see what there is. I completely agree to that.
DEBRA: A couple of things that I think I have just off the top of my head and not having gone to the natural food store and looked for it, but just by being aware of what’s in the store. At my particular natural food store, they have, right at the register, these little bite-sized chocolate candies, just a little bite of chocolate that’s organic chocolate and it has unrefined cane sugar in it. So you could certainly get a bunch of those and pass those out. Everybody loves chocolate.
ANNIE B. BOND: Absolutely. Totally. And so for Easter, instead of jellybeans, I would get little chocolates and place them around. I would do just exactly that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: I would do everything I could creatively to come up with alternatives to food dyes and the more wholesome the sugar, the better.
DEBRA: They also have lollipops and hard candies made from brown rice syrup, which is also another good slow acting sweetener.
There’s a website online called NaturalCandyStore.com. And they have a whole page called Organic Halloween Candy. If you want to get to this page, you just type organic Halloween candy into your favorite search engine and it will come right up. And it’s got all kinds of things. They’ve got Gummi Bears…
ANNIE B. BOND: Beautiful colors too.
DEBRA: …organic maple candy pumpkins and root beer flavored organic candy drops and lollipops and all kinds of things.
And they’re all made out of organic and natural ingredients. So if you want to have that kind of thing and you don’t have it in your natural food store, just go online here. It’s all available. It’s just a matter of knowing that these products exist and choosing to get them instead of the standard toxic stuff.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, exactly. And because then there’s the whole stretch where we do make so many desserts at home too, one thing that I got really good and we just enjoyed doing would be making foods with vegetable dyes and making the frosting type things, coloring things with vegetables. And so blueberries make a gorgeous bluish purple and there are just all sorts of foods that you can cook…
DEBRA: Beets.
ANNIE B. BOND: …to get a great food diet, to make your own, which is another fun thing to do.
DEBRA: It is a fun thing to do. I was looking on my own website, on my Green Living Q&A. I looked up on Halloween to see what I had written in the past. In one of them, there was a tip from a woman who said that when her children were on trick-or-treating age, they would invite their friends over. The woman writing said, “We’d invite their children’s friends over for pizza and apple cider and homemade pumpkin pie after they’re trick-or-treating.” Oh, no. Then the kids would go out for trick-or-treating.
So they’ve already had a good meal. And after they got home from the trick-or-treating, their kids and their friends, this parent would check the candy and they would divide it up. And then she would buy the candy back for whatever the price was that it would be sold for at the local grocery store. And then they would put it back in their trick-or-treat box and give it away to the other trick-or-treaters that were coming to their house. And the kids would have money then to go spend, to buy toys or whatever that they wanted and they didn’t eat the candy at all. I thought that was a great way to make it…
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s a creative way of handling it and giving something to the kids so they can find that fun and the more money they can make or something. That was a good idea to fill them up first. So yes, it’s interesting.
DEBRA: So we need to take another break. And when we come back, let’s talk about costumes because that’s a big part of Halloween, getting dressed up and having fun. So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of many bestselling books about toxic-free living.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie B. Bond who does a lot of things. She’s written five books on toxic-free living. She’s the Editor-In-Chief of the Wellness Wire. And she leads the selection of toxic-free products for a wonderful website called A True Find. It has some gorgeous products from all over the world. Her website is AnnieBBond.com and you can find out all about everything she does by going to AnnieBBond.com.
So Annie, I want to start by just talking about some articles I found about the toxic chemicals in costumes. I always felt very uncomfortable in Halloween costumes and you were talking about the masks. Before there were rubber masks and there were plastic masks. I always felt as a kid that I didn’t want to wear the mask. It looked nice, but I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t like the way it smelled. And so I very soon just didn’t wear the mask at all.
All of those, I was just looking at the costumes all made out of synthetic materials when I was recently in a store, a big discount store. And I just was walking up and down the aisle and just everything is made from nylon and polyester and plastic and they have purple pumpkin bags that you can carry your candy in and all these things.
There was an article that was just out last week about how that there was a shipment of children’s costumes from China to distributor in Seattle that was confiscated by Consumer Products Safety Investigators because they tested it and they found that there was lead in the costumes that are 11 times the legal limit.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh my goodness.
DEBRA: They seized 229 cartons of 1371 costumes and that they will all be destroyed. But those are only the ones that were tested.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, it’s so discouraging.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes. And I’ve said many times on the show, but we’ll say it again, we even said this yesterday about how lead, there’s no safe level for lead and even though the government has set a standard, there’s really no safe level. And it can poison children’s brains and all kinds of developmental problems come later in life from being exposed to lead as a child.
And there really isn’t any reason why we have to be, have our children be exposed to these kinds of things.
And then there was another article I found where they found all kinds of toxic metals. There’s a whole list here. There’s a group called EcoWaste Coalition where they test Halloween costumes, body and face paint, masks, decorations and candy.
And they said that more than 20% of the products that they tested still contained lead. And in 2011, two years ago…
ANNIE B. BOND: What percent was that again, Debra?
DEBRA: Twenty percent.
ANNIE B. BOND: Is it 20 or 40?
DEBRA: Twenty.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: Twenty percent still contained lead. And two years ago, when they tested, they found excessive levels of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury in 70% of the Halloween costumes that they tested.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh dear.
DEBRA: And last year, the number came down to 28%. This year, it’s 20%, but that’s still only just a little tiny amount that they tested. And if you multiply that out by all the Halloween costumes that you’re seeing in stores across the country, 20% of that is a lot and there’s no way for you as a parent to know if you’re buying a Halloween costume that is full of heavy metals that are very, very toxic to children.
So my recommendation is that we should be making our own costumes. And just not even buy any of that stuff because number one, there’s no way for you to tell if they are safe or not safe. And number two, they’re made up of synthetic fabrics.
And number three, none of this is on the label, but the other thing is that they actually, many if not all of them, have fire retardants applied because if there’s any time of year that is dangerous for children having lose clothing on, it’s Halloween with all those candles and all those pumpkins and people walking around with candles and stuff. The official government recommendations for Halloween costumes say, “Buy fire retardant costumes.”
ANNIE B. BOND: I was thinking about what my recommendation would be. And I think that report you gave actually changed my mind because one of the problems with kids of course is that they want to be like their friends and they want to fit and you want to help them to fit it if you can just because it matters so much to them. So it’s always a toss-up sometimes about what’s more important for them. But it’s more important for them not to get exposed to heavy metals than it is for them to fit in and I think that there’s no question about that.
It’s hard. I sewed a lot of costumes and my daughter was also in a lot of musical theater. She always just loved to have me sew the costumes. It became a fun family project.
And what I was going to say that’s great news – I mean I’m with you now about the costumes. I was going to say that you use your common sense. You’re out there and you’re shopping and you do the best you can in the sense of trying to get the most natural, you smell things, you try to navigate as best as you can given what costumes show up when you’re out looking.
But I think I changed my mind and I agreed about the making. The fun thing is that the fabric stores have absolutely wonderful patterns available and all sorts of fun accessories. So it can become a really fun family project. Most families these days have both parents working. It’s really hard to find the time. But it is one of those meaningful times that you can have with your kids I think. I’m with you, Debra. I agree.
DEBRA: Thank you. I know that it’s been a long time since I bought a Halloween costume. It’s been since I was a child. But as soon as I was able to make my own costume as a teen and figure it out, then that’s what I started doing.
You can go thrift stores and pick out things that might be suitable for costume or you can make things. Teenagers can learn how to sew. I remember when I was in school, I took a sewing class. It’s not that difficult. It really isn’t that difficult.
But I know for myself, I now try to keep my costumes. I like to dress up for Halloween. But I keep my costumes really simple.
One of the things that I did was that if you go to a party store, then they have these little hats you can wear, just little tiny hats on headbands. Sure, they’re synthetic, but it’s a very small amount of synthetic. I have a little witch’s hat and I’ll tell you more about this.
ANNIE B. BOND: This is what I mean by the common sense so you make an educated decision at the time.
DEBRA: It’s very different than having a whole dress full of fire retardant. We’ll be back after the break and talk more about how to make creative costumes that are toxic-free. My guest today is Annie B. Bond. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of many books on toxic-free living and her website is AnnieBBond.com and you can find out everything that she does.
So Annie, what I wanted to say about what I usually do now at Halloween is I either do something simple like a little witch’s hat. Or I paint my face and I just dress in black, all my black cotton clothes and then I paint my face. So let’s talk about…
ANNIE B. BOND: I was just going to talk about face paint too.
DEBRA: Yeah. I think it’s a wonderful creative thing to do. But I want to make sure that people understand that if you go and buy face paints at the store, they probably have lead in them because several years ago, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics had face paints tested and found that 10 out of 10 children’s face paint tested contained low levels of lead and again, there’s no safe level of lead, and other heavy metals they found were nickel, chromium and cobalt.
But here’s the good news. There are natural face paints that you can buy if you go to NaturalEarthPaint.com. They’ve got great, great, great face paints and they are just so natural. The woman who developed them, I had her on the show and she totally understands all of this about colors and paint and everything. And she has created these fabulous face paints.
Actually, I just put a blog post on my website, safe pace paint. That’s hard to say. I’ll say that three times fast. Safe face paint, if you just type that in my site’s search engine, “safe face paint,” it’s got a link to the natural face paints you can buy.
And it’s also got a link to – I see I have a typo here, I need to fix it – to a place where you can make your own homemade face paint. And that’s on a website called Mommypotamus.com. And I have the exact link by the end of the show. I’ll put the exact link here to where you can make your own face paint at home from natural colors and things that you were talking about, natural vegetable colors.
And so these are two creative ideas that people can use to have some fun and have it be natural and safe.
ANNIE B. BOND: And it’s really easy to make a natural face paint. A recipe I have has a shortening, a [coat] shortening and I would use coconut oil instead. And it has cornstarch, white flour and glycerin and you mix that up and then you could add colors.
I think that you could do different kinds of starches. So you mix the corn altogether and you’d be able to use arrowwood or something.
DEBRA: This recipe I have in front of me from Mommypotamus says has cornstarch or arrowroot powder. Then she uses honey instead of glycerin, natural food coloring.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: Yeah, I haven’t tried it, but it looks like it would work and I think that that would be a fun thing to do. I always like making things myself if I can.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, me too. Honey is very healing for the skin.
DEBRA: It is.
ANNIE B. BOND: So that’s a very, very nice recipe that you just said. I like that.
DEBRA: Yeah, I like it too and the recipe for the natural earth paints is very good. It’s got natural pigments in it and things like that she’s put together. But I really like these kinds of do-it-yourself formulas where you can make it out of basically foods that you could eat. I mean you could eat this face paint. It might not taste very good, but you could eat it.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And the other thing is you could make paper mache masks If you wanted to get into some fun projects, you could definitely do that.
DEBRA: That sounds fun.
ANNIE B. BOND: I think it’s the kind of thing that you want to – I was invited, of all things. I had such a fun time. Last year, I went to that Middle Earth Halloween party and I spent six weeks working on my costume for that. And even for hurricane Sandy with no electricity, I was sitting by the fire, sewing and sewing the thing.
DEBRA: And what did you make?
ANNIE B. BOND: I made myself looking like – I found a picture of Madonna who had dressed up as the queen of arc – I mean the Joan of Arc. I did something very similar. So I made it like a chain, a real chain and I made the chainmail hat with the chain hanging down. It was very fun.
DEBRA: Wow.
ANNIE B. BOND: I actually heard somebody say it was going to be in Martha Stewart. Actually the picture of me is going to be in Martha Stewart. I should go out and buy a copy. I just realized that it’s a magazine. But it was so much fun. It was just an absolute bliss doing it.
But it became a project. It just became something you plan a couple of months in advance and you work on it and think about it.
DEBRA: That’s right. It becomes a creative thing. I think that this is one of the things that we’ve lost in our consumer culture.
We think of ourselves as consumers, so if we want something, we need to go out and buy it and so then we’re only limited to what the manufacturers are giving to us. But we are creative beings by nature and we can create anything that we want to create and I think it’s much more fun if you’re doing something like a costume to go out and create something, figure out.
I’m a member of Toastmasters and we are having a Halloween party. Just after Halloween, we’re having an open house and we’re going to, each of us, be giving a very short speech as a character from a book or a movie. And so, we’re all going to come dressed as that character.
ANNIE B. BOND: What a fun. What a fun idea. Yeah.
DEBRA: Doesn’t that sound great?
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s very fun. It’s very fun.
DEBRA: And so I happened to be receiving an award that night, which is one of the reasons why this is going on. In Toastmasters, the highest award is the Distinguished Toastmasters Award and you have to give 50 speeches and do a whole leadership program and everything to get this award. And so I had already started working on my, I’m going to say, “costume,” my evening gown for that occasion.
It’s like a fairy dress with the little stars, purple little stars. And I thought now, I have to come up with a character from a book or movie to be – that’s my dress that I already started working on. And so I decided to be Glenda, the Good Witch of the North.
ANNIE B. BOND: Very nice.
DEBRA: And so I’ll have to give my speech as Glenda.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, that sounds very fun. What a great idea.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: But it is exactly right. It becomes an event. When I have my costume that I was – I mean I had my daughter and all her friends involved. It was a big e-mail thing back and forth, taking iPhone pictures, “What about this? It’s a bracelet.” It just became a very fun community event really.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes. We still have just a few more minutes. But the conclusion here is that Halloween can be turned into a creative, homemade event rather than a toxic […]. And it can be something really fun and something that is an annual thing that you do together as a family and with your friends.
I wanted to mention about trick-or-treating that children don’t have to go out and trick-or-treat. It may not even be safe in some neighborhoods. And there’s something wrong with inviting your children’s friends over for a party and they can get all dressed up and you can feed them organic food and you can have sweet things to eat that are prepared better. And they can go around and trade treats or something.
I mean there are all kinds of things that you could think of to make an event that children would rather come and do that event every year than go out, trick-or-treating because it’s so much fun.
ANNIE B. BOND: Exactly. Yeah. It’s just a matter of being creative and thoughtful really.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah. So Annie, do you have any last thoughts before we get to the end of the show?
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s really a matter of paying attention I think. I think that’s everything that you’ve said. And it has been about needing to pay attention. We can’t just be in denial about the fact that so many of the things that we buy for Halloween are actually really dangerous. We can’t pretend that’s not the case and we do have to make change. We have to adapt and accommodate that knowledge creatively. It’s just something we have to do. It’s not a question anymore I guess.
DEBRA: Yeah, there really isn’t a question.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s just like I can never have dry-cleaning in my house because I’m so chemically sensitive and I haven’t for 30 years. And I haven’t missed it. It’s fine.
DEBRA: I haven’t missed it either. I haven’t missed it either. I had a woman e-mailed me with a consulting question about her daughter’s room has a fairly large vinyl decal on the wall. And she wanted to know if it was toxic and should she remove it.
Vinyl, as we know, causes cancer and it’s giving off fumes into her daughter’s room. And she was saying, “I don’t have the money now to replace it. Should I remove it? Do I need to remove it?” And I looked at that and I thought she knows it’s toxic and she’s asking me, “Should I remove it? I don’t have money to replace it.” What’s more important, that her daughter live in a toxic-free room or there will be something on the wall? And I think it’s much more important to be choosing, to continue to choose.
At the beginning, when I was so sick, I didn’t have money to buy everything, but I took everything that was toxic out of my house. And I was just left with emptiness because I had no money to replace anything. But over the years, what was important was to remove those toxic chemicals. We need to go.
ANNIE B. BOND: And then you make…
DEBRA: The show is over.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah.
DEBRA: […]
ANNIE B. BOND: Actually I did it too.
DEBRA: Annie will be back with us again another time. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Have a happy Halloween.
The Basic Principles of Toxicology
Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Basic Principles of Toxicology
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: October 21, 2013
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 we do that because there are so many toxic chemicals in our lives today at this point in time, and the water we drink, the food we eat, our consumer products, our homes, even in our bodies from past exposures.
And on this show, we talk about how to recognize toxic chemicals, where they are in products, how to choose a non-toxic product, and how to get toxic chemicals out of our bodies, and be healthy, other ways of doing things that are not toxic, and just being able to recognize the difference.
So today, we’re going to be talking about with—my guest is a toxicologist. There’s a whole field of toxicology that just figures out what is toxic and what isn’t. And there are processes on how they do the standard ways of doing things.
And my guest is going to tell us about some of those. His name is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He is a Ph.D., D.A.B.T. He’s the Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology in Washington State, and author of an e-book called “A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.”
He has a very extensive website called Toxipedia.org that is a suite of sites that puts scientific information about toxics in the context of history, society and culture.
He’s got a lot of information and explains things very clearly. And I’m going to have him on many, many times.
So today—he’s already been on once. You can go back into the archives at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the other show, listen to today’s show, listen to the future shows, because here, you’re really going to learn what’s this whole question about toxic things really is about.
Before I introduce Dr. Gilbert, I just want to say that we’re going to be talking about his book today, A Small Dose of Toxicology.
And you can get that book free, it would be nice if you made a donation, but you can get that book free by going to Toxipedia.org.
Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I actually have the title of his book in the description of show, is the link to the place where you can get it for free. It’s totally worth reading. Even if you just read it in little bits and pieces, you’ll get so much information to understand the toxic chemicals in the world around you.
Hello, Dr. Gilbert. Thanks for being here.
STEVEN GILBERT: Hi, Debra. It’s good to see you again.
DEBRA: Thank you. And how are you today?
STEVEN GILBERT: Very good.
DEBRA: Good. So where shall we start? First, I’d like you to tell our listening audience what inspired you to be interested in the field of toxicology.
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, I started quite a while ago, but I was very interested in protecting children’s health because I felt we expose them to many chemicals, and we need to have better control of the chemicals we expose them to.
So I was very interested in chemicals, such as lead and mercury, and the consequences to the developing nervous system.
DEBRA: Good! So let’s just start right out. I’m going to let you lead this interview. Usually, the interviewers wants to lead the interviewee, but you know your subjects so well, I’m going to let you guide us as to what you’d like to talk about. So, go ahead.
Give us a lecture. Just pretend like you’re in the classroom giving a lecture
STEVEN GILBERT: Okay, it sounds like fun. Let’s first talk a little about caffeine. And I want to emphasize my book, A Small Dose of Toxicology. Each chapter of the book has a PowerPoint presentation that goes with the chapter. So if you’re not up for reading the book, you can just look at the PowerPoint presentations. And much of what I’ll talk about today is based on the first couple of chapters of the book and the powerpoints that are associated with those chapters.
But I thought we’d talk about caffeine. Are you a caffeine consumer, Debra?
DEBRA: Off and on. It depends on how I’m feeling. I am a chocolate consumer, and I also understand that there are different types of caffeine. Somebody I had on the show was talking about tea, and he was saying the type of caffeine in tea is different from the type in coffee, and different from chocolate. And I haven’t researched that, and I don’t know if you have anything to say about that.
But I do know that caffeine does affect your body. And it’s on my list of “better to not take it.”
STEVEN GILBERT: Caffeine is a really interesting compound. It’s the same in tea and coffee. It’s the same type of caffeine. Caffeine is, the chemical name is 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. Chocolate, however, has more theophylline in it. It has a little bit different—it has a dimethylxanthine instead of a trimethylxantine in it.
DEBRA: So does that make it better for you?
STEVEN GILBERT: It makes it a little bit different. You don’t get quite the central nervous system effect that you do with caffeine with chocolate. So it’s a little bit different.
But for example, you have to be really careful with dogs, for example. If they get a hold of chocolate, it could be very toxic to dogs. They don’t metabolize theophylline very well.
DEBRA: So, is there a difference? We might as well just define caffeine here in terms of its differences in coming from different sources. I know green tea has some caffeine in it, but it’s not as much as coffee.
STEVEN GILBERT: Actually, most tea, a lot of tea, or black teas, by weight, will have more caffeine than coffee. But we do a much better job of extracting the caffeine from coffee than we do from tea.
If you want more caffeine with your tea, you just have to brew it longer because the hot water will extract the caffeine. But with coffee, because we grind it up so small, and the coffee granules have a bigger surface area, we’ll extract more caffeine from coffee.
So your average cup of coffee has about 100 mg. of caffeine in it. But there’s enormous variability in that.
So, I think one thing to remember and think about caffeine is—and this is a really great lesson in toxicology—is how does caffeine distribute throughout the body?
DEBRA: Tell us about that. That’s really important point.
STEVEN GILBERT: When you consume caffeine, it absorbs relatively quickly, so your peak caffeine levels will be about 30-minutes after you consume your caffeine-containing beverage, and caffeine distributes throughout total body water.
So your urine, if you go to the bathroom, your urine will have about the same concentration of caffeine as your blood does. And actually, for breast milk, it will be about the same. So that’s a good lesson to be thinking about. If you’re breast feeding a child, you want to consume your caffeine after breast feeding, not before, because you want to minimize the amount of caffeine that goes to the child.
DEBRA: Absolutely! This whole idea of how the chemical distributes through the body, that’s one of the points that toxicologists look at. That’s one of the things that’s important to know about a chemical that you’re being exposed to.
STEVEN GILBERT: Absolutely! That’s a really important property of the chemical. We have mentioned caffeine distributes throughout the total body water. But something like lead, which substitutes for calcium, it distributes to the bone and absorbed by the bone. It substitutes for the calcium that’s in the bone.
Compounds like PCBs, DDT, flare retardant, and a range of other compounds, distribute to fats. So they’re fat-soluble compounds.
So you have to be really aware of where a compound distributes.
Another important property is how fast it’s metabolized—how fast it’s changed by the body, and excreted by the body. Caffeine, if you think about caffeine, if you consume your cup of coffee, how much time does it take for you to be ready for a second cup? When you feel like you’d like a little more caffeine to boost your caffeine levels back up again, do you have any idea?
Debra, when you think about you drinking coffee or anybody else?
DEBRA: Well, I only rarely drink coffee. And I actually try not to drink coffee. And I have never been a cup of coffee in the morning kind of coffee drinker. But I drink it when I’m traveling usually because I’m in some different time zone. And I drink it if I haven’t slept well, which is—usually, I can sleep well nowadays. But at times, when I haven’t slept well, and I need to work long hours, then I’ll have a cup of coffee because it will perk me up.
Now, in my particular body, if I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, then it lasts me all days. That’s all I want to drink, just one cup of coffee. And I don’t even drink a whole cup of coffee. I only drink about half a cup of coffee.
STEVEN GILBERT: You’re probably more sensitive to caffeine than others because some people can drink caffeine throughout the day, or coffee throughout the day.
DEBRA: I know people who do that.
STEVEN GILBERT: I know! And it amazes me because I’m pretty sensitive to it also.
DEBRA: And when they’re not drinking coffee, they’re drinking Coke, or some other caffeinated beverage.
STEVEN GILBERT: So your Coke, your can of Coke, your average cola beverage, will have about 50 mg., about half of what coffee does (unless you’re consuming Jolt or one of the high caffeine beverages). But those high caffeine-containing beverages are pretty popular right now.
DEBRA: And I think that coffee is actually better for you to drink than a soda because you can have more control—especially organic coffee—over the sugar and anything else that might be put into it.
We need to actually take a break right now, but we’ll come right back, and hear more about this fascinating subject. I actually love toxicology.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m talking with Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about basic principles of toxicology with Dr. Steven Gilbert, Ph.D., and he is the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And he has a fabulous website about toxicology called Toxipedia.org which is very easy to understand.
There are lots, and lots, and lots of information there, but it’s all written in a way that, I think, any average person could understand it. It’s not a technical website at all. It’s very good.
And so today, we’re talking about principles of toxicology. So go on, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: Right before the break, we were talking about how fast a compound is metabolized or removed from the body. And with caffeine, the general principle of that is called the half-life.
So you think of the compound, the compound gets up to say 10 in your blood, how long does it take to drop the 5?
DEBRA: Why do they do that? Why don’t they just say from whatever it is to zero? Why do they do half-life?
STEVEN GILBERT: Because you want to look at how quickly the chemical is being removed from your body. So if it’s a fast metabolizer, and the half-life is short, it moves out of the body relatively quickly. The compound that’s got a long half-life stays in the body for a longer period of time.
So, it’s a really good marker for how long the compound sticks around. And it has to be also where it’s distributed in the body.
DEBRA: Okay, good.
STEVEN GILBERT: Caffeine, for example, the half-life is pretty short. For most people, it’s three to four hours, but there’s variability in that.
So, if you consume a cup of coffee or a can of cola, your caffeine blood levels will rise let’s say to 10, three to four hours later, it will be down to 5. And you want to boost your caffeine levels back up if you like the stimulant effects of caffeine.
But there are some really important changes in that. For example, a woman that’s pregnant, the second and third trimester, the caffeine half-life about doubles. So it goes up to about seven or eight hours, which means, your blood caffeine levels will be higher for a longer period of time during pregnancy.
DEBRA: And if you keep drinking the same amount of coffee a before pregnancy, then you’re really getting a jolt.
STEVEN GILBERT: You are, and your fetus is getting a jolt too because that caffeine—and it’s quickly distributes across the placenta. So the child is basically swimming in caffeine that’s metabolized during pregnancy.
Another thing to remember with half-life is the infant, from zero to six months, does not metabolize caffeine. So the half-life is measured in days. So all it can do is excrete it in the urine. That’s a really important property to remember. It’s much different for a child because their liver function is not really developed yet.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that. That is amazing. It’s making me think about other chemicals that children are being exposed to as well during that same period of time—like caffeine, it would take them longer to metabolize than an adult.
I just think that the most critical time to not be exposed to toxic chemicals is that pregnant mothers, pregnant women, should not be exposed, and newborn babies should not be exposed, and anything that people in those two groups can do to reduce their chemical exposure is well, well, well worth it.
I think that that’s the most critical population to be concerned about.
STEVEN GILBERT: I agree. I think women of child-bearing age and infants and kids, it’s a really important period of time. But unfortunately, we are exposed to a lot of chemicals now. Several studies have been done that showed that there can be over 200 chemicals, industrial-based chemicals, in fetus during development.
So, it’s really become a greater and greater problem. And we often don’t know what chemicals are in our products that we’re consuming.
DEBRA: That’s right. Well, just off the topic, but relevant to this, is that, just last week, Target Store announced that they are now having a new sustainable product program where they’re going to be looking at the toxic chemicals in every single—well, not in every single one of their products, but they’re rolling out category by category.
So, the manufacturers will now have to tell them all the ingredients. And all the products will be rated for their toxic levels at a store like Target. So I think that we’re making progress with that. And I think Walmart has a program like that as well.
Walking into these stores, I don’t see that they’re really in effect yet. But at least they’re looking at this, that that’s how much toxics issues are coming to the fore now, that major retailers like that are having programs where they’re actually paying attention to that.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think that’s right. I think there are more efforts to do that. And Walmart, I believe they had a problem with some lead in some of their child products recently. There’s a study done by Washington Toxics Coalition here in Seattle that found lead in some of their products.
So, I think they need to do better about that. They need to really be working with the public to protect us from exposure to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: I agree. And it’s the work of toxicologists like you that makes it possible then for the retailers and the consumers to then understand what the toxic chemicals are, and then be able to control them, and manage the risk either as a retailer or an individual in their daily life.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, and really put more pressure, and encourage retailers to be more responsible, and be more aware of the chemicals that might be in their products.
For example, in the food industry, in the Washington State, we have Referendum 522 about labeling genetically-modified organisms in products. So, the GMO Referendum 522 would require grocery stores and others to label if there’s GMO in the product.
And one thing Whole Foods just came out saying they’re moving towards labeling all their GMO products now, which is really great.
DEBRA: I think that’s really good. But I also just have to say that a place like Whole Foods, you would expect that there would be no GMO products. But if there are, they need to be labeled, for sure.
Well, let’s go back to—
STEVEN GILBERT: I want to mention one more thing about caffeine. Some of the listeners—when you stop consuming caffeine, you get a headache from caffeine consumption.
DEBRA: Yes, that happens to me.
STEVEN GILBERT: Have you had that ever happen to you?
DEBRA: Yes.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really interesting property of caffeine. And you could almost say that’s a sign of drug addiction because you can end up consuming a product to avoid the adverse effects of withdrawal from that product. So you’ll have withdrawal syndromes from caffeine which is a headache.
And that’s one reason some of the analgesic tablets will have caffeine along with analgesic in them because a lot of headaches are caffeine-induced headaches.
If you think about the caffeine, and why people make money from caffeine—the cola and the coffee companies—it has a relatively short half-life, three to four hours, you have to keep consuming it because you can’t store it up, and you get a headache when you stop drinking it. So, it’s almost a perfect compound to make money from. A lot of people exploit those properties in caffeine to make a lot of money from the drinks and coffee beverages. It’s really a fascinating compound.
DEBRA: It is. We need to take another break, but we will be right back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And he also has a website, Toxipedia.org.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And a lot of what we’re talking about on the show today is in this book, plus much, much, much more. And you can get this book free, this e-book for free, by going to Toxipedia.org.
And I hope you’ll go there and get it. If you want a link directly to the book, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and in the description of today’s show, the link to the book goes right to the page where you can get this book for free.
I think every household needs to have it, study it as quickly or slowly as you need to, but this is the basics of what you need to understand to be living in the world today where we’re so exposed to toxic chemicals.
Dr. Gilbert, you’ve done a great job with this book.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you very much, Debra. I really appreciate that.
DEBRA: It’s the best basic toxicology book I’ve ever seen.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you.
DEBRA: So, I’m looking at the page—not the page, but the beginning of the chapter—about caffeine in this book. And it tells you things like the source of this chemical, the recommended daily intake.
And by the way, it says that the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, advises pregnant women to avoid caffeine-containing foods and drugs or consume them only sparingly. That’s the recommendation from the FDA. So, if the FDA is saying that, I think that’s something to watch out for.
And you just have all kinds of information.
So, I know we advertise in the description that we’re going to be talking about caffeine and—I’m looking for it in the description here—mercury and lead. So let’s move on to talking about lead.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, lead is a very interesting compound. So it’s a heavy metal. It’s wildly used. It was added to paint. And we knew a long time ago that lead makes the mind give away. We knew that two millenniums ago. So we knew lead was toxic.
In Europe, lead was banned from paint in the 1920’s by the League of Nations, recognizing the toxicity of lead. But United States did not ban lead-based paint until 1978 which is really tragic because that perpetuated exposure to children.
We also made the huge mistake of adding lead to gasoline, which increased average blood levels across the nation, and really, around the world. And there are still some areas trying to get lead out of the gasoline.
So what’s interesting about lead is that it substitutes for calcium. So when you’re consuming lead, it goes through your body, it gets into your blood, and then it’s sequestered in the bone. And this can have serious consequence because, if you were exposed to lead while you’re developing, then you store lead in your bone, when does lead come out of the bone? When does calcium come out of the bone?
One important time during those periods is when a woman is pregnant because the fetus is really a sink for calcium, and that lead is mobilized out of the bone to support the child.
So, if you’re exposed to lead during development, you can pass it along to your infants and children.
And the other thing to remember with lead is the absorption of lead. Because the growing child needs lead, when the child ingests lead, about 50% of that lead is absorbed. If they don’t, they only absorb about 10%.
So, that’s a really important distinction to make because a child is more susceptible to lead exposure for a couple of reasons—one, is that absorption factor of 50% of the lead they ingest is absorbed, and also, the [hand-them-out] behavior. A child will have the highest blood lead when they’re one to three years of age, when they’re on the ground, they’re sticking things in their mouth. And anything that has lead on it, lead in paint, will come off. And the lead will be absorbed by the child.
So, that’s a really important fact to remember. It’s the same exposure representing a much bigger dose to the child.
DEBRA: One thing I want to mention about a lead exposure—I’m actually going to be talking about this tomorrow. We’re doing a show about scary toxic chemicals for Halloween. But there are a lot of toxic chemicals that you’re exposed to in Halloween.
And one of them is lead in face paint. And there was a study done where they actually took 10 brands of face paint, and they sent them all to the lab. This was a campaign for safe cosmetic. They sent them all to the lab, and all 10 of them had lead.
And I’ll let you say that there is no safe level for lead.
STEVEN GILBERT: There is no safe level of lead exposure. And lead exposure should always be avoided. We are exposed to a little background lead because we’ve done a great job spreading it around the environment. But there is no reason for products like face paint have lead in them.
Titanium is a great product. And most paint is switched to titanium. So, cosmetics should not have lead in them. And they should remember this, that a child exposed to that, lipstick will have lead in them. There’s been a study showing how much lipstick can have in it. And that’s really detrimental because you put lipstick on your lips, obviously, and you lick a little bit of that, so you’re ingesting it when you rub it off your lips.
So, there is just no reason to have lead in cosmetics. And I think our industries and our product developers need to be accountable for that and need to get the lead out of their products.
DEBRA: I completely agree. So what are some other sources where people might be exposed to lead that they could avoid?
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, one, you have to be careful of, some candies will have lead in them (in the wrappings on the candies, the lead paint). And jewelry is a really important source. They’re really clammed down on that. There have been increased laws about that, trying to remove lead from products. And then, Washington State did pass a law trying to ban lead, cadmium and phthalates from baby toys.
But there are a lot of products and a lot of toys that have lead paint on them. There was quite a campaign to get lead out of products coming from China, for example.
So, lead is a great additive. It makes things shiny. It dries quickly. So there’s a lot of incentive to use lead. But it’s really detrimental to the child’s development when they’re exposed to lead. And those detriments occurred at very little levels.
The Center for Disease Control just the last year has lowered the blood lead action level. It wasn’t as far as I’d like to see it go, but they did set a new level of lead action, really emphasizing, again, that there is no safe level of lead exposure.
DEBRA: Another source is lead in the glaze on dinnerware, and also lead crystal. And those are very—
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, good point. The lead can be on glazened dinnerware. So you have to be careful of that.
And a new technology now called XRF Technology allows you to scan products fairly quickly to see if there’s lead in them. And where you live, there are agencies and other non-profits that have this XRF Technology, and do programs where you can bring in toys and other products in to get checked for lead.
Another source of lead is actually, just recently, is bath buts. Old bath tubs can have lead glazed on them.
DEBRA: I read about that in my books, yes. And so you just need to—so what is your opinion about using the little test kits, the little swabs?
STEVEN GILBERT: Those little swabs are good. They give you a basic indication if there’s lead there. But they’re not great in the sense they don’t tell you how much lead is there. They don’t go beneath the surface—so it’s just surface lead such as paint chips. Lower paints may have lead in them, they will not check for that if there’s some painted over. They’ll give you a gross indication, but they’re not super reliable.
DEBRA: My viewpoint is that I think that they could be used as an inexpensive way to—if it tests positive, you know there’s some lead there. And you just make a decision not to use it right there. If it tests negative, then you want to go and get the other tests.
STEVEN GILBERT: If you suspect it might have lead in it, then you have to move on to a more specific test like using the XRF Technology.
DEBRA: We need to take another break.
STEVEN GILBERT: …which has really been a great development because it’s a very cheap way. It’s quick. It gives you feedback immediately about the product. And you can actually look in dirt also, lead in dirt, or in the paint […] and things like that.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. So we’ll be right back. And we’re going to be talking about mercury when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m talking with toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s a toxicologist. And his website is Toxipedia.org. And you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and look for this show.
There’s a link there to his book, A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. When you click on that link, you can get a free copy of the e-book.
So, Dr. Gilbert, let’s go on and talk about mercury now. This is really fascinating to hear, these different characteristics of these different chemicals. So how is mercury different from lead and caffeine?
STEVEN GILBERT: Mercury is a very interesting compound also. Mercury comes in two flavors—inorganic and organic.
So, the inorganic, many people have experienced playing with the silver metal. Have you tried playing with that, Debra?
DEBRA: I think in science class a long time ago.
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s fun to play around with on table top. Broken thermometers will have quite a bit of mercury. Your old thermostats will have mercury in them in old houses. This one had a mercury-based thermostat that I finally got rid of. It could be recycled safely.
But mercury has been widely used. It’s got many, many uses in the electronic industry. And it’s actually a good fungicide. It’s been added to paint before, which is not a good idea. But it’s a very powerful compound.
Now, the thing about mercury is it could change to organic mercury, methyl mercury, when it gets into the environment.
So, bacteria change the mercury, the inorganic into organic mercury, methyl mercury, and it gradually moves up the food chain from algae, bacteria and other organisms, up into the fish we eat. It’s concentrated in high tropic level fish—fish that consume other fish. For example, tuna, shark, pike, will have high concentrations of mercury in them. Swordfish has generally high levels of mercury in that because it’s concentrated in the muscle.
So, mercury goes to the muscle and also the central nervous system. It’s stored there—not in fat, and not in bone, but in muscle. So it’s very hard to get rid of it from the fish.
So, we learned about mercury—the first instance where we really became aware of this was in Minamata in Japan in the 1950s. This caused a really tragic exposure and great consternation in the population there. It caused fetal deformities and really retarded development.
So, the question lately is how little mercury—is there any level of mercury that’s safe?
And generally, there’s no level of mercury that’s really safe, although it’s very difficult not to be exposed to some mercury because fish is a very important food source.
So, one of the sources of mercury that everybody should be aware of is coal. Coal has some mercury in it. Coal-fired plants will produce mercury. And that’s been one of the issues in Washington State in the Northwest because they want to ship a lot of coal to China.
Coals burn in China, the prevailing winds move the ethylene from those smoke stacks, which contains mercury, in the Pacific Ocean, and into the Northwest United States, which contaminates our water supplies with mercury. And the fish and wildlife become sources of mercury.
So, mercury causes neurodevelopment disorders. It’s a well-known neurotoxicant. Inorganic mercury is like the Mad Hatter.
Remember the Mad Hatter?
DEBRA: Yes.
STEVEN GILBERT: And that’s a great story. It was used in the felting and hatting industry, and their exposure to mercury there.
DEBRA: I’m trying to remember. Don’t they lick the brushes, and that’s how they were doing, getting the mercury, because they licked the brushes? Maybe I’m thinking of something else.
STEVEN GILBERT: It was mostly from vapor. So the mercury would evaporate and they would be exposed to them that way, inhaling the mercury. You’re thinking of paint, licking the paint radium. Dial watches were well-known for that because people were painting the dials on watches and would be exposed to radium which is a toxic and bone-seeking compound.
DEBRA: And also, did you know that Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, died from mercury poisoning?
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I’ve heard about that. There are some thoughts about that. There were also a couple of Chinese emperors that died from mercury exposure too. It seems they were taking mercury tablets.
Mercury has been used as a medicine for a long time. It’s for syphilis and for other diseases. It also shows up in cosmetics because it’s a great fungicide. You might know that some vaccines will have organic mercury in vaccines. There’s a lot of concern about that potentially contributing to autism. Most of the data is not supporting that, but that’s another issue because we’re exposed to mercury from a variety of products and sources.
DEBRA: Well, I can tell you that I—well, I do occasionally drink coffee. I do not eat fish or any kind of seafood.
STEVEN GILBERT: Seafood is really good. It’s got omega-3 fatty acids in it. I think it’s more looking at which fish you eat. Like salmon, for example, they spend a lot of time in the ocean, but they’re relatively short-lived. It’s the longer-lived fish that you really have to worry about mercury exposure in them like tuna, swordfish, pike. They are longer-lived fish that consume other fish that you really have to worry about.
But fish has got a lot of important nutrients in it.
DEBRA: I agree. But ever since I was a child, and I took my first bite of fish, which happened to be halibut, I’ve never wanted to eat seafood. I put it in my mouth and I go, “I don’t want this.” And I know that some people just love seafood and think it’s the most delicious thing in the world. And it just isn’t for me. I just pay attention to the fact that my body doesn’t want it, and I don’t eat it.
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, that’s important to do. I think that, again, it’s the developing nervous system that’s the most vulnerable to mercury exposure. So it’s women of child-bearing age, and the developing nervous system of kids that are most vulnerable to mercury exposure.
Actually, one more thought on that.
DEBRA: Go ahead.
STEVEN GILBERT: The EPA is actually looking at revising that because there are numerous looking at the amount of fish that are consumed because high fish consumers are more vulnerable to mercury exposure. So the EPA is looking at changing its recommendations on how much mercury is safe to consume. It would be very interesting to see in the next year.
DEBRA: Well, Dr. Gilbert, we only have a few minutes left, so is there anything that you want to make sure that you say in this show? We have about four minutes left.
STEVEN GILBERT: The thing I would like to—well, one quick thing about lead is we have to be careful of lead in drinking water. So you have to watch out for that. Old homes have lead-based pipes that bring water into the home. And even some schools, the older schools can have lead in the drinking water. So just watch out for that.
I think the other thing I just want to mention is we need to take a more precautionary approach to chemicals we’re exposed to.
The precautionary principle says that we need to look at the uncertainty and not focus on the uncertainty that we need to take a precautionary approach and reduce exposure to these chemicals.
The Food and Drug Administration, we put new drugs on the market, we take a very precautionary approach, requiring that chemicals or data be submitted from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries demonstrating safety and efficacy of products. We do not have a similar approach in industrial chemicals.
And that, I think, really needs to change. They’re trying to modify the Toxic Substance Control Act, which is an old law passed in 1976, to really adjust that and provide more data on chemicals and the potential hazards of industrial-based chemicals that we’re exposed to.
DEBRA: I think that’s really important. I’ve been thinking, one of the things that I’ve noticed because I’ve been doing this work a long time like you have is that I’ve seen things change over the years in terms of the general awareness of the society, but also the information that has become available. There are so much more information about the toxicity of products than there was 30 years ago.
And so I now see many more individuals and agencies and organizations saying, “Well, we need to do something about these toxic chemicals.”
And then what happens is that a list is put together of chemicals of concern, and then it all has to be supported by scientific data.
Now, I think that that’s all a good thing to do. I’m not against science by any means. But as a consumer advocate and somebody who’s trying to avoid chemicals in my daily life, it seems to me like there are some things that are obvious—that organic food without pesticides is better for you than food with pesticides sprayed on it.
I think that there’s ample enough evidence to know that we shouldn’t be consuming pesticides. And yet, that still continues.
And what do you think needs to happen in order for us to stop trying to prove how toxic various chemicals are, and just make that leap out of them entirely? That’s what I would like.
STEVEN GILBERT: I totally agree with you. And that’s why I really emphasize we need a more precautionary approach and more emphasis on the precautionary principle because we have all this information.
That’s one thing I’m trying to do with my website. We have tremendous amounts of knowledge. The issue is applying it and making the information accessible. We need to know what is in our products and what we’re being exposed to.
Caffeine is a great example of that. It might be listed as an ingredient, but you don’t know how much is in the beverages you’re consuming. And it can be fatal. There have been a couple of incidences where people consuming high caffeine-containing beverages have died.
So, we really need to have a better approach to chemicals in the environment where the burden of proof is not for the consumer to demonstrate harm, but the industry has to have the burden of demonstrating it showing safety.
Bisphenol-A is a great example of that. We secrete a little bit of Bisphenol-A in urine, and nobody gave permission to be exposed to these compounds.
DEBRA: No, we haven’t. I haven’t, and I don’t want to be exposed to them. Well, we’re going to run out of time in about less than a minute, but I just want to close with this statement. And we’re going to have a lot more time to talk, Dr. Gilbert.
What I wanted to say is that I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a lot better labeling so that we know. There needs to be disclosure, there needs to be labeling, so that consumers really know what’s in the product, and we can make informed choices.
Thank you so much. And I want to work on that a lot more coming up. So, thank you so much for being on, Dr. Gilbert. We are going to have you back very soon.
STEVEN GILBERT: Great. Thank you very much. And thanks, Debra. It’s really great.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out who else is going to be on this week.
Target’s New “Sustainable Products Standard”
Nine months ago, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families asked the top ten retailers to remove one hundred hazardous chemicals from their store shelves. After months of communications from this organization as well as consumer pressure, last week Target announced their first step in the Mind the Store challenge.
Target now has a new “Sustainable Products Standard.”
I think it’s great that Target is starting to look at toxic chemicals in the products they sell. They have identified authoritative lists of chemicals of concern and will give a product ZERO points in their rating system “if they have one or more ingredients on one of the designated hazard lists…A product can receive a maximum of 50 points if they have no ingredients on the hazard lists.”
So can you now assume that all products sold by Target are or will be safe?
Not yet.
First, their rating system only covers a limited list of toxic chemicals. The worst ones, to be sure, but there are still others not addressed.
And I agree with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families that Target should make their ratings for each product known to consumers, so we can tell which products on their shelves are the safest.
Meanwhile, you can shop at Debra’s List, knowing I’ve listed only the safest products I can find.
The Seal that Defines “Natural Product”
My guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs Manager for the Natural Products Association (NPA). We’ll be talking about the what defines a natural product, how natural products are labeled, what, if any, government regulations apply to them, and what the Natural Products Association is doing to identify products that meet their definition.Vicki works with the association’s self-regulatory quality assurance and regulatory education programs, and manages the NPA GMP Certification Program. In this capacity, she works closely with program advisors, third-party auditors and companies seeking NPA GMP certification. She has been involved in the development and revisions of the NPA GMP Standard and related program materials and GMP education for the past 14 years. Through her work, Ms. Whitsitt has developed competencies in dietary supplement law and regulation compliance. www.NPAinfo.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Seal That Defines “Natural Product”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Vicki Whatsitt
Date of Broadcast: October 17, 2013
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 it’s necessary to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals all over the place—in the air we breathe, then the food we eat, the water we drink, in our homes, in consumer products, and even in our bodies that our bodies are carrying around toxic chemicals from past exposures, toxic chemicals that your body can’t process very well.
And so we talk about toxic chemicals, and we talk about their health effects, and we talk about what’s toxic and what’s not, and how we can live in a way that is healthy for us, and eliminate as many as toxic exposures as we can, and find the things that are not toxic.
Today is Thursday, October 17, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, and it’s a little bit overcast today. We’re not having our usual sunshine that we were talking about yesterday when we were talking about sunscreen, and I just want to remind people that even if it’s cloudy, you still can get a sunburn, so watch out for that.
Today, my guest is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s the scientific and regulatory affairs manager for the Natural Products Association.
And we’re going to be talking today about what is a natural product. That term natural product is used very widely and has been used for a long time, but there actually is an organization—the Natural Products Association, who has set a standard and a definition, and certifies products as being natural. And we’re going to find out what that means today.
Hi, Vicki. Thanks for being with me.
VICKI WHITSITT: Thank you, Debra. It’s a pleasure to be here.
DEBRA: Thanks. Well, first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, what your interest is, and your background in, how you got to the Natural Products Association? And then tell us about the history of the Association.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, my background is, of course, as a consumer, I’ve been interested in the whole natural industry approach, whatever you want to call it, since I was quite young. I won’t tell you how long ago that was. I raised my kids to eating what people would call naturals foods, and avoiding processed foods, avoiding a lot of refined sugars, that sort of thing.
Then I started actually with the Natural Products Association.
So I always had a personal interest.
And then I started working for the National Products Industry about 16 years ago. And now, I’m on the other side of it, meaning, not the consumer side, but now, I’m on the business side. And so, I’ll tell you a little bit about the organization—who we are, what we do.
So we were founded in 1936. That means we’re 77 years old. We’re the nation’s largest and oldest trade association dedicated to the natural products industry. And as a trade association, of course, a lot of what we do is advocate on Capitol Hill […] for the rights of consumers to have access to natural products, for the rights of retailers and suppliers so they can sell the products.
We have over 1900 members, and that accounts for over 10,000 retail, manufacturing and distribution locations throughout the U.S. We have companies in all 50 states, as a matter of fact.
And we are the only trade association that covers the entire spectrum—from the ingredient suppliers, the manufacturer to the retailer. And we believe that our membership diversity makes us strong. Our retailers are particularly important because they’re the gateway to the consumers, and they let us know at every turn about what’s important to consumers.
DEBRA: What happened in 1936 that made it necessary for this association to be founded?
VICKI WHITSITT: That is a great question. I don’t have any exact answer. I just know a long time ago, it wasn’t as broad a focus. And so trade associations are important because that’s people with common interest grouping together to talk to Capitol Hill, and to advocate for business opportunities, that sort of thing.
And so a small group of people, we were not very large, and we started when we were established. And one of the early activities that we did besides advocating was started trade shows. So our association started the first trade show in this industry—a place for business to come together, and retailers and business talk about what’s out there, what the consumers want, and interact.
So from the very beginning, we’ve been very involved with all aspects of the industry.
DEBRA: So now, I understand that there’s no legal definition of the word natural product.
VICKI WHITSITT: That’s true.
DEBRA: And I wanted to just give the URL of your business. It’s NPAInfo.org, Natural Products Association. NPAInfo.org.
And you have a lot of information on this site, and I’m hoping that my listeners will go there, and take a look. And when you get to the site, there are different tabs. It’s the top one. It says for consumers, for retailers and for suppliers.
And of course, you can look at all of them. But if you click on the for consumers tab, then there are various pieces of information there, including a store locator where you can type in your zip code, and find stores that sell products that have been certified.
So one of the things that you do at the Natural Products Association is that you certify natural products. So first, please tell me, what is your definition of a natural product.
VICKI WHITSITT: The definition is that products are made of ingredients that come from or are made from a renewable resource found in nature—fauna, flora, mineral. Absolutely no petroleum compound, and that the processing is used to make these are only those that are allowed under the standard.
Under the definition, it does allow, and the standard does allow for—it’s 95% truly natural, and then there’s a very limited amount of synthetic preservatives that can be used in products that will certify natural.
DEBRA: I’ve been researching this regarding about this subject for 30 years, so let me ask you some questions. So it sounds like when I first started, I thought the definition of natural was just as you said, that it would be a plant and animal, or a mineral, and it wouldn’t have any petroleum ingredients in it.
And then you said about processing that it needed to just be minimal processing.
And that’s what I thought too. So in that case, a natural product would be something that has, say, on the label, ingredients that we would recognize like—well, these are ingredients that would be in a product, but apples and lemons and coconut oil, and salt, and things like that. Am I on the right track here so far?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, yes. And I mean, for a food that’s probably exactly what you would see on the label. It’s a little trickier with cosmetics, with personal care products because they use what’s called INCI Nomenclature. It’s very specific naming, convention for ingredients.
And so sometimes when you’re looking at a label, you see something that you can’t pronounce, but it really might be a natural ingredient, or there might be something, an extract, “Oh, yes. Lavender oil extract. I know what that is,” and you would assume that that’s natural.
But depending on how it was made, it might be what we consider natural under our definition—cold-pressed. But it also may have been extracted using a solvent—a petroleum-based solvent, which then would make that what we would call synthetic ingredient.
DEBRA: I exactly agree with you on that. So this is the question that I’m trying to ask is because you wouldn’t accept for certification if it was lavender oil, for example, that was extracted with a solvent. But you would accept it if it was cold-pressed.
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes, exactly. And that’s the value of a program like ours. All of our products and ingredients have gone through very vigorous third party reviews as part of the certification process.
DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about that when we come back. We need to go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, and she’s from the Natural Products Association. They look with great scrutiny natural products and certify ones that are truly natural. And we’re going to find out more about what that means when we come back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt from the Natural Products Association. And we’re talking about what makes a natural product.
Okay, so what we said before the break was that it needs to be a plant or animal or a mineral, and not a synthetic, petrochemical ingredient. Yet, let me ask you this. I’m going to ask you this question, but it’s not to be critical because I want to understand the logic of what you’re applying here.
So you wouldn’t certify a product that had lavender oil in it that was extracted with a solvent, but you allow some small percentage of preservatives and stuff that are synthetic?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes, and that’s a really good question. And we’re often asked why we allow any synthetic ingredient under the natural standard. That’s a good question.
DEBRA: A lot of listeners are asking that question.
VICKI WHITSITT: These are temporarily allowed as the standard of a living document. It’s reviewed continually. We’ve already made some revisions that strengthen it.
For example, we now only allow natural fragrances under the standard. And that’s progress. That’s a tremendous progress.
And it took several years of ingredient companies working to make sure that there were commercially available natural fragrances, so that we could move to that step.
It’s important for natural products to be effective and properly preserved for consumers to choose them over the alternative, and for them to come back and buy them. You take it home, but if it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t hold up, if it’s not shelf-stable at home, you’re not going to want to buy it again.
And so the allowed synthetics, you’ll notice it’s limited to a very specific short list, most of which are there because they provide preservation activity to ensure that the products are shelf-stable in the store and also in the consumer’s home.
Like I said, we’re evolving, adjusting the science technological advancements. We’re always looking for natural alternatives.
So this is reviewed every year to determine if there are viable alternatives commercially available. And as they come available, these things will be dropped from the standard.
And our goal, of course, is 100%. And by the way, we think that being 95% of the way there is much better than where we were a few years ago. And many of our products are able to be formulated not using any synthetics.
But we feel it’s important, especially the preservation activity, that there needs to be those alternatives out there for ingredients that need the preservative in them to be stable, and not to go rancid, to stay a [viable] product for the consumer.
That’s why we have these limited lists.
So just to be clear—it doesn’t mean any synthetic. The only synthetics that are allowed are those on that very limited list.
DEBRA: That’s very clear. Thank you for clearing that up. So if you have a seal, it says Natural Products Association certified, it has—I see two of them here. I’m thinking one is for personal care, and one is for household products […]?
And so if I see that on the label, as a consumer, that means that that it’s 100% natural, it may be 100% natural, but it may also have some of these other ingredients that are allowed.
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. And our standard does require that all ingredients are listed, so a consumer can see exactly what’s in the product.
Any of these products that might be using a very—and normally, we’re talking 1% or less, but they will be listed on the label because they also are…
DEBRA: And I just want to say because I know that there are some people listening, and sometimes including myself, that want everything to be 100% natural. And so they say, “Well, how do I identify what are the ingredients that are not natural?”
So in this case, you really need to learn what those ingredients are. The ones that are allowed are listed on the website. And I want to say that it’s a tremendous, tremendous step in the right direction that these products are certified have moved away from even more toxic things that could be in products. They’re so much better than the really toxic products that are on the market.
And so to have these very small amounts of synthetics in them, well, you’d have to not walk outside and breathe the air. It really is that […], wouldn’t you say?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. And we appreciate that. We don’t feel that we’re doing the consumer any good if we have a standard that companies can’t meet, first of all, because they’re not going to put out a product that is unsafe or stable. Then you’re not going to have the products.
And number two, again, we want everybody—consumers, and I’m a consumer as well, I want that product to last when I open it up more than a day or two.
And again, one of the strengths is that this is a constantly evolving standard and definition. And we have very great technical expertise involved in this that they really understand. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of the ingredient industry.
And so we are able to evaluate when we can move a synthetic off of the list.
DEBRA: That’s great that you’re doing that.
Now, I know some of my listeners are wondering, well, what about—are all the ingredients organic, or do they have pesticide residues? I’m asking a lot of hard questions, I know…
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, that’s a good question. Organic might be natural. Natural is not necessarily organic. So there are companies that use the organic ingredients, but it’s not a requirement under our standard.
One of the things we also do—no, this is good. These are good questions, is that part of the documentation companies submit is they do have to submit […] that lists contaminants as well, so that we do look for issues, but we’re not an organic standard.
DEBRA: Okay, good. We need to take another break. And we’ll be back with more hard questions.
VICKI WHITSITT: Okay. I love them. Thank you.
DEBRA: I’m just trying to make it clear what you’re doing, so that people know what it is when they see your seal, that they know what it represents.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s with the Natural Products Association, and they certify natural products.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s with the Natural Products Association. And we’re talking about what makes a natural product, and about what kind of products they certify, and why.
So I have another ingredient question for you, Vicki. We were talking about lavender oil that’s cold-pressed versus lavender oil with a solvent—that you wouldn’t certify something that had solvent extract of lavender oil
What about ingredients—a lot of ingredients that are in, what are considered to be products in the natural products industry, are products that have as their source material a renewable or mineral product, like coconut oil, for example. But then that coconut oil goes through an industrial process, and gets turned into something like sodium lauryl sulfate.
So are those kinds of ingredients that are industrially processed also included?
VICKI WHITSITT: No.
DEBRA: So it explain to us more about that.
VICKI WHITSITT: They’re included on the prohibited list, if that’s what you’re asking. So if you’ve been looking on our website, and you looked at our standard, you’ll see that within the standard itself, we have prohibited ingredients, and we also have a separate illustrative list.
So we describe prohibited ingredients by class or type, and then we also have called out some specific ingredients that are prohibited and why, and one of the things that part of this vigorous, third party review, when companies want to get a product certified or an ingredient certified, they have to include documentation that tells us the source because something like glycerin, or there are other ingredients that can come from a natural source or a synthetic source.
So we have to go all the way back to the source, we have to look at how it’s processed, and we don’t allow, even if it was processed using a solvent that’s not in the final product, our standard doesn’t allow it even in the processing.
DEBRA: That’s excellent.
VICKI WHITSITT: So we do a really vigorous ingredient review, as well as product review. And also, any of our certified ingredients, no synthetics are allowed in the finished ingredient, or in the processing of the ingredient. So those are 100% natural.
You have a company that wants to make a natural product, and they are searching for sources for their ingredients. They can go to our website, look at our list, and those are ingredients that have already been through the review process and qualified—well, qualified under our standard.
Our illustrative list, I think what you brought up is a really good point, if anybody is listening, that is a formulator, understand that the list—again, we use the lavender oil. If you have to look at the source, you have to look at how it’s made because just simply being on that list doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to qualify under the standard.
DEBRA: I’m glad you pointed that out. I wanted to tell you how happy I was to see that list because one of the things that’s happening right now, and whether it was just some progress about this in the last couple of days, is that you may or may not know that there is an organization that is asking top 10 retailers to take certain chemicals, products with certain chemicals off their shelves.
And this past week, Target was one of those on the list, and they were not doing it, and not doing it, and not doing it. And they finally agreed to do it.
And so I’m having been looking at products and evaluating products for myself as a consumer advocate for more than 30 years, I’m asking myself, as good an idea as this is, to ask retailers to do this, how are they supposed to evaluate the products that are on their shelves if they don’t have any kind of background in this subject?
But that same question comes up in terms of consumers too. I know what I know because—I didn’t take chemistry in school, but I certainly studied toxicology books and chemistry books, and all of these things. And it seems like that right now, we’re at a point where there’s a lot of pressure from different directions for retailers and manufacturers to identify their toxic ingredients, to reduce their toxic ingredients, and yet, everybody seems to have to start at square one, and look at an ingredient, and learn how to evaluate it, and go look it up in a toxicology book.
And what you’ve done is that you put together a list that says these are the acceptable ingredients.
And this is what we need on a much larger scale. This is my opinion. We need to have lists of the toxic ingredients that are not acceptable, like you’ve made, and we need to have lists of ingredients that are acceptable, like you’ve made.
I’m in complete agreement with your process, and I wish this would be done more, so that consumers can then say, “Well, we know what to look for now.” And I wish that there would be more information on the labels, so that it can say lavender oil cold-pressed, and that would be the standard, so that those of us who want to take a look at it can.
I think you’re doing everything exactly on the right track.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, thank you. With that in mind—you’re right. Consumers probably are not going to have access to all of the information, obviously, that we have, when a company submits ingredients. But a consumer can go to our standard, for example, and look where we have ingredients that are prohibited.
And even if you just started with our initial list where we talk about parabens, or the SOS, or petroleum, mineral oil, paraffin, glycols, phthalates, some of those things—it’s surprising how many products with the term natural in their name have these ingredients in them.
So maybe a consumer won’t know where that lavender oil, or exactly how it was processed, but they could use our standard and familiarize themselves with some of the more commonly used synthetics, and look for products that avoid those, or they can buy some things that have our seal on it, and they’ll know that NPA’s done the hard for them.
DEBRA: And also, anyone can go to your website. And again, I’ll give it. It’s NPAInfor.org. And if you click on the “for consumers” tab, one of the things is right there on that page. Look for the headline that says “certified natural products.”
And then there’s a list of personal care products, there’s a list of homecare products, and you can just click on either one of those, and it tells you the exact brand names.
Then you can just go to the store and choose those, and know that they meet the standards.
And I really do think—you have put together some great information that anyone who’s interested in natural products to go and look your standard, go look at your list of products, and they can start to learn what are the ingredients to look for that are good, and which to avoid.
We’re going to talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s from the Natural Products Association. And we’ll learn more about natural products after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, from the Natural Products Association, and they certify products to be natural. They have the standard, and when a product meets their standard, then they can display the seal.
Vicki, could you just tell us, step by step, what a product needs to go through in order to get the seal?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, sure. For a company that has a product that they want to put through the process, the first thing that they have to do is ensure that at least 60% of their product line needs to the NPA standard. That’s to qualify. They don’t have to certify all of those, but our program is intended to be more than a green washing program.
So we want a company that has a real commitment to natural, and part of the way they demonstrate that is having at least 60% of their product line qualify.
So then we recommend, the next step is they read our standard, become familiar with what’s allowed, what’s prohibited, there’s an application process, and they will have to provide how it works, and detailed information about each of the ingredients, as well as the manufacturing process that they’ve used to make the product.
It sounds very simple. It can be very complicated because we do ask a lot of information. But we need that to be able to verify that their ingredients qualify under the standard.
And the cost for certification is $500.00 per product for NPA members, and $1250 per product for non-members—the flat fee that covers all the administrative work on our end, the cost of the audit, and the use of the seal for two years. If they use NPA-certified ingredients—
DEBRA: I think that’s a reasonable…
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. It really is. It’s a bargain, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It is. It is. Yes. So I’ve seen on your website that you have some articles about labeling. So let’s talk about labeling for a little bit. There was one about GMO labeling. What’s your position on that?
VICKI WHITSITT: NPA’s position is that we support the consumer’s right to know in a nutshell.
DEBRA: Good!
VICKI WHITSITT: So there you go. But when we’re looking at it from a legislative point of view, we want to be sure that that’s really the goal of it. That’s something that NPA just grappled with this past year. We spent a lot of time discussing it. But we have always, for quite a long time, NPA’s position has been supporting the consumer’s right to know what’s in a product.
DEBRA: I agree with that. And I think that I probably more than most people in the world want to see everything. I know some consumers say, “But I don’t even know what that means if I see it on the label.”
But I want to know everything.
And also, you have something about caffeine labeling. Do you think that caffeinated beverages and food should be labeled?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. We did a voluntary standard, and it’s not about restricting. It’s really, again, consumer’s right to know. And so we did come out in support of voluntary labeling caffeine standard.
DEBRA: Good. So that’s a standard that you’re having that can be a part of your standard.
Now, you particularly work in the NPA GMP Certification Program. Now, what does GMP mean?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it means Good Manufacturing Practices.
DEBRA: Good Manufacturing Practices. I knew it must have meant something standard like that […]
VICKI WHITSITT: The companies that are certified say it means—yes. So it has to do with the systems that you use to make sure that your product meets the established specification, so you’re producing quality products.
DEBRA: What products does that apply to?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, in NPA Certification Program, it’s specific to dietary supplements. There are good manufacturing practices for foods, there are voluntary guidelines for cosmetics, for example. But NPA Certification Program is specific to dietary supplement. That would include vitamins, minerals, herbal products—they all fall under the regulatory definition of dietary supplement.
DEBRA: And what kind of practices might not be good practices? Why would a company need to get certified, or want to get certified to show that they’re not doing what?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it’s not about what they’re not doing. It’s about what they are doing. Did they have appropriate procedures in place? Are they documenting their work like they should? Do they have—you might call it a recipe and a cookbook, but do they have a master manufacturing record that describes how everything is going to be done, so that no steps are left out, that the right amount of the ingredients get in?
Have they set appropriate specifications for their ingredients to ensure that they have the correct strength, and that they don’t have any contaminants in them?
So it’s about setting up a strong, quality system that puts controls in place from the raw material stage, all the way through the manufacturing, all your verification testing, and even your distribution practices.
So it really is creating a very strong quality system. And the reason you would be certified is because, again, you have undergone a very rigorous third party review to evaluate if you meet that level of compliance.
And so by law, everybody has to meet the FDA GMP’s for dietary supplements. But there’s other variance as to how companies do it, and how strong their systems really are. So certification is the way you can show your customers, their businesses, your retailers that, in fact, you have strong quality systems in place.
DEBRA: That’s actually very interesting to hear you describe all of this because I’m mostly looking at ingredients. I’m wanting to get the most natural ingredients that I can and avoid the ones that are synthetic and toxic. But I hadn’t really thought about the quality of the manufacturing.
And while you were talking, I was thinking about how I, as a homemaker, am manufacturing things that I make in my home, such as dinner. I was thinking about you saying, did they have it written down how much to put in, this and that, and the other thing.
And as consumers, we want to know that if we buy a product that it needs certain standards of quality. But we don’t quite know what those quality standards are. And we also want to know that if we buy a product once, and it has a certain standard that we can expect that it’s going to have that standard again.
But I honestly can’t tell you […] going to do the same for me from one night to the next.
VICKI WHITSITT: But the cooking at home, making your famous chicken soup is different. And like you said, that’s where variances are okay. But you don’t want variances in your dietary supplements. You want them to be consistent from bottle to bottle.
DEBRA: But it makes sense to me that—I know my skills at cooking, I know the skill of other people as cooks, and I know that there’s a big difference. It’s just human beings, people like you and I, who are working in these manufacturing companies, and they have different degrees of skill as to how well they’re going to do, put these quality assurance things into place.
So it makes sense to me that there would be a certification that would just look at the quality of how the product is being produced.
And I also thought that I should say that I know I’ve talked to a lot of different organizations that have different kinds of certification programs. And I know from my past experience that just because a product doesn’t have a certification doesn’t meant that it’s a bad product, that there’s a lot of reasons why people don’t get certifications.
That doesn’t mean that they don’t meet the standard, for example. They just aren’t certified.
VICKI WHITSITT: We agree with you. That certification is a way to demonstrate to others that our programs are based on third party assessments. But you’re right. A company choosing not to go through it should not necessarily be seen as a negative—more these programs are a positive. They are a way for you to demonstrate to others that third party assessment demonstration that a lot of consumers are looking for.
Because most of us don’t—I mean, I can’t think of any consumer that has access to a manufacturing plant, for example. It just doesn’t happen.
And so if you’re concerned, or if you’re looking for a way to have more confidence, that’s what it’s about.
And also GMP certification is valuable business to business. And so there’s another level there why companies participate, not only for the consumer, but it’s also their businesses where they are—the retailers, or companies that manufacture, but don’t sell their own product, they manufacture for others.
Those people buying, they’re having their products made by them, want some level of assurance, some qualified assessment of the systems in place.
DEBRA: Well, our time is just about up. Thank you so much for being with me today, Vicki. And I do understand a lot better now what your organization does. And I’ll take a look for that seal when I know what it means now when I see it.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on your show. We appreciate you reaching out to NPA about our natural standard and certification programs. We love to get the word out about what we have to offer, and let consumers know about where to look for, what to look for, and that they can come to our website to find even more…
DEBRA: Sorry. There’s the music. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd.
Safe Face Paint
Question from Deanna
I have some great homeade recipes for face paint http://www.mommypotamus.com/how-to-make-homemade-face-paint-thats-safe-enough-to-ea/ but it would be nice not having to make something from scratch! I have come across this company a few times & wonder if their face paint is safe? http://www.naturalearthpaint.com/2013/07/07/introducing-our-natural-face-body-paint-kit/
Debra’s Answer
Yes, this face paint from Earth Paints is safe. It’s completely natural and organic, and tested by toxicologists to be free of heavy metals, parabens, animal products and formaldehyde.
Several years ago, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics had face paints tested, and found that 10 out of 10 children’s face paints tested contained low levels of lead. Lead can be absorbed through the skin, and there is NO safe level. Lead is a neurotoxin that affects the nervous system.
According to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics:
Other heavy metals found were nickel, chromium, and cobalt.
Odor from Pine Furniture
Question from Bonnie Johnson
I have a pine armoire I have had for 13 years. When I lived in Ca I never noticed the smell but I was forced to close up the room it is in here in MI for a week. When I went into the room the pine smell was very potent. I know it is damper here than in Ca. Could that be bringing out the smell. Is there any thing I can treat this piece with to make the smell go away?
Debra’s Answer
Are you sure what you are smelling is pine? I have a lot of unfinished pine furniture in my house and my experience has been that the pine smell is strong at the beginning, but as time goes by, it volatilizes and smells less and less. I would say that after 13 years, there wouldn’t be anything left to volatilize.
I’ve noticed that as my pine furniture dries out over time and that may be contributing to it smelling less. Perhaps the dampness did contribute to releasing more odor.
If that is the case, the solution would be to remove the dampness from the wood, which is a good idea anyway. If it were me, I would probably close up the room with a space heater inside. The heat will pull the moisture out of the wood.
Is the armoire unfinished? If so, you could apply several coats of a water-based wood finish, but I would remove the dampness first.
MelanSol Certified Natural Skin Care
A very natural sunscreen (in three strengths) that does not contain the common toxic ingredients found in most sunscreens, plus moisturizers and sunburn care products. This site also has a lot of information about toxic ingredients in sun care products.
 |
Listen to my interview with Oceana Naturals President Michael J. Russ. |
Raise a Green Dog
An excellent resource for all things toxic-free for dogs, chosen by a caring human who loves her dogs (and cats). There’s a blog with lots of information about toxics in dog products and safer alternatives (click on “Learn to be Green”) and lots of toxic-free products.
|
Listen to my interview with Raise a Green Dog authors Leslie May and Johann The Dog. |
The Natural Mattress Store
Makes and sells the Eco-Cloud line of latex mattresses in the San Francisco Bay Area, from certified organic materials. “There are no fire retardant chemicals and no polyurethane foam in any of our mattresses.” These mattresses are unique in that they have removable zipper covers, which allows you to air your mattress on a sunny day, “and also allows us to change the firmness of your mattress after you have received it. You have up to three months to test the mattress and have any adjustment necessary in your home.” They also make and sell pillows filled with organic wool, organic cotton, natural kapok, natural latex, and more, in a variety of thicknesses and sizes. Plus foundations made from natural materials, toppers, and natural bed frames.
Caring for Your Dog Toxic-Free
My guests today are Leslie May and Johann The Dog, authors of the Raise a Green Dog blog and website. This very popular blog began in November 2007 and has grown over the years into a complete website, with educational pages, tips, tricks and product information to help dog lovers learn more about being green and helping their dog live a healthier, happier life. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals your dog may be exposed to in typical dog products and how to choose and find safer alternatives. Leslie grew up in a green and organic family, before being green was popular. After adopting Johann as a puppy from a no-kill animal shelter in the Indianapolis area in September of 2004, she wanted to be sure that he was not only safe from the environmental dangers that he may encounter in his life, she also wanted eco-friendly, healthy and safe products for him to eat, play with, sleep in, and be and live around, inside and out. Fortunately knowing how to live an eco-friendly, healthy and organic lifestyle gave her a ‘leg up’ in helping find information, tips and products that would keep Johann the happiest and healthiest dog he could be. She quickly discovered that healthy and green information and products were not easy to find for other dog lovers. That’s when Raise A Green Dog was born….with one goal in mind: to bring valuable, green lifestyle information to dog lovers, so they can enjoy a long and happy life with their dogs, and help the environment at the same time. In her spare time, Leslie enjoys life in the mountains of NE Georgia with her dogs, Johann (YoYo) and Gracie, and her kitties, Wolfie and Wiggy; and enjoys competing in dog agility and hiking the many mountain trails with Johann and Gracie. http://debralynndadd.com/category/debras-list/raise-a-green-dog and blog.raiseagreendog.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Caring for Your Dog Toxic-Free
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Leslie May & Johann, the Dog
Date of Broadcast: October 14, 2013
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 we need to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals out there. They’re in the food we eat, the water we drink.
They’re in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, even in our bodies from past exposures.
But there’s something we can do about all these toxic chemicals. If you’re being exposed to something, or you have chemicals in your body that you want to remove, it can all be done, that we know how to eliminate toxic chemicals from most of the environment now. It’s just a matter of learning it and actually deciding to do it.
So what’s this show is about.
We’re talking about where the toxic chemicals are, but also, what are the safer solution, and who’s doing what to make this world a safer place.
It is Monday, October 14th. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we are going to be talking about how to have a toxic-free dog.
Now, animals have bodies just like we, humans, have bodies, and they are affected by toxic chemicals as well, except that they are much smaller. And so all the toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to in our daily lives, our pets are being exposed to as well, except that they’re being exposed to—depending on the size of your dog, they’re being exposed to 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 10 times the amount of toxic chemicals that we are just because they’re being exposed to those same amounts, but their bodies are smaller.
And so we have pets now all of kinds, having all kinds of illnesses that pets didn’t use to have before—that they have thyroid problems, they get cancer, all kinds of things.
And so another reason to have a toxic-free home is to protect your pet and have a healthy pet.
So my guest today is Leslie May, and Johann the Dog, who are authors of Raise a Green Dog Blog.
Hi, Leslie.
LESLIE MAY: Hi. How are you? Thank you for having me today.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. And is Johann there too?
LESLIE MAY: Oh, we might hear him bark a little. He’s a Sheltie. He’ll do that.
DEBRA: Good. I just thought he might want to say hello.
LESLIE MAY: I had to keep him out of the cat litter box though, so he’s in a little confined area.
DEBRA: Anytime he’d like to chime in, he’s perfectly welcome.
LESLIE MAY: Well, thank you. He appreciates that.
DEBRA: So tell us how you got interested in having a green dog.
LESLIE MAY: Well, I was raised green. I was raised eco-friendly. I was raised organic. My mother really didn’t know any other way. You know how when you’re raised a certain way, you don’t know there’s another way.
But she was very forward-thinking. She grew up on the campus of IU in Bloomington, and was exposed to a lot of different cultures and ideas, which was amazing, in my education as well.
And she picked up on the importance of living a simpler life, a whole life, a fresh life in a lot of different aspects. And it is a decision she made to how she wanted to have her life be.
And so, of course, being her daughter, that is the life that I led as well. And she had an organic garden. She cleaned with water and vinegar. I didn’t even know what a lawn chemical was until I built my own house and saw my neighbors spreading things.
So when I had cats—I still have my Woolfie and Wiggy. Eveybody’s named after composers, by the way. They’re 17 and 18 years old now. Wiggy is short for Ludwig, by the way. And they’re 17 and 18. And when I started working from home, I just couldn’t wait to adopt a dog. I felt it was time. I had the time to devote.
Dogs are exposed outside a lot more than cats are. I have indoor cats.
I obviously transferred my life to my cats’ lives, to my dog’s life as well, as far as eating and being inside. But I had some things to learn about being outside. We learned a lot of things. My dog has a blog. And people found out that we were green, eco-friendly and organic. And they started e-mailing him and asking a lot of questions—things from, “What kind of lotion does your mom put on her legs because I know you lick her legs, that’s safe for you?”
DEBRA: How cute.
LESLIE MAY: All kinds of little things like that. And the questions became so prolific that I couldn’t even answer them all. I’m like, “People are hungry. They’re hungry for information, they’re hungry for information, I’m just going to show what I do.”
And that’s what Raise a Green Dog is, and how it started.
I adopted Johann in 2004 from a no-kill shelter. And I started the blog in 2007.
DEBRA: Well, very good. So you have a lot to tell us today.
LESLIE MAY: I suppose…
DEBRA: You should probably say that Johann is probably Johann Sebastian Bach the Dog? Is that right?
LESLIE MAY: That’s exactly right. He is named after Bach, and I knew people would make fun of me for calling him Johann.
But his first agility class—we did agility for fun, he got the nickname Yoyo. And it’s his nickname. That’s what we really call him.
DEBRA: I love that. And the cat must be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
LESLIE MAY: Yes, Woolfie, he was the first of the four that I have now; Wiggy and [Woodbag].
DEBRA: And then, what’s the fourth?
LESLIE MAY: And I have Gracie. It’s hard to find a girl’s name. There weren’t a lot of classical composers with women’s name, but Grace Williams, she has written amazing arias. I think she died in the 70’s. But she was actually pretty famous in the opera world.
DEBRA: Well, good. I come from a classical music background, so I appreciate what you’re doing.
So where should we start? We have a few minutes before the break, and I usually want to talk about what are the toxic chemical exposures that might be occurring to start off the show, and then we’ll talk about the less toxic solutions.
So tell us about some of the places where a dog might be exposed to toxic chemicals. Just start with anything.
LESLIE MAY: Yes, and it’s really broad, obviously, because they go pretty much everywhere we do.
So I like to look at a dog’s life as inside life and outside life. And they can be exposed to chemicals within the home if we use toxic cleaning products, how we clean our floor. My dogs lick things off the floor, so that’s how they ingest it more strongly than we would ever.
What they eat—they can be exposed to toxic chemicals through what they eat, GMOs as well, fragrances, sprays, anything inside. They can also be exposed to things outside—lawn chemicals are a big issue with dogs. They spend a lot of time in our lawns.
They can drink in streams that may be contaminated with giardia. Actually, Gracie has gotten that before. And other toxic run-off chemicals, especially in the corn [boat] or through fracking.
We go to agility competitions and the horse arenas where they actually have a lot of chemicals in the dirt, it’s just amazing if you look at what your dog encounters every day that they can probably come into hundreds of toxic chemicals just in one day on a nice outing day—inside and outside.
So it’s broad. It’s very broad.
DEBRA: Have you noticed any particular illnesses amongst animals, your own animals, or other animals that are pets that you know of?
LESLIE MAY: I do believe—there have been statistics and studies done. For example, lawn chemicals, there are some wonderful researches of these, including Purdue Veterinary Teaching Hospital, doing studies on lawn chemicals and their effects on dogs. And they are finding that dogs that aren’t more exposed to conventional lawn chemicals I’m speaking of have more instances of canine lymphoma, as well as some breeds have more instances of bladder cancer.
So there are really wonderful people doing amazing studies that can really help determine the information about this.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leslie May and Johann the Dog might come and make a special appearance as well. And we’re talking about how to protect your dogs, your pets, from toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Leslie May and Johann the Dog, from Johann Sebastian Bach. And they write Raise a Green Dog Blog, and have a website. You can go to Blog. RaiseAGreenDog.com, or just also go to RaiseAGreenDog.com, and you’ll find lots of information.
I’m looking at your blog page, Leslie, and I see that you have a list of various articles that you’ve written. Some of them are about very specific toxic dangers. So I want to ask you about some of those. Let’s start with—is your dog’s stainless steel bowl radioactive?
LESLIE MAY: That’s quite a headline, isn’t it?
DEBRA: Yes. Let me just tell you how I think as a consumer advocate on somebody who has worked in this field of toxic chemicals for more than 30 years. When I see a statement like, “Is your dog’s stainless steel bowl radioactive?” I immediately think, “Wait a minute. If the dog’s stainless steel bowl is radioactive, what about other stainless steel?”
So let’s talk about stainless steel being radioactive.
LESLIE MAY: Yes. It seemed at first when this was announced back in July of last year that it was a very shocking and unusual thing. But actually, it’s a common thin. There were some stainless steel bowls that was spot checked from Petco, and found to be radioactive.
They came from stainless steel, which is really scrap. Stainless steel is made from scrap, recycled metals. A lot of times these scrap things are thrown in that may come from hospitals that are radioactive x-ray machines, or whatever they may be.
And what they found was that these bowls were made from scrap that contained radioactive material.
And it’s actually a very common thing. How did these bowls become radioactive? I had a gut feeling of how it happened, but I did my research and wanted to really dig in deep, and find out how that could happen.
And some people thought, “Well, these are probably stainless steel bowls from China” because everything from China is dangerous, some people believe, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be from China. It could actually be scrap from the United
States as well.
DEBRA: Here’s the thing about stainless steel, as you said, it’s made from scrap. And it’s a good thing to be recycling steel.
That’s a good thing for the environment. But what ends up happening, as you said, is that there could be all kinds of things that are in the stuff that’s being recycled.
And they’re not necessarily filtered out or it’s not necessarily cleansed. It’s just—this is what’s there in the scrap. And unfortunately, that’s a downside to buying recycled materials because there could be toxic chemicals in it. There could be toxic chemicals in recycled paper from the inks that are in the paper that have been printed on the other paper that’s been recycled, et cetera.
So it could be any stainless steel anywhere.
LESLIE MAY: Not everything is checked. Things are spot-checked, but not everything is checked.
I was communicating with Steve Dale, who writes the Chicago Dog Blog, and he’s like, “How are going to find out which one’s already affected?” I’m like, “Get a Geiger calendar.”
I guess that’s really the only solution.
DEBRA: Or just not use stainless steel. I’ve been writing about not using stainless steel for years because it also will leech on all kinds of heavy metals, and other things. It’s not just that it’s radioactive. And it’s unfortunate because there are so many stainless steel products, and stainless steel has good qualities to it, about being able to wash it, and all those other things.
But this is just another toxic chemical now in stainless steel.
So what do you recommend for a pet bowl?
LESLIE MAY: I actually do use stainless steel. I researched a very high quality stainless steel, a dog bowl company. The reason I don’t use plastic is because it has the potential to leech BPA, an endocrine disrupter. I don’t use ceramic because of the potential of the lead […]
It’s all about weighting risk. And where am I seeing risk in your life, and in your dog’s life. And I determined from my own decision-making that stainless steel was the least risky for my dogs. And I’ve actually had my bowls for 10 years now.
So it’s probably leeched all out by now.
But I think that my bowl is probably the safest material. That’s the decisions that I made. And I still really recommend that on my blog. I think they’re all bamboo. They’re all bamboo bowls that I’ve actually thought about. And they do have BPA-free travel bowls that are—they’re rubber, but they’re BPA-free. They’re like […] or whatever. And that’s for travel.
If you dent them, denting them, and scratching them heavily, that just increases risks. So I keep […] And I use BPA-free travel bowls for travel.
DEBRA: Well, when I had my cats, I don’t have cats anymore, but when I had my cats, I would use ceramic bowls, and I would test them to make sure that they had lead-free glazes on them. Unless it says lead-free specifically, then you still don’t know.
And I think that there are a lot of stores now that are aware of this. And so they’re maybe choosing lead-free. But it’s pretty easy to get. For about $25 at Home Depot, you can get a lead test kit. And so if I have anything ceramic, I just test it, and I find out.
So we need take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May, and we’re talking about toxic chemicals that your dog might be exposed to, and how you can minimize their risk.
And we’ll back in just a moment.
No, we won’t. We’re not going off for until another 10 seconds.
Sorry.
Sometimes I look at this clock on my computer, and I read the seconds instead of reading the minutes. So now, we’re going to break.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May and her dog, Johann. There he is.
LESLIE MAY: Excuse me. Well, I hope he doesn’t speak too long. Sorry about that.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. I was hoping he’d come in and say hello. Is that okay now?
LESLIE MAY: Yes, I’m here. It’s still quiet in the moment. He is in the other room.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. I’m not worried about it because I can hear you. So again, I’m looking at your list of articles here, very interesting, lots of information about toxic chemical exposures for dogs, and also, how to do things in a safe, toxic-free way. Also, there’s a lot of green natural toxic-free products listed on this website.
I’m at RaiseAGreenDog.com, and there’s a page. It’s RaiseAGreenDog.com/LearnHowToHelpYourDogBeGreen. I’m sure you’ll find it if you go to the website.
LESLIE MAY: There’s a link at the top, Learn to be Green. They’re […] blog post section.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s what you want to click on, it’s Learn to be Green. And again, that’s RaiseAGreenDog.com. And then click on Learn to be Green.
So you have some information on here about fluoride. Let’s talk about water. What kind of water do you give to your pets because there are a lot of toxic chemicals in water?
LESLIE MAY: Well, that’s a very interesting subject right now for us, to tell you the honest truth. Right now, we’re living in the mountains in Georgia, and we have a well. In the summer, our well became contaminated with bacteria, and it took a while—it affected me. It didn’t affect them. And then it just was a happenstance thing, I got poison ivy, which made my hands open, and washing my hands with the water created a constant re-infection in my hands.
And that’s how I found out the well was contaminated.
We actually installed a UV filter, a whole house UV filter in the cabin. That’s how we did that. So we are completely bacteria-free, and we also have a filter that filters—we don’t have to worry about fluoride here. I can mention that. Excessive minerals are common in the mountains, so we have a [pure] filter that gets out the excessive minerals—not all of the good ones, but the excessive ones.
We do want to have water that has minerals and vitamins in it.
Until I got the filter, however, I boiled the water for all of us. And I put a filter—I had to change the filter very often because it would become contaminated with bacteria itself, for showering and cleaning. But for drinking, cooking, we boil it for them. It felt like I was living in a third world country for about three weeks.
But for a city, there are wonderful filters that you can get that will filter out chlorines and fluoride. When we lived in the city, on the city water system, we did use filter like that for virtually everything—cooking, drinking, and even you can get showerheads as well. And we have one of those as well.
DEBRA: I really think it’s necessary.
LESLIE MAY: I think the water is the basic of a dog’s life.
DEBRA: It is.
LESLIE MAY: It’s really, really important.
DEBRA: Yes, I think it’s important for every home to have a water filter considering that the state of water nowadays, and it’s important for humans, and it’s important for pets. And I have one that I like very much that’s very inexpensive—well, not very inexpensive, but what I would call affordable for what it does because it removes everything that you want to have removed, including fluoride and chloramines, and all those things.
And if you want to know more about that water filter, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and go over on the right-hand column, and scroll down, and you’ll see a picture of it. Take a look at that, especially if you have pets because remember that your pets, because of their size, they’re being exposed to the same chemicals that you’re being exposed to except in much greater amounts because of the small size of their bodies.
So earlier, you were talking about the studies about how lawn chemicals are affecting dogs now. I see here that on this page we’ve been discussing, the Learn to be Green page, you have a complete checklist for healthier, safer law for your dog. So tell us about some of the things that people can do with their lawns.
LESLIE MAY: I think that people are overwhelmed by organic lawn care in gardening. It’s really not. The whole charm—it makes you think, “Oh, my gosh. It sounds so difficult.” But it’s not. If you go to a source, and there are simple steps, it really is simple.
When I built my home, the first thing that people started doing was starting the stuff on the lawn. And I didn’t know what they were doing because I wasn’t raised that way. And I asked them, “What are you doing?”
“Well, we’re putting the four-step program on.”
I’m like, “What’s that?”
And they told me, and I said, “That’s not healthy.”
Instinctively, my alarm went off. And so the land that the […] had been sitting for 25 years with nothing happening on it, but it used to be farmland. So it’s pretty much stripped of nutrients at that point.
So of course, we did have to feed our lawns to get them to grow correctly, and we were in a […] situation, so you can’t have the dandelion in your front yard.
We had to really have an effort in growing this lawn organically. I tried different things. I would use corn gluten in the spring to keep the weeds down. I would oversee it regularly. I used fish emulsion because I did find some pellet-based, organic, wonderful fertilizers, but I didn’t care what it was. If it was down there, Gracie would want to eat it. So we switched to a spray, fish emulsion, which we could actually use almost six, seven times a year, very safely, and feed the lawn on a really regular basis.
I used nematodes for grubs because the Japanese beetles were horrific up there in the beginning. And they subsided over time. I had rubber birches which they love. But they subsided over time. Nematodes were amazing. I never had a flea. I pulled dandelions in the spring, in the fall.
It worked out very, very well. It wasn’t difficult. I had one of the best lawns in the neighborhood, and people would complain regularly that their lawn care company killed their lawn.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally understand. So we’re going to take another break. And when we come back, you mentioned fleas, so I want to hear about what you do in a non-toxic and natural way to control fleas with both your dogs and cats.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leslie May and her dog Johann from RaiseAGreenDog.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May from Raise a Green Dog. She has a blog and a website, so you just go to RaiseAGreenDog.com. And we’ve been talking about a whole page full of articles that she has from her blog.
When you go to RaiseAGreenDog.com, you just click on “learn to be green” and you’ll find all these articles that tell you not only where the toxic chemicals are, but what you can do to avoid them.
Leslie, it’s coming up on Christmas soon, even though it’s mid-October, as we’re having this live show. And this show will be in the archives, so all the shows are recorded, and you can always listen to any show over again, or listen to shows that you’d missed. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
But we’re coming up on Christmas. I know people are starting to think about those, and you have an article about which kind of Christmas tree is healthier for your dog and the environment. So tell us about that.
LESLIE MAY: I guess that was last year, I wrote that. I haven’t thought about Christmas trees, so wow. We live in the mountains, and we have pine trees everywhere in all shapes and sizes.
And cutting down one pine tree that’s two inches from another one is actually going to be good for the forest. So that’s what we do because it bends out a little bit […] more efficiently and effectively.
So we actually cut down our own little Charlie Brown Christmas tree. But I know that everybody has thought about where they’re going to get their tree this year. And there are so many different options. You can go buy a live tree, which is amazing. And I have a lot of friends that actually do that that live in the city.
Once they’ve used it, and they go and plant it in their yard. And I think that’s a wonderful idea.
Other alternatives are buying from one of the tree-cutting places on the side of the road, or at your local grocery store. I’m not a big fan of that idea. I think there’s a lot of environmentally, I think, wrong with that.
DEBRA: Yes, I do too. To think that I’ve ended up doing that I like the most was going to a local Christmas tree farm. And that way, we could just cut the tree fresh that they’ve been growing there, but we could also check out what kind of pesticides and things that they’ve been using or not.
LESLIE MAY: And the nice thing is that there are organic farms now, tree farms—organic tree farms. And of course, look at [treecycling] options after, either doing it yourself, or having it done as a commercial community project.
And of course, there are artificial trees as well.
DEBRA: Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello? Todd, we don’t have Leslie. Hello? Hello? Hello?
While we’re fixing this and trying to get Leslie back, I’ll tell you more about her website, and hopefully, we’ll get her back.
So let’s see. She talks about growing an organic vegetable garden for your dog so that you can feed your dog organic food.
We were going to talk about fleas and I’m hoping that—our technician is working on getting Leslie back and hopefully, we can talk about fleas.
In the meantime, I’ll start telling you what she has to say about fleas.
I’ve had experiences of fleas as well. And you really have to keep ahead of them. Let’s see. Getting to know fleas—there’s well over 2000 different types of fleas in the world, but it’s the cat flea and the dog flea that are the most problematic for the dogs.
Now, this is very cute because—she’s back. Leslie, are you back?
LESLIE MAY: Yes, I am. I don’t know what happened.
DEBRA: I don’t know what happened, but this is live radio, so anything could happen technically. So we’re talking about fleas. And I was just starting to read from your ultimate guide for fleas.
So why don’t you pick up and continue, and tell us what to do about fleas without toxic pesticides.
LESLIE MAY: Fleas are really easy. I know that once you get them, you don’t think they are, because I’ve been there. Trust me. But I think there are a lot of really very healthy, very environmental-friendly ways that can deal with fleas.
In my yard, I spray garlic spray. To keep the fleas out of the year, I do it a couple of times a year starting right at flea season.
And then inside, I put some diatomaceous herbs, which I think is an amazing product, in my carpet, around the baseboards.
It keeps all the [rag bugs] out.
Also, when you go out and about with your dog, that’s when they’re most likely to actually pick up a flea. There are lots of wonderful herbal sprays on the market that are very healthy, very friendly. We’ve got some on our website in the flea and tick section. And they just repel it because fleas don’t like them.
They just don’t even hop on your dog.
And that’s really what you want.
Fleas don’t really stay on a dog that’s healthy. So feeding them a really good, high-quality diet, organic diet if you can, fleas don’t really like them.
Now, I have brought a flea back on my dog from agility trials. Now, they didn’t stay on the dog, but they’ve gotten on the cats who are 17 and 18. They’re older. They have compromised immune systems all the time now. It just happens when you get older.
So we do get fleas. And there is a wonderful website called GreenPaws.org and there are links in that article, free article in my blog, they have tested every single flea and tick products on the market for danger, or less danger, or no danger.
It’s from the Natural Resource Defense Council. We’ve interviewed their chemist before when they were doing this test. And they kept it up to date. They’re amazing.
But spot-ons have really dangerous chemicals in them. And you really don’t need them. You don’t need them. If you do need stronger products—because I have been there, I live in the mountains in an area where there was a major tick infestation, very dangerous for my dogs.
Actually, one of my dogs got Rocky Mountain, and that is a killer. It can kill your dog. But we were very aware of the symptoms prior, so I knew exactly what it was the minute she collapsed.
So, for ticks, neem—anything with neem in it is a really great repellant. Keep them off your dog, they won’t bite your dog.
And that’s what we’re using in a really high tick-infested area. And then Green Paws has also tested some products that are over-the-counter, and yes, they are stronger, and yes, they are chemicals, but sometimes when you have a really big problem, you need something a little stronger.
We’ve realized that’s reality. It’s either a major life-threatening disease or a little chemical. You have to pick the choices with the rest.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And I think that there are times when we do need to choose the chemical even if it’s toxic in order to solve a problem. And this is why it’s important to be thinking about what are the problems in advance, so that it doesn’t get to that state.
But even I have used the toxic chemical if there is not a natural way to do it, if something has gotten to that degree where it’s needed.
LESLIE MAY: I do give my dogs heartworm pills and there are a lot of people that say, “I can’t believe you do that, Leslie.”
But heartworm is very dangerous. And I don’t want them to ever get it. And if that’s the only chemical that they ingest, one of the very, very, very few—
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s the point. The point is that just because you might need to use something like your heartworm pills, if you eliminate as many other toxic exposures as you can, then it becomes less dangerous to do that.
And so it’s looking at—
LESLIE MAY: And Green Paws have—
DEBRA: —the more you reduce your risk. The more you reduce the toxic chemicals, the more you reduce your risk.
LESLIE MAY: Exactly. That’s when Gracie got rocky mountain. She was very sick, and it’s a neurological problem, as well as a high fever. She had to take antibiotics. There was no other way. But they worked on her because I don’t think she’s had—one other time in her entire life.
And I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had them. I’m old now. There you go. I’m older. So five times in my life when I’m this age, it’s amazing.
DEBRA: Well, it’s been a pleasure to have you, Leslie. We just have less than a minute left on the show, and thank you so much for being with us. And thank you for bringing all this information to people and presenting it in such a delightful and interesting way.
I could give you about 10 seconds to say whatever else you’d like to say.
LESLIE MAY: I just want to tell people that living a green, healthy, organic lifestyle seems like a very overwhelming thing to tackle, but really, if you just go to the […] section at RaiseAGreenDog.com, pick one thing. Make one little change today, one little change tomorrow or next week, and before you know it, your dog will be healthier, happier and live a much longer life.
DEBRA: And thank you for being with us. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Toilets Without Antimicrobials
Question from TA
I am interested in finding a dual-flush toilet that doesn’t contain any toxic antimicrobial substances.
The manufacturers are apparently coating them with antimicrobial substances to make them easier to keep clean, etc.
I see that American Standard makes toilets with an EverClean Surface, which they say is “a silver based, double coat surface which inhibits the growth of stain and odor causing bacteria, mold and mildew.” http://www.americanstandard-us.com/learn/planning-center/faq/answer/?questionID=243&categoryID=29&categoryName=Toilets
Do you think this is a safe option? I don’t know if it is ONLY silver, or if they might be including other things also.
Is there anything else you would suggest we consider when purchasing a new toilet?
I assume the dual-flush is a good idea, and I had no idea they were using antimicrobials. Is there anything else I should be aware of?
Debra’s Answer
From browsing the American Standard site, it seems that EverClean is a “permanent glaze additive,” which would mean that the silver is embedded into the standard glaze. The silver wouldn’t outgas since it is an embedded particle, yet it would inhibit the growth of bacteria on the porcelain surface.
I don’t see a health problem with this.
What Tape Can I Use to Repair a Mattress?
Question from Joe
Our mattress tore on the underside during a move. I can see the exposed foam and although this side is facing down on the boxspring I would like to fix until we get a new mattress as this mattress is only 5 years old. I have 3M heavy duty shipping tape covering the area now, but then was curious if using the tape was harmful. What could I do to temporarily fix. Most of the time our kids sleep with us.
Debra’s Answer
I would suggest using aluminum foil tape, which would not be toxic. You can get it at any home improvement store like Lowe’s or Home Depot.
Kapok Fill for Comforters
Question from Dianne
Hi Debra, I am looking for an organic comforter for my granddaughters and have found a lot of wool versions from your website. Thank You for that!
I was wondering if you know anything about something called Kapok seeds? Gaiam has a comforter with Kapok seeds which is covered with organic cotton. Do you have any info on this?
Thanks So Much! Dianne
Debra’s Answer
Yes, I know about kapok. It is a silky fiber taken from the seed pod of the tropical kapok tree, which is also called the “silk-cotton tree.” It is used as an alternative to down for stuffing in comforters and pillows.
It is totally fine to use this natural material.
Finding and Eliminating Toxic Exposures in Your Home
My guest today is Diana Schultz, CEO of Green and Healthy Homes, and a Certified Building Biologist and Bau-Biologie Environmental Consultant in Orlando, Florida. We’ll be talking about the types of toxic exposures she is finding and measuring in living spaces and how she was able to reduce or eliminate these toxic exposures to improve indoor air quality. With a background in Urban Planning with Environmental Studies and personal experience in designing and building her own home, Diana was introduced to the International Institute for Bau-Biologie and EcologyT (Building Biology) and became Certified by the Institute in 2008. Building Biology is the study of healthy buildings and everything that affects the relationship between our bodies and our built environment. In addition to conducting client home assessments, mitigation services and educational workshops at Green and Healthy Homes, Diana serves as a Program Provider for the International Institute for Building Biology and participates in many of the Institute’s on-site 5-day Seminars as Instructor and Student Mentor. Diana is passionate about sharing the holistic message that Mother Nature is our ultimate guide – “We are dedicated to the principles of living in harmony with nature and in creating built environments that naturally support health and well being in homes and work places every day.” www.greenandhealthyhomes.net
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Finding and Eliminating Toxic Exposures in Your Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Schultz
Date of Broadcast: October 10, 2013
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 we do that because there are so many things that are toxic in our world, and so many things that are not toxic. And if we learn to recognize what’s toxic, and learn what isn’t toxic, then we can make wise, healthy and environmentally friendly choices by choosing the things that are better for us.
Today, we’re going to be talking about recognizing toxic chemicals in your home. It’s Thursday, October 10th, I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. And I’m actually having a great day. Most of the time, I have great days. Today, I’m having an exceptionally wonderful day. And I’m very happy to be here doing this radio show, and being with you.
My guest today is Diana Schultz. She’s CEO of Green and Healthy Homes, and a certified building biologist and Bau-Biologie environmental consultant in Orlando, Florida, but she also talks to people on the phone, anywhere you happen to be if you need her services. Her website is GreenAndHealthyHomes.net.
Hi, Diana.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Hi, Debra. How are you today? I guess you are doing really well.
DEBRA: I’m having a really good day. Sometimes everybody has problems in their lives, or things that need to be resolved.
And then sometimes, especially in relationships, even with your friends—I’m not even talking about marriages or businesses or things.
But sometimes, you just need to discuss things, and then you discuss things, and things are a whole lot better, and you move onto a whole new level of being friends, or caring about a person, or being in love, or whatever it happens to be.
And I just had one of those discussions this morning. And I just feel really good—feel really good.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Wonderful. I know what that’s like. We do all need to share. It’s so valuable.
DEBRA: We do. We do. And it’s just important to talk about what’s going on, so that everybody can participate in coming up with a solution. And I think that that really applies to toxic chemicals too—that if we all work together, and share what we know, then we’ll end up having a less toxic world.
So Diana, tell us first what you do just briefly because we’re going to talk about that a lot. But tell us also how you got interested in this subject.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Well, as a building biologist, this is a very wide field. It’s a holistic study, and I got involved through my own searching for healthy living. And I had done studies in environmental illness and nutrition, and I actually designed and built my own home, studied Feng Shui. And actually, it was through the Feng Shui practitioner that is a Bau-Biologie, that’s B-A-U, hyphen, B-I-O-L-O-G-I-E, Bau-Biologie came from Germany about 25 years ago.
This Feng Shui practitioner was also a Bau-Biologie, and I said to myself, “What is that?”
And I went to her website, and found through her website the Institute for Building Biology. And the terms are interchangeable.
Bau translates into building.
So I was fascinated and I immediately, the next day, called the institute and said, “Tell me more.” And I realized that all of the experience that I had in my life—my background is in urban planning with environmental studies. And I had worked as an urban planner for a number of years. All of my experience came together, and it was just amazing.
And I found out that three weeks from that day, was their bi-annual conference. And I was on a plane to Nashville, got there, did not know anything, had not taken a course, had not read a book, hadn’t done anything with the training yet. And three days later, I came home, and I was just walking around my house, analyzing every surface, every material, everything.
And I couldn’t actually talk for a couple of days. My teenagers at the time were saying, “What’s wrong, Mom?”
But I hadn’t looked back. I immediately embarked upon the training. It took me just short of a year to complete my certification program with the institute, and I started my business immediately. And I have been doing inspections. I do home assessments—I come into the home , and not only share the information and explain what’s important about the things that we’re looking at, but I have meters and equipment, and I actually measure indoor air quality, electromagnetic radiation, I look at the building structure, the mechanicals, the HVAC system, the filtration on the air conditioning.
I look at the materials that people are—their furnishings, and the products that they’re using. And I can show them some of the things that they really don’t realize could be contributing to malaise, or—some people aren’t able to sleep. They’re starting to suffer things and they’re starting to put two and two together that it could be something in the house that’s causing it.
So that’s how I got started.
DEBRA: That’s a good story. That’s very interesting. I want to mention that the International Institute for Bau-Biologie actually, for many years, was here in Clearwater, Florida, where I live.
DIANA SCHULTZ: That’s right.
DEBRA: And I met Helmut Ziehe, the architect who founded it way back in the beginning when he founded it. I think we met in California when he was in California once. And so we knew each other for years before he passed away. I think—wasn’t it last year or the year before? It was just very recently.
DIANA SCHULTZ: It was just actually in January. Dear Helmut, yes. And he fortunately was able to participate in our 25th anniversary celebration last October in Washington D.C. And not to tut my own horn, but I actually was privileged to do the interview of Helmut for the video that we found and we showed at that dinner that night. And he talked about the history of building biology and how we brought it to the United States, and how he cared so much about carrying on and encouraged us to do that, and carry on this important work, of sharing this information, and helping people to have more healthy living spaces.
DEBRA: It is important work. And I know, you and I are both consultants in the same fields, but we do things slightly differently.
You are very trained to measure in a way that I’m not. I go into the home, and I look at it from my experience, that even though I don’t use a machine, I use my senses, and I use my knowledge of what’s in the materials. But I think that it’s very important, it’s very interesting to have your home measured for toxic chemicals and for radiation.
One of the things when the Institute was still here in Clearwater, I had the privilege of having one of the classes come and do all the measurements in my house as part of their final test.
And so I had about a dozen Bau-Biologie consultants here with all their machines, and everybody took measurements and told me exactly what was going on with my electromagnetic fields, and they tested the indoor air quality.
And I actually got to see that even though I had been making my house less toxic from research and experience, I had never had it measured, and I was very happy to find that it really was not toxic. But if you are trying to figure out what is the toxic chemical, it’s a good idea to have those measurements taken because then you can—
I know many people who talk to me and say, well, my husband or my wife, or whatever, they don’t understand this. They think it’s all in my head or whatever.
When you can show somebody on a test that there’s a toxic chemical, that this amount of formaldehyde in the air, and here’s where it’s coming from, and these are the health effects associated with formaldehyde, that makes a big difference.
So what you’re doing is very scientific, and we should just mention that in addition to you being available, people can go to the website for the International Institute for Building Biology and Ecology. There’s a link on your website to that and there’s a lot more information and that if you want somebody in your local area who can do this.
I’m not trying to take business away from, Diana.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Not at all.
DEBRA: But they can find local consultants that are trained as you by going to their website.
We need to take a break, and when we come back, we’ll talk some more about toxic chemicals that are found in homes, the things that Diana is looking for when she goes to do an inspection, the kinds of things that you can talk to her about on the phone if you’d like to do a consultation with her.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Diana Schultz. She’s the CEO of Green and Healthy Homes, and that’s at GreenAndHealthyHomes.net.
Diana, tell us about the instruments that you use to measure indoor air quality and what kind of chemicals you’re finding in typical homes.
DIANA SCHULTZ: We measure volatile organic compounds, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, relative humidity, ozone, particulates in the air. That’s something that a lot of people are not aware of, the particulates. We have a laser particle counter that we can determine a total count of particles and it recycles every two seconds that are in the air, and it gives us a total count.
So when I’m in a home, I usually, before I turn the meter on, I look at the flooring. Is it solid flooring or is it carpet, or is it some combination? That gives me a big clue because carpeted areas always have more particulate levels. The synthetic carpets will act with static and attract particles, so carpets are very hard to clean, to keep clean. They just attract everything, and collect everything.
DEBRA: I agree.
DIANA SCHULTZ: And so we look at the count. Usually, I look at about between 300,000 and 600,000 particles on my meter, and I tell people what I expect, so that when it comes up—it’s news to me too, whatever is there, and then I can comment on it.
Outdoor air will probably get a million, a million and a half particles, depending upon pollen in the air. This counts everything—the particles from pollen, from dust, skin dander, dog hair, molds, viruses, bacteria, it will even pick up small pieces of ink that fly around from your ink printer, believe it or not.
These are particles that are measured down to 0.3 microns in size, so we can’t see them.
So we look at that and the TIF meter is a meter that I measure combustible gases with. So if someone has a gas appliance, a gas hot water heater, stove, et cetera. I measure around the pipes and where the gas would be coming in and out. It comes up sometimes that people actually have gas leaks, and they don’t realize it. We found them in some of our classes with the students.
That’s an interesting test.
And I can also test some volatile organic compounds with that meter. Not all of them, but it’s designed to detect acetone and methane and propane and butane and those types of things that will burn. But it also picks up toluene and other toxic volatile organic compounds with a sound register.
So it sounds like a fire alarm when it catches something. And it’s always fun to show people what their laundry soap, their liquid laundry soap is doing if it’s got volatile organic compounds that could be off-gassing.
DEBRA: Volatile organic compounds being those VOCs that everybody talks about.
Could you explain? I remember many, many years ago, when I first started, when we were talking about air filters, we would talk about gasses versus particles, and that volatile toxic chemicals were gasses. And we would say, “Well, you need to get a good filter like a carbon filter that will remove gasses.”
And we didn’t pay much attention to particles because what I was looking for was toxic chemicals.
Can you explain why it’s important to consider particles with toxic chemicals?
DIANA SCHULTZ: Sure. Particles can have a static attraction as well—things that are floating around in the air. And the smaller the particles, the longer they stay suspended in the air. And they can be sticky. And they can attract viruses and bacteria and other things, and when they’re in the air, we breathe those in.
And that’s how we can get toxic things inside our bodies. That’s the method of entry.
Also, particulates can include dust mites that live on dust. And there are more than 100,000 dust mites in a single gram of dust. If you’ve ever seen a blown-up picture of what a dust mite looks like, it looks like a crab. It’s pretty horrendous-looking.
And we have those in our dust. And they live on moisture.
So one of the preferable places that they like to live is in our beds because we expand a lot of moisture while we’re sleeping.
So we recommend that you leave your bed turned down in the morning. You don’t make your bed right away, and let it dry out before you make the bed.
And then when you wash your sheets, I’m sure most of you folks know, your listeners and you too, Debra, that you wash your sheets in the hottest water that you can, to take care of dust mites and keep that population down.
They’re allergens. So allergens are in particulates. That’s why we want to look for those.
I measured a house up in Maryland. The first thing I did was look at their air conditioning system. They were complaining of respiratory problems, and the air conditioning filter was not adequate. It was a mesh filter that you could see through. Those filters may get large particles, but these filters are designed to be washed.
Well, water molecules are much larger than 0.3 microns. They go right though that mesh and that means that all the other particles that are large can also go through.
Their filter is just not adequate. So we found that first. And then we went into the den later on in the day, and the wife was complaining about the husband’s books that had been there for years and years and years.
And I went over to the bookcase and just gently touched the bookcase. And over 4-million particles were counted on my particle scan.
It was just horrendous. And it was an easy fix because they really did want to get rid of all of that anyway, and I gave them clear directions how to do that safely with not being in the room, have whoever’s doing it have masks to filter their own breathing.
So I see these situations in people’s homes, and it’s gratifying to know that they’re happy when I leave because they’ve been empowered with the methods that they can actually take action themselves.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Diana Schultz, CEO of Green and Healthy Homes. That’s GreenAndHealthyHomes.net. And when we come back, we’ll hear some more stories about what she is finding in your homes. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Diana Schultz, CEO of Green and Healthy Homes. And we’re talking about how she goes to homes, and I’m assuming, workplaces. You also do workplaces, or is that a separate category?
DIANA SCHULTZ: I have done some commercial properties, stores and offices. Generally though, we focus on the home and particularly, the sleeping area.
DEBRA: So she goes to homes and she figures out where are the toxic chemicals, and can make recommendations about how to make your home less toxic.
So Diana, tell us about some of the things that you have found in different homes, and what you did? If you can just walk us through a story of someone you did a consultation for.
DIANA SCHULTZ: One of the things I did want to share I think that’s really important is to talk to you about ozone. I just spoke with a woman on the phone this week, and she had water damage and mold. The mediators brought in ozone machines, and it just was a terrible disaster.
People were trying to self-heal or take care of their homes, thinking that ozone is going to kill mold, which it does, and bacteria, viruses, et cetera, or odors. They’re using it to do this without understanding the scientific principles about what’s going on.
Ozone is O3, and that means it’s three atoms of oxygen on one molecule. The third atom is volatile and it likes to fly off. And that’s what does the oxidizing of organic materials, mold, et cetera. But it also will synthesize other very toxic chemicals like formaldehyde.
I had a situation where the couple had come home one night. Their air handler was hanging in their garage. The bracket had come loose, and they noticed water dripping down the back wall. They called the air conditioner company who came out, fixed the bracket, opened up the panel, and she saw black in there. And she went, “Oh, what’s that?” And he said, “Oh, that’s just dirt,” and took a sleeve and wiped it off.
Three weeks later, they had their entire home—all the duct work was infested with mold and it has spread all over the house.
So, to make a long story short, I arrived on the scene, the truck was out front, taking all of their things away. In between that event and when I got there, the mold remediator had come in and brought in ozone generators which had synthesized five times the EPA limit of ozone exposure, which was extreme.
You could smell it. It was horrible. It had deteriorated the particle board and the cabinets, the leather furniture, all of their things were deteriorating.
And this woman, I talked to had the same thing—clothes were damaged, art work was damaged, photographs just disappeared.
Ozone is not healthy for indoor air space at all. And so air purifiers, now that are out on the market, are not regulated, and people are buying these—they call them oxygen generators or ozonators or ionizers. Ionizing is part of that process, and they’re producing ozone in their homes. And it could be levels that are not healthy. So, I have measured that as well.
I just want to caution people that…
DEBRA: That’s a good warning because I hadn’t heard that. I actually know quite a bit about ozone because my father used to do a lot of research on ozone for water purification. And so I know that you’re not supposed to be breathing ozone. And that if people are using ozone to clean up toxic chemicals or mold or whatever, you’re not supposed to be in the space when that’s being used.
But it’s a very powerful thing, and I don’t particularly recommend it. People write in and ask me all the time, “Well, can I use this machine?” But I don’t think that people should use that unless they really know what they’re doing, that if you want to have that kind of treatment, you should probably have somebody who knows how to do this as a professional at it.
And something like mold, you really don’t want to mess with mold. If you have a mold problem in your house, you need to have a mold mediator come in and do the right thing. I had a mold problem. This is one of the things that I found out when I had my Bau-Biologie inspection was that they found a tremendous amount of mold in my bathroom, and it was actually going into the rest of my house. And because of that inspection, I actually had to redo my entire bathroom. I had to rip everything out down to the studs, walls, floors, everything. And we had a mold test. It went to the lab, and it came back, and it showed how much mold was in my house because of dripping pipes in the wall.
It had all molded all under the bathroom, and that was the result of taking those measurements. So that’s an important thing to do.
DIANA SCHULTZ: That is. There are definite steps to take. In Florida here, we have to have a written protocol by an independent investigator, and the mold remediation company has to be a separate company, so there’s no conflict of interest there.
And the original company comes back after that and does a clearance test to make sure that they did their job properly, and there is no more mold. It’s quite a big issue.
DEBRA: It is a big issue. So what are some chemicals that you’ve found?
DIANA SCHULTZ: You had mentioned formaldehyde. One experience that we had with one of our classes, as you know, we take our students to a home as a lab, so they can experience working with the meters and equipment, and in one of the homes that we went into, there was a huge amount of formaldehyde that was being emitted from a leather couch.
So not all leather is the same, and there are companies that can produce safe and healthy leather without using formaldehyde.
That was a very, very interesting find.
Also, I did want to talk about—this is involving indoor air. We also do electromagnetic radiation, but I know we’re focusing on toxic chemicals—
DEBRA: Well, we can talk about EMFs too because I know that lots of people who are interested in toxic chemicals are interested in EMFs, and it is a health problem. But we need to go and take a break. And so let’s get into that when we come back from the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Diana Schultz, CEO of Green and Health Homes. And when we come back, we will be talking about electromagnetic fields that might be causing health problems in your home. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about indoor air pollution. My guest is Diana Schultz. She’s the CEO of Green and Healthy Homes, a certified building biologist and Bau-Biologie environmental consultant. And you can go to her website at GreenAndHealthyHomes.net.
So Diana, tell us about electromagnetic fields.
DIANA SCHULTZ: We actually measure electric, magnetic, and wireless frequencies that are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. That is measured in terms of Hertz, which are frequencies.
Our bodies resonate between 0 and 60-Hertz. Each one of our organs has a unique frequency. So we’re electrical beings. You can take an EKG, measure brain waves. We are electrical, and we’re finding now that people are feeling health effects from all of three of these types of electromagnetic radiation.
So we have the meters to measure these types of things. One segue from toxic chemicals into EMR would be the fluorescent light bulb. It has both health hazards.
DEBRA: Yes, it does.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Fluorescent light bulbs have mercury and they also emit electromagnetic fields. In other words, there’s a pulse. There is a frequency coming out of the ballast, and the bottom part of one of the new swirly fluorescent bulbs. There’s a ballast also in the tube type fluorescent bulbs. They work the same way.
And that also includes full spectrum bulbs. They have a better quality of light, but they still have the mercury and the magnetic fields coming off of them. So we don’t recommend those.
Magnetic fields are coming from the flow of current and can come from electronic equipment, appliances, three-way switches, dimmer switches, a lot of different sources in the walls from wiring errors, electrical panels, et cetera.
One of the easiest ways to protect your bedroom from electric and magnetic fields is to simply, at night, turn the breaker off in your bedroom that controls the walls. That would mean that if you had a clock radio plugged in, you would need to have a battery to power the clock radio, so you still have that functionality.
It eliminates all of that. Unless there is something coming through the floors that, if you’re on the second story, there might be lighting underneath and the ceiling, so those are things that we take a look at and measure, and really characterize the space.
Wireless frequencies are coming from one point source to another, such as a cell phone tower to a cell phone, or a router to a laptop, et cetera. These frequencies are higher and faster and are permeating every cell in our bodies. There are many, many studies, hundreds of studies now that have been reviewed in the past five years by the Bioinitiative report, if anyone wants to look that up, that are specifically discussing and finding evidence for health effects—health effects from electromagnetic radiation.
DEBRA: I remember when the Bau-Biologie’s class came to assess my house, one of the things that they did measure for was EMFs. And they had me lie on my bed, and then measure around me, so that I could see exactly what was going on with the EMFs while I was sleeping. And that was a very interesting thing to see.
But the thing that they found as being the number one source of EMFs in my particular house was my cordless phone, which I was sitting right next to all day long every day. And so it was just a very easy fix for me to just eliminate the cordless phone entirely. I’m not talking about my cell phone. I’m talking about a cordless phone like a base that you would sit on a desk.
I also had a battery back-up that I had sitting underneath my desk, connected to my computer with a surge protector and everything. And that was the second hottest item. And I was literally sitting on top of it. I was just inches away, until I removed those two things and it greatly reduced—I totally agree with you about turning off the breaker.
I don’t do that myself personally, but I have certain rooms where the EMFs have been adjusted in the rooms, so that it’s not live. And it does make a difference, but I just want people to know that there are things, like individual items, if you have cordless phones or some kind of power source, that if you would just change that one thing, that it can make a huge difference in the amount of EMFs you’re being exposed to on a daily basis.
But once again, it’s worth it to have somebody come with a meter and find out where your exposures are.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Yes, cordless phones are huge. They are 24/7, way worse than your cell phone because your cell phone pretty much stays idle. They are transmissions going through a cell phone when you’re not on a call, but it’s not as drastic an exposure level as a cordless phone.
DEBRA: People have all this attention on cell phone now. There’s all this attention on cell phones, but cordless phones are even worse.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Yes, and you can get a hardwired phone at Office Depot, or Radio Shack, whatever, $8 for a GE.
DEBRA: Very inexpensive.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Yes, and it has caller ID, call waiting, all the digital—and it does not have a wall wart or a transformer plug that plugs into the wall. The power source for these phones should be through the phone cord, through the phone jack, right in your wall.
So if you lose power, you don’t lose the phone. It’s still connected to the phone system.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. So what are some other tips for people on how they can clean up their homes?
DIANA SCHULTZ: You can move the clock radio away from your bed, or you get a battery-powered which is even better. The router that you’re using for your computer equipment is a huge source as well. And that is something that we recommend people hardwire.
We used to have local area networks, or LANs. Basically, what we’re saying is to take a cord, you can plug into the port at the back of the router, the USB port, and take an internet cable right to your laptop or right to your computer.
DEBRA: And that’s exactly what I do.
DIANA SCHULTZ: Yes, me too. You have to get into the software, and turn off the wireless portion of the router, and the wireless communications on either your desktop or your laptop as well because they will still try to transmit. So you need to turn those transmitters off.
Some people get a computer guy or a geek guy, or they know how to do that themselves and getting into their preferences of their computer.
Apple computers are very easy. You can just toggle those on and off. You should be able to toggle it on and off, so that you have control over that.
It’s huge, and we just highly recommend that people pay attention to where the cell phone towers are in your neighborhood, the new SMART meter, the power meter on the side of your house is also a digital transmitter. It’s transmitting your usage data to the utility company 24/7. That is just another big problem that if you’re interested, you could go to StopSmartMeters.org, and see a lot of information about that.
DEBRA: And also, to keep in mind with electromagnetic fields that they go right through walls. And so if you have something on the other side of a wall, to watch out for that. It could be that your best is up against a SMART meter, which is on the outside of your building, or your desk is up against the refrigerator on the other side of the wall, or something like that. And all those electromagnetic fields are just coming right through. They get blocked by methane except—well, what blocks the electromagnetic field?
DIANA SCHULTZ: The electric fields drop off pretty quickly. Those are measured in bolts per meter. Magnetic fields are measured in milli-Gauss. You cannot effectively shield magnetic fields. You need a distance away from them.
Wireless radio frequencies can be shielded. Our mitigation strategy is to eliminate the source, and that goes for any of these hazards. Eliminate the source first, then distance yourself from what’s left, and then shield if you need to as a last result.
And shielding can include shielding your walls from exterior sources like SMART meters, and cell towers, et cetera. You need to eliminate the sources inside if you’re going to do that because any wire mesh you put in the wall to shield or paint. There’s a shielding paint. There’s a lot of shielding fabric, shielding foil.
Using these things if you need to make sure that it’s not going to bounce back at you. So that’s why it’s important to measure the direction that these things are coming from because they are directional, and they do reflect and bounce.
We’re pretty good at figuring that out and then coming up with a plan for people. Sometimes you can’t do all of these things all at one time, but that’s okay. Just take it easy and do what you can, and there are good, better and best choices.
DEBRA: Diana, I have to interrupt you because we’re coming to the end of the show, and the music is going to start. Thank you for being with me. You can go to Diana’s website, GreenAndHealthyHomes.net. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Foraging & Feasting: How to Find and Eat the Wild Foods Around You
My guest today is Dina Falconi, author of Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. We’ll be talking about how you can identify wild edible plants, harvest and cook them, celebrating local bounty and traditional foodways. Dina is a clinical herbalist wit
h a strong focus on food activism and nutritional healing. An avid gardener, wildcrafter, and permaculturalist, Dina has been teaching classes about the use of herbs for food, medicine, and pleasure,including wild food foraging and cooking, for more than twenty years. She produces Falcon Formulations natural body care products and Earthly Extracts medicinal tinctures. She is a founding member of the Northeast Herbal Association, a chapter leader of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and an organizer of Slow Food-Hudson Valley. www.botanicalartspress.com/example-product.html
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Foraging & Feasting: How to Find and Eat the Wild Foods Around You
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dina Falconi
Date of Broadcast: November 26, 2014 (October 09, 2013)
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. We need to do this because there are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products in our homes, in our bodies, outdoors when we’re walking around. In fact, there are toxic chemicals everywhere even in the north pole, even in the blood of polar bears and penguins who don’t come anywhere near toxic chemicals.
So this is something we need to know about. We need to educate ourselves about, we need to know where the toxic chemicals are and we need to learn how to live without them, what are the good practices so that more toxic chemicals don’t get out in the world.
And today, we’re going to be talking about food. My guest is Dina Falconi. She has a book called BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Fiesting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. And so this is going out into the wild and getting your own food.
I had a little appetizer on that subject the other night when I was watching Anthony Bourdain’s show called Parts Unknown. And in it, he visited Copenhagen specifically to visit a restaurant called Noma that was voted three years in a row the best restaurant in the world. What they do is they forage and their whole entire menu is based on foraging.
They go out in the countryside and they also have farmers that they work with. On the farm, they don’t plant things in rows. They just put out the foods that they are wanting to cultivate along with the wild foods and that every day, it’s about just going out and seeing what’s in season and using the foods in unusual ways.
This week, if you’re listening live, this week, the show is being replayed many times on CNN. If you just go to ‘Anthony Bourdain Copenhagen’, just type that into Google, ‘Anthony Bourdain Copenhagen’, the CNN site will come up and you can see it all the times that it’s playing and you can tape it because it’s in the middle of the night now. This is well worth watching because they really talk about their philosophy on the show and why it’s important to eat locally and particularly understand and partake of the foods at the place that you live in.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today because Dina has written a fabulous book, a beautiful, fabulous book on this very subject. Hi, Dina. Thanks for being here today.
DINA FALCONI: Hi, Debra. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Now, some of you may know that Dina has been on the show before. If you enjoyed this show and you’d like to hear Dina again, you can go to the archives at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for her because we talked about another book that she has where it’s about making your own personal care products out of herbs and plants. Dina, I think I told you that I wasn’t able to find my copy of the book, but after the show, I found it. So I do have it. Even though I got it many years ago, I still have it on my shelf. It’s just that I move my books around. Sometimes, I can’t find it.
DINA FALCONI: Sure.
DEBRA: So I know that on the last show, you told us about your background, but I’m sure we have some new listeners today that don’t know anything about it. So why don’t you tell us about your home in upstate New York and how you got interested. Last time, you told us about how you got interested in making herbal personal care products. But why don’t you tell us today how you got interested in foraging.
DINA FALCONI: Sure! My interest comes – I would say, it’s a 30+ year interest. When I was a pre-teen, I got interested in holistic health through food and whole foods and the idea that food is our medicine. And so the foraging came out of that focus, out of, “Okay, what are powerful foods? What are foods that are more nutritious, more healthful?” and the wild foods really are that. And so foraging comes in to that picture. When anybody is really looking for optimal nutrition and health, really wild foods can play a huge role in our diets relative to that, to that point of view.
DEBRA: I think we should say a few words about how foraged foods and local, natural foods, they are – well, first of all, they’re in their natural state as nature intended. And so they’re not GMO, they’re not cultivated in terms of having some man-made variety. They’re just as nature-intended. And so I think they have a benefit in being that way.
But also, they’re the food that flourish in that particular place and we’re living in a place. And I think that just as – probably everybody has heard that if you have allergies, you can eat local honey and it will help your allergies. I think that eating local foods, particularly the indigenous ones, help your body live in that place.
DINA FALCONI: Mm-hmmm… that’s definitely possible. And also, to add to that, just thinking about the nutrient content and the phytochemical constituents — for example, if you look at dandelion, which is the weed that is the bane of so many different lawns and agricultural situations, this particular weed is so nutritious and has so much to offer in terms of therapeutic value that as a food, it’s a super food.
So not only the idea that it helps you to eat locally and to adapt to the ecosystem that’s also there, but just from a more even chemical point of view, if you just look and analyze the nutrient content of a dandelion leaf compared to lettuce that most people are eating, it’s got maybe 50-fold nutrient content on certain vitamins and minerals.
So just on a really basic level, nutritional level, there’s this package out there. And then the issue of bioavailability, how we can digest it since it hasn’t been tampered with. So it’s the way that nature – like you were saying, the way that nature has it on its own. We haven’t affected the germ plasma or hybridized it in any way (at least not that we know of). It’s just doing its own thing. So we’re eating something the way that nature is offering.
And we’ve co-evolved with plants and so often times, we can absorb the nutrients from these foods more than something that we’ve cultivated. So not only the content being higher, but that it’s in a package that is more familiar historically.
DEBRA: Yeah, I think that nature as a whole is designed to work together. All the parts are designed to nourish each other.
DINA FALCONI: Mm-hmmm… exactly.
DEBRA: And if we go directly to nature, we’ll get the nourishment that we need and all the elements beyond vitamins and minerals that may be in those plants. When we start doing some more man-made things, the more we affect the plant or the animal, the lesser of that direct nature contact that we have. I think it’s that aliveness factor that is in the native plants that really gives us something that cultivated plants don’t.
So I’m in 100% agreement with you of forage plants being super foods and having factors that we can’t maybe even understand, but are so valuable to our well-being.
DINA FALCONI: Definitely. I think that’s for sure. I mean, for example, the dandelion is a good thing to think about where it stimulates digestive functions, so it helps us digest our food. So things in the dandelion – not just the nutrients, but the other factors that are in dandelion like you’re saying that we may not even know what they are.
Dandelion has been used to help stimulate digestion for centuries. It’s used as a liver supportive herb, so you have what’s called the liver tonic in your food. [Inaudible 00:09:55] is actually historical, official medicine, but it’s actually a food-like medicine. So we’re bringing in the therapeutic qualities as we eat more.
In our culture, we sort of separated medicine from food and when you go back to the idea that food is your medicine and the wild plants really exhibit those qualities, they are foods and medicines. The dandelion is a great example because if you work with the dandelion, if you eat it, make tea out of it, you really benefit from the liver tonic properties as well as the nutritional content.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back. We’re speaking with Dina Falconi today. She’s the author of BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dina Falconi. She is the author of BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. And this is really an amazing book. I wish I had this many, many years ago. When I lived in northern California, just north of San Francisco, we had a lot of edible plants and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, but I knew which ones were edible.
And there was actually quite a number of people where I live who were very interested in going out and foraging the plants and eating them and identifying them and helping other people learn them.
Here where I live in Florida, there’s just virtually none of that going on. It’s been really difficult for me to find out what are the local plants that I can eat and which ones are poisonous.
Some of the features of the book is first of all, it’s an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous book that you could put on your coffee table, but I would like people to actually use it as a cookbook. But it was illustrated by a botanical illustrator and so the illustrations of the edible plants are like old botanical illustrations, all in color and all the parts. They tell you what time of year they’re in bloom and you get to see the roots and the leaves and the flowers. It’s just such a resource in that way.
And as I’m glancing through it, I see a lot of plants that we used to have in California – well, they still have them in California. I’m just not there – like red clover used to grow on the side of the street that I lived on because I lived out in the forest. It’s just a delight to look at this and have all these recipes.
And one of the things I love about your recipes is that most of them are master recipes that give away to do something an then ideas on how to make variations , which is exactly how I think. I never think in terms of “How can I make one recipe?” I think in terms of “How can I put some ingredients together? And then how can I make variations?” And so once you learn the technique of things, then it makes it a lot easier to cook I think and that’s just what you did in this book. So bravo, bravo, bravo.
DINA FALCONI: Thank you. Yeah.
DEBRA: Well, let’s go back to talking about dandelion for a minute because that’s something I think that probably anyone in any part of the country could just go out in their front yard and find. Doesn’t it grow everywhere practically?
DINA FALCONI: It grows everywhere. It’s absolutely one of the most ubiquitous weeds in the world and I think a great, great gift that most people aren’t appreciating, but rather opposite it and for not good reasons. It’s something that is a gift that we can all benefit from, so yeah, the dandelions.
DEBRA: Well, let’s just kind of start at the beginning about foraging dandelions. The first thing is that you would want to go pick some, but what are some guidelines about picking them? You wouldn’t want to pick them if you’ve sprayed pesticides all over your lawn.
DINA FALCONI: Right! I’m really encouraging people to not use herbicide, not use pesticides. Really, really, really, that’s one of the things that part of this – the theme of the book is to encourage people to meet the weeds that grow in their lawns and appreciate what’s actually showing up rather than trying to eradicate them and just have grass. So it’s the excitement around, “What’s actually coming into our lives here? On their own, what’s wild and how can we learn what those gifts are and how can we use them for food for medicine?” or just to observe.
So the dandelion comes into the lawn and aggravates all the lawn keepers, but rather than approach it from, “Oh, no! We need just grass? What’s in the grass besides grass and how can we utilize those plants?” So those you’re going to find dandelion there.
And one thing also is you do want to – you want to know where you’re picking. Try to pick from a relatively clean place. That’s something you have to assess based on where you are, so looking at habitat.
And then another thing too for listeners is we really don’t want anyone to be eating anything that they’re not 100% sure of. So when you’re just beginning, it’s good to just use to eyes to observe. It’s a language. It’s learning a new language, to key out plants. It’s very easy, but it just takes practice.
So part of the fun is to just be observers or to take some plant walks. The book is a wonderful resource and it will send people along on that journey of keying plants out properly. But I always say please do not eat anything that you don’t know.
So having said that…
DEBRA: I totally agree. One thing that I’ve done only recently (because the technology wasn’t available before), I’m carrying around my cellphone anyway and I don’t know a cellphone that doesn’t have a camera in it nowadays. So what I’ve been doing is just taking photos of different plants that I don’t know that look like they’re weeds. And then they can come back and look at those and go online and try to identify them or send the photos off to some place that may be able to help me identify them.
DINA FALCONI: Absolutely.
DEBRA: That’s been a way for me. And then, it has a date on it, so I know what season it is.
DINA FALCONI: That’s right.
DEBRA: And it is just a process of getting to know your place and what the gifts are.
DINA FALCONI: …committing some time to studying, not in a sort of boring, studious way, but in a curious way. So you’re going out there and you’re engaging with your curious. You’re watching and you’re taking photos or you’re drawing and you’re just practicing observation, your skills of observation.
DEBRA: Right!
DINA FALCONI: And then all of a sudden, things really come to life. And so you can then with confidence after some time know your plants and learn which ones are food, which ones are medicine, how to prepare them. And that’s the point of this book, it’s the gift of that. The plant pages are laid out, so they take you through observing the plant in its entire life cycle. So you’re seeing it in all the different stages and also what part at what time of year – what part you would use, how you would use it. So you can then go right from the ‘plant maps’ I call them and then it takes you to the recipe section and plug it right into a recipe.
But then like you said, it’s not limited to that plant. So you can plug different plants into different recipes. So it’s a literacy. The goals for writing the book were creating more food literacy and excitement also around plant literacy. So people are learning plants, wild plants and understanding how to cook from that perspective, but it doesn’t stop there.
DEBRA: Well, I think you certainly accomplished that. I am very excited after seeing your book to get back to learning my plants. I’m learning that literacy and especially after also seeing on TV what the restaurant Noma is doing and their excitement about really learning their plants and as you said, through all their different forms in different parts of the seasons.
We need to take a break, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio and we’ll be back with Dina Falconi talking about foraging and feasting.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is Dina Falconi, author of BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. You can see this book at BotanicalArtsPress.com. It’s a fabulous book and well worth having. Wherever you live, it will give you ideas about how to find your plants, your local plants and what to do with them even if the list in the book doesn’t exactly line up with what you have locally because plants are different everywhere you go.
Dina, I want to talk a lot about the recipes, but I have a question for you first and that is when we were talking earlier about plants in the lawn. Now, I know that in certain areas, they want you to mow your lawn all the time. I would like to just let my lawn grow and see what grows. Around the edges of my lawn, I have different things coming up and I can see what there is. But what if somebody would want to turn their whole, entire lawn area into a wild food paradise?
DINA FALCONI: That’s exactly what I think everyone should do.
DEBRA: Me too! Me too, but do you have any suggestions on how to transition from having lawn into doing that?
DINA FALCONI: Sure, so you want to create it with a sense of aesthetics. So you can have walking paths. You can perhaps put a statue somewhere. Create it so that it’s intentional. So there’s the sense of brackets around it and placements. So that’s my specialty, basically, wild gardens because I want all of the wild things to grow, but I also want it to look like a beautiful place to walk into.
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
DINA FALCONI: So you want to have your really designated walking paths and then the areas that are wild. And you can choose to plant some things as well that are edible that can hold the space. Maybe a couple of fruiting bushes or a small fruit tree, like a dwarf fruit tree. And then under that, you can allow a lot of the different weeds to grow like chickweed and violet.
So you’re creating this edible landscape that you will also put in maybe a couple of cultivated items, but you’re really allowing the wild.
And you as the tenderer of that landscape can shape it. It isn’t like everything has to be crazy-looking. You can clip it back. You can make it look attractive, so that it’s intentional. And then people will have curiosity and want to walk into it rather than it looks sort of like a neglected zone, which is also I feel lovely. Personally, I’m attracted to those. But if you’re in a township where that’s of concern, then you have to work with a little bit more of an aesthetic approach, but you can still really encourage the lamb’s quarters, the chickweeds and the dandelions and all of that, but you shape it in a way that makes a viewer feel that they’re in a cared for place.
DEBRA: Yes, I like that idea. And also, you could just take a certain area. You wouldn’t have to do all your lawn at once especially if you need to heal your lawn. If it’s had pesticides on it, you might want to stop using pesticides and do some things to decontaminate your soil or whatever and set aside an area that’s now going to be the ‘wild area’ and maybe put marigolds or something around the edges so that it has some attractiveness, but you’re allowing that particular area to go back to nature.
Can’t you also buy – I guess they would be considered seeds for native plants?
DINA FALCONI: You can buy seeds for native seeds. This particular approach that I’m talking about though is to really – yes, absolutely. You can put native plants in. But really, it’s to open your eyes to what actually exists already where you live.
DEBRA: Right.
DINA FALCONI: So they’re not always native. They’re actually invasives. And part of the book is – how would I say it kind of popping up or seen the virtues in the invasive species and learning about them and how…
DEBRA: Tell us something about that because I know there’s been arguments. Where I used to live in California, I lived in a rural area where there is actually a habitat and they were invasive plants. And so people were constantly ripping out the invasives. But there’s also the argument for the fact that if something blows in and starts growing there, well that’s the natural thing to have happen. So tell us your viewpoint about that.
DINA FALCONI: Well, I’m thinking along the lines of – for example, we have garlic mustard here in the northeast. It’s considered an invasive. A lot of people are really preoccupied with removing it. And so my thinking is it’s actually a really tasty edible. You can use the roots, the leaves, the seeds. It’s featured in the book. It’s one of our pages. Two of the pages are to garlic mustard.
And so the idea is to learn about the invasive species and what their benefits are and then within your ecosystem, understanding how it can play a role there. So maybe you don’t let it go crazy, but you appreciate its uses and you eat it as a way of controlling it. You know about it.
DEBRA: Exactly! I love that idea because while you were talking, I was just sitting here thinking where people could see it as being invasive and rip it out and just put it in a pile, you take it to the dump or whatever or they could say, “This is invasive, but it has all these uses, then let’s put it to use. And then it will be controlled.”
DINA FALCONI: Absolutely, exactly.
DEBRA: In the south, we have something – kudzu or something…
DINA FALCONI: Yeah, it’s actually honoring or being curious to learn what presents itself and then understanding, “Okay, this is invasive, I see. How is it used? Oh! Well, you know what? This is an amazing pesto. This is an amazing salad. This makes horse radish. This is all garlic mustard. The seeds are used for making mustard condiment.”
So here we have an invasive species. Everyone is really angry at it. I’m not saying to let it take over the world…
DEBRA: No.
DINA FALCONI: …but that it’s arrived and so I’m glad to have it and I’ll be looking forward to make pesto for this book signing event I need to do this weekend at the Green Market, New York City. I want to find my garlic mustard. I don’t want it eradicated, but I don’t want it to take over my golden field patch.
So that’s the concern. Where you live, how does it relate to what you have and how do you control it? So I don’t want it to take over everything, but I really want it. And so learning about how they grow, which is part of the book’s theme (to understand the growth of a plant and how it reproduces), so you can control it or you can allow it to spread depending upon what your needs are within your ecosystem, your landscape, that kind of thing.
What were you going to say?
DEBRA: Well, I wanted to just say that by us understanding these plants, we can control so that they don’t become invasive, that they become invasive because we’re not partaking of their gifts. We’re just letting them go and not gift to us. That’s what makes a plant invasive.
DINA FALCONI: I mean, I’m also a believer – I mean, I understand. I want to protect habitats and I want to have diversity and that’s for sure something as a plant person. But at the same time, so many of the plants were invasive, are invasive are so useful. So I don’t want to shut them out at all. There’s a gift.
DEBRA: I agree with you. We have to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Dina Falconi, author of BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Feasting. We’ll be right back after this to talk more about wild foods and how you can use them and enjoy them.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dina Falconi, author of BotanicalArtsPress.com Foraging & Feasting. You can find this book at BotanicalArtsPress.com. It’s just an amazing book. There’s so much information in here. Right now, I’m looking at a page. There’s seasonal harvest charts, so you can look up for the plants in the book, exactly when to harvest it. And then there’s a chart with culinary uses.
So Dina, let’s talk about your recipes. Which one is your favorite recipe?
DINA FALCONI: I knew you were going to ask that and I can’t say, I love too many of them. It’s definitely – well, I recently made the fruit mousse pie, which is made with a raw press crust and a raw raspberry puree. It’s just delicious and divine. That’s really like class – you know, people love it, the class that I’m teaching.
DEBRA: Well, just describe that more, what it’s like and how to make it.
DINA FALCONI: Describe that more?
DEBRA: Yeah, just so people can get an idea of the kind of recipes that you have.
DINA FALCONI: That’s an all raw pie, but you are soaking and drying the nuts or seeds that you choose to use in the crust. That day, I made it with a pumpkin seed soaked and dried crust with coconut, dried coconut and apricots, dried apricots. And so those are ground together into a fine kind of a meal. And then you press that into your pie crust [inaudible 00:40:18]. And then you are heating up just gently some of the fruit puree. And then you are – I’m being distracted, I’m sorry. Okay, and then you’re getting a good grass-feed beef gelatin and that’s what you’re using to stiffen it to give it a kind of a body. So it’s like an old world jello.
And you’re using a little maple syrup, a little bit of honey to sweeten it. That’s just put into the refrigerator and it solidifies in about two or three hours. You have this very elegant, full flavored all-natural pie.
DEBRA: Mmmm… that sounds really good.
DINA FALCONI: It’s so good. It’s so good. I mean, I have other delicious recipes. I really love the wild greens, the wild amaranth, leaves, the lamb’s quarter. Those are really tasty pot herbs. That’s a term that we use for plants you put into a pot and cook. But really, those plants can be sautéed, steamed, turned into soups, made into quiches or into casseroles. I love the dishes that features something like that, the amaranths, greens. They’re just delicious.
Even just with a little bit of water, you cook them and then drain any residual water, adding either your choice of a good cold pressed olive oil or good grass-fed butter, a pinch of salt, lemon juice or good vinegar, it is divine. Just simple greens. Wild greens has so much good flavor.
Let’s see what else to say? I mean, this book is not vegetarian although it celebrates the fruits and vegetables. There is a small section called the ‘Animal Kingdom Entrees’. And there is in there the cottage pie, which is just lovely. You’re making a topping with mashed potatoes and burdock root. That’s topping a grass-fed beef base that has wild bergamot and different herbs that are seasoning the meat part and that’s baked. It’s a kind of a shepherd’s pie. It’s called cottage pie.
DEBRA: So it sounds like you’re taking some familiar recipes like shepherd’s pie that people would know, but you’re then adding the local ingredients that you’re finding.
DINA FALCONI: Well, you’ve got it. These are classic recipes. So there’s 100 recipes and they’re classic recipes. You’ll recognize them, but they are celebrating or integrating the wild plants into those classic recipes.
So you have gratins and quiches and soups. There’s a whole beverage section. Actually, a really I think wonderful beverage section, which seems to be lacking in most cookbooks. So I’ excited about that.
And so you have these basic master recipes that are templates that you’ll find in the Art of French Cooking and The Joy of Cooking and classic cookbooks. But they’re pulled out of there and they’re turned into whole food versions. So really, I try to use all the recipes contain the most natural ingredients that we can find and use, the most helpful without sacrificing deliciousness (I mean, because the recipes are really delicious), but also looking for that healthful and therapeutic, medicinal quality that food should have so that it actually nourishes us, but it’s also delicious.
And so yes, the idea was to take templates of recipes that I use, that one would use and then integrate the wild into that or if you don’t have wild, then yes, replace the lamb’s quarter with Swiss chard or spinach.
Also, the fun of the cookbook is to play with a little bit of pushing the edge with flavors. So it’s playing with ice creams and seeing how far you can go with an ice cream flavor like a lemon bomb peach ice cream or sacred basil ice cream.
Also, doing things like condiments, making different ketchups with elderberries or with black currants.
DEBRA: Yeah, that sounds so good.
DINA FALCONI: Yeah, it’s really – yeah.
DEBRA: One of the things that I’ve learned about cooking – I started cooking when I was sick. I’ve been cooking for a long time and I’ve gone through many, many stages about cooking. And one of the things that I’ve learned is that there basic foods. One of the things that I eat a lot of is organic chicken. It’s just an easy way to get that organic protein there. But you can get tired of eating chicken day in and day out and people are always looking for ways, “What can I do with chicken?”
But the thing that is so wonderful about cooking is that you can make so many sauces and relishes and salsas and condiments, all these condiments. You can just take that basic thing, like you were saying, ketchup and instead of making it out of tomato, you can make it out of something else and you can put in different spices and things. And you start putting these little home-made sauces that are seasonal and local on your chicken and you’re not eating the same chicken every night.
DINA FALCONI: That’s right. You can slice that chicken that you roasted onto a beautiful wild salad. You can use it as a taco filling. You can use it in your sandwich. You can have it with a blueberry chutney and it’s not the same chicken.
DEBRA: Boy, that sounds really good. I make a lot of chutney because I love that sweet and tangy flavor and the heat in it. Whatever is the fresh fruit of the season, I make chutney out of it and it always just taste different.
I mean, we’re coming up on pomegranate chutney season. I love that.
DINA FALCONI: Mmmm… mmmm… absolutely.
DEBRA: I make cranberry chutney. Sometimes, I put the pomegranate in with the cranberries and make chutney. I make cooked chutney, but I also make raw chutney. I just take all those same chutney things that you would put in a cooked chutney and I put it in a bowl and just eat it raw. It’s fabulous, fabulous.
There are so many things that we can do with these foods if we just apply our creativity and start and learning what these different foods have to offer. Whether they’re foods that we grow or foods that we forage or foods that we buy, learning the food and what its gifts are and how to pair it with other things and learning those basic master recipes I think is the key to cooking, to knowing how to cook.
It’s not about following a new recipe every day. It’s about knowing how to cook.
DINA FALCONI: And part of the layout of the recipe section is so that you really feel confident about a technique, so you are held really tightly. Your hands are held through the process, but then your creativity is also allowed to flow. So it’s not like, “Here you go, throw this together.” It’s actually step-by-step and now you’re ready to go, “Here, these are the options” and it goes on and on. So it’s that dance where you’re getting really good instruction and you’re being held and then you’re also given the strength to kind of fly and go with the techniques and see, “Well, where can you go with it with creativity? What’s in season? What can you do with that particular fruit or vegetable or meat or grain” or whatever like that, yeah.
It’s a celebrating of flavors. It’s kind of the thing too with the raw foods. You really can play with the food. I think that’s where Noma comes in. They’re really pushing the edge on food.
DEBRA: They really are. And in addition, if you haven’t seen the show, I really encourage you to see it. And everybody listening, it’s so fascinating because in addition to the restaurant, they have what I can only call a ‘food laboratory’ where they do science experiments about food. They ferment them, they dry them. They are just, say, take a food and they say, “What are all the things we can do it?”
And that’s just what I do. That’s my basic question. “Here are the foods that I can eat, the ones that make me healthy, the ones that are local to my place, the ones that I can get organic. And now, what do I do with them?” It’s a creative adventure. Your book certainly is a worthy tool to help people do that.
So we’ve come to the end of our time, Dina.
DINA FALCONI: Well, thanks for having me again.
DEBRA: Well, thank you. And I’m going to be really cooking out of this book very soon. Best of luck with it. You can go to BotanicalArtsPress.com to get her book.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, you can go and listen to it again because everything is archived. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and all the archives shows are there. There’s more than a hundred of them now. I’ll be back tomorrow with another one, Toxic Free Talk Radio. Thank you.
A New Kind of Natural Bed
My guest today is Eliana Jantz, founder of Shepherd’s Dream (which is now owned and run by her daughter Sarah Sunshine Smith). Eliana has taken another step in the innovation of using wool to make beds with her new business, Heartfelt Collective. We’ll be talking about her new venture, mattress design, and her experience with wool. Eliana has been a pioneer in the creation of wool beds for the past three decades and has worked closely with her wool growers to develop organic standards for wool (I helped write them). We have been friends for years. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/heartfelt-collective, www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/shepherds-dream.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A New Kind of Bed
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Eliana Jantz
Date of Broadcast: October 08, 2013
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.
Sometimes, we talk about what’s toxic. Sometimes, we talk about how to be less toxic. And some days, like today, we talk about going way outside of the box and being very much in harmony with nature.
It’s Tuesday, October 8th. And my guest today is Eliana Jantz. She’s the founder of Shepherd’s Dream, which has been a very popular mattress and bedding company for many years. And she now has a new business called Heartfelt Collective in which she is making beds like you’ve never seen before. I guarantee it.
Eliana is really oriented to the big view design. Most companies that are making natural beds are taking the regular American bed or European—the regular industrial bed—and swapping out the materials. Eliana, from the beginning, has always been thinking outside of this design box to be looking at universal principles for bed design, holistic approaches with local sourcing of materials, geographical and cultural perspectives, and designs from indigenous cultures.
And we’re going to talk about all of these things today and see what she’s up to.
Hi, Eliana.
ELIANA JANTZ: Hi, Debra. It’s great to be on the show with you. Thanks for inviting me.
DEBRA: It’s great to have you on the show!
ELIANA JANTZ: Oh, thank you.
DEBRA: First, I’m just going to tell everybody that Eliana and I have been friends for I don’t know how many decades.
ELIANA JANTZ: I think we met in the early ‘90s, so over 20 years.
DEBRA: I think it was earlier than that because I think I put you in my very first book, Non-Toxic & Natural in 1984. And I think I contacted you because I was looking for some kind of natural bed something to put in my book. And what you were doing was selling patterns and materials so that people could make their own mattresses.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes, like the traditional Japanese futon.
DEBRA: That’s right. And that’s how we met.
So, before we get into talking about beds, what you are doing is so unusual. Tell us just a little bit about how you got into doing such a different thing. What inspired you in the beginning?
ELIANA JANTZ: We’re all conditioned by our culture. So we grow up with certain beds, and that’s how we start. We started with beds that were developed in this century. Before that, for eons, people were doing the kind of bed that I’m doing now. So,
I’ve come back to what was the ancient bed.
After we got off track a little bit there in the 1900s, when they introduced—
DEBRA: Industrial beds.
ELIANA JANTZ: —synthetics, yes. And latex foams, polyurethane foam, and then the Memory Foam, that got everybody way off track—even more now with toxic materials. And very intensive, mechanical, industrial process is also toxic to the planet.
What I wanted to set as an intention for today, for our talk today, is to de-mystify the whole subject of mattress for people.
DEBRA: And we’re going to do that. What I’d like to do is just start with the inspiration just to introduce you to our listening audience. I’d like to hear, and I think everybody likes to hear, what was that a-ha moment that you led out of the industrial bed into searching for a difference choice. And then we’ll talk about the nightmare of industrial beds. And we’ll talk about your big design picture.
ELIANA JANTZ: Sounds good. The very first thing that was the a-ha moment was when I saw the first handmade organic cotton—it wasn’t organic, it was a cotton futon made in the traditional Japanese way. And it was so beautiful to me. And it was the first real piece of furniture, definitely the first bed, that made sense.
And so, I was elated. I have a natural love for good design, basic design, for our life, to enhance our lives with. So this was a natural material that I was attracted to, and I started to then conduct workshops so that people could make their own bed.
And then, I just continued on with evolving according to what the feedback was from the people who were buying my beds.
What we found was that cotton tended to—
Shall I go into this now? How that evolved from the cotton?
DEBRA: Yes, go ahead.
ELIANA JANTZ: We started with cotton bedding, which is typically done in Japan—though they also use wool, and love to.
But it’s a more precious resource. The cotton was the most common. And we began there.
What we found was that by translating it over to the American industrial culture, that it didn’t translate well because people were used to thick mattresses, and the cotton futon was made very thin in Japan, and then aired out and kept dry.
Here, they began to collect moisture from the sleeping body, which is a very moist place, the bed. And it would, over time, start to mildew. It wasn’t the right balance of airing with the quality of that material and the design of that product.
DEBRA: I think we should also say about, in Japan, the way they use a futon is completely different than how we use a mattress. They’re very thin, and they go on top of tatami mats which can breathe. So there’s air circulation.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes, even though it’s minimal.
DEBRA: And they’re so lightweight. They’re more like our comforters in terms of weight. So you can just pick them up and take them out on the balcony, and put them over the railing. And during the day time, they roll them up and put them away. There aren’t even beds like we have bedrooms.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes, it’s integrated into their day, night life, the whole maintenance of it. They respect the fact that these products require maintenance. So they have a relationship that way in their day. And they’re very efficient with space.
And a tatami mat is the other component that I think is a raw material that’s prevalent and available to humans that makes a good partner to the felts, the wool felts, in creating a bed.
So, the tatami mat and the futon was the Japanese version. We took that in, started making thicker mattresses, had the problem of mold and hardness and unwieldiness, and then explored and found that wool was the solution for the issues that we were encountering there.
And we were very delighted to discover that wool has all these other qualities that benefit us so much. And so now, we’re wholeheartedly committed to the use of wool. And I, through Heartfelt Collective, we use only wool in our materials now, so that it’s completely consistent.
DEBRA: Tell us about the benefits of wool. We’re going to need to go to a break very soon, but we have enough time to just hear about wool.
ELIANA JANTZ: First thing people don’t realize on a bed, you want to know what the microclimate is going to be like. Most people pay attention to the quality of support, but they forget about the microclimate, so they lay on foam for a few minutes, and think, “Yes, it’s supporting me well.” But over a period of time, it’s really not. It’s actually holding your body heat close to you, and so you’re not able to easily make the balance of temperature needs in the body.
With wool, you’re completely supported with very efficient temperature regulation. So you’re going to sleep deeper and better without being woken.
And also, moisture—moisture on wool—you can have moisture going into the wool underneath you, but you won’t feel it as moisture because the wool is so incredibly dynamic at spreading that moisture out, so it will still feel dry, and it is drying as well, so the bed stays dry.
And this is a healthy bed. A dry bed is a healthy bed.
DEBRA: I live in Florida, and last night, it’s 83-degrees all night. And so there’s a lot of perspiration that goes on here, but I have your Shepherd’s Dream wool mattress, and on top of that, I have a wool topper, and on top of that, I have a wool felt. And my bed is always comfortable and never sweaty.
And we need to go to break, but we’re going to come back with a lot more information, interesting information you’ve never heard before about beds.
My guest today is Eliana Jantz. Her new business is Heartfelt Collective. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about extraordinary beds.
But before we talk about your wonderful solution, Eliana, let’s talk about the nightmare of modern industrial beds because I know you want to talk about that, so tell us about that.
ELIANA JANTZ: Well, the reason I want to talk about it is because people are still under the impression that they don’t realize they have options other than this because it’s so prevalent. And the advertising budgets are so massive that people are inundated everywhere with this idea that Tempur-Pedic mattresses are—especially the Tempur-Pedic and Memory Foam are everywhere. Costco has it.
They’re very readily available, probably Wal-Mart has one, a Memory Foam now. And progressive people are buy these thinking that they are more healthy. But it turns out that they’re not.
This all started in the 20’s and 30’s. In the 20’s, the first latex was created, and it was created for British royalty.
DEBRA: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes. They’re the only ones that could afford them. Everybody else was sleeping on a variety of natural materials in different construction techniques, but simple mattresses, sometimes just fiber-filled.
And then the springs came about in the 30’s, so that’s when we started getting inner springs. The original ones were like the buggy that people would ride around in. They liked that feeling under their butt.
Then they translated it to the mattress and thought this is great, and then had a big advertising push on that, and really convinced everybody that this is the way to sleep.
Well, it turns out, we know [inaudible 00:12:11] biology has done all the research and shown that the metals are actually doing havoc with your natural electromagnetic field around your body. So that’s not a good idea. And then the bounciness is actually not a good idea either because it compromises your ability as an intelligent body to position itself correctly.
You have this give underneath you that doesn’t let you feel where ground is. And so you’re confused about how to position yourself. So it has that downfall.
And then once foams became prevalent—in the 30’s, they began using the foam materials, polyurethane materials, in the mattresses, along with a host of other chemicals that would create flame resistance or bug resistance or who knows what.
So you end up with this bed full of synthetic and toxins, toxic materials. And now, they’re still, even now, selling everybody on this Tempur-Pedic, which is the worst, probably, of all of them. It tends to overheat more than regular foam than the original polyurethane foam or latex. And it has very toxic side effects.
I’m sure you’ve heard from people on that one, right, Debra?
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely.
ELIANA JANTZ: And the Memory Foam and Tempur-Pedic, a lot of people have had big problems with that. And it’s brought on symptoms to their lungs or breathing, and so forth.
The only reason—it’s very well-promoted, and that’s why people are convinced that this must be okay, but it’s really not.
So what a lot of the organic mattress makers are doing now is making beds more or less the traditional inner spring, box spring or version of latex mixed with natural materials, but looking very much the same as really the old, big mattresses.
I’m not a big fan of big, bulky mattresses because it’s very difficult to take care of them.
DEBRA: When I started having natural mattresses all those many years ago, I had a cotton futon, but I think it was 8 or 10-inches thick, and I couldn’t move it. And then I had a wool mattress that was very thick. Before I got yours, I had a wool mattress that was very thick.
I remember my ex-husband used to call it the elephant because I would try to lift it, and I couldn’t. It was so thick that you would actually perspire. And then I had these perspiration stains on the mattress cover, and it got so bad that the cover actually wore through.
And then I just had a big lump of wool with a ripped cover, and it did not take many years for this to happen.
So what I finally ended up with was yours. And yours works because it’s layered.
ELIANA JANTZ: Layer is one of the design principles that I come up with. Layers, it’s so sensible. And we’ve now gotten to with the layered felt bed to where you have however many layers, 6 to 10 layers of felt, each of them weighs only six to eight pounds.
It can be easily, individually taken out to sun. It’s just an easy, beautiful thing. Anyone can do it. So yes, that’s jumping ahead a little bit too.
DEBRA: That’s jumping ahead a little bit, and we have another break coming up in about 30 second. And I want to introduce your bed properly, so that people understand what’s happening.
ELIANA JANTZ: And I’d like to talk a little bit more about the wool fiber too, and it’s health qualities a little more as well.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Well, we will do all of that when we come back from this break. My guest today is Eliana Jantz, and she’s the founder many years of Shepherd’s Dream, which I know many people love, and I love, and I have a Shepherd’s Dream bed. And now, she has a new more advanced, more ancient design with her beds from Heartfelt Collective, which we’re going to talk about very soon.
I’m Debra Lynn, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m 10 seconds short. I got the clock wrong.
I think that the wool be is the way to go. I have a wool bed with a wool mattress, a wool topper, a wool comforter, a wool pillow, and everything is wool.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, my guest is Eliana Jantz, who is the founder of Shepherd’s Dream, and she now has a new bedding company called the Heartfelt Collective Beds at HeartfeltCollective.com.
And I encourage you—we’re going to describe the bed, but I encourage you to go to her website at HeartfeltCollective.com, and actually, look at what we’re talking about because when I first saw the pictures of these mattresses, it took my breath away. It was such a deep primal recognition of, yes, this is the bed—
ELIANA JANTZ: It makes sense.
DEBRA: It makes sense. It totally makes sense. But I want to back up just for a second before we talk about this bed because one of the innovations that Eliana made in Shepherd’s Dream was this whole idea of layering that instead of having one thick mattress, like the general industrial mattress and also most natural fiber mattresses follow the same model.
What she did was she made thinner mattresses out of wool, and then you could pile them up to be whatever thickness you wanted, whatever firmness you wanted, and you put them on a wood slat bed, so that there is—a wood slat frame, so that there is circulation around it.
And that’s what I’ve been sleeping on for years. And it just makes sense to me.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes. And the wool is what we arrived at fully. Before we were doing layers filled with cotton as well, but wool turned out to be the ideal material, so it actually is on our basic design principles is use of wool only, and the use of wool as felt because as soon it’s felted, now, it’s a maintainable and washable layer for your bed mattress.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about the Heartfelt because it’s so, so different. Just describe it, Eliana. Describe it.
ELIANA JANTZ: So these felts, we discovered that we could take this fresh bedding that we were having delivered from our carding mill here in Montague. And through a wet felting process, we could come up with a stable, felted pad that was wool.
So when I saw that, that was it. It was the very fulfilling, almost last step with the wool because where can you go from that?
It’s as simple as it can get. And it’s very easy to maintain, and it’s just a natural for so many things in our domestic lives.
DEBRA: And the felt are washable.
ELIANA JANTZ: They’re washable. They’re washable.
DEBRA: So anybody who is concerned about having a bed that they need to wash it, and get the dust mites out, or they need to take it outside and put it in the sun, or they need to beat it like rug, or anything like that.
When I look at these pictures—I have a felt on my bed. I actually got one of the first felts, not number one, but one of the early felts on my bed. And it makes such a difference to have the wool just right there.
ELIANA JANTZ: It really is amazing.
DEBRA: Under the sheet. It really makes a difference.
ELIANA JANTZ: It’s about a third of an inch thick. And it doesn’t seem like much, but it really does provide a lot of give.
There’s springiness in the wool fiber. That’s another reason.
DEBRA: There is, and an absorption that’s just right there under the sheet. That’s [inaudible 21:18] sheet and my wool felt.
Thinking back to this whole idea of the futons in Japan, I’m looking at these pictures on your website, and I could just see if I had one of these beds, I could just take and roll up the felts, and take them wherever I wanted to take them, and I’ll lift the bed again.
That you don’t need to figure out how you’re going to get the mattress down the stairs, or how can you lift it or whatever. It’s completely nomadic.
ELIANA JANTZ: And it’s an heirloom. It’s going to last you a lifetime, and you pass it on.
That’s a piece about mattresses that are common out there. The box spring, inner spring and the foam mattresses, that they end up in a landfill in about 10 or 15 years. That’s the life span they’re given. And then you have to start again with another—
DEBRA: And garbage. But this will last for so long.
ELIANA JANTZ: This is an heirloom that will go on and on.
And so when I just saw that felt, I was excited, and I was talking about the idea of a layered felt mattress for years, seven years now, or eight years.
And finally, last year, after working on developing the technique for wet felting, I put one together and developed a way of lacing it into a unit that looks more like a mattress. And so when people saw that, they realized, “Oh, that’s what she was talking about. That’s great.”
DEBRA: And when I saw that lacing, I went, “Oh, my god. This is what it should look like.”
But even if it wasn’t laced, you could still just pile them up.
ELIANA JANTZ: It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful. It’s beautiful. It’s a sacred little touch at the end. But it’s not really necessary for the design of the product. You could just layer felts on top of each other without the closure, for people who are that way.
I’m that way—minimum maintenance. So I can just grab felts as I need to, rather than unlacing and relacing. But it can be done either way.
So these felts are placed on top of the slatted frame, and the slatted frame is very closely spaced, less than an inch, three-quarters of an inch or less, and the slats are two and a half inches wide. And so those can be ordered from Shepherd’s Dream, but you can make them yourself too.
And then the layers are just placed on top of that closely slatted frame. And people will use anywhere from 5 layers to 12 layers for their mattress.
DEBRA: So I see in one of these pictures that you have one tied up in a roll like a pillow. So are you using them for pillows too?
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes. They make great bolsters. We use the yoga mat as a two-person pillow bolster where we can both use it, talking to each other, laying down, or resting. Or for whatever reason, they’re great for mattress on massage tables or floor massage or yoga, stretching.
They have so many uses. They can be used as wall felt. We have a whole room now done with our wall. We just put the felt right over the studs, and it just makes it really cozy. You think you’re in a [unintelligible 24:53].
DEBRA: So you’re using it instead of sheetrock? You just put it up the studs and then stretch the felts? What a great idea. And so does this act as soundproofing too?
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes. It just makes it a very cozy, sweet space. And it can be taken down and washed. So yes, it goes on and on.
The wool, or animal furs, or sheep skin, or sheep wool, has been with us forever. It’s the ultimate companion for humanity. It helps make life easier and support us through our healing and balancing process.
DEBRA: I agree. We need to take another break, but we’ll be back with more. We’re talking with Eliana Jantz about her new business, HeartfeltCollective.com, where they’re making beds out of wool felts, just layers of wool felts.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Eliana Jantz of Shepherd’s Dream and HeartfeltCollective.com. And we’re talking today about her new wool felts that she’s making, and how she’s putting them together to make a mattress, but they also have other uses.
Eliana, I’m looking at your other uses for felts page. Do you want to tell us what some of those are? We already talked about some, but are there any others you’d like to mention?
ELIANA JANTZ: Well, they make a great car seat pad. That’s another place you spend a lot of time where you want to have that quality, but wonderful wool next to you. And again, the microclimate being the most ideal you could have.
I mentioned the floor stretching. If you’re a floor person like me, I spend all my time at home on the felt doing everything I do.
But it’s wonderful for a floor massage.
There are so many things. We want to continue to develop other products, as we’re getting organized as a collective, making these felts. It’s going to give us an opportunity to work together, those of us who are…
DEBRA: There are so many things. I’m looking at these pictures here. There’s this adorable picture, on the homepage, of a little girl. She’s just wrapped in a felt. And part of it is under her as the pad, and part of it is over here as the blanket.
And I just look at that and I go, “I just want to be wrapped up in a felt.”
It’s so wonderful.
And also, you can cut them. So if people buy a particular-sized felt, they can just cut pieces. Like here, you have it pictured as a chair pad, which I think I should get a felt for that. And you can put as many layers as you want.
And the neck roll—wool comes in different natural colors. Mine is charcoal grey, but it also comes in regular kind of cream color.
There’s so much you could do with these. I would actually love to have a coat made out of one of these felts.
ELIANA JANTZ: We’ll get to that, Debra. We will.
DEBRA: We’re almost to the end of our hour. Eliana, would you tell us something about your collective, and how your whole business has grown up there in Montague, California, and all the interconnected pieces?
ELIANA JANTZ: So we moved here in 2002 because Patrick Colon had developed this carding mill, and we were in need of a wool that was processed to the quality that we were looking for, which was hard to find at the time.
And so this was a real godsend to us to have a mill close by where we could source our wool.
So it was, in fact, such a big deal. We moved to Montague where the mill was set up. And we’ve been here now 11 years.
And that mill was put together by Patrick Colon, who passed away a couple of years later, and then was taken over by my now son-in-law, who’s now the owner and manager of the mill. They’ve since set up a second mill and they provide almost, probably most of the organic mattress companies on the West Coast with the wool.
And then Sarah, my daughter, took over ownership of the company we started in ’97, Shepherd’s Dream. And so that is, in fact, the operations for that is humming away right underneath me here as I speak. I’m on the second floor right above the workshop.
And I love this integration with Shepherd’s Dream. They’ve been really supportive of me during this process of [inaudible 00:29:56] the felt bed. And in fact, if you go to their website, you’ll see that the layered felt bed is the first thing, an option that they list for mattress.
And since they did, we’ve had a lot of orders coming. And so I’ve been training new felters who are joining the collective, and we’re up to three felters now doing this as a full livelihood. With the way that the orders are continually increasing, we’ll be adding more felts as we go.
We’re going into a paradigm, in terms of how our life feels, and how we work. It’s set up so that we all have maximum flexibility.
And yet, we’re working together and collaborating.
We have cottage industry set up in pods, at certain locations, home locations, where up to six felters can join that pod.
Also, the whole financial aspect of how Heartfelt Collective works is completely transparent to all members of the collective.
And so we are truly exploring new models for how we can run a production, distribution system.
So it’s very exciting for me.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful. The whole time that I’ve known you all these many years, you’re always looking to see how can we be closer to nature, how can we be less industrial and more human.
I admire this so much about you because you’re not only are envisioning these things, but you’re actually putting them into practice, and you’re bringing people together around you, who are wanting to explore these new ideas with you.
And I think that this is really the way things should be made.
ELIANA JANTZ: People resonate with it.
DEBRA: And I feel that when I’m sleeping on my bed at night. I know where it came from. I have been to visit Eliana in Montague several times. I have slept in the Shepherd’s Dream showroom, workshop, where they make the mattresses. I know exactly where she’s sitting upstairs, talking to us, because I’ve been in that room too.
ELIANA JANTZ: To mention also, Shepherd’s Dream has a guest room where you can try out the wool mattress that they make, which is a five-inch wool mattress on a slatted frame.
You can just call Shepherd’s Dream if you’re coming through this way, and book a night, and try it out, and if you end up buying a mattress, they credit you that. It’s $35 a night to stay on a beautiful space with a wool bed, with a shower and bath. So it’s fun.
DEBRA: It is. If you’re looking for a non-toxic place to stay, it’s near Ashland, Oregon. So if you’re wanting to go on a trip to Ashland, go stay at Shepherd’s Dream because it’s the most non-toxic place you’ll ever stay. It’s wonderful. Unless you stay at my house, of course.
ELIANA JANTZ: And then when you come here, you can come up to my studio, and try out the layered felt bed as well, and see how it’s done because our school is located here as well where we’re felting away most days.
DEBRA: I think that it’s worth the trip if you’re anywhere nearby. I’ve even driven from the San Francisco Bay Area up to—it’s near Mount Shasta. So it’s about a 4-hour drive from San Francisco.
ELIANA JANTZ: It’s right off the I5. We’re five miles east of the I5.
DEBRA: It’s a big straight shot on the I5 to go north, but it is about four hours. And then you just go down a little country road, and you go and see, and it’s just an incredible example of what can be done. And it’s a nice drive.
ELIANA JANTZ: Yes, this little town is—
DEBRA: It’s just a little town, but it’s a wonderful thing to see, and just go try out the beds, and you can see the sheep along the way.
We only have a couple of minutes left, Eliana. I’m so glad that you are with me today. Do you have any closing words you’d like to say?
ELIANA JANTZ: The main thing I want everybody to know is you can create a wonderful bed, and you don’t have to be confused by all the many, many options out there that sound very confounding. Just think about basic principles, and then just slowly design your bed, and create it, and we can help you.
So we have plans and instructions for how to do slats and so forth. So if you are in a do it yourself camp, then we can help you with that too. You can call Heartfelt and order directly from us. And you can set up a consultation with us by e-mailing us right straight from the website. And Shepherd’s Dream is right there to provide the products, like the frame, and latex strips.
So it’s full service, every component of a bed, you can be surrounded in wool, and that is the best way to be when you’re sleeping.
DEBRA: And I would also say that if budget is a concern that you can buy these things piece by piece. You could start out buying a felt, and then buy another felt. And pretty soon, you’ll have enough to get rid of your old mattress.
So it’s not like you need to invest thousands of dollars all at once.
And even by the time you’re done with it, it’s not thousands of dollars. It’s something that’s affordable.
ELIANA JANTZ: And it depends on how many layers you need.
DEBRA: Yes.
ELIANA JANTZ: Some people need five. Some people need 12. So it’s very flexible that way. It can always be changed, added to, subtracted from, used for many different uses.
DEBRA: Well, go to HeartfeltCollective.com, and take a look at this because I’m sure that you’ll be pleased with it, and it’s certainly something. If you’re looking for a bed, this is something to consider.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. All the shows are archived, recorded and archived. You can listen to this one again. You can listen to yesterday’s. You can listen to a past one with Sarah Sunshine Smith from Shepherd’s Dream.
Thank you for being with me. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
How Can I Remove the Strong Odor in My House
Question from Barb
My husband and 3 children are renting a home that was renovated 4 years ago.
There is a strong odor in the home; I think it’s coming from the cabinetry in the closets, laundry room, mudroom, etc.
I purchased an IQ air filter for my toddler’s room, but just one is not enough, as my other boys, my husband and I, and a baby on the way, are all breathing the air elsewhere.
Is there anything more I can do to help removed these odors? I’m guessing they are VOC’s (formaldehyde). I have a baby on the way and am concerned for our health. (P.S. I had the house tested for mold and the results were negative.)
Thank you Debra for all your knowledge and expertise!!!!
Debra’s Answer
I am guessing the odor is formaldehyde as well, if the odor is coming from the cabinetry. I would recommend that you get an inexpensive formaldehyde test kit and check.
There are four things you can do.
Remove the cabinetry, which is probably not practical in a rental.
Seal the cabinetry with a vapor barrier sealant, such as AFM Safe Seal, a clear sealant that is highly effective at sealing in formaldehyde. If that isn’t possible, you can put foil over all the cabinets inside and out (use foil tape to seal the seams, but that wouldn’t be attractive.
You could buy more air filters.
Open the windows and ventilate, ventilate, ventilate.
Divina Natural
A 100% natural and organic luxurious skin care line with focus on natural treatments for anti-aging, skin lightening, serious skin conditions and long lasting hydration. You can “rejuvenate, restore and revitalize your skin organically and holistically with the finest and most effective ingredients at the most affordable prices.” Products come unscented and scented with essential oils; you can also have products custom-scented or developed especially to address your individual skin condition.
|
Listen to my interview with Divina Natural Managing Partner and Formulator Sheila Jacaman. |
Water Right
“World class” garden hoses made from drinking water safe polyurethane instead of toxic PVC. Well made hoses in a variety of styles, including the standard garden hose and coil hose.
Heal Skin Problems With Organic Products
My guest today is Sheila Jacaman, Managing Partner & Formulator for Divina Natural, a 100% natural luxurious skin care line with focus on natural treatments for anti-aging, skin lightening, serious skin conditions and long lasting hydration. With Sheila’s products you can “rejuvenate, restore and revitalize your skin organically and holistically with the finest and most effective ingredients at the most affordable prices.” We’ll be talking about her special products and how they can be used to to heal, transform, and protect your skin. Sheila’s interest in developing creams began in 1999 when she could not find a cream that truly nourished and protected her skin. Her background was in research and development of juice blends for international juice companies. In this capacity, she did very sophisticated analytical research on many natural ingredients. When she decided to formulate her own skin care line, she brought this same level of interest and professionalism to formulating her products. http://debralynndadd.com/category/debras-list/divina-natural
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Heal Skin Problems with Organic Products
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Sheila Jacaman
Date of Broadcast: October 7, 2013
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 yes, it’s toxic out there, but there are things that we can do to remove toxic chemicals from our homes, from our workplaces, from our bodies. And even things that we can do to affect government regulations and what manufacturers can do because as consumers, we do have the power in our hands, and we can create a less toxic world in our own lives and in the world. And that’s what this show is about.
This whole last week, sometimes you go through time periods where it just seems like everything is confusing and everything is falling apart, and things that you’ve relied on in this past just start crumbling. I think that’s true for everybody at some time in their lives. And I’ve been going through that.
The past couple of weeks, I’ve been having computer problems, and problems with my washing machine, and problems with my car, and all these things. And when I go through time periods like that, I just keep saying, “Okay, these things are only temporary things, that the problem is temporary. The fact that something is breaking”—even when our health isn’t good, it’s because we haven’t done the things to maintain things.
And even if we maintain things absolutely perfectly, still, physical things break, and they wear out. And leaves are falling off the tree because that’s part of the cycle of what’s going on in the world.
And so when things go wrong, and it looks like things are tough, that doesn’t meant that there isn’t something good on the other side because I always find that if I can get through that period, that there’s something better on the other end.
And this week, everything looks bright and wonderful, and my washing machine works, and my computers, and my car works, and new projects are starting, and life is looking good again. But sometimes we need to get through those problems.
And I’m bringing this up because it’s the same cycle with toxic chemicals that we discover that something is toxic, or it’s making us sick, or there’s a problem with the regulation, or whatever. And we just need to recognize, “Okay, that’s what the situation is.”
But if we keep moving forward, if we keep looking for the good, if we keep creating the good, then that’s what we’ll end up with at the end. And I’ve just seen that happen over and over and over.
So today, we’re going to talk about healing skin problems. This is not just about getting your face clean, and which product you’re going to use that doesn’t have perfume in it, or something about the—this is really about therapeutic skin care.
And my guest today is Sheila Jacaman. She’s the Managing Partner and Formulator for Divina Natural. It’s 100% natural, organic, luxurious skin care line that focuses on natural treatments for anti-aging, skin lightening, serious skin conditions like even skin cancer, and long-lasting hydration.
With Sheila’s products, you can rejuvenate, restore and revitalize your skin organically and holistically with the finest and most effective ingredients at the most affordable prices.
So this is what we’re going to talk about today. If you’ve got a skin problem, listen up, because Sheila has some answers.
Hi, Sheila. Thanks for being here.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Hi, Debbie. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your show.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. It’s Debra, please.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Debra, okay.
DEBRA: I haven’t been Debbie since I was 16 years old.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Okay, Debra. Debra, yes.
DEBRA: I’m sorry to correct you, but I didn’t want anybody else who listens to this think it was okay to call me Debbie.
So tell us about how you got interested in making this line of products.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Well, it started about, I would say, 18 years ago, in my own research laboratory. I was a formulator in the beverage business for children’s products called Juicy Juice for the Nestle Beverage Company. And I was their primary supplier and formulator of ingredients that went into children’s beverages.
So, I was already conscious about how quality ingredients and the necessity that they be pure and pesticide-free when we were dealing with formulations for children, and also low sugar—natural sugar but low doses.
So, in that laboratory, in doing work for the public for the aloe vera industry and for the grape industry, I discovered that these were products that I could use on my skin. I was using a Swiss brand that was very, very expensive, that would cost me $500 each time I would buy a bottle. And that was very expensive, but I thought I needed it to keep my skin looking young, since I had a pretty stressed life being a formulator for this multinational company and in a very demanding job that required my travels abroad.
I was writing essays for my clients in the aloe vera industry, and I discovered that this is something I needed to use on my face.
But in doing so, in applying a dab of aloe vera, it didn’t go well on my face on its own. So I ordered a book, and I started making products, using things that I had in my own research lab like essential oils. I was also doing analysis for essential oils.
So I have an extensive laboratory background. And I had in my disposal quite a few things I could whip up in my lab to put on my skin.
So in doing so, I created a delicious product that was very hydrating. And I no longer used this Swiss product because it wasn’t working for me. I’m fair complexioned and freckled and on the dry side. I didn’t have an oily t-zone or acne issue. I had dry skin that was wrinkling at 30. I needed to look nice. I had three kids.
So it all started in a research lab. And then as I developed the line, people started wanting me to go public with it. And it wasn’t until three years ago, Debra, that the line was available to the public. And it’s available mainly on my website at DivinaNatural.com.
And slowly, over the years, it has evolved into helping people with problem skin.
I’m an expert in anti-aging, keeping wrinkles to a minimum, and keeping them from developing. But then I started working on things like psoriasis and pain management, helping people with arthritis, and inflammation caused by arthritis.
And just recently, I’ve been working and focusing on skin lightening and skin cancers with a seaweed.
DEBRA: We can talk about all those things. Why don’t we start—you used the word hydration. And I’ve been looking at skin care products for 30 years, not just for my own use, but from the viewpoint of a consumer advocate to make sure that I was recommending products that didn’t have toxic chemicals in them.
And before I go any further, I just want to say because I think I should say this over and over again that people are concerned about toxic chemicals in products, but when you start to say, “Let’s move away from toxic chemicals,” you can just simply move to a position where there’s nothing toxic in a product.
But then the next step is to move to a product that actually has a benefit to it. And those beneficial products aren’t toxic, but they’re more than not toxic. They actually are doing good.
And I think, Sheila, that your products fall into that category of having lots of beneficial properties to them, in addition to not causing harm.
So I know that there are certain steps that people should be aware of, if they’re wanting to care for their skin. And I’m fairly certain that the general public doesn’t know what these steps are. And maybe they hear words like hydration in advertising, but don’t really know what these steps mean, why they’re important.
So let’s just start with hydration because whether somebody has a skin problem right now or not, everybody needs to be concerned about hydration.
So tell us what that is.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Hydration is how your skin can absorb water. So it is important that—there are several blockers to hydration.
DEBRA: Good. Tell us what those are.
SHEILA JACAMAN: One blocker to hydrated skin is dead skin cells. They act as a barrier for absorption, deep into your cells, to be able to have hydrated skin. And also, the other blocker is any product, any ingredients containing petroleum-based ingredients. And these are misleading because 99% of the cosmetic industry and pharmaceutical industry uses petroleum-based ingredients as their carrier oil or their main emulsifier to make the cream creamy.
DEBRA: So what’s happening, in essence then, is that the skin needs hydration. It needs water. The cells need water. And when you said that about deeply getting the water into the cells, I just had this picture of my cells saying, “Oh, thank you.
Thank you. Please give me some water,” like our cells are dying of thirst.
And so what’s happening, as you just said, is the big companies are using petroleum ingredients that block our ability to get water into our skin. And then we have dry skin, and we need to put something else on it. But that’s also a petroleum ingredient, and it just goes on and on and on, that our skin doesn’t get to do its natural hydration. Is that correct?
SHEILA JACAMAN: That is correct. When we have an oil spill in the ocean, what happens is thousands and hundreds of thousands of fish die and birds die because they can’t fly. It cogs up their lungs. It stops their overall function ability.
So anything petroleum-based, and that would be mineral oil, petrolatum, all kinds of polymers, carbomers and polymers and carbomers are thickeners to make the cream creamy because women like to put on a cream and it not be water.
So when they apply these products, what happens is, their skin is completely blocked from absorption—completely.
So no matter what they put on, the skin will dry. Additionally, these companies, because the product cannot be absorbed into your cells, and for your skin to be hydrated, it needs to be absorbed subcutaneously below the surface level of your skin for it to be effective.
Since it cannot absorb using petroleum-based ingredients, the companies add alcohol as one of the third or fourth ingredient to make it dry.
So what happens is you’re adding weight to your skin, and if you’re applying these products to your face you will actually wrinkle faster.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’ll be back after the commercial break with Sheila Jacaman from Divina Natural. And we’ll be talking more about what you can do to keep your skin in good shape, make it better, prevent aging, and handle skin problems all naturally and organically.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about how to make your skin beautiful even if it has some problems and needs some peeling.
My guest is Sheila Jacaman, Managing Partner and Formulator for Divina Natural. And that’s at DivinaNatural.com. And she makes 100% organic and natural luxurious skin care products.
So before the break, we were talking about hydration. So Sheila, tell us what people should do to hydrate their skin properly.
SHEILA JACAMAN: To hydrate your skin properly, you need to wash your face with a ild soap. I do have a cleanser that doesn’t have sodium lauryl sulfate. Our product line is 100% paraben-free and chemical-free, so we don’t use any synthetic preservatives.
But we need to clean our face and exfoliate our face. For proper hydration, the skin needs to be exfoliated.
DEBRA: And what does that mean?
SHEILA JACAMAN: That means you can use a mild exfoliant. We make one with organic blue corn that’s very, very fine. And you remove your dead skin cells. You can add a little coffee grinds to your cream, and clean your face with some used coffee grinds. And then rinse it with cool water.
Then we spray with a hydrosol, which is a botanical extraction, water extraction, from plant material that’s alkaline. And it helps stimulate microcirculation and absorption. It’s hydrating and healing.
It’s like an essential oil, but it’s the water from the plant.
Then we put on a lifting serum. It’s a very hydrating serum. And over that goes a moisturizer. Then we have an eye serum.
People that hydrate their skin properly using natural products, like Divina, have instant results. I would say in 10 minutes, their face is lifted and hydrated like if we would put raisin in water, and it would plump up.
DEBRA: That’s a great analogy. I like that, yes.
SHEILA JACAMAN: And many times, Debra, our skin is so dehydrated that it looks like a raisin.
DEBRA: You’re explaining this so well, Sheila, because I know a lot about ingredients, but I don’t know a lot about the technical aspects of what are skin needs. And you’re explaining the natural needs of what skin knows really well because, of course, if you have a plump grape, and you put it out in the sun, and you don’t give it any water, it’s going to wrinkle. It’s going to turn into a wrinkled raisin. And that’s just what’s going on with our skin.
And of course, we would have wrinkles.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Right. So the women look at me after we finish a facial, and they say, “Sheila, will my face be like this all day?”
I said, “As the hours go by, your face is going to become more hydrated because the skin care line is activated with heat.”
So as your body warms up, the product goes deeper into your skin cells. It breaks down into your skin. Since it doesn’t have any alcohol, it can’t evaporate. So it soaks in. And this became the body care line. The whole line works the same way. It absorbs and gives you this instant effect that’s long-lasting.
DEBRA: Brilliant. Very, very good. So that’s what everybody should be doing for hydration. So I know a lot of women are concerned about anti-aging, and you have some special products for that. Do you want to tell us about those, and how they work?
SHEILA JACAMAN: Yes, I have some anti-aging products, and I am using the most scientifically-advanced seaweeds and essential oils for my anti-aging line that stimulate collagen.
What happens as we age, the collagen depletes, and we become less plump and full in our face. And also, because we’re starving our skin using petroleum-based ingredients and toxic chemicals, then our skin is not healthy and vibrant.
What this anti-aging product does is it gives your skin luminosity. It makes it alive, and like a pearl texture. It’s very soft. The seaweed is a hydrating ingredient also, and it’s primary in my skin care line I use seaweeds called padina pavonica, which is in very expensive skin care lines, only in four, in the whole world, the padina pavonica.
And that stimulates collagen, and it gives your skin a pearl-light appearance. And if someone goes under an infrared light, then you will notice that the skin actually looks like a pearl in shine and luminosity.
I’m also using a seaweed that is cellular age-reversing called fucoidan. It has been the topic of many, many anti-cancer research studies. It is in over 900 research studies in companies or organizations, such as Harvard and Stanford and universities in Australia and medical research.
So everything I do, I am making sure that it has a scientific foundation in terms of what it would do for the skin, and it blocks UV rays.
Seaweeds are very important to block damaging UV rays. And we want to block those, yet allow a healthy dose of sun when we need it.
DEBRA: Somebody could apply that to their skin, and it would act as a sunscreen?
SHEILA JACAMAN: Not necessarily a sunscreen, but a UV blocker. It would block damaging UV rays. I also make a mineral sun care with zinc oxide, which would be more of a sun screen.
DEBRA: Okay, good. We need to take another break. I’m here with Sheila Jacaman. She’s from Divina Natural, DivinaNatural.com. She makes incredible skin care products from organic ingredients, and they’re especially designed to address skin care problems and to give your skin great hydration.
So we’ll be back and hear more on about how to take care of your skin after this.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Sheila Jacaman from Divina Natural. That’s at DivinaNatural.com. She’s the formulator of her products which are especially designed to be especially effective to make your skin healthy and beautiful.
Sheila, I’m tripping over my words here because I was reading your website over the break. And I had my attention on that when we came back.
SHEILA JACAMAN: That’s a good distraction.
DEBRA: Yes, it is a good distraction. I want to make sure that we tell our listeners about your custom orders. And I’m reading here that not only can people buy your already formulated products, but that people can contact you, and you can make a custom formula for them to address exactly what their skin situation is.
So tell us about that.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Well, I have clients that love my products. In Alaska, one particular lady, this very adorable lady, that’s been on the product for a couple of years now, and she likes rose essential oil.
So she writes me a note. She knows when she’s about to run out, and she says, “When you do your next production, please make mine with rose.”
So I can customize like that with a special aroma that someone likes that is natural because I don’t use any fragrance.
Fragrance is really bad. We haven’t talked about that but—
DEBRA: Let’s talk about that right now because so many products, especially skin care products, contain artificial fragrance.
So tell us why that’s bad for your skin.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Most products contain artificial fragrance, and they’re toxic, they’re synthetic, and they do get absorbed into your skin, and they’re bad. So I am very curious now to read your book, Toxic-Free, because I have been making toxic-free skin care for over 18 years now.
So I am all into toxic-free ingredients. And toxins can be even raw materials that you use that contain pesticides.
So you have to be very careful when you’re a formulator and you’re choosing an ingredient to make sure that it is organically sourced and sustainable, and it is not toxic.
DEBRA: One of the things about pesticides in skin care ingredients is especially important with essential oils. And I think you’ll agree with this because an essential oil is a concentration of the oil. And so if you’re making that out of a plant that’s been sprayed with pesticides, what you’re doing is concentrating the pesticides as well.
So if you have anything that has essential oils in it, you just really, really have to have them be organic.
SHEILA JACAMAN: And our main ingredient is seaweeds and aloe vera, and they have to be organic also because we don’t want anything that’s been sprayed with pesticides.
So when someone calls me with a serious skin condition, such as psoriasis or inflammation from surgery or arthritic pain, I make special formulas, and I have something called Intensive Skin Treatment that is not a medicine.
Divina’s products are not a medication. They are a natural product that helps with certain problems that I have studied to be naturally healing. But this is not a medication, but it will help the problem.
DEBRA: Well, I can see that it could help the problem because if you look at natural alternatives for creating health in your body as a whole, for a lot of people, all of their health problems are due to the fact that they’re missing most of their nutrition.
And you just give somebody proper nutrition from organic foods and organic supplements, and their health comes back.
And so you don’t need drugs. What you need is to do the things that are proper, so that your body creates health. And I think that’s what your products are doing. It’s just giving your skin what it needs in order to be healthy.
SHEILA JACAMAN: That’s correct. I have many clients with psoriasis and they have brought me shoeboxes, literally, shoeboxes full of products that they’ve used—some ointments that cost $285 for half-an-ounce that don’t work.
And if they get off my products—people that have been on the products for three years now, and if they gt off the product, then their condition worsens, and they have to start back on the program.
Let’s go back to basics. Let’s exfoliate. Let’s use our soap. We’re going to put on a hydrosol. We’re going to put on the intensive skin treatment.
And within a week, their skin is tolerable, manageable. They can walk.
So I do, in some instances, shingles. Some of my products are special orders. They can contact me. I have a contact form. My clients, if they’re out of town, they can send me pictures of their skin, any sort of diagnosis that they’ve had, and then I can formulate a special ingredient for them.
If they want a cream, my basic cream, with a special aroma that they like, I can do that also. There may be a little extra fee, but it will be moderate, to make a special batch for someone. I will do it, and I do do it every time I make creams.
DEBRA: I see here on your custom order page that you treat—I shouldn’t use the word treat. That sounds too medical. But you help psoriasis, eczema, severe acne, shingles, scars, skin allergies, arthritis, dark spots, and any number of other skin or scalp problems, body pains and cosmetic issues.
So there’s a lot that you can do with this.
We’re coming up on the break, so I don’t want to get started on another topic right now. But after we come back, let’s talk about acne because I know that that’s one of the biggest concerns that, especially teenagers have, but I know that adults have acne too.
Psoriasis is painful and itching and all of those things, and not the most beautiful thing, but acne just is one of those thing that people will—it’s so unsightly, especially for teenagers, that millions, probably billions of dollars are spent on acne treatment.
So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here with Sheila Jacaman from Divina Natural. And when we come back, we’ll talk about what to do with acne that is natural and organic. We’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Sheila Jacaman, Managing Partner and Formulator for Divina Natural, a 100% natural, luxurious skin care line, with focus on natural treatments for anti-aging, skin lightening, serious skin conditions and long-lasting hydration.
We’ve been talking about all those things. If you’re interested in taking a look at her products, the website is DivinaNatural.com.
Sheila, let’s talk about acne. What should teenagers be doing maybe to handle their acne, but also setting up their skin for being good and healthy throughout their lifetime?
SHEILA JACAMAN: Well, the first thing they need to do is stop using lots of different chemical products that they sell for this condition. And once we get to a natural approach to cleaning their skin, exfoliating it, and one of the most important—number one is having clean hands because the acne, some of the pores are open, and they’re infected, and they have pus.
So we have to make sure that they’re using clean hands to touch their face, clean their face.
And then I’m using active ingredients, such as tea tree, thyme, oregano, palmarosa, cinnamon leaf oil, to combat acne. And we’re able to combat it at a very rapid speed, and have a deep absorption, anti-inflammation, using a seaweed base.
So it’s a light serum that’s applied to their face, and it reduces the inflammation within 10 minutes.
DEBRA: That is fast. I wish you were around when I was a teenager because I struggled with that all throughout my teens.
And I think, actually, it didn’t stop until I stopped using toxic chemicals on my skin. I was just thinking about that because I discovered that I was being made sick by toxic chemicals when I was 24 years old, a long time ago. And I stopped using all that stuff, especially scented skin care products.
I was buying a very well-known, everybody would recognize this brand at the department store, and I was putting that on my skin in many steps, trying to get rid of the acne on my skin. And nothing was working. Nothing, nothing.
And I stopped using everything, and the acne went away.
SHEILA JACAMAN: That’s what you have to do. People that use my products, we say, “Okay, let’s stop what you’re using.”
They’re loaded with parabens. There’s a family of five of them, and they are chemical preservative that is very toxic. And they do not flush out of your system.
Research has shown that women have breast cancer, and they remove the breast tissue, the parabens are in their breast tissue.
So we have to be careful what we put on our skin. It is our largest organ, and absorbs what we put on it, except petroleum.
So we can starve or skin, or we can feed it the wrong product. And we have to treat it like food. We have to treat our skin and treat our skin care products like food.
DEBRA: Well, that just makes sense to me because what we’re doing when we eat food is that we’re putting nutrients into our body that just goes throughout our body, and different parts of our bodies use those nutrients in order to build healthy cells, and healthy organs, and living tissues and all those things.
And we wouldn’t just eat petroleum, although people eat it every day in all kinds of food additives, and pesticides, and everything. But if I gave you a can of motor oil, which is straight petroleum, nobody would drink that and yet, all these skin care ingredients that are made from petroleum are made from that same petroleum that’s in a can of motor oil.
So it totally makes sense to me that what you should do is give your skin nutrients because petroleum doesn’t do any of that.
SHEILA JACAMAN: And the research shows that someone that is using petroleum-based ingredients in their skin care have a higher rate of getting cancer than smoking. That’s pretty shocking because cigarettes are really detestable in terms of what they do to your lungs and clogs your lungs.
But people use these creams, so it’s very hard, Debra, in a natural industry, to be able to be competitive because our products are hundred times more expensive than mineral oil. I use very high grade grape seed oil. I use wheat germ oil, vitamin E, avocado oil, and calophyllum inophyllum.
I would like to talk about that oil a little bit right now.
DEBRA: Go ahead.
SHEILA JACAMAN: The calophyllum inophyllum is a vegetable oil that comes from Madagascar. And it’s in my treatment line.
It’s in my acne products. It’s in my intensive skin. It’s in pain relief.
It is an incredible oil to help the essential oils be active and keep them working. And it’s just a very soothing oil that is in all of my treatment line products, including acne and in the mask. I also make an acne mask that’s fabulous. It helps dry out and disinfect these pimples, some of them embedded and red and spread in groups of five or six.
Now, the other thing that is important is the focus that Divina has on anti-cancer. We are using fucoidan-based seaweeds that are anti-cancer. And this can be looked up at www.PubMed.gov/fucoidan, so people can look up this word.
DEBRA: How do you spell it? Spell it for us.
SHEILA JACAMAN: It’s F-U-C-O-I-D-A-N. And most of my products have fucoidan, and it is in active ingredient.
But what fucoidan does, and what fucoidan is, is a brown seaweed. The brown seaweed is anti-cancerous, and it blocks UV rays. And I have actually done some work with some clients that had cancer that were going to have radiation after 40 days of me meeting them.
They came back to me after 40 days, and thrilled to death, because the oncologist, she had eight spots on her face that were going to be burned off. And the doctor said they did not need to be radiated or burned off, and that they were fine, using the product called Skin Lightening, which is a seaweed that is special for combatting cancer and destroying cancer cells, and preventing cancer cells from developing.
DEBRA: I went on an herb walk once, many years ago. And the woman who was leading the walk, she was showing us different herbs that were useful just in our local environment, in the community where I lived.
She made a comment that I have never forgotten. And that is, she said that in nature, there is an antidote for everything.
One of the things that was common where I lived was stinging nettles. And I don’t know if you or any of the listeners have ever touched a stinging nettle. But if you touch it, then it does sting your skin. And you can cook nettles actually and eat them. And when you cook them, that little stinging part, the little fuzzy part goes away.
But growing next to the stinging nettle plant is another plant whose name I’ve forgotten. And if you put that on the stinging skin, it makes the sting go away.
And I was just thinking about that when you were talking about the seaweed kills the cancer cells. But of course, in nature, if something was going to happen to the body, in the larger world of nature, there’s going to be a solution for it. And that’s what the solution is—the solution, I can’t think of any situation where the solution is to put petroleum on it.
SHEILA JACAMAN: No, it would be the worst thing you could do.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree.
SHEILA JACAMAN: So the species that I’m using in this product called Skin Lightening and soon, that product will be called Fucoidan Lotion, it has a high ingredient of fucoidan, of fucus vesiculosus, which is a seaweed that destroys cancer cells, but it also removes sun and H spots. And it inhibits the melanin production, which is why people spot.
Many time, ladies spot during pregnancy. And this cream is safe to use during pregnancy, on their face, to prevent sunspots, or hypopigmentation is more commonly known.
DEBRA: Sheila, I don’t want to interrupt you, but we’re coming to the end of the show, and I don’t to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence when the music starts playing.
Thank you so much for being here. I can give you about 15 seconds to wrap up if there’s something you’d like to say.
SHEILA JACAMAN: Yes, thank you so much for hosting me and inviting me. It’s an honor. And it would be an honor to help anybody with their skin. Every single client is personal to me, and it’s a relationship that we develop, and it spreads into their family. And I would be happy for anyone to visit our website at www.DivinaNatural.com, and let us be your health care and skin care provider.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. That’s Sheila Jacaman, DivinaNatural.com.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Is This an Organic Mattress?
Question from Jamie
I am looking to buy a organic mattress. Have you heard of this company and is this a true organic mattress? www.thenaturalmattressstore.com
Debra’s Answer
I hadn’t heard of this company until you just wrote to me, but I looked at their website and it seems like they are using all the right materials.
There is a legal thing however about labeling a mattress “organic,” which I explained at Q&A: What is an Organic Mattress?
They have pdfs of all their certifications at www.thenaturalmattressstore.com/certifications, but they are all for the materials. There is no certification for “organic mattress.”
I don’t think they are trying to be misleading. Perhaps they just don’t know about the requirement for GOTS certification in order to use the term “organic mattress.”
Otherwise, the materials and construction look fine to me and they have a gorgeous website. If the workmanship on their mattresses is anything like the quality of their website…wow.
Nontoxic Shutters for Windows
Question from Jamie
Hi, Can you recommend a non-toxic Shutters for windows?
Debra’s Answer
Any wood shutters would be fine. The toxic part is the paint or finish. If it is not well cured, it could give off toxic fumes. Or you could get unfinished wood shutters and paint them yourself with a less toxic finish of your choice.
Toxic-Free Building and Remodeling
My guest today is Victoria Schomer, ASID, LEED AP. As an architect, innkeeper, and real estate agent, Victoria and been at the helm of many ‘firsts’ in the green design and build movement, completing her first green project in 1990. We’ve been friends for years and today we’ll be talking about toxic-free design for building and remodeling, including information on LEED and other green building programs. In 1991, Victoria began publishing “Interior Concerns” the first green design and building newsletter in the US. She followed the next year with the first green materials and products resource guide. She later formed the nonprofit, Building Concerns, to further broaden the base of design and build education tools and programs. In 2000, Victoria was honored for her pioneering work in green design with the American Society of Interior Designer’s (ASID) prestigious “Design for Humanity Award.” Victoria is a co-founded and co-author of the REGREEN: Residential Remodeling Guidelines. She is a founder member of ASID’s Sustainable Design Council, a member of their Distinguished Speakers Bureau, and is REGREEN Trained. She is a LEED AP and BD+C, and a USGBC REGREEN Faculty member. Victoria continues her design and consulting business, Green Built Environments, working on projects throughout the US, and based in North Carolina. And most recently has become a real estate broker to offer comprehensive evaluation and assessment of properties for their green potentials. Green Built Environments, Real Living Carolina Property, Asheville Green Cottage
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic-Free Building and Remodeling
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Victoria Schomer
Date of Broadcast: October 02, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Today is Wednesday, October 2nd 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, and the sun is shining.
One of the reasons why we need to be talking about how to thrive in a toxic world is because the world is toxic. Half of my time – well, not actually half, but a good portion of my time, I’m working on finding out what’s toxic. And there are many, many people in the world today who are asking this question, who are recognizing that there are toxic chemicals all around us. What are they? Which ones are they? Where are they hiding? What should be regulated? How toxic are they? Who gets what kind of illness from them? There are all these questions that are being asked, and many, many people working on these issues.
But I actually see that in comparison to all the people that are working on just finding out what’s toxic, there are very few people talking about what are the solutions. There are many, many books written on, “This is bad, this is bad, this is bad,” and we need to know all of that, so that we can avoid those toxic chemicals or remove them from our bodies, but what I’m really trying to do on this show (and I think I’m doing a good job) is bring together enough people who are working on what’s toxic to show you that we are living in a toxic world and we need to do something about it, but also show you that there are solutions, that everything is not toxic and that there are people who are working towards strengthening that which is good and healthy and sustainable.
My guest today is one of those people who, like me has been working on this issue for a very long time – decades, in fact.
Her name is Victoria Schomer. She’s an architect, innkeeper, and a real estate agent. And she has been a pioneer in bringing toxic-free and green to the design world of designing buildings and remodeling, almost as long as I’ve been looking at the consumer product aspect of this. We met – hmmm… we’ll ask Victoria when we met. Hi, Victoria.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Hi, Debra!
DEBRA: How are you?
VICTORIA SCHOMER: I’m doing great. We’re having just the most beautiful fall weather that just won’tseem to quit. I think it’s our compensation for having such a lousy, foggy summer.
DEBRA: Well, Victoria is in Asheville, North Carolina. I’ve been to Asheville in the fall and it’s absolutely stunningly gorgeous with all the color.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah, it is.
DEBRA: It’s just an amazing place.
So Victoria, tell us how you started on this field because you really have been a pioneer. You’ve been doing this for a very long time. How did you get into it when there wasn’t a field? How did you even think of this? And then, what were some of the first steps you did? And I think I know when I came into the picture.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Well, I think when I think about what formed who I am today, this green and constantly inquiring environmentally-concerned people, I am grateful that I grew up in Virginia with a big woods in my backyard. And even though it looked like suburbia with lots of houses lining the street, lots of kids playing, there were acres and acres of wood in our backyard.
So, I was a treehugger before. I couldn’t remember anything else. We played in the creek and hang out with the salamanders and the box turtle. And that was pretty much how I spent all my play time with all my buddies in the neighborhood. That was certainly an important part of what formed me as someone who just loved to be in nature.
Are you there?
DEBRA: Yes, I’m here.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh, because I heard a clicking noise.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t hear it.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh, okay.
And so I guess it wasn’t that big of a surprise that I chose interior design. I was always rearranging rocks in the creek and trying to re-engineer to flow better. And so, interior design in the building world seemed to just be of a natural interest to me.
But it was pretty quick in my career that I started reading about reinforced destruction. And when I think about my love of the forest and the wood and I started reading about what was happening in the tropical rainforest, I was really horrified.
I then equated that and connected that with the fact that me recommending mahogany desks and chairs to my clients, I was the one participating and destroying that habitat for those societies and those animals by me recommending those products to clients. And boy, that really pulled the plug on a lot of my thinking or my decision-making process for doing just standard selection of materials and products.
DEBRA: Well, I think that’s a really important point that people get to when you stop thinking about just yourself and realize that all of your actions that you take is affecting the rest of the world. And I think a lot of people haven’t gotten to that point.
I went through a similar process where I recognized that everything that I was toxic that I was using was not only affecting me, but it was affecting the environment. And if I wanted to leave in a clean environment, I have to stop putting toxic things in it.
DEBRA: Right, yeah. You just can’t participate in something that you disdain or you hate or that you feel is not right. It really pulled the plug on my design career.
I also started reading about European paint materials, the ones made from plant chemistry or from the resins on the […] trees or the old casein paint, milk-based paints that were being in Europe, and I thought, “Wow! Why are they using products that seem to be so benign when we are…” Here again, me, as the interior designer, I’m painting the interior of these people’s homes with all these toxic stuff, making them sick. I’m thinking, “Wait a minute! What in the world am I doing?”
It pretty much just stopped me dead in my tracks. And I think you and I at that time were deep in the weeds of researching and trying to figure out what is going on here and how in the world are we going to move forward making this world safe for ourselves and everyone we’re working with and that we love and care about. And all the critters, for me, was about the entire ecosystem really.
DEBRA: And so, you grew up, you were very fortunate to grow up in a childhood where the critters and the ecosystem where you lived in was very real to you. I know a lot of children grow up in cities.
I even once had an editor on one of my books where I talked about my “local forest” was the phrase that I used because I did have a local forest. I was living next to a state park that had preserved a forest. And she had no idea what a local forest was. She couldn’t conceive it. I remember seeing her blue pencil line crossing that out, saying, “You can’t say that. There’s no such thing as a local forest,” and I’m like, “Yes, there is!”
And when they start having awareness of that, they will want to protect those things as well.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah, absolutely. And for many kids, that’s all that they will know and experience for their childhood.
I can remember somebody who started doing urban parks in restoring these areas like New York City where they’re just terrible tear-downs and they started doing gardens. But they used to package the seeds to these inner city kids and they look at them and they go, “What’s that?” How arrogant of me to assume that every kid out there knows how to a seed goes into the soil and generates and becomes a living thing.
It was, again, another wake-up call of the disconnect I had with people in my world and I how I felt like I really wanted to bridge that gap somehow and help them have this […] that I had as a kid.
DEBRA: That’s why I talk about nature so much in this show because it’s a lot about our health. Toxic is a lot about our health. But it’s also about what we’re doing to the world that supports us. To me, health is about supporting all of life, not just mine or one individual body.
So, you started Interior Concerns.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah, I started a non-profit.
DEBRA: Yeah, and I think that’s when I met you. And we must have been in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time. I found about Interior Concerns and I think I hooked you up because you were doing just what I was doing, but you were doing it for building products and decorating products.
And we need to take a break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Victoria Schomer. And we’ll be back right after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Victoria Schomer. She is an interior designer, innkeeper and real estate agent. She has been at the helm of many firsts in the green design and build movement, completing her first green project in 1990.
So Victoria, would you tell us, I really want to talk about what you do because you do many things. But first, would you tell us a little history since you were there through the whole thing from the beginning of what were the concerns of how did this whole green building movement start? What were the concerns, particularly the toxic concerns of sick building syndrome and all that? How did these all get to be what it is today?
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Well, I think the biggest press piece was that the EPA headquarters had been carpeted with toxic carpet.
DEBRA: I remember that.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah. And boy, help me with my remembering how early that was, but I bet you that was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. So, that 4PC that was in that toxic carpet –
And I think there’s some irony that it was the EPA, not nice, but it was kind of ironic. That was the beginning of all of these people who were getting sick from exposure from this carpet that had been installed in this office at the EPA headquarters.
That was the beginning of this inquiry into, “Okay, what is going on here? Why are all these people getting sick?” And the only thing that they could connect it to was this installation of this new carpet.
And of course, a lawsuit is what motivated everybody to wrap their heads around it and get it taken care of. And it didn’t take long for them to figure out that it was in the glues that bind together all the toxic carpet that make up that carpet, the loops of carpet had to be glued to the backing, so that they stay in place. It was in the glue.
So, here, again, it was one of these big chemical companies producing something without any regard or any legislation or any criteria for what were safe or not.
So, that was the beginning of, I think, the realization that, “Uh-oh, it’s not all safe inside or out.” We already knew that outdoor air quality was smog and we could see that. But we assume that we were indoors, we were safe tucked inside as long as our windows weren’t open. Well, guess what? We learned differently.
And that was my first remembrance. I think that’s probably what started it all.
So, from the early ‘90s on, we started examining everything that was going inside our buildings. And it’s been a long rollercoaster ride. As we start to look at some product, and we go, “Wow! Isn’t spray foam insulation just the greatest thing since sliced bread? How tight an insulation material it could be, it makes your home very energy efficient, it’s easy to install.”
The first time I used that product on a renovation, I was quite shock because I have a pretty good nose. I don’t have any real serious chemical sensitivities. I have my own immune issues, but nothing anywhere near as dramatic as a lot of people that I work with. But I thought, “This isn’t right. This stuff smells really bad. No one’s talked about it.” And that was probably five or six years ago. And it’s only been in the last year or so.
This is what makes me a bit crazy. I couldn’t possibly be the only one that this was suspecting that this stuff doesn’t smell good. How about the installers? I mean, they’re using a Hazmat suit and a respirator. Isn’t that kind of a tip-off that this product might be great for energy efficiency, but what in the world is it doing to us in installation? And then, what is it doing to us while it’s outgassing? And what’s it going to do when it starts breaking down into small particulates and becoming airborne and in our homes and in our entire environment?
Well, I think this is exactly what I think part of the problem has been. I think it’s improving some. But I know in the beginning, I was looking at people when the whole idea of green started back in 1990 that people were saying, “Oh, we need to do this environmental thing” and they would only look at one aspect, I think, which is, say, “Let’s save energy.” And that’s all they would look at. And so, if something saved energy, it was legitimate.
And yet, we live in a multi-faceted life. What we really need to do is look at all the different facets. If we do something that saves energy with toxic chemicals that kill people, that’s not a solution. And I think that that’s what the field has had to learn.
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm… yeah. And I looked at the U.S. Green Building Council, which, to its huge benefit has really driven the green movement internationally (what they created has been enormous), but their focus has been about – and through their LEED rating system, which is just a system that you can add a points or acquire points based on your water usage or energy efficiency, the location of the materials, where they came from, how much waste material you were able to divert to recycling instead of landfill, they have a rating system.
And that rating system has been rated so heavily on the efficiency, how much material have you saved, all those things.
Only in the last year or so have they finally gotten it with the help of the Healthy Building Network that they have got to address toxins in the home and in the building. And they are now making the rating system address those issues and requiring people to get a lot more points in the category of indoor air quality or indoor environmental quality as energy efficiency.
And the U.S. Green Building Council is having their 20th anniversary. So, it’s taken this 20 years.
Granted, they’ve done tremendous stuff. Gosh, I mean…
VICTORIA SCHOMER: I agree, I totally agree. In the environment, there are issues that need to be addressed like energy efficiency that are not particularly toxics issues although energy efficiency is a toxics issue because of the toxic waste that gets produced and the pollution that comes from burning the fuels.
But all these other things (we’re talking about toxic chemicals and the materials that we use in our homes), that hasn’t be addressed to the degree that it should be.
We need to take another break, but we’ll be right back. We’ll find out more about what’s going on with Toxic Free Building with Victoria Schomer, one of the pioneers in the field.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about green interiors in your home. My guest is Victoria Schomer who is a pioneer in this field.
Victoria, we were talking in the last segment about the EPA building. And during the break, I looked it up. I actually wrote in my book, Home Safe Home, which is no longer in print that in 1984 actually…
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh, my God!
DEBRA: In 1984, in my very first published book, Non-Toxic and Natural, I wrote that you shouldn’t use synthetic wall to wall carpeting. And I had no studies to base it on, but I listed all the toxic chemicals that I knew of that were in carpeting. Anyone could just look at that list and if they had any knowledge of toxic chemicals (like I did at the time) and say, “Wait a minute!
This is too much toxic exposure.”
But the year was – and I just had it here – 1988. That was the incident at the EPA. And then it took all the way – I mean, this was really a big thing and I wrote and wrote and wrote about this. And they found all these levels of 4PC like you were talking about.
And then the Consumer Product Safety Commission had received 500 complaints about reactions to carpet from the general public by 1991. And then, a whole contingency of state attorneys, generals, asked the Consumer Product Safety Commission to put a warning on new carpet, but they refused. And now, we still have that same toxic carpet with no warning on it all these years later.
So, that’s what we’re up against. It’s that we do have all these toxic products like that. And you and others and me have been looking for safe alternatives.
So, tell us more about what you do. I’ll just say that on your website, which is GreenBuilt-e.com, it shows that you do green design and build green-built environments. But you’re also a realtor and you also have a bed & breakfast in Asheville, a green cottage.
I love the way you can do design, but you can also, as you say, “help people discover the potentials,” which is also something that I do. I’m not a realtor, but I can go anywhere in the world and assess the potential of turning a building into being less toxic.
And you also provide a space where people can come and see what it’s like to spend the night in a place that isn’t toxic. And I think that you’ve done a very good job of providing all these different services. It’s really wonderful.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: I think it’s the most fun I’ve been having. I wouldn’t say that my design and build isn’t fun. But the green bed and breakfast is just really fun. For seven years now, we are getting the most amazing people.
And the synergy of who meets who, who’s interested in anything, the conversations at the breakfast table are always – mostly, it’s always focused around health and the environment and different issues, things like that. Everyone comes to us because we’re pretty much in the same page.
It’s just been wonderful to facilitate that opportunity for people to come and stay at a place. They love the colors that I’ve picked. They said, “What am I sleeping on? My back doesn’t hurt this morning. How come it doesn’t smell in here of anything?” It’s really wonderful to make that available to people because there’s not many people that they can find that.
I would just check in my emails. I’ve got a client, a B&B guest, she comes all the time. She’s chemically sensitive. She comes here and she feels safe to come here and stay. That’s just a wonderful thing that I feel really good about, offering that.
DEBRA: It’s a living example of people can come and see this is what their home could be like.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah, and it’s so simple what we’ve done here. We’re not a Victorian B&B with lots of things to dust.
We’re mostly all hardwood floors and healthy bedding, organic linens. It’s really a very simple environment. And I think for me, I always say my default when I’m trying to figure out what products to use is to use whatever’s got the least chemicals or the least products in there, and whatever is the simplest.
We clean absolutely everything with vinegar water and tea tree oil as an antiseptic. That is it! It’s clean. We’ve got two doctors. We swiffer and sweep. But otherwise, vinegar and water and tea tree oil has done everything we need to other than some soft scrub. And as we know, it’s not giving any reactions to people. That’s been an easy solution.
And there are many easy solutions if we keep things simple I think.
DEBRA: I think so too. I mean, I basically clean with vinegar and water and baking soda and all those things. So, if people want to know more about Victoria’s green bed & breakfast, you can go to AshevilleGreenCottage.com. You can see pictures of the rooms and all kinds of information. I’m looking at the pictures right now. Beautiful!
Oh, Victoria, in one of your rooms, you have exactly my bedframe!
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh, you’re kidding?
DEBRA: No, I have exactly this bed, the one that has a curve over the top and that little medallion and the three panels, that’s my bed.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh!
DEBRA: In the Mediterranean Room.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: In the Mediterranean Room, yeah.
DEBRA: That’s cool! So, tell us what you do as a real estate broker, how you can help people assess.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah, this has been really exciting because as you know, there is just so much existing housing stock. I mean, I guess the greenest building there is the one you didn’t build because you couldn’t create more waste, put in more toxins, et cetera.
There is so much building stock existing, building stock that is just perfectly sighted – south-facing slope, roofline for solar exposures. It has space where it can open it up so you can have a garden and provide for yourself, easy way to cause ventilation for good air quality and fresher air.
And then, for me, the simpler the architectural style, the better. Just a ranch-style home to me is the most perfect example of a piece of real estate that you can green up, that’s easy to design or redesign and make it your own, but also, make it energy efficient, make it safe and also have opportunities to make it energy efficient and use solar and natural ventilation and things like that.
So, it’s been really, really fun to get involved in the building side from that angle, and help people find homes.
It’s a scary proposition going out there to make a new home for yourself, especially when you have either health –
DEBRA: It is!
VICTORIA SCHOMER: …or as most people know, they know enough now to know that there are things they should be looking for, but they’re not quite sure what they are. But they need support to make sure that they don’t buy something that’s going to make them sick.
DEBRA: Or also to know if they can clean that up or not. And we’ll talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Victoria Schomer. We’re talking about green and toxic-free homes. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Victoria Schomer, oen of the pioneers in green and non-toxic building and remodeling. She does many things. Her website is GreenBuilt-e.com. You can go and see everything that she does there. And there are links to all the different aspects of her work, doing design work, acting as a realtor to find toxic-free and green properties. And also, you can stay at her bed and breakfast.
Victoria, this is the last segment of the show, so I want to make sure that you get the opportunity to talk about whatever you would like to talk about. So, is there something you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?
VICTORIA SCHOMER: I don’t know, we’ve talked about all my favorite things, and yours too I think. I think the one thing I just wanted to conclude for me is to sum up my last 20 to 25 years, and realize that I actually feel more hopeful than I have for a long time about where we’re heading in protecting ourselves from exposures to chemicals, and also, saving this planet.
I know people feel like it’s scarier than ever out there, and there are dangers lurking every corner. But I think that’s the way the world has been. A hundred years ago, we could’ve died of a disease pretty easily, and there were a lot of unfriendly activity going on.
I think we have, really, two great opportunities. One is that I think the mainstream public is pretty savvy to what’s going on.
DEBRA: I agree.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: And they are making their voice heard. We’re not stumbling around with 2000 people, but we have tens and tens of thousands of people who are now saying, “Enough is enough.” You realize when Walmart has decided to ban ten toxic ingredients in their products that they sell, that’s a big step. How that all shapes out remains to be seen, but that’s been announced in September. When Oregon decided that genetically-modified seeds were not going to take precedence over natural seeds, we’re getting there slowly, but surely.
So, I feel more hopeful because our consumers and our public are just so much more involved and informed. And because we have the Internet, we have so many places where we can access information, where we can research for ourselves, we can take more personal responsibility for our own health because we can be informed about what’s out there and what’s going to be better for us on an individual basis.
And we all are so unique. You know and I know it’s challenging to help support somebody with a chemical sensitivity because every person’s situation and their toxic levels and the things that they get reactions from are different.
So, the modern information we have out there now, I think we can all do a better job of taking care of ourselves and also, we’re just a bigger base of people who are not going to let things get out of control.
DEBRA: Well, I think I totally agree with you in everything that you say. I know that you and I have had a lot of experience with multiple chemical sensitivities although you’re not chemically sensitive. That was my original introduction to all of these.
But coming from that, that’s a particular way of viewing life of saying, “Well, all these toxic chemicals are making my body sick. They’re destroying my immune system” but what I came to after I started recovering and started doing the researches, that it’s not just about people being chemically sensitive.
In my last book, Toxic-Free, I really identified that every single body system – there are now studies which say toxic chemicals are affecting every single body system. So, it doesn’t matter what symptom or what illness you have, toxic chemicals is contributing to it.
And there are doctors now that know that the first thing that you need to do is detox because no treatment is going to work unless you have the toxic chemicals out of your body if that’s what’s causing the problem.
And if your body is sick because of toxics, you could take all the drugs in the world or have all the surgery in the world, and it’s not solving the problem that toxic chemicals are making you sick.
We know more about that than ever. I totally agree with you that the Internet is giving us more information. It’s making it easier.
When I first started 30 years ago, I had to go down to the library. And one book that I have sitting on my shelf today called Clinical Toxicology of Consumer Products, I used that at the library. And I bought a chemistry dictionary.
So, the way I learned about toxic chemicals was that I would look up chemical A and it would say, “It’s made from this and this and this,” I’d go look up all those other chemicals. And now, I can just go online and type in ‘arsenic’ and I get a hundred results of all the health effects of arsenic.
It’s really very simple for people to get this information now.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Mm-hmmm… mm-hmmm… but I think, yeah, your point that everybody has got something that they’re dealing with, and we need to keep ourselves safe. We also need to take good care of ourselves. We need to really – I’m so grateful to live in Asheville. The stars aligned and I ended up here (from my quick story of how we ended up here).
I’m in an environment where people care about their kids and they want to feed their families, they want to live back on Earth again, on the planet, and feed themselves and grow their own food. There’s hardly a restaurant in town that doesn’t do farm to table organic food.
It’s just a great environment to be in. And I wish that for everyone, to find an environment that helps to support them from the community standpoint because it’s tough out there trying to keep yourself healthy and figure it all out.
DEBRA: It is, it is. And I love Asheville. I think that anybody who wants to go on a vacation who doesn’t live in Asheville should go to Asheville for a vacation. I go there any time I have the opportunity. It’s only a 12-hour drive for me.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Oh, God!
DEBRA: I love going to Asheville. I love going to Asheville. It’s a great place.
Well, we still do have a few more minutes, just a few more minutes. So, let’s see, what else can we talk about.
Well, how do you see the future? Let’s look in the crystal ball.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Well, I’m hoping – you know, when I look at a big entity like Walmart sort of bowing down to, “Okay, we’re going to have to really pay attention to this,” If we can get the chemical companies to do the same thing, and we can get our politicians to rally around getting the legislation in place that protects us as consumers, I think that’s going to happen.
It all looks so screwy, but maybe things look the worse before they clear up, that expression, whatever that is.
DEBRA: It’s darkest before the dawn.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah. I think that that’s where we are in this.
DEBRA: I think so too.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Our politicians couldn’t get more malfunctioning and the chemical companies couldn’t be so overtly blowing us off like, “Yeah, we don’t care.”
So, when I see Walmart saying, “Okay, we’re going to ban these chemicals,” they’re a global supplier of products, so all of their suppliers are going to have to stop […] what they’re using as well.
So, as I’ve said, I don’t know how it’s all going to really shake out, but I feel really encouraged by the things that are starting to happen that are having big impacts globally.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I see kind of behind-the-scenes, there are things going on from manufacturer that consumers don’t see because they’re not advertised to consumers. But manufacturers, there are actually programs going on to help manufacturers identify where are the toxic chemicals in their products and help them identify how they can reformulate their products. That’s going on.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Yeah!
DEBRA: There was something I saw from the American Chemical Society. The American Chemical Society had at their conference a presentation about natural flavorings for food because they recognized that consumers would no longer tolerate or buy artificial flavorings. And so, this is like the American Chemical Society. It was amazing for me to see that because you think that they’re holding on so tight to the way things used to be, but they’re not necessarily. The change is happening.
And I see it from that fundamental level. And so, I’m going to work, so we see it in the world.
Well, thank you so much for being with me, Victoria.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: You bet, you bet.
DEBRA: Let me give your website again. It’s GreenBuilt-e.com. And you can go find out about all the services that Victoria offers in design and building and in choosing homes to buy. You can just go visit a toxic-free environment at her bed and breakfast in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina.
VICTORIA SCHOMER: Thank you so much, Debra. It was delightful.
DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. So, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can find out who the other guests are. You can also find out who has been on in the past because every single one of these shows are archived. You can go back and listen to the shows from the past.
And across the top, there’s a menu. Just click around on different parts of my website because you can go to Debra’s List and find hundreds of websites that sell toxic-free products, you can go to Q&A and find out all kinds of questions (you can ask your own questions). You can call me for a consultation. You can buy my book. We’ve just got lots and lots of information.
Thanks for being with me today.
Heat Bond Products for Sewing
Question from Li
Do you know anything about HeatnBond® Lite and HeatnBond® Hem for sewing? I sew a lot and sometimes my items call for fusible things and sometimes it would make my items a lot easier to make but I don’t want to use off gassing glues! Any help with this would be great Debra! Thanks! http://www.thermowebonline.com/c/our-brands_heatnbond
I got them to send me an MSDS for the product but don’t understand it. Would you help me decipher it? I can tell that I haven’t noticed much smell using it before. She said it is a hot melt adhesive.
Debra’s Answer
Thanks for sending the MSDS. That helps me a lot to answer your question.
OK. Under SECTION 2. PRODUCT AND COMPONENT HAZARD DATA it says “Components: Hydrocarbon and/or oxygen Hydrocarbon Polymers Approx. Percent: 99% TLV ** None **”
What does that mean? “TLV” stands for “threshold limit value” of a chemical substance, which is a level to which it is believed a worker can be exposed day after day for a working lifetime without adverse health effects. It’s an exposure limit.
Now what does “none” mean? I had to look this up and still the answer isn’t clear. The closest answer I could get was “a lower TLV means that less the allowed in the workplace air, and less you should inhale.”. So I’m thinking “none” means you shouldn’t inhale it at all. But that doesn’t make sense for this product. Yet, there are ***s around it so they want you to pay attention.
Then it says “see Section 6” which says:
Based on the above I would say that “none” means there is no need for concern.
Copper Water Bottles
Question from Allison
I have been seeing some sites promoting the use of copper water bottles as the next best metal. They are claiming that is has antimicrobal qualities. It has been understanding that copper in food storage is not ideal, it being a heavy metal. However, many water pipes are copper. Can you help clear up the confusion? Thank you so much!
Debra’s Answer
This is not an easy thing to clear up.
Many years ago, I went to a nutritionist who told me I had a copper imbalance in my body. She treated me for it, and my symptoms went away. I remember at that time reading about not using copper pipes, etc, and you are right, that copper cooking pots are lined (though copper candy pots are not).
Here is a comprehensive article about Copper Toxicity Syndrome, by Lawrence Wilson, MD. In it he explains how copper is required by the body for important functions, and how too much copper can be toxic. I personally wouldn’t use copper as a container for my everyday drinking water.
Heartfelt Collective
“An heirloom bed for the new paradigm.” A unique bed made entirely of layers of organic wool felt—the latest creation from Eliana Jantz, who has been exploring the common threads of bedding that weave through indigenous cultures for more than thirty years. This is the most basic bed, I can’t even really call it a mattress, because it’s simply layers of handmade wool felts, which can be separated for washing, sunning and airing. It’s the simplest of beds. You choose the degree of support with the number of layers, placed on a wood slat frame.
|
Listen to my interview with Eliana Jantz, Founder of Heartfelt Collective. |
U-Line
Plastic-free packaging for shipping, including corrugated cardboard boxes in more than 1200 sizes, corrugated wrap, stuffing materials, recycled wrapping paper, padded mailers (search for “Jiffy Padded Mailers”), and gummed paper tape. Also glass jars with metal lids for food storage. And maybe much more…more than 25,000 products. Seems like they have a lot of “old-fashioned” items, that were commonly in use before plastic came along.
Vita Clay
Vita Clay slow cookers are the only brand that I know for sure does not have lead in the glaze of their pots. Their pots have no glaze at all and they work very hard to ensure their products are made from chemical-free natural clay. I called Vita Clay and talked with them about the clay they use. Their pots are made from zisha clay, which is a famous Chinese clay, known for its purity. It has been used for centuries to make teapots because zisha teapots are treasured for their ability to enhance the flavor, aroma and texture of tea. Zisha clay is also structurally strong without glazing and does not crack when subjected to large and sudden temperature differences. Vita Clay pots are certified lead-free by SGS and are also tested by the FDA.
Is This Zero VOC Paint Toxic?
Question from Jamie
I recently painted my entire house with Zero VOC paint from Kelly Moore? Do you know how dangerous that paint is?
Debra’s Answer
On the Kelly Moore Zero VOC Enviro Coat website it says the paints “are formulated with a 100% acrylic resin, and are Zero VOC for safe and virtually odorless application.” It also says it has “antimicrobial properties.” And these paints have zero VOC colorants, which is not the case with all zero VOC paints.
Let’s look at the MSDS. There are no hazardous materials reported.
But I just have to note that some chemicals I consider to be hazardous are not required to be reported.
As paints go, this is much less toxic than many, but it’s still a plastic paint made from petroleum. There are safer paints available. See Debra’s List: Interior Decorating: Paint.
How Long Do Pesticides Last?
Question from Bonnie Johnson
If pesticide was used in an apartment before you moved in how long would it take to go away and no longer be harmful. Are there any pesticides that are lower in toxins?
Debra’s Answer
Different pesticides persist for different lengths of time and if you can find out the name of the pesticide, you can look it up online and find out how long it persists before it biodegrades.
The length of time a pesticide persists is measured in “half life,” which is “the time when the expected value of the number of entities that have decayed is equal to half the original number.” It’s a probability, not an absolute. So minimum time before it will be gone is the half life number.
LCD TV or LED TV best for MCS?
Question from Alyce
I’m so confused about whether LCD TV or an LED TV is best for MCS. I seem to find conflicting information. Appreciate opinions!
Debra’s Answer
Readers? Any opinions to share?
Is a Plastic Laundry Sink Toxic?
Question from Cecilia
Dear Debra, I need to install a new laundry sink. I wanted to avoid plastic, but since the difference in price is so big (4 times more for stainless steel), I will appreciate your opinion about this one: http://www.mustee.com/product-lines/laundry-utility-tubs/index.html Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
According to their website, it’s made from fiberglass. Fiberglass is molten glass spun into fibers, but then plastic resins of various types are added. Nothing wrong with the glass fibers, but unless you know the type of resin used, we can’t evaluate the toxicity.
I suggest giving the manufacturer a call and then writing again with the answer. Then I can tell you if it is toxic or not.
Let it Shine: The History and Possibilites of Solar Energy
My guest is John Perlin, author of Let it Shine: The 6,000-year story of Solar Energy. I still have on my shelf an autographed copy of his previous book A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, published in 1980 (now out-of-print). It’s actually 
one of my favorite books of all time and can’t wait to read the new one. John’s work, to me, is an inspiration for solar energy. John is an international expert on solar energy and has lectured around the world on the subject. We’ll be talking about the history of solar energy and the possibilities of using solar energy as a less toxic energy source now and in the future. www.john-perlin.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Let it Shine: the History and Possibilities of Solar Energy
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: John Perlin
Date of Broadcast: September 26, 2013
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 even though there are many, many toxic chemicals out there, there are also a lot of things that we can do to remove toxic chemicals from our home, remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, remove toxic chemicals from our community. And my personal goal is to have a completely toxic-free world. And that’s possible because all the technology exists. It just is a matter of education and choice.
And that’s why I’m here, to let you know what’s possible so that you can make those choices.
Today, we’re going to talk about solar energy, and I have probably the best person in the world that I can think of to have here as a guest to talk about this subject.
My guest is John Perlin. He’s the author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy.
Now, the reason why we’re talking about solar energy today is because it’s a less toxic alternative to using fossil fuels which create toxic waste in their mining. I’m not sure if that’s the right word. But when they remove it from the earth, there’s toxic waste. When it gets processed, there’s toxic waste. And when it gets burned for energy, there’s toxic waste.
So, we can eliminate a lot of toxics in the environment by using solar energy.
I actually met John Perlin many years ago—we’ll find out if he remembers—when he had written a book called A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology. He was a co-author of that book. And now, his new book, Let It Shine, he talks about the 6000-year story of solar energy.
So, a lot has happened. He’s obviously learned a lot more about solar energy. And when I read A Golden Thread, I couldn’t put it down. I just read it from cover to cover. I was so excited and so inspired because solar energy is a lot more than putting solar panels on your house.
And the thing that I immediately thought of was to use a solar oven. And I now live in Florida. And we have so much sunshine.
We could be using so much solar energy in so many ways, and we aren’t.
And so, this is why it’s important for us to talk about this, so that more people can hear about it.
Hi, John. Thanks for being on the show today.
JOHN PERLIN: Hi! And I do remember you.
DEBRA: Oh, good! I remember you. And when I saw your book I thought, “Oh, yes. Let’s have John on.”
JOHN PERLIN: Well, I hope you find Let It Shine as hard to put down as A Golden Thread.
DEBRA: Well, I actually haven’t started reading it yet. I glanced through it to see where you’re going with it. But I’m taking it with me. I’m going to the Natural Products Expo this afternoon, getting on a plane to Baltimore. And I’m taking it with me so I can read it on the plane, and in between doing other things.
I’m so glad that you have an updated book because your perspective is so unique and empowering. And we’re going to talk about all of these things today.
JOHN PERLIN: First of all, maybe we can do a second show after you read the book.
DEBRA: Well, we could! We absolutely could. And I’ll probably have more questions to ask you. But let’s start out with how did you get so interested in solar energy?
JOHN PERLIN: Well, it’s a long story, but to make it very short, when I was living in Jerusalem, I decided I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea what I was going to write.
And then, what happened when I came back to America, I got involved in a debate in Santa Barbara, California whether oil, natural gas, was the only way we can fuel the world.
So, I spent—
DEBRA: Let me interrupt you for minute because I’m from California. In fact, I think I met you when I was in Santa Barbara.
So, for those of you who don’t know, Santa Barbara is an extremely beautiful place right on the Pacific Ocean. And off shore, there are oil wells. And there’s a lot of controversy about having those oil wells there. But they’re just unsightly if nothing else.
And they’re probably causing some pollution. And I don’t even know what all the issues are, but there are oil wells off the coast of Santa Barbara. You can just see them in a line.
JOHN PERLIN: Well, the thing was, is they wanted to bring it on shore and build a large refining plant using the argument there was no other choice to fuel America.
So, I went to the library, and explored the literature at the time, and found that solar was viable. And so, what I did was I testified at the supervisors’ meeting. And they liked my talk so much that the leading radio station said if I make a little book on that, they will give me all the air time possible.
So, I did that. And I had only 10 books that I made. And that sold out really quickly.
So then the librarian at Santa Barbara said he liked the book so much. It was a little book called “Solar Energy Fact Sheet.” I just sent it to a group that reviews such innovative, new literature. It was called a book legger. And they gave it a great review.
And suddenly, I was selling books all over the world.
And then, I got invited to a conference on solar energy and someone said, “If you think you guys are doing something new, back in the turn of the century, we had solar water heaters in Southern California.”
So, I thought, “Wow! What a story. No one knows about this. I’ll write a book on solar water heating in California.”
And then, I talked to an architect that had been around for longer than anyone else. And he said, “If you think this is new, when I was in architectural school, I learned that the Romans heated their baths with solar energy.”
And then, I went to University of California Santa Barbara to the Classics Department to find out where I could find information on this. And suddenly, one of the professors said, “Oh, if you think that’s new, you should explore the excavations at Olympus which talk about the Greeks using solar energy to heat all their houses and building all their cities so every house could use the heat of the sun.”
So, that’s how I began my foray into solar history.
DEBRA: And at the time, nobody else was writing about that. Wasn’t yours one of the first books that really discussed solar energy in the way that you discuss it?
JOHN PERLIN: It was the only book.
DEBRA: It was the only book.
JOHN PERLIN: Actually, that’s one of the interesting things about my work is that it’s primarily original archival research.
DEBRA: Yes. And you and I have a parallel in that about the same time I was starting to write about toxics. My book was the only book. I was in libraries looking up what kind of chemicals were in products in books that nobody ever read—medical books and poison control books and things like that.
And mine was the first book that somebody wrote about toxic chemicals in consumer products.
So, we both started within five years of each other, writing on subjects that nobody had written on before.
JOHN PERLIN: So, in this book, it’s twice as big—twice as long, I should say, twice as many pages of A Golden Thread because, once again, I don’t know, I just had my eyes out in the last 20 years for these historical materials.
For example, there were these Chinese scholars at the university. And their wives, although they have PhDs, they had no work. And I asked them a question and said, “Was solar architecture big in China?”
And they said, “Are you kidding? Today, when a house has a south-facing exposure, it’s 20% or 30% more valuable on the market.”
And so then I asked them do they know any historical antecedents?” And they said, “We all know about the literature.”
And so they went to all these books that were written 3000 years ago that no one in the US has ever seen. They translated them for me.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. And then we’ll be back, and we’ll talk more about this very fascinating subject.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I am here with John Perlin, author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is John Perlin, and we’re talking about solar energy. He’s the author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy.
John, before we go any further, could you tell our listening audience what would be the savings of toxic chemical exposure by using solar energy? What is it replacing that we’re not going to have pollution of?
JOHN PERLIN: Well, first of all, greenhouse gases, all the solar technologies, lessen dramatically the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air. Second of all, in China, the pollution is so terrible. And they see photovoltaics as the only way of stopping the burning of coal, which is terribly, terribly toxic for humans, for everyone.
Also, the dream actually is that photovotaics can produce photovoltaics. In other words, have a breeder type of a plant where you have solar-producing solar.
So basically, I think wires are toxic also. And one of the things that solar does is allow everyone in the world to use their local energy source that’s been on our portfolio for 6000 years—but actually, has been on our portfolio for billions of years—the sun.
And most people believe that its abundancy will last at least another I think 14 billion years.
DEBRA: Yes, I think that’s a good and renewable enough resource. Is it called a renewable resource? Is it renewing itself? Is the sun renewing itself by continuing to burn or is it just a perpetual resource?
JOHN PERLIN: That’s a funny thing that you should mention. In astrophysics, it says it’s not renewable because it’s constantly burning fuel. It’s like a nuclear reaction that’s safely sited 93 million miles away.
So, it is using fuel. It’s not a perpetual motion machine, but the amount of fuel available will last about 16 billion years.
DEBRA: Okay, that’s enough. That is enough.
JOHN PERLIN: So, I guess when you consider coal or oil, the supplies will be only in the hundreds of years, possibly even less. When you look at the sun, it’s renewable in the sense that we don’t have to use any energy except to produce the panels themselves.
What’s interesting about that too is you can look at a solar electrical panel as basically a little mini electrical generator. And in about a year, it produces enough electricity to pay for all the electricity that went into making it.
DEBRA: And then how long does a photovoltaic last?
JOHN PERLIN: If built properly with proper back sheet, proper packaging, they should last 50 or 60 years at least. I mean, there are solar cells that were built in 1980 that are still producing as much electricity as they did 30, 40 years ago, which is amazing when you consider that it’s the only electronic material that’s exposed to night and day, snow and rain, and hot sun.
DEBRA: So, what kind of materials are solar cells made from?
JOHN PERLIN: Solar cells are made of—well, the primary solar cell used today is the silicon solar cell. And it’s made up of silicon which is one of the most abundant materials on the earth.
DEBRA: Is there anything toxic about it?
JOHN PERLIN: There are a few toxic elements. But if they are recycled, it is a very clean technology.
But I’d like to get into what the book covers. The book covers all the solar technologies. People don’t realize that there are various ways of using the sun. One is using the heat of the sun.
DEBRA: Actually, this is what I want to talk about the most because I think that people know that photovoltaic exists. But I want everybody to see that there are so many other ways. So just go ahead because that was what excited me the most.
JOHN PERLIN: First of all, just siting a building can really change the way a structure uses energy. For example, if you site your house just like the Chinese did 4000 years ago or 6000 years ago, or how the Greeks did, in the same fashion, or as the Romans did, or as in succeeding chapters, how the Europeans did in the 19th century, you can cover—depending on the climate you’re in—at least 60% of your energy needs.
And using glass, which was invented by the Romans, you can trap solar heat, so you can even get more heat inside the house.
What people don’t realize is one of the beauties of solar—they say, “Well, solar is too [diffuse].” Well, that’s the beauty of it because it fits the temperature that you want in your room, in your house, in your interior.
So, that’s one way. An interesting example is the proofreader was reading my book, and she said, “Now, I know why my house is so uncomfortable because it’s sited east west.” And east west, you get tremendous amounts of sun heat into the house during the summer time and almost no solar energy in the winter time.
While if you face your house south—I was in Turkey. They still build like they did 2500 years ago in Ancient Turkey. And even in 96 degree weather, in the hottest time of the day, if you go in the house, it’s comfortable.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally, totally agree with this. We need to take another break. We’ll be right back. And we’ll talk more about this.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is John Perlin, author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy. And we’ll be right back with more about the history of how solar energy has been used.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is John Perlin, author of the book Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy.
John, what proof do you have that solar power has been used for 6000 years?
JOHN PERLIN: Well, we have the archeological evidence from [unintelligible 18:30], which is a Neolithic community. Every house had a thatched roof. It was like wearing a hat. So it kept the high summer sun off the house and allow the low summer sun to go into the windows that were all faced south. And so, we have archeological proof.
And then 4000 years ago, we have, again, archeological proof that the big, big city called Erlitou not only had its buildings with, once again, a big hat, and on the north side of a south-facing courtyard where all the sun could come in during the winter months when it’s low. And the hat, you might say, of the building, kept the high summer sun off.
You might say it’s almost like God’s plan because, by having a building that’s stationary, we can design it so it could keep the hot summer sun off and allow the winter sun to enter.
I would like to get back to the different technologies that we have so people can know.
The next technology we have is called mirrors or concentrators. They’re called burning mirrors. And one of the real great science of the new book was that, 3000 years ago, the Chinese were using what they called solar igniters or thick mirrors that would focus the rays of the sun to a point, and they would ignite combustibles.
You have to understand. It was really difficult back in the old days to light a fire because you had to use friction. There were no matches. So, about 3000 years ago, the Chinese started using the sun to alleviate that problem. And they found molds for those mirrors—actually 30,000 molds to make. And they also found [caches] of the mirrors themselves.
And a very bright archeologist, he restored one of the mirrors, and then he shined it up. He had a fire going in maybe 15 or 16 seconds.
So there are solar mirrors that have also been with us for 3000 years that can provide power. And it also provide cooking.
Your stove that you talked about is a combination, I think, of glass that traps solar heat and also in the interior is like a mirror which then focuses more solar heat onto what you’re cooking. Isn’t that what it is?
DEBRA: Yes. I actually don’t have one. I was looking at building one. And I think it was lined with aluminum foil, so the foil acted as a reflector. And then you would put the food in a pot or a glass baking dish. And then it would create and it would bake.
I’m still very interested in doing that. I just need to do it.
I think that the first step is to be inspired and get the information to know what the different technologies are, and have the inspiration to do it. But then there’s also—I looked into putting solar panels on my roof, and it was some tens of thousands of dollars. And so that didn’t happen.
But I really want to see—especially here in Florida, I’d like to see a lot more solar just right here in my community, and in the State of Florida, because we have such a huge resource. And I’m looking at what’s an entry level thing that people could do and afford to do. And I think that solar ovens might be it.
JOHN PERLIN: Well, let me tell you what Florida did in the past. I actually was in Coral Gables.
DEBRA: I love Coral Gables!
JOHN PERLIN: And Coral Gables, if you look, they have these false chimneys that are made out of—I believe, it’s aluminum.
And what they are are storage tanks that either connect or used to connect to solar water heaters that were built during the ‘30s and the ‘20s and the ‘40s. And I had the luck to climb up to an apartment building roof, and see a solar water heater that was built in 1923 in Coral Gables that was still producing such heat that I could only keep my finger on the output pipe for a second.
So, that’s the amazing thing about the technology. That’s 90 years ago and still working.
DEBRA: Well, why do you think, since we had all these technologies—our modern method of heating and electricity and all of that is very industrial and only about 200 years old. Why do you think that all these old technologies are not in use? And do you think that we’re going to be able to bring them back?
JOHN PERLIN: Actually, first of all, it’s not true that they’re not in use. I was, for example, in Western Turkey, and every building, every house, had a solar water heater. In China, they have 60 million solar water heaters.
DEBRA: Well, I meant in America.
JOHN PERLIN: America is a special case. And that’s what my book does—it thinks internationally. And so the solar water heater which was developed in America has traveled or migrated throughout the world in places like Cyprus, places like Israel, places like China, places like Barbados. They’re producing the majority of the hot water for those countries.
Now, what it’s based on is glass as a solar heat trap, which the Romans discovered, and then in the 1700s, they tried to see how much glass could trap solar heat. And actually, you can build a very good oven that way—and they did—by just using insulation in a box, that has two or three glass covers.
DEBRA: I really, really want to do that. But we need to take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is John Perlin, author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy.
And if you want to go to his website, it’s John-Perlin, P-E-R-L-I-N, dot com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is John Perlin, author of Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy. And if you’re interested in getting a copy of his book, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and click on the title or click on the book cover that’s there, and it will take you right to a place where you can order it.
John, I wanted to just also mention we’ve been talking about using the sun, but I want to also say that, here in Florida, instead of needing heat, what we need is to not have sun because it’s too hot here. And so, I know that one of the challenges I’m facing on my property is how can I keep my house cooler and be shielding my house from the sun instead of bringing the sun in?
And so I think that, in considering the sun, we can be considering how we can use the sun, but then also, how we can block the sun when it’s necessary in order to control temperature.
JOHN PERLIN: Actually, that’s what all the ancient cultures did. As I’ve said, they built a house—first of all, you have to face your house correctly.
DEBRA: Yes. I was thinking about that while you were thinking. I was thinking, “Well, let me just pick up my house and turn it around.”
JOHN PERLIN: Is your house facing east west?
DEBRA: The windows are all on the east and west side.
JOHN PERLIN: So, what you want to do is possibly look at the new windows that have thermal control in the glass. Secondly, what you want to do is insulate. And third of all, what you want to do is possibly build eaves, very long eaves, that will keep out the summer sun because you’re not going to get any winter sun anyway.
DEBRA: No, we don’t have much winter sun. But in the summer sun—I mean, my desk actually, where I’m sitting right now, faces east. And I have 17 feet of windows that look out into the garden. It’s very nice. But every morning, the sun shines right in, and I have to put a shade down or I can’t sit here.
And a friend of mine who’s an architect and is familiar with all these natural flows, she actually suggested that I put up some lattice, so that I can build a blind on it.
JOHN PERLIN: Exactly! I was just going to say that. What you can do is plant diurnal plants that have leaves during the summer time and shed those leaves during the winter time.
DEBRA: That would be great. Yes, I like that idea a lot.
JOHN PERLIN: So just getting back into the books so people know what it contains, one of the really massive uses of solar energy that remains today and no one thinks of it is making salt. What you do is you take very shallow [troughs] or you just allow the sea water to come into channels, and then you allow the sun to evaporate the water. And you have salt. That’s probably the biggest use of solar energy over the millennia.
And still, in San Francisco Bay, you see this pink area, and it’s producing solar salt.
DEBRA: Yes, especially when you fly into the airport. Everybody can see that when you fly into San Francisco.
JOHN PERLIN: That’s actually a solar salt plant. And the opposite or the inverse is producing fresh water. Instead of evaporating—when you evaporate the water, you collect it on the surface, and allow it to trickle down, and allow the salt to collect in the middle of your solar still. That saved thousands of air men in World War II and is still a standard fair for everyone in the air force. So, there you have solar saving, saving lots of lives.
And to get to solar cells, the first solar cells were actually discovered in the 1870s.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that.
JOHN PERLIN: Actually, in the book, there’s a picture of the first solar module. The problem was, because they didn’t have the science, they didn’t realize that their solar cells were very inefficient.
And then in the ‘50s, with silicon, they discovered how to make very efficient solar cells and they became the power house of the satellites. And what people don’t realize is that all modern light is run by satellites, and all satellites are run by solar cells.
DEBRA: Wow! So we’re using it in many, many more ways than I think that the average person even realizes.
JOHN PERLIN: For example, when you do a bank transaction, or when you pump gas, all that is run by satellite. If you look at the top at the roof of the building, there’s a little microwave fixture. And the microwave repeater sends the transaction to a satellite. The satellite sends it to a hub or its central company. And then the transaction is done in milliseconds.
And also, cell phones, for example, would have never existed without satellites, of course—GPS, I could go on and on, CNN.
All those that we take for granted are products of satellites run by solar cells.
DEBRA: Well, so it really is in our culture even though we don’t know it. How can people who are not using solar in their homes get started?
JOHN PERLIN: Well, first of all, your house, try to make the house as best a solar collector during the winter time and as a solar avoider during the summer. You’d save lots of money. You probably could coat your glass, for example, with a tint, a material that would keep a lot of the sunlight out for example.
DEBRA: That’s something people do here actually.
JOHN PERLIN: And now, like I said, they’re developing smart glass which can actually not only keep the heat in during winter time, the heat out during the summer time, but also can produce electricity. So, by replacing glass, that’s another way.
Also, they can do what they did in Florida in the 1920s and 1930s, if they can do it then, they certainly can do it today, is have a solar water heater.
I don’t know when you were quoted […]?
DEBRA: It was several years ago. Are the prices coming down?
JOHN PERLIN: That’s the big secret that no one knows. The price of solar cells has dropped below a dollar a watt—and so, by a factor of four. And that’s why photovoltaics where every house can become its own producer is actually seen now by many utilities as a threat to their existence because, rather than being powered from a distant central generating plant, your rooftop can become a power source.
And the beauty of that is transmission losses are about 30% and all of that is avoided because you’re using the electricity that’s produced on your roof in your home.
DEBRA: I could really see that every house could have solar cells on them. So are there programs that help people finance them and things like that?
JOHN PERLIN: There are several companies like Solar City that actually lease photovoltaics. And what happens is they charge you less than your utility bill, and then they get all the subsidies and benefits that are available. And so that’s how they make money.
I don’t know how it is in Florida, but in California, solar actually is the least expensive way of producing electricity at this moment.
DEBRA: I’m going to look into that. I wish we could talk about it more, but we’ve only got about one minute left in the show. So I want to give you the opportunity to say whatever you’d like to say in closing that we haven’t yet covered.
JOHN PERLIN: I think the book provides the background story behind today’s worldwide solar revolution which is really, really happening. Everywhere, we have gone from maybe 360 kilowatts in 1977 to 100 gigawatts today in photovoltaics.
But also, in solar water heating, we have gone from about 60 or 70 gigawatts equivalent to about 300 today.
So now, the essentials are covered by solar energy like I said on the satellites. But also, solar energy is the fastest growing energy source in the world. And this is what Amory Lovins says. “Let It Shine show how today’s renewable revolution builds on the tenacious efforts of countless generations of innovators whose vision we may finally be privileged enough to bring into full flower.”
DEBRA: And I have to interrupt you because we’re at the end and the music is going to come on. Thank you so much, John Perlin.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Getting to Know Alpacas
My guest is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm, one of the largest breeders of both Suri and Huacaya alpaca in the northeast United States. We’ll be talking about alpaca as a toxic-free renewable and sustainable material for clothing, bedding, and other products.. Steve grew up in Iowa in a rural community. Following graduation from high school he entered into radio broadcasting, and spent the next 17 years working in all aspects of media. His experience in business and marketing took him to Houston, Texas in 1995 where he began a career in telecommunications In 2005 Steve moved to Connecticut to over-see operations of Safe Haven Alpaca Farm, a family business that began in 2001 with six alpaca. The addition of a large retail store featuring alpaca clothing, gifts and accessories, a bed and breakfast and growing the herd from twenty alpaca to over 100 have been accomplished since he joined the business. Steve Putney on the Board of Directors of the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association. www.safehavenalpaca.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Getting to Know Alpacas
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steve Putney
Date of Broadcast: September 25, 2013
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.
Today is Wednesday, September 25, 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida on a beautiful autumn day. It’s just gray and drizzling and quiet. Very nice!
So today, we’re going to talk about alpacas. And the reason we’re talking about alpacas today is because this weekend, it is National Alpaca Farm Days. There are many alpaca farms all over the United States that will be open, and you can go and take your family and visit and meet the alpacas.
If you go to NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com, about halfway down the page, there’s a menu item that says “find a farm,” just click on that, and you can find a farm near you and go visit the alpacas. It’s a wonderful thing to do.
I’ve met many alpacas. And I just think they are wonderful animals. And it will be a great outing for your family and your kids.
You’ll like the alpacas.
And we’re going to learn all about alpacas today.
One of the reasons why I wanted to have a show about alpacas is because when we’re looking at toxic chemicals—and if you’ve been listening to this show, you know there are many, many toxic chemicals all over the place in all kinds of consumer products.
If you’re wanting to move away from toxic chemical exposure, there’s actually a scale with different degrees, a gradient, where, at the worst, would be to use an industrial product made from toxic chemicals. And then, the next better thing would be to use an industrial product made from petroleum products that are not toxic.
And then, the next better thing would be to use an industrial product made from ingredients that have natural renewable sources like coconut oil is one that we’ve been talking about a lot on this show recently. But there are many natural ingredients that start with a natural, renewable material, and then they put it through an industrial process. And what comes out at the other end is an industrial ingredient, some of which are toxic.
For example, salt, in its natural state, is vital to health and very good for you. It has many natural minerals. But when they put salt through industrial processing, you get something called refined salt, which is, when you just see salt on the label, that’s what it is, refined salt. And it’s virtually in every processed food that’s on the market. You get symptoms. It affects your health.
You get high blood pressure and all kinds of other—wreaking havoc in your body because salt now has become an industrial chemical.
And then, the very best is to just get out of that industrial model entirely and use things that are produced by nature outside of the industrial system. And alpaca is one of those things where they’re out in nature, they’re eating grass, or whatever. We’ll find out what they eat. And they’re sheared, and then they’re made into products that we can us. And it’s all natural.
So my guest today is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm. And he’s on the board of directors of the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association.
Thanks for being with us, Steve.
STEVE PUTNEY: Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: So, tell us your story about how you got to be raising alpacas.
STEVE PUTNEY: Well, the Safe Haven began back in 2001. My mother-in-law had a large piece of property and wanted to do something with it. I saw an ad in the magazine toward a few farms, fell in love with the animals, and decided to purchase a package of animals and began the alpaca farm.
I came up in 2005 to help her run the operation, and grow the operation, and try to get more involved in the industry itself, which we have done. And I’ve been doing it since 2005. It’s what I do full time. And I love what I do.
DEBRA: Don’t you think that most people [unintelligible 04:29].
STEVE PUTNEY: Well, I think a lot of people, that’s where they start. For anybody that hasn’t been exposed to the alpaca, they’re often confused with the llama. But they’re much smaller. The llama has more of a guard-type mentality, a territorial mentality. The alpaca is a very soft, very gentle animal to be around.
And animals that have been exposed to people are desensitized. You can come up, you can touch them, you can interact with them. And they’re like no other animal you’ve ever been around before.
And so, I think that experience captures a lot of people’s imagination to say, “Hey, this is something that I would like to walk out my back door and be able to do every day as well.”
DEBRA: So, tell us, what’s the process of raising an alpaca? What do they eat? Do you treat them with pesticides? What’s it like in the life of an alpaca?
STEVE PUTNEY: Well, the life of a single alpaca, they’re going to eat about four to five pounds of either hay, grass, some sort of porridge every day. There is a processed grain, if you will. It’s made differently. There isn’t a national company that’s doing it like Purina or anything like that. So, it’s local companies that are making these recipes.
It’s fairly standardized all over. They’re pretty close to being the same thing. And they get about a pound of that a day. A 50-pound bag, it varies a little bit from one end of the country, but $15 to $20. And they eat about a pound of that a day. So obviously, a bag of feed lasts you a long time.
And again, hay cost varies a lot from coast to coast and border to border. And so […] as well.
So, you will have people that have large pasture areas where they’re grazing animals, they’re not necessarily feeding [unintelligible 06:28]. You have other people that are using what we refer to as “dry lot,” which means there isn’t any grass growing, and they’re feeding out hay.
And they don’t require a lot of medical care. They’re pretty hardy animals. They can stand up to all kinds of different weather-type conditions. And so, there’s not a lot of veterinarian costs associated with the animal as well.
DEBRA: So, when it’s time to shear the alpaca—and I’m asking this question because I know there’s a lot of people who are concerned about animal rights and not wanting to kill animals, so they don’t wear wools from sheep that have been killed for meat. But you’re not killing the alpacas for meat, are you? You’re just shearing them because who eats alpaca meats? Does anybody eat alpaca meat?
STEVE PUTNEY: There are some farms in the United States that are raising alpacas and to cull the herd. And for people who don’t understand what that is, you have animals that, for whatever reason, are not going to be breeding animals. They are non-productive animals. They are producing a meat product from those, and are harvesting the hide. There are some farms out there that are doing that.
For the most part, everybody in the industry were raising them primarily for the fleece. And we shear them once a year. And the shearing process is actually—it’s an interesting process because the alpaca, as long as it feels confined, it doesn’t really try to fight you very much. But if it feels like it can get away, it will try.
So, we do actually tie them down, which sounds really bad. But it protects the animal from hurting itself and the people who are doing the shearing from getting hurt as well.
And there are three cuts to the alpaca fleece versus a sheep fleece which comes off as a solid piece. There are three separate cuts—the blanket, which is the finest alpaca; the seconds, which is still very, very usable in garments (you just wouldn’t want to have it right up against your skin as it’s going to have some guard hairs and things); and then the thirds, which work really well for things like stuffing quilts, pillows and things like that.
And so, it’s a little bit different than what people would see with shearing a sheep. But it’s not harmful to the animal in any way, shape or form. And the shearers across the United States are very, very careful to take exceptionally good care of the animals.
So shearing, it’s probably more traumatic to the people doing it because [unintelligible 09:11] animal themselves.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’ll be back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
We’re talking about alpacas today because this weekend is National Alpaca Farm Days. You can go to NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com and find out where you can go to a local farm and meet an alpaca. And we’ll be right back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about alpacas with Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm. This weekend, you can go visit an alpaca at a local farm and just go to NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com, and you can find a farm near you.
So Steve, tell us more about—I understand that alpacas are considered a green animal.
STEVE PUTNEY: They are probably the greenest animal I have ever met in my entire life. We were talking about them grazing. In the front of their mouth, they don’t have teeth on the top. The bottom teeth mesh up to the gum. And when the alpaca bites that on the grass, it shakes its head just a little bit—it’s almost imperceptible—and actually cuts the grass off versus other animals that will grab it and tear it.
And so, the alpaca actually encourages pasture growth which is hard to find. It’s like having an organic lawn mower. It’s amazing.
So, it begins there. They are a modified [unintelligible 10:57]. They process the stuff they take in, and they get all of the nutrients they can possibly get out of it. And then, when you get down to what goes in must come out, the manure that they produce is actually not real high in ammonia. And it’s not what you would consider to be a hot manure. So, it can actually be put on plants and vegetables and stuff fresh without harming them in any way, shape or form. And it has slow release of the nitrogen and phosphorous and stuff that’s in it, so it lasts a long time when you put it on your plants.
Along with that as well—again, kind of unique for a livestock animal—they don’t have a hoof. They have a soft pad like a dog has and a nail. And that means that when it’s rainy and stuff, and they’re walking across the ground, they’re not digging in and tearing up the ground.
That’s the beginning of it. Then you start breaking down the fiber itself. It doesn’t have any lanolin in it. It has a natural resin that makes it water-resistant. But it’s hypoallergenic.
And so, when it’s time to do the scrubbing which they refer to—for example, if you have wool, it has to be scrubbed, it has to be cleaned before it’s processed and turned into something. With alpaca, they don’t have to use any kind of harsh cleaning agents, and you don’t have to send it to special facilities for the scrubbing.
And so, you can use a very normal, gentle wash to begin the process of processing it into yarn or thread that then becomes clothing that you can wear right against your skin.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that about alpacas. So is it called alpaca wool or alpaca fleece or alpaca hair?
STEVE PUTNEY: They refer to it as fiber.
DEBRA: Fiber, alpaca fiber, okay.
STEVE PUTNEY: Yes, they refer to it as fiber. And you can look at it as wool. It’s the same process, but it actually has more hair-like qualities than it does wool-type qualities.
DEBRA: So when you shear the alpaca, then you clean it, and then how do you process that into a yarn or a thread? What is that process? I’m trying to visualize what happens between the hair being on the alpaca, and then turning into something you can make something from.
STEVE PUTNEY: Let me walk you through the process. We begin with the shearing. And as I mentioned, you have three different cuts on the alpaca. So we’ll focus on the blanket because that’s the finest and that’s the stuff that you’re going to wear against your skin.
So, the blanket, if the blanket is taken off, and it’s put in a bag, most people weigh it. And then it goes on a skirting table. You pick out the [unintelligible 14:01] so that it’s clean. It goes into a gentle wash.
A lot of people who are doing this at home will use just a little bit of Dawn dishwashing liquid and do it in the sink because all you’re really trying to do is release the dirt because there is no oil or anything associated with the fleece.
It’s then dried, and it goes into a carter. And what a carter does is it lines up all the fibers in the same direction.
From there, if you’re doing it in a machine, which most people will, it goes in and it gets spun into what is referred to as a roving, which is a very, very loose, I guess you would call it “rope” of the alpaca fiber, but it’s then spun together, so that it adheres to itself.
And this is the same process that’s used for wool, for cotton, and anything like that.
DEBRA: It sounds very familiar like wool.
STEVE PUTNEY: And then, from there, it will go into either for hand spinners. They’re going to take that roving, and they’re going to do their hand spinning with it in a more commercial environment—the cottage industry, for example. They have small machines that they put it in. And depending upon what the end product you’re looking for, you’re going to have certain weights and things, the number of plies that you’re going to do, but it gets basically woven into a thin string. And then, that thin string is either doubled or tripled or quadrupled in order to make the weight of yarn that you’re looking for.
DEBRA: So, is this basically a cottage industry? There are not big industrial factories that are processing this, right?
STEVE PUTNEY: Here in the United States, no. It is most definitely a cottage industry. A lot of people that have alpacas, they have farm [stores]. We were talking about National Alpaca Farm Days. They have farm stores. So what they’ll do is they’ll take a portion, if not all of their fleece production, and they’ll turn that into yarn, roving, and some things like that.
And so, when people are going out for National Alpaca Farm Days, they actually have an opportunity to lay their hand on some of the end products, and feel the incredible softness of it, and in some cases, if they so chose, purchase those products as well.
DEBRA: It is incredibly soft. And we’re coming up on another break, so after the break, I’ll talk about my alpaca pillow, which I totally love, and how it’s different from a wool pillow.
My name is Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm.
And we’re talking about alpacas and the National Alpaca Farm Days. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about alpacas because this weekend is National Alpaca Farm Days. And you can just go to NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com, and find an alpaca farm near you, and go visit the alpacas, which are very friendly animals. It’s a great thing for you to do as a family outing on a nice autumn day.
My guest today is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm. And he’s at SafeHavenAlpaca.com.
I was going to talk about my alpaca pillow. My alpaca pillow is the best pillow I have ever slept on. And it is very different. I’ve slept on many natural fibers. And I know that my listeners are interested in pillows with natural fibers inside because we don’t want to be sleeping on polyester or polyurethane foam with fire retardant or any of those kinds of things.
And so, I’ve slept on a cotton pillow. I’ve slept on a feather pillow. I’ve slept on a buckwheat hull pillow. I’ve slept on a wool pillow, sheep wool pillow. And now, I’m sleeping on an alpaca pillow. And I’ve had my alpaca pillow for about a year now, and it’s still like the day I bought it. It’s still resilient and puffy. And I can just puff it up really easily, and it just goes right back to being this big, puffy pillow.
And so, that really shows me the difference between sheep wool and alpaca.
STEVE PUTNEY: Do you have a cover for it? Is it made out of alpaca as well?
DEBRA: No, I don’t. It’s cotton. It’s got a cotton cover.
STEVE PUTNEY: You need to get the alpaca cover because alpaca, when we were talking about the blanket, it is as soft as cashmere. It is incredibly soft to the feel. And so against your face and your neck and stuff, it has no itchiness, no scratchiness to it. It has an incredible feel. And so, you need to go to the next level now, Debra, and get the exterior part as well.
DEBRA: I guess I do! Well, I didn’t even know. Tell us about some different types of products that are made from alpaca because I didn’t know there was an alpaca pillow cover.
STEVE PUTNEY: There are, yes. They’re pretty much anything that is made from cotton, that’s made from wool, and any of the natural fibers that are out there. You can find alpaca everything from the stuff that you would expect to see, such as sweaters, hats, mittens, gloves, those types of things.
The industry is now producing fabric from alpaca as well, and so—
DEBRA: I didn’t know that.
STEVE PUTNEY: Yes, so there are pillow covers and there are shirts. I know there is, I believe, in Italy, someone that’s actually making suits from alpaca.
And so, pretty much any kind of product that you would expect to find from any other sort of natural fiber, even, unfortunately, polyester and things like that, you’re going to be able to find in alpaca as well.
Most of the products that you find out there now are being imported from Peru. Peru still has the most alpacas. And they also, at the same time, have the manufacturing infrastructure there. The cottage industry and some of the industries here in the United States is starting to make more things out of alpaca.
Pendleton Wools, which is known for their blankets and woolen products, they actually do a run of alpaca blankets every year. And so there are alpaca blankets that are being made out there that are American-made as well now.
DEBRA: I think you said earlier that people who are allergic to wool are not allergic to alpaca. Did I get that right?
STEVE PUTNEY: For the most part, the people that are allergic to the wool, their problem is they’re actually allergic to the lanolin that’s in the wool. And so since alpaca doesn’t have that lanolin, they don’t have any allergic reaction to it.
The other thing with alpaca versus wool, I should say, is wool has a little barb, a little hook at the end of it. That scratchy feeling that you have when you have wool against your skin, alpaca doesn’t have that. It’s a straight fiber. And so against your skin, it feels incredibly, incredibly soft against your skin. And so, you don’t have the itchiness, you don’t have the problems with allergies as well.
DEBRA: I’m thinking about this pillow case. I live here in Florida. And even though it’s hot all the time, even in the winter, but especially in the summer time, it’s hot and humid, but I sleep on cotton flannel—and I have cotton flannel pillow cases not because I need to keep warm, that’s why they do it in the north. But here, I find that cotton flannel is more absorptive. So it absorbs the perspiration better than just regular cotton sheets in the [inaudible 00:22:12].
So, how does alpaca stand up to that? Does it absorb moisture?
STEVE PUTNEY: What you’re talking about is referred to as wicking, and that’s the ability of a fabric to pull moisture from the body, and then allow air in to cool the body. Alpaca is exceptional at wicking. It has that ability to pull the moisture from your body.
Now, depending upon the weave of the garment, if you get a tightly-weaved garment, it’s not going to let a lot of air through. So as you are shopping, you want to be aware.
And there are different garments made for different times of the year. I wear alpaca socks all year long in the summer time and stuff to help keep my feet cool, and in the winter time, to help keep my feet warm. And so, as you’re shopping, you want to be aware that a garment that is tightly knitted together and thicker is going to be a warm weather garment, or something that is thinner and has a looser weave to it is going to have that natural wicking and actually help you keep cool.
DEBRA: Wow! This is all new to me. It’s time for another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking about alpacas. My guest is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm. And he is inviting you and your family to visit an alpaca this weekend with National Alpaca Farm Days. That’s NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com. And we’ll be right back with more about alpacas.
No, we won’t. We’re not going yet because I looked at the clock incorrectly. We still have another 45 seconds.
So, let’s see, what can we talk about for 45 seconds?
STEVE PUTNEY: For 45 seconds, we can tell everybody that if they go to the website, literally, coast to coast, border to border, there are farms near you that are participating. And if you go to that website, click “find a farm,” you can enter your zip code in it. It will bring you to a farm near you.
DEBRA: I’m on the website right now, and I’m clicking on “find a farm.” I’m going to enter my zip code, and see, 33755. Oh, you can also pick how many miles away you are. I have an alpaca farm just right near where I live. Wow! So now, I’m clicking on the little thing.
Oh, now, we’re going to break.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be right back talking about alpacas.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Steve Putney from Safe Haven Alpaca Farm. That’s
And he’s here to talk about National Alpaca Farm Days. And that’s coming up this weekend. And you can go to their website, you can click on “find a farm” which I did, and over the break, I took a look at it.
I want to ask you a question, Steve, but I don’t know if you know the answer. But when I put in my zip code, it gave me a map, a Google Map, with a little indicator of where the farm was. But when I click on it, it didn’t tell me where the farm was. Is it supposed to?
Hello?
STEVE PUTNEY: I’m sorry. Yes, it should have been hyperlinked to take you to the farm’s information, so that you know what hours they’re open, and if they have events and things like that going on. We’ll check on that and make sure it’s operating correctly.
DEBRA: Why don’t you check on it? It might be my computer didn’t do it, but I think that’s what’s supposed to be happening.
So you might check on that. But if some of our listeners go there, and it’s not working for them, I could locate my local alpaca farm because I could see on the map where it was. And then, I just typed in “alpaca farm” and the name of the city, and I got information about it.
And it turns out that there’s an actual alpaca farm less than four miles from where I live. And they’ll be open this weekend. And they not only have alpacas that I can go visit, but they have their own shop. I didn’t even know it was there. And even beyond Alpaca Farm Days, because I’m going to be out of town on Saturday, but I could maybe go on Sunday. Even beyond that, I could go to the store because they’ve got alpaca items that they make themselves. They have some that are imported from Peru. And they also are having classes in knitting, crocheting and felting—how to knit, crochet and felt alpaca—you told me what the word was.
STEVE PUTNEY: Fiber. Fiber is the magic word.
DEBRA: Fiber. Alpaca fiber. I’m really looking forward to those. I’m just so excited about alpacas.
So tell us what’s happening on your farm this weekend. If someone would come to your farm, what will they see?
STEVE PUTNEY: We’ve done National Alpaca Farm Days every year. And every year, we change it up a little bit. We always have free food here for people. We have a pretty good-sized store here on the property that’s open. So we’ve got just about anything you could possibly want in alpaca available.
In past years, people have come in and actually hand-carded and turned the alpaca into yarn in front of people’s eyes, which is amazing for me to watch. I can’t do that. I don’t know that I even want to try. So those people who do hand spinning, it’s amazing to watch.
We’ve had people here that have done knitting, and have done weaving, those types of things.
This year, we’re going to focus on doing felting. And we’re going to have actually the ability for people to come here, and do their own felting, and actually create something from felt if they choose to stay that long and do it.
We always have free food. Most of the farms have snacks and refreshments and stuff available. And it really is an opportunity for people to get out and not just find out about the animal, but the business associated with the animal, the industry, the products.
And then, what we’re doing this year here—which we partnered with a farm that’s very near us—we’re actually going to be taking our animals to the local tractor supply as well. And that’s an opportunity to take the animal to the people versus having the people come to an animal.
So, we’re looking forward to that as an opportunity to really, kind of a more urban-type setting versus the rural setting that most alpaca farms are in to bring the animal there and introduce people that wouldn’t normally be introduced to the animal, to the alpaca.
DEBRA: That sounds like so much fun. I just love going to farm days, and to the county fair, and to the state fair, and to historic sites that recreate how life was in the past and all those things because I think that there are so much that we still rely on our industrial products going to the store and buying things that I think that so many people have lost touch with where things come from out of nature.
I once knew somebody. I met him as an adult. And he didn’t know that bread was made from wheat. And I think that that’s not unusual. It shocked me, but I think that that’s not unusual. And I think that to be able to see the connection between the animal and the farm and the product that comes from that and be able to actually make something out of the fiber, and then have a product at the other end that you get to see from the animal in nature, to the product in your hand, and it’s all right there, I think everybody should have those kinds of experiences so that you have that connection with nature. You can see that something doesn’t need to come from a factory. It can come from your own hands and the materials at hand, literally.
It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing. And I’m glad that the alpaca farms are going to be open this weekend. It’s the greatest thing—
STEVE PUTNEY: There has been a huge resurgence in people that have taken up knitting, crocheting, spinning, those types of things. And it’s neat to see that happen because of the fact that there are all of these natural fibers out there. And a lot of the smaller mills, we were talking about the cottage industry, are starting to experiment with different types of blends.
The local mill near me has started blending alpaca with bamboo which makes an incredibly soft end product.
DEBRA: Talk about soft. That would be incredibly soft.
STEVE PUTNEY: Exactly! And the neat thing is that alpaca has the ability to, they’re refer to it as “bloom” around other things.
So if you’ve got a blend of alpaca at about 50% to 60%, and you’re using a different natural fiber for some reason for more strength or whatever your purpose is, when you wash it, the alpaca tends to bloom around, so you feel more of the alpaca and less of the other fiber.
And so, there’s a lot of neat stuff happening with alpaca. It’s just a very unique—you know, you were talking about your pillow, the fact that you had it for a year and it’s still fluffed up, and it still feels good. When archeologists were digging up in Peru, they found—well, I should explain it.
At one point, alpaca was reserved for royalty. They were the only ones that were allowed to wear it for the Incans. And when they have opened up some of these tombs, and they found this royalty, they were buried in alpaca, and the garments are still intact today. And so, it’s an incredibly durable fiber as well.
DEBRA: I’m on your page on your website where you’re selling socks, and I noticed that you have them for men and women and also diabetic socks. And diabetics, as I think a lot of people know, have a problem in their feet. They have a lot of pain because the circulation stops. So, if diabetics are wearing these socks, they’ve got to be really soft. This is just amazing.
STEVE PUTNEY: The best example—and hopefully, if people will go out and they visit a farm, other people will have this type of demonstration. I have a blend here of Merino, which is one of the softest wools that you can lay your hands on. It’s a 50/50 blend of Merino and alpaca that’s sitting there. And I have 100% alpaca. And I tell people, “Rub on either side of your cheek,” one being the alpaca, the other being the blend. “Tell me which is which.” And nobody ever guesses wrong. It is so much softer than what other natural fibers are. And it feels so good against the skin. It is truly an amazing natural product.
DEBRA: Why do you think that it hasn’t been known as much? I’ve been writing about natural products and fibers for more than 30 years. And I knew that alpaca existed, but I didn’t know all these qualities about it. Why is it becoming more popular and more known now and not before?
STEVE PUTNEY: It’s an education factor. It’s also the growth of the industry and the size of our natural herd. When you get a national herd at one point (that was basically 10,000 animals), you really weren’t producing enough end products to get anybody’s attention.
And so now, we’ve got enough farms. And we still need to grow a lot. I don’t want to make it sound like we’re there. We’re not.
We’re still very much a growing industry. But we’re starting to get the attention of some of the fashion designers and stuff are starting to include alpaca.
And so, we’ve gotten big enough now that we’re getting people’s attention. And there is practical application where, at one point, there wasn’t a consistent supply of the product, so it was hard for people to say, “I’m going to make a product from this every year.” Now, we can meet that demand.
DEBRA: Well, I am so happy that this is growing. And thank you so much for coming on today to tell us more about alpacas and to tell us about the National Alpaca Farm Days which, again, they’re coming up this weekend on Saturday and Sunday.
And you can go to NationalAlpacaFarmDays.com, and find a farm, and go find out about those alpacas, and find out what your local alpaca farmers are doing, and meet an alpaca. It will be the best meet-an-animal experience you ever had.
I just love alpacas. They’re my favorite animal and they are so friendly and warm and just wonderful.
So, that’s it for today. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
How To Detox Your Hair, Yes, Your Hair
My guest is Ellen Eves, Social Media Director from Morocco Method, makers of all-natural. raw, vegan hair care products, “designed to both detoxify and nourish” your hair. We’ll be talking about how standard hair care products—even “natural” brands—strip and damage your hair, requiring additional hair care products for care, and how you can remove these toxic chemicals from your hair to restore it’s natural body and luster. Founder Anthony Morrocco’s quest to find a naturally-based treatment for hair and scalp problems began with his apprenticeship at world famous Kenneth’s, a posh New York salon, where his clients included Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall, Joan Rivers, Faye Dunaway, Liza Minnelli, and numerous other celebrities. Now, after more than four decades of travel, research and experimentation, including his study of Chinese herbalism and acupressure under Bruce Lee’s master, Mr. Fung Yi of Peking and Dr. Cecilia Lu of Shanghai, Anthony has perfected a holistic program for women and men determined to make positive changes for healthier, more vibrant hair. All Morrocco Method products contain only the finest natural derived minerals and botanicals harvested from around the world. and selected for maximum potency. They have followed the principles of Old World farmers who understood that planting, harvesting and storing foods according to the lunar cycle maximizes the energetic potency of the plants. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/morocco-method
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Detox Your Hair, Yes, Your Hair
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ellen Eves
Date of Broadcast: September 24, 2013
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 we do need to talk about that because there are a lot of toxic chemicals out in the world. But the good news is that we, as consumers, can make wise choices to eliminate many of those toxic exposures. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, so they don’t build up and make us sick. And yes, we do have what’s called a body burden of toxic chemicals in our bodies. And every day, Monday through Friday, at mid-eastern time, we talk about how we can live in a less toxic way.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to detox your hair. Yes, how to detox your hair. If you’re having a bad hair day—and some people have a bad hair day every day—if you have a bad hair day, then you’re going to want to listen to this because this is some new information you probably haven’t ever heard before about toxic chemicals in hair products and what they can do to your hair.
So, we’re just going to get started right now with my guest, Ellen Eves. She’s the social media director from Morocco Method.
And Morocco Method makes all-natural, raw, vegan hair care products that are designed to both detoxify and nourish your hair.
Hi Ellen. Thanks for being here.
ELLEN EVES: Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
ELLEN EVES: I’m doing quite well.
DEBRA: Good! So I’ll just tell you that Ellen sent me some Morocco Method products, and I’ve been using them for about a month—no, longer than that. I used them for about 30 days. And then she was on vacation and I ran out, and then she came back. She got some more.
She’s going to tell you about why these are special products. But first, I want to tell you my experience with them.
They’re very different from any hair care products you ever heard of before. They don’t lather, and they’re made out of all-natural, as I said, raw, vegan ingredients. And so, it looks like a little paste when you put it in your hand. And you mix it with water, and you put it on your hair, and you just massage your scalp. And then, on the first day that you use it, your hair looks awful. And that’s not just my experience. This is the process.
And what’s going on is that your hair is starting to detox. Well, I should probably let Ellen tell you the story. But I just want to say that I’m not even sure that I’m really at the end, but here’s the difference. Prior to using these products, I have very thin, fine hair. And it’s been that way my whole life. And it would never stay in place, and I can barely do anything with it.
But then I started using these products, the Morocco products, and I got to a point where my hair started staying in place. I could brush my hair, and I could put somewhere, and it would stay. And one day, I noticed that my hair had a sheen to it. It glowed in the light. And it wasn’t because I put something on my hair. My hair just had this sheen to it. It was this soft luster.
And so, I see this big change.
But what happened was there were a couple of days where I just used my regular shampoo, my regular, organic shampoo, and my hair just totally fell flat. And then I would, next day, go back to the Morocco Method, and I have that same body to it that I never had or anything else.
And in fact, yesterday, I just went “Let me just try this again.” I used that whole organic shampoo, and still, my hair fell flat. And today, it was beautiful again.
So, there really is something to this. And Ellen is going to tell you all about it.
So Ellen, before you talk about the products themselves, and what they do, and how they do it, just tell our listening audience, how these products came to be developed.
ELLEN EVES: Absolutely. So basically, this has been Anthony Morocco’s brain child for over 40 years. He’s carefully studied and practiced this holistic hair care. His quest originally started, he was working at [unintelligible 04:49], which is a very posh salon in New York. It was the where to go. He worked with clients like Jackie O. He worked with Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall, Joan Rivers, Faye Dunaway, as well as numerous other celebrities.
And for years, he just watched these rich and famous walk in with these hair care problems and left with the same problems, only to be covered up with perms and styles and blow drying, gels, mousses, chemicals. They are really leaving with the same problems that they were coming in with. The problems were just being covered.
And so, he realized that regardless of the money being spent on traditional hair care, these problems just weren’t going away.
And these are problems with the scalp, problems with the hair, as an actual thing as opposed to a style.
So, this really inspired him to create this new system of hair and scalp treatment that would have really successful long-term results as opposed to just coming in and getting a style and covering up the problem. He really wanted to solve them.
So, he traveled for more than four decades, researching and experimenting. He studied Chinese herbalism, acupuncture under Bruce Lee’s master. He studied pretty much all over the world to learn about a new way to make a positive change for healthy, more vibrant hair naturally.
So, what he has really done is he’s created a system that really is nothing else. Morocco Method products contain only the finest, naturally-derived minerals, botanicals, and they’re harvested from all around the world.
We also harvest them in order to get the maximum potency. We also have used old world farmers who understood that planting and harvesting and as well as storing foods according to the lunar cycle that really maximizes the potency. So, our products are created around this lunar cycle basically.
Anthony has also created this lunar chart for haircutting, which is going even a step farther, and it indicates different days that might help you with a particular goal and where you want to be by cutting on that specific day.
But I did want to mention about detox. So it does sound crazy that we detox our hair like we detox our body. But in fact, build-up of chemical products are constantly clogging the pores of the scalp and the shafts of the hair. And they have to be removed before you can really start on a healthy hair journey—the same as with your body with any detox that you’re going to go through.
So, as your hair begins to let go of these plastics and cones and chemicals, this is the change. This is what Debra was talking about when she noticed, “Oh, no! My hair doesn’t look as great as it has.” This is actually your hair letting go of these chemicals and learning to regulate its own oil production.
DEBRA: I just want to interrupt you for a minute. We have plenty of time. Let’s have a conversation. I also wanted to mention that I’ve noticed that my hair was thinning in the front which, of course, none of the women—and men either—they don’t want to have this happen.
And as I was using these products, I noticed that, suddenly, I have this new growth of little hairs right in the area where it had been thinning. And so I just want to emphasize this part that Ellen is saying about how the pores get clogged and the hair follicles get clogged. And then the nutrients don’t get to your hair. And this is what all these chemical hair care products do.
And there’s a certain type of shampoo called the clarifying shampoo. And somebody had suggested that I use a natural, organic clarifying shampoo to get a step out of my hair. Now, I had only been using organic products for many years. You can buy organic shampoo in any natural food store or online made out of organic ingredients. But they’re still the same ingredients that are in regular shampoos except that they’re natural.
ELLEN EVES: Exactly.
DEBRA: And what we’re talking about here with the Morocco Method is a completely different kind of products that is not just another organic shampoo. It has a completely different function.
And so, I used organic shampoo, and then I use this organic clarifying shampoo, and it really didn’t do anything dramatic for me. But when I started using the Morocco Method products, there was a very clear difference in my hair.
I had to go through the process. And then there was one day where I noticed, “Oh, my hair looks beautiful, and it’s soft.” And it was just like all of a sudden like that.
We need to take a break, Ellen. But we’ll come back very soon and hear more about Morocco Method products. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about detoxing your hair, so there will be no more bad hair days. My guest today is Ellen Eves, social media director from Morocco Method.
Ellen, tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that are used in hair care products, and how they damage your hair.
ELLEN EVES: There are a lot of different things. There are also just environmental issues. But the main issue happens to be really with the scalp. A lot of people neglect the scalp just because they think of their hair, and a lot of people have the misconception that your hair is just dead. But Anthony really comes through the perspective that your hair is alive, and you should be feeding it this raw nutrition just like you would with your body.
There are a lot of different chemicals. One common chemical that I would like to touch on because it’s used in so many of these organic and “natural” shampoos—and I think we even had an experience with it—is some of these different cocamides and these sulfated “coconut products.”
But in fact, these products are made in a lab and they’re completely chemical. And then what they do is they basically affect the way that your scalp products sebaceous oil, which is the oil that keeps your hair happy. It keeps your scalp happy, it keeps you producing good, healthy hair.
And what happens is with these chemicals, a lot of times, they’ll dry up your scalp. They’ll strip your scalp of all the oils that it needs that it naturally produces. And when it does that, a lot of people experience an oily scalp but dry hair. And this is a very common side effect of chemicals that they use in common shampoos, different sulfates and things like that.
What’s happening is they’re stripping all the oils in your hair, and so then your hair looks great for maybe 24 hours. But then your scalp basically goes into overdrive, and overproduces all this oil because it’s been so stripped. And then you’re looking at you’re showering every single day to make sure that your scalp doesn’t look oily. That’s a pretty common occurrence, especially with chemical shampoos.
DEBRA: And of course then you’re buying much, much more shampoo than you actually need. And that’s a profit center for that company.
And I’m not against people making money. But I think people wouldn’t be surprised to hear me say that, often times, we can just see many examples of companies making products that require consumers to buy more or have repeat purchases because that makes sense economically for them. But it doesn’t necessarily make sense for our health or the environment, or our hair, or anything.
I’ve been a firm believer that what we should be doing is looking at the natural process that our bodies go through or the environment goes through, and then see what it is that’s needed in order to work with that natural process, and allow our hair to look as it would look naturally, instead of what I would call industrial hair.
What you’re saying reminds me of how, when they make processed food, they take out all the nutrients, and then they put back in industrial nutrients.
ELLEN EVES: Exactly!
DEBRA: And so they advertise that there’s always vitamin and minerals in this white bread, but there was more vitamins and minerals in the wheat bread before they took them all out. And our hair has the ability to look great on its own if we’re not stripping it.
I remember many years ago, I washed my skin with coconut oil-based soap. And it’s so dried my skin out. And we can’t see our scalp because it’s under the hair, but if we’re using coconut-based products, they’re doing the same thing.
ELLEN EVES: Natural coconut oil, of course, is going to be good for your hair. But mostly, it’s cocamide MEA and DEA. And these are two of the products that contain these high levels. And they can be really bad for you. I believe it was the Center for Environmental Health, there’s actually been a current lawsuit going on because these shampoos, such as Palmolive—I know Paul Mitchell was one of them. There are many of them, if you were to check it out. They’re selling these products, and they’re mislabeling them as natural because they’re saying that they’re these coconut-based products. And they’re actually really not because there are these cocamides that are made in factories and made in labs.
And this is one of the classic ways that a lot of companies now are “brainwashing” people and convincing them that they’re buying natural when, in fact, they’re buying the same chemicals just with a different name.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. And I just want to confirm that Ellen isn’t just saying this because she works for a natural company that uses all-natural ingredients that are really natural, in their natural state. This is common, common, common.
When I first started doing my consumer advocacy work more than 30 years ago, I looked at those labels and I said, “Oh, this is made from coconut, so it must be okay. It must be natural.”
But what I learned was when I started studying what those ingredients are, I learned that yes, sure. It might start as coconut oil, but then it goes through just the same kind of industrial process as if you were starting a petroleum, and they, in fact, add a lot of petroleum ingredients as part of the process.
And so, if you have something like a cocamide, it’s not natural, and that people, for a long time, didn’t even look at this, but they’re looking at it now.
And if you want something that’s natural, it needs to be made from natural, whole ingredients as they exist in nature. And anything else is an industrial product. It doesn’t matter if it starts as petroleum or coconut oil or beets. It’s still an industrial product if it goes through that industrial process.
ELLEN EVES: That’s exactly right. As you mentioned, we are a raw company. And this really means that we don’t pasteurize, we don’t sterilize with harsh chemicals with heat. These are, just as you’ve said, whole ingredients.
We’re talking about whole leaves. We’re talking about real marine proteins as opposed to things that have been genetically altered in a lab in order to look natural.
DEBRA: Yes, exactly. Well, we need to come on another break really soon. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Ellen Eves, social media director from Morocco Method. And when we come back, we’re going to hear all about the Morocco Method products, and how they work, and what to do with them.
So we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about hair, how to have more beautiful, natural hair with my guest, Ellen Eves, social media director for Morocco Method.
Actually, I’ve had Morocco Method on my list of recommended websites, DebrasList.com, for many years. And I chose them because of their purity of ingredients. And I didn’t know until recently all these other things that we’re talking about today about how much it can help your hair.
But Ellen, they could also just go straight to MoroccoMethod.com.
ELLEN EVES: Yes, that’s it.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So tell us about the products.
ELLEN EVES: So we really come from a five-step method really. The Morocco Method is five steps.
Step #1 is shampooing and going natural and stopping your chemical abuse. This is the most important part like we were talking about. This comes with the detox. And we do have a product that really does help with detox. And that’s our Zen Detox Hair & Scalp Therapy.
And what that does, it’s a clay masque, and you basically mix it with water, and you put it on your head. And it starts to really pull out those impurities, those heavy metals, those toxins.
And like Debra mentioned earlier, most likely, these are from your “natural shampoo” or your commercial shampoo really.
But they can also be from the environment, so we still recommend detoxing, even if you’re fully on Morocco Method, once every season or so, just to make sure that you’re really pulling everything out.
Step #2 comes with conditioning. So step #1 is really focused on the scalp, whereas step #2 is focused on the hair.
So the hair often is often the poorest thing, so we really have to give it that condition and that extra oil. So that comes along with step #3, which is brushing and massaging.
So our scalp creates has these pores with all the sebaceous oil inside of it. And as these sebaceous oils come out of the scalp, they need to be brushed down to the ends of the hair which is really what needs that good oil.
So we recommend a boar bristle brush, and massaging, and brushing every day. Massaging is more about the scalp and really, getting it invigorated and excited, getting the blood flowing through there, so that your hair is more excited about growing […].
DEBRA: I think it does need that. People go and get massages, but they don’t always get their scalp massaged, and I always like it. When I go to salon, they really massage your scalp while you’re getting your shampoo.
We don’t do that at home. We don’t do that at home. And now, I do. I know when I’m putting the shampoo—I don’t even want to call it shampoo because it’s not like a shampoo out of a bottle.
But when I’m using it, I really massage my scalp every morning.
ELLEN EVES: And that’s a very important part of it. We do offer a scalp massager that Anthony has created that’s natural rubber. But massaging your scalp is really important because you need to get the blood flowing. It’s the same as if you sit at a desk all day, you’ve got to make sure you’re moving around and keeping your blood flowing.
So then step #4 is going to be styling and henna hair coloring. We do offer hair coloring using henna. We have a variety of types. And something I did want to touch on as well is that most people think that henna means red. And that’s just not actually true. We use different parts of the henna leaf, the henna bark, the henna root.
We also add things like cinnamon or marigold flower to give you exactly the variation of brown, blonde, red or black that you’re really looking for. And this is a great way of continuing to color, especially if there’s a couple of greys are starting to pop out, and you maybe don’t want everyone to see them.
This is a great way to naturally color your hair.
Along with this in step #4 is cutting. And something that a lot of people’s common misconception is they think, “Oh, I want to grow my hair long, so I just won’t ever cut it.”
But actually, you do need to cut your hair in order to grow it because basically, it will start splitting from the bottom, and as it splits up, up, and up, you’re going to have even more damage and more splitting, and you’re never going to get that really healthy thick hair that you want.
And then step #5 is more of a—it’s for our advanced members, you could say. After you’ve been on Morocco Method for a while, if you’re really looking for hair rejuvenation, if you’re looking for growth in particular, we do have a variety of different elixirs, is what we call them. And they’re the finest oils and the finest minerals and herbs that you can basically find from around the world, put into these little bottles that you can massage into your hair and scalp.
We have seen a lot of success on people, just like what you were saying, Debra, after using the shampoo, with seeing those little baby hairs start to pop up when you thought you were thinning.
DEBRA: Yes, it was really amazing when I looked in the mirror and I thought, “Oh, there’s all these little hairs, this soft little line of hairs just right around the edge of my forehead.” And it was quite encouraging because I could tell that—what I was about to say was I could tell that my hair and scalp have turned into an ecosystem. And I’m not quite sure that’s the right analogy.
But I’m feeling like that instead of just shampooing and just letting my hair do whatever it’s doing, I feel like I’m actually paying attention and interacting with my hair as a natural thing.
ELLEN EVES: Absolutely. You’re feeding it live nutrition. And that’s the whole thing, this whole idea that we come from, is that you’re feeding it in the same way. These raw ingredients, they supply living nourishment to your hair the same way that raw fresh foods are going to provide wholesome nourishment within your body.
So it is very similar.
It’s funny that you compared it to an ecosystem because we very much come from the idea that your scalp is like soil and your hair is like a plant. And you’re never going to be able to grow a healthy plant out of terrible soils, so you have to start with the detox and start with the soil and start with the scalp, and then from there, you have to trim the dead off, that kind of thing.
So it’s interesting. I find it funny that you said that because that is very much the idea that we’re coming from as well.
DEBRA: Well, I must have picked it up because that’s what I thought so clearly. And I know enough about nature to know that there is a pattern to everything, and that everything has their optimum way of existing. And that if you can find out—if you’re growing tomatoes, if you can find out what tomato plants like, and then do that, then you’re going to have a great crop of tomatoes.
But each plant is different, and even each scalp is different. Each body is different. And so you have more than one type of shampoo, and you only have just that one Zen treatment, but you have several different shampoos for different hair types.
And let’s talk about that some more after the next break.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re having a very interesting discussion about how to detox your hair, and the difference between what you find on the shelf in the hair care products and what’s really natural about caring for your hair.
We’ll be right back just after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Ellen Eves, social media director from Morocco Method, and we’re learning all about their all-natural, raw, vegan hair care products, designed to both detoxify and nourish your hair.
So Ellen, tell us more about the process. How would somebody start out? What would they order when they go to your site? I know that there are three different shampoos, I think, or maybe more. How do you tell which one to get?
Because I know that you sent me samples of different ones, and that some of them were much better for my hair than others.
And I finally settled on the one that seemed to be right for my hair and use that over and over again.
So tell the listeners more about the process.
ELLEN EVES: Absolutely. So we have five shampoos and six different conditioners. And what we actually recommend is we recommend rotating all five, especially when you start in detox, sometimes it can be more difficult, and one shampoo is definitely going to be better for you than another.
But as you continue your process […], I hope you’ll re-try some of the shampoos that maybe weren’t the best for your hair at the time. We recommend rotating all five just because that way, you’re getting really the nutrients from each individual shampoo, and it’s really giving your scalp exactly what it needs.
DEBRA: That makes sense to me. That makes sense.
ELLEN EVES: Another reason that we recommend rotating all five is because this way, your scalp and your hair don’t get used to the product. Our scalp and our hair, like the rest of our body, if you just keep putting the same thing in it all the time, it’s going to start to get used to it, and we almost have to trick ourselves into continuing to feed your hair exactly what it needs without it giving you any reluctance.
So what we recommend to start with is actually in the packages section, it’s called the Healthy Hair Starter Package. And what this includes is it includes two-ounce samples of all five of our shampoos and all six of our conditioners, and then it also comes with a scalp massager.
So with our shampoos, each of our shampoo is based on an element. It’s air, ether, water, fire and earth. And then basically, we rotate all five of those. And then with our conditioners, we have two rinse out conditioners, which are just like any conditioner you’d use in the shower. And then we also have two spray conditioners. These are great especially for detox with people that are dealing with a more oily hair type during their detox, we recommend just using these spray conditioners.
And then we also have our Euro oil, which is an oil that you can use for deep conditioning. Some people like to use it for styling. There’s a lot of really good uses for this oil. And then lastly, there’s Zen Detox Hair & Scalp Therapy which I mentioned before is a great masque for detoxing your hair and scalp.
DEBRA: One thing that I would just give as a tip from having used these products is that I had an idea of how much to use from how much shampoo I used to put in my hand. And I really found that using a smaller amount works better than using a large amount because it was sometimes hard to rinse it all out if I use a lot. I’d have to rinse and rinse and rinse.
But just using a smaller amount—I found the right balance for myself, and I think that that’s part of the process here.
Can you talk about—does the type of water that you use make any difference, like hard water or soft water?
ELLEN EVES: We do recommend getting some kind of a filter. I’m not sure if I could even really speak to hard water versus soft water. But we do sell a shower filter on our website, and we do recommend getting a filter because it will help get rid of some of those impurities before they get put into the scalp.
One thing to mention too just about shampooing, because I know we work together for a while finding exactly the right way, and what was best for you, and you brought up a little important point, which is listening to your hair.
A lot of people, they have a lot of questions on exactly how to use it, but I think part of it is finding out for yourself. Like you side, everyone is going to be different. Every one’s scalp is going to be different.
And because the different things we put in our hair, and the different places that we live, we’re all going to have different kinds of toxins in our bodies and in our hair.
So one thing that you brought up before that I want to bring up again is diluting the shampoo. Not only is this a great way to save some money on your shampoo, but we actually suggest is taking a smaller bottle and mixing about 50% shampoo and 50% water, and then pouring that mixture all over your head and really massaging it into your scalp.
As Debra mentioned, these shampoos, they don’t foam. So getting them through your hair and your scalp can sometimes seem like a bit of a struggle, and this is one way we—
DEBRA: I would totally agree with that. I don’t mix it in a separate bottle, but I take a little bit like about the size of a dime, and I put it in my hand, and then I cup my hand and put water in it and I mix it up. And then I put that on my hair, and it makes it a lot easier to get all the nutrients through the hair. And it makes it a lot easier to rinse it out, if you just take that paste and put it in your hair. It’s much more difficult.
But I really like what you’re saying about listening to your hair because I find that what makes natural methods effective is to get to know yourself, and to get to know your own body, and to get to know the nature of the natural materials, and what they can do, and how your body responds to them.
And that’s much more self-awareness, which I think is always good. And I also found that in considering the environment, that we live in this world where everything is cookie cutter exactly the same. And that’s what the industrial world is about.
Yet, the world of nature, which we are all born of, we’re all natural beings, the world of nature, everything is different.
Everything is unique from place to place to body to body. And when you embark on a program like this, you’re really going into a journey and an adventure of restoring your hair to its natural state. But it’s your hair. It’s not the model’s hair. It’s not the lab rat’s hair.
It’s your hair. It’s your hair. And it will come back its natural beauty given a chance.
ELLEN EVES: And we’ve seen that. We have more testimonials than I can count on people who maybe they had great hair when they were a kid, and maybe they never had that amazing hair that they always wanted. And through Morocco Method, and through their ability to listen to their hair, really listen to their body, and allow for this journey, which is exactly what you’re saying, this healthy hair journey, allowing for that has really helped quite a few people to regain their hair, and I think self-confidence as well.
DEBRA: One thing I forgot to tell you, Ellen, is that my hair has started to curl. If I were to show you a picture of me as a child, I had like Shirley Temple curly hair. That’s my natural state, is to have curly hair. And over the years, it’s gotten straight, straight, straight. And now, it’s starting to curl.
After I take a shower, and I wash my hair, I just puff it up with my fingers, and it curls. And I haven’t seen that in decades.
ELLEN EVES: There you go. That’s a perfect example. We actually even have a girl in the office who went through something similar. Her hair was a wave, very, very curly, and then just through the use of chemicals and products and things like that, it had started to become this in-between straight and curly. And now, through use of Morocco Method, she’s also been able to restore the hair that she had when she was a kid.
And I think that that’s a huge thing, and especially to be able to do that naturally and without chemicals is pretty cool.
DEBRA: Well, chemicals nourish nothing.
ELLEN EVES: Exactly.
DEBRA: They really are not nutrients. And although some people like to pretend that they are, but they aren’t. And if you want something—we all have living bodies. And if we want them to be alive and vibrant, we need to take other living things, and use them to nourish our bodies, whether we’re eating them or putting them on our skin, or putting then on our hair.
We just have a few minutes left. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to say?
ELLEN EVES: I don’t think so. I do want to just ask the essential question that basically our company, that Morocco Method was founded on. I do want to just pose it to the audience. Why compromise your health and the health of your scalp and your hair with chemical products when you can achieve radiant beauty with safe all-natural hair care?
DEBRA: Excellent question. Well, I appreciate your contacting me, and letting me try the products because it certainly changed how I think about hair, and how I think about hair products, and the way I evaluate them because my hair certainly is different, and I certainly can see that what I’m doing is supporting my hair instead of just washing it and stripping it and all those kinds of things.
So thank you so much, Ellen, for being with me.
ELLEN EVES: Thank you so much.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And if you enjoyed this show, please tell your friends, tell your family, tell everybody you work with. What we want to do here is we want everybody on the planet to live toxic free, so that we can just walk into any store, and know that the products on the shelves are safe, that we can protect our own bodies and the health of our loved ones.
And you can listen to this show again. Everything is recorded, so you can go back and listen to yesterday’s show, and the day before, in the archives. Lots of information.
So we are going to be creating a toxic-free world. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Saladmaster Cookware
Question from Lisa Ausley
What is your opinion of Saladmaster cookware? It is supposed to be surgical grade stainless steel and titanium. Also, is it true lead is used in making glass products?
Debra’s Answer
According to the Saladmaster website, the interior of the pots and pans are lined with a combination of 316 stainless steel and titanium. They are the only cooking system to use 316Ti made from stell mills in the US and Switzerland.
316 “surgical stainless steel” is better than the 304 stainless steel used to make most stainless steel objects. In addition to chromium and nickel, surgical stainless steel also contains molybdenum to prevent specific forms of corrosion and help maintain the cutting edge. Three hundred sixteen surgical steel is used in the manufacture and handling of food and pharmaceutical products where it is often required in order to minimize metallic contamination.
If you want to use stainless steel cookware, this one would be less likely to leach than most.
Lead is not typically an ingredient in glass cookware. When lead is used, such as to make sparkling lead crystal glasses, it’s generally in the name.
Personal Care Products Certified Organic To Food Standards
My guest is Narelle Chenery, who is joining us from Australia. She is the creator of Miessence, the world’s first certified organic skin care and personal care line. We’ll be talking about organic ingredients in personal care products, organic certifications, and the power consumers have to make change. Narelle is a passionate educator and activist for social and consumer change, speaking worldwide to business leaders, entrepreneurs, cosmetic industry professionals and government bodies. After completing her Applied Science degree in 1993, Narelle discovered that ‘natural’ cosmetics weren’t all they claimed to be and began making her own products in her kitchen. In 1998, 6 weeks after the birth of her third child, she launched her hand-made cosmetics as a mail order line. She quickly attracted a small and loyal band of customers, many of whom still use her products today. A year later she teamed up with her then husband Colin Chenery and business activist Alf Orpen and, after 18 months of research in 2001, Narelle revolutionised the beauty industry with the world’s first certified organic skin care products; Miessence. Seven years on, industry giants like Estee Lauder are following in her footsteps, launching their own certified organic products. Narelle is passionate about empowering and educating consumers on how to avoid harmful chemicals in their products. “We, as consumers, are incredibly powerful; we just need to own it! Most of the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry turnover supports the use of toxic chemicals. If we tell those chemical-peddlers we will no longer put up with the toxins they put onto our bodies and the environment (by refusing to buy them) they will have no choice but to make the changes we wish to see!” Narelle is a member of the Australian Society of Cosmetic Chemists and continues to develop her Miessence products. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/miessence
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Personal Care Products Certified Organic to Food Standards
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Narelle Chenery
Date of Broadcast: September 19, 2013
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 yes, it is a toxic world. There are many toxic chemicals in all kinds of consumer products. Even just walk outside your home, or even your home, the air is full of toxic chemicals. The water we drink is full of toxic chemicals. And we do live in a toxic world.
But there are many people who are doing things to change that. There are many people who are trying to change regulations, who are making less toxic products and completely non-toxic products that you can use in your homes so that you can have a toxic-free home like I do. You can also remove toxic chemicals from your body. And we talk about that too.
And so, there are all kinds of things that you can do that you don’t have to be a victim of toxic chemical exposure. You can be well and healthy and happy. It is possible. We can do it.
Today is Thursday, September 19th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. We have a few clouds, so we might get a thunderstorm, but we’ll see. We haven’t had any hurricanes. I live here in Florida where there are hurricanes. And we haven’t had one all season. There hasn’t even been one anywhere near the state of Florida. So that’s a good thing. But hurricanes regulate the temperature, so it’s okay to have one every once in a while.
Today, we’re going to talk about organic personal care products. And I’ve had actually a number of guests on recently talking about personal care products. But what’s different today is that we’re going to be talking—these personal care products are actually the first body care products certified organic to food standards.
And my guest today is Narelle Chenery. She’s joining us from Australia where it’s two in the morning. She’s the creator of MiEssence. And it was the world’s first certified organic skin care and personal care line. We’re going to be talking about organic, organic certifications.
And she, like I, agree that we, as consumers, have a lot of power to make a change. So we’re going to be talking about that too.
Hi Narelle! Are you there in Australia?
NARELLE CHENERY: Hi Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: How are you?
NARELLE CHENERY: I’m well given it’s nine minutes past two in the morning.
DEBRA: Oh, good! Well, first, why don’t you start off just by telling us your story? You really have been a pioneer. And you did something creative and different at a time when nobody else was doing it. So tell us how you came to do this.
NARELLE CHENERY: Thank you. Like most massive life-changing things, I was inspired by an unfortunate event in my life which was—I don’t know whether you call them pap smears in the States.
DEBRA: Yes, we do.
NARELLE CHENERY: I was 23 years old, and I had a bad pap smear which scared the living daylights out of me. That meant I’m on my way to cervical cancer. So that inspired me to create huge changes in my life and clean up my diet and clean up my personal care and basically try and detox myself starting with getting on the path of natural hygiene and natural health and eating organic foods and detoxing my body.
And within a couple of years, I was actually pregnant with my first child. I was in my third year at university when I got pregnant. So I never actually—I completed my degree in Math. But soon after, I needed to get some kind of income. So I was doing part-time selling skin care products. And I’ve been introduced by girl friends to a company in the States that was proclaiming to have natural, non-toxic products.
So, I got involved with that company. And I couldn’t actually—the marketing was all around being natural and pure and safe. This is like 20+ years ago. But there was something I didn’t understand. The labels, I couldn’t pronounce the ingredients on the labels. Even though they were proclaiming to be natural, I couldn’t understand or pronounce the ingredients on the labels.
DEBRA: I understand. If something was natural, it would have an ingredient like lemons and not…
NARELLE CHENERY: That’s right! It’s not going to be sodium hydroxylate or… yeah! So that was challenging for me, or that, at least, raised questions in my mind.
And then, I actually found a book in a health food store that I was in by a pioneer in your country in the natural skincare arena called Aubrey Hampton. Have you heard of the brand Aubrey Organics?
DEBRA: Oh, yes! And in fact, they’re right here in Florida. I’ve known Aubrey Organics for 30 years.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah! Yeah. I mean, he’s a pioneer in the natural cosmetic industry, and also, his book, What’s in Your Cosmetics? in my early 20’s, I bought that book, and it absolutely inspired me and shocked me and disgusted me to think that the products that I’ve been using and selling that were proclaiming to be natural weren’t actually natural at all.
And in fact, some of the ingredients that they were talking about, “naturally derived surfactants” or “naturally derived sodium lauryl sulfate,” those ingredients from coconuts, and all these long-winded multi- or polysyllabic words, and then followed by “(coconut)”, I recognized or I realized that these companies that were claiming to be natural weren’t actually natural at all.
So, in reading this book by Aubrey Hampton, I was inspired to look for a brand that was absolutely pure and natural and safe in Australia. And when I couldn’t find it, I was having a whinge to my mother-in-law who worked in a bookstore, and she started giving me books about herbal medicine and how to make skin creams out of the ingredients in your kitchen cabinet. And it just started as a hobby.
And within a few years, I had a home-based business, like a direct sale business. And within five years of starting my hobby, I had cracked the world’s first certified organic skincare product. That was in 2001, January of 2001.
And i was still basically working from home at that stage. So, I met a man at a natural health festival who wanted to become my business partner. And fast forward 15 years, and we’re now selling our products online to 70 countries around the world.
DEBRA: That’s fabulous!
We’re going to need to go to a break in a moment. But I just want to comment on something that you said before we go. I want to explain because this was something that I was confused about for many years, but I finally figured it out.
When I first started, I thought if something was derived from a natural ingredient like coconut, that that was natural. And that is the definition of natural in most of the world and within the industry.
Next week, I’m going to the Natural Products Expo in Baltimore. And there’s going to be a lot of products like that. I know that there are going to be.
But the thing is that if you take coconut oil, and then you put it into a laboratory, and you mix it with petrochemicals, and then you change it a lot, then you end up with that ingredient that has in parenthesis after it “derived from coconut oil.” And it’s not the same as coconut. It’s not the same as actually putting coconut oil on your skin.
And this is where you can take a step out of the petroleum products kind of personal care products into those industrialized natural ingredients. And that’s a good step to take. But if you want something that’s truly natural where you have ingredients from nature in their natural state, then you have to take another step.
We’re going to talk more about that when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Narelle Chenery who is the creator of MiEssence, the world’s first certified organic skin care and personal care line. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Narelle Chenery who is joining us from Australia where it’s 2 a.m. in the morning. She’s the creator of MiEssence, the world’s first certified organic skin care and personal care line.
Narelle, when you first got certified back in 2001, wasn’t it…
NARELLE CHENERY: Yes.
DEBRA: …you were the first personal care line to be certified to organic food standards. Now, is there a different standard then for personal care products? Can you just kind of explain the world organic certification and what gets on the label and things as it applies to personal care products?
NARELLE CHENERY: Sure! Yeah, at the time, 2001, this is actually before the USDA National Organic Program launched their standards. We have dozens of certifiers in your country, but there was no overarching standard.
And at the time, they were only organic food standards on the planet. There were no organic cosmetic standards in existence.
So that was the only choice I had. I had to meet food standards.
That was what inspired me. Because I was so disappointed at the products that I had been selling and I’ve been involved with, I was inspired to create something that was absolutely pure, and no one could pick any bones with, and have it so that it wasn’t just me saying it. I’ve been fooled by the marketing and the green-washing, I wanted my products to be independently certified. And the only relevant certification for absolute purity at that time was organic foods.
So, organic food is a minimum of 95% organic content […], with very minimal allowance, that up to 5% allowance for natural, non-organic ingredients. And that’s a very similar standard here in Australia. Organic food standards around the world are, by and large, that 95%+ content standard.
DEBRA: I want to ask you before you go on about that because I’ve had many people ask me over the years, “I want 100% organic. Why did they allow that 5%?”
NARELLE CHENERY: Because we live in the real world.
DEBRA: Yes, okay.
NARELLE CHENERY: Not everything is available…
DEBRA: And there are some minor ingredients that may not be available organically that you still need to put in the product.
NARELLE CHENERY: And that 5% still has very stringent criteria that you must adhere to. It doesn’t mean that you can use toxic chemicals or preservatives or all sorts of nasty junk. There are still very stringent criteria for that 5%. It basically an allowance for natural ingredients that haven’t been grown organically. So there’s a small allowance.
This is the real world. Not everything is available in organic form.
DEBRA: Not yet, that’s correct, that’s correct.
Okay! So, what’s going on today about certifying? When you see on just like a natural product that you see, a personal care product in a natural food store say, and it’ll say it contains organic this and that, organic that, but they don’t all say “certified,” are there any regulations or certifications for organic for personal care. How is that working now? I know there’s been some talk and some changes. I’m not quite sure where it is at the moment.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yes. Well, to the best of my knowledge, in your country, the USDA has stated publicly that they don’t want to get involved with personal care, that they will allow personal care products that meets the organic standard to be certified USDA. So that’s great news. But it’s not like a state objective of theirs to incorporate personal care products into their standard.
DEBRA: I also heard in that regard that in textile products—like mattresses, for example, is where I’ve heard about this—what the USDA will do is they’ll certify an agricultural ingredient, an agricultural material. So they could certify say apples or something else that might be in your personal care product, like some essential oil or something, and they can also certify cotton, but they’re not certifying the product in the same way in other categories as they are in the category of food.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yes, yes. Well, they will certify products that meet the food standards even if the function isn’t food.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s good to know. So, it could say “certified organic,” if you see that “USDA certified organic” symbol on a product that’s not a food product, that means that it’s following the same rules as if you saw that USDA certified label on a food product like catsup, for example. It has to be 95% organic.
NARELLE CHENERY: Absolutely, yes.
DEBRA: So if you see it on a personal care product, then it will be 95% organic just like that catsup would be.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yes, that’s right.
There are actually three levels of certification with the USDA. They do have a 100% organic certification. If every single one of the ingredients in that product is certified organic, they do allow a 100% organic claim.
Then there’s the certified organic which is that 95%+ organic content. And then, they have a “made with organic” claim that you can make, but no logo is allowed to be used on the product. You can’t bear the USDA logo on the product. But you can make the claim “made with organic ingredients.” And that is a 70%+ organic content.
DEBRA: Good, good.
NARELLE CHENERY: That sounds tiny. But interesting, that’s only pertaining to food, that “made with organic.” So to the best of my knowledge, they don’t allow a “made with organic” claim for personal care products.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. We’ll come back right after this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Narelle Chenery who is joining us from Australia at two in the morning there. And she’s the creator of MiEssence, the world’s first certified organic skincare and personal care line.
And MiEssence, you can go to my website, and type in MiEssence in the search box, and a local distributor will come up. It’s on Debra’s List. Or you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and there’s a link under Narelle’s shining, smiling face. And we’ll be right back after this.
DEBRA: Okay, let’s try this again. Here I was, announcing we were coming back, and there was no audio.
So, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Narelle Chenery who is in Australia where it’s just past two in the morning. She’s the creator of MiEssence, the world’s first certified organic skincare and personal care line.
And if you’d like to go visit her website, you can just type in MiEssence on any search engine, or you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the announcement of today’s show, you’ll see her picture there. And at the end of that, there’s a link to the MiEssence site that is on my website.
So, Narelle, I’ve been looking at your website. And there’s a tab for ingredients. I’ve been looking at that over the break, and I see that every single ingredient is a plant that I recognize or a mineral like aloe vera, amber essence, apple cider vinegar, avocado oil. I mean, you really have taken those kitchen kind of ingredients and put them in very wonderful products.
NARELLE CHENERY: Thank you! I love what I do, that’s for sure.
DEBRA: Well, I can tell. I’ve used a lot of your products, and I think they’re great.
So, tell us about your products. I know now you have a lot of different things even more than basic personal care. So why don’t you tell us about them and what’s special about them.
NARELLE CHENERY: Well, yes. I started out with skincare. I really fell in love with the natural ingredients. Actually, these books that I was telling you about, the one from Aubrey Hampton, he listed the amazing properties of the likes of shea butter and rose essential oil and horse chestnut extract.
And the more research I did into the cornucopia of the amazing ingredients available in nature, and how healing and regenerative and soothing and nourishing they are to the skin, I just thought, “Oh, my God! How amazing would it be if I could create a range of skincare products that could utilize a whole range of organic essential oils and herbs and plant butters and root extracts, citrus extracts that all have amazing properties for the skin?”
So, we have a whole range of skincare. We have a 10-step facial. And we have bathrooms, toothpaste, deodorants, shampoos, body washes. And that extended into cleaning products, home cleaning products and essential oils and perfumes.
And in the last few years, I’ve focused on health and well-being and actually creating superfood-based products or nutritional products out of the purest and most potent plant-based ingredients on the planet that I can find that has the greatest benefit for the body.
So, we have from an organic probiotic, an organic antioxidant, and an alkalizing green chlorophyll-rich super food.
So, we’ve got about a hundred products in our range now.
DEBRA: That’s a lot of product.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah! I just love what I do, and I just love creating. And I get inspired by finding—basically, I want to solve problems. I want to solve problems, and I want to create products that people love to use and fall in love with and actually work and are good for them. So that’s what drives me.
DEBRA: Well, I think you’ve certainly accomplished exactly that.
I’m just looking at different things here on your website. And here, I’m looking at the make-up page, and you have a video.
NARELLE CHENERY: Oh, yeah, cosmetics, yeah. I forgot to say we have cosmetics as well, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. This is great. So we’re going to need to take another break in about a minute here. So tell us a little bit more about your mineral makeup. Can you just tell us about are all mineral make-up the same or are there things that we should be looking for?
NARELLE CHENERY: No, all mineral makeups are not the same. There are chemicals that are described in mineral makeups.
And one particular ingredient, titanium dioxide, for example, is a mineral that’s used in many cosmetic bases. And titanium dioxide actually has been found to be very unstable in the presence of UV light, in sunlight, and it degrades to form free radicals which actually damage the skin.
So, the most stable mineral is zinc oxide. And that’s the mineral that I use as a base of all of my cosmetic products as opposed to the titanium dioxide which can break down to form free radicals which causes oxidation and free radical damage and aging of the skin; whereas zinc oxide is a very stable mineral. It’s stable in the presence of UV light. And it actually acts as a natural sunscreen that reflects the sun’s rays and protects the skin. So that’s the ideal ingredients to look for in a mineral cosmetic as the base.
DEBRA: Good, that’s good to know. There’s all these mineral makeups, all these different brands, and they all advertise how natural they are and what are the standards. This is what I’m always looking for as a consumer advocate, what can I tell consumers so that they can tell the difference and find the best products both in terms of how well they work and also how natural or organic or non-toxic that they are, what to be looking for. So thank you for that.
So, your products are sold through multilevel marketing. Can you tell me why you decided to do that? And what are the benefits of doing that?
NARELLE CHENERY: Actually, we got involved with network marketing or multilevel marketing because, originally, I was just selling direct and selling into health food stores. And I had a friend of a friend who basically wanted to become a business partner or wanted us to contract manufacture for him. And he had a really significant history in corporate network marketing.
He’s been involved in some companies from the States. And he wanted to create his own network marketing company out of organic skincare.
And my experience with network marketing hadn’t been entirely positive in terms of over-promising and under-delivering and being very hype-based.
DEBRA: Why do people feel that way? This is why I’m asking you this question because a lot of people say, “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with MLM because of past experiences.” Yet there’s a lot of really great companies like yourself. So go on because I want people to hear this.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah, yeah. That’s right. It does have a bad name. There’s no doubt about it. And I absolutely didn’t like the idea, the hype around the promises, the get-rich-quick scheme. Actually, network marketing, for our purposes, especially because we create—
Our products are made fresh. One of our unique qualities is that we make our products monthly. We make fresh, and we ship direct to our consumers. So, the best way for us—I mean, it used to break my heart because I was originally selling in health food stores. And once it goes into a retail product, once your product goes into a retail store, there’s no guarantee how long it’s going to sit there for.
DEBRA: And you have to be concerned about shelf life. And when you have to be concerned about shelf life, you have to design the product differently. I mean, we’re talking about all these fabulous benefits of the natural ingredients, but if it sits on the shelf…
NARELLE CHENERY: it loses its vitality.
DEBRA: It loses its vitality, yeah.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yes. Our products are really unique in that they’re cold-formulated, high vitality, certified organic, raw, beneficial, active, no chemical emulsifiers and preservatives, and antioxidants. Nothing is synthetic in them. So the freshness is a really unique quality. And it’s actually highly beneficial to get the products fresh so you get the most benefit.
That’s one of my pillars, is that the products have to be good for you and actually make a difference.
So, network marketing is actually wonderful for us because it means that we can ship direct to the consumer, to the end user, directly from our factory. And it also enables us to share what would have been the marketing budget that goes to exporters and distributors and wholesalers and retailers…
DEBRA: And let me just say this about the fees. If you go into stores, retail stores, a lot of retail stores, you have to fees to be on the shelf.
NARELLE CHENERY: That’s right, yes. Not to mention that the margins that they need. So, we have to make a margin, the wholesalers need a margin, the distributors need a margin, the exporters need a margin. So there’s quite a significant chunk of money from the retail price down to what would be the manufacturing cost. There’s a significant chunk of money that is a valuable and is used up in that normal supply chain.
So, what we do is we put that chunk of money into our people who actually share our vision and mission and passion for the beautiful products that we make, and they share our story. It’s quite a unique story. The way our products are made were quite different.
So, our products work well with word-of-mouth and presenting, home presentations, and actually experiential moments in the home so you can actually try the products before you buy.
So, networking marketing is actually perfect for us because it means that we get to share our prosperity with people who love our products and want to talk about our products. And it also means we get to ship fresh directly to the consumer, so the end user gets the best, most potent, as pure as possible, freshest products that’s possible.
DEBRA: And also too, one of the things that I found with network marketing is that if you’re a user these products—as most people are who are wanting to then sell them—you can make enough commissions and more. You can make at least enough commissions to pay for your use of the product. Plus, more profit on top of that. And so, I think it’s a very good way for people who want to use a particular product to be able to earn at least a little extra income to be able to pay for it. It’s such a benefit of this marketing.
It really is, I think, a good marketing structure. It’s an excellent marketing structure that’s just has a bad reputation.
NARELLE CHENERY: It has a bad name.
DEBRA: It’s how it’s been used. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the structure. It’s just that it has a bad reputation.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah, yeah. And we have a monthly order that you can get your products monthly. And if you get three people doing the same thing, you actually get your products for free.
DEBRA: It’s only three people.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah, I know. It’s really cool.
DEBRA: Yeah. So, I said a little earlier—we’re needing to go to break, but I got a little note from my producer that we could skip the break because we had our little technical difficulty. So we just have to skip the break.
So, let’s just move on to talking about the power of consumers and how much difference we can make in the world. What do you want to say about that?
NARELLE CHENERY: Oh, I’d love to refer to the quote by Margaret Mead which is, “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.” And that speaks volumes to me.
So, from my perspective, being an informed consumer is the most powerful thing we can do, to not be fooled. Being informed means that you can look beyond. You have the capacity to look beyond the greenwashing and slick marketing that is rife in the world today. There’s very much rubbish that you have to sift through to get to the real deal.
So, being informed enables you to look beyond that greenwashing, protects your family from toxic ingredients disguised as natural ingredients. It’s what you mentioned before, Debra, the practice of listing toxic chemical ingredients, and then putting graphics of coconuts, is so deceptive. Those ingredients that are stated to be from coconuts, they always involve a chemical process, as you mentioned. And some of those…
DEBRA: They do!
NARELLE CHENERY: And there’s processing impurities in the chemicals in the manufacturing process that’s being linked to all sorts of health effects like learning disabilities and infertility, birth defects, asthma, cancer. It’s horrific that it is right there.
DEBRA: It is horrific. But you know, I just want to say that I don’t think that most manufacturers are being intentionally deceptive. There was a film some years ago called Absence of Malice. I think that’s maybe even a legal term. I think that it is more that we live in an industrial culture and that everything we do is informed by industrialism, and that people like you and I before we had our realizations…
NARELLE CHENERY: [inaudible 34:13]
DEBRA: Yeah! I mean, everybody, unless we have parents that had changed their minds about industrialism, we all start out in the industrial mindset. And so, we go to the store, and we buy whatever is on the shelf. We eat packaged food and all those kinds of things assuming that everything is fine. And then, we have something happen in our lives, and we see the folly of that, and that our lives could be much better if we weren’t exposed to all those chemicals.
Well, I think that a lot of the manufacturers who are still using those chemicals, I think that they put things like “sodium lauryl sodium (coconut)” on the label to make it look like it’s from coconut because that’s what the suppliers are telling them.
A chemist who’s only thinking in terms of the normal, industrial model, someone goes to them and says, “Well, we want to make a natural formula.” He doesn’t think like you do to use apple cider vinegar. He thinks, “Let’s put together this industrial chemical with this industrial chemical. And it’s from coconut, so it’s natural.”
When I started out 30 years ago, that was considered natural. And there were no products like yours at that time. And if you wanted to have something that was like yours, people had to do like I did…
NARELLE CHENERY: Make it themselves.
DEBRA: You have to make it yourself in your kitchen. I mean, the quality and purity of products has just increased tremendous in the right direction over the past 30 years. It’s a huge difference.
But I think that there are still people who aren’t with the program. They haven’t recognized what it is that we need to do. And so we still have—we now have this choice between the toxic chemical or the toxic natural chemical or pure ingredients like yours where you’re using the whole ingredient.
And I think that’s a context that we need to be thinking in now in terms of personal care, those three categories, which category does it fall in? And it certainly is a step in the right direction to get out of the toxic petroleum ingredients into the natural industrial ingredients. But where we really want to go is where your products are.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah, I agree. I agree, it’s not malicious. It’s just born of ignorance and not questioning and having the knowledge to question, not sort of not really even thinking about it, just assuming that it’s safe because it’s in existence. If it’s being made, it must be safe.
DEBRA: It’s in existence. The government isn’t telling us not to use it.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah.
DEBRA: The government is still allowing it on the shelf, so it must be safe.
NARELLE CHENERY: That’s right. If it’s on the market, it won’t hurt me.
DEBRA: Yeah, we live in interesting times.
Well, now we really do have only two minutes left. So, is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered? Any final words?
NARELLE CHENERY: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: It’s over! Isn’t that quick?
NARELLE CHENERY: That was really quick.
Well, from your listeners’ perspective, the best way as a tool for them—because they’re going to be now looking at their bathroom products and going, “Well, is this product natural? How do I know now?” So, the best way or, really, the only way to assess the integrity of a product—and it’s available these days, all the personal care products and the food products. The only way to guarantee the organic integrity of any product is to look for the logo.
Look for the logo of certification. And that guarantees the organic integrity of that products. It’s an independent third-party guarantee of the authenticity and integrity of every single ingredient. And only certified organic products can bear the certified logo.
So basically, if you have a product that’s claiming “made with organic”—
The big thing is there’s so much greenwashing in the personal care/skincare industry. And unfortunately, it is intentional. It’s intentionally misleading consumers, this greenwashing, by hiding those synthetic surfactants ingredients that we just talked about in the substantial water components of shampoos for example.
A shampoo is about 70% water from a formulation perspective. So what companies do to mislead consumers and give people the idea that their product is greener than it actually is, they list weak botanical extracts or “aqueous infusions,” they call it. So you’ll see things like…
DEBRA: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you because, if I don’t, then the music is going to interrupt you.
NARELLE CHENERY: Yeah, sure.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Talk Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more about my guest Narelle Chenery. Go to her website and see about Narelle’s products. Thanks for being with me!
Moldex Mold Inhibiting Paint
Question from Daisy
We’re renovating our house and I’m wondering about Moldex mold-inhibiting paint for the bathrooms? I saw it in a “green” products store, but I’d like to know how this paint compares to other paints as far as VOC’s or other problem ingredients.
Debra’s Answer
Well, it looks fine to me. The MSDS for Moldex Paint lists NO regulated hazardous chemicals and the mold-inhibiting agent is a silver, which does not outgas.
So fine with me if you want to use this.
In my bathroom I used colored clay plaster from [American Clay Plaster]=Naomi find listing on Debra’s List for link. It’s just made from natural minerals and has no petroleum ingredients at all. It absorbs moisture and then releases it, so mold doesn’t get created in the first place. That’s a more natural approach.
Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Products
My guests today are Erika Schreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. We’ll be talking about their report Chemicals Revealed, which analyzes reports filed with the Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) by manufacturers, in compliance with the state’s Children’s Safe Products Act of 2008. More than 5,000 reports were filed that contained a total of 41 chemicals identified by Ecology as a concern for children’s health. Erika, Science Director, leads the Washington Toxics Coalition’s research program. She has worked on the Washington Toxics Coalition staff since 1997. She has led studies including an investigation of sources of pollution to Puget Sound, tests of toxic chemicals in toys and other children’s products, and biomonitoring studies of toxics in pregnant women and other Washingtonians. In the past, she led efforts to secure protections for salmon from pesticides and win greater support for organic and sustainable agriculture. She obtained an M.S. in ecology from the University of Michigan and a B.S. in molecular biology from MIT. Nancy, author of the report, has a Bachelor’s degree in Ecosystems Analysis from Huxley College at Western Washington University, and a Master’s in Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington. She studied freshwater and marine ecosystems as an undergrad and studied bioremediation of toxic organic compounds and the environmental chemistry of pollutants in grad school. Nancy has professional experience in hazardous waste management and in waste water engineering, but also has experience representing the interests of families of children with special needs at Seattle Children’s Hospital. http://watoxics.org/chemicalsrevealed
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Products
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Erika Schreder
Date of Broadcast: September 18, 2013
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 today, we are really going to find out how toxic the world is because I have some guests from Washington Toxics Coalition who are going to tell us about studies and reports and all kinds of things to tell us what toxic chemicals are in children’s products.
But first, I want to say Happy Pollution Prevention Week. The third full week in September is always Pollution Prevention Week.
I’ve been doing this all these many years, 30 years, and I didn’t know every year when is Pollution Prevention Week. But evidently, it’s been going on for a while, launched by the US Environmental Protection Agency. And it’s dedicated to preventing and reducing pollution.
According to the EPA, the US annually produces millions of tons of pollution and spends tens of billions of dollars per year controlling it in the form of cleanups, storm water management and education, and other things.
So, this week—and this week only—the EPA encourages us to look at our lifestyles and brainstorm changes we can make in our daily lives.
Well, we do that every day here, Monday through Friday, noon eastern. That’s exactly what we do, look at our lifestyles, and find out what kind of changes we can make in our daily lives.
Some examples, according to the EPA, include saving energy and money by looking for the Energy Star label to find energy efficient electronics and appliances. And that does reduce pollution going out in the environment that is generated by energy use.
Also, we can save water by looking for the Water Sense label to find water efficient products which can save over 5000 gallons of water per year per household and keep water supplies at safe levels. That’s a good thing to do.
The EPA also urges us to pick safer products by looking for the EPA’s Design for the Environment Safer Product label. Plus, there are many, many, many other things. And we talk about those here.
That’s about all we need to say about this.
As long as we’re talking about millions of things—Washington Toxics Coalition, whose representatives are here today, sent out an e-mail this week in which they revealed that the American Chemistry Council, the ACC, spends—how much do you think—$100-million a year to continue to use toxic chemicals while people like Washington Toxics and you and I are fighting to stop toxic chemicals. They’re spending $100 million a year in order to keep them on the market. That’s a lot of money.
I’m going to introduce my guests now. Hi, Erika and Nancy, are you both there?
ERIKA SCHREDER: I’m here. This is Erika.
NANCY UDING: Hi, Debra. This is Nancy. Good morning.
DEBRA: Hi, good morning. Well, it’s afternoon here, but it’s morning and afternoon everywhere that’s somebody’s listening probably.
They’re from the Washington Toxics Coalition. And Washington Toxics Coalition does a lot of things that they’ll tell you about.
But what we’re going to be talking about today is their report, “Chemicals Revealed” which analyzes reports filed with the Washington State Department of Ecology by manufacturers in compliance with the State’s Children’s Safe Products Act of 2008.
And more than 5000 reports that were filed that contain chemicals that is on Washington State’s list of 66 chemicals of concern, and they found 41 of those chemicals that are a problem for children’s health in those 5000 reports, the same chemicals over and over again.
So Erika, why don’t you start, and tell us a little bit about how you personally got interested in toxic chemicals.
ERIKA SCHREDER: Well, I’ve been here at the Washington Toxics Coalition for more than 15 years, but I did get here in a roundabout way. My training is in molecular biology and in plant ecology. And so, I was actually doing research on sustainable agricultural practices and got interested in pesticides.
And so, I actually worked on pesticides for a number of years here at the Toxics Coalition, trained and built up our sustainable agriculture here in Washington, and also get some restrictions in place to eliminate the use of some of the most toxic pesticides.
And from there, I broadened out to working on other toxic chemicals. And that’s where I am today.
DEBRA: Very good. Nancy, how did you get into toxic chemicals?
NANCY UDING: Well, I’ve been interested in toxic chemicals through my education and early professional life. I’ve studied ecosystems and environmental engineering. And I also worked in hazardous waste management professionally.
But toxic chemicals really hit home for me once I started a family. I have a daughter who was diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum and with learning disabilities. And the big learning I had from that situation is that a lot of these issues that our young children are having to deal with, there can be a combination of genetic predisposition plus an environmental assault.
And I know many, many families in a similar situation.
And so, a lot of times, I feel like this environmental assault can very well include toxic chemicals. So, in my personal choice to work with my daughter and her issues, we used some of the so-called alternative treatment for autism spectrum, which included things like chelating for heavy metals and doing some toxic protocols with a naturopathic physician.
So, it really hit home for me because so many young people and so many individuals have different sensitivities, and it varies by the individual. And so I think we need to be really looking at for what we can do to really minimize exposure that everyone has to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: Yeah, I agree. When I first became interested myself more than 30 years ago, it was because toxic chemicals were making me sick. It started with my immune system. But as I started studying it, I went, “Wait a minute. It’s not just about me being sensitive like an allergy. I’m not just this unique person. There are toxic chemicals in consumer products that are poisoning everyone.”
And that’s when I started writing about it because this is something we can do something about. We don’t have to just sit here and be poisoned.
So, tell us about Washington Toxics. When did that start? And what do you do as an organization?
ERIKA SCHREDER: Well, we’re a 30-year-old organization, so we’ve been here in Washington for quite some time. And we also, as an organization, started out by working on pesticides, helping local community groups fight spraying especially in forest settings.
But today, we are a tightly-focused organization, working to create a healthier and just world by promoting safer products, safer chemicals and practices, to create a healthier future. And we do that using groundbreaking research. We use topnotch advocacy, grassroots organizing. And we provide consumer information.
DEBRA: Good. I actually read a lot of what you write, and what the organization produces. And I have long admired your organization for the research that you do because that research needs to be done.
So, let’s talk about your Chemicals Revealed report. Why don’t we start with the Washington State Children’s Safe Products
Act? What’s that about?
ERIKA SCHREDER: Yes, I can give you some background on that and how this information came to be. So, it was back in 2007—you probably remember, and I’m sure a lot of listeners remember—it was the summer of 2007 we found out that Thomas the Tank Engine had lead. And that that toy was not alone, that many of our kids’ favorite toys were contaminated with high levels of lead. And it came as a shock to many people that that was actually legal. As long as it wasn’t in the paint, we allowed lead in toys and other children’s products.
And so, we had actually been working at that time to test children’s products because we had found using an XRF analyzer that a lot of children’s products had lead, arsenic, cadmium. And so we were concerned about it. And we’re actually in the middle of doing testing of kids’ products right when that news started to break.
So, we were poised and ready with legislation to propose, which eventually became the Children’s Safe Products Act, which was passed in 2008.
DEBRA: Okay, I need to interrupt you because we need to go to a break. But we can talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guests today are Erika Schreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guests today are Erika Schreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. And we’re talking about their report called Chemicals Revealed, which is about toxic chemicals in children’s products. They studied more than 5000 children’s products and found 41 chemicals known to the State of Washington to be harmful to children.
You were talking about the Washington State Children’s Safe Products Act, so tell us more about that.
ERIKA SCHREDER: So, the Act did two things. One, it banned some of the chemicals that we knew were already showing up in children’s products. And those were lead, cadmium and phthalates. And then, the other thing it did was set up a system where we can learn more about what toxics were present in kids’ products because I think the lead surprise really taught us that there was a lot we didn’t know. Government agencies didn’t have that information, members of the public didn’t have the information. And so we didn’t really know where to go next to make those products safer.
So, the law set up a system that requires manufacturers to report when products that they sell or market to children contain chemicals that cause cancer, hormone disruption, nerve system toxicity, et cetera.
DEBRA: Go ahead, Nancy.
NANCY UDING: This is Nancy. So the system for reporting, the report requirements actually kicked in last year in 2012. And so, with Chemicals Revealed, we took the first two rounds of reporting by manufacturers’ reports to the State for the chemicals that are in products that they’ve been selling in the State of Washington over the time period. So, Chemicals Revealed is a summary of the information that is in all those of manufacturers’ reports.
And so we were surprised. It was very shocking to see that over 5000 products on shelves in stores in Washington State contained toxic chemicals. And these are children’s products. So, we wanted to put this report together, so people had access to this information. This is really one of a kind information. There isn’t any other reporting requirement like this anywhere else in the country. And of course, many of the manufacturers that were selling products in Washington State with these chemicals, they’re selling in other parts of the country as well.
DEBRA: It seems to me when I hear the idea that there needs to be a report, that a manufacturer needs to say, “Yes, I have these toxic chemicals in my product,” I get chills because what kind of a person would knowingly make and sell a product where they would sign a piece of paper that says, “Yes, I’m making a product that has toxic chemicals that are known to cause harm to children.” I just think that that’s an amazing thing that that even exists in the world.
NANCY UDING: Yes, it is amazing that even exists in the world. And the reason it does is we don’t have adequate laws that are protecting us from these chemicals.
And so, our federal laws, or the Toxic Substances Control Act, that’s supposed to be protecting us from toxic chemicals, is really doing a very poor job of protecting us. And that’s why we do actions like this at the state level, so we can protect people where we can.
But part of it too is that people just don’t really know. A lot of times, when we talk about toxic chemicals being in children’s products, a lot of people, when they hear that, are just shocked because it’s like, “Really? Aren’t we protecting our children?
And aren’t there laws working for us?”
Well, it’s good that we have this information because people can start to realize that we aren’t being adequately protected, and we need to go further and pass new policies both at the state and at the national levels to protect ourselves and our children.
And in the spirit of Pollution Prevention Week, that’s the change that we can make in our daily lives, is to get involved in the process, both in our own states and at the federal level, and try and get these chemicals off the shelves.
DEBRA: Are these chemicals required to be revealed on the labels of the products?
NANCY UDING: No, they aren’t.
ERIKA SCHREDER: The way it’s set up is there’s a public database, so they don’t have to be on the label. But remember, the public can look on the database, and get the information. It’s not, unfortunately, product-specific, so it’s a little bit more general than that.
For example, Walmart would have to report, instead of a certain Princess Barbie Doll contains this phthalate, they would instead report that dolls contain this phthalate.
DEBRA: I think that every single product should be required to—I understand about trade secrets, and I understand about labeling laws and things like that. But I think that consumers need to know what’s in the product, and that every single product should, either on their label or on their website or there should be some database somewhere, even if it’s not publicly accessible that says everything that’s in every product. Children can be poisoned and can have an acute poisoning, immediate poisoning, and you can go to the Poison Control Center, and they can’t find out what’s in products.
NANCY UDING: I believe we have the right to know what’s in everything that we’re using. But again, the laws and the manufacturing processes could be very complex. And also, the information that we know about these chemicals, it changes over time. There are a lot of chemicals right now that are out on the market that are being used and are in the products that we’re using. Right now, we don’t even know what kind of harm they can cause because the research and the science isn’t up to date on some of them.
DEBRA: I agree.
NANCY UDING: So, pretty much our approach is that we want to keep these chemicals out of products, first and foremost, and that the best way to do so is to work on changing some of our chemical policies.
And also, we want to protect everyone. When I was a new mom, I had no idea what some of the kinds of toxic hazards that I had to look out for. We want to protect everybody too.
DEBRA: I agree.
NANCY UDING: You don’t want to have consumers have to look at labels.
DEBRA: Wouldn’t that be great if we didn’t have to read labels?
NANCY UDING: I know! That would be great.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back with my guests, Erika Schreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. And when we come back, we’ll hear more about their report, Chemicals Revealed, over 5000 kids’ products containing toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you’d like to read this report we’re talking about called Chemicals Revealed from the Washington Toxics Coalition, you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and scroll down until you see today’s show. All the shows are listed for this week. And at the end of the description of this show, there’s the URL for page that has this report on it.
And also, you can go to the WashingtonToxics.org website, and it’s there. It’s WAToxics.org.
NANCY UDING: Yes, WAToxics.org.
DEBRA: WAToxics.org, yes. And there’s lots and lots and lots of information there. When you go to their website, you can get a lot of information. You can sign up for their newsletter, and they’ll send you alerts and all kinds of things. And you can also make a donation because, remember, the American Chemical Council is spending $100 million a year to support the continued use of toxic chemicals and to make there not be stringent regulations that would prevent the use of toxic chemicals.
They have $100 million a year. And we have us. So everybody needs to help.
NANCY UDING: Yes, thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Tell us some of the specific findings in the report.
NANCY UDING: Well, some of the specific findings—there’s a lot of report. There are 5000 reports. One thing that we did in Chemicals Revealed was summarize some of the main types of chemicals that we saw being reported. And so, some of those chemicals are toxic heavy metals, such as mercury, cadmium. And then a couple of newcomers that we don’t hear too much about—molybdenum, antimony and cobalt—were reported.
Cobalt was reported over a thousand times. It also had a few reports of arsenic, believe it or not, which is quite surprising.
We also saw a lot of phthalates on the list reported. And phthalates are used as—
DEBRA: Plasticizers.
NANCY UDING: —plasticizers. And they’re used in a lot of different products. We saw them in all kinds of things—clothing, toys, baby products. And phthalates are hormone disrupters. So they’re of a concern in that regard. But many, many products contain phthalates.
And then there were other things like industrial solvents that appeared to be contaminants in the manufacturing process—solvents like ethylene glycol, which we also know as antifreeze, methyl ethyl ketone, toluene, those kinds of industrial solvents.
There are traces of those chemicals in many of these products.
And so yes, again, you were remarking there were 41 chemicals off of the list of 66 of high concern […]
One thing we did see too is that, in terms of products reported, clothing was reported the most often with almost 3000 of the reports for clothing, and then combined with footwear. So that really raises some red flags for us. The issue of clothing is something that we probably ought to be looking at more closely.
There are also a lot of toys and games and children’s jewelry and accessories; again, many baby products, such as baby car seats and baby bath, and safety products, changing mat, a lot of bedding, a lot of arts and crafts toys.
So, it’s just a wide variety of products that people use every day, and that their children are in contact with every day.
DEBRA: Something like clothing, they’re wearing it all day long, or bedding, they’re sleeping in a bed all night long, and their skin is touching this. It’s very easy for these toxic chemicals and metals to get right in through their skin.
I wanted to ask you, I’m looking at the report, and so I just want to clarify, the companies that were reporting are retailers, not manufacturers?
NANCY UDING: Well, the companies that are reporting are manufacturers. And some—that’s kind of a complicated situation because some retailers manufacture their own brand, or their own products. And so, in that case, they would be reporting their products. In other cases—and this is a little tricky area with the whole reporting requirement—there are some retailers that purchase. They have products manufactured for them that they purchased, and then they sell the products.
Some manufacturers consider themselves as the manufacturer and responsible for reporting. But we do see other retailers seem to take a different interpretation of that and don’t consider themselves the manufacturers.
So, we see some companies that should probably be reporting more products that aren’t because they don’t consider themselves the manufacturer.
An interesting thing is that some of the biggest reporters, the manufacturers, actually have policies in place in their companies where they do have chemical restrictions list. And so they are taking the steps to reduce their chemical use in the manufacturing process. So, we like to really commend some of these companies for doing this.
But in terms of why they’re reporting so many products, it could be just because they know more about their products. They’ve been investigating it further and that they’re actually learning more about what toxic chemicals they’re using.
DEBRA: On other shows, I’ve been talking to manufacturers who are looking to see what the toxic chemical uses down in different layers, not just the top layer of what’s the ingredient that goes into the final making of the product, but what are the chemicals and processes that go into making the ingredients and down several layers.
And so, I think that you’re exactly right. The general public isn’t really aware of how much attention is being paid to toxics on the manufacturing level. And I think that there are some companies in particular that are taking this extremely seriously and are doing their best to, gradually, over time, replace those toxic chemicals with less toxic chemicals or remove all together.
And so, there is progress being made. And I think that you’re right, that if they’re reporting, it’s because they know.
I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I talked to manufacturers 20 years ago where they didn’t have a clue about anything. It’s just, “Well, I buy this container, and I mix it with this other container,” and that’s what their products are.
We need to take another break, but we’ll be right back after this with Erika Shreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. We’re talking about their report, Chemicals Revealed, and finding out about the toxic chemicals that are in children’s products. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And today, my guests are Erika Schreder and Nancy Uding from Washington Toxics Coalition. And they wrote a report called Chemicals Revealed that tells us about toxic chemicals in children’s products.
Can you tell us why is there more of a concern for children than adults?
ERIKA SCHREDER: There are a few reasons that we’re more concerned about kids. The primary one is that they’re still developing. So if you have any toxic insult, then it can affect them the rest of their lives because their systems are still developing.
But also, they are less able to detoxify than adults are. And they tend to have greater exposures because, pound for pound, they eat more food, drink more water, breathe more air than adults do. And so by and large, they tend to actually have greater concentrations of these compounds in their bodies.
DEBRA: Yes, they do. People really need to keep in mind that if an adult and a child and a baby are all in the same room, they’re all going to have the same exposure, but the adult’s body is much bigger than the child’s, and the child’s is bigger than the baby’s.
And so, really, when you have a newborn baby in a toxic home, that baby is getting more exposure than anybody else. And we really need to be watching out for that. As you said, things that you are exposed to, just newborns in the room, things that babies are exposed to, it sets them up for having a having a healthy life or not a healthy life. And we need to keep that in mind.
It’s very important.
Another thing that I see here in the report is a sentence that says the use of hazardous chemicals in children’s products is unnecessary.
And I totally agree with you on that. And I just want to let people know that, even though there are many toxic products for children, there are also many not toxic products for children. There is organic clothing, there is organic bedding, there are toys made out of natural materials. And all these products, even though they’re a small percentage of what’s in the marketplace, they all do exist. And the parents can make those choices.
And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and go up to the top of the page, there is a button that says “shop.” If you click on there, it will take you to Debra’s List, which is my compilation of many hundreds of websites that sell products that do not contain these toxic chemicals.
ERIKA SCHREDER: Another thing people can do in their search for toxic-free products is if you have retailers in your local area, and you want to be able to purchase toxic-free products, please contact your retailers and tell them that you support having toxic-free products available. And would they please take some of those toxic products off their shelves, and put less toxic and non-toxic products out there for people to purchase.
DEBRA: Don’t you think it would be nice if some consumers got together and demonstrated in front of some of these retailers.
They could carry signs out front that says, “No more toxic products.”
ERIKA SCHREDER: Well, people do do that. That is definitely a strategy. It’s also good to just start by making a phone call, and saying you’re a regular shopper at this store, and I really want to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that I’m exposed to and my kids are exposed to.
Just ask them, will they please take some of these products off their shelf.
DEBRA: Well, I know that there’s a program called Mind the Store. I’ve had people on from that organization. We’ve talked about that. And there are ten top retailers that are being asked to do that.
And I do know, I’ve been in some of these stores like Target, and I’ve noticed over the years that there are less toxic chemicals, but there are still more that can be taken off the shelves. And so it’s just a matter of letting retailers and manufacturers know that you want toxic-free products.
Consumers have a lot of power. And if we don’t buy those toxic products, they’ll stop making them.
You’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve been doing it for a long time. Washington Toxics has been doing this for a long time.
And don’t you see that, even though there is still a long way to go, that we have made progress?
ERIKA SCHREDER: We’re definitely seeing response from many manufacturers and from retailers. Just last week, there was a big announcement from, I think it was Proctor & Gamble, that they are phasing triclosan and phthalates out of their products.
These companies are starting to see that consumers want safer products and products that they can feel confident in. And I think the retailers are also sensitive to that. And that’s why we’re working with Mind the Store to really target these retailers and ask them to stop selling products that contain any of these hundred toxic chemicals that we’re asking them to phase out.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. I’m working with them too. I think that’s a great idea. I would like to see that to happen.
You know, I’ve spent 30 years trying to help consumers recognize the difference between a toxic product and a non-toxic product. But what I’d really like is to be out of a job and to just be able to walk into any store at any time and know that anything that I look at on the shelf is something that’s safe to buy.
And that’s really where we should be because all technology exists to do that. There’s no reason why we need toxic chemicals.
And it’s just a matter of choice, marketing, and understanding all those things. But I do see times are changing. Times are changing. And I think that there’s a lot more awareness than there used to be.
So, at the end of your report, you have some recommendations. You want to tell us what those are?
NANCY UDING: Sure! One thing that we like to recommend to people is, of course, get involved, and talk to your local policy makers and your national policy makers, your congress members, to pass toxic chemical policy changes that will keep the chemicals out of products that we use every day. So, just get involved and become active.
We also recommend that other states pass reporting requirement laws because the information that we got from the Children’s Safe Products Act has just been really great information to have if it’s hard to look at and hard to realize that there are so many products that have toxic chemicals. It’s still really important for us to all to know as consumers. It’s also really important for policy makers to know this as well.
And in addition to looking at the national federal chemical policy situation, we need to change TSCA and reform TSCA, but we also need to be able to work on protecting people at the state level. And states should be able to take action and get toxic chemicals out of products.
And again, we really support the Mind the Store campaign. And we call on retailers to take toxic chemicals of their shelves.
DEBRA: Sometimes I feel like walking around with a little roll of stickers that say “toxic” and just put them on the shelves—guerilla advertising.
ERIKA SCHREDER: The other thing I wanted to mention is that, as Nancy was saying, we’re recommending that other states passed similar policies that would at least give us that first step of getting the information. And the number of states did consider that type of legislation last year. So people are interested in getting involved at the state level where we’re really seeing a lot of change.
They can go to the SaferStates.org website and see what’s happening in other states, what organizations are active that they can start to work with.
And there’s also actually a great article on the homepage of that website right now about the type of law, what’s happened in Washington and other states.
DEBRA: That’s great to know that. See, there are all these activities going on. We are going to get these toxic chemicals out of products, I am sure of it, in my lifetime.
So, we only have about a minute left. Are there any final words you’d like to say, each of you?
ERIKA SCHREDER: Well, I would just like to say thanks for having us on the show. It’s really great to be here.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
ERIKA SCHREDER: And also, again, we’d love to ask people to check out our website. It’s WAToxics.org, WAToxics. And we have tons of information on there including lots of recommendations. We did just do an e-mail newsletter about something that you can do about addressing the situation of toxic chemicals in clothing. So, if you can go to our website and search for “toxics in my tee shirt,” then you’ll get a few recommendations that we have for parents.
And just thanks for having us and Happy Pollution Prevention Week.
DEBRA: Happy Pollution Prevention Week to you too.
So, did both of you say something? I couldn’t tell. Yes, I think you did.
Well, we just have a few seconds left. So thank you very much for being with us. Everybody should go to Washington Toxics Coalition website, which is WAToxics.org. Sign up for their newsletter, make a donation, help them do their work because they’re the ones that are doing the research about toxic chemicals, health effects, where they are in products, and all of those kinds of things.
You can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can find out who else is going to be on this week. And you can also listen to past shows. We’ve got all kinds of great guests just like these, people who are making products, who are selling products, who are reporting on products, or investigating products.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Soap Nuts: The All Natural Solution for Laundry
My guest today is Mona Weiss, a naturalist and actress who co-founded Eco Nuts in 2009 with her fiancée, Pirates of the Carribbean actor Scott Shields, to bring eco-friendly laundry and cleaning products to the marketplace in compostable or recyclable packaging. We’ll be talking about how to recognize toxic and natural ingredients on product labels and how natural products can improve health conditions. Having suffered from a “normal detergent” allergy all her life, as well as a sensitivity to dyes and fragrances, Mona is extremely discerning when it comes to products that come in contact with her skin. Mona discovered she had sensitivities to toxins on new year’s eve right before she turned 16 and was home alone. The idea to start Eco Nuts came about 10 years later. In addition, Mona loves to study our natural world. She’s studied salamanders, marine and freshwater ecology, discovered new species of micro spiders in the Costa Rican rain forest, and worked with leopards, lions, and bears. econuts.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Soap Nuts: The All Natural Solution for Laundry
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Mona Weiss
Date of Broadcast: September 17, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Today is—what is today? It’s Tuesday, September 17th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining, so we’ll have no thunderstorms today.
And I may have a slight technical problem with my computer which is happening intermittently. Yesterday, it was fine for the whole show. So I’m crossing my fingers that it will be fine today.
And we do this show because there are toxic chemicals all around in all kinds of consumer products, in the air that we breathe, in the water we drink, just everywhere. But there are many, many products that do not contain toxic chemicals. There are ways to get toxic chemicals out of our bodies. And being free of these toxic exposures is what this show is all about.
Today, we’re going to talk about laundry and one of my favorite laundry products, soap nuts.
My guest today is Mona Weiss. She’s a naturalist and actress and co-founder of EcoNuts.
Hi Mona!
MONA WEISS: Hello!
DEBRA: How are you today?
MONA WEISS: Oh, I’m doing great. The sun isn’t even shining here, and I’m in California.
DEBRA: Oh, no! Well, I’m sure it’ll be shining soon.
So, tell us first, what led you to be interested in toxic chemicals and in starting your company, EcoNuts.
MONA WEISS: Absolutely! It kind of started when I was about 16 years old. I was home alone. It was New Year’s Eve and my parents were at a party. I am up late beating Legend of Zelda on Nintendo. Up until that time, I was getting hives and rashes and stuff like that. But I never really paid attention to it. And that night, I had a really bad reaction. I’m home alone, and I was just covered in these red welts. My mom wasn’t at home. I didn’t really know what to do.
Long story short, we figured out that I’m allergic to food dye which was really weird. My original clue that night was that I’ve eaten rainbow sprinkle cookie and a raspberry Snapple. I had to go to the doctor and all that stuff.
So, we figured this out. And I had to suddenly look at everything I’m eating and cut out these food dyes (which are in everything, it’s unavoidable).
And around that time, I’m also diagnosed with ADD. And I was thinking, “God! This is really bad.”
Fast forward to years later, after I graduated college, I met Scott, my fiancée, and we started EcoNuts together.
And at the time he’s dating, he’s like, “You don’t have ADD. I think you’re just eating the wrong foods.”
So, I started buying organic foods and I got off the medication. And sure enough, I don’t have ADD. And all I needed was just healthy, organic food.
And then, there was one missing piece of the puzzle which was that I was still getting rashes. I could just eat fruits and vegetables, I’m still getting rashes. Well, it doesn’t have food dye in it, so what’s going on?
So, the mystery of that was solved when Scott’s uncle mentioned that there are these berries in the Himalayas that make soap. Maybe I should try using these for my laundry. That might help my problem.
I thought he was completely crazy. I’m using the detergent the doctor told me to use. So the doctor’s right… maybe?
DEBRA: Right, right. Maybe…
MONA WEISS: But anyway, we got these berries. And I’m like freaking out. I didn’t want to put them in my washing machine, but I did.
I washed my clothes. And holy cow! They worked not only to clean my clothes, but all of my eczema and allergies and rashes, they went away as soon as I started wearing the clothes that I had washed with these berries.
There was no real company kind of selling these, a real product. I was thinking, “You know what? I’m sure I’m not the only one with this problem.”
But these worked great. You’re not putting any chemicals down the drain. It’s environmentally conscious. So we decided to start a company and bring this product to mainstream.
DEBRA: I think what you’ve done—it’s not that soap nuts didn’t exist before because I’ve been using them for about four or five years…
MONA WEISS: Oh, yeah.
DEBRA: But what you’ve done is you’ve made it into a mainstream brand. You’ve made it available, and you’ve made it attractive. You’ve done a really good job of putting a whole story together and having a great website and making it something that just an average consumer could use.
You’ve put some other products together with it, and you’ve just done a great job, Mona. I’m really, really happy with your website.
MONA WEISS: Oh, great!
DEBRA: You’ve done a good job. And I’ve looked at many, many websites over the years.
MONA WEISS: Oh, great.
DEBRA: So, I love your story because it really illustrates how, once again, somebody had a health problem. We hear this story every day on this show. Once again, somebody else had a health problem, and they discovered it was some toxic chemical that was causing the health problem. They stopped using the toxic chemical—in this case, detergent and all the associated other things like perfume and everything that is in the detergent—and your health problem went away.
How many health problems are there in the world? One of the ones that I like to talk about all the time is how many millions of people have insomnia and they’re taking sleeping pills every night for the insomnia when they could just change their sheets and not have formaldehyde resin on their bedsheets, and then they wouldn’t have insomnia.
That’s what happened to me. That’s part of my story. I changed my sheets. And you changed your detergent. And now, we’re both without our symptoms!
I just have to keep saying this over and over because I want everybody who’s listening to understand that if you’re sick, if you’re having a symptom, look around and see what you’re being exposed to and start eliminating the toxic chemicals and see if those symptoms will go away.
So, tell us what soap nuts are.
MONA WEISS: Okay! So, they’re these little berries. They grow on a tree in the Himalayas. I mean, there are 20 different species. They grow all over the world. But the best ones for laundry happened to grow in the Himalayas.
And they make soap.
They make soap when they come into contact with water. The tree makes the soap to taste bad to insects. So it’s sort of trying to protect this inner seed.
So, what we do is we remove the inner seed because it doesn’t really do anything. And then, you take these little—they’re a hard shell. The common name is nuts, but it’s actually a berry. So it’s safe if you have nut allergies.
You can put it in this little big (which we give you). It’s just to keep track of it, so there are not berries floating around in your machine. Stick it in your washing machine, and then it will make soap. And wash your clothes!
It’s sort of complicated description for something that’s very, very simple.
DEBRA: It is very simple. When I started washing with them, somebody told me—I don’t even remember how I found out about it. Somebody told me, and I got some soap nuts. And they’re kind of sticky. The ones I have are kind of sticky. You put them in the little bag, and then you toss them in the washer, and you think, “How is this going to work?”
But I had an experience in the past. I grew up in California, in Northern California. And there, we had something called soap plant. It’s an Indian use of a plant. In grade school, I learned how to recognize it. They would take us on a hike, and we would go and pick up the soap plant. You pull it out of the ground, and the root is soapy. You put water on it, and you can wash your hands with it. And I thought that was a cool thing when I was a child. So, I thought, “Well, this makes sense to me, soap nuts.”
And the first time I washed my clothes with it, they came out so soft and so clean that I was hooked. It’s such an easy thing! You can use them over and over and over. You put them in the little bag (you put like three or four in the little bag), and you just keep using them until they kind of melt away. And then you put three or four more in the little bag. It’s just kind of an amazing product.
We need to take a break, Mona. So we’ll continue on with your story after the break.
MONA WEISS: Awesome!
DEBRA: This is Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Mona Weiss from EcoNuts. We’re talking about soap nuts and other natural cleaners and other natural laundry tips. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mona Weiss, co-founder of EcoNuts where they sell soap nuts for your laundry.
Mona, I know that you’re not the only one who sell soap nuts. But there’s something different about yours from the other ones. Tell us about that.
MONA WEISS: Well, we try to treat it like a normal product that people would buy. I mean, it’s a little bit of a hard stretch to ask people to use berries in their washing machine. It can freak people out.
So, what we tried to do is to make it as accessible for people to use as possible, make it easy to use, and present it in an attractive package that people want.
And we have other products too. We’ve got a liquid detergent which is an extract from these soap nuts. So if you like the idea, but you’d rather use a liquid detergent, we’ve got that for you.
DEBRA: Good! I know before, we had to make it ourselves.
MONA WEISS: Yeah! You can still make it yourself. It just depends how adventurous you want to be.
DEBRA: You also have a powder that you’ve made it from it?
MONA WEISS: Yeah, we’ve got a cleaning powder. And we’ve got surface cleaners as well—certified organic cleaners for your house. I mean, everything comes in aluminum—the liquids all do—and not plastic which is very easy for people to recycle.
And we use concentrated formulas, so it’s easier in terms of shipping. My grandma loves it because she doesn’t have to lift anything heavy at all.
So, we try to make that a very consumer-friendly item.
DEBRA: Yours are certified organic. Are all soap nuts certified organic?
MONA WEISS: No. Well, it depends if the company goes and gets the certification. They, for the most part, grow wild organically. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the company—and part of the organic process is you have to get certified at every single level. So you have to be certified where it grows, and then where it’s handled. And everyone that touches them needs to get certified and make sure that it does not come into contact with chemicals for the entire journey of the product.
DEBRA: That’s really good to know. I think most people don’t think about it. I think that they think that a certified organic means that it’s grown organically, but not that it’s certified all the way down the track there. So that’s good.
And you also sterilize your soap nuts.
MONA WEISS: Yeah! Yeah.
DEBRA: Tell us about that.
MONA WEISS: We came up with this process. We lab tested these early on just because handling these were making us a little—like we’re getting sick once in a while. So we decided to send these off to a lab and get them tested and there were some germs on these. It just made me feel, “You know what? Not only me and my employees are handling these, but for the consumers, we should really develop some kind of process to kind of clean these and make it just safe for people to use.” I mean, a lot of our customers have compromised immune systems and various problems. I didn’t want to be responsible for getting anybody sick.
So, we came up with a process that is totally chemical-free. It’s very safe. And that process is also part of our organic certification. So while it’s a trade secret, we do have everything inspected by Oregon Tilth who certifies us to make sure that they’re cool with the process and everything like that.
DEBRA: That’s very good. I’m glad that you’re doing that. I haven’t even thought about it, but it is an organic product—organic in the sense that it’s a plan, it’s not something that came out of a factory. It’s something that’s coming out of the Earth. And of course, it could have germs on it like anything else that grows and is being handled through all that line. So I’m really glad that you did that.
So, good job again! I’m just so impressed with what you did.
MONA WEISS: Yeah. I mean, this is something that gets handled a lot down the line. I don’t know if people are washing their hands are not. But when it gets to us, we want to make sure that we put out the best possible product for our customers.
DEBRA: I appreciate that. So how does it compare using soap nuts to using a detergent in terms of cost, for example.
MONA WEISS: Oh! Well, our product costs about a third of the cost of regular detergent. It really is a big cost savings. You don’t expect that with organic product at all, that they would be cheaper because, a lot of times, they’re more expensive.
But this particular product, we’re able to come in way cheaper. Plus, you’re reusing this product. You can reuse these soap nuts up to 10 times. So it’s really a great cost-savings for anyone.
DEBRA: Well, how do you know when you’ve used up your soap nuts?
MONA WEISS: We’ve got a little chart and video on our website. But basically, there’s a bunch of different ways to tell. They’re going to get paper thin and just start to fall apart. And there’s going to be a point where there’s just no more soap. At any point in time, you can stick them in a jar of water and shake it, and you’re going to see soap bubbles until the soap is gone which is really cool.
DEBRA: I’m actually looking on your website right now as we’re talking. And you do have a page that says ‘how to tell when your EcoNuts are used up’. And down at the bottom, you have all these pictures after so many washes.
And down at the bottom, it just looks like the little skins, the skins of a net, instead of the whole nut.
And in the picture, it actually kind of looks like a hazelnut. By the time we get down to the bottom, it just looks like hazelnut skins. And that’s when I stop using them myself. You can just take them and throw them out in the garden and they’ll just biodegrade.
One of the things that I think is so cool about soap nuts is that there’s absolutely no processing to them. There’s no factories. It just comes off the tree and they go down the line and get packaged and sterilized and stuff. But then there’s no taking it apart and making it into 17 different ingredients or whatever.
There are no ingredients. It’s just a berry off a tree. And that’s what you’re washing your clothes with. And at the end, when it’s done, you just put it out in the yard.
I can’t think of a more sustainable thing.
MONA WEISS: Oh, it’s totally awesome!
DEBRA: I mean, talk about a natural product. This is a natural laundry product. This is a natural laundry product.
I’m just so thrilled about them.
We need to take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We were talking with my guest, Mona Weiss from EcoNuts. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Mona Weiss, co-founder of EcoNuts. And we’re talking about all-natural laundry, EcoNuts, being soap nuts that just go from the three, they’re sterilized, they’re certified organic, then they go in your laundry and it’s the most natural way I know of that you can wash your clothes.
Mona, I keep looking at your site. And I keep reading more and more. Listeners, Mona has a great blog that she keeps writing about different natural laundry tips. And one really caught my eye. This is on the page about diapers. You’re writing about why it’s such a good idea.
I want to ask you a question. But first, for all the moms out there, tell us why it’s a good idea to use soap nuts to wash diapers.
MONA WEISS: Well, if you’re washing clothe diapers, you’re doing a lot of laundry. So it just comes down to not putting a heavy amount of chemicals or anything—not only against your child’s skin, but back into the environment via the water […]
Your baby has very sensitive skin. So to use a product that doesn’t have any kind of man-made chemicals in it or whatsoever, there’s nothing better to use.
DEBRA: I totally agree.
Okay, now here’s what caught my eye. Down on the page, it says, “How to wash your cloth diapers with EcoNuts?”
And before you start, you recommend doing a strip. And that is to wash your washing machine with EcoNuts without any clothing or diapers or anything in it. Just wash the washing machine.
And that really interested me because you say that the EcoNuts will remove, it will loosen and remove the detergent residues on the fragrances and anything that happens to be in the fiber or in the washing machine.
And this is of interest to me because I just bought a new washing machine. And to save money, I bought a washing machine that had been returned, but in good condition. There wasn’t anything wrong with the washing machine. It just had been purchased and returned.
They obviously had used it because when I got it home, I noticed it smelled much more perfumy than it did when it was in the store. I mean, I guess it was hard to tell with all those other smells in the store […]
But when I got at home, I said, “You know what? I can’t put my clothes on this washer because I didn’t want them to get contaminated with perfume.”
So now, I’ve been wondering what to do. I’m going to just use my soap nuts and run a wash through with just the soap nuts and get that perfume smell out.
MONA WEISS: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great idea. Regular chemical detergent will leave this residue in your machine. It builds up over time. And then, of course, we recommend that when you’re washing diapers, diapers are so absorbent that they’ll just reabsorb all of the stuff as it’s getting removed from your machine.
DEBRA: You know, this is just so interesting to me, that a natural substance would release all these chemicals from the washer and from the clothes. If you’ve been washing your clothes in detergents the first time, you wash them in EcoNuts, all that stuff is going to come out, and it won’t be putting those chemicals next to your skin anymore. This is so marvelous. So, so good!
MONA WEISS: It’s really cool. It’s really, really cool.
DEBRA: There are so many good things about this.
Okay, so you’ve got some other products here. I want you to tell us about your wool dryer balls.
MONA WEISS: Alright! This is a really cool product. It’s a new product that we brought in recently. And I love, love, love these. They’re solid wool balls. And they’re pretty heavy. You stick four of them in your dryer, and they tumble with your clothes. They help to soften clothes.
I mean, the soap nuts, they soften clothes. But this will also help soften your clothes. But it also reduces the amount of time it takes to dry. And it does this because it helps to circulate hot air in the dryer, and it gets in between your clothes or sheets or whatever you’re washing to let hot air get in between. And it really does work.
DEBRA: I’ve heard that. I haven’t actually used them because when I first found out about them, they were plastic—not yours, but what was being advertised, it’s plastic. And they’re PVC plastic. And PVC is one of the most toxic plastics on earth. Green Peace has for many years had a campaign to just eliminate PVC entirely.
And another thing about plastic is when you expose it to heat, it releases plastic fumes.
MONA WEISS: Yes, exactly!
DEBRA: And so here, they were taking these PVC dryer balls and putting them in a hot environment and then rolling them all around with your clothes—not a good idea.
MONA WEISS: Yeah!
DEBRA: So, I love this idea of the wool dryer balls. It’s just perfect. It’s a perfect compliment to your soap nuts.
Again, it’s a completely natural product where all you’re doing is just shearing the wool off the sheep, and this minimal processing into this little ball, and then you use it.
And again, when it’s done, however long it lasts—years?
MONA WEISS: Yeah, it lasts a really long time.
DEBRA: Yeah, these aren’t going to melt like your soap nuts.
MONA WEISS: No!
DEBRA: But when you’re done with them, they just go back into the garden and just biodegrade. And we don’t have to do any tests on these chemicals because there are no chemicals or anything! It’s just perfectly natural, perfectly safe. All products should be like this.
MONA WEISS: Wow! Wow.
DEBRA: I just get really excited with this.
Okay, let’s see, what else do you have?
The way I found Mona’s site was that I was searching for natural disinfectants in order to wash clothes. I had a client who actually had staph infection. She needed to sterilize all of her sheets and her clothes and everything.
And I thought, “Well, what can you use to sterilize in the laundry.” And Mona has written an entire blog post on how to sterilize your laundry naturally. So, tell us about that.
MONA WEISS: Sure! This is sort of a big topic especially among people with cloth diapers. But also, if you get sick, you worry about how to sterilize your laundry and make it safe again.
So, what I’ve put together is really just a reference guide. There’s a lot of different ways that you can kill germs in your laundry…
DEBRA: Wait, wait. I have to interrupt you, I’m sorry, because we have to go break. After the break, you can tell us about what some of those are.
MONA WEISS: Oh, sure!
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Mona Weiss from EcoNuts. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mona Weiss, co-founder of EcoNuts. And her website is EcoNuts.com—obviously, a very good name. It’s EcoNuts.com.
And before the break, we were talking about how you can sterilize, sanitize your laundry. And Mona, you were going to give us some tips.
MONA WEISS: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I don’t really like to recommend one way over another just because it’s really up to you what you feel would be the right way for you. But one way that I think a lot of people overlook is using the sun. And the sun is great because it’s free! And it uses…
DEBRA: Yes, and natural.
MONA WEISS: It’s free, it’s natural. There’s no chemical. It’s ultraviolet light. And all you have to do is put your clothes out in the sun. And the ultraviolet radiation and infrared light is going to help to kill all kinds of nasties on your clothes which is really cool!
DEBRA: Excellent!
MONA WEISS: Yeah, it’s excellent. And people don’t even think about it. But it’s one of the reasons…
DEBRA: You know, we live in an industrial culture which is always looking to have you buy something to solve every problem. If you’re sick, we’ve been trained to think we need to go to the doctor and we need to take a pill rather than saying, “We’re sick, what’s going on in our environment that’s making us sick? Or how could we eat something different or be out in the sun?” or whatever.
And so part of the orientation away from toxic chemicals is to start looking to nature and to see what nature has to offer.
I once took a class, a hike out in nature with an herbalist. And she said, “Every problem in nature, there’s a solution right next to it.” So if you have poison oak, you know that there’s a plant growing right next to it that’s going to be the antidote to poison oak. Isn’t that cool? I love that.
MONA WEISS: It’s totally awesome!
DEBRA: It’s all around us. Nature has all the solution all around us. I love that!
So, if you don’t have any sun or if you can’t put your clothes out in the sun, what’s the consumer thing you can do?
MONA WEISS: Lemon juice is a really great disinfectant. It changes the pH of the water in your washing machine.
Basically, it makes it more acidic. And a lot of different microbes can’t survive in an acid environment. So that’s one thing straight from nature. You don’t have to do anything.
DEBRA: Right! And you probably already have a lemon in your kitchen.
Mona has a whole post on her blog about how to do this. So if this is something that you need to do, go look it up on her site, on EcoNuts.com, and she’s got a lot more tips.
Let’s talk about static cling. I know you have another blog post about static cling. And the first thing that I want to say—I read your whole post during the break. The first thing I want to say about static cling is that I learned a long, long time ago that static cling only happens with synthetic fabrics. Those of us who only have 100% natural fibers have no static clings.
MONA WEISS: It’s true. Well, some people can find that if they’re washing say wool or cotton in the same load, they might get a little bit. But it’s far less. I mean, it builds up with synthetic fabrics far more than anything.
DEBRA: I never have static cling when I’m wearing my cotton clothes. I mostly have cotton clothes. What I’m washing in the washer is cotton and linen. I have very few wool clothes living in Florida.
MONA WEISS: Alright!
DEBRA: And when I do wash my wool clothes, I just wash them by hand. And so the only thing I’m mixing is cotton and linen. And I never have static cling. I never have static cling when I’m wearing clothes. So that’s a good way to get rid of all the dryer sheets or fabric softeners or all those things. Just don’t have synthetic clothes.
So, give us your tips. For people who are wearing synthetic clothes and washing synthetic clothes, what’s something that you can do for static cling?
MONA WEISS: Well, in the same vein of what you’re talking about, just separating your fabrics. If you wash all your synthetic [separate] from the others, that’s going to cut down the static. Static will build up if there are two very different fabrics rubbing up against each other.
Another one is to stop your dryer when stuff is just dry. Static builds up in a very dry environment. So if there’s still moisture in the air in your washing machine, then static won’t build up.
DEBRA: Hmmm…
MONA WEISS: It’s very cool!
Well, there are two other ways.
DEBRA: I just want to say something before you go on. It’s also a good idea to remove your clothing from the dryer immediately when the dryer buzzes and says that it’s done. Wrinkles come from clothing sitting on the dryer on top of each other all crunched up. And if you take out the clothes, right when it’s done, and hang them up or fold them up or whatever, you don’t have to iron them.
MONA WEISS: Oh, yeah. Bonus!
DEBRA: Ironing is about my favorite thing. And I wear practically all cotton which needs to be iron. So I do very well with taking those clothes out of the dryer immediately.
Okay, go on with more tips.
MONA WEISS: Okay, you can throw a bulb of aluminum foil into your dryer. It’ll discharge the static.
DEBRA: That’s a lot better than using dryer sheets.
MONA WEISS: Yeah, you don’t have to use dryer sheets. You can do it for free or for pennies.
And this is probably the most effective way that I have heard in terms of feedback from other people. If you put a safety pin on two different fabrics—so say you’re washing cotton and polyester together, you’d put safety pin on a polyester garment and a safety pin on your cotton garment—it’ll discharge the static in your dryer.
DEBRA: I’ve never tried that, but it sounds like that it would work. It sounds like that there’s some science behind that.
MONA WEISS: Yeah, the metal will—without getting technical into the science-y stuff, it’s the same reason why you get a little zap if you’re walking around in socks on the floor and then you touch the doorknob. It’s the same principle. The door knob is your safety pin.
DEBRA: Wow! Interesting…
MONA WEISS: And the metal inside of the dryer, if you’re touching the metal to the metal, it’ll kind of take that charge away.
DEBRA: Wow!
MONA WEISS: It’s crazy! It really works.
DEBRA: Sometimes, it’s just the simplest things that are the solution. That’s so great.
So, we’re coming to the end of our show now. We only have three minutes left. So is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t talked about?
MONA WEISS: Well, just in general, I think that some people get really overwhelmed if they look at possible toxins in your homes. I think that’s easy if people just sort of change one thing at a time.
DEBRA: I agree.
MONA WEISS: Every time I go to the grocery store, I try to buy this one new healthy food item that I’ve never tried before.
DEBRA: Good for you!
MONA WEISS: And I think the same thing can be said about any product that you want to change out or do something healthier about it. It’s just making these small changes that in the long run make a really big change.
DEBRA: I completely agree with that. And in fact, for many, many years, I have always said that the first thing I think people should change is their cleaning products because cleaning products are governed by the Hazardous Substances Act. They’re not required by law to list the toxic chemicals or any of their ingredients, so you really don’t know what’s in them. And they’re some of the most toxic products in your home.
Even detergent, I don’t remember the exact statistic, but it’s either number one or two most common product that causes children’s poisoning at home. Kids, they’re attracted to the smell and the color, and they just drink it or put the powder in their mouth, and they need to be rushed to the emergency room—so especially if you have children in your house.
I mean, I think if they put a soap nut in their mouth…
MONA WEISS: It tastes like soap.
DEBRA: I mean, they’re probably not going to want to chew it or swallow it, but it’s a lot safer than detergent—just a lot safer than detergent.
We talk a lot on the show about chemicals at cause health effects over time. We might not see the negative effects right away. But detergent is one of those things that’s called an acute poison. You could take your child to the emergency room if they get […] It’s one of those things that says, “Keep out of reach of children,” and yet we think of detergent as being just a common household product. And we really need to be watching out for that.
So Mona, you’ve given us all a very good, safe, effective, extraordinary solution to that toxic chemical. And I really encourage everyone who’s still using detergent to try this product because it works so well.
Well, thank you for being with us today.
MONA WEISS: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
DEBRA: And again, the website is EcoNuts.com. That’s EcoNuts.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you want to know more about the show, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I list, on the page, all the guests for the week, so you can look ahead. And I also list all the guests that have been on in the past. And there’s a link to the recording in the Archive.
So, thank you for joining me today. Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Do In-House Saunas Cause Mold?
Question from Abner
I’ve seen a few sources–including a fine book written by Holmes (the contractor & house inspector guy)–that advise against installing saunas in houses because they can cause trouble (e.g., mold) by introducing too much moisture into the house. In that regard, another source lumped saunas in the same category as indoor pools, indoor hot tubs, and steam showers. But surely saunas do not create nearly as much moisture as those other items do? Debra, do you think it safe to install a sauna in a house? Thank you.
Debra’s Answer
A sauna can contribute to mold growth in a home, particularly in a humid climate. If you do decide to use one I would make sure you find someone to install it who is very well informed about mold prevention.
How To Read Labels on Personal Care Products and Use Natural Products to Benefit Your Health
My guest is Donya Fahmy, CEO, Founder, and Formulator for Dropwise Essentials—a health and wellness company specializing in premium aromatherapy and natural solutions for personal care. She is the author of author of Aromatherapy and the Expectant Mom: A Woman’s Guide to the Best Essential Oils for a Holistic Pregnancy. We’ll be talking about how to recognize toxic and natural ingredients on product labels and how natural products can improve health conditions. Inspired by her avid interest in alternative medicine and her personal experience using essential oils and herbs to successfully treat what doctors and traditional medicine couldn’t, Donya created the formulations that make up the Dropwise product line as a practical way to share the simple yet amazing benefits of “flower power.” 
By incorporating synergistic blends into everyday personal care products, that make people feel and smell great, she helps consumers recognize plants as a safe, effective, and environmentally sound alternative to pharmaceuticals, Over-the-Counter (OTC) medications, and mass-produced and potentially toxic personal care products. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/dropwise-essentials
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How To Read Labels on Personal Care Products & Use Natural Products to Benefit Your Health
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Donya Fahmy
Date of Broadcast: September 16, 2013
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 we do need to learn how to thrive in a toxic world because there are many, many, many toxic chemicals. We live in an industrial society where most of what is created by it is toxic. And there’s a way of thinking that goes along with that. And we need to step out of that and see that there are other options, things that support health instead of destroying it.
And that’s what we talk about on this show. We talk about how to recognize what is being harmful to your health, what’s toxic, and how to become familiar with many of the other wonderful options there are that are life-supporting and enjoyable to participate in.
So, today is Monday, September 16, 2013. The sun is shining, so we won’t have any problems with thunderstorms today. But I am having this little computer glitch going on. And if we run into it during the show, just hold on because I’ll be right back. I’ll do my best to not have it be a problem during the show.
I just wanted to mention too, something came up last week with one of my clients who wrote to me a question about choosing a safer product and wanted my opinion about which was the best. And then she said to me, “Well, I’m not going to be able to do anything about this” because she had to have this particular thing done to her house and that was the only way to do it.
And I wrote back to her because there are many things that we can do things about and there are many things that we can’t do things about. But the point is not to be 100% eliminating all the toxic chemicals that you might encounter. That’s actually not even necessary.
What is necessary is to eliminate as many toxic exposures as you can, a significant portion of your toxic exposures, so that your body has the opportunity to do its own regenerative processes and stay healthy. And it can tolerate a certain amount of toxic chemicals. But most people can’t tolerate the amount of toxic chemicals that they’re exposed to if they did nothing to control or eliminate them.
There are also many things that you can do to support your body in being able to be more tolerant of toxic chemicals and help your body process toxic chemicals out.
So, if you think you can’t do everything, that’s okay. It’s okay. Just do what you can do. Do the things that are most important to do. And then, don’t sweat it because you just want to just be gradually, at your own pace, moving into a life that has less toxic exposure to it.
Some people do it all at once like I did. But just every time you make a choice, if you can make a choice that’s less toxic, that actually helps. If you hear something on one of my radio shows that sounds interesting to you, pursue it. And one by one, you’ll make this transition from living in a toxic world to living at toxic-free life.
Today, we’re going to be talking about personal care products and about how natural products can benefit your health. You don’t have to be using toxic drugs. You don’t have to be using expensive medical interventions because your body can heal itself given the right things.
So, we’re going to be talking about some of that today, and also, how you can tell what is toxic and what’s not toxic when you’re choosing personal care products.
My guest today is Donya Fahmy. She’s the CEO, founder and formulator for Dropwise Essentials. And I see there’s a typo on my website where it says that she’s a chemist. That’s not correct. And we’re going to fix that. I’m going to e-mail, during the break, I’ll e-mail my assistant and she’ll fix that.
But Donya, she does know what she’s doing with aromatherapy. Dropwise Essentials is a health and wellness company specializing in premium aromatherapy and natural solutions for personal care.
Welcome, Donya.
DONYA FAHMY: Hi, Debra. Thanks for having me here.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. How are you this morning?
DONYA FAHMY: I’m good, thank you.
DEBRA: Good! So tell us how you got interested in all the natural things that you do.
DONYA FAHMY: I ended up starting Dropwise Essentials in much the same way that a lot of entrepreneurs do, which is they end up having a personal need in their life, and they can’t find a good solution for it, so then they decided they want to come up with the solution for it themselves.
So, my story began about almost 20 year ago—maybe a little bit more actually at this point, I’ve lost track. But I was having some recurring health challenges. And the worst of them, of course, for me, was these recurring bouts of eczema. And this went on for about seven years. So I’d get them usually once a year, sometimes twice a year. And to this day, I still don’t know exactly what cause them. I just know that when it happened, I would be absolutely miserable. Sometimes the itching was so intense, I’d scratch myself in my sleep until I bled.
And during that period, a seven-year period, I went to a parade of dermatologists and doctors, looking for answers and solutions, using traditional medicine—which is what I was raised with. But none of them were able to help me to get through the bottom of the problem to figure out what was causing it. And they all pretty much prescribed the same thing, the same medicines, and none of them really worked.
So, I began to worry that I was headed down a dangerous path of depending on harsh medicine—and in this particular case, it was cortisone—and not making any progress really towards identifying and eliminating the cause of the problem and healing, getting over it.
So I finally got really fed up and frustrated. I just hit a wall at one point. I was like, “This is not working for me. There’s just got to be another way.”
And at that point in time, I had a little bit of an epiphany. I was like, “I’m just going to take matters into my own hands here.”
And I can’t honestly say at that time that I really knew what I was doing, but I was determined to find a way.
And so, at that time, I’ve already been dabbling in aromatherapy just as a hobby for personal pleasure. I had acquired a small collection of essential oils and a variety of books on the subject. So I just delved in and started researching, which essential oils are good for the skin, as well as other types of oils, and which ones are good for reducing inflammation.
And I said, “What the hell?” I jumped in and made my own little blend. I diluted it in a base of certified organic jojoba oil. And some people don’t know what that is. Jojoba is spelled J-O-J-O-B-A. And the reason I did that is because when you’re working on essential oils, you should never just apply them straight to your skin. You always want to dilute them first. And jojoba is an excellent skin care oil. And it’s also very widely used in aromatherapy. So I read that in many of my books.
So, I took my blend, and I applied it topically all over several times a day for a couple of days. And I was just amazed at how quickly it got my itching and inflammation under control. And we’re talking a couple of days here after years and years of doing calamine lotion and hydrocortisone creams and all these things, over-the-counter and prescription things, and anti-histamines that didn’t work.
And so, for the first time—in retrospect, I can say this now—the first time, my skin and my body had a fighting chance to heal itself without all this interference from the prescription and all the over-the-counter medications.
And so, once that cleared up, I had one more recurring episode. And of course, instead of going to the doctor, I just pulled up my little blend, and applied it. And then this time, I added an herbal tincture for liver support because I read in a book about Chinese medicine that conditions of the skin are often tied to problems with your liver or your lungs. And I was convinced at that point I time that it was the liver.
And so, when that episode cleared up, I was completely free of eczema for seven years after that. I don’t know if there’s any significance to the numbers. I had this condition for seven years. It just dogged me without any resolution. And then, it completely disappeared for seven years after I adopted this new holistic approach to dealing with it. And that too is an epiphany for me.
So, I suddenly became extremely interested in herbs, in flowers, and plants as medicine. And I started my research on how I could use these ingredients to create every day products that would help other people achieve optimal health and wellness.
By the way, the blend I just described eventually became the first product in the Dropwise Essentials product line. It’s our certified organic body oil in a blend called Soothe.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’re going to hear more about everything that you have to tell us when we come back from the break. And I also want to tell our listeners about an experience I had with clearing up eczema, so we’ll do that when we come back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Donya Fahmy. And she’s the CEO, founder and formulator for Dropwise Essentials. And that’s at Dropwise.com
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here today with my guest, Donya Fahmy.
She’s the CEO, founder and formulator for Dropwise Essentials. And she makes some wonderful aromatherapy products.
Before the break, I mentioned that I wanted to just tell my experience with eczema—and not with me personally. But many, many years ago—many years ago, like 30 years ago—I was very sensitive to chemicals. And I used to faint when I would take a shower from the chlorine fumes. It’s actually what’s coming out of your shower if you don’t have a shower filter—chloroform.
That stuff is very toxic, it’ll knock you out. They pour it on a cloth and put it over your nose. That’s in those old movies when they would do that and knock people out. And that’s what’s coming out of your shower. I would faint when I took a shower.
And so, my father decided that he would rig up a shower filter. This is before. Nobody had a shower filter at that time. And so he went down to the hardware store and got a carbon filter, and rigged it up. And it was very ugly because it was designed to go under the sink. But it did the job, and I didn’t faint. And there was no more chloroform coming through.
I started telling my friends about this. One of my friends had eczema very much all over her body and was putting cortisone on it—and that didn’t even help. About three days after showering with no chlorine or chloroform or any of that coming out of the shower water, she had absolutely no eczema.
And I mentioned this because, so many times, I see this over and over and over where there are all these consumer products that make you sick, and then our industrial system has a remedy for the illness that has been caused by the consumer product. For example, you wash your hair, and you strip out all the natural oils, and then you have to put conditioner on it. It just goes down the list. I could just give you many, many examples of this.
But it’s the same thing too. I don’t know what was causing your eczema, Donya. And I am very happy that your aromatherapy healed it up, but it would have been interesting to me to see if there was some consumer product irritating it. And I think that the aromatherapy did its job beautifully. That’s what I wanted to say.
DONYA FAHMY: That’s so interesting. I have not heard that about the filtering the shower. I mean, I know now that’s a really common thing. I’m sure back then, it was still a foreign concept.
DEBRA: It was! You wouldn’t have known that 20 years ago. The point here being is that there are many ways to clear up any health condition. And it can have many causes. And that was just another interesting one related to toxic exposure.
DONYA FAHMY: Absolutely! We’re not all one size fits all. We’re all unique individuals with our own unique genetic imprints and our different environmental situations. And I think one of the, I would say, “failings” of the western medical approach is it tries to be too cookie cutter and too one-size-fits-all in terms of the prescription and the chemicals that they recommend.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you.
DONYA FAHMY: And I think that may be part of the issue there too, is that when you don’t take into account those differences, then in many situations, it might work, and in other situations, it’s created more harm than doing good.
And unfortunately, that’s not something that we have enough knowledge about or control over. But I was just listening to you talk a little while ago, and you’re sort of echoing some of the things that are the philosophy behind what I adopted after this experience.
So, two things happened, which is, first, I became a fanatic label reader. I just became a fanatic, learning about what are all these ingredients in these products that I’m using, and what’s their purpose, and what’s their function. I became really aware suddenly of all chemicals and synthetic ingredients and everything in the marketplace and then all the products that I had been using up until that time. I couldn’t help but wonder if this played a role.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say that it actually caused it, but it certainly could have played a role in creating the problem.
And if not, it might have played a role in, otherwise, somehow interfering with my body’s own natural ability to resolve it and heal it.
DEBRA: Toxic chemicals can do all kinds of things to bodies.
So, I know you’ve done a lot of research about reading labels. So you wanted to tell us about some of the ingredients to watch out for when you’re reading labels.
DONYA FAHMY: Actually, what I’d like to do, if it’s okay with you, is to share some tips on understanding how to read a label because I think that’s—
DEBRA: Sure, yes.
DONYA FAHMY: Basically, what I wanted to say is when I myself started my own research, and I was reading labels—and it was not just personal care, it’s everything like food—I just was overwhelmed. There’s just tens of thousands of chemicals in these products. It’s really frightening the way they do it.
And it became like a fool’s errand to try to understand what all that was. So I needed to come up with my own system for filtering and understanding and simplifying so I could decide. I made a decision at that point. I’d set some ground rules for myself about what I was going to allow into my life going forward and what I was not. And I think of a wise way to do it.
The first thing I want to share is I have something that I call my 5-7 rule. And so, something important to know—if people don’t already know this—is that the FDA requires companies to list ingredients in their products in the descending order of prevalence, the concentration. And so, I always tell people, look at the first five to seven ingredients because, 9 out of 10 times, those are going to be most prevalent in the product.
And that’s where you want to start. You want to make sure that those first five to seven ingredients don’t have any really toxic or questionable ingredients in there.
So, for example, if you’re talking about moisturizers—lotions, creams. At the end of the day, the moisturizer is mostly just water and oil with some kind of agent to emulsify (because water and oil don’t mix, so it need something to help it stay together), and then a preservative to inhibit the growth of mold and bacteria because there’s water in the product.
So, when you’re looking at a lotion, for example, the first ingredient on that label should be water. Aqua-something is what they call it. And if it’s not, then I would just steer clear from that because some of these companies are making these products with all sorts of chemicals.
DEBRA: We want to hear more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Donya Fahmy. She’s the CEO, founder and formulator of Dropwise Essentials. And she makes wonderful aromatherapy products. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Donya Fahmy, CEO, founder and formulator for Dropwise Essentials. They make aromatherapy products.
Before the break, we were talking about reading labels. Donya, what are the top five ingredients that you would recommend people never use?
DONYA FAHMY: My top five, without getting too much into it—because obviously, we don’t have a lot of time here today—sulfates are on the top of my list. And those are commonly found in liquid soap products, shampoos, body washes, and that sort of thing.
DEBRA: So, that would be like sodium lauryl sulfate?
DONYA FAHMY: Yes, absolutely. SLS is the most common one that people are familiar with. And there are variations on it like ammonium lauryl sulfate and ammonium laureth sulfate. These are cousins of the same ingredients.
Those are all synthetic. And they’re all very harsh. And they’re not just found in shampoos, by the way. They’re also found in toothpastes and mouthwashes. They’re extremely cheap, but they’re also quite harmful. So, that’s near the top of my list.
The next one, people have probably already heard this, which is parabens. Those are most commonly used as preservatives.
But the problems is they’re so widely used. But typically, there will in 2% or less concentration in any products, but they’re in almost every product. And so, the danger comes from the constant, repetitive exposure and cumulative. So, if you’re using these products, like several of them several times a day, and all of them are preserved with types of ingredient, that’s also definitely one I would eliminate as much as humanly possible.
And then, the third one I talk about that not too many people talk about is triclosan. It’s commonly found in antibacterial soaps and washes and the hand sanitizers. This is a derivative of Agent Orange. It’s highly, highly, highly toxic. Not only is not good for you, it’s also really bad for the environment. It gets washed down the drain into landfills and streams. And it’s leading to something called a phenomenon called super bugs which is new, more virulent bacterial strains that are becoming more highly resistant to antibiotics. So, those are three.
The other one that I dislike intensely is something called propylene glycol. And that is used in antifreeze actually. It’s one of the main ingredients in [unintelligible 20:16]. It’s used in products to help moderate them, so they don’t get widely altered in high or low temperature situations. That’s one of its functions. But that one too is one of the sneaky ones that is showing up.
And it shows up in food products too. If you eat packaged and processed food—and I highly recommend that you don’t. But if you do, sometimes, you’ll find that ingredient in there too.
DEBRA: I’ve seen it in food products. And I recommend that people just eliminate all packaged and processed food products, and just eat fresh food and learn how to cook—just like we should be putting fresh ingredients on our skin, real natural stuff.
DONYA FAHMY: Ideally, yes. And then the last of these, this is a nebulous one too, it’s called phthalates. I know it’s a tongue twister there. Phthalates are unidentified compounds that are normally found and put on the label as fragrance or parfum (which his the French term for perfume).
And the problem with that is that because they’re components of fragrance, and not the actual ingredient, there’s no regulation around that. The FDA doesn’t require companies that use those to disclose that.
And so, fragrances are these complex […] chemicals. And they often contain these phthalates. Phthalates are industrial chemicals that are used as plasticizers. That means they’re used to soften plastics. So you can just imagine if it can soften a plastic, what might it be doing inside your body, especially if it ends up getting lodged in your body, and it can’t work its way out. So, that is a big no-no on my list.
And of course, essential oils—being the aromatherapy lady, I’d say essential oils are far superior alternatives or substitutes to anything with that term fragrance.
So, be aware when you’re reading labels. If it says fragrance on it, question mark.
And it doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that’s made with fragrance has that in there. But there’s just really no way of knowing just by reading the label.
DEBRA: There’s no way of knowing. And if it says fragrance, you can be sure that it is synthetic fragrance, and it’s made with thousands of synthetic chemicals. But if it says essential oil as an ingredient, and that means it’s a natural essential oil, yes?
DONYA FAHMY: Yes. So, there’s a little bit of a twist there in that what happens is—you know, everything has a chemical structure to it, including plants and natural substances. And what happens with these synthetics is they’re designed to mimic these natural substances because they have different chemical structures. And it’s the difference on the structure of the chemical composition that wreaks havoc to their bodies.
Like likes likes. Nature understands nature which is why our bodies respond to essential oils and herbs and plants because they both exist in nature.
Chemicals now are different. So when they come into your body, they’re almost like foreign objects in there. Your body doesn’t really understand what they are or how to metabolize them.
And there’s even some thinking right now in the scientific community that there’s a link between these chemicals and obesity because what happens is your body starts to create fat and then envelopes these toxins with fat to protect you. That’s what’s protecting you from harm. So it envelopes the toxins with fat. And then they get locked up, and then you can’t burn the fat off.
A lot of these people who diet, but they never seem to get anywhere, it’s something to think about. There could be a link there.
And if they start to really focus on eliminating toxins from their life, they might have more success with that.
DEBRA: I totally, totally agree with that.
So, when we come back from the break, which is going to be pretty soon—not quite yet, but very soon—when we come back from the break, I want you to tell us about your products and aromatherapy and what you have to offer. Especially, you said to me that you’ve created these formulations to be a practical way to share this simple, yet amazing benefits of flower power in people’s everyday lives.
And so, there are things that you can do to support your health and support your body functioning the way it is supposed to function by using these simple elements from nature.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Donya Fahmy. She’s the CEO, founder and formulator for Dropwise Essentials. And we will be back in just a few minutes.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Donya Fahmy from Dropwise Essentials. Donya, tell us about your products.
DONYA FAHMY: So basically, from the very start when I was researching ingredients and trying to learn about them, I adopted a philosophy, so to speak, or a motto, which is if it’s not safe to put in your mouth, it’s not safe to put on your skin.
DEBRA: I agree.
DONYA FAHMY: Obviously, when you’re talking about personal care cosmetics, you can’t eat them, even ones that are made with natural ingredients. But you want to strive for a finish product that’s as close to something that you might be able to eat.
Of course, there are many companies out there, skin care companies, that make products with food and all that stuff. But with food, you need preservatives or it doesn’t have a very long shelf life or you need a refrigerator. So, I try to be as practical as possible.
I’ve researched ingredients. I wanted to find out which of these plant-based oils, nut oils, and coconut, things like that, that were hardy in and of themselves—that were hardy with a long shelf life. We could use a higher concentration of these oils that would minimize the need for additional preservatives and that sort of thing.
So, we use primarily certified organic and raw or very minimally processed plant-based ingredients. And of course, no synthetic or petroleum ingredients.
It makes sense if you think about it. It’s really a simple concept. If you use all plant-based and primarily organically farmed bio-based raw materials, that not only ensures the integrity and safety of products for everyday use, but it also supports and promotes sustainable farming and agricultural practices.
So, we are a green business, and that’s a really important part of what we do because, in turn, what that does is it reduces the overall amount of toxic pesticides that are used and it reduces the farming pollution. So, of course, organic farming is a whole big topic in and of itself, but it’s definitely connected to our philosophy of creating products.
The other piece is that a lot of aromatherapy products that are on the market, typically, they have what I call single note or double note, meaning one essential oil or primary essential oil—like lavender, of course, is really popular, or it might have a mint in it—or two oils, or maybe even three that go together. But they’re more designed for scent purposes, oils that go together that smell good as opposed to having some kind of synergistic or therapeutic application.
So, in my case, I really wanted to create synergistic blends. And so, that’s what ours are. Blends typically have anywhere from four to seven different essential oils, carefully selected to work together to create a synergy that’s uplifting and improve your mood and make you happy or a blend that will give you a little boost of energy, increase your circulation and help you get going, or one that calms and balances and grounds you when you’re feeling really anxious or stressed. So, that’s the approach.
And then, the thinking behind that is that, if you put these in everyday personal care products like lotions and body washes, et cetera, then you can just be using these products on a daily basis, and have the amazing benefits, the healing properties of the oil going to work for you.
So, if you lead a very stressful life now, for example, you can use one of our calming soothing blends like what I mentioned earlier. Use it in the shower in the morning, have a bottle of lotion in your purse or at your desk. And you just re-applying small amounts (because you really don’t need a lot, a little goes a long way), and you just inhale that and take that in. It just totally alters your mindset and how you’re feeling. And it calms your heart rate and your blood pressure. You can have these very subtle therapeutic effects.
Of course, we’re talking about personal care products. So we’re not using therapeutic concentrations at all because there are therapeutic concentrations in aromatherapy. But we, of course, don’t do that with our products because that would not be a wise choice. We need to make it in a way that’s usable for the widest possible audience.
DEBRA: I just like to point out something that I think some listeners might be confused about. You mentioned sodium lauryl sulfate earlier. And many, many, many years ago, one of the first things that I did like you is I just looked up all the ingredients.
I wanted to know what they were made from and I wanted to know which ones were toxic and which ones were made from petrochemicals.
And when I got to sodium lauryl sulfate, most of what I read was it’s made from coconut oil. And so I thought, “Oh, coconut oil, that’s fine. That’s not toxic. That’s not petrochemicals.” And a lot of websites now still will say, “Oh, we use sodium lauryl sulfate. It’s made from coconut oil.”
But what I learned was that it may start out as coconut oil, but it’s a processed, petrochemical, industrial—by the time they get done with it, it doesn’t resemble coconut oil at all. It’s just coconut oil just maybe the raw material, but then it’s mixed with other petroleum ingredients, and what I, at one point, decided to call a hybrid ingredient because it may start out natural, but it doesn’t end up being natural.
And I think that it’s really important to distinguish between those particularly in the natural products industry. They say, “Oh, it comes from coconut oil,” but that’s not the same as actual coconut oil that you use.
When you’re using an oil, you’re using a whole oil. It’s a whole food versus a fractionated food. You’re using these whole plant ingredients that come from nature. And that’s part of what makes it so wonderful.
I know you do a lot of education. So tell us about what you have to offer in that area.
DONYA FAHMY: I’ve been on a mission lately to educate and help pregnant women or women who are planning to become pregnant to adopt and get into this holistic lifestyle from early on and to protect themselves and their babies from these hidden health risks, from all these toxins.
So, I do a free one-hour training. I’m doing one actually tomorrow night at 5:30 Pacific time, 8:30 eastern, where I go into more detail about these top 10 worst toxic ingredients and what are some of the other statistics and research studies showing about how these ingredients are harming us, why it’s important to be aware of this, why it’s important to eliminate them.
And then, I do a little bit about essential oils, especially essential oils during pregnancy. There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation about what’s safe to use during pregnancy and what isn’t. And so I try to help clear that up for people and bust some of those common myths.
And so, that’s called How to Look Your Best without Compromising Your Baby’s Health.
And I also teach a teleclass where I go into some of this information much, much deeper. So, the paid class is designed to teach people to become expert label readers and learn how to compare product labels and know which chemical and toxic or what’s potentially toxic and what’s natural; and then, within the natural products world, learning how to navigate that minefield.
There are so many choices and options there, it’s really hard for someone who doesn’t know how to distinguish, “Am I getting what I’m paying for? I’m paying more for a higher quality product, but am I getting my money’s worth?”
And so, I teach a little bit about how to understand whether you’re overpaying for something that you don’t need to be overpaying for.
It’s expensive. It’s important that we take care of ourselves, and we have to look at that as an investment in our long-term health. But you also want to know what you’re getting. And what I tell people, there are all these fields, but what do all these fields mean—organic, natural, made with organic […] And at the end of the day, what I have to say is, if you just become an educated consumer, and you understand how to read labels, you don’t have to rely on those fields to guide you. Your knowledge is what will help you distinguish between things that are absolutely no-no, “I’m not going to touch that,” to the things that are, “Oh, this is really good for me? I’m going to go here,” or everything in between, which is, “Well, this has some ingredients in it that I’m not crazy about, but I’m willing to make that compromise.”
You mentioned that at the top of the hour which you can’t necessarily eliminate everything. But know what’s your enemy, what’s your worst enemy and your worst offenders, and make sure you can eliminate those.
DEBRA: For example, I think it’s really important for people to eliminate triclosan—period. They should eliminate lead—period.
There are just some chemicals that should not be in products. They should not be on the planet. Nobody should be anywhere near them, especially pregnant women, especially women who want to get pregnant. And it’s just important that we know what those are.
And then, there’s another list after that that’s like if you can do something about it, then do something about it. But there are some things that’s just—triclosan, it’s just so toxic that we just need to do the best we can.
So, we’ve just got about a minute left. So are there any closing words you’d like to give?
DONYA FAHMY: Well, I’d like to share the URL for people who might like to jump onto the free call, which is happening tomorrow, as I mentioned. So you can go to www.AromatherapyforPregnancy.com/Preview, and you can register for the call.
And I encourage anyone who’s interested to do that because, even if you can’t make it to the call, you’ll be able to listen to a replay of it through the end of the week.
And if you already know you want to learn more, then you can actually go register for my class. We’re doing a $100 discount tuition. And that’s just www.AromaTherapyForPregnancy.com. It will take you to that page.
DEBRA: And your website at Dropwise is just Dropwise.com. I’m looking here at different things. I’m looking at your website right now. And you’ve got some tabs across the top—one is Bath & Body. And that’s where you go to find all the personal care products that you’ve been talking about.
But you also have natural remedy blends and various aromatherapy things, essential oils, and all the things that go with that.
And you have some items for using natural aromatherapy in the home and for travel.
And that’s all the time we have. Thank you so much for being here with me. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk.
DONYA FAHMY: Thank you.
Dropwise Essentials
“A safer, greener, conscious alternative to the sterile world of commercial industrial-strength beauty products. Our products are free of synthetic and petroleum chemicals; made with certified organic ingredients; formulated with 100% pure essential oils; earth-friendly; and cruelty-free. They contain no parabens, no propylene glycol, no sodium laurel sulfate, no phthalates or synthetic fragrance, and no petroleum-based ingredients of any kind. We use ingredients like organic jojoba, organic virgin coconut, and organic macadamia nut oils, as well as organic aloe vera, organic cocoa butter, organic castor oil, organic beeswax, and certified organic herbs like calendula and chamomile, which are supportive of the skin. You can always count on us to provide full ingredient disclosure, clearly articulated explanations of the benefits of using our products, and the authentic use of aromatherapy in the products.”
|
Listen to my interview with Dropwise Essentials CEO, Founder, and Formulator Donya Fahmy. |
Eco Nuts
Do your laundry with all-natural, unprocessed soap nuts. Yes, these are actual nuts, well, actually berries, from a tree that grows in the Himalayas. The berries naturally produce a soap called saponin, which works as a surfactant to lift stains from fabrics and keep dirt suspended in the water that is rinsed away. Unlike detergent, soap nuts leave no residue, so they are ideal for babies and people with sensitive skin. I’ve used them for years and they really do work—in fact, they are my favorite way to wash clothes. My clothes are very soft.”Eco Nuts are wild-harvested, meaning they are gathered from wild trees grown without any kind of chemicals, fertilizers, or pesticides. The saponin actually tastes bad to insects so no pesticides are needed, and the trees naturally love poor uncultivated soil. They are organically grown by mother earth and certified USDA Organic by Oregon Tilth. Our soap nuts are both de-seeded and sterilized – the only soap nuts on the market that are both!” This site also sells other organic cleaning and laundry products and they have a lot of natural laundry tips.
|
Listen to my interview with Eco Nuts co-founder Mona Weiss. |
Teflon Coasting on Polo Shirts
Question from Helen
Our kids’ school uses uniform items from Lands’ End. Today I learned that the only polos they sell now have Teflon finishes. Can heavy, hot laundering remove the Teflon?
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know what to make of this.
The DuPont Teflon Fabric Protector website says that it repels water and protects the fabric from stains and soil. And then it says
Compliant with OekoTex Standard 100. That’s the standard to meet for absence of toxic chemicals in textiles.
They must have changed the formula for what they call Teflon.
I don’t think it’s removable. Not even with heavy, hot laundering.
I don’t know the whole formula but I was able to find an MSDS for a different textile protection application that says it’s a plastic with added fluoride. It also says the toxic exposure is limited to the product in manufacture and not in use.
Getting Mold Off Basement Walls
Question from sheila
what else can you use to get mold off basement walls other than bleach I really don’t like bleach.
thank you
sheila
Debra’s Answer
Try Twenty Mule Team Borax, which you can buy in the cleaning products section of any supermarket. That often works well on mold. But remember mold grows in dark and damp conditions. If those conditions remain, you will continue to have mold growing.
Miessence
Three simple wholefood supplements made from organic fruits and vegetables. 100% raw and vegan. In-Liven is a fermented probiotic superfood that re-colonises your gastrointestinal tract with the full spectrum of friendly Lactobacillus bacteria. Berry Radical is “a potent combination of nine of the world’s most effective antioxidant superfoods”, including certified organic antioxidant-rich raw cacao (chocolate), olive juice extract, coffee fruit extract, and other fruits and berries to support healthy immune function and protect cells. DeepGreen Alkalising Superfood balances your body pH with a super-concentrated source of alkalising, mineral-rich, green algae, grass juices and leafy greens.
Are Duraflame Logs Safe to Burn in the Fireplace?
Question from Rachel
Are duraflame logs safe to burn in the fire place? I have heard the are pretty “green” but wanted to make sure with you’d kids and dogs in the house. Thank you.
Debra’s Answer
Whenever you burn anything, it gives off toxic combustion by-products, which is why houses have fireplaces–to vent the toxic gasses and particles to the outdoors.
Duraflame and other manufactured logs are made from recycled materials, in this case sawdust, but other logs are made from other recycled materials such as coffee grounds, held together with plant wax. So they burn like a candle.
Surprisingly, there are independent test results that show Duraflame burns cleaner than natural wood.
Toxics in the Arts
My guest Monona Rossol is a chemist, artist, industrial hygienist, and President/founder of Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to providing health and safety services to the arts. Author of nine books on toxics in the arts, Monona also is the Health and Safety Director for Local 829 of the United Scenic Artists, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). I’ve known of and admired her work for decades. Monona was born into a theatrical family and worked as a professional entertainer from age 3 to 17. She enrolled in the University of Wisconsin where she earned: a BS in Chemistry with a minor in Math, an MS majoring in Ceramics and Sculpture, and an MFA with majors in Ceramics and Glassblowing and a minor in Music. While in school she worked as a chemist, taught and exhibited art work, performed with University music and theater groups, and worked yearly in summer stock. After leaving school, she performed in musical and straight acting roles in Off and Off Off Broadway theaters and cabaret. Monona has lectured and consulted in the US, Canada, Australia, England, Mexico and Portugal. www.artscraftstheatersafety.org
In this show Monona lays it on the line about how toxic the world is today. She took us to the Chemical Abstract Service website which registers chemicals. There is a counter that clicks every time a new chemical is registered. During the show 49 new chemicals were added to the 70 million plus chemicals that were already registered at the start of the show.
She also talks about the inadequate and misleading labeling of ALL art materials, including the ones you buy at art supply stores and the common art materials sold everywhere. If you have a school-aged child that has an art class, listen to this show.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxics in the Arts
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Monona Rossol
Date of Broadcast: September 12, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how we thrive in a toxic world.
And there are many, many toxic chemicals in the world. This is why we have to talk about how to be toxic-free, because there are toxic chemicals in your hairspray, toxic chemicals in your orange juice, toxic chemical in the interior of your car.
Everywhere, there are toxic chemicals. But there are also products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them, or have so many less toxic chemicals in them that really isn’t a danger.
So, you can do things to remove toxic chemicals from your home. You can do things to remove toxic chemicals from your body. And that’s what we talk about on this show.
Today, we’re going to be talking with a very interesting, very informed, very experienced woman who has been working in the field of toxics for many, many years. But first, there are a couple of things I want to tell you.
First is on the website browser I use, they give you a little quote of the day. And this morning, the quote was from Henry Ford.
He said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
And I consider toxic chemicals to be a failure. And we can just begin again. We can just say, “Okay, toxic chemicals, be gone” and begin again more intelligently.
Many people already have begun again more intelligently. Everybody can do that, and just think in a different way.
Also, this morning, I was cleaning my house. I decided that I was just really going to get rid of everything that I was no longer using and was outdated. And I was cleaning my office. And you know how papers pile up and all those things. And by the time I got to the end of it, I thought, you just need to simplify. And one way to simplify is to just eliminate the toxic chemicals. Just eliminate everything that has toxic chemicals in it. And then life is much simpler because what’s left is everything that’s healthy and good for us.
So, I’ve known about my guest today. Her name is Monona Rossol. She’s a chemist, artist, industrial hygienist, and president and founder of the Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety. It’s a not for profit corporation dedicated to providing health and safety services to the arts.
Now, I have known of her—because I just met her on the phone a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve known of her for as long as
I’ve been doing my work which is more than 30 years. So this obviously says how I old I am and how old she is.
But I want to tell you that we are both still alive and kicking and working in the field of toxics.
The other day, I was talking to somebody on the phone, a young man who made reference to people who were born after 1970 not knowing how to use computers. And I said, “Oh, that puts me in that category.” And he says, “No!” And I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “How old do you think I am?” And he said, “30 years old.” And I said, “Hahaha.” He said, “It must be because you don’t use toxic chemicals.”
And I think that’s true. People who are away from toxic chemicals are much younger much longer.
So hi, Monona.
MONONA ROSSOL: Hello.
DEBRA: How are you doing today?
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, I’ve had such a schedule because, I don’t know if you know, but OSHA has a December 1st deadline for a whole new training on chemicals […] So, every single employee is supposed to be doing this training. And the colleges, some of them are just figuring it out. So I’m like a one-legged lady in an ass-kicking contest trying to run all over the country.
DEBRA: Well, good for you. There’s so much we can talk about. I hardly know where to begin.
First, just tell us how you got interested in toxic chemicals. Why do you do what you do?
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, it wasn’t obvious at first because what I really wanted to do was be a doctor. But remember that was the ‘50s. And I also was raised in show business. Now, there’s no discrimination in show business because as long as men can’t sing soprano, you didn’t have a problem.
So I left my family at 17, got off the road, and enrolled in the university, got all A’s, and expected to be welcomed in medical school. And of course, the courts had just decreed they had to take 10% women, and they gave us this lecture telling us how they hated us and they didn’t want us there. And I just gave them the sign of the finger and left.
So, I got a degree in chemistry instead with a minor in math. I wanted to be a chemist. And in fact, the industrial lab I went to work for was going to pay my way through graduate school in chemistry.
However, I was a member of the NAACP and participated in marches. I couldn’t get security clearance. And when they found that out, they had no use for me. So then I thought, “Well, I’ll go into arts.” Surely, there’s no discrimination.
And it was the worst of all!
Nevertheless, I worked as a research chemist at the University of Wisconsin to put myself through art school. And every day I went from one department to the other and back again. And it dawned on me, I was seeing the same chemicals in both departments. I was seeing acids for etching and solvents and pigments and dyes and all of the same stuff I was seeing in the chemistry department.
So, I started doing lectures on this, and people just walked out. And I thought, “You know? I found something that’s obvious, and it’s true, and it makes people this mad, it’s probably a good thing.”
And so, it always was a sideline. And sooner or later, it took over everything that I did because there isn’t really anybody else that really does this in this area. I mean, there are industrial hygienists, and there are safety professionals, but very few with real expertise in theater and in arts.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m very impressed with how you brought your interests in toxics into a very specific area that you have an interest and experience in. And I think it’s wonderful because, you’re right, that nobody could—somebody would need to have—like I can’t do it. I’m not an industrial hygienist or a chemist, but as a consumer advocate, I can look at other products that I’m familiar with. But I’m not familiar with the world of art materials like you are.;
And so you are absolutely the perfect person to do it. And I’m sure many people are very grateful that you are doing that.
MONONA ROSSOL: It is also a tricky field. I mean, I carry $2 million in liability insurance. And I plan buildings. It’s not an easy field for people to do. It can’t be just because people are interested.
And in fact, if this radio broadcast is heard by somebody who really has degrees in chemistry and expertise in both fields, I’ll give them the corporation. I’m really looking for someone to help out with some of this work because it’s far too much for me.
DEBRA: Well, and I’m sure there’s going to be more because, as more and more people become familiar with the problem, and that there is more acceptance that toxics are a problem—I understand that years ago, people would just walk out and say, “What is she talking about?” It’s sometimes a difficult thing to confront.
So, I’m looking at your biography here on your website—it’s the ArtsCraftsTheaterSafety.org website—and there’s just a whole list of things that you do, including things like doing building planning to put in the proper ventilation into buildings so that art materials can be used.
Before we go on, because I want you to tell us a lot about the toxic chemicals in the arts and better alternatives, but can you explain what an industrial hygienist is?
MONONA ROSSOL: Doesn’t it sound like we clean teeth in a factory?
DEBRA: Yeah!
MONONA ROSSOL: It really does. It means we look at various workplaces and look at all of the issues having to do with health and safety and protective equipment and so on in those places—and advise.
And my areas are primarily in ventilation and ventilation design and in training toxic chemical protection (protection of workers from toxic chemicals and so on).
Over the years, I’ve become a regulatory expert by virtue of—I’ve been reading federal register in hard copies since 1977. I don’t know if anybody else is that crazy.
DEBRA: I read a little bit of federal register, but probably not as much as you.
We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Monona Rossol, chemist, artist, industrial hygienist, and savior of artists from toxic chemicals. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Monona Rossol, chemist, artist, industrial hygienist, president and founder of Arts, Crafts & Theater Safety, a not for profit corporation that addresses the health and safety in the arts. And she’s also the author of nine books—isn’t it, nine books?
MONONA ROSSOL: Yes.
DEBRA: And I think that your first book was in 1990, is that right?
MONONA ROSSOL: ’86.
DEBRA: 1986, that’s right. I see one down here in 1986. My first one was in 1984.
MONONA ROSSOL: Okay, there we go.
DEBRA: So, we’ve been doing this for about the same period of time. So, the field of arts is a very wide field. I’m trying to figure out where to start to ask you a question because you cover everything from, I guess, painting and sculpting, to theaters.
Give us an overview of the kinds of things that you work with.
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, I actually have two hats. You know me as the president of Arts, Crafts & Theater Safety, which is for anyone who calls in the arts at all. But I’m also the safety officer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local USA829. So I get to all the film locations, and all of the TV studios and all of that kind of thing as well.
And we’ve also formed here in New York something called a New York Production Locals. So when I go on those […], I’m talking to everybody, including SAG and everybody.
So, it’s a very interesting career. And that’s why I’m sure I couldn’t be doing all of this if there were a lot of other people to split up this work. But when I walk into an art studio, or even if it’s a private studio or whatever, what I’m looking for is the things they probably looked at over and over but don’t see.
DEBRA: Like what?
MONONA ROSSOL: A lot of the electrical hazards, a lot of chemicals that they could replace for safer ones. Sometimes, there are ventilation systems they think work, and they don’t. Many private artists really don’t have ventilation. And they think they can by just putting a fan and a window. And sometimes that’s actually counterproductive if they don’t know where the air is coming from in that […]
So, there all those basics. And sometimes, we can fix these things by just explaining to them what the principles are, why we’re going to put the fan somewhere else, and we’re going to do this. And after all these years, very often, if there is a solution, I’d probably know it.
DEBRA: I’m sure you do. I understand that because it’s easy for me to walk into a house, in a different environment, I can go into a house, because I’ve gone into so many of them, I can immediately point out where the toxic chemicals are. And it’s the same toxic chemicals in all the houses. People are using the same kind of materials and products and they’re all being toxic.
And so, I would imagine that you’re doing pretty much what I do when I walk in a house as you’re looking and finding the toxic chemicals and showing people how to replace them with something safer.
MONONA ROSSOL: Getting all those little hidey holes where the bad stuff is hiding out.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So, what are some typical toxic chemicals that you find in the arts?
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, of course, archival pigments are not FDA-approved food dyes. All of the pigments are toxic. And there’s a mistaken type of labeling that tells you these things are non-toxic. Well, that’s just not possible.
They’re either untested organic pigments, or they are metallic pigments—almost all of which are toxic. They can be based on cadmium, lead, chrome, mercury, or whatever.
Because art materials are exempt from the Consumer Lead Laws, they also have their own very, very inferior labeling standard, which literally can call untested chemicals non-toxic. And many times, they will call lead products as non-toxic because the toxicologist who okays that labeling will say, “Well, yes, if it’s used as directed, they shouldn’t get more exposure than we think is okay.” Well, okay, for who, number one; and number two, cyanide plating baths are non-toxic if used as directed too. I would really like to know what’s in it. And I’ve never seen artist use the material as directed. So, that’s just […]
It’s really important to change the labeling, change people’s attitude, so that they can look at these things with the eyes that they need to, to realize that they’re not what they think they are, that the organic pigments have not been tested for long-term toxicity, and many of them are in chemical classes that we know will be toxic or cause cancer if they ever are tested.
[silence]
Hello?
DEBRA: Oh, there we go! Here we go. So, I think you’re hearing me now.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We just had a technical difficulty with my computer. So Monona, are you there? Okay, we’re getting our guest back on the line.
So, we’ve been talking about toxic chemicals in the arts. And I didn’t hear the last thing that she said, but we’ll get this all sorted out. And I’m just writing a note to my producer here. Computers are interesting things.
Hello?
MONONA ROSSOL: Yes, I’m here.
DEBRA: Oh, good. Let’s get back to what we were talking about.
MONONA ROSSOL: When was I talking to air?
DEBRA: You were just talking to air.
But I wanted to ask you a question. You mentioned about the labeling laws don’t apply to art materials. Are we talking about professional art materials or commercial art materials that people would buy at the drugstore or art material store? What are we talking about?
MONONA ROSSOL: Children’s, everything. Everything comes under a separate law. It’s a separate amendment to the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. And I’m one of the full activists that got it passed. We thought we were doing a good thing. And it turns out to be absolutely the worst thing we could have done.
What this law does is it institutes an American Society of Testing Material Standard called ASTMD4236. It’s a chronic hazard labeling standard. In other words, acute tests very often are done on chemicals like whether you put it in your eye, you go blind or you swallow it, you drop dead. But things like cancer, birth defects, long-term organ damage, those things weren’t being tested for at all in the ‘80s, not at all.
DEBRA: That’s right.
MONONA ROSSOL: So we got a law because there were all of these products for children that contain asbestos, powdered asbestos, and lead, and all kinds of things.
So, we did get this law in. But unfortunately, we were young and dumb. And the way the law reads is a toxicologist reviews the ingredients as provided by the manufacturer and then certifies the labeling as meeting the standard.
And if he decides that it is non-toxic, then they certify that they can use that label. And if he certifies it, it doesn’t need any warnings. And if it’s really serious, he will specify the warnings. And then, you will see that all are materials sold legally in this country say “conform to ASTMD4236.”
DEBRA: And it says non-toxic right on the label.
MONONA ROSSOL: Right! And who pays the toxicologist for the review?
DEBRA: The manufacturer.
MONONA ROSSOL: Yeah, yeah […]
DEBRA: But we shouldn’t just ignore those labels.
MONONA ROSSOL: Oh, yes. Oh, please, worse to ignore them.
Plus, you see, if you were not using that system, it says 1% of the toxic material or 0.1% of a known non-carcinogen, you have to declare it on the material safety datasheet so we can at least find out if there’s some real bad stuff in there. But the people who label under ASTMD4236 simply reference the standard and tell you nothing—absolutely nothing.
So, it’s a terrible law. I’ve called for having it repealed because it’s just not working at all.
DEBRA: So, should parents be concerned about children—like you think crayons and markers—
MONONA ROSSOL: I would be. Here’s what I would tell all parents.
DEBRA: Please tell all parents.
MONONA ROSSOL: Those are not food dyes. And even if they were food dyes, I wouldn’t want my kid playing with red #40.
They need to not do things like finger painting, which kids love that. But you need to teach kids, if it’s brightly colored, you don’t put your hands in it and whoosh around in it. You need to teach them common sense. We have to stop breaking out the cookies and the juice after the class because these things have long-term issues. It’s just common sense.
DEBRA: I remember in school, they were just taking the finger paint—and not even the finger paint, tempera paint and stuff—and we were just putting our hands in it. Are they still doing that?
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, absolutely! Well, if it wasn’t for crayons, I’d have gone hungry as a child. I don’t know about you, but we need to not do that.
DEBRA: Well! I’m so glad that you’re telling us about this because I thought that if it says non-toxic on the label, and that there is an organization behind it that it should mean that when they say a toxicologist is checking this out.
MONONA ROSSOL: It doesn’t work. I’ve actually done two lawsuits where I was retained as an expert for brain damaged kids. We’ve got big settlements from the ceramic glaze people. And that toxicologist was on the other side of those losing cases.
I have a long history with this labeling. It is not what people think it is. And I would just really counsel people not to pay any attention to it and use common sense in working with the art materials.
The real secret to industrial hygiene is nobody was ever harmed by a chemical to which they were not exposed. So get it off your skin. Don’t snort it.
DEBRA: That’s the first rule of poisoning is that the first thing you do when somebody is poisoned is take them away from the poison. If you’ve been exposed to something that’s poisonous, go out of the room, throw up the poison if you ate it.
That’s the first thing that they do, is to take people aware from the poison. I think why not just stay away from the poison to begin with?
MONONA ROSSOL: Way back since the renaissance, and even way before, there was this thing we called a brush. If the paint goes from the tube, to the pallet, to the brush, to the canvass, you didn’t have an exposure. But if you can’t get it to your head, and you’re going to be putting your hands on that, it’s just not smart.
Lead is a skin absorber. We don’t know about many of the other metals.
DEBRA: So basically, you don’t want to put your hands in it. So, if a child were using crayon, but not touching it, or using paints with a brush, that would be safer than putting their hands in it or eating the crayon.
MONONA ROSSOL: Yes. And the art room should not be a kitchen.
DEBRA: Certainly! You put down a sandwich, and it gets paint all over it.
MONONA ROSSOL: And dust doesn’t settle everywhere, but the coffee cup. We just have to get common sense.
DEBRA: Yes, it is common sense. Wow! I’m just sitting here, so stunned to hear this because it’s a lot worse than I thought.
So, people can get material safety datasheets for the art materials, but they don’t say anything, you said.
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, here’s the really interesting thing. You called at a perfect time because just about the time people finally learn about material safety datasheets, bingo, you’re going to have to learn a new name. It’s going to be a safety datasheet now.
DEBRA: Tell us about that.
MONONA ROSSOL: It’s going to be a safety datasheet now.
All the laws had changed. And the reason is we either have to change all of our safety datasheets and our industrial labels.
The art materials labels aren’t going to change, but the industrial materials have to change. And a lot of the stuff that you buy in the hardware store, a lot of that’s all going to change because, if we don’t, we can no longer expect export to the rest of the world because the rest of the world has passed us by.
The Europeans were the first to adopt a UN system of labeling and safety datasheets that makes a lot more sense than the crud we’ve got. And almost every other country in the world has adopted it. So we have no choice. And it’s a joy because this new safety datasheet has 16 sections. It’s very detailed. It’s not up to the manufacturer what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.
DEBRA: When do these go into effect?
MONONA ROSSOL: They’ve got until December 1st to do the training. And by 2015, they’ve got to be completely switched over.
So, it’s a very interesting thing. And how many people know it? It’s law. I’m amazed that people don’t know, but this has happened.
Well, one of the things is nobody watches the OSHA regulations because they haven’t basically changed essentially since 1971 when OSHA was founded. Every time they tried to change something, the industry would form coalitions, take them to court, and get it reversed. So, your quality standards to the workplace are still primarily 1971 ones.
So, it’s been a hassle. But this change went right through because industry can’t really fight it. It’s not up to us. So, there is a little speed on the horizon there.
They’re still not going to do what the Europeans are doing in terms of their toxicity labeling because they’re going to either tell you the tests or the words “no data available” are going to be on each test blank, so that we will really know that most of the chemicals that we’re using have never been tested for cancer, never been tested for reproductive hazards, never been tested for any of this. Nothing you use has been tested. We think they have, but they haven’t.
DEBRA: No, they haven’t.
MONONA ROSSOL: And you’ll know. You think somebody must be testing. No! They’re absolutely not. They test when there’s a pile of bodies, and somebody has to find out why. That’s always been the case.
DEBRA: Why do you think that is the case? Why do you think that all these chemicals are being allowed on the market?
MONONA ROSSOL: That’s really simple because it started in the Industrial Revolution. It’s never been any different. The only thing that’s been different is advertising, which we’re a bunch of fools to read.
When Madam Curie and her husband worked out isolating radium, what happened? People said, “Look at that. It glows in the dark. It must be good for you.” They put it in patent medicines.
DEBRA: And they put it in dishware. There used to have glow in the dark dishware.
MONONA ROSSOL: There are only two steps to progress. And that’s been two in the rest of the world too until recently, until Europe woke up and spilled the coffee. Find the chemical, find the market source. There’s never been any testing in between.
And so, I’m looking at the Chemical Abstract Service website right now on my computer.
DEBRA: Oh, yes, let’s talk about that.
MONONA ROSSOL: There are 73,193,912 chemicals that have been registered. Now, if I waited a second, it will be 13. You can watch the counter. It’s 13 now.
DEBRA: Well, we need to take a break actually. We need to take a break, and let’s find out when we come back from the break what the number is.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m talking with the marvelous Monona Rossol about toxic chemicals in the workplace, in art supplies, in our children’s art supplies, in our homes. She’s just a wonderful source of information, and we’ll back right after this.
DEBRA: I switched from microphone through the computer to telephone, and I noticed I still have my microphone on. I was hoping that if I’d just unplug it, it didn’t get sound over there and sound over here. Anyway, I’m back. And we’ll continue.
So, what’s the number?
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, 73 million, of course, is the big one. When I wrote my book, “Pick Your Poison” in 2011, it was 50 million. It’s now 73,193,994. So it will probably, while we’re talking here, pop over to 73,194,000. It’ll pop over to.
And there are about a thousand chemicals worldwide that have been evaluated for their cancer effects. Figure it out!
It’s just popped over.
DEBRA: I’m just looking my book, Toxic-Free. When I wrote my book, Toxic-Free, a few years ago—let’s see what the number was then. Oh, here! Now, what’s the date on my book? It was published in just a couple of years ago. Copyright 2011. So, this was in 2010 when I was writing this. And I wrote it on Page 15. On that day, it was 57,110,200. And in the time it took me to type that number, it has switched to 201.
MONONA ROSSOL: In 2009, when Europe had adopted this rule that I was talking about to change all of this and to force industry to test the 30,000 high production volume chemicals that they want tested, that’s when the speed really increased. In 2009, they were registering chemicals at a rate of 25 per minute. So, it was just awesome.
And it’s infinite. If you know anything about chemistry, it’s infinite. There’s no end to the number of chemicals that they can invent. And 21 million of those are available for quick catalog purchase right now.
DEBRA: 21 million! You know, when people talk about chemicals, just like the news media, they say there are 80 million chemicals, but there’s way more than 80 million—not 80 million, they say 80,000 chemicals. And those are the ones that are always used.
MONONA ROSSOL: 84,000 is the number in TSCA, the Toxic Substance Control Act that EPA has control over supposedly.
But EPA has no control over those chemicals because, in order to force industry to test any of them, they have to prove beyond doubt—in fact, usually in court—that there is a substantial risk.
Well, how do you prove a substantial risk when the whole definition of this is is there is no data? It’s a catch-22 law. And that’s why of the 83,000 until just recently, they only tested around 200 of those 84,000.
DEBRA: And then what happens—now please confirm this for me, for our listening audience. Then what happens is that these toxic chemicals go out into the market, and people get sick. And then, they excited about something bisphenol-A, and then there are some studies, and then maybe they ban it.
MONONA ROSSOL: That’s right. And usually, it’s only after there are complaints, issues, somehow that come up.
And industry loves it when the activists get together and ban a chemical. Oh, my goodness, they know you’re wasting your time, and your energy, and your money to do this. Bisphenol-A, bisphenol-S, bisphenol-C, bisphenol-F are already in your bottles. What do they do? We don’t know! There’s no point banning a chemical if you aren’t going to make them test the substitute for that chemical.
DEBRA: So, given all this, given that there are all these toxic chemicals out there, and they’re everywhere, and if we ban one, there’s just another one coming down the pike every second, what’s the number now? Are you still on the website?
MONONA ROSSOL: Yes, 72,194,039. So, it flipped over to the 4000 and it’s now 4039 on the end. That was 40.
DEBRA: And to think that’s while we were talking. And listeners, Monona and I talked about starting the clock on this at the beginning of the show, and then we forgot to do it. So we were going to find out how many new toxic chemicals are introduced during the period of time of this show. You can see how fast it’s ticking. And this is […]
MONONA ROSSOL: Well, I did write it down. I wrote down the number just we before we started talking. So when we finish, let me know and I will subtract it and tell you.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Good! I’m glad you did that.
So, what is your recommendation? What is your recommendation given that we are living in this toxic experiment? What would you like to talk about?
MONONA ROSSOL: The thing we can do, all of us, is stop being fools. Stop believing the advertising. And stop believing that somebody is testing and somebody is looking out for us. If you just get that right there, you’ve made a difference.
Second of all, we have to start talking to people and the activist organizations about not being pansies and banning chemicals one at a time without asking for testing. I know there’s a Lautenberg bill that you could support, but that list was 200 chemicals, revolving list. That’s not the real issue.
We have to open the discussion again on what’s really going wrong because we’re wasting our time. And industry will be able to do a dance around what people are planning now.
Really, education is it, and political action is it, because you can’t protect yourself. The computer you’re looking at, the computer I’m looking at, you can’t sell that in Europe. You cannot your computer in Europe. Why? Because it contains the polybrominated biphenyl ethers that are banned over there, some of the phthalates that are in there. They’re coming out in your house […] They’re in your urine and then in your blood. They’re in there. That computer is made with lead, cadmium, mercury and chrome. You can’t sell that in Europe. They make them without.
Why don’t we know that? Why don’t we just tell industry, “Hey, the ones you make for Europe? Make them for us. We’ll pay the extra buck and a half.”
That’s what we’ve got to do. We have to inform ourselves. We have to tell industry.
What we don’t get is government will really do what we want it to if we get together and make them. We do have that ability.
But nobody wants to spend the time, the energy, nobody wants to learn anything. I’ve never seen a culture that doesn’t want to learn.
But it’s tough. I train and I could tell you that there’s a culture out there that just wants to be left alone to do whatever they’re doing now. We have to change that. And I don’t know how.
But all of the other things—trying to avoid this, trying to avoid that, it’s helpful. But damn, it’s not getting at the root of the problem.
DEBRA: No, it’s not getting at the root of the problem. In my life, I’ve seen it for myself and for other people that if you make life choices, you can protect yourself to a certain degree. My health used to be very bad because of my toxic chemical exposures. And now, it’s much better. And even at my age, people don’t think that I’m my age. I think that toxic chemicals actually make you look older. They damage your skin and all those kinds of things.
People are interested in anti-aging. Toxic chemicals, avoiding them, will certainly help you look younger.
I forgot what I was going to say. Toxic chemical moment. What were we talking about before?
MONONA ROSSOL: We were talking about things that you can avoid to make life better.
I mean, if you stop eating shellfish—by the way, did you see the new study, the 212 chemicals that the Centers for Disease Control is monitoring in all of us, and all those PCBs, and all that stuff?
DEBRA: Is there a new one? I saw one about…
MONONA ROSSOL: There was one done in Europe. Exeter University in London took all of that data and divided it by socioeconomic status.
DEBRA: I haven’t seen that.
MONONA ROSSOL: The poor have high levels of nine substances. And they’re the ones you’d expect—lead, cadmium, industrial chemicals like antimony, the cheap phthalates that are in vinyl plastics and a few other things.
But the rich got a dose. Boy, do they get a dose. That’s really good news to me. They got it from sunscreen, they got it from shellfish. They get mercury and cesium and thallium.
DEBRA: I’m going to look up this study.
MONONA ROSSOL: Look up Exeter UK socioeconomic data. They divided the data by socioeconomic status. It’s on—I think it’s EPH. I should be able to find it. Environmental Health Perspective, I think it’s there.
DEBRA: I’ll be able to find it.
MONONA ROSSOL: Yes, it’s cool. I just wrote an article about it. I can send you that too.
DEBRA: Well, tell us what the number is because we’ve only got a second.
MONONA ROSSOL: The number of what?
DEBRA: The number that’s on the…
MONONA ROSSOL: Oh, the number, okay. I’m going to check it now.
DEBRA: That’s the final music. We’ll just keep talking over it.
MONONA ROSSOL: Yeah, 484 chemical were invented while we talked.
DEBRA: Thank you so much Monona. Just go to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and go to her website,. It’s ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out her website. Go there. And thank you so much. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Bye!
MONONA ROSSOL: Bye bye.
How do I Remove Old Carpet Glue From the Floor?
Question from John
Hi Debra, Excellent service you’re running here.
I just spent 2 days chizelling out a glued down carpet. Apparantly this was common in the 70s. How do I get rid of the adhesive smell short of replacing the plywood floor? Sanding it off is too toxic an option.
Thanks,
John
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience doing this.
Readers, any suggestions?
Raising Backyard Chickens for Fun and Food
My guest today is Sarah Griffin-Boubacar, Retail Store Manager at Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply the largest organic gardening supply company in the U.S. Since both Sarah and I will talk about our experiences raising backyard chickens and Sarah will give her expert advice and talk about the resources they have to offer to make raising chickens a success. Sarah is a graduate of Humboldt State University in Northern California and worked on an organic coffee and fruit farm in Hawaii. She loves to be involved in the local agriculture scene in California and enjoys helping farmers and gardeners with their questions and problems. Sarah was trained in Integrated Pest Management by the University of California. She teaches popular workshops at Peaceful Valley on Canning & Preserving, Cheesemaking, and Irrigation. At home Sarah has an extensive organic garden, and raises backyard chickens and little boys. Backyard Chicken Supplies. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/peaceful-valley-farm-supply
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Raising Backyard Chickens for Fun & Food
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Sarah Griffin-Boubacar
Date of Broadcast: September 11, 2013
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.
We do this because there are toxic chemicals all around us in all kinds of consumer products, even in our bodies from past exposure, but there are things we can do about it. We can reduce our exposures in many, many ways.
We can remove toxic chemicals in our bodies. And talking about these positive things that we can do is what we do here on this show to empower all of you to live a toxic-free life.
Before we get started with our topic today, which is going to be raising chickens for fun and food in your own backyard, I want to tell you about a movie I went to last night. I went to see The Butler which is a wonderful, wonderful movie. I really encourage all of you to see it for its entertainment value if nothing else.
But the reason that I want to talk about it today is because it’s about the civil rights movement, what happened and what people did. You get to see behind the scenes in one family’s life during the period of the civil rights movement and what happened, what people did in order to gain civil rights for black people.
And if you’re younger than I am, you may not have lived through this period in the 1960s when this was going on.
And if so, you absolutely should see this one, so you know what happened.
There was a time in my lifetime when black people could not drink from the same water fountain as white people.
They could not be served in restaurants in the same tables that white people ate at. They had their own sections in the restaurant. And they couldn’t vote. They didn’t have basic human rights.
And yet, now they do.
It’s so common that some of you who are younger than I am don’t even remember or know that there was a time not so long ago when black people didn’t have these rights.
And I bring this up today because it’s kind of the same thing with toxics. We have a right to not be poisoned every day. And we are being poisoned every day. We’re being poisoned by toxic chemicals all around us unless we do something specific, unless we educate ourselves, unless we make certain choices to minimize our toxic exposure and to support our bodies in positive ways that [build] our health.
We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And these are inalienable rights—not granted to us by the government, but granted to use by life. We have the right to have health and be alive and be productive and be able to do anything that we want to do with our lives.
And if we don’t have that, we have the opportunity to fight for that… just like people have fought for other rights.
There was a time when women didn’t have the vote. And it wasn’t so long ago. It was only maybe a hundred years ago when women were fighting for the vote. And now what we need to be fighting for is our life to live a toxic-free life.
So, I was very inspired by this film last night because I got to see everything from the beginning of the whole civil rights movement from the characters who were working in the cotton fields to everything that happened all the way through a black man being elected president which is a big victory for them and a big, big change. And that happened within the span of a lifetime—within my lifetime, since I was born.
And we can do that too! Other changes can be made. We can stand up and say “no toxic chemicals” so that we’re not living in this world where, unless we do something to remove toxic chemicals, then we’re going to be exposed.
And so we still should be doing everything that we should. But I want you to know this is a great example to see what kind of change can happen in the world.
Inspiring, inspiring film, The Butler. I really recommend it.
Okay! So now, we’ re going to talk about something else. We’re going to talk about raising backyard chickens which is a wonderful thing to do.
My guest today is Sarah Griffin-Boubacar. She’s the retail store manager for Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. And they’re at GrowOrganic.com.
Hi Sarah!
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Hi! Can you hear me?
DEBRA: I can! Can you hear me?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, yeah. I can hear you great.
DEBRA: Good! I can hear you great too.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, good.
DEBRA: So Sarah, let’s start by—tell me how you got interested. You personally got interested in organic gardening, and specifically, chickens. And also, a little about the history of Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply as a business.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Okay, yeah. Well, personally, after college, I went and worked on an organic farm in Hawaii. It was a great opportunity. Really, really nice. It was an organic fruit farm and a coffee farm. It was beautiful of course.
DEBRA: Hmmm… yeah!
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: And we had chickens there. And so I was exposed to them. That was the first time
I’ve ever really raised chickens. I loved their personalities. They’re so easy. I loved the fresh eggs. We were all vegetarians at that time, so the eggs were the feature there.
So yeah, I got interested in them at that point. And then, from there, I have my own flock—and have had for quite a few years now. I’m totally hooked!
DEBRA: I complete understand. I had chickens too. And I would still have them, but one day, the police came and said they were going to take them away if I didn’t do something with them myself.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, no! That’s terrible.
DEBRA: I know, it is. But if you can imagine, this in the year 2013 in the United States of America, there is a city in Florida that has an ordinance that says you can’t have chickens. I don’t know what century they’re living in.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, I just don’t see why, what the argument could be against chickens. Roosters, I can kind of understand.
DEBRA: I don’t either. But anyway, fortunately, I got these chickens from a friend of mine who lives outside the city limits in the county where in the county of Pinellas, you can have chickens in county land. You just can’t have them in this particular city which happens to be in Pinellas county.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Well, I think your listeners would be interested to know that there are lots of cities in the country including where I live in California, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramnento, my little town of Grass Valley. You can have chickens within the city limits. All you need is a little backyard.
DEBRA: That’s right. All you need is a little backyard. And if you have any questions—I remember looking up online “cities that allow chickens in the backyard” and I got a whole list of major cities.
So, if after you listen to all these, you want to raise chickens, and you’re not doing it yet, just call your city and ask if it’s okay, if they have any ordinance about it.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, yeah. And make friends with your neighbors too. If you promise not to have roosters that will wake them up in the morning and give them free eggs, then they probably won’t have any problem with your chickens either.
DEBRA: I think that that’s true.
But I want to say that I loved having chickens. I absolutely love them. They do have wonderful personalities. And I’ve read that over and over. And they’re just so calming to be with.
I have a chicken house. I still have my chicken house. It’s just a little one that’s like an a-frame. I think there’s a name for it, I forgot what it is. But it’s an a-frame. And it has a little chicken run in it and a little upstairs, a top where they go and…
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, that sounds like mine, mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: And so it doesn’t take up very much room in the backyard. And you can move it around easily. I just put it there on top of the grass, and I would just lie on the grass next to the chicken house. And I’d feed pieces of grass and things to them through the chicken wire. I didn’t want to let them out because I didn’t want to have to run after them and catch them.
Every morning, I would go and I’d bring them their food, and I’d bring them their water. And I’d hand feed them weeds out of the garden which they just loved.
I remember, I had to keep them for about a month before they started laying eggs because of the age they were when I got them. But when that first egg came, oh, my god, it was such a thrill. It was having that direct experience between actually feeding the chicken and then having the egg come out and eating the egg that I had raised.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah! Yeah, it’s similar to growing a tomato plant from a seed, and watering and caring for it, and finally, getting your first tomato. Yes, it’s the same kind of satisfaction you get.
DEBRA: It is! But for me, it was somehow more wondrous because it was coming out of an animal instead of a plant […]
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, yeah.
DEBRA: And then, I got this egg. And it was like, “Oh, my God! It actually…” A very direct, very, very direct experience. And they taste so much better than any eggs you’ve ever eaten.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, yes, they do, especially if they’re on pasture, absolutely.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. You know what? We need to go to break. We’ll be back very soon. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about raising backyard chickens with Sarah Griffin-Boubacar from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Sarah Griffin-Boubacar from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. They’re at GrowOrganic.com. And they’re the largest organic gardening supply company in the United States. They have a lot more than just gardening supplies.
Sarah, tell us something about the history of this company. I remember knowing about you and recommending Peaceful Valley many, many years ago—I think when it first started.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, we’ve been around since 1976. We started out in a little shed on Peaceful Valley Road just kind of as a cooperative amongst farmers, thinking, “Hey, we can pool our resources and buy a pallet of fertilizer rather than just one bag each and save money that way.”
And so that’s how we started. And then, we had a catalog for a really long time. People are really familiar with our catalog. I have a lot of people come in that want the catalog to use as a reference tool, so that they can learn about organic gardening just through our catalog because it has so much information about fertilizers and tools and pest control and all sorts of things.
From there, of course, we have our website, GrowOrganic.com. Again, it has lots of information. We have a gardening forum and a blog. So, any kind of gardening questions that you have are answered by that. We also do a weekly video where we have the topic of the week which is usually something seasonal you should be doing in your gardening. They’re about 3- or 4-minute videos that are really useful, and fun, entertaining too!
DEBRA: Well, just so people have an idea of what’s on your site, tell us about the broad variety of things that you carry. I mean, you have seeds and tools and things, but a lot more than that.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah! I think part of what sets us apart is we really try to be only organic. And so that’s really nice when you have a problem in your garden or if you want to start a new garden and you know you want to do it organic, but you don’t necessarily know what that means. You can go to our site, and you can see all sorts of organic solutions for things, all sorts of organic products, when it comes to fertilizers and pest control and tools.
And then, our latest, more recent addition to our line is a homesteading line of products. If you have a beautiful garden and you have way too much food, what are you going to do with it? You can can it. You can make it into cheese. You can process it in such a way using all of the tools in our homesteading line. It’s really exciting.
DEBRA: Yeah, I was really excited to see that too. I mean, you can grow your food, but then what are you going to do with it when you have this big abundance.
And so you have things like canning supplies and dehydrators and cookbooks and juicers and baking supplies and food storage containers and beer brewing kits and wine-making kits.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, it’s amazing. Once you get into it… anything you have in abundance, yeah.
DEBRA: Your site really is all about food. It’s really all about growing it, preserving it, cooking it, turning it to wonderful things to eat just from ground to table. It’s a really excellent, excellent resource. I’m very happy to have you here.
And you have a whole section on backyard chicken supplies. I’m just going to that link. I put the link on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. So they can go right to that page as well as to your page.
There’s just so many things you have, all the little supplies like the watering can and books about how to keep chicken and chicken feed and things to hold the feed. Do you sell chicken coops too?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Not at the moment, but we have in the past, and we’re looking for a new supplier.
So yeah, we will have coops in the future too, pretty much everything you need to raise chickens.
DEBRA: I actually built my coop.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: So did I, yeah.
DEBRA: I think the coops that we built was like $500. It was recommended by the woman who gave me the chickens. And I looked at them, and I said, “$500? Hmmm… I think we can build this.” And we did. We just looked at the picture and built it. It was very easy.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah.
DEBRA: So, before we talk about how to raise chickens, let’s talk about why somebody would want to raise chickens.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Well, they’re very easy. They’re one of the easiest and least expensive pets. So if you want them as a pet—which I think would be the second most reason why people would want to raise chicken. I think the first reason of course would be eggs…
DEBRA: Eggs, yes.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: …and after that, would be just pets because they are really entertaining and rather beautiful pets. I know maybe people don’t think of chickens as beautiful, but you just haven’t seen the right chickens because a lot of them are really lovely. They have such diversity in their breeds and varieties.
They’re really easy. They take care of themselves mostly. And they’re very inexpensive compared to any other pet.
And again, the eggs, eggs that are fresh and they taste great. And they have a higher nutritional value if you grow them yourself especially because you know exactly what goes into that egg because you are providing the chicken with all the feed. When you have a commercially-produced egg, you don’t know.
DEBRA: You don’t know. And I want to just interrupt you for a second to tell the listeners some of the things that might be given to those eggs.
First of all, the feed is probably GMO-raised. So if it’s soy or corn or cottonseed, it’s probably GMO. Also, additives that are put in like amino acids, vitamins and enzymes could be GMO microorganisms.
They also feed chickens that are laying eggs arsenic, antibiotics. And chickens that are not free range usually, there’s problems with salmonella in the eggs. It’s not organic feed usually, so there’s pesticide residues.
And also, even if they’re organic eggs, you don’t really know what’s going in them. So we should certainly want to have more control.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: And also, personally, I like to know that the food that I’m eating, especially when it comes from an animal is grown with respect to the animal and that it’s grown from a happy chicken. I do eat my chickens. I know that when they’re living with me, I know that they are treated with respect and they are healthy and living their lives as chickens should live—and not in a cage or something like that.
Personally, that’s really important to me. And also, there’s also really useful things that chickens can do besides even lay eggs.
DEBRA: Wait! Before you go on, we need to go to another break. So we’ll talk about that when we come back.
I want to mention that if you want to know more about what’s going on with chickens and growing chickens and agriculture and what’s in them, the Cornucopia Institute has a lot of information about this. So just google “Cornucopia Institute eggs” and you can find out a lot about eggs and why you should do your own in the backyard.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back and talk more about backyard chickens.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Sarah Griffin-Boubacar from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. They’re at GrowOrganic.com.
And I interrupted you, Sarah, so go ahead with what you were going to say before the break.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, that’s okay. Yeah, you were asking me why you should raise chickens, what the reasons would be.
So, other than eggs […] that are great, they also provide chemical-free bug and weed control.
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm…
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: If you let them out into your pasture, they will eat every single bug and every single weed in no time. And then, what they leave behind is the world’s best fertilizer. Chicken manure is awesome and nutrient-rich and great for the soil. So chickens will improve your yard and garden at the same time. I think that’s a really good reason to raise chickens just in and of itself.
DEBRA: I want my chickens back.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, I know, right?
So, yeah, I think that chickens are really great to have in your backyard and really useful. I also feed them all of my kitchen scraps. Very little gets into my compost. All of my kitchen scraps goes straight to the chickens. They gobble it up and they love it. And it’s also kind of fun to see what would’ve been wasted goes straight into your food supply. That goes straight into the chicken, it goes straight into the eggs.
DEBRA: Yeah! Don’t you think that’s cool, to just see the lettuce leaf going into the chicken and coming out as an egg?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, exactly! It would’ve been wasted or it would’ve gone into a compost pile.
DEBRA: Well, it would’ve gone into the compost. I mean, I’m never concerned about food waste because it always goes into my compost. But it’s just this magical thing that happens. If you’ve never had that experience, it’s just—like I wasn’t raised on a farm. We had guinea pigs. We didn’t have chickens or anything like that when I was growing up.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Well, guinea pigs will do the same thing. They’ll eat all your scraps, but you won’t get…
DEBRA: Right! They won’t give you eggs.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Right, right.
DEBRA: They will give you more little guinea pigs.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: I think there are so many reasons to raise them. And they’re really easy. Right now, I have a flock of about 12 chickens in my backyard. I do live in a rural area, but I just have a small coop that I built myself. It was really easy. And they enhance my life I think.
DEBRA: So, go through the steps of how somebody would start off getting chickens. What do they need to do?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Okay, yeah! So, the first thing you need to do is, of course, you need a place for them to be. I mentioned your backyard is great. If your backyard is fenced, that’s about all it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be entirely enclosed unless you have really heavy predators in your area. If you live in the city, you probably don’t (although dogs can be a predator, so you need to make sure that they’re safe from that).
Then you need a coop. They need a place to be that’s clean and dry well-ventilated, but also warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I have kind of like what you were saying, an a-frame with a run on the button. So that’s nice. That works really well. There are lots of designs.
We have a couple of books on The Art of the Chicken Coop. You can make them really cute and build your own or buy them pre-made. They can really be a nice addition to your backyard, looks-wise even.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. There are some very, very attractive chicken coops. I wish I could have them in my backyard.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: One day… you need to write to your city council.
DEBRA: I’m going to change this ordinance, so that we can all have chickens here.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Right!
So, once you’ve got the place for them to be, then you need to get the chickens. And you can get chickens as chicks or as chickens or as kind of in between, the teenagers which are called pullets. And of course, the cheapest way to go is to get chicks. You can get them usually $2 to $3 at the seed store or you can order them online and have them mail it to you. That’s what I did this year.
DEBRA: Really?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: It’s kind of funny, but…
DEBRA: I didn’t know that they can email chicks…
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Not email, but mail…
DEBRA: I mean, mail chicks.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, I got them from Murray McMurray Hatchery. So when they’re born, they have this energy stored from the yolk. And so they can go a couple of days without food or water. So that’s the perfect opportunity. As soon as they hatch, they ship them on out.
If you have some very specific varieties in mind and your local feed store doesn’t have those, you can go to Murray McMurray. They have a minimum order, so you might want to share chicks with the neighborhood. That’s what I did this year. We had to get 30 or something like that. But then I shared them with a bunch of different people, so it was fine.
And I got some really fancy chickens. There are all sorts of different breeds that you can get.
DEBRA: Do you get new chickens every year?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: I do! We moved recently, and so I had to revamp my flock. I have a couple that are older. And most of them are around the same age that I got this year. So I got them in April. They’re almost starting to lay.
I get eggs every day because of the older chickens. So it’s kind of nice to have a few different ages, so that I always have eggs. While some are maturing, some are laying. And when those get too old, then my ones that are still maturing will still be laying.
DEBRA: So if you get chicks—I didn’t get chicks. I got teenagers, the pullets
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: The pullets, uh-huh…
DEBRA: If you get chicks, how long does it take before they start to lay?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: It can take between say four to six months. It takes quite a while. It depends on the breed. I got mine in April, and I’m really expecting them to start laying any day now.
DEBRA: Yeah, because we need to realize that a chick is like a baby. A baby wouldn’t have a baby.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Exactly!
DEBRA: So, my baby wouldn’t have a baby. It has to grow up.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: And so you have to have some patience.
DEBRA: And it gets to a certain age, and it would have a baby.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Right, right. And they grow so fast.
Of course then, also, when you’re trying to decide what kind of chickens to get, you need to decide what you want.
Do you want layers so you can have eggs or do you want broilers so you can have meat? And the broilers will mature in six to eight weeks depending on the breed.
So, if you’re raising chickens for meat, then that’s a lot less of a time commitment for that. And those breeds, you have specific breeds for meat and specific breeds for eggs. And then, you have a few kind of dual purpose, in between also. And so you have to decide when you’re going to get which kind of chicken.
The layers will mature much slower. They grow more slowly. But they’re the ones that are going to give you the most eggs. And then the broilers are going to mature really quickly. You’re going to see how those chicks grow way faster than your layers. And those, you can butcher six to eight weeks.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. We’ll be right back with Sarah Griffin-Boubacar from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. They’re at GrowOrganic.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Sarah Griffin-Boubacar, retail store manager at Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. And they’re at GrowOrganic.com.
Sarah, one of the things that I like so much about chickens and backyard eggs is that you really get to have a whole variety of different types of eggs that come from different types of chickens. And when you buy them at the store, you get white eggs and you get brown eggs. But you can have different kinds of chickens that’ll give you blue eggs and pink eggs and speckled eggs. It just really is wonderful to find there’s a blue egg.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Absolutely!
DEBRA: I used to get my eggs—when I lived in California, I used to get my eggs from a neighbor who had chickens. And I never knew what color the eggs were going to be. It was just wonderful!
And I think this gives us more diversity too because we use so too species. It’s like all the tomatoes are the same variety of tomatoes. All the carrots are the same variety of carrots. And when we grow things in our own backyard, we can grow so many different varieties of anything—not just eggs, but all the food that we eat can be unique varieties.
When I was in California, I even got seeds from people who have made—like they have saved their tomatoes and had local seeds very specific to our own micro-ecosystem. And that’s the tomatoes that I grew.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Yeah, definitely. So, when you’re choosing what kind of chickens you want for your flock, you have these questions—are they layers or are they broilers? And the typical layer (which is the standard chicken that produces the white eggs that you get in the grocery store), you don’t necessarily want to get that kind.
DEBRA: And what’s the name of that kind? Do you know?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: That one is a Plymouth Rock, I’m pretty sure. Here, let me see. Sorry, no, the Cornish Rock is the standard broiler that you eat. You would typically eat the cockerels, those of a Cornish Rock.
And the White Leghorns are the most common egg layers. They produce a white egg, and they’re not very genetically diverse, as you were saying. So they don’t make the most exciting pets for one thing. They’re not as smart.
If you really want to get some of the intelligent and fun chickens, I would recommend going with more of the heritage breeds. So that blue egg you were talking about, that would be an Ameraucana chicken—really cute chicken, really spunky and good layers, a little docile temperament, hearty to different climates.
The more commercial breeds, if you get a heat wave, they could just knock right off because they’re not really adapted for that.
A really nice chocolaty brown egg that I love is from a Cuckoo Maran. I have a couple of those. And they lay these beautiful dark brown speckled eggs that are just lovely. And the chickens themselves are more fun and more spunky. Like I said, they have more personality, and also, just more vitality. So that’s really good.
I love the Wyandottes. They’re a nice, dual-purpose breed. And they’re beautiful. They have the most amazing coloring on their feathers. And there are lots of varieties within the Wyandottes themselves.
So, I recommend your listeners to just look through what the breeders have to offer. Try a couple of each different kinds of chickens just to see which one you like the best.
DEBRA: That’s very good advice. When I had chickens, that year, we went to the Florida State Fair. And they have all these agricultural exhibits. I actually saw a calf being born at the state fair.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, cool!
DEBRA: But they had this huge room with all these different kinds of chickens. And of course, people were coming from the 4H with their chickens and getting awarded for the best eggs and all these things.
It was interesting to go and see—I have some of the chickens online. But then to actually go to the state fair and see them in person, so to speak, you get an idea what their personalities are like and how beautiful they are. And you just go, “Oh, I want one of those. I want one of those.”
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Absolutely, yeah. My son, he’s five and he’s doing 4H this year and raising the chickens for 4H. And it’s really fun. The chickens are entirely his responsibility with a little guidance from mom and dad.
DEBRA: Wow!
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: So, as far as what to do, once you’ve got your coop, and once you’ve got your chicks, then you want to set up a chick breeder. You can’t necessarily put them in a coop yet. It can’t be drafty. It has to be really warm in there, but not too hot for the babies.
They’re the most sensitive. And that baby period is very short (as it is with even humans). So you don’t have to worry about it too much. But they like it to be 90° to 95° for the first week of life. So it’s nice and warm. You can achieve that just with a heat lamp that’s placed right.
And they need to have access to food and water and clean bedding. That’s really pretty easy to achieve. You want to give them chick crumbles. You can buy it as just a prepared feed. You don’t have to make their own feed or anything like that.
And have a chick waterer. They’re nice and small so they can reach it. The big chicken waterer, they can’t necessarily reach it at this point when they’re tiny.
And you also just want to watch them. You want to make sure that they’re healthy and make sure that there’s nothing going on. I always check their cloacas, that they don’t get clogged because that can kill a chick really fast.
And play with them, so that they get used to people and they’ll like you better when they’re adults that way and be more fun.
It doesn’t take very long before you can move them into the coop, about 60 days. So it’s not that long. And then, you move them into the coop. A rule of thumb is you want about 3 to 4 sq. ft. per chicken inside your coop and 10 sq. ft. per chicken in an outside run.
In order to get those really delicious eggs, they need to eat something green. So pasturing them is a really good idea although it’s not necessary. You can just feed them seed. You can start feeding them layer palettes when they’re about as old as my chickens, like four to six months old. I start feeding them layer palettes. It has a higher calcium and a lower protein. For that egg production, you want to start feeding them that.
And one of my chickens’ favorite times of day is the time when I feed them scratch which is cracked corn. We have a nice, non-GMO cracked corn that I give them. They love that. That’s like a really good bonding time with the chickens. When I bring them the kitchen scraps and the cracked corn, it’s like candy for them. They just love it!
That’s when they follow me around the yard and things like that, looking for that.
Yeah, you just want to make sure they always have water available. We have some really nice waterers that will stay clean. I like to hang them, so that they don’t sit in the dirt and get dirty. We have an automatic waterer which is really nice. The chicken waterer is one of the things my five year old can’t do. It’s kind of heavy for him. So the automatic waterer is nice.
You want to make sure that they have good bedding. The floor and the coop needs to stay clean. You don’t want their poop to get all over their feet and everything—so a nice bedding.
I personally use organic rice hulls. And that makes a really nice bedding both for chicks and for chickens. And what’s really great about that is when I clean out the coop, then I’ve got this beautiful soil amendment that’s full of chicken manure and rice hulls. And so I put it into my compost for a few days-or well, for about 30 days—to fully compost. And then it’s just brilliant to add to my heavy clay soil. It’s perfect!
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: So that’s really nice. Yeah! They’re really easy and really sweet and really fun.
DEBRA: Having my chickens—I had them for about a year—it was one of the best garden experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve grown vegetables. I’m not currently growing anything, but I have in the past, and I will again. But just having those chickens, they really were like pets. It was wonderful.
We have about a minute left. Is there any final concluding words you’d like to say?
SARAH GRIFFIN-BOUBACAR: Oh, just check out our website and just to see what you can grow yourself. That whole sustainability aspect, growing organically and growing chickens organically is a really good thing you can do not only for your own family, but for the whole community at large too, encouraging more people to have chickens.
I mean, they just don’t really cost that much. And the way that you’ll get the fresh eggs is really worth it.
DEBRA: It really is, I totally agree with that. And you can also share them with your neighbors as you’ve said before and just make it a community thing.
Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Sarah. Everybody should go to GrowOrganic.com and take a look at your website. if you’re looking for the backyard chicken supplies, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I have the link there. Or it’s under the Homestead tab on GrowOrganic.com.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Terressentials
For nearly a quarter of a century, the organic artisan crafting team at Terressentials has been handcrafting a diverse array of distinctive gourmet and USDA certified organic personal care products, including organic skin care, organic hair care, organic bath products, organic baby products, and more. As a certified organic business with a deep commitment to an authentic organic lifestyle, Terressentials limits its palette of body care ingredients to those materials permitted in the production of certified organic foods under the USDA National Organic Program regulations. For discriminating and organically-aware individuals around the world, Terressentials offers many elegant, effective, aromatic and nourishing body and hair care products that are 100% organic and also crafts a lovely range of organic fragrance-free products (without added essential oils) for those who prefer the traditional fresh simplicity of pure organic herbals. The Terressentials website is full of information about cosmetic ingredients, the organic regulations, and organic skin and hair care. All product ingredients are listed on the Terressentials site and trial sizes are available for personal experimentation.
|
Listen to my interviews with Terressentials co-founders Diana Kaye and James Hahn. |
New Consumer Products Law in California Will Require Toxic Chemical Disclosure as of October 1
Just a few weeks ago the State of California approved the Safer Consumer Products Regulations, which go into effect almost immediately on October 1.
A media statement from the Department of Toxic Substances Control said, “The regulations require manufacturers to seek alternative safer chemical ingredients in widely used products. This is one of the first programs of its kind in the world.”
They will be publishing a list of some 1200 Candidate Chemicals and a list of proposed Priority Products. The first list of 230 candidate chemicals is expected to be available in mid-September.
This is pretty amazing because it is a regulation requiring manufacturers to make their products less toxic.
Here is an article directed to businesses about how the new law will affect them: GreenBiz: What you need to know about California’s new consumer products law
This is going to shake things up because I know that many companies don’t have a clue about what toxic chemicals are in their products.
Yesterday on Toxic Free Talk Radio I interviewed Martin Wolf, Director of Product Sustainability and Authenticity for Seventh Generation. We talked about exactly this: identifying toxic chemicals throughout the supply chain of products. You can listen to the interview at How Seventh Generation is Eliminating Toxics Throughout Thier Supply Chain
Times are changing for toxics! Finally!
I’m going to be watching how this plays out.
Aluminum Found to Cause Cancer
A new study published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry has demonstrated that exposure to aluminum can increase the migratory and invasive properties of human breast cancer cells. This is important because death from breast cancer is caused by the spread of the tumor and not from the presence of the primary tumor.
Another study, also published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry found increased levels of aluminum in breast fluids from women with breast cancer, in comparison to healthy women.
Apparently aluminum has cancer-causing properties at levels 100,000 times lower than found in some consumer products. Aluminum is widely used as a food additive (and is present as a contaminant from aluminum cookware), is present in vaccines, and is sprayed by millions under their arms every morning in aluminum chlorohydrate antiperspirant.
The article concluded, “These forms of aluminum may be contributing to the burgeoning cancer epidemic in exposed populations. Given this possibility, the further use of aluminum in foods, cosmetics and drugs should be halted until adequate risk assessments can be made thoroughly proving its safety.” They admit this is not likely to happen, but warn individuals to discontinue exposure to aluminum to prevent cancer.
Read the full article at: GreenMedInfo: The Cancer-Causing Metal Millions Eat, Wear or Have Injected Into Their Kids
We all have residues of past aluminum exposures stored in our bodies as part of our “body burden”. Touchstone Essentials’ PureBody liquid zeolite can remove aluminum, as well as other toxic metals stored in your body.
Peaceful Valley Farm Supply
The largest organic gardening supply company in the U.S., they carry everything you need to grow your own food, and ship everywhere in the United States. They sell seeds, fertilizers, weed and pest controls, garden tools, irrrigation, growing supplies, books, plus all the tools to preserve the abundance of food you have grown. They also sell backyard chicken and beekeeping supplies, wine making kits, and so much more. “We are dedicated to preserving the environment by providing you with cost-effective, state-of-the-art, organic growing supplies and the information and tools needed to apply them. We strive to provide great service, low prices and the best selection of quality products available, while maintaining our leadership as one of the pioneers of America’s organic gardening supplies marketplace. When you shop with us, be assured that each product has been reviewed by our staff. We know you want quality, so we scrutinized every product in this catalog to ensure that it meets our high standards.”
|
Listen to my interview with Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply, Retail Store Manager Sarah Griffin-Boubacar. |
Real Salt
An all natural unrefined sea salt harvested from an ancient underground ocean in Redmond, Utah USA. In addition to plain salt, they also sell garlic salt, onion salt, and seasoning salt made with their salt and organic ingredients. Good educational information on the website about refined salt vs unrefined sea salt and various sources of salt.
|
Listen to my interview with Redmond Incorporated sales and marketing in charge Darryl Bosshardt. |
How Seventh Generation is Eliminating Toxics Throughout Their Supply Chain
My guest is chemist Martin Wolf, Director of Product Sustainability and Authenticity for Seventh Generation, a manufacturer and distributor of ecological household and personal care products. We’ll be talking about what Seventh Generation is doing to eliminate toxic chemicals in every phase of manufacture, and how they are helping make the world less toxic by working to improve toxics regulations. Martin brings more than 40 years of experience in industrial and environmental chemistry to his work, including the occurrence of hazardous chemicals in the environment, conducting life cycle studies of industrial processes, and designing more sustainable household cleaning products. At Seventh Generation, Martin has developed frameworks for environmental product design, helped educate his co-workers, customers, and consumers about the environmental impacts of consumer products and the industries that produce them, helped develop standards for voluntary disclosure, and brought change to the cleaning products industry through more sustainable product designs. In 2010, Martin received a 2010 EPA Region 1 Environmental Merit Award for his work. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/seventh-generation
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Seventh Generation is Eliminating Toxics Throughout Their Supply Chain
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Martin Wolf
Date of Broadcast: September 9, 2013
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 we do need to talk about this because there are toxic chemicals all over the place—in the food we eat, in the air we breathe, and all kinds of consumer products, and even in our own bodies, where it’s been accumulating probably since birth for most of us who are alive today. I know, I fall in that category.
But there are things that we can do to remove toxic chemicals from our home, to remove toxic chemicals from our body, and even to create a toxic-free world by changing regulations, and getting everybody on the bandwagon to have a healthy and safe environment.
Today is Monday, September 9, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, and the sun is shining for a change. This is the time of the year when it rains almost every day, and I heard on the news that there is actually a hurricane forming out in the Atlantic, near the equator, but I don’t think we need to worry about that.
What we’re going to talk about today is about toxic chemicals throughout the supply chain—when manufacturers make a consumer product. It’s like when we make a salad, for example, because when you make a salad, you’re taking raw materials, not something you bought in a package, although today, a lot of salad ingredients come in packages.
But let’s say you went to the farmers market, or out into your backyard, and you got some lettuce, and tomatoes, and cucumbers, and onions, and you’re going to make a salad. And so you’re bringing these materials that already exist, these raw materials, you’re putting them together in a bowl, and then you’re calling them a salad.
Now, unless you’re like me and make your own salad dressing, maybe you are opening a bottle of salad dressing. And so then you put in your salad a product that already exists which is made of other products, of other ingredients.
And so what you might see on the label, if you were labeling this salad as a consumer product is lettuce, tomatoes, onions and salad dressing. But what’s in that salad dressing is a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s a product onto itself.
And most consumer products, when you look on the label, and you see sodium lauryl sulfate, and all these different chemical names, which you might not recognize, each one of those, just like salad dressing, it’s a product. It’s an ingredient, it’s a product that has its whole set of manufacturing. It was manufactured someplace else, and it has its whole list of ingredients, and we never see that.
All we see on the label is the final products that are mixed together like when you mix together a salad.
So today, what we’re doing to do is we’re going to is we’re going to take a look down what’s called the supply chain. And my guest today is Martin Wolf. He’s the director of product sustainability and authenticity of Seventh Generation, who is a manufacturing distributor of ecological household and personal products.
Martin is a chemist. This is the first time we’ve had a chemist on the show. And he has more than 40 years’ experience in industrial and environmental chemistry. He knows a thing or two about chemistry, toxic chemicals and supply chains.
So welcome to the show, Martin.
MARTIN WOLF: Thank you very much, Debra. And thank you for having me on the show.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I was just thinking before the show that, together, we have 70 years of experience between us.
MARTIN WOLF: I know. Our careers have actually developed together. I don’t know if you remember back when you published a few of your original books in the 1990s. I was a consultant to the Good Housekeeping Institute, and we worked together on some of these very same issues.
DEBRA: I do remember that. I do. And it’s interesting to me how people now, at this point in my career, I’m meeting a lot of people that I met early on, over again, that we’re all coming back together. And I think that that’s great because there’s so much experience, and there’s so much understanding, and so much knowledge that all of us have, who have been doing it for so long.
So tell us—I want you to tell our audience about your personal background, how you got interested in doing what you do as a chemist, instead of making toxic chemicals that you’re working to have a better environment. And also, tell us about the
Seventh Generation as a company, what’s their history.
MARTIN WOLF: Sure, I’d be glad to.
As implied by our discussion so far, this has been a journey. I didn’t start out in my career as a chemist thinking much about the connections between chemicals and human health. I was more focused on the work at hand that I’ve started my career at a manufacturer of agricultural chemicals—herbicides and pesticides, studying their fate in the environment.
And I was very impressed by the research that that company did.
About seven years into that job, I left and I joined a company that manufactures instrumentation to detect carcinogens in the environment.
In addition to being a chemist, I also studied electrical engineering. So instrumentation was of great interest to me because it combined my two fields.
And we started installing these pieces of equipment throughout the world. It was a wonderful job. I got to travel to Denmark, and Russia, and other countries, and installed this equipment. And we started discovering carcinogens in a variety of household and food products—everything from bacon to beer, and worked with food producers on eliminating the problems in some instances, in some instances, finding that the problems were more intractable.
But that started me thinking about the connection between the chemicals that are in so many of the things that we have in our daily lives, and carcinogens, and the increasing prevalence of cancer in our society.
So I started my own laboratory, looking at chemicals in the environment. And we were, what was called an EPA contract laboratory. We investigated soil and water samples. And my understanding of how careless companies could be about the chemicals they were using started to grow. And when I sold that laboratory and started consulting, I started working with individuals, such as yourself, and Jeffrey Hollinger, who founded, or was one of the co-founders of Seventh Generation, and started looking—
DEBRA: [inaudible 07:25]
MARTIN WOLF: Yes. He’s still very active and wonderfully. And started seeing through Jeffrey that businesses could work in a different way, not only by making products that were safer than conventional products, or contained fewer substances of concern, but also how a company could be organized to be socially responsible, and itself a socially responsible community.
And those are among the objectives of Seventh Generation, not only to make products that are safer for the environment and for the consumers that use them, but also be an example of how businesses can be proponents of social equity, and work up and down their supply chain, to see social equity brought to the fore.
So it’s been an exciting journey and a lot of fun, and it’s also been a process of evolution. When I first started working with Jeffrey, I could see how chemicals could affect the environment. When it came to human health, I was a little reticent to draw that connection. It was only over time and I saw exactly which chemicals are being used, where they were being used, and how they were being used, that I started to think that indeed, there could be a connection between the products we use, and our personal health.
DEBRA: I want to interrupt you here. I have a question, and we’re coming up on the break. So I’m sure you’re not going to be able to answer it prior to the break, but when we come back, you just said a very interesting thing to me, and that was that as a chemist, you could see how chemicals were affecting the environment. It was more difficult for you to see how they were affecting human health.
And I’d like you to speak more to that when we come back after the break because there are so many chemists, making so many chemicals, and now, you’re working on the side of chemical safety.
But I’d like to know more about what a chemist might be thinking from your experience.
So we’re going to take a break now. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Martin Wolf. He’s the director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And we’ll be right back. Don’t go away.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity of Seventh Generation. And before the break, I asked him, he had made a statement that it was difficult for him as a chemist to see the connection between human health and toxic chemicals, but he could see it between toxic chemicals and the environment.
So would you tell us more about that?
MARTIN WOLF: Sure, I’d be glad to. The connection between chemicals and the environment came to me very early in my career because of my work on the fate of pesticides in the environment. As I mentioned, my first job was with an agricultural chemical company.
However, there was this general belief that according to toxicology, and I quote, “The dose makes the poison.” And companies were always careful not to use such large quantities of material that they would be toxic to the individuals using them.
And it was only over time that the realization came to me that the dose makes the poison may be true for acute toxins, things that will kill you or harm you right away, but it was less true for chronic toxins, like carcinogens and mutagens, where really, it wasn’t clear what the lowest dose could be that would cause harm.
And companies would use these chronic toxicants in their products believing the levels were low enough to be safe. And frankly, they might be right, but I think there’s evidence that they’re not right, that somehow that lower limit that we are striving for is really not well known.
And with current science, I’m not sure it can be known. We just don’t have the means to do massive animal studies at very low doses. Most animal studies are done at very high doses because you need a very large number of animals if you’re going to use low doses, and that gets to be very expensive. And also, the relationship between animal studies and actual human experience is not clear.
DEBRA: I think the difficulty is that individual human bodies, well, as well as individual creatures in the environment, would have the same situation. But individual human bodies have very different tolerances for chemicals.
This is where I think it’s difficult to find what is that dose that’s safe.
So for me, if something—my rule of thumb has always been, if there’s a question about it, like the carcinogen, if it’s been established that they’ve got a high dose that causes cancer, then I don’t know what the safe dose is. And so I just decide to apply the precautionary principle and eliminate it entirely if I can.
MARTIN WOLF: In Seventh Generation, as a company, and I personally agree with that approach, we work very hard not to intentionally use any carcinogenic or chronically toxic substances in our products. And when we learn of their presence through inadvertent contamination in the supply chain, we work very hard to get them out as quickly as we can.
DEBRA: I want to ask you—I want us to talk about the supply chain. But first, would you tell us what green chemistry is? I’m sure a lot of people hear that term, but what does that mean?
MARTIN WOLF: Well, it is a term that is subject to interpretation. There is a book that was published almost 10 years now, by
Paul Anastas and John Warner called “The Principles of Green Chemistry.”
And among the principles are to use the least hazardous substances possible to be, what they call, atom-deficient, i.e., to work with chemistries that don’t use a lot of resources to make the desired products, to look at the chemistry of nature, and try to mimic her efficiency and her elegance and her relevant safety rather than using the small molecules that I’ll call the hammer approach to chemistry—by brute force, you succeed in what you’re doing rather than using nature’s more subtle techniques.
So they have 12 principles that get to those ideas—lower, hazard and more efficiency, and mimicking nature. But I also like to think with chemistry, it goes beyond that into renewable resources, the use of natural substances rather than petroleum-derived substances. And I think we are seeing a revolution in the first of industrial chemistry in that regard.
DEBRA: I was thinking about this the other day. I tend to try to create categories of things that I can understand a category of something, and then I put products into these categories. And to me, green chemistry, the word chemistry implies to me petrochemicals. And yet, and I think you’re correct me and say all things are chemistry, that the substances in our bodies are chemistry.
And so chemistry isn’t just what goes on in a factory, correct?
MARTIN WOLF: Absolutely. We are walking chemical factories. All life is…
DEBRA: So when you talk about green chemistry, I still think of green chemistry being industrial. And then I think of a solution being beyond green chemistry.
For example, a green chemistry product might be a product made out of a known toxic plastic right polyethylene. But beyond green chemistry would be to make it out of organic cotton. And because that cotton is grown by nature, it’s out in the field, it has nothing to do with the factory until we start processing it into a product.
I just wanted to bring this up because I think that people don’t always really understand terminology. And so we hear things like green chemistry and it’s like, “What does that mean?”
MARTIN WOLF: In fact, the wall between synthetic chemistry or petroleum chemistry and bio chemistry is falling. They’re becoming more and more interchangeable as we develop ways of taking substances found in nature and converting them to molecules that we can then manipulate.
How can I say this? On both sides of the wall between petrochemicals and biochemicals, there are substances that are toxic.
DEBRA: I agree.
MARTIN WOLF: You don’t touch poison ivy. And on both sides, there are chemicals that are relevantly safe. And I agree with you. My bias is that there are more such chemicals on the natural side of the wall than the synthetic side.
We have to go beyond just the simple division into biologically-derived and petro-derived.
DEBRA: And we need to take a break, so I need to interrupt you right there. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And we’ll be back talking more about chemicals and manufacturing.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And they make a lot of household and personal care products, and are paying particular attention to getting all toxic chemicals out of their supply chain.
So Martin, explain what a supply chain is. I think I explained it a little bit in the beginning, but from your viewpoint, as somebody who is working in the supply chain, tell us what you do.
MARTIN WOLF: Your example of a salad and salad dressing is a great one. Our supply chain is the string of companies and events that leads to the production of a product.
So, we need to buy materials called surfactants that help with cleaning, and enzymes that help with cleaning, and other substances that make a product. We buy those from a company, one of our suppliers, but they also are buying raw materials from another company.
So, to make a surfactant, they might have to buy coconut oil, and they might have to buy ethanol, and they might have to buy other substances and combine them to make the surfactant. The coconut oil has to come from a plantation where the coconuts are grown.
And we take the chemical that’s produced, but it’s important for us to know all the steps in making that chemical, so we can determine where there might be the introduction of hazardous substances that we wouldn’t want to see in our product.
And as you might expect from this description, it’s a very elaborate process, and it’s not always clear what’s happening at a country that could be thousands of miles away. And of course, there are some disheartening examples.
Recently, there’s been the example of melanin in children’s formula produced in China because a supply chain supplier wanted to make it look like they had more of certain proteins in their milk than there really were, or lead and other heavy metals, and lipstick and children’s toys, phthalates and other things that shouldn’t be in consumer products.
DEBRA: And they often aren’t on the label because they’re down the supply chain.
MARTIN WOLF: That’s correct.
DEBRA: And so that’s why you don’t see them. And so we look at the labels, and think, “Well, this product only has what I see on the label.” But even an example that I often give is apple sauce. Apple sauce is just apples and water, and maybe some sugar sometimes, depending on the brand. But even if all you have is apples and water, that’s all it says on the label.
But apples contain pesticides, and water pollutants, and all these things that you don’t see.
And I think that it’s interesting that in our culture today that if you are selling a toxic apple sauce, all it says on the label is apples and water. Yet if you’re selling organic apple sauce, it has to be very carefully labeled and regulated in order for them to be able to say organic.
I think it should be the other way around. I think the label should say apples and pesticides.
MARTIN WOLF: I think you’re exactly right. But I’ll point out that in food products, in cosmetic products, you actually have an advantage because they list some ingredients, whereas in cleaning products, there’s no legal requirement to list the ingredients on the label at all, so there could be almost anything in that bottle. Unfortunately, sometimes, that’s exactly what’s there—almost anything.
So Seventh Generation has a policy of listing all ingredients on its products even if it’s not required by law, and in our cosmetic products, our personal care products for example, we go beyond the law, and also list every component in the fragrances we use because, one, we’re proud of what we do, which is to use only essential oils and plant extracts. And two, we want our consumers to know that we are using only plant extracts, that there are no phthalates or other substances to extend the fragrance or synthetic substances that smell like particular fragrance or smell like nothing that people seem to like in their air fresheners and some of their home care products.
We think it’s important that companies list ingredients, and we think it’s important that consumers read them.
But to your point, even if you list what you’re putting in the substance, there might be upstream contamination of that.
So for example, in 2010, I think it was both Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson agreed to reduce the occurrence of 1,4-dioxane, which is a probable human carcinogen in their products to 10 ppm after having much higher levels discovered in their products.
It’s not something they had intentionally, it’s not something they have to put on their labels, but it’s something that was there.
DEBRA: Doesn’t it get created like when two chemicals can come together and make a third chemical?
MARTIN WOLF: That’s exactly what happens. When the substances known as surfactants are being made, if you don’t have good process control, or even, unavoidably, in the making of some surfactants, you get 1, 4-dioxane as a byproduct.
So Seventh Generation, which I admit, at one time, used some of those surfactants, just stopped using them because we knew our consumers wouldn’t want any 1,4-dioxane in their products, and we wouldn’t want there to be any.
DEBRA: And that’s the responsible thing to do. I think that part of it is that I see a business is like an individual except that there are more people. It’s an entity. An individual is an entity, and a business is an entity. It just has more people in it.
But the issues are the same, in terms of what are your standards going to be, and what are you going to do to make a safe business, or a safe—in your case, it’s a safe workplace. But individuals, we’re saying, what can we do to make a safe home?
And what I’m hearing from you is you’re taking so much care, so much more than I typically see in a business, to know what’s going into your products.
Many years ago, 23 years ago, in fact, about the same time you and I were both looking at the sustainability of products, and I was working with some people to be manufacturing some sustainable products.
And we were looking at life cycle, and we were looking at supply chain and all these things.
I had your job in that company, where it was my job to find out what was in these ingredients that we were now going to call green products. And I was looking into chain and—I have to take a break now, but I’ll come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking with Martin Wolf, director product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is chemist, Martin Wolf, who is the director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And you probably see Seventh Generation products in all the stores that you go to, but if you don’t, you can just go to SeventhGeneration.com, and take a look.
So Martin, do you think that we’re actually in exciting times now, and I think back to 1990, that things were very different then, and that we were all saying, “Well, how do we make these products?” And that today, there’s so much more innovation in products.
MARTIN WOLF: This is a very exciting time. We see change happening in the industry. And I just do want to say that if Seventh Generation alone made products that we consider to be safer for people and the environment, we wouldn’t have a tremendous impact because we are not a big part of the cleaning product market and personal care market. We’re growing but we’re still pretty small.
So we see part of our role as getting the industry to change, and we’re very active in industry associations and also working with advocacy groups like the Breast Cancer Fund, and Women’s Voices for the Earth.
And we’ve also been really successful. We’ve made phosphate-free products that are better for the environment, and got the industry, or a part of the group that got the industry to eliminate phosphates in all auto dish products in 2010.
We’re strong advocates for ingredient communication. And the industry introduced a voluntary standard in 2010. And we were part in developing that standard. And we have had, as one of our policies, not to use any chronically toxic materials in our products. And we’re struggling and working hard to see the industry change.
And just this week, Proctor & Gamble announced they were going to stop using triclosan and diethyl phthalate in their personal care products in 2014.
So we’re seeing change happening, and it is very exciting to see.
DEBRA: It’s almost like there’s so much awareness and so much happening. It’s almost hard to keep up with it because I do see that there’s awareness on every level. But in order for us to make a big change as a society, away from toxic chemicals, we need to have regulations be in place. We need to have manufacturers be educated. We need to have consumers be educated.
Everybody along the line needs to all be in agreement that this is the direction that we’re going. And I see that happening.
But some parts are slimmer than others to catch on, get on the program.
But I see companies like yours and others that are saying, “Okay, this is what our company is going to be about.” And I see consumers deciding that that’s what it is that they want for themselves and their families.
This is so different than it was when you and I first started.
MARTIN WOLF: Absolutely. We’re seeing the so-called green segment of these categories grow much, much faster than the conventional segments, which means consumers are making that change.
And we’re also seeing the science develop, things that allowed companies to say, “Well, it really doesn’t matter or you can’t prove that it matters.”
Those excuses are starting to fray at the edges, let’s say, as more and more research is directed toward this. And some of the things you and I advocated for 20 years ago are becoming wise rather fringed things to be doing.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m seeing that. I’m seeing it. I want to get back to your supply chain. Are you now, or are there any plans to make some of that information available to consumers? I know that you’re putting ingredients on the label, but do you have a pictorial info, whatever it’s called, info picture, or something like that, that would show the layers of where, what you’re looking at, and what kinds of things that are down the line.
MARTIN WOLF: It’s funny you should ask that because that is one of my goals for this year, to get at least one of our products on our website as an infographic to show where it comes from, and where the different components are made, much like
Patagonia does with its footprint chronicle online.
DEBRA: I haven’t seen that. I’ll go take a look. That’s what I want to see as a consumer. I’d love to see an infographic that has the products at the top, and then lines coming down. At the bottom of the page, I’ve got a coconut tree, so I can see what’s going on. All these things led up through this process to become this product.
You can just see it all at once.
MARTIN WOLF: And it’s amazingly complex, but it’s certainly doable. And as I say, we’re working on it. We’ve talked to our supply chain partners, and they’re cooperating with us, which is also a change. They see the value of making this information public. We’re very excited to be working on that.
DEBRA: Well, I can hardly wait. And I hope when you have it ready that the first person you would come to is me. I want to be on the radio together.
MARTIN WOLF: Excellent. I will make sure since I now have your e-mail address to send you a notice.
DEBRA: Good. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time now today. Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered? We still have about four minutes.
MARTIN WOLF: There were three things that I was thinking about that I felt were important to say. And they are to the listeners of your program. And the first is to be mindful of what you buy because we are constantly barraged with ideas and what’s important to our family, and we really need to filter that information and think about what’s truly important to our family, and what is going to be best for their health and safety.
I also want to remind them that change is in their hands, and they should advocate for change. A very big issue facing us is updating the Toxic Substances Control Act, and a new law called the Chemical Safety Improvement Act.
And we should let out congressmen and senators know that this is important to us, so that regulations that strengthen our chemical supply chain are in place. And by strengthen it, I mean, make it safer for us as end users.
And I just want to point out that this is about our family’s health, and that’s really what’s at stake, and why wouldn’t we act to protect their health. It’s so important.
DEBRA: I’d like to answer that question because I haven’t said this yet on the show. I think the reason why people don’t act more, and I’m not picking out any individuals in saying this, but I think it has to do with love. And I think that it’s because when you really love something that you want to take care of them. That’s just the feeling that goes along with it.
And so if you love your family, you want what’s best for your family. If you love yourself, you want to have what’s best for yourself. If you love the planet, you want to have what’s best for the planet.
You want things to survive.
And I think that if people aren’t feeling that, then—we live in a culture where that’s not valued. People say that they want to be loved or whatever, but I think that real love comes from inside. And it’s within every one of us, and that part of it is to do the things that help us sustain all life.
I think that it’s a part of love, and the more we love, the more we’ll take the right actions.
MARTIN WOLF: I hope, well, in fact, that is true. I see it in myself and in my family. I have a daughter who is now a grown young woman. And I think about the things that I fed her in my ignorance because as I said, this has been a journey. And If I had known then what I know now, I would definitely have done things differently.
I think it’s important not only to show that love, but also to show the knowledge and wisdom to execute on that.
DEBRA: Well, it does take knowledge and wisdom because you could love and want to care for something, and not know what to do. And so knowledge and wisdom is the other part of it. And the more information that we can have about our consumer products […], the better off we’re going to be about that.
MARTIN WOLF: I absolutely agree with that. And let me just say, this has been a real pleasure. The time has gone amazingly quickly. There’s so much more to discuss and talk about, but I’m glad we had at least this first time together.
DEBRA: I’m glad too. And I really appreciate your being here, Martin. And you certainly can come back again because I know that you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with us. And I want to do this again, so we’ll schedule you again.
Thank you for being here.
MARTIN WOLF: It was definitely my pleasure. Thank you.
DEBRA: Good. Mine too. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I just had my 100th show last Friday, so there’s a hundred interviews you could be listening to all with people of the caliber of the guest that you just listened to, people who are making products, who are developing new ways of doing things, authors who are writing about this subject, people who are working for new regulations.
I’m just working to get everybody in the field that I possibly can to show you all the different directions, all the things that people are doing, all the voices, so that we can really understand what to do. So come back tomorrow.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Oral Irrigator
Question from Star
Hi Debra, Do you know where one can purchase an oral irrigator made of non or low toxic plastic [w/no bpa’s etc.] The one from ‘waterpic’ leaves a bitter taste to the water.
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
I have a Hydrofloss which is made with ABS plastic. It’s very hard plastic and I have not noticed any outgassing or leaching into the water. It was recommended by my biological dentist and my chiropractor.
Be sure to get extra tips. The tips get clogged after a few months and need to be replaced.
Carbon-free Water Filter?
Question from Star
I seem to react badly to carbon, but am also allergic to something (possibly pesticides) in my tap water (Berkeley, CA) so I want to buy a counter-top or portable filter without carbon. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
There are no water filter that remove the pollutants that carbon removes without carbon.
However, there are different types of carbon and various degrees of purity. Many filters are made with carbon from China that might contain contaminants.
The Pure Effect water filters I recommend contain “allergy-free” carbon that is certified by NSF. The entire unit is made in the USA.
I would suggest that you try this filter and see if you tolerate it. I’ve been told by the company that my customers have reported that they are happy with the unit as am I.
Lose Weight With Garcinia Combogia
Question from Cool girl
I read about losing weight in 28 days with Garcinia Combogia. I also read in the link that Racheal Ray tried this on her own. How reliable is this product? Is it safe to take? I’m trying to lose 25 pounds. Any suggestion in this regard would really help. I have read lot of your Q&A and I’m one of your website followers. http://www.amazon.com/Garcinia-Cambogia-Pure-Extract-Suppressant/dp/B00CDWF5A8/ref=sr_1_7?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1374909243&sr=1-7&keywords=garcinia+cambogia+extract
Debra’s Answer
Sorry, I can’t recommend that. It sounds like another marketing scheme.
The healthiest way to lose weight is to eat vegetables and protein, drink plenty of water, and exercise moderately. Let your body lose weight gradually. These quick weight loss plans are a stress on your body and also quickly release into your body a flood of toxic chemicals stored in your fat.
Show #100 – How To Earn Money Selling Toxic-Free Products & Services
It’s my hundredth show, so I’m going to celebrate with a special topic: how to make money selling toxic-free products and services. We’ll explore all kinds of businesses to get involved in and three specific business models:
- affiliate programs (www.pureeffectfilters.com)
- local businesses (www.itsournature.com)
- multi-level marketing (debralynndadd.mytouchstoneessentials.com)
Make it your business to help others live toxic-free. I’ve got three guests who are doing it and making good income. One of my suggestions is an excellent product that is widely needed, and you can get in for zero money down. Tune in and explore the possibilities.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Show #100 – How to Earn Money Selling Toxic-Free Products & Services
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Igor Milevskiy, Linda Taylor & Barbara Gitomer
Date of Broadcast: September 06, 2013
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 because, yes, it is a toxic world, but we can be free of the harmful effects of all those toxic chemicals out there by controlling the amount of toxic chemicals that we have in our homes, reduce it drastically—and that is totally possible. And we can also remove toxic chemicals from our bodies that are causing all kinds of illnesses.
In fact, the toxic chemicals that we may already have in our bodies can cause any illness and symptom in every body system.
So, this is one of the reasons why we need to be paying attention to this. You can do all kinds of things to heal your body. And if there’s still toxic chemicals in your body, then you’ll still get sick. And I want you to be well, and happy, and healthy, and productive, and have the life that you want to have without being sick.
Today is my 100th show. And I’m so pleased with this. I’m so pleased that I’ve had all these wonderful guests on. I’m so pleased that all of you have been continuing to listen and actually increasing in numbers. And 100 shows, that’s a lot of shows, Monday through Friday, every day.
So we’re having a special subject today. And we’re having three guests. What we’re going to talk about is how you can make money selling toxic-free products. And by you participating in the commerce of toxic-free products, that gets more people using them, but you also end up making money, so that you can buy—sometimes toxic-free products cost a little more. Often they don’t; they even cost less.
But I want you to be happy, healthy and prosperous, and be able to pay for whatever it is that you need to pay for in your life.
And one way you can do that—we’ve been in a down economy, and if you’re looking for some extra money, or if you need a job, you can create your own job, your own work, your own income by selling toxic-free products.
I’m going to talk today about three different ways that you can do that, three modes of commerce. And the first one we’re going to talk about is affiliate programs.
Now, what an affiliate program is where you promote a product on your website, if you have one. But you don’t need a website to be an affiliate. They want you to have a website, but that’s not the only way that you can promote. If you find a product that you’d like to sell, you can sell it, and then place the orders through your website. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell your friends and your family, or go to a farmers market or whatever it is. It’s just that the affiliate program gives you a percentage of the sale that you’ve made on behalf of the company.
And my first guest is Igor. And I have forgotten his last name, and I don’t have it written down here. What is your last name, Igor?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Milevskiy, but that’s okay.
DEBRA: I always call him Igor.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s good enough.
DEBRA: Can you back up from your microphone or your telephone a little bit because you’re getting a lot of static.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Sure. Is that better?
DEBRA: That’s a lot better.
Now, Igor is the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Filtration. And he sells a water filter, which if you’ve been listening to this show, you hear the ad on this show every day. It’s the water filter that I use personally in my own home. I’ve been using it since January, and I’m extremely happy with it.
A lot of my listeners and readers have purchased these filters, and I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails back from people telling me how happy they are with them.
And so you can become an affiliate of Pure Effect Advanced Filtration.
Igor, why don’t you tell us about your filters, a little bit about the filters, and tell us about your program?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Sure! I just want to say, by the way, congratulations on the 100th show. You’ve done a great job. And I’m happy to hear that you’re growing strong. Thank you for having me on.
Basically, our affiliate program is meant to really help people take off without any investment. The product we have is very unique. And it’s very necessary in these polluted times where water quality is getting worse and there are more chemicals in the environment. We have one of the most advanced water filters, that I’m aware of, on the market currently.
The reason for that is because we have a radiation removal technology, which helps with nuclear issues, when you have leaking power plants. We have fluoride removal technology, which is all natural. It’s not aluminum-based; other companies use aluminum. It also addresses other chemicals and contaminants.
The affiliates have an opportunity to offer this product to their friends, their contacts, and whoever they’d like without any investment. We already have a preset banners and special links that they can use. It’s as simple as filling out a form, and logging into your backend panel that we give you access to. And you get a special link, and whoever you send this link to, they click on it, they go to our site, they buy a product.
Our system automatically tracks everything, and it pays 15% per filter for the drinking water, and 8% for the whole house systems, which are much larger units.
As you are aware, it’s a good side business. It’s something a person can really make an extra income with because people needs—
DEBRA: It is.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: You’re not selling something people don’t need. It’s something people are excited about when they see this product.
DEBRA: They are. Let me just give a couple of ideas of things that I haven’t actually done, but were ideas that I thought of since I’m an affiliate of yours. One is that, especially in communities where there is fluoride in the water, you can do things like put together a flyer about the dangers of fluoride, and just start educating your community.
You can go out and speak at all the service clubs and the PTA, and all those things, and you can just put together your 18-minute speech, have some flyers to hand out that has your link on it.
And people will want to buy these filters because they’re reasonably priced. The one I have was only $319. This is an unexpected price for the amount of filtration that you get. It’s a very efficient filter for a very low price.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Professional quality unit. It’s not made in China. It’s very high quality. I’m actually thinking the price may be too low, but I’m keeping it that way for now. I think it’s going well, but we’re trying to keep it affordable.
DEBRA: Yes, it is an affordable filter that does the job of what people need because people are drinking polluted water. And when you start educating people around you about this, they’re going to want to buy this filter.
Another thought that I had was to have a business where not only do you sell the filters, but you actually go and sell them, and get paid for installation as well.
Those are two ways that you could really market this product that aren’t even online. And I know that some of my customers have been so happy with their units that they want to tell their friends.
And in fact, my first customer told a friend, and her friend bought it, and she said, “Oh, my god. Tell us what people can do if they are affiliates about the sub-affiliate program.”
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s another way to make money. That’s another feature within our affiliate program that if you sign up—if you become an affiliate and you sign up your friend as a sub-affiliate, you’re going to get 5% of their sales into your affiliate program. So they sell something, you’ll also get the trickledown effect which is automatically tracked by that tracking system I mentioned before where you get your own unique link.
So it’s pretty automated, and it’s a pretty advanced system, so I think that if somebody’s interested, we can speak more with them about it, or they could sign up and I can explain more.
DEBRA: I want to tell people that if you want to sign up for the affiliate program, please sign up as an affiliate program under me. You don’t have to buy a certain amount of water filters every month. You don’t have to invest any more. There’s no minimum purchase. You just sign up.
And if you want to sign up as a sub-affiliate under me, so that I get a little commission that helps to pay the cost of putting on this radio show, and having my website and all those things, then they’ll be a place on the application that asks you for, what is it called, the parent I.D. or something like that.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Referral or parent affiliate, yes.
DEBRA: And my number is Debra, D-E-B-R-A, 8008.
Thank you so much for being with us, Igor. If you want to look into this, you go to PureEffectFilters.com, or you can call Igor at 1-888-891-4821. And we’ll be back after this with the next idea on how you can have a business selling toxic-free products.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And in our next segment, we’re going to be talking about how you can have a local business, selling toxic-free products. And my guest for this segment is Linda Taylor. She’s the founder and owner of a business called It’s Our Nature.
Hi, Linda.
LINDA TAYLOR: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: Thanks for being with me here.
LINDA TAYLOR: My pleasure. Thank you for having me on your show.
DEBRA: So Linda’s website is ItsOurNature.com, no apostrophe in. It’s just I-T-S Our Nature dot-com. And I want to mention that if you are interested in any of this information, and you missed the URL, or you missed the phone number or whatever, you can always go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to this show again because every show is archived.
So, the way I met Linda is because Linda, she doesn’t have a brick and mortar business, but what she does is that she goes to fresh markets, she goes to festivals, she goes to the farmers market. She even sets up her business inside existing businesses like my local natural food store.
And so, I see her all over the community. And that’s how she makes her money—selling toxic-free products.
So Linda, tell us how you got started in this.
LINDA TAYLOR: Well, In 1995, I left corporate career, and I wanted to blend wellness of the earth with our own wellness. And in 1996, on Earth Day, I began with the concept of guiding nature excursions. I called it moving in the rhythm of nature with women and girls.
DEBRA: I love that.
LINDA TAYLOR: It was focused on women and girls. We did gentle kayak paddles and walks, and full moon Tai chi, experiences on the beach. It was really to connect us with nature. And because I had been in a manufacturing sales perspective in my other career, I did have an eye for quality products, and I was also, in my own personal resolution, getting more and more concerned about the chemicals that were entering into every aspect of our life.
And it just so happened that as I was beginning to explore the idea of organic cotton, and what that even meant. I was approached by a woman who had started a company called Organic Threads, and she was sourcing out chemical-free—that means cotton that is grown without chemicals, and she was also finding colored cotton that’s [faux] fiber cotton that’s grown brown and green. And she was creating socks that were manufactured in the United States.
Well, that caught my interests because we were doing a lot of walking, and obviously, it’s important to have proper support when you are walking in different areas. So I began to distribute these socks. I called it socks that would hug our feet, as we were in nature.
And then from there, because so many were concerned, rightfully so, about the hot summer sun, and the hot sun year round here in Florida, and I didn’t want people not to enjoy nature for that reason, I discovered another product which was palm frond sunhats that were made responsibly with sustainable fiber, and gave us a UPF rating of 50, and did not have any chemical content to do so.
It was natural.
DEBRA: And I should add that Linda’s business is here in Florida where I live, and we desperately need to protect ourselves from the sun.
So this is a very bio-regional and local needed product.
LINDA TAYLOR: Yes, for sure. So I began cross-marketing, the folks that were interested in the guided experiences, and were learning to love nature even more, and care about themselves were very interested in these starting out two products.
And then it just evolved from there to more and more products. In the beginning, they were hard to find because I had a criteria that it would be chemical-free fiber. It also needed to be an eco-dye, a, dye that did not use heavy metals or toxins that would harm us, even if it was put on organic fiber. And then I also became very diligent about looking for fair labor, labor that was not exploited to make the products.
And that’s when another evolution of It’s Our Nature was healthy wear for people who care. And that became almost more of a direction after about eight, nine years of my company, when as you explained, more and more market availabilities were coming about.
That was the growth of the farmers markets and the festivals.
And so because I wanted to operate my business in line with my beliefs and the idea that I had of values, of slow impact, and leaving no trace and that kind of element. So distribute these products through the farmers market was just a wonderful little avenue.
DEBRA: And I see this growing movement in farmers markets, and at least here where we are in Florida. When we go to the farmers markets, there are a lot of people who are selling craft products or moringa trees, or all kinds of things that are suitable to us locally, not just produce that comes out of a field from the farmers.
And so I think that there are a lot of opportunities to reach people. Obviously, you continue to do this as a business, so I’m assuming that you’re making money doing it.
And I just think that there’s a lot of opportunity for a lot of people in their own communities to reach people with toxic-free products where they can actually—you know, we’ve got customers walking by all day long. And they want to stop and talk and learn about the products, and that’s a good way to sell them instead of just having them sit on a shelf somewhere.
Our break is coming up. Thank you so much for joining me today, Linda. And I’m sure I’ll see at a farmers market.
LINDA TAYLOR: I look forward to that. Thank you.
DEBRA: Her website is ItsOurNature.com. And we need to take a little break here. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about how you can make money selling toxic-free products. We’ll be back. Don’t go away.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today is my 100th show. I’m just so pleased of all the guests that have been on, and all the listeners that we’ve had. And if you want to listen to any of those past shows, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, where they are all archived. And today’s show will also be archived. If you hear any information you want to hear again because you didn’t get catch it, the URL or the phone number or whatever, please just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and you can listen to the show again.
Our next segment, we’re going to talk about MLM, and I know that that’s a bad word for some people. The person that we’re going to be talking to is my upline, Barbara Gitomer. And I have to tell you that I always—I just decided I was not going to be involved in MLM at all many years ago. I didn’t even want to hear about it, but I changed my mind when I came upon a product that I believe in, not just 100% but 1000% and that is Pure Body Liquid Zeolite.
And I just think this is a product that everybody should take in the world, and everybody should take it every day for the rest of their lives is my opinion, and that’s what I’m doing because it removes the toxic chemicals from your body—heavy metals, toxic chemicals, radiation, so that it doesn’t accumulate.
It removes the accumulation, but also, as you continue to take it, it removes the toxic chemicals from your body before they start building up. And in today’s world, it’s just something that we all need.
I had to get over my idea of what MLM was, and I did. And I have to say that not all MLM companies are alike, that some of the things you’ve heard about MLM are probably true about some companies, but not this one.
And so I invited Barbara to come here today to tell us more about the products, but also about the business because if you want to make some money, this is a way to do it. Not that I’m making a million dollars a month, I’m not, because I’m not actually doing the things that you need to do to set up a downline and all these things. I’m just selling the products.
But Barbara is going to tell you how you can make an income that you can live on by selling just top quality toxic-free products.
Hi, Barbara.
BARBARA GITOMER: Hi, Debra. Congratulations on your 100th show.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so excited.
BARBARA GITOMER: You should be.
DEBRA: So Barbara, first, why don’t you start off by telling us your story briefly of how you got into MLM, and then we’ll talk about what an multilevel marketing company is, and why Touchstone Essentials is such a fabulous example of that.
BARBARA GITOMER: Okay, I’d love to do that. Thank you. I was right with you. I was certainly not looking at MLMs. It was not on my radar. I did not have any intention of doing anything like that. And many people who are in the industry did at one time have no intention of ever doing it.
My husband and I, years ago, had an entertainment and event planning business in Suburban Philadelphia. We were very successful. It was a very lucrative company. We did really well. Of course, Mark was out a lot—weekends, late nights. He was really on the road a lot. I was working the office.
But it was a fun industry to be in, the event planning industry. And we had the house we wanted, the cars we wanted, the vacations we wanted. We had a son in private college. We had another one in high school. Things were going really well until one night, when Mark was coming home from an event, a drunk driver speeding through a red light crashed into his car, and our lives changed in an instant.
He was diagnosed with what’s called a traumatic brain injury. It was a closed head injury. He looked fine except for this huge lump in the back of his head. But it really affected a lot of things. It affected his memory. It affected a lot of functions. It affected a lot of perceptions, multitasking.
He just wasn’t able to function. We ultimately lost that business.
A lot of people talk about plan B’s. You hear about plan B so much, it gets to be a cliché. But we were really needing a plan B at this point, and we hadn’t ever thought about that because we were doing really well.
But we had a very dear friend who introduced us to some products because she thought they would help Mark in his recovery. Mark had decided he wasn’t going to be go the drug or surgery route. It was going to be all natural.
And this dear friend introduced us to some products that really did help, but the products were distributed through a network marketing company. And then she introduced us to the whole concept of the business, and seriously, I would like to say it really saved our lives. I don’t know what we would have done at that point. We lost our business. We had lots of bills to pay.
We were both in that industry—we were both working the business. It’s not like I had another job outside somewhere where I was bringing an income in.
So being able to find this industry of MLM really was a lifesaver for us.
DEBRA: So now, tell us, and I’m glad that you found it because you’re a great upline for me.
BARBARA GITOMER: Thank you.
DEBRA: So tell us what are the benefits of an MLM? I know one of the things that really impressed when I heard a presentation was that because it’s a direct distribution, a company can make the products and get them straight to the consumer without having them sit on shelves for months and months and months.
And because the marketing is direct—the marketing is about one person talking to another person, or going to a website, or something like that. And so you can get more information to a person. It’s not like if you go into a store, a product on the shelf, it’s just all you have is the label. But there are all these interesting products that aren’t sold in stores, that are available through
MLM that are life-changing products. So tell us.
BARBARA GITOMER: There are so many things to talk about with what you’ve just said. So first of all, talking about getting it to a store shelf—when you think about what’s involved in getting it to a store shelf, there are so many middle men. There’s the person who’s designing it, there’s the manufacturer, then there’s shipping to somewhere shipping—there’s just lots and lots of middle men. It’s not, as you said, direct.
Well, when you have to pay all of those middle men, then the profits are going to so many different places, whereas in this industry, when you have direct marketing, then so much of that profit can go to research and development.
I think, generally, not always, but when it’s an MLM, generally, you’re going to have a real quality product because they’re able to put so much money into research and development.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a minute because we need to go to the break. But we’ll be back again with Barbara after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today is my 100th show, and we’re talking about how you can make money selling toxic-free products. Stay right there because we’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today is my 100th show. We’re talking about how you can make money selling toxic-free products. And by doing that, you’ll also create a toxic-free life for yourself, and for the world.
In this segment, we’re continuing to talk with Barbara Gitomer, who is my upline at Touchstone Essentials, a multilevel marketing company. And I said that I was not interested in MLM, but I was interested in the product.
And this is a product that you hear me talk about all the time, Pure Body Liquid Zeolite. They also have whole food supplements that I take. If you want more information about this, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and you’ll see over in the right-hand column, there’s a little button that says “zeolite” and another one with a broccoli. The zeolite one has a magnet on it. It’s not hard to find these, and just click on that, and that will take you to my website where you can find out more information.
I wanted to make sure that we are actually approaching the end of the show. I want to make sure that we explain how an MLM works, which is different from the other kinds of models that we’ve been talking about earlier in the show.
You do have to make an investment in order to be able to collect your commissions. And you do have to make a minimum purchase each month but in this particular company, the minimum purchase is the purchase that I would make any way, taking the products. There’s nothing—I don’t have to have any inventory, or anything like that. I don’t have to be calling up my friends every day.
None of that sort of thing.
And so what I find is that having the ability to make money through this MLM program, it pays for the supplements and the zeolite that I would want to take anyway. I’m getting my zeolite for free. And anybody can do this.
Anybody can do this. It’s not limited to age, or where you live, or even skill. Anybody can do this.
Barbara, do you want to talk more about the program?
BARBARA GITOMER: I just wanted to say also, just like what you do, some people would think of you as a writer, or a talk show host, but I think of you more as a teacher. And I think about that in MLM. That’s what we’re doing. We’re actually teaching. We’re teaching people about how they can live healthier, more productive lives.
When you talk about bugging your friends, that kind of thing, it’s really all in the attitude. It’s in what you believe in.
So if you are listener to Debra Lynn Dadd, then you probably agree that toxins are really poisons. We’re poisoning our bodies, and there’s something very simple we can do about it, and it’s wonderful to be able to make a living doing it.
So it’s really just teaching people about how they can be healthier, how they can actually control what’s going on in their life.
And what’s good about that word control is you can also control how you’re living, as far as when you’re working, and where you’re working, with whom you’re working, which you can’t do in Corporate America.
You get hired wherever you get a job, and then you just have to convince people of whatever that company is selling. But here, you get to choose what you want to do, and you get to choose what company you want to affiliate with.
So if it’s a company that you truly believe in the products, and truly believe in the founder and the integrity of the company, and if you see that it is attracting people that are like-minded and high quality people, then you can feel comfortable about making that investment. But as you said, with that investment, it’s really money I’d be using anyway. I’m not spending money. I’m not putting money up. I am getting top quality products that I would want to use anyway, and then sharing it with other people.
There are many, many ways to share it. One of the ways is the way you do it, Debra, through your newsletter. You have a following which is really good, but there are so many ways to just talk to people, e-mail people, do internet blasts, just going to health fairs, and meeting people there.
In any walk of life, you can talk about this because it’s a good thing to talk about—staying healthy and being healthy, and how can you improve your life, and how can you control how you’re going to be spending your time rather than someone else telling you, you’ll be here between 8 and 5, Monday through Friday. You can control when you’re going to work, and how much you’re going to work.
DEBRA: And how much money you’re going to make. This is one of the things that this is why I’m self-employed, why I’m not working for a corporation is because I decided a long time ago that if I went to a 9 to 5 job, I would only get the amount of money that my employer wanted me to make. And being self-employed, I have multiple streams of income, and I can make more or less money, depending on what I put into it, how many phone calls am I making, how many e-mails am I sending out, all those kinds of things—how many website visitors, how much my communicating on the radio.
All these things are my decision, and it results in more or less money. And I see people in this particular company making a lot of money, and the stats are just going up. Didn’t we just have our best month ever?
BARBARA GITOMER: Yes, we did. Each month, it’s increasing. And that’s because you have people who are talking about this to other people, and then those people are talking about it to other people, and then those people are talking about it to other people.
So it just grows exponentially. And the more you put into it, as you said, the more you put into it, the more you can make.
DEBRA: That’s right. I see really high quality people. There was a conference in April, and when I went to the conference, and this company is only, since February of last year, a year and a half, and I went to the first conference when it first started, and of course, it was just very new then. But this year, oh, my god, there are people who are interested in making money, that are choosing to do this and build their downline, and get the word out, and all this because the products are so good, and then can see that they can really make money doing this, and that the company is going to be there. And it’s high integrity.
Some of the best people that I’ve ever met, I’ve met in this company. And I’m really not trying to push MLM on anyone by saying this. I’m just trying to say that if you want to make money, that you should take another look at this, if you think that MLM is something that is not workable because it really is, and it really depends on the people who are involved, and it depends on the product. It depends on how the system, how the program is set up.
Barbara, can you just talk a little bit about the compensation program or things that you might tell somebody if they’re evaluating an MLM because I know this isn’t the first one that you’ve been in.
BARBARA GITOMER: That’s true. Well, one of the things I just want to point out with what you were saying is that making money is a wonderful thing, but what we love about this is that every time we make money, it’s because we’ve helped somebody. If it was all about the money, then it wouldn’t do it for us. It really has to come from the heart.
DEBRA: I totally agree. I’m not doing it because I was looking for MLM. I’m doing it because I found a product that I think is something that can help everybody with the problem that I’m working to solve.
BARBARA GITOMER: So when you’re looking for an MLM, then you want to look for just that. We don’t resonate with people who just brag about checks. We resonate with people who are passionate about changing people’s lives. That’s one of the things you want to look at.
You want to look at the founder. You want to look at how are they paying.
When it comes to compensation plans, there are all different kinds, but we feel that if you give lots of value to the people that you’re dealing with, then the check is going to take care of itself. So you just have to keep giving value to people.
If you want me to cover a little bit—i mean, basically, you are paid—
DEBRA: Actually, we only have a couple of minutes left now. I just wanted to make sure that people know that there’s just a lot more information. I’ve interviewed the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials, Eddie Stone, several times, and you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and type in “Touchstone Essentials,” and you’ll get all his interviews, and you can hear him, and why he founded the company and what he’s about, and the integrity with which these products are made.
So Barbara, I just want to make sure I got that in. But is there any final thing that you want to say?
BARBARA GITOMER: One of the things that I did not cover when you’re choosing one is you want to be sure that you can be passionate about the product. And you want to be sure that you’re paid based on the movement of that product, and not on the act of signing up.
We’re a product passionate company, and when you feel that product passion, and you talk to other people about it, then they want to share it with others as well. And it’s that constant sharing that’s going to create checks.
DEBRA: Yes, I would agree. I would agree. So thank you so much for being with us, Barbara. And I’m sure I’ll talk to you soon.
BARBARA GITOMER: I’m sure. Thanks for having me also.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So that was my little summary for today of how you can make money selling toxic-free products. You can go to DebrasList.com, or you could just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and across the top, there’s a menu, and if you click on “shop,” it will take you to Debra’s List, and there are hundreds of websites that are selling toxic-free products.
And if you want to get some ideas of what kinds of things are available, you might want to open some kind of shop, or go to farmers markets like Linda does, or whatever, just start thinking about how can you put together something so that the way that you make money also does good to help people.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
I met my guest Annie B. Bond many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. We’ll be talking about how to clean your home with natural substances you probably have in your kitchen, plus a few more that are easy to find and inexpensive. We’ve both been cleaning toxic-free for years, so we have a lot of experience and knowledge between us. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: September 05, 2013
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 we need to be doing this show and you all need to be listening because there are toxic chemicals out there. They’re all around us.
They’re in consumer products. They’re even in our bodies. And many people, including myself, were born with toxic chemicals in our bodies because they’ve been ubiquitous in the world since the mid-1940s. So, a lot of people are being affected by toxic chemicals and not even knowing it. And that’s why I do this show, so that you can learn where there are toxic chemicals, what they’re doing to you and your loved ones, and what you can do to be free of their harmful effects. That’s the whole idea of being toxic-free, is to be free from the harmful effects of toxic chemicals.
Today we’re going to be talking about cleaning, cleaning products and cleaning products that you can make right in your own home. And cleaning products are actually one of the first things that I recommend to people that you start with in your home.
It’s just like a basic, basic, basic thing because cleaning products are so toxic.
The labeling of cleaning products is governed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission under something called the Hazardous Substances Labeling Law. And you may have seen on the backs of cleaning products that they have certain words like “toxic,” “highly toxic,” “extremely dangerous,” “poison,” “warning,” “caution,” skull and crossbones. And all of these are words that are required by law to put on these products because they’re so toxic.
And we’ll talk about that a little bit more what those words mean and what kind of toxic chemicals are in cleaning products.
We’ll talk about that today.
My guest today is Annie B. Bond. And I met her many years ago when her publisher asked me to write a foreword to her first book, Clean & Green. Now, Clean & Green, I still have my copy of Clean & Green sitting right here on my desk. And it’s the one that Annie herself gave to me all those years ago with her autograph on it. And I still use this book. This is one of the books that I think that—you know there are other green cleaning books that have been written since. But I think it was the first.
And it’s still, I would say, one of those classic books that everybody needs to have on their shelves.
She’s also written a book called Better Basics for the Home which has a lot. It’s kind of an updated version. It has a lot of cleaning formulas in it. Where I have spent the bulk of my time looking at what are less toxic products people can buy, Annie has spent her time researching and writing about what are the ways that you can do things at home to make things yourself.
Hi Annie! Thanks for being with me today.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thanks, Debra. I’m delighted to be here as always. It’s a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you.
DEBRA: Yes, you’re welcome. Annie’s been here several other times. And so, after you listen to our show live here today, you could go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you could just enter “Annie Bond” in the search box, and her other shows will come up because all the shows that we do here are recorded and archived. So, even if you want to listen to today’s show again, if you heard something interesting, and you want to go back and listen to it again, all you have to do is just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look up the show and you can listen to the archives.
So, how is it in upstate New York today?
ANNIE B. BOND: Lovely, just beautiful! It has a touch of fall in the air, but it’s nice, dry, cool, and lovely day. Thank you.
DEBRA: Well, I think there’s a touch of fall here too even though we don’t have leaves falling like you do and it’s doesn’t get as cold here in Florida. There’s something about the angle of the sun. When it gets to September, it’s not so overhead and hot as it is in the middle of summer. And that’s kind of how I tell that autumn’s approaching here.
ANNIE B. BOND: Well, the angle of the sun makes a big difference . In February here, I always know there’s a shift because, suddenly, the sun is low, it shines on the windows more. It’s just these little subtle things that tell us where we are and what we’re doing…
DEBRA: …and what time it is.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
So, tell us a little bit—I know that you’ve told us your story before on other shows. But let’s just start with how did you get to be interested in this subject, just a little brief synopsis. And why did you pick cleaning to be the first subject that you research and write about?
ANNIE B. BOND: Well, especially because if there is anybody that hates to clean, it’s me. So the irony of my writing a book on cleaning has never escaped people that know me.
Well, I thought I wanted to sort of comment and jump off on something you said about your research of products and I tended to research the formulas. And I think I’m happy to say that my books are probably a little obsolete by now because of the fact that there’s now a green product on the market for just about anything you want to do, a healthy non-toxic product for just about anything whereas back when I wrote Clean & Green in 1988 and ’89, for example, that just wasn’t the case.
And so, if you wanted to peel wax off the floor or something like that, you just have to dig into the formulas because there just wasn’t to learn about what to do. I just wasn’t finding enough products to cover everything. And so that was I think part of where I went in.
And I say my books are obsolete, but a lot of us love the sort of DIY, the whole do-it-yourself. And that’s the basic kind of feeling. And there’s a beautiful simplicity to, I think, just having a few ingredients in your kitchen to clean with. So, that certainly tapped into a genuine interest of mine.
But I, like you, came into this field unexpectedly. I was working at a restaurant that had a gas leak. And it sent 80 people to the hospital in 1980. I was waitressing, and so I was breathing in the fumes very deeply. And at that moment, I got what I have been told was permanent central nervous system damage.
And then, our apartment building was exterminated with a pesticide that’s been taken off the market because it’s so neurotoxic.
And so, that one-two punch to my body put me in the hospital for three months. I was extremely sick.
And I’m ever grateful to a sister of mine who just could not believe what had happened to me. I was fine, and then I wasn’t fine just on a dime. And she found one of the first environmental medicine doctors in the world at that time. This is by then 1980.
And so thank goodness for that or I would’ve frankly been in and out of state mental hospitals my whole life because I have various central nervous system kind of reactions. I am forever grateful.
And I spent the next eight years learning how to live in our society without chemicals. You just don’t know how many there are until you try to live without them. And I moved 10 times in four years and on and on. You think you’re fine, and then somebody half a mile away start spraying their trees for something, pesticide, and you happen to have your windows open and it all blows in. It took a long time for me.
But once I found a place to live that is a sanctuary in that way for pesticide drift, especially for me (it’s what I’m most sensitive to), I have lived a normal life for 25 years, whereas when I was really sick, I couldn’t even go through New York City without an industrial gas mask. But learning how to live without chemicals has completely transformed it so I can lead a normal life.
And as long as I come home to a healthy homes, then I can be exposed to things. And so, that’s what I love to tell people that aren’t even close to being as sick as I was. Just make your home a sanctuary because then it’ll help you recoup and recover regardless of what you sort of stumbled into out there.
DEBRA: And I’m so glad that you mentioned all that and told that part of your story. Toxic chemicals can do bad things to your body. It happened to you, and it happened to me. But both of us are examples of people who have recovered and can go out and travel and eat in restaurants and go to the movie and do all those things that people do that. But because we come back home to our non-toxic homes, then our bodies have the opportunity to recover from that exposure.
What happens for most people is they go out into the world, and they have no place to come home to that’s safe. And that’s why they end up with all these body burden.
We need to take a break, but we’ll be back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of Clean & Green and Better Basics for the Home. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Talk Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of Clean & Green and Better Basics for the Home. Annie, before we start talking about what are some things that people can do at home to make their own cleaning products, let’s just talk about the cleaning products we don’t want them to use, the stuff that’s in the supermarket.
I used to tell people that they could just go to a natural food store and buy anything, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore. I like making my own myself, and I do.
When I first was dealing with this many, many years ago, as you said, Annie, there was not many commercial products to choose from. And so I just started making my own. And I just continued to do that because it’s so easy. And that’s what I became accustomed to. But I do try a lot of the new products and see.
So, let’s talk about first the warning labels that are on the products. Do you want to make a comment about that?
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I would love to! I’m glad you brought that up. It’s one of the things I often give people as a wonderful starting point because it’s a little overwhelming to get started.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: And so, I just sort of call them “signal words.” And they’re on the bottles, as you mentioned. And so what I suggest is you go to your cleaning cupboard, wherever that may be, if you have one or wherever you keep your cleaning products. And you go through the products, and you remove everything that has a signal word that’s stronger than “caution.”
And call your community recycling center, see when they have a toxic waste pick-up.
I know a lot of people recommend you use something up, but I don’t with toxic products.
DEBRA: I agree. I don’t recommend that either, yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: So, that gives you a good starting point. At that point, you’ve removed solvents that are neurotoxic, a lot of pesticides, things like that, petroleum distillates that are flammable and neurotoxic and problematic in your house.
So, that leaves us in a range of products with a caution. I’m not suggesting that they’re all safe, because they’re not, but at least you’ve eliminated some of the real dangers. But detergents have cautions on them—and as well they should because a lot of children end up in poison control centers because they’ve drunk some detergent or something like that.
And you know, detergents aren’t natural materials. They’re not found in nature. In our society, it makes sense that we use a lot of detergents because, for a lot of myriad reasons (which we could talk about)— I use them myself because I have hard water.
And if I didn’t, I’d end up with a lot of soap scum and things like that. But they’re not 100% safe. But wouldn’t you agree that just clearing everything out that’s more dangerous than a “caution” is a good starting point.
DEBRA: I think that that’s an excellent starting point. And the thing is that if you see one of those warning labels on the product, then that is at least—there are so many products out there that should have warning labels that don’t. But in the area of cleaning products and pesticides, they have these warning labels on them. So if you see a warning label, don’t use the product.
Now, I agree with you, Annie, about the caution labels. And there’s one in particular, one instance I want to make sure that everybody understands. One of the things that they put warning labels on is for an inhalant dust hazard. And so something could have a warning label on it for that and have no toxic chemicals at all, that it’s just a dust hazard. And one of the examples is like polishing Bon Ami polishing cleanser, one of my favorite least toxic things that I’ve been recommending for years. In fact, at the time period, when Annie and I met, Bon Ami was one of the only cleaning products I can tell people to use.
ANNIE B. BOND: I remember, yes.
DEBRA: Yeah! And I remember, the very first book that I ever wrote, it was called A Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive. I self-published it. This is way back in 1982. And all throughout the book, I kept saying, “Use baking soda for this. Use baking soda for that.” And a friend of mine looked at it and said, “The title of this book should be Use Baking Soda for Everything.”
But the point I’m wanting to make here is that there may be a warning label like on Bon Ami where it says “caution” because of the dust hazard, but there’s nothing in it that you need to be cautious about except breathing the dust as a particle.
So, if you see a caution, just take a look and see is the caution there because it’s a powder or is it there because there’s a slightly toxic chemical in it. And that’s just something to distinguish.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I would agree. And another product that I love—I was just trying to find my box, but I don’t want to be wandering around the house while I’m on the radio. So I won’t delve into that—is washing soda.
It’s actually very alkaline. And people get alarmed because the recommendation on the box is to wear gloves when you use it.
And it’s only because it’s very alkaline. It doesn’t really burn your hands badly—I mean, not even badly, it doesn’t burn your hands. But it’s sort of like being extra careful as to use.
I would think there’s probably a caution on that box as well because it’s so alkaline. But because it’s so alkaline, that’s also what makes it wonderful. That’s the product I found to peel the wax off the floors, for example.
So, in my research in the ‘80s, we moved into—one of our moving 10 sometimes before here—an apartment that had a wax, a scented wax, on the kitchen floor. And I just absolutely had to get it off. I ended up using a washing soda paste, very damp.
And it just peeled the wax right open. It was fantastic! That became my solvent alternative.
But it’s sort of like a slight slippery slope because you end up wanting to work gloves or being told to wear gloves. But there are no toxic fumes. But any time I want a solvent […], that’s what I use because it works so well.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that it acted as a solvent. But you probably said that in one of your books and I just forgot.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, that’s exactly right. However, you have to be careful. If you use too much, of course it will peel paint off the wall. You could dilute it like a quarter of a tub to a gallon of water, you don’t have to worry about that kind of thing. But it’s amazing for like cleaning soot or heavy-duty engine oil spill or things like that.
The heavy duty cleaning, that’s when I use washing soda. And I just love it for those.
DEBRA: Well, we need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of Clean & Green and Better Basics for the Home. And we’ll be right back. Don’t go away!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of Clean & Green and Better Basics for the Home.
I want to tell you that on Clean & Green, there’s a subtitle that says 485 Ways to Clean, Polish, Disinfect, Deodorize, Launder, Remove Stains, Even Wax Your Car without Harming Yourself or the Environment.” And Better Basics for the Home says “868 Practical Formulas, All-Purpose Household Cleaners, Body Creams and Lotions, Laundry Products, Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living.”
So, either of these books, both of these books, they’re a tremendous treasure chest of information on how you can go about these simple tasks of daily life in a way that is not toxic. And a lot of these formulas, you can make just with things that you already have in your kitchen. And so it’s worth checking this out. Everybody should have both of these books. That’s my recommendation.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you. And I just loved writing them too. Of all the work I’ve done in years, I think that was right up. The Better Basics, both books, are right up there. It’s some of my favorite things I ever did. I love those formulas and testing every single one. I had a checkered kitchen floor once. And each check had a different cleaning system on it. Anyway…
DEBRA: Well, Annie, I don’t think they’re obsolete. I think that this is the way. I really think that we should be moving back towards taking responsibility ourselves to make the things that we have because, more and more, the toxic chemicals are hidden in places that we don’t even know about. They’re not on the labels.
In fact, cleaning products as a class of products, are not required by law to list their ingredients on the label. And that’s the reason why they have these signal words of “caution” and…
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah! It’s just absolutely horrifying! That’s horrifying. It is really horrifying.
And there’s another aspect of this which I think is really an important one. And that is the price of it.
I was on a radio show in 1993 or something called Smart Money. And they asked me before I came on to compare the price of my formulas to going through the supermarket and find the equivalent products. And so, I religiously, very carefully, did analyze this ounce by ounce comparatively.
And so, the price for about a time for buying just the basics for cleaning the house in the supermarket was $63. And from my ounce to ounce, including a very expensive essential oil, which was tea tree oil—which at the time I think was $8 a bottle or something—it was $11. So, the contrast in the price of it is dramatic in its own right. So that’s really nice.
And then, I think that we just can’t get across enough how the simplicity of it is just such a lovely way to have be part of your life.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree. Well, tell us what are the basic things that you use to clean your house. And then, I’ll tell you mine.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I think that there’s a really important—I mean, I have a story. Right now, right here, my daughter just moved into a new apartment. It’s new to her, an apartment, with a couple friends. And they ended up getting a couch. They’re recently out of college. And so, there have been a couch that they have that was in somebody’s basement, and they sold it out.
And they put it in their living room. And of course, it does reeked of mold and mildew.
I could tell the story of my suggestions to her which will give you the basics in a way. But also, something awful has been spilled on something. So, the first thing I suggested that she do is she can take out her bottle of tea tree oil, which I know she had, and put a teaspoon of tea tree oil to a cup of water and spray the entire couch because it’s a broad spectrum fungicide and the smell will lift in a few days and so will the mildew. And in fact, that really, really helped enormously.
But then she had some stains on some carpets and some funny smells. And it was hard to know what was what. And so I want to talk a little bit about baking soda and vinegar because a lot of people mix the two, and there’s sort of a bubbling. And it’s important to realize that when you get that bubbling, you’re actually neutralizing the power of the other.
So, just going with straight vinegar, it’s really good to have an acidic cleanser. And that kills a lot of bacteria, mold, germs and things like that. It’s wonderful for that.
The alkaline with the baking soda has a whole other smell/odor neutralization. And also, alkaline minerals tend to go through gunk and eat it up and dissolve it and make it easier to clean. So that’s why baking soda is great for cleaning the bottom of the oven, for example, if you make it wet enough and you use enough of it.
So, we didn’t know if some of the odors were alkaline or if they were acidic or whatever. But you would alternate baking soda or vinegar.
So, she started them by sprinkling baking soda to neutralize odors that were more acidic based actually. And then, she would clean that up and then vacuum really well. And then, she would spray with vinegar.
For example, who knew, I found, over the years, I’m very sensitive to perfume. And vinegar is the best way for me to get rid of a perfume smell.
DEBRA: Oh, I’m so glad you said that because this is one of my top questions on my blog: “How do I get perfume out of whatever?”
ANNIE B. BOND: And I have an infrared sauna in my house because I have a terrible case of Lyme disease. And that’s back when they treated it with high heat. And after going to my doctor’s office in my bathing suit in the middle of January, I’m just like, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Actually, I was in the sauna, in this high heat, and we had a fire alarm. And I had to go on the parking lot right in my bikini… in January… and I’m near upstate New York. So that was that for doing that.
Anyway, somebody came to my house, used my sauna, and they had tons of perfume on them. I could not get the smell out. I tried everything! And then, I had sprayed the whole thing with vinegar. And within an hour or two, the smell is gone.
DEBRA: Excellent! Excellent, excellent.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, that was a great, great find. But that’s why Debra and I, to the audience here, are great resources because we’ve spent years struggling with these odors and things.
DEBRA: Yes, exactly!
ANNIE B. BOND: And it’s not always easy, learning how to peel wax off of the floor or get perfume out of the sauna, who knows?
But at any rate, I love vinegar now. If you have germs you’re worried about, you could spray straight vinegar on a bathroom door knob. I mean, there are things that work really well for that.
My favorite recipe of all…
DEBRA: Wait! Before you tell us that, we need to take a break, so I don’t want you to get started with the recipe. But we’ll cover it after we come back.
ANNIE B. BOND: Okay!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Annie B. Bond, author of Clean & Green and Better Basics for the Home. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is my very dear and very long time friend, Annie B. Bond. And we’re talking about how we clean our houses with just the basic, fundamental thing.
Annie and I have both been through our own trials with being exposed to toxic chemicals. And we’ve both recovered and live normal lives. So we have a lot of experience with this.
Okay, Annie, this is…
ANNIE B. BOND: Thanks, Debra. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. This is our last segment. So let’s get down to just the nitty-gritty of let’s both talk about the basics of what we do to clean our houses. So how do you scour your sink?
ANNIE B. BOND: Okay! So, I was going to start with my favorite bath tub cleaner, but let me just move to the sink. I mean, my bath tub cleaner, I would use for the sink too. But this is what I love to whiten my sink. It’s sort of a newer discovery, but it’s sodium bicarbonate. And Eco [Verb], for example, has a box for their laundry. Whitener, it’s a combination with hydrogen peroxide. And it is an incredible whitener. So, I’ll fill the sinks with water, and I’ll add a quarter of a cup or so of sodium bicarbonate and let it sit there for a while, an hour or two, and it just sparkles.
But if you can’t find it, or that’s a little too complicated, the best scrub that I know of is you pour about a half a cup of baking soda into a bowl, and you squirt in enough of a green dish detergent, that liquid dish detergent, into the bowl and stir it—or an all-purpose cleaner or soap, liquid soap, would be fine. And you’d stir into a texture like frosting. And then, you scoop it on a sponge, and you scrub with that.
And the thing I love about this is that it rinses incredibly well. So, for someone who grew up back in the days when the scouring powders is used for clean the bath tubs, and you end up sitting in the grit because you could never really rinse it well enough, this is a fabulous product because it just rinses beautifully. It cleans well.
I have people writing me from all over the world about this formulas as being the best ever. And people have tried to monetize it and put it in packages and everything. But it’s very simple and it’s the easiest thing. And so I never don’t have that around.
Also, as a heads-up about that, it works really well too for cleaning stainless steel appliances. You just have to rinse it.
And if you can’t get all of the residue off for stainless steel, you just spray it with a little bit of vinegar and that will neutralize the baking soda actually. And you wipe it all off in the end. So, that’s a wonderful product.
And then, for cleaning the windows, for example, a lot of people went the wrong way in the early ‘90s thinking—because a lot of editors would say on radio, “Just clean your windows with vinegar, and that’s all you need.” And then, a lot of people abandoned non-toxic cleaning because they did that and they got streaks. And the reason, most simply, is because the residual wax and the cleaning in their window cleaner that they’ve been using for so many years have to be taken off first. After that, the vinegar alone would have been perfect. But they need to add a little dab of detergent in liquid or soap into the water and vinegar spray for the windows, and then they’ll be fine from then on with just vinegar. But that’s a good thing.
DEBRA: I use vinegar to clean my windows, but I dilute it half and half with water. And I use a soft cotton cloth, like a cotton rag, to clean the windows because it’s better than paper towels.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, absolutely! Yeah, no, that’s lovely. And you wouldn’t have had the residue problem. So many people have the residue problem where they just need to start the first time with a little bit of soap or detergent in that.
Washing soda is available in the laundry section of the supermarket. If you like sort of an all-purpose spray cleaner, if you put about a half a teaspoon of washing soda to about a cup of really hot water in a spray bottle and then a few squirts of liquid soap or detergent and shake it up. That’s a great all purpose cleaner. The washing soda will take away some of the heavier dirt and stains. And I think it’s a great product.
You could try up to a teaspoon of washing soda. But the problem is that it will clog the sprayer. So you just need to not add too much.
What else? What would be another basic thing?
DEBRA: Laundry.
ANNIE B. BOND: Laundry. Well, one thing to never do is to use the commercial dryer sheets or use any detergent that has a scent in it. The chemicals in those products are absolutely sort of mind-boggling. I did a whole research once on dryer sheets, and I couldn’t believe how many people have become seriously ill from asthma especially from using a lot of dryer sheets. The chemicals in them are really striking.
And so, I recommend, if you want to soften your clothes, that kind of thing, you could add a half a cup of vinegar in your rinse water. But the key is really to go unscented everything to start with.
DEBRA: Absolutely! In fact, we were talking before about taking everything out of your house with a warning label on it. I strongly suggest that you take everything out of your house that’s scented as well unless it has a natural essential.
ANNIE B. BOND: Absolutely! I mean, my daughter and I, I rented a small cabin for us, a cottage, at Cape Cod this summer. We walked in and we both almost keeled over because of the smell just from the laundry room.
I boxed everything up and put it out in another shed. And it took about a day for the fumes to go. But I don’t know how people live with those. It was so powerful. Yesterday, I had a repairman come to my house, and he just reeked of perfume. And I realized that what it was was the scent from the detergent on this clothes. He wasn’t wearing any scent, but he smelled like a girl because it was the detergent.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah! It was the detergent. Absolutely! It’s unbelievably strong. And so, I whole-heartedly agree. But many chemically sensitive people can tolerate—many if not most maybe—many of the pure essential oils. And so I don’t hesitate to use those if needed for certain types of things because they are very antibacterial and antifungal and antiseptic.
And if you want a scent, I can put a few drops of lavender essential oil in a cotton cloth and put it in a dryer sometimes if I want to sort of freshen up the smell of it. But there are many things you can do without having to resort to synthetic chemicals.
DEBRA: That’s right! And in the beginning when I first started learning about all of this, I thought, “Oh, scent is scent.” But it isn’t. What we’re talking about as being harmful is the synthetic fragrances that are made from petroleum, from crude oil. And they’re very, very different from the natural fragrances that are made by plants.
ANNIE B. BOND: And your body knows it.
DEBRA: Yeah, your body does know it. Some people can’t tolerate any of them if your body has been damaged by the synthetic ones. Some people can’t tolerate the essential ones. But when I found out that I do fine with essential oils, it was just so wonderful to have those real fragrances as opposed to the artificial ones.
Did you know that we can actually thank Coco Chanel for artificial fragrances?
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, really?
DEBRA: Yes, because it was just at the time in history when they started discovering that—I mean, scientists were playing around in the lab. And before Coco Chanel, all fragrances were essential oils. But what happened was that women would put it on, and by the end of the evening, they couldn’t smell it anymore, or the men that they wanted to impress couldn’t smell it anymore. And then, Coco Chanel happened to be in a laboratory, and she saw this synthetic fragrance. She smelled it and realized that it lasted . And she said to the chemist, “Please make me…”
And what she wanted was a fragrance that was not like anything in nature. She wanted something totally abstract. And so, that’s how we got the first perfume, Chanel no. 5 was the formula #5 in the laboratory. That’s why it’s called Chanel no. 5.
ANNIE B. BOND: Wow!
DEBRA: And from there, artificial scents started going throughout the industrial world.
ANNIE B. BOND: Wow! What year was that? Do you have any idea?
DEBRA: 18-something I think or early 1900s. I don’t remember.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, incredible.
DEBRA: Yeah, this is how these things happen.
Anyway, we’ve got just about a minute left. Is there anything, any final words, you’d like to leave us with?
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I would say just to do it. It’s just amazing. Some people do it all at once. Some people do it step by step, But the baby sleeps better. The house smells better. Everybody’s more relaxed. It just makes a huge difference. So it’s more of a sanctuary at home. And it’s a wonderful thing to do.
DEBRA: It is, I agree. And I think that I just like to close with a point that you started off with about having your home be your toxic free sanctuary, knowing that there’s a place that you can go where, even though it might not be 100% toxic-free (because air is still coming in from the outside), but there’s so much that we can do in our homes that so significantly reduces the amount of toxic chemicals that our bodies are being exposed to that it can literally turn your life around.
Annie and I both had that experience of just working on the toxic exposure that we have in our homes and really doing nothing else because, at the time, there was nothing else to do. And just taking that one step has restored our health and allowed us to continue to have good health. Just taking that step has allowed us to no longer be suffering with the toxic exposures.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back tomorrow.
Gluten-Free Skin Products
My guest today is Anthony Vargas, Founder and Owner of Tilth Beauty, and former Vice President of Research and Development for Elizabeth Arden. We’ll be talking about his natural-based, high-performance, gluten-free skincare line, where gluten is found in beauty products, how gluten in skin care products can affect our health, and who should be concerned about gluten exposure through the skin. Based on three decades of experience, research, and development, each Tilth Beauty product has been painstakingly crafted with a unique and potent blend of botanical and industry -proven ingredients without ANY potentially harmful elements commonly found in most skincare products: no parabens, phthalates, sulfates, petroleum-based products, silicones, synthetic fragrances or GMOs, animal/dairy-derived products, or artificial colors. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/tilth-beauty
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Gluten-Free Skin Products
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Anthony Vargas
Date of Broadcast: September 04, 2013
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 we do this because it is a toxic world. There are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products, in the air we breathe outside, in the water we drink. They’re just all over the place. But they’re not everywhere because there are many things that we can do to find products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them and things that we can do to remove toxic chemicals from our homes and our bodies and even things we can do to restore our health after our bodies have been damaged by toxic chemicals. And those are the things that we talk about on this show.
Today is Wednesday, September 4th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where the sun is shining. And today, we’re going to talk about beauty products—not just beauty products, skin care products, luxurious skincare products, anti-aging skin care products that are all natural, some organic, and also gluten-free. We’re going to be talking about why it’s important that everybody pay attention to gluten-free. I’m going to tell you my own personal story about that.
So, before we do that though, I want to talk a little bit about something I was thinking about this morning. And that is, yesterday, we were talking about learning to do new things. And I was telling you a story about how I now, because I don’t have my husband of 26 years to change a tire on my car, need to learn how to change a tire—and many other things around the house that he used to do for me. And I was likening that to having to learn about toxic chemicals.
But there’s another related thing. And that is knowledge. If we have knowledge about something, knowledge and skill, then we don’t have to be the victim of it. If we know where the toxic chemicals are in products, then we have a choice. If we don’t know, we have no choice. We’re just going to buy anything that gets advertised, anything we see on TV.
But if we have knowledge, if we know what toxic chemicals are, if we know what they can do to our bodies, if we know where to find them in products, and more importantly, even how to recognize a product that doesn’t have toxic chemicals, then we have a choice, then we have freedom to choose.
And that’s why we’re here doing this show. That’s why I’m here. I want you to have the same choices that I have and to be able to decide if I have toxic chemicals in my life or not. I want you to have that choice too.
So, today, my guest is Anthony Vargas. He’s the founder and owner of—well, he’s the founder and owner of a company. The brand is called Tilth Beauty. And he’s the former Vice President of Research and Development for Elizabeth Arden. So he’s been working in the business for 30 years. He knows all about what goes on in the cosmetics world. And we’re going to be talking about his new brand, Tilth Beauty and what’s special about it.
Anthony, thanks for being with me today.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Great, Debra! I’m glad to be here on your show today.
DEBRA: And thank you. I’m very happy that you’re here. So, former Vice President of Research and Development for Elizabeth Arden. How did you get from there to Tilth Beauty?
ANTHONY VARGAS: Well, that’s such a great question. And it was about two years ago that I decided to create my own line of products. And I had this vision where I created a line of products that didn’t have any of the questionable ingredients that you’re hearing about in the news everyday—things like the parabens, the pthalates, and sulfates, and synthetic fragrances, and even silicone these days. But also, what was important is gluten-free.
In the last, I would say seven years or so, we were getting more and more inquiries from actually people who had Celiac Disease. They would call us, and they would ask if we had any products that had gluten in them. And the first time we got the calls, we really didn’t have a list of gluten-free products. So we had to go back and look at all of our skincare products and determine if they had gluten in them or not and have a list of the ones that were gluten-free and the ones that had gluten in them. So, when they would call, then we could tell them.
But the calls started getting more and more and more. And then, also, there were a lot of other news stories that were coming out. You heard about the parabens being implicated in breast tumors. Sulfates, they could contain carcinogens within them.
And I looked around at a lot of the products, and I said, “You know, we have a lot of these ingredients within the products that are out there in the cosmetic industry.”
And the European Union is very tough. I think they’re tougher than the FDA is as far as stating which ingredients you can have and can’t have in your products. As a matter of fact, they have a list of over 400 materials that they banned from skin care products or any kind of topical products. And then, yet some of those materials are still here in products in the United States.
I looked around and I said, “You know, I need to develop my line of products without any of these materials so that a consumer doesn’t have to really scratch their when they’re buying my products.” And we go along. We actually put a little sticker on the product saying if it’s gluten-free or paraben-free and sulfate-free.
And yeah, that’s why I decided to do this, because I wanted to give the consumer a line that, basically, they didn’t have to question if they’re putting it on their skin or not.
Now, you have to go the other way too. We have a lot of naturally derived materials in our products. And what people have to also consciously know, if they’re allergic to any kind of a natural type product. You’ve got that lying there too.
And that’s why I decided to do this. We came out with a fairly extensive line of products last year.
It’s something that I think a lot of people are looking for now besides people with Celiac Disease looking for gluten-free products. There’s a lot of people that are looking for products that are paraben-free, sulfate-free.
I was in the supermarket the other day, and I was looking at a lot of the body wash products that are out there on the shelves. And I would say probably over 95% of them still had sulfates in them.
DEBRA: Yes! Yes, they do. They do.
ANTHONY VARGAS: It was very difficult to find one that didn’t.
DEBRA: Well, I think that you’re doing a really good job when you said that you wanted to create a product that consumers wouldn’t question, that they wouldn’t have to question because I know that a lot of consumers want to have those kinds of products exactly. There are so many toxic products on the market that people have to read the labels. And now that you’ve already done that work for them, and only included the safe ingredients, I think, is a really good service, especially since there are so many beauty products to choose from. It’s really good that that was your criteria.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, it absolutely was. And the one thing that you had mention is that a lot of the consumers really don’t read the labels.
DEBRA: They really don’t. And even if they do read the labels, who knows what all those ingredients are. I know that when I started 30 years ago, I was running around with a chemical dictionary because I’d read a label, and I wouldn’t understand it at all.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah, that’s very true.
DEBRA: And even today, I have to look them up.
ANTHONY VARGAS: The ingredients are put on the carton according to the chemical structure.
And there is this body over in Washington that oversees that. It’s what we call the INCI name, the International Nomenclature Ingredients Standards. And they determine what the name of your ingredient is going to be. And it gets this very long name.
You look at it and you’re going to yourself, “Oh, my God! Can I even pronounce that?”
But there’s an easy way to identify some of these materials. The parabens are labeled as parabens. You’ll see them labeled as like “methyl-paraben” or “propyl-paraben” or “ethyl paraben.”
Gluten, anything that has hydrolyzed wheat or triticum in the name or vulgari, you know it’s going to be a gluten product. However—and this is something that people really don’t understand—sometimes, like vitamin E, that could be derived from wheat. But that’s not gluten-free.
DEBRA: Aha! Well, we need to take a break. And we’re going to talk more about that when we come back.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty, a line of super skin care product that are gluten-free as well as natural and organic. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty.
And Anthony, before we go on, I’m sure many people don’t know what the word tilth means. And you talk about this on your website. I know you have a page where you explain what tilth is. So tell us what tilth is.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, sure! A lot of people ask that question. And basically, what tilth means is the condition of the soil on how it holds on to moisture, nutrients, and oxygen—which is very related to the skin.
Your skin has to hold on to oxygen, moisture, and also nutrients. And that’s where the name tilth came from.
DEBRA: I love that. I think it’s a beautiful concept. And as soon as I read that on your site, since I did already understand what tilth was (knowing a lot about organic gardening), I hadn’t really thought about it in relationship to my skin, that my skin also needs to hold the moisture and nutrients as you’ve said.
And I have some samples of your products. And this morning, I was trying them out. And when I put—what did I put on—the moisturizing cream I think, I don’t remember what it’s called. It’s in a little jar. As soon as I put it on my skin, my skin just absorbed it like it was a sponge. It just went right in. And my skin feels a lot softer just immediately. And I didn’t realize how dry my skin was until I put your product on it.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, yeah. One of the sayings that I try to stress to editors when I’m speaking to them, or even customers, they don’t realize how important the moisture content in your skin is. Sometimes, they ask me, “If I were to do some kind of routine to keep my skin nice and looking fresh, what would you suggest?” I say, “Make sure you use a moisturizer every day because moisture is key for your skin and is key for the processes for your skin to operate correctly.” Without that proper moisture balance, nothing is going to operate correctly. And it’s going to cause premature signs of aging.
DEBRA: Well, if we didn’t water our garden, the plants wouldn’t grow. So it just makes sense to me that we should be moisturizing our skin. And that was actually something I was never taught. But I got it! As soon as I put your product on my face, I got it!
ANTHONY VARGAS: So that’s a very good analogy. If you don’t water your plants… exactly!
DEBRA: So, I really want to talk more about how to recognize gluten because I think that people don’t know that. And I didn’t know that until I got your press release. But before we do that, I want to make sure that people really understand. I know that people were calling you with concerns about Celiac disease. But I want to talk about why everybody should be concerned about this. And I want to tell my story first, and then I want to hear your answer to that question.
My story is that I have eaten gluten off and on my whole adult life. Many, many years ago, I was told that I was allergic to wheat. I stopped eating wheat for a year. And I didn’t feel any different. And so I went back to eating wheat. And I really didn’t notice how wheat might be affecting me, or I didn’t think about the gluten aspect because there’s gluten in more things than wheat. A lot of different grains contain gluten.
And so, I thought I was doing well to eat rye bread, 100% rye bread, instead of eating gluten, instead of eating wheat.
So then, about two months ago, my current healthcare practitioner said, “I want you to just go on a gluten-free diet.” And the reason he wanted me to go on a gluten-free diet was because it’s starting to become known that gluten can affect your thyroid.
And I’ve been having problems with my thyroid for many, many years. I take a thyroid supplement. But in the last few years, my thyroid blood tests have been off. And various doctors have tried various things. And they just couldn’t get my blood test to show normal on the TSH test for thyroid.
And so, I went on this gluten-free diet. And to my surprise, after 30 days on the gluten-free diet, my blood tests for TSH went from 89—which is like very, very high—to 1.49 which is right in the middle of normal. And the only thing I changed was that I stopped eating gluten.
Now, this is not about Celiac disease. This is about gluten affecting all different areas in your body. And the thyroid is one of them. And the thyroid gland contributes to the whole health of your whole, entire body.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, absolutely! It sure does.
DEBRA: It sure does. And so, if the small amount of wheat that I was eating, the small amount of gluten that I was eating, was affecting my thyroid gland that badly, I sure don’t want any gluten in my products that I’m going to put on my skin. It just makes sense to me for everybody.
I now consider gluten to be a toxic chemical because it affects your body like any other toxic chemical does.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, absolutely! They’re going to be doing more and more research to see what else gluten affects in your body too.
DEBRA: I’m sure, I’m sure.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, absolutely! And like you said, gluten, it’s in oats, it’s in rye, it’s in barley. It’s in all of that.
DEBRA: I just don’t eat any grains at all anymore.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah!
DEBRA: And I feel so much better. I feel so much better because my thyroid gland is working.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah! And it’s one of the things, when you look at the cosmetic products out there, of course, you can see some of them, like I mentioned before, you’ll see like hydrolyzed wheat protein. It’s in a lot of skin care products. It’s in a lot of shampoos because it’s used as a conditioner to help condition the hair and also, the skin.
And then, if you see anything that says like “hordeum vulgari,” stay away from that because that contains gluten too. It’s part of the barley; and then, also triticum.
Triticum is another name for the wheat itself. And if you see that on the label, you should avoid it.
Now, I have mentioned before we went off for the little intermission there that vitamin E can be derived from wheat, and there are some other materials within these products that are derived from wheat, you’ve got to be very careful.
DEBRA: I’m sorry I have to interrupt you again because we’ve got to take another break. But immediately, when we come back from this break, we are going to talk about exactly that (without me telling my story).
ANTHONY VARGAS: Sure, okay.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty. And we’re talking about gluten-free skincare products. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty which is a high-performance, luxury anti-aging skincare line that is also gluten-free.
So, tell us now, Anthony, about those ingredients that are probably in everybody’s skincare products that are derived from wheat and have gluten in them but don’t say so in the name.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Correct! One of them is vitamin E. It’s very common in a lot of cosmetic products. You see it labeled as tocopherol. And that can come from wheat.
We make sure that we don’t use any form of tocopherol or vitamin E that’s derived from wheat. We get it from other sources that are not from wheat or barley or oats. So it’s going to be gluten-free.
And you know, something else that we do is we actually run a test on the whole product afterwards to make sure. Sometimes, you don’t get the full information from the maker or the manufacture of the raw material. You’ve got to be very careful about that too. You’ve got to scrutinize how they make these ingredients or where they are derived from.
And I think that if a consumer sees that a line says gluten-free, they can rest assure that they’re not going to have any gluten in those products. And I think that’s the only way. If you don’t see it says “gluten-free,” then it could be questionable. And what you need to do is you need to read that label.
DEBRA: Well, you know, it could be questionable in the sense that—I remember when I was researching lead-free lipsticks. I was calling around and I was saying, “Does your lipstick have lead in it? Does your lipstick have lead in it?”, most people didn’t know how to answer the question. They didn’t know that the iron oxide—it’s where the lead is, in the iron oxide. And of course, they had iron oxide. And they had never tested their lipsticks to find out if they were lead-free or not. And so they would just say, “Oh, no! There’s no lead in it. There’s no lead in it. There’s no lead in it.” And yet all these lipsticks where all these places I was calling all had lead in them.
And so, I think that if somebody is concerned about gluten-free, then they need to buy a product that is advertised as being gluten-free so that they know that the people behind making it have some idea what they’re talking about and had an intention to make it gluten-free instead of just asking a company if their product is gluten-free.
ANTHONY VARGAS: You know, Debra, there was actually a study that was done a couple of years ago. And it was presented at the American College of Gastroenterology’s annual scientific meeting, and the title of it was Information About Cosmetic Ingredients is Difficult to Obtain. The petition was for Celiac patients.
DEBRA: Wow!
ANTHONY VARGAS: So, somebody did go out and tried and figured this out. And you’re right, there’s a lot of companies that really sometimes don’t know or don’t give out the information. It’s getting a little bit better. And the reason why it’s getting a little bit better is because of the European Union. If you’re dealing or selling products over in Europe, you have to outline all of this.
You have to outline if there’s lead in your products. You have to outline if there’s gluten or anything like that.
And there’s even other materials, like nanomaterials—you know, if you’ve got nanomaterials in your products, you actually have to label your packaging that it contains that now.
DEBRA: Wow! They are so far ahead of us.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah! So, the European Union is way ahead of the United States when it comes to issues like that.
DEBRA: Yeah, but they have been for a long time. I remember in 1990 when I was first writing—I specialize in writing about toxics now. I started 30 years ago writing about toxics. But there was a little time period in between where I was writing about all kinds of green issues. And in 1990, I went to a green products show in Germany because we didn’t have a green product show here. And when I walked in, tears came to my eyes because they had all these products that I had never heard of here.
And they were already there in Germany. And so, we have a ways to go to catch up with Europe.
But at the same time, I went to this green product show, I was walking down the street breathing cigarette smoke because they were all sitting in caffeine with cream all over it, smoking cigarettes.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yes, the Europeans certainly do love their cigarettes.
DEBRA: You know, you go from one extreme to the other over there.
ANTHONY VARGAS: But really, seriously though, I think that the cosmetic manufacturers here in the United States really seriously need to look at keeping these materials out of their products now.
And silicone is another material that’s going to be coming up soon because there’s a problem with them. They’re inert so they don’t degrade. And they’re accumulating in the environment. And you look at your products, and I would say probably 80% to 90% of your products contain silicones.
DEBRA: Hmmm…
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah, but it’s an ingredient I think that the whole industry needs to start looking at.
A few years ago, Canada was looking at banning certain silicones. I was working over at my old job there at Arden, and I was like, “Oh, my God! If they did that, I would be in a lot of trouble.” But the industry and some other people had lobbied, and they didn’t pass the laws. But it’s something that’s still going to be coming down sooner or later.
And if the industry […] gave the same information to the consumer here in the United States as they’re giving to the people over in Europe, it would make it a lot easier for the consumer, but it’s got a ways to go. And that’s why we have our line. You don’t have to worry. We put that right on the label if it’s gluten-free or paraben-free or anything. I know the regulations. I know what materials shouldn’t be in products and which ones are questionable for future use. So I don’t put any of them in our products.
DEBRA: Was it difficult to do that?
ANTHONY VARGAS: We use a lot of naturally-derived materials in our products. And that’s going to be the way to go. We do use peptides within our products. But peptides, basically, they mimic the same peptides in your skin. They’re made from amino acids. And amino acids are the basic building blocks of all the proteins in your skin. So it’s not going to harm you. And that’s why…
DEBRA: So, when you were putting all these together, did you find it difficult to find ingredients? Once you made the decision, was it a big deal? Could every…
I mean, your products are beautiful. They look like any products that you would find in a department store. I mean, somebody who’s accustomed to buying those luxury line skincare products, they wouldn’t notice any difference. It’s not like something that’s not that fine, not what one might expect from a natural product. It’s not a granola product. It is beautiful, it works and all those things.
But couldn’t everybody, all the different brands, just formulate like you? Why do we need to have those toxic chemicals at all?
ANTHONY VARGAS: Well, here is the thing with that. A lot of those chemicals are basically inexpensive. And that’s why they use them because when you’re developing a product, you have a cost of goods target you have to meet. So it’s easy to use those chemicals because they’re inexpensive. Some of the more naturally-derived materials are more expensive. And that’s why.
DEBRA: Yes. And we need to take another break. We need to take another break. We’ll be right back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking about beauty products and cosmetics with
Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty. And that’s TilthBeauty.com.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here today with Anthony Vargas, founder and owner of Tilth Beauty. We’re talking about gluten-free natural skincare products and cosmetic products in general.
So, before we go on with Anthony, I just want to mention that tonight, 11:00, Eastern time, I’m going to be on with Jeff Renz.
He’s going to be interviewing me tonight. So tune in and we’ll see what he asks me. We’ll be on all for the whole hour from 11:00 to midnight tonight right here where you tune in for this show. You just tune in right at the same place. And you’ll hear Jeff Renz interviewing me.
So, Anthony, tell us about your products now. Just tell us the different types of products you have and how they work together and all their benefits.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Oh, sure! I have a line of 14 products. We have three cleansers, two toners. We had two treatment serums. We have two eye products, two moisture creams. We have an exfoliator. And we have a misting product. And we also have a body lotion.
Now, we start out with the cleansers because that’s what you would normally start out with. And we have three different types of cleansers. We have what we call a cream foaming cleanser because there are certain consumers that like that.
And this one is infused with natural extracts that contain a lot of antioxidants within them, so they can deposit that on the skin.
We have a gel cleanser because sometimes the consumers prefer that. And it’s sulfate-free. All these products are paraben-free, sulfate-free. It’s a great product infused with rose extract within it because Rose has a great propensity to help to regenerate the skin. And it has the rose kind of scent to it too.
And then, we have what we call our oily cleanser. And this one is for the consumer that looks for an oily type cleanser. And it helps to take off the makeup. And that one has the argan oil, the jojoba oil and also caprylic capric triglyceride in it. It’s a very nice organic cleanser.
And believe it or not, a lot of men like the cleanser. They use it for shaving. And it leaves their skin smooth and soft.
DEBRA: Hmmm… I do want to mention…
ANTHONY VARGAS: We had a lot of comments on it for men. As a matter of fact, some of the women who bought the product say that their husbands keep stealing it from them. So they have to keep buying it.
And then, we have two toners. Now we’re redefining how toners are because people believe toners are basically just to remove excess dirt. But we use our toners actually to help treat the skin too. We have a berry extract toner. And it contains three different berry extracts—blueberry, goji beans and cranberry. And they have tons of antioxidants, so they’re going to help protect the skin.
And then we have the Aloe Restoration toner. It’s got aloe and cactus extract. And they help to refortify the skin and the skin’s barrier. It’s great for older, mature skin.
Now, we have some treatment products. We have the A Flawless Serum. And this one contains a proven cosmoceutical ingredient, retinol. It’s a vitamin A. It’s something that your skin needs for its collagen-boosting properties and what-not. And it also helps to basically repair or help repair the signs of sun damage. And it also has Indian ginseng extract and myrtle leaf extract which actually increase the efficacy of the retinol—all in a very nice paraben-free base.
We have a serum for younger consumer which is what we call the Sea Origin Serum. And it has 11 marine extracts. There’s a lot of algae and what-not. I have a seaweed out there that have a lot of properties for protecting the skin, containing antioxidants. It’s a glycoprotein to help moisturize the skin. So it’s a great product for younger consumers to help protect their skin.
We follow that up with some moisturizers. We have what we call the Anti-Aging Firming Moisture Cream. It’s got a lot of natural oils in it. And it will help firm the skin.
DEBRA: I think that’s the one I have.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah! It’s a naturally derived material. And it helps to enhance collagen and elastin production. And a lot of people like that particular product.
And for those who have very dry skin, but don’t need, let’s say, anti-aging benefits, we have the Intense Restoration Moisture Cream.
DEBRA: Actually, that’s the one I have. I was just looking at the box, the Intense Restoration.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah, it’s great! It’s got…
DEBRA: That’s the one where I put it on and my skin just…
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah, they’re going to help to nourish the skin and repair any damage that’s done to your skin’s barrier.
It’s a great product and people really, really love it.
But we also have a body moisturizer. We have what we call the hydration body lotion. And that one’s also a chock full of natural ingredients, butters and oils, that help to again repair the skin’s barrier. And it’s a great product!
It’s not overly greasy. And a lot of people love what it does to their skin.
And then, we have this—well, it’s kind of a product that’s a little bit different. It’s our Refresh Peptide Mist. It’s a product that you would use during the day if you feel that your skin is a little irritated or a little dry. Just pull it out of your pocket book and spray it on your face. And it also helps to set back your make-up.
It’s funny because a couple people really, really loved it. And there was this actor who had asked us for it. He was getting married, and they wanted to put it in their gift bag, which is kind of cool.
And then, we have our Gentle Poppy Seed Exfoliator. It’s totally all-natural, organic ingredients within it. It’s got date seed, poppy seed in it. Great exfoliator! It’s not overly harsh, it’s very gentle on the skin. And it’s a kind of exfoliator where you can just use it on its own or, if you want, you can mix it with your favorite cleanser. So, you can use it two ways.
And that’s our line. It’s a great line. It’s 14 total.
I forgot about the two eye products. There’s the eye product, the serum, The Eye Wonder Serum. And that’s for the woman who has a lot of crow’s feet or what-not. And again, this one has encapsulated retinol in addition to a few peptides that help to alleviate the look of those wrinkles.
And we also have the Resurrect Eye Cream. And this is a great product. It’s more for the woman who has dryness around the eye area because it also helps moisturize. But it has four different peptides in it. It has a couple of peptides that help to alleviate the immediate look of those wrinkles; and then two other peptides which helps to introduce more collagen or boost up the collagen production in your skin and increase the firmness around the eye area, the skin in the eye area. It’s a great product. We’ve gotten rave reviews on it actually.
DEBRA: I really like these products on my skin.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Again, all questionable ingredients are out. There’s no parabens. It’s glutenf-free. No phthalates, no sulfates, no petroleum-based ingredients, no silicones. We keep out anything with EEA and TEA out of them. We don’t use any [unintelligible 34:32] or anything like that in there or any of these acrylic-type materials, thickeners and what-not, that they put in the products.
DEBRA: One thing I want to mention just because a lot of people are asking about fragrances is that I didn’t see any additional fragrance on the ingredients list, but that these do have a very slight fragrance just from the botanical ingredients which is fine with me personally. I mean, you don’t say anything on the label about if it’s fragrance-free or not fragrance-free. So how would you describe the fragrances level of your products?
ANTHONY VARGAS: Well, we don’t put any synthetic fragrances in all of our products. Any time that you smell any kind of a scent, it usually comes from the extracts themselves.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what it smelled like to me, yeah.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah, we don’t like to put fragrances in. There’s a lot of problems with that. Fragrances have so many components to them.
DEBRA: Yes, we’ve talked about that on the show.
ANTHONY VARGAS: And there’s a list of about 24 ingredients that if they’re in your fragrance, you have to list it on your cosmetic ingredient list because they’re deemed to be known allergens.
So, any time that there’s a scent in our products, it comes from one of the extracts, not from a fragrance or anything like that.
DEBRA: Good! We’re almost to the end of our time. Do you have any final words you’d like to give us?
ANTHONY VARGAS: Yeah! I think what the consumer needs to do, really, they need to educate themselves. And they really need to look at the ingredients of the products that they’re buying. Typically, I think a lot of the consumers just go by the marketing hype and buy the product. And then, they don’t look at the ingredients. You know, I’m horrified sometimes when I see these products all of a sudden selling like crazy, and then I look at the ingredients list. It’s like, “Oh, my God! Are they kidding me? There’s a lot of these questionable ingredients in this product.”
Consumers need to know what they’re buying. They really, really need to do that and educate themselves.
DEBRA: I agree. Thank you so much for being with us today. I learned a lot. And I like your products. Thank you for coming.
ANTHONY VARGAS: Great!
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can see Anthony’s products at TilthBeauty.com. You can visit my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And listen to me tonight at 11:00 p.m., Eastern, with Jeff Renz. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Odor on Leather Shoes
Question from Mary A.
Help! My husband stepped in gas while at the gas station…he was wearing rubber soled, leather shoes. How can we get rid of the horrible odor ??
Debra’s Answer
I would put them out in the sun for a few days, sole side up. If that doesn’t work, toss them.
Tilth Beauty
A natural-based, high-performance, anti-aging luxury skincare line that is also gluten-free. Based on three decades of experience, research, and development, each product has been painstakingly crafted with a unique and potent blend of botanical and industry -proven ingredients without ANY potentially harmful elements commonly found in most skincare products: no parabens, phthalates, sulfates, petroleum-based products, silicones, synthetic fragrances or GMOs, animal/dairy-derived products, or artificial colors. “Tilth is the name given to indicate the health of soil. Healthy soil (soil with good tilth) is seen to be oxidized with the ability to maintain good levels of moisture and vital nutrients. Tilth Beauty has taken this concept and adapted it using the latest skin care technology to produce the best anti-aging skin care products. “Here at Tilth Beauty, we’ve combined the readily available tools given to us by Mother Nature with cutting edge technology to forge luxurious, safe and highly effective skin care products without using any questionable ingredients.” Products have a slight fragrance from the botanical ingredients.
|
Listen to my interview with Tilth Beauty Founder and Owner Anthony Vargas. |
Natural Art Supplies
My guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane, founder of Natural Earth Paints. We’ll be talking about some of the toxic exposures from art paints, and safer paints to use. Leah began using all natural earth paints about five years ago, after being an oil painter for more than eighteen years. She eliminated all solvents and toxins from her studio and then began collecting her own pigments from nature. This transition away from toxic, modern paints gave her the joy of doing no harm to the environment and the freedom to express her art and passion in partnership with the earth. Her constant allergies and headaches cleared up with the removal of solvents and toxins in the studio. She also developed a deeper connection with the natural world as she spent more time outside the studio directly connecting with the origins of her paints. In 2010 she launched the business, Natural Earth Paint, with her husband Drew and now creates and sells natural art supplies all over the world. Their products include Children’s Earth Paints, Natural Face Paints, Natural Egg Dye Kits for Easter, Earth Oil Paint Kits and also professional, non-toxic supplies for artists. See her beautiful earth paintings at www.FanningArt.com. www.NaturalEarthPaint.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Art Supplies
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Leah Fanning Mebane
Date of Broadcast: September 03, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. It really is necessary for us to talk about this because there are many toxic chemicals out in the world.
Yet, there are also many things that are not toxic and what this show is about is helping us identify what’s toxic so that we can avoid it, but also to identify what are the good safe things that we can use and do so that we can have good health and be happy and productive and help the lives that we want to live without being encumbered by the dangers of toxic chemicals. That’s why we’re here.
Today is Tuesday, September 2nd, 2013. We just had the Labor Day weekend. I hope you had a great weekend. I had a great weekend because I was redesigning my website. It’s not completely done, but a lot of the new designs are up. So if you want, go take a look at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I’m really happy with the way it looks and I’m excited to finish that project this afternoon.
I also wanted to tell you about something that I realized this weekend. Some of you who have been listening on a regular basis know that recently, my husband in 26 years and I are no longer together. We actually were divorced a couple of years ago, but we still were friends and housemates. I know that sounds strange. Anyway, he is now off living in California after he was in an accident where he broke his back.
So I’m on my own for the first time in 26 years and I’m just noticing how many things he used to do for me that I don’t know how to do.
One of them that came up for me this weekend was checking the air in my tires on my car. I think probably before I met him 26 years ago, I knew how to do that, but I haven’t done it in 26 years because he always did it for me. I’m wondering how many pounds of pressures is supposed to be in a tire? How do I use the tire gauge? And where do I go to put new air in my tire, more air in the tires?
I realized that if you’re going to go do something, if you’re going to move into a better life, like with toxics, if you are going to remove toxic chemicals in your life, there are just going to be things that you’re going to need to learn. You’re going to need new information, you’re going to need new skills. You’re not going to be doing things in the same way as you have been accustomed to doing them.
That’s another reason why I’m doing this show. It’s because I’ve been living without toxic chemicals for more than 30 years. I know something about those, but I realized that most people in the world don’t. They don’t have that kind of experience.
By listening to the show, by bringing my guest on, you can see what the possibilities are. But you are going to have to learn a new way of doing things and that’s going to require a little bit of trial and error and finding out where to go to buy these products, how to choose them, all those things. Just like I need to learn where to go put air in my tire, you’re going to need to learn where you can go to buy an organic cotton sheet or whatever it is that you wanting to buy.
All of that kind of information is on my website. It’s on the show. It’s on the website of other people. It really is all out there for you. It’s just you taking those steps to decide that you’re going to live in a toxic free way and learn how to do that. I’ll try to make it as easy and fun and interesting as possible. But it all comes down to you taking those steps.
And I do want to just encourage you by saying that every time, in the past 30 years that I have decided to give up something familiar and toxic for something unfamiliar and safer, I’ve always been happy with that choice. It’s always more pleasurable to use and more interesting and more beautiful and more compatible with me.
So take a chance. Do something different. Learn a new skill. Get familiar with something new. It’s going to be worth it, believe me.
So today, we’re going to talk about art. We’re going to talk about paint and about toxic chemicals in paint and about safe paints that you can use that are made from earth pigments and other natural ingredients.
My guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane. I want to make sure I said that right, Leah Fanning Mebane. She has a website called NaturalEarthPaint.com where she sells paints that she has developed made out of natural materials. She’s also an incredible artist and you can go to her artist website, which is FanningArt.com and see her gorgeous paintings. She was an oil painter for many years until she got sick. And then she developed some natural paints.
Leah, thanks for being with me today.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Thank you so much for inviting me, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us your story instead of me telling your story.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Oh, yes. I started out way back in art school back when I was first learning how to paint with oil paints for the first time. And my teachers there all pretty much taught all the standard way of teaching oil paint with all the toxins involved. And they were all really wonderful teachers, but they just all taught the same thing. So I just assumed that all of the toxins were just a necessary evil to painting really high quality art.
So I just accepted it back then. Even from the beginning in my studio, as soon as I started to paint, I would have really bad headaches and allergy reactions and sneezing. It’s pretty immediate right when I started.
But then after that, I moved to Boulder, Colorado and met my husband. We started getting into all natural earth-friendly everything and I became a fulltime artist. I just continued to use all of these super toxic supplies just because that was my art and I felt like I couldn’t sacrifice quality to make any changes. So I just continued suffering all of my crazy symptoms for quite a while.
And then we had a shift. We moved to Oregon and we got even more into just trying to have a zero footprint on the earth. we built a natural earth and home and we’re there for many years, off the grid, with composting toilets and stoves and just a very natural non-toxic lifestyle.
But I was still using all these toxic paints in my studio down the road, which is crazy. I just didn’t know of any alternatives at the time. I didn’t know that anything could be high quality and eco-friendly.
DEBRA: What kind of symptoms did you have?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Mainly just really severe headaches and sneezing and fatigue and just various allergic reactions.
DEBRA: I think a lot of people are having those kinds of symptoms, but they don’t know that it’s toxic chemicals.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: So tell us about when you got to a point where you have decided that was enough and you found the paints that you use now.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Well, something happened, I guess it was five years ago, which completely was a huge catalyst to get me to make a huge change. I got pregnant for the first time with my baby. Literally, about a week later, I also got accepted for a really huge solo show, art exhibit, which would happen the week before my child was due, which meant that I would paint about 25 huge oil paintings throughout my entire pregnancy.
DEBRA: And before you tell us the rest of it, we need to take a short commercial break.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Okay.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane. She does beautiful artwork. You should go to her website and see her paintings at FanningArt.com. And she’s going to be telling us more about the all-natural toxic free earth paints that she developed when we come back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane. She’s an artist who has developed some totally toxic free natural earth paints and we’re going to learn more about them now.
So Leah, tell us about your inspiration. You had a big show, you needed to paint a lot of paintings and you were pregnant all at the same time. So then what happened next?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Well, when that happened, it just launched me into figuring out how to get rid of all of my toxins immediately. I couldn’t wait at all anymore and I just did tons of research and experimentations. I just figured it out pretty quickly how to get rid of all the toxins in the oil painting process. So that was basically how the earth paint came about.
And then about a year after my son was born, I had that idea to make children’s paint too out of the natural earth pigments that I used in the oil paints. So that’s how that happened.
DEBRA: Tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that are in paints. I know that you’re a professional artist, so the paints you are using might be different from the paints that people are using at home. But what kind of toxic chemicals should people be concerned about in paints?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: In typical oil paints, there are lots of different toxins. There are really bad heavy metal toxins like cadmium and cobalt. And then the pigments and oil paints are usually petroleum-based synthetic pigments and then there are usually some toxic preservatives too and also fillers. So there were lots of pretty nasty things in typical oil paints.
And then you also use turpentine and mineral spirits in oil painting to clean your brushes and thin your paint. Those have VOCs and they offgas. Actually, after you paint your paintings, they continue to offgass. Your paintings off-gas into your room.
DEBRA: I remember my grandmother, my mother’s mother was an oil painter and she was always painting. I remember that smell of the paint and the thinner and all that and the pictures continuing to have that smell. I used to spend my summers with her, so I was exposed to a lot of that day in and day out. As a child, she had me painting with those paints right next to her. So that’s I think an exposure that I had that I hadn’t really thought about before.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah. Yes. That’s amazing.
DEBRA: Mineral spirits, for people who don’t know exactly what that is, are a mixture of different solvents that are VOCs volatile organic chemicals. And so, they evaporate and volatilize into the air and then you breathe them and they go into your lungs. And immediately, they go into your blood stream.
They have a lot of different names for this, but the thing about it is that you never know exactly what’s in it or how toxic it might be because there’s no standard formula for making mineral spirits. They just take all the solvents that are around, whatever is cheapest and they throw them altogether. One batch of mineral spirit might be very different from another batch of mineral spirits. So you could be exposed to some very toxic things if you’re using mineral spirits for anything.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes.
DEBRA: Are there toxic chemicals in paints that people might be buying at a hobby store, art supply store?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes. Yeah, a more common paint actually is acrylic paint just for crafting. And that’s generally more eco-friendly since it’s water-based, but acrylic paint is basically just liquid plastics with petroleum-based pigments.
DEBRA: Acrylic is a plastic.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah. It’s just 100% petroleum. You can definitely smell it when you’re painting with it and it’s not great for water supply when you wash it down the drain.
Also, just regular children’s paints in any art supplies store have lots of toxins in them too, which is really shocking when I had my child and I did a little research. Even though most of them say “nontoxic” on the label or “certified nontoxic,” it really doesn’t mean much of anything.
There are very, very little regulations on ingredients in kids’ paints and they never list them on the package.
So lots of times, kids’ paints have heavy metals like cadmium. And the most common preservative in kids’ paints is formaldehyde (which is a carcinogen). There are lots of other petrochemicals and petroleum-based pigments. So all of that is in kids’ paints, which is very shocking and it’s something that every parent should know when they’re letting their kids paint.
DEBRA: Could you explain to us about the labels that are on paint that write the “AP nontoxic?” What does that actually mean?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: It just basically means that they passed the US regulation standard for nontoxic, but there’s really not much required to pass that. You just send in your information about what’s in your paint and no one does any testing on it. So they just trust the people.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that. Because I’m not an artist and I am not using these paints all the time, I haven’t done as much research on art supplies as other things that I’ve researched that I’m using myself all the time. But I thought that the Arts and Crafts Materials Institute – is that what it’s called? I’m trying to remember the name.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Sure!
DEBRA: They are the ones that run that program and I thought that they have toxicologists on their staff and that they were testing for those things.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: But I don’t know that for a fact. You probably know more about it than I do. Anyway, we need to take another break. When we come back, we’re going to learn all about Leah’s natural earth paints. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane. She’s an artist who developed a line of earth paints, eco-friendly and toxic free.
Before the break, we were talking about the little symbol on packages of art supplies, the AP and CL – I’m actually now looking at the website for this organization. It’s the Art and Creative Materials Institute. I think their little emblems used to say “Nontoxic” on them, but they don’t anymore. But they conform to a certain standard and I guess what I need to do is I need to find out what that standard is and I’ll talk to them and I will cover that on another show.
Let’s go back to what you’re doing, Leah. I wanted to ask you a question about your paints just from an artistic viewpoint. I know that for myself, sometimes I run into things like I’m pretty familiar with natural dyes because I used to know somebody who would dye fabric using only plant-based dyes. And I know that sometimes there are limitations on what you can do with the colors when you are taking the natural route whereas in the synthetic dyes and pigments and everything, in such an array of colors, you could have actually any color you want.
Do you find that you have any limitations as an artist by using the natural pigments? Are you able to mix up pretty much any color you want?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: That’s a good question. The earth pigments definitely don’t come in every single color. It means that our paints are made with just pure natural earth and minerals. So you can’t get a very bright purple with natural earth I found and you can’t get bright cadmium reds or yellows with natural earth. But what are even good are the really beautiful radiant natural hues, which actually I think are even more beautiful than the really, really bright and more fluorescent colors and they probably – oh, go ahead.
DEBRA: Go ahead. No, go ahead. I don’t want to interrupt you.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: I was going to say they come in surprisingly huge array of colors. In natural earth, you can get a really great red, orange, yellow, green, a very bright blue from minerals, brown, different browns of course, black or white. And we do have a violet, but it’s more of an earthy violet.
DEBRA: I’ve worked with milk paint. I’ve painted walls with milk paint. When I remodeled my bathroom, we used colored clay plaster. So when you’re working with those paints and plasters, it’s all earth pigments. So the only colors that you can use are the ones that are there, but I found that there was a tremendous variety and I had no disappointment in the colors at all or no feeling that there wasn’t enough choice. It was just really beautiful.
Could you tell me? I don’t have an idea of where these earth pigments come from. Can you tell me how they exist in the earth and how they are processed and things like that?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Sure. Yes. They’re just natural clay and they’re colored with different natural iron oxides and minerals in the earth.
DEBRA: Do they occur in nature that way? Are they being mined from someplace?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes. They’re dug straight from the ground. You can synthetically make iron oxide (basically rust), but these are just natural clays straight from the earth.
When I first started the business, I was actually collecting them myself and going out in the woods and digging them out and grinding and sifting and seething them into a very, very fine powder. So that’s basically the processing part. It’s just the grinding part into a very, very fine powder.
DEBRA: And then how does it turn into paint? You just mix something in it and it goes on. I’m not an artist. I don’t know how this works.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes. It’s extremely easy to make paint. Anyone can do it. Basically just add pigments to a binder and there are many, many different types of binders. Throughout history, since the cavemen, people have used tree stuff or blood or milk or eggs.
There are lots of different things you can add. That’s basically the glue to mix in with the pigment and so that it will attach to the surface. The Egyptians and Etruscans and Medieval Monks all used natural earth pigments and binders.
DEBRA: Yes.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Go ahead.
DEBRA: There’s a huge history of people using natural earth pigments for paints because I guess the first synthetic color wasn’t developed until the 1800s. So prior to that, any color that you see on a wall in the ancient building – and the artists like Leonardo da Vinci, they had to mix up their own paints. They couldn’t just go down to the art store and buy them in a tube.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: That’s right. Yeah. It’s interesting.
DEBRA: All those paintings, all those pre-industrial paintings by those great masters were all from completely natural paints.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: And you can see how long they have lasted.
DEBRA: Very long.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah.
DEBRA: Some of those paints are hundreds and hundreds of years old.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah. If you think of the cave paintings, they’re at least 40,000 years old. They’re natural earth pigments on those walls.
DEBRA: That’s incredible.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes.
DEBRA: I’m looking at all your beautiful paintings on your website. Are all these recent natural paintings or some of them are synthetic paints from before?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: You can tell on the colors if you go to my Abstracts page. There’s one section called Art from the Earth and they’re all paintings with the natural earth paints, natural earth oil paints. And those were all pretty much everything I painted in the last three years since I’ve been only recently using the natural paint. So the ones before that, you can see in my other paintings, they have a little bit more bright and young colors.
DEBRA: They’re a little bit more bright, but I just naturally gravitate towards the softer colors. I was just working on redesigning my website and I’m always picking the soft colors that look like these earth colors rather than the bright colors that look so synthetic.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah.
DEBRA: We will be back after this break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re here today with my guest, Leah Fanning Mebane and we’re talking about art and paints and toxic chemicals and how to not have toxic chemicals in your paint. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Leah Fanning Mebane. I’m so careful about pronouncing your name because I like it when people pronounce my name correctly.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah.
DEBRA: Leah Fanning Mebane. I’ll get it before the end of the show. I’ve just been enjoying looking through both of her websites during the break or during the breaks, I should say. That’s what I do during the break, I sit here and I look at people’s websites.
Let me give you the URLs. One is NaturalEarthPaint.com and her artist’s site is FanningArt.com. On NaturalEarthPaint.com, you can find her professional artist oil paints, which are simply earth pigments and walnut oil. And there’s also the children’s earth paint. And there’s also a face painting kit and there’s a book that she had painted all the pictures for. It is just a lovely, lovely site. If I felt that I had any aptitude for painting, anything, I would buy all these paintings and paint away because I just think that it looks like a wonderful thing to do. And especially if I had a child, I would get the children’s paints just right away and let them go for it.
When you put things on your skin, the toxic chemicals can be absorbed right through your skin. So if your children are finger painting, you don’t want to buy the toxic finger paint. You would want to buy something like this. Wouldn’t you agree?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Absolutely, yes. Yeah. Our children’s paints are just simply natural earth and organic milk proteins. So it’s very pure and completely natural, only two ingredients.
DEBRA: It sounds like even if they accidentally put their fingers on their mouth, it wouldn’t harm them at all.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes, not basically and it will probably taste very good.
DEBRA: Yeah. Do you find as an artist that you have a different experience working with natural materials than the synthetic materials? Does it feel different to you?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: The natural paints or the natural pigments, the particles of the pigments are irregular sizes since they’re natural and the synthetic pigments are just very uniformed since they are made synthetically. So when light bounces through the pigment, it bounces off of all these irregular edges and makes the paint a lot more luminous and radiant. So that’s another good side of the earth pigment as opposed to synthetic.
DEBRA: I like that idea. I like that idea. You have an article on your website called Why is Earth Paint Sacred?. Can you tell us about that?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah. That was about the aboriginal cultures in Australia and how creating with natural earth was a very sacred process for them. And all of their ochre sites, they call them ochre natural earth sites where they would harvest the clay, were very sacred and private. It was the process of painting their bodies and spiritual rituals are very big for their culture. Most indigenous cultures all over the world use natural earth pigments and they use them in religion and spiritual reasons.
DEBRA: And a lot of tribal cultures did paint their bodies, painted their faces. So this whole modern idea of face painting isn’t such a strange thing.
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yeah, absolutely. Ever since the cavemen, we’ve been painting our bodies with pigment and bear fat or oil or whatever [inaudible 00:43:39] that they wanted to use. And it wasn’t until very recent times that our face paints are now super toxic and filled with synthetics and toxins and heavy metals and lots of nasty things. So it’s been very crazy that you would create something to put on your skin that’s filled with toxins.
DEBRA: But there are many, many products that are exactly like that. Many beautiful lotions and shampoos and all those things are full of toxic chemicals. We put them on our bodies. They get absorbed through our skin immediately. You don’t want to put heavy metals on your children’s faces. It’s just not a good thing to do. So this is really great that you have an alternative for that.
So did I miss anything? Is there anything else that you want to talk about your work?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: I don’t think so. And on our website, we have lots of different articles and resources and nature-based craft and art [inaudible 00:44:49] and natural paint recipes to make different types of paints with our pigments. So there are lots of stuff on the website if you want to check it out and see what’s there.
DEBRA: Yeah. So you sell the pigments separate and you also sell them made into paint, right?
LEAH FANNING MEBANE: Yes.
DEBRA: So people can make their own paints. Okay, good. That’s a good thing to know. Okay. I’m so glad that you came to talk to us today about this because it’s such an important subject and I think that art is an important thing for people to experience.
I know that even though I’m not a painter, I’m an artist in my writing and doing my graphic design for my website and as a writer and I’m also a musician. I know that art comes from within and it’s something that needs to be expressed. So it’s so good to have a way that we can be creating colorful art, visual art, painting, painting our bodies, painting paper, painting canvass, painting our walls, whatever and to do it in a way that connects us with the earth instead of doing in a way that’s toxic.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to my website and find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And if you go to – particularly you want to go today because I just put up my new artistic expression of my new banner across the top. I haven’t redesigned the whole entire site, but I put up a new banner because I wanted to communicate more what the site is about in a way that it wasn’t before. I’m very excited – you can see my artistic expression – to be able to play with the colors and do all these things.
So when you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, first of all, you will find the upcoming shows for the current week. And so today, we had Leah and tomorrow, we’re going to be talking about gluten-free skin products and on Thursday, my friend, Annie B. Bond, author of many books is going to be here. We are going to be talking about toxic free cleaning basics. We have both been doing this for a long time, so we both know a lot about how you can clean your house in very simple and natural ways without buying toxic cleaning products.
And on Friday of this week is show number 100. I can’t believe that the time has gone by so fast. I can’t believe that I have already done a hundred shows, but Friday will be show number 100 and I am working on planning something special to celebrate because 100 is a lot, doing this for five days a week. But I have to say that I really love doing these shows, that when it gets to be 11:45 and I know that I’m going to go on at 12:00, that’s the highlight of my day actually. I have a pretty wonderful life, but I just love talking about things that are better for life, things that are better for health and I love talking to people who are doing better things for our lives and for our planet.
So in addition to finding out who’s going to be on this week, I also have all the shows archived. You can listen to all 100 shows, except for show number one. It didn’t get recorded. But you go to the Archives and you can see all the other guests that have been on. You could listen to today’s show again if you want to. And you can listen to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week anywhere in the world on any device that picks up the internet and you can share them with your friends and you can download them, whatever it is that you want. Just listen and get the information because if you apply the information that is in these shows, you’ll have a less toxic life and will have a less toxic world.
Across the top of the page, right under my picture of me holding my book, Toxic Free, you‘ll see there’s a navigation bar where you can go to different parts of my website. If you can click on Shop, that will take you to Debra’s List and you will be able to find hundreds of links to all kinds of toxic free products. Some of the businesses that are listed there have been guests and many more will be guests in the future, but you’ll find almost anything that you need right there.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’ll be back tomorrow.
Tips for Safer Clothing from Washington Toxics Coalition
I’m passing this along to you from Washington Toxics Coalition…
Are you buying back-to-school clothing to replace the worn out and the outgrown? Under the Children’s Safe Products Act, toxic metals, phthalates and formaldehyde were reported to the Washington State Department of Ecology by makers and retailers of children’s clothing. While the presence of a chemical does not necessarily mean a product is harmful, read on to learn about the chemicals found in clothing and how to minimize exposure until we know more about the risks.
Where do chemicals on clothing come from? Some come from the dyes used to give our clothing color; others from the inks used for screen printing logos, sports designs and special characters from movies and TV. Chemicals may also originate in the processing of the yarn into clothing and the sizing used to finish a garment. Small metal parts or ornamentation on clothing often contain heavy metals.
What can you do?
- Opt for hand me downs or shop at second hand stores as repeated washings may reduce chemical load from the finishing process.
- Choose screen printing designs carefully to avoid those with a raised, plastic feel.
- Try to avoid clothing with metal parts or ornamentation especially if the metal part can fit into a young child’s mouth.
- Forego clothing with wrinkle free, anti-microbial and stain-resistant labeling.
- Always wash new garments several times before wearing to reduce manufacturing and shipping residuals.
- Patronize retailers and manufacturers that have made a commitment to reducing their chemical footprint. Search for this type of information at a company’s website.
What about organic clothing? The USDA Organic standards vouch for how the cotton plant was grown, but do not certify how the fiber was processed into clothing. Certification programs such as GOTS and OEKO-TEX® label garments made of textiles that were manufactured responsibly. The GOTS and OEKO-TEX® standards differ in which chemicals are restricted and the allowable limits for others, but both may indicate that a company is taking care of how its textile manufacturing impacts health and the environment. Certified clothing can be expensive, however, so prioritize garments that your child will spend many hours in such as pajamas.
Think about following the precautionary principle when it comes to nano-textiles, fabrics with nano-particles embedded to provide primarily stain-resistance or anti-bacterial properties. There is concern that nano-particles such as silver may detach from the textile and enter the body or be dispersed in the environment.
* * * *
And here’s some good news: Swedish clothing chain H&M will sell only organic cotton by 2020. I’m told they have lots of organic and 100% natural fiber clothing. http://about.hm.com/AboutSection/en/About/Sustainability/Commitments/Use-Resources-Responsibly/Raw-Materials/Cotton.html
It would be wonderful if other stores would follow suit.
Is Boric Acid Safe?
Question from E.
Hi Debra, What are your thoughts on flame retardants in natural insulation? I’m trying to fill cracks around a doorway inside my house with a natural type of batting but I’ve noticed all the natural options (sheep’s wool, denim/cotton insulation) are treated with boron/boric acid. I’m confused because I’ve read flame retardants should be avoided at all costs but all these suppliers are stating this is a non-toxic product that you don’t need a dust mask or eye protection for. I thought breathing this stuff in was a no-no – why would I want it in my house? I don’t know what material I can use because it seems everything is treated with flame retardants.
Debra’s Answer
Well, they are incorrect.
For many years boric acid was used on natural fiber mattresses because it was thought to be nontoxic, but there is evidence now that it has health effects of concern.
It is known that boric acid is poisonous if taken internally or inhaled in large quantities. The Thirteenth Edition of the Merck Index says that hat 5 to 20 g/kg has produced death in adult humans. A kilogram (kg) is about 2.2 pounds. So you would have to ingest about 10 to 40 grams of boric acid for it to be fatal. A gram is about one thousandth of a kilogram, so 10 grams would be about .35274 ounces or about 2 teaspoons. So two to eight teaspoons would be fatal, if you opened a container of boric acid and ingested it.
But there is also concern about long term exposure. Repeated day-in and day-out, or in this case night-in and night-out exposure can cause kidney damage and eventually kidney failure.
Long term exposure to boric acid may be of more concern, causing kidney damage and eventually kidney failure.
In Europe, there is a list of chemicals called Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals Regulations (REACH). As of 2010, the classification of Boric Acid CAS 10043-35-3 / 11113-50-1 is H360FD (May damage fertility. May damage the unborn child.)
Packing a Lunch Without Plastic
Whether you are packing a lunch for school, work, travel, or picnic, my guest Sandra Ann Harris, California eco-mom and Founder of ECOLunchbox, can tell you how to pack it without plastic. Her food containers are plastic-free, waster-free, BPA-free, PVC-free, and petroleum-free. We’ll talk about the toxic chemicals in standard lunch boxes, utensils, containers, and wrappings, and explore the many toxic-free options for carrying your own nutritious, delicious, organic lunch. Sandra started ECOLunchbox to empower families with non-toxic lunchtime tools to help them learn to reduce their dependence on plastics. Scientists are learning more everyday about the health and environmental hazards of toxins in plastics. ECOlunchbox’s mission is to offer lunchware alternatives that are healthy for both people and our planet. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/ecolunchbox
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Packing a Lunch Without Plastic
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Sandra Ann Harris
Date of Broadcast: August 29, 2013
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 we need to talk about this because there are toxic chemicals out there. But we don’t have to have them in our homes. We don’t have to have them in our bodies. It’s our choice.
And so, on this show, I and my many wonderful guests talk about how you can live a toxic-free life, so that you can be healthy, happy and productive and do whatever you want with your life.
Today, we’re going to be talking about how to pack your lunch. Whether you’re taking your lunch to school, work, travel, a picnic or any place else, you can carry your lunch without plastic.
And my guest today is Sandra Ann Harris. She’s a California ECO mom and founder of ECO Lunch Box. Hi, Sandra! Thanks for being with me.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Hi, it’s great to join you today.
DEBRA: Thank you! Okay. Well, first, let’s start off and hear your story. How did you start this business? Why is this important to you?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: I set out to be in consumer products. My background is journalism and humanitarian aid. But when my son went off to preschool, and I started packing a lunch for him day in and day out, it became really apparent very, very quickly that I wasn’t making the best choices for him or for the planet.
Every day, he’d come home with his lunch box with Ziploc bags, with half eaten sandwiches and little individual yogurt cups with the yogurt spilling out and all sorts of other waste that went directly into my trash can. This was about 10 years ago.
But when I wanted to make a better choice and not have things and throwaways and try to avoid plastics, I went out to the marketplace, and I just couldn’t find what I needed.
DEBRA: Exactly! I remember 10 years ago, they didn’t have anything like what you’re talking about on your site. So, go ahead.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: So, exactly. I mean, now, I think many of your listeners probably have seen stainless steel containers online for sure and maybe even in their local markets. But at this time, people were using stainless steel water bottles like by Clean Canteen. But all of the containers that were available were plastic.
So, I just decided that I wanted to make available a product that was plastic-free for my own kids because I was really concerned about the toxins and plastics. Nalgene around that time was recalled—Nalgene! I’ve always loved that brand. I’m a backpacker and an environmentalist. I had tents and Nalgenes throughout the house. And I really trusted that brand. But lo, and behold, there was this thing called BPA, bisphenol-A which we now know is a hormone mimicker. It creates kind of a synthetic estrogen in our body.
And so, they had recalled all of the Nalgene. And I thought, “My goodness! If this trusted brand is struggling with how to put a safe product made out of plastic on the market, what plastic really is safe?”
So, I called Sigg, the maker of the aluminum water bottles. It’s a Swiss company. And I said, “Hey, Sigg, what’s that lining on the inside of your water bottles?” It says that it’s proprietary. “Can you tell me more about it?” Well, they wouldn’t. It was some kind of a petroleum-based plastic resin that they were using.
And the more questions I asked, the more I realized I wasn’t getting answers about plastics that made me feel comfortable, answers that I could understand.
DEBRA: Yes. So, what made you decide? I mean, I think probably a lot of women, a lot of moms, are looking at the plastic bags and saying, “Well, gee, I’m questioning this plastic,” but then they don’t do anything.
What was it within you that made you say, “I’m going to do something about this and help change the world and make these non-plastic items available to other moms and children”?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Well, as a mother, I think that the first thing that I have to do with my children is make sure that they’re healthy. And then, I have to be sure that they’re safe.
DEBRA: Good for you!
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: And then, I have to educate them. But if they’re not healthy, if I’m not doing the best I can to protect them against toxins that I’m aware about—there are probably tons of stuff out there that I’m not even aware about yet. If I’m not keeping them healthy, then all the other layers of parenting that we work so hard at become kind of futile.
The thing about these chemicals and plastics and all sorts of other consumer products is there’s a lot more information out there behind the curtain in the board rooms than we’re really aware of. And even at the national level, in terms of health and safety regulators who oversee these things, they knew about BPA, bisphenol-A; and then, there’s pthlalates which are used to make plastics, very squeezy. The BPA is used to make the plastics more rigid and often transparent. They’ve known for 70 years that it’s a very questionable choice to include those chemicals in our plastics.
So then some of your listeners probably have noticed there are all sorts of plastics out there that say, “We’re BPA-free. It’s safe! You can use this plastic.” Well, I’d be very cautious about using plastic at all.
What’s been happening is that BPA has been substituted for BPS, a bisphenol substitute, which has many of the same properties and may even be more toxic. It’s just hard for regulators—and for moms—to keep up with the latest regarding the science behind plastic.
We’re not scientists. I don’t have a full time job studying toxicity. So I just want to make simple choices that are tried and true.
And I think stainless steel, true containers, with no coating or no mixed media or plastic, just straight up stainless steel, it’s non-reactive, it’s non-leeching. I haven’t heard anything about it that makes me concerned.
And then, we offer a line of artisan cotton lunch bags and snack sacks that are machine wash and tumble dry. Again, no coating. It’s not a cotton that’s been covered with plastic, but is presenting itself as fabric.
Those kinds of mixed media, if you don’t understand what it is, I would just slow way down and just think about, “Okay, what’s in here?” And if I don’t know what’s in here, start asking questions.
DEBRA: Well, I totally agree with you. I just want to say something about regulations because, right now, one of the things that’s going on in our world is that there are a lot of people trying to change the regulations about toxic chemicals in Washington DC. And this has been going on for about 10 years.
We have a law right now called the Toxic Substances Control Act. And it’s called TSCA for short. And it’s been very interesting for me to watch what’s been going on kind of behind the scenes. And one of the big question is: “Well, what are the toxic chemicals?” There has to be this big proof to the government that the chemical is toxic before they can do something to regulate it.
And it’s interesting to see. I mean, I’m not saying that the people in the government are not intelligent. But you and I can look at this data about plastics, and we can say, “Well, I don’t want to have that for myself or my child.” But at the government—in some ways, I kind of want to defend them, but explain what’s going on. At the government level, it’s not just about an individual making a decision. It’s about individual senators and representatives and the president making decisions that are going to affect everybody in the country.
And so, if they’re going to say that something’s toxic, then there better be scientific evidence about this toxic chemical.
And I think, in some ways, that it’s even more difficult to establish what is a toxic chemical than it is for legislatures to make a decision to ban it or regulate it or whatever. That’s the hard part. If they get the science, we can see that regulations do go in.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Right!
DEBRA: We’re going to take a break. And then, we’ll go on talking about this more after the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Sandra Ann Harris from ECO Lunchbox.
And we’re talking about how to pack your lunch without plastic. We’ll be right back with more on that right after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Sandra Ann Harris, founder of ECO Lunchbox. And you can go to her website at ECO Lunchboxes.com and see all the things that we’re talking about today on the show.
Sandra, you started to say something before I interrupted you. Do you want to continue with that thought?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Yeah, I enjoyed hearing what you were saying, Debra, about the challenge that our national legislatures have in terms of passing laws to protect families against toxins. And what kept going through my mind as I was listening to you educate us about that is there’s this philosophy from the top that, really, chemicals, as well as people in our legal system, are innocent until proven guilty. And there’s all this burden put on our top lawmakers and elected leaders to prove these chemicals guilty; whereas I think it makes a lot more sense to put that on its head and say, “Hey, guys… hey, manufactures. If you want to introduce these chemicals into consumer products and expose our national population to whatever it is that you’re going to put in there, prove to us that it’s innocent. Prove to us it’s not going to be harmful.”
DEBRA: I totally understand what you’re saying! I totally understand what you’re saying. And I agree with you to a certain point. Having studied toxicology for 30 years—this is why I know this—is that it’s very difficult to prove a negative. You could prove something, like you could take a chemical and you could feed it to a hundred rats, and if all the rats died, then you could say, “Well, this is toxic, and we shouldn’t be feeding it to babies,” for example. It’s harder to prove that something is going to be safe for every single person and every single dose.
Yesterday, I was talking to a homeopathic consultant. And she was telling us that the dose makes all the difference, that you could take something very toxic and make it extremely, extremely dilute. And it will actually eliminate the symptoms of the toxic exposure.
But also, everybody has different sensitivities. And so one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that when I—because as a consumer advocate, I’ve chosen to take responsibility for the position of saying, “This is toxic. Don’t use it. And this is okay. And it’s okay to use.”
Now, how do I make that decision? Well, I can’t take into consideration everybody’s individual sensitivities. What I can do is that I can go and look at scientific studies that say “this causes cancer” or “this affects the nervous system.” And there are many, many chemicals where that data is known. LIke you said at the beginning, they’ve known bisphenol-A was toxic for 70 years.
And that’s where I question if they know that it’s toxic, if they know fluoride is toxic, if they know formaldehyde causes cancer, why are they still allowing those chemicals to be in our products that are being sold?
That’s where it’s not a gray area if we know the toxic chemicals are toxic. There should be regulations against them.
There’s also something called the precautionary principle. And the precautionary principle says, “If there’s any reason to doubt”—any reason to doubt, it doesn’t have to be proven—“If there’s any reason to doubt, err on the side of good judgment and don’t do it.”
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: That really resonates with me. When it comes lunch time in particular, especially with a lot of moms working these days, our kids are at either public school a couple of hundred days a year packing a lunch or some kids are packing a lunch year round either at camps or daycare or whatever. And why not use the precautionary principle of avoiding plastics during that daily activity that happens hundreds and hundreds of times every year.
Now, exposure to plastic and other products in our cars and we’re breathing it in everywhere some of the staff we’re not going to be able to control but I like to approach things as you said with more of a precautionary approach kind of a drop in the bucket philosophy where I want yeah you know. If you can hear me how do we now that ever asked Paul I think I just lost my cats.
Now, incidental exposure to plastic and other products—in our cars—and we’re breathing it, everywhere, sometimes there’s stuff we’re not going to be able to control. But I like to approach things, as you said, with more of a precautionary approach, kind of a drops in the bucket velocity wherever I can.
DEBRA: Hello, I can’t hear you.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: You can’t hear me?
DEBRA: Hello?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Can you hear me now, Debra?
DEBRA: I think I just lost my guest?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Hello, can you hear me? I hear you. Debra? Hello? I hear you. Hello?
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we have a little technical difficult. Apparently, you lost me. I thought we were losing the guest. So Sandra, you’re still there, right?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: I’m here. We’re back!
DEBRA: Okay, good. Wow! Well, sometimes, this is what happens on live radio, is the machines don’t work.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: I wasn’t aware I dropped out. But could you hear me when I was talking about my drops in the bucket philosophy?
DEBRA: No, please go ahead and say that again.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Okay! Right before we lost the call, Debra, you were sharing about the precautionary principle. And I was saying that that’s certainly how, as a mother, I approach toxins in our family life. And when it comes to lunch in particular, when you think about the hundreds of times every year that our kids are packing a lunch, all those drops in the bucket, why not just remove toxins both from the food as well as from the containers the best we can?
Are we going to ever eliminate our kids’ exposure to plastics and other toxins entirely. Of course not! But there are areas where we have control. And lunch time is certainly one of those.
So, when I started ECO Lunchbox, I was like, “Well, do I really want to start a consumer products company?” And I thought, “You know what? There’s a lot more to this than just providing a stainless steel lunchbox.”
This is a tool for change. This is a tool for education, both as kids and as parents in terms of valuing and proactively doing something to safeguard their own health as well as—and we haven’t even talked about this (this could be a whole other show)— our planet, all the plastics that get out there into the world, and they don’t biodegrade. And unfortunately, less than 1% of plastics are ever recycled. So whatever happens to the rest, the 99%? Somewhere in our environment…
DEBRA: It gets in a landfill somewhere or, you know, there’s an island forming in the Pacific made up of plastic trash.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Exactly! I mean, they call that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And I’ll warn your listeners, if you’re just thinking about a huge mountain floating out there, basically it’s just kind of plastic that’s floating in these dryers that swirl it all together. And they’re just little broken down pieces. Ultraviolet rays kind of break down big pieces of plastic into little rubbish. And the fish are eating it, and they’re not doing well—and the birds. It’s washing up on the Pacific Coast. And there are five gyres throughout the world where this is happening.
So, I felt like, you know, hey, I’m not really a consumer products person, I’m a change maker, I’m an educator. I mean, as I’ve said, I was a humanitarian aid worker. And there’s a lot I can do around providing this healthy tools for living in terms of helping people empower themselves—and most importantly, helping children every day make a positive step towards a healthier them and a healthier world.
DEBRA: Well, I’m so glad that you’re providing this because I want to make sure that you know that every little bit helps. And the reason that every little bit helps is plastic, in particular, is one of those substances that your body holds onto. I mean, it’s hard for it to process. And so, what ends up happening, what makes a toxic effect in the body is day in and day out exposure over and over and then having it build up in your body.
And so, if you’re eliminating the plastic exposure of lunchtime, if you’re eliminating the pesticides in lunch by serving organic food in these containers, then it’s that much less of what’s called body burden. That’s the official term for all the chemicals that are building up in your body , body burden.
And you know, I found that bisphenol-A, I researched about how long does bisphenol-A continue to stay in your body. And it turns out that your body will process it through in about three days. So all you have to do is stop eating or drinking bisphenol-A for three days, and it will be out of your body. It’s not something not something that accumulates.
Yet tests have shown that virtually all Americans are walking around with bisphenol-A in our bodies. So this is a worthwhile thing to do, very worthwhile.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Well, thank you for your encouragement.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
DEBRA: Let’s start talking about your products. Just start at the beginning. I’m looking at your home page, and it’s great that you have them all here. And I especially love—let’s start with my favorite thing. This is not the containers. Sandra is going to tell you about that. But she’s got these beautiful bags. She’s got lunch bags, she’s got cloth napkins, she’s got a knapsack shoulder bag. These are all beautiful hand-printed artisan fabrics. And it’s a traditional Japanese design so you’re just basically taking a piece of cloth and knots up into a bag. And they’re so beautiful. So beautiful! So, I really wanted to just comment on that.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Yeah, the textiles are really the heart beat of the business. We source the textiles, fair trade, direct from the artisans. A dear friend of mine, she lived in India on a Fulbright Scholarship, studying the art of block printing. And these artisans going back a thousand years have carved wooden blocks and printed fabrics in the traditional way. And it’s an honor to have their fabric as a part of our line. And it just gives this feel-good factor.
And in addition to feeling good, it just makes the food taste better. Who wants to eat out of some beat-up old tupperware container. It may be reusable. But as we’ve talked about, plastic is a concern. It’s just not a very pleasant experience. Why not eat out of beautiful containers with colorful hand-blocked printed napkins.
And we have a couple of different purses that come with a reusable napkin. And then, we have the Furoshiki which you were mentioning, Debra. So, everyone have heard of bento boxes from Japan. Those words are just totally mainstream now.
But what we don’t hear about as much is, well, they weren’t just carrying their bento boxes in Japan in their hands. They were carrying them in Furoshiki which is a flat piece of textile that can be twisted and tied and knotted in all sorts of fun and clever and creative ways or just simply. Just tie it up around your bento, your ECO lunchbox. And then, when you get where you’re going, you can untie it, and you have like a little place mat where you can put your fruit out, put your role, whatever it is.
DEBRA: This is so wonderful!
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: And you can have a nice experience eating your lunch.
DEBRA: And I see in the picture that it folds up. You can fold it up and put it in your purse. And you could…
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Absolutely!
DEBRA: I used to have a folding bag, a reusable bag, that came in a little pouch. And I always had the little pouch. But this is so beautiful. It’s a beautiful piece of cloth. You can fold it up, and put it in your purse. And then you always have a reusable bag.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Absolutely, yeah. There’s something really satisfying about rolling back the clock and looking behind us and time for traditional solutions that have worked for generations. We really don’t need all these high-tech insulated new stuff that you see on the shelves of the big box retailers. Something as simple as a stainless steel food container—
And we have some really cute Bento style ones with nesting containers. And there’s definitely a fun factor. They sparkle, but it’s traditional. It’s is what people in India and China and many other parts of the world have successfully used for a couple of hundred years. And they’re still using these tools. So, I’m just so happy to make them available here in the United States where a lot of people think it’s a “new idea.” No, it’s not!
DEBRA: No, it’s not a new idea. That was one of the first things that I did 30 years ago when I started researching what can I use that’s not toxic. The first thing I did was I started looking at the past. If you just roll back time 200 years, you don’t have any of these toxic chemicals. I mean, not that there were no toxic chemicals. I had a toxicologist on a couple weeks ago where he was talking about toxic chemicals go back to the beginning of time, to ancient times. But the overwhelming preponderance of toxic chemicals you didn’t have 150 years ago. And there were clever ways to use things. And this is just a beautiful tradition.
I want to ask you a question because this is a shopping question. And some of the listeners might have this question when they go to your site.
I see you have several different sizes of these bags. And so you have—oh, wait! Maybe this is a kit, the Furoshiki ECO Snack Sack Kit. So, that has just the regular Furoshiki plus the other things in the kit. So that’s one size. And then, the other size is the lunch wrap. And then, you have a lunch bag. I’m a little confused.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Yeah, thanks for asking.
So, some of our items we sell in kits, and what I mean by that is we offer a stainless steel container with a bag or a snack pack. I think one of the items that you were mentioning is one of my favorites. It’s our ECO Snack Sack which is Furoshiki style. So, it’s a snack sack that’s 100% cotton. Again, no plastic coating. And I chose not to do mix media, not to add velcro, not to add a zipper, not to add anything because the recyclability of the snack sack, if it were to reach end of life, is much higher if it’s just 100% cotton. There’s a good market for recycled cotton. And I didn’t want to introduce a known toxin. Why not just tie it closed, which works great for moms that have kids that are in a stroller and wanting to snack on their little goodies.
You just tie it to the bar in front so you don’t have your little one throwing their snacks sack overboard. I don’t know if any of you out there have had that experience. But it’s like, “Sweetie, what happened to your snack?” And they’re like, “Hee-hee-hee…” Back two blocks, they’ve thrown it overboard.
This also works great on a bicycle or tied to a belt loop or a backpack if you’re out hiking. And then, you can either just put fruit right in there, or you can put a small water bottle in one of our stainless steel ECO zippers, which is a round stainless container with a stainless steel lid. Put some [unintelligible 27:09] in there. Put some fruits and cucumbers, whatever you want. It’s all plastic-free.
And when you sit down to eat that, and you’re calibrating what you’re eating, and the containers are sparkling, and the block-painted fabric is so colorful and beautiful, trust me, everything is going to taste better. It’s going to bring a smile.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you because I think that beauty has a lot to do with our experience of things. And that’s why I created a beautiful environment in my home. And I’m always looking at where can I find those natural materials that are going lend that extra, beautiful and useful. There’s no reason why things that are useful needs to be ugly. We can have that beauty factor there. And you’ve certainly done a great job with this.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: We’ve got another break now. So, we’ll be back after this. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Sandra Ann Harris of ECO Lunchbox. And that’s ECOLunchboxes.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Sandra—argh, you would think I could remember her name by the time I get through the whole show.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Harris…
DEBRA: I got the standard part, Sandra Ann Harris.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: You got the most important part.
DEBRA: During the break, my windows on my computer got all mixed up.
…Sandra Ann Harris, founder of ECO Lunchbox. That’s at ECOLunchboxes.com. And we’re talking about packing a healthy lunch without plastic.
So, now that we’ve talked about all the wonderful things that you sell to carry the food in, let’s talk about healthy food for lunch.
What do you pack for lunches?
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Well, the first couple of years that I had ECO Lunchbox, I felt a lot of pressure to do cute little bentos for my kids. And then, I kind of realized, “Well, wait a minute! Why am I packing their lunch?” Learning to make good choices with your own food is a life skill that kids should be learning from a really young age.
And so, for the last few years, I’ve been coaching my kids on how to pack their lunch. And I always ask that they pack something that involves protein and two sides, at least one fruit or vegetable. And then I let them do it. You can’t send your kid off to college if they don’t even know how to pack their own lunch.
Again, lunch provides this opportunity for kids to take control, to chose which lunch box. And with the guidance of their parents and education, both at school and at home, I’m sure hopeful that they’re going to make a choice to pack into a lunchbox something that’s non-plastic and toxic-free. And then, it’s a constant back and forth between my kids and myself about what are they going to be packing in their lunch, and have they put it on the shopping list, and did they pack too much or too little.
But I really let them handle it.
Now, another rule of thumb in addition to coaching them to always pack and entrée that involves a protein. And then the two sides is the food needs to be safely kept at room temperature.
Over the years, it seems like Americans have developed this expectation that they should be able to pack pretty much anything—cut up things, wet things, leftover things. For people going off to the office, if they can bring some kind of a glass container and put it in the microwave—I know microwaves aren’t that great, but a lot of people like their food hot. Okay, fine!
I think kids need to pack things that aren’t going to go bad if they’ve been sitting out for a few hours—not butters, nut jerky, unless the lunch is packed with a water bottle that’s full of icy water that serves as a cold pack.
There’s no need to use the blue plastic, the little ice packs that we see all over in the big box retailers. If you want to pack something that needs a little extra coolness, you want to eat your yogurt a bit cool, put your water bottle in there with a whole bunch of ice, and you’re good for a couple of hours.
So, you have to be strategic and thoughtful about what to pack if you’re not going to be using, for example, thermoses that are plastic or mixed plastic with stainless steel or other plastic or synthetic containers. You have to kind of think it through.
DEBRA: Well, Sandra, you’re applying a principle that I very much appreciate and apply myself which is, instead of making everything that what you want to do like bring hot soup for lunch, and then we have to have a plastic thermos, it’s looking at what’s available and how can you best work with it in terms of non-toxic materials.
So, there are lunches that suite having stainless steel containers and cloth bags. But those are the materials that can be easily and safely and healthfully used. And we then enjoy that. We enjoy that because there’s a suitability and a harmony.
I forgot the name of them, but I’ve seen this several times on TV, that there’s a longstanding tradition in India where they have these guys that go to the homes and pick up the lunches and then deliver them to the workers.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: The tiffin wallahs.
DEBRA: The tiffin wallahs, yes. And it’s a longstanding tradition that that’s the way that they worked it out. Instead of using plastic, the tiffin wallahs go to the homes, and the wives and mothers prepare them healthy meals, and the tiffin wallahs take them to the workers.
There’s no fast food hamburger or anything like that. They’ve got good, healthy, home-cooked meals they’re carrying around in these little steel containers. It’s a traditional thing. And it’s just wonderful to have that viewpoint, that you’re just going to say like I say—I don’t say, “Well, here’s my recipe. I’m going to go to the grocery store and buy this ingredient from South America.”
I go to the farmers’ market and I say, “What’s at the farmers’ market?” and that dictates what I’m going to eat.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Yeah, what’s available in response to that.
DEBRA: What’s available and responsible, yeah. If our desires are not governed by advertising or the whim of the day, and we start seeing ourselves as integrated with all of life and having a responsibility for all of life and our participation in it and what the effect of our actions are, then it starts to become a joy to do the things that protect the rest of life.
I wasn’t born knowing what I’m about to say, but I realized it, that everything doesn’t come from the store. My mother used to always say, “There’s always more at the store,” but there isn’t. Beyond that, there’s the whole environment. And that’s where everything we eat, everything we buy, everything comes from, those resources. And if we don’t take care of those resources, we don’t have anything.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Absolutely, yeah. And I think feeling more connected to our food and encouraging children to feel more connected to what they’re eating will also provide great [aside] in terms of their health. I mean, you think about kids who are relying on energy bars that are just kind of grab-and-go, covered in plastic. What’s their experience by eating those bars?
Do they even know what’s in the bar?
DEBRA: Well, of course, they don’t.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Are they building skills to make healthy choices as they grow up, to eat fresh fruits and vegetables?
There’s a lot of Inclination especially I think among young people today not to take the time to really properly eat. I know there’s the whole slow food movement and local food. And we’re seeing a resurgence of interest around food over the last 10 years here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But by and large, it’s more about the hoity-toity thing that the adults do. And they still get these bulk bars and prepackaged snacks at the grocery stores. And they just kind of throw them in the pantry for their kids.
Why not take the time? Like today, my kids packed zucchini muffins with walnuts and [unintelligible 36:46]. My son has food allergies. And that’s their grab-and-go. So, I try to have some kind of a homemade baked goodie, either something I make myself or something either my son or my daughter makes as a substitute for some of those bars, something that’s packed with nutrition and that’s really easy. And then, today, we made homemade flat bread pizza last night. And they packed a couple of leftover slices of pizza and a piece of fruit. There you go!
DEBRA: What a fabulous mom you are. Oh, my God! Everything that you’re doing is totally aligned with what I think is the right thing to do. Those good food choices need to happen when children are children. They need to grow up with them.
While you were talking about kids eating snacks, I was remembering a time—I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Oakland, California. I spent a lot of time there. And one of my favorite places to go is the farmers’ market at the ferry building.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Oh, yeah.
DEBRA: I just wish we had one here in Florida like that.
But anyway, I just remember one day just catching a glimpse of a baby, maybe two years old in a stroller, maybe one. But her father had just bought a basket of these gorgeous blueberries. And he was giving her these blueberries. And she just like put them up in her mouth and smeared them on her face. She had blueberry juice all over her face, and she had the most beaming smile that I have ever seen—the happiness of this baby eating blueberries.
And that’s the way I think we should be feeling about our really. And when I go to the store, I often will bring home food, and I’ll go, “What’s this?” It doesn’t even taste good, I mean even produce, because it’s traveled so far or whatever. And to be able to go to someplace like a farmer’s market like that and have that extraordinary produce that should be the norm everywhere, and see the happiness that that brings from eating…
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Yeah, like for older kids—my daughter is 10 now and my son is 13—I just give them $10 at the farmers’ market, and I’m like, “Any fruit or vegetable you want, go for it.” They’re like, “Seriously?!”
DEBRA: I was getting so excited talking to you, I didn’t watch the clock, but the show is over.
SANDRA ANN HARRIS: Oh…
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thank you, Sandra. Bye!
Tableware and Flatware
Question from Brenda Alexander
What kind of flatware is the most non toxic without heavy metal contamination? Also, What brand of tableware–plates and dishes are the most safe? Is pyrex safe to eat off of?
Thanks,
Brenda Alexander
brenda@wwdb.org
Debra’s Answer
There isn’t one brand of tableware that is “most safe,” but there are certain types.
My first choice would be clear glass, which is sold in many places. Here is some clear glass dinnerware sold online.
After that I would choose glazed porcelain or pottery, as long as the glaze does not contain lead.
I would not use any kind of plastic dinnerware.
I’ve listed some websites that sell dinnerware I like on the dinnerware page of Debra’s List.
As for flatware, honestly the best recommendation (no kidding) would be to eat with your fingers, and next would be wooden chopsticks without a finish and those Chinese porcelain spoons.
Airocide Air Cleaner
Question from Angelique
Someone on one of my MCS groups is gushing with praise about this expensive air purifier. Do you or any of your readers know anything about it, or have any experiences with it? It’s called Airocide.
Debra’s Answer
I have no personal experience with this, but it makes sense to me.
The Airocide website says:
Airocide is different from any other air purifier you’ve ever heard of or tried because it’s not a filter. This technology, developed by NASA, clears the air of virtually 100% of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) – the harmful gasses emitted by products you have around your home, like aerosol sprays, cleaning supplies, disinfectants, hobby supplies, dry-cleaned clothing, building materials, paints and paint thinners, strippers, pesticides and even air fresheners. This FDA approved device also completely eliminates all mold, fungi, viruses and bacteria (all major causes of allergy symptoms) that enter the chamber. All that exits is clear, crisp air.
Airocide draws in harmful airborne pathogens and forces them into a densely packed matrix of highly reactive catalysts that are activated by a high intensity 254-nanometer light. The reaction destroys these harmful pathogens on contact. Nothing is captured so there is nothing to clean. All that exits is crisp, clear air, with zero ozone emissions.
Readers, any experience?
OK to Line My Kitchen Shelves With Cork?
Question from Bruce
For a rental home with particle board kitchen cabinet shelves, (the particle board is 11 years old and likely mostly offgassed), does anyone know if cork is safe for lining shelves and drawers? Williams-Sonoma sells some. Okay for chemically-senstive people? Odor?
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
I’m not sure I understand your question. Particleboard cabinet shelves have nothing to do with the toxicity of cork.
I have used cork myself to make bulletin boards. You can buy it in big sheets for flooring underlayment, and it would probably cost less per foot that way that if you bought it at Williams-Sonoma. It’s a good material for lining shelves and drawers as it holds things in place instead of having them slide around.
I’m not aware of any chemicals used on cork, but it does have a slight odor from the natural cork itself, as is true for many natural materials.
Fabrics That are Nontoxic, Ethical, Sustainable…and Beautiful
My guests today are Patty Grossman and Leigh Anne Van Dusen, co-founders (and sisters) of O Ecotextiles. They are changing the way textiles are being made by proving that it’s possible to produce luxurious, sensuous fabrics in ways that are non-toxic, ethical and sustainable. Today we’ll be talking about toxic chemicals in textiles, and how they are creating safe fabrics (they specialize in upholstery fabrics, but the production issues apply to all fabrics). The the collection has garnered accolades and honors since it debuted at Decorex in 2007, where it won Best Merchandise from House & Garden magazine. In 2009, Environmental Building News and BuildingGreen named O Ecotextiles one of the top 10 Green Building Products of 2008. Leigh Anne and Patty believe that the best way to achieve necessary changes in textile manufacturing is to share what they’ve learned about the methods used to make fabrics – and what this means to us and our planet. Their research and groundbreaking efforts to create aesthetically pleasing and environmentally safe fabrics has made them experts in the issues of sustainability in textiles. They are founding members of the Sustainable Furnishings Council and serve on its Textiles Subcommittee. www.oecotextiles.com
Read Why and How to Green Your Textile Choices
Make Your Own Herbal Bodycare Products
My guest Dina Falconi is the author of Earthly Bodies & Heavenly Hair: Natural and Healthy Personal Care for Everybody. We will be talking about nuturing and healing your body with herbal products you can make yourself—many using ingredients you already have in your own kitchen. Dina is a clinical herbalist with a strong focus on food activism and nutritional healing. An avid gardener, wildcrafter, and permaculturalist, Dina has been teaching classes about the use of herbs for food, medicine, and pleasure, including wild food foraging and cooking, for more than twenty years. She produces Falcon Formulations natural body care products and Earthly Extracts medicinal tinctures. She is a founding member of the Northeast Herbal Association, a chapter leader of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and an organizer of Slow Food-Hudson Valley. Today Dina is also the author of Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook (she’ll be back on the show soon to talk about this) www.debralynndadd.com/books/earthly-bodies-amp-heavenly-hair
Dye in Blue Jeans
Question from Orsolya
Dear Debra,
All the clothing what we wear is made from 100% natural fibers. I say no to synthetics it is the way we decided to live. (same goes for cosmetics, cleaning staff…etc.) For my baby I bought unbleached, undyed or low impact dyed organic 100% natural fiber clothing only.
I understand that non organic natural fiber clothing is safe if it is colorfast. I always handwash everything so I can see if it is safe to keep it. I have hard time with jeans because I have never purchased jeans that is 100% colorfast. I bought two jeans for my son, one of them is bleeding blue colors even after handwashing it three or four times. The other bleeds only very light blue color and only when I handwash (with detergents) it not bleeding at all during rinse. Do you think it is safe to keep it? How about after washing it fifty times? 🙂 I go crazy handwashing and checking if it still bleed the color… 🙂 My son (and myself too) can live without jeans. I started to hate them because all of them bleed colors as hell…
So please share your jeans experience with me. Have you ever seen a 100% colorfast jeans?
Does colorfast means that during the first three-four handwash non of the colors should bleed just like if we washed an undyed fabric?
Thank you for your time and wonderful website!!!!
Debra’s Answer
Blue jeans are blue from a natural plant dye called indigo. Historically, this dye was important economically because blue dyes are rare in nature. Today virtually all blue dyes are made from petroleum. Indigo is used almost solely to dye the cotton yarn used to make blue jeans, and the rest is used to dye other natural fiber yarns.
There is lots of information about indigo online, here is one site Indigo: The Indelible Color That Ruled The World.
Indigo is what makes blue jeans fade over time, because the dye washes out bit by bit.
Another source says that virtually all of the indigo dye used to dye blue jeans is synthetic, that is, made from petroleum. They go on to say, “All these chemicals and toxins added in the production process are leaking from the jeans during the consumer use, washing and end of life. Most salesmen recommend their consumers not to wash their jeans the first couple of weeks, but it actually takes about 3-5 washes to get rid of the worst chemicals stuck in the fabric. This means that the consumer will end up absorbing dangerous toxins and this could result in allergies or rashes.”
I would stick with colorfast dyes, since there is so much unknown here.
Can These Fumes Harm My Child?
Question from Kelly
We had an oil based low voc polyurethane applied to our hardwood floors on the entire first floor of our house. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of the toxicity until after it was done and still smelled for weeks and I started researching.
We have a young child and was running air purifiers but after 6 weeks and a lot of research on that and the carpets we had installed in the other room at the same time we decided to remove all the hardwoods and put tile down.
As floors were pulled up we realized all the quarter molding around the floor perimeter was tacky – assuming the contractor replaced wood before curing occurred.
I am concerned that my child being around that for 6 weeks (a few hours a day) could have harmed my child. Do you think this still tacky polyurethane under the wood could have out gassed enough to cause long term damage or would the fumes have evaporated quickly and/or the wood molding on top of it blocked fumes?
We ran air purifiers all the time and left windows cracked. I am just very nervous.
Debra’s Answer
This is a difficult question to answer.
First I just want to note that there is no such thing as an “oil based low voc polyurethane”. Oil-based polyurethane is not low VOC. I just checked and couldn’t find one. So it sounds like standard oil-based polyurethane, which contains toxic solvents and takes a long time to cure.
I’m looking at a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for an oil-based polyurethane finish product and the volatile toxic chemicals are mineral spirits, aromatic 150, and napthalene.
Right in the MSDS are warning messages for these three ingredients, the same warning for all three:
So without a doubt, these are toxic chemicals to avoid if one can.
Experience with Various Futons?
Question from Chris
Hi Debra, We have a 3 year old Maggie couch from Bob’s that is primarily foam. I am guessing it is still pretty toxic as it isn’t that old but we were not aware of the many toxic issues when it was given to us. We’d like to get a futon to use as a couch instead as it seems to be the most cost effective.
We are considering the Dreamton mattress from White Lotus with the EverGreen foam core, surrounded in green cotton and wrapped in wool. Do you have any experience with this mattress or type of foam?
I am also concerned about their wool as I’ve read many negative things about how New Zealand sheep are treated and I want no part of that if it’s true. I’d prefer all wool from Shepherd’s Dream as I have their bed but there is no way I can afford another one.
Also, if were able to save enough for wool/cotton from Heart of Vermont, do you know how well they wear as a couch? We don’t want all cotton and I can’t do latex.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much! Chris
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any advice?
I don’t have any experience with these mattresses except that I have visited the workplace where they make White Lotus mattresses and found no materials that I considered to be toxic. I don’t know anything about how the sheep are treated for their wool. Give them a call and ask them.
Meet a Toxicologist
Yes, there is a field called “toxicology” and it’s all about determining what’s toxic and what’s not. Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- The Basic Principles of Toxicology
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Meet a Toxicologist
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: August 22, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And we need to have all kinds of information because there are toxic chemicals all around us in the consumer products that we use every day. Just walking out our front doors, there are toxic chemicals falling from the sky, and pesticides on lawns, and car exhausts. And all around us, there are toxic chemicals.
But we can be free of the negative health effects of all these toxic chemicals by learning how to minimize our exposure to them, and remove them from our bodies.
Today is Thursday, August 22, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And it’s cloudy, maybe there might be thunderstorms, so if you lose me, that’s why, but I’ll be right back.
Today, we’re going to be talking with Dr. Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT. He’s a toxicologist, the director and founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of the book, A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
He received his PhD in toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester New York, and he’s a diplomat of the American Board of Toxicology and an affiliate professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences in the University of Washington.
So he has a lot of experience with toxic chemicals. And 1986, that was about when I started getting interested in toxic chemicals.
Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: You’re very welcome. It’s nice to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. So tell us, how did you get interested in toxic chemicals, of all things?
STEVEN GILBERT: It came out a little bit sideways. My background is actually in electrical engineering. And I did a lot of computer work after I’ve graduated. And a lot of that was related to testing and designing products for testing on toxic chemicals.
But I came into it that way. And I got very interested in the effects of chemicals particularly in the developing nervous system and how to prevent chemicals such as lead and mercury from affecting developing nervous systems.
I went back to school about six years after I graduated to get my PhD and really devoted myself to trying to lessen the effects of chemicals on the developing nervous system.
DEBRA: That’s a very good thing to do. We share that interest in preventing the effects of toxic chemicals.
STEVEN GILBERT: We really focus on prevention than treatment. It’s great, but we really need to focus on prevention.
DEBRA: I totally agree. So what does a toxicologist do?
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really good question. Toxicologists do a range of things. And one reason I like about the field of toxicology is you can do it for testing chemicals, you can do regulatory work on policy development, determining what chemical levels might be safe in the environment or in the food supply or in the water supply. So, there’s a range of jobs in the state and federal area.
There are also pharmaceutical companies. They employ a lot of toxicologists for developing new drugs and testing the health and safety of the new drugs. Pesticide manufacturers, so the agriculture industry, employ toxicologists.
So, there’s really a wide range. I don’t do any research anymore, only in the academic environment of course. A lot of toxicologists is working in the academic environment, looking at the health effects of chemicals.
I don’t do any research anymore. My focus is really on how we talk about toxicology, how we inform people.
So, my view is we know how to do more and more about less and less. We’re really good at doing research. What we don’t do such a good job of connecting the dots and really getting information out there to people so we can make better decisions about our health.
DEBRA: I actually agree with that. And that’s part of why I inform the public about toxicology information. It’s because I don’t think that the field is informing the public enough. I would agree with you on that.
STEVEN GILBERT: I really appreciate what you’re trying to do here because I think it is really important to talk about these issues and get more information out there. We know a lot of stuff. We just don’t use it well.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. And that’s one of the reasons why I asked you to be on the show, and I’m so glad that you’re here. And I hope you’ll come again, and maybe again, and again and again because I only know as much as I can learn as a consumer, and somebody that didn’t even take chemistry in school. But I just sat down when I got to a point in my life where I needed to understand toxic chemicals because they we remaking me sick.
I just sat down with a chemistry dictionary, and I looked up formaldehyde. And then it said this is how formaldehyde is made or something. And then I went and looked up the other chemicals that went into it.
And that’s how I learned about chemistry, it was just reading a chemistry dictionary. But you’re so trained in this field that all of us who are listening, and everybody in the world need to be hearing from people like you, to educate us because we all, in the world that we’re living in today, we all need to be toxicologists. We all need to be understanding the chemicals around us, and knowing how to protect ourselves from them.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think that’s really true because we do need to know the basics. And that’s why I wrote my book, A Small Dose of Toxicology, as an introductory book on toxicology and the health effects of the common chemicals that we’re all exposed to.
I think it’s very important to learn at least the principles of that because a lot of decisions are made around toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: They are. And I haven’t read all of your book, but I’ve been reading it in small doses. And I really love the approach that you have. I love that you’re tying everything that you’re saying to daily life, and I love that you’re saying things in a simple way, and then also providing more resources.
I see a lot of similarities between what I’m doing and what you’re doing, especially look at A Small Dose of Toxicology. Some of the principles that you covered were the same things that I felt I needed to cover in my book, so that people could have a basic understanding. But of course, you’re writing about it from your knowledge as a trained toxicologist where I’m just writing about it as somebody who reads about it, but hasn’t been trained.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, that’s a very important perspective because we all are affected by toxic chemicals. I think that perspective is really important.
But just to quickly mention, the Small Dose is free. It’s a free e-book. So it can be downloaded off the web for free.
DEBRA: Yes, and I would suggest that everybody go and download it because it really is—even if you only read part of it, the parts of it that explain the basics of toxicology are really, really excellent. And these are things that every single person needs to know on the planet. You need to know this like you need to know the alphabet or how to add and subtract.
It’s just basics of life in the way the world is today.
And in fact, let’s just talk more about—right now, let’s talk more about what’s on your website. It’s Toxipedia.org. And that’s where you can go to find the book. T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A dot org.
And why don’t you tell us about different kinds of resources you have there? The thing that’s important to say about this, why this is different from other websites about toxic chemicals is that you really explore the world of toxicology in the context of history, society and culture.
And so one of the things that you can find out on this website, for example, is the whole history of toxicology going back to ancient times. Toxic chemicals didn’t just appear in the 1940s when they started making pesticides. Toxic chemicals exist, and
Dr. Gilbert really put the whole field together in a way that is very fascinating.
So, tell us more about what they can find on your website.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you, Debra. I think the history, putting the science in the context of history, society and culture, is very important. We just can’t throw a lot of facts out there. And there’s a lot of [heartfelt] issues around toxicology that I think need to be explored. And we have a lot of lessons learned if we look historically.
So, I try to put the chemicals and the other information in that context, in the context of history and society, so we know where we’re coming from and know how to avoid some of these mistakes.
One of the things we did was to make an interactive poster called Milestone to Toxicology. So the milestone poster is a colorful poster. It has little squares on it. You can explore the squares. You open it up. It’s a PDF file. You can click on one of those squares and get more information.
That poster has now been translated into over 10 languages. So it’s in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Italian, Turkish, Arabic. It’s a very fun poster, fun information.
So, one thing we tried to do is make toxicological information fun. We also have a big education section. And that explores Small Dose. And there’s material for a 1- and 2-day toxicology courses. Each chapter of the Small Dose book comes with a PowerPoint presentation that you can download to help teaching the material.
We have sections on ethics. I think ethics and values, how to make decisions, is really important.
We also support a number of other websites. We just have a pretty wide range, one of the most—
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a minute because we do need to go to our station break. And then we’ll be right back, and we can continue.
I’m talking with Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert who is a toxicologist and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. And he’s got a great website, Toxipedia.org, T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A dot-org.
And before I interrupted him, Dr. Gilbert was telling us about what’s on his website. So why don’t you go on and finish what you want to say about that?
STEVEN GILBERT: I was just talking about the different sections we have. We have a lot of material there. It’s a free Wiki-based site. We’re always looking for contributions.
For example, on the front page, I was just mentioning the ethics where we talk about environmental justice issues and the decision-making process. We have a section on the precautionary principle. And hopefully, we’ll get into that a little bit more later.
We also have a section called the Toxicology History room which has a number of posters or contributors from people around the world. You can actually request the Toxicology History posters to be at your facility.
We have a section called Lessons Learned where we have different essays explore past issues around toxicology. We have a Day-to-Day Issues Around Toxicology. I tweet about this every day. I put up an issue or a historical fact that occurred on toxicology.
So, we try to make toxicology interesting. We support a number of other sites like the World Library of Toxicology. ASmallDoseOf.org supports the A Small Dose of Toxicology book.
We have new a website coming up—it’s just getting going—called Women in Peace. And we have a site called Washington Nuclear Museum and Education that we support that focuses on Hanford and toxicology issues around Hanford, the most contaminated site in the Northern Hemisphere. It was used to create plutonium for World War II.
And we also have a site called Integrative Pest Management, IPMopedia, that looks at Integrative Pest Management issues.
So, we cover a wide range of areas. And you can search Toxipedia. I hope you enjoy exploring it.
DEBRA: I’ve been enjoying exploring it very much. And I’m sure I haven’t seen all of it yet. There’s a lot there. And it’s all presented in an interesting and simple way. So very well done.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you.
DEBRA: I also wanted to say that it was interesting to me when I started reading A Small Dose of Toxicology—one thing I want to make sure that everybody sees is, and I always have trouble finding it, is that you have a page where you talk about different toxic chemicals and give background on that, such as you do in A Small Dose of Toxicology has a small list. But you have more on your website.
And I always have difficulty finding it. But it’s there. So people should search for it.
What I wanted to say about the chemicals that are in A Small Dose of Toxicology is that I had to smile when I read this because the number one toxic chemical that you list, not that you were rating them, as being the most important, but the first one that you chose to address was alcohol—alcoholic beverages.
And in my book, Toxic-Free, that was number two. And then the second toxic chemical—and the reason I wanted to mention this is because people usually think of toxic chemicals as being something like formaldehyde or benzene or something like that. But in your book, A Small Dose of Toxicology, the first one you address is alcoholic beverages, and the second one you address is caffeine like in coffee and chocolate, and all those other caffeine-laden foods.
And number three is nicotine.
In my book, Toxic-Free, the number one that I discussed first was cigarettes, nicotine and cigarettes.
So we have a very similar approach as to what we started our books with.
STEVEN GILBERT: Very good.
DEBRA: A lot of similarity. And then we go off in different directions. But the fact that we both started with the basics of toxicology and the same toxic chemicals, that was pretty interesting.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s very good. I think that’s very important because those are chemicals we’re all commonly exposed to. We need to understand the potential health effects of those chemicals.
DEBRA: We do. And I think that if somebody is drinking a lot of alcoholic beverages, if they’re drinking a lot of coffee, there’s the caffeine, and there’s the pesticide, and all the pollution in the water and everything, or if they’re smoking a lot of cigarettes, if they’re doing any of those three things, in my opinion, I think that those are going to make them sick. And you could eliminate some other toxic chemical down the line like formaldehyde on bed sheets or something, but it’s not going to help to do that if you’re doing these big things—those big three things. Good. I’m glad we agree.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, we totally agree on that.
DEBRA: So could you tell us about individual sensitivities and how people react or are poisoned in different ways?
STEVEN GILBERT: I think a really important issue is individual sensitivity. I think, as we understand the genome better and sciences progress, that’s become more and more important, understanding who is most sensitive to chemicals.
For example, pesticides are a good example of that where some people are more sensitive to pesticides because they don’t metabolize them as well. So you get what’s called the healthy worker effect.
So workers that work in pesticide fields tend to metabolize pesticides faster and deal with them. People that are slow metabolizers don’t work well in pesticide fields and tend to drop out of the industry. You’ve got people that are more resilient to pesticides.
There are many chemicals that are like that. Lead, for example, the more we’ve learned about lead, the more we found that people are more sensitive to lead at a very young age. The developing nervous systems is exclusively sensitive.
So, taking into account age, the health effects of chemicals is really, really important. The developing nervous system is explicitly sensitive to pesticides, lead, mercury. And we’ve learned that over the last 20 years just how sensitive that is.
And metabolism is very important, how well you metabolize a compound. And your genetics is very important […]
So, there are a lot of issues. Always remember that kids are not little adults because they eat more, breathe more, and drink more than adults do per body weight. So there’s sensitivity like that. And kids have that hand-to-mouth behavior. So there are a lot of interesting issues you need to take into account when looking at toxic effects of the chemical.
DEBRA: So that was one of the things that was of interest to me as I was studying and learning these things too because you think that, like you read in a book this chemical is toxic or that chemical is toxic, but then how is it toxic to you? And that’s a whole different question.
After we take our commercial break here, I want to ask you this question about how is it determined that a chemical is toxic because there’s so much variation in how our bodies receive the toxicity and what our bodies to with these toxic chemicals, how we can figure out what’s really toxic. And there are so many variations about that.
So we’re going to address that after this commercial break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m talking to Steven Gilbert. He’s a toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT. He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology and the publisher of a huge and wonderful website on toxicology called Toxipedia.org, T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A dot org.
Before the break, I asked a question, and I want to repeat the question because I really have two questions, and they’re related to each other. I think what I asked you before the break was to tell us about the individual differences that we have in our bodies that would make a chemical more or less toxic to us. But there’s another question too.
You probably need to answer these one at a time, but I want to ask them both at once.
There’s a lot of controversy about whether or not a chemical is toxic. And so I’m looking at a lot of industrial things that are happening like manufacturers, and regulations, which I think we’re going to talk about later if we have some time. But people are saying toxic chemicals need to be regulated or we should be labeling things in certain ways.
But then there’s a question about what are the toxic chemicals that need to be regulated and is the chemical toxic.
Those are the two things I’d like us to talk about next. Big questions.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, those are huge questions. One quick example on different sensitivities is with caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant. And some people can drink caffeine at dinner time, and not have any problems with going to sleep. Other people like myself will only drink caffeine in the afternoon or 2 o’clock at the latest because it does affect our sleep.
So, we respond and react to chemicals very differently. And that’s just a simple example. Some people get a headache when they stop drinking caffeine. And that’s another example of individual sensitivity. It varies widely with our genetics the effects of different chemicals.
DEBRA: Yes, it does.
STEVEN GILBERT: Now, to the other question of determining toxicity, we know how to do that in a lot of cases. For example, the Food and Drug Administration requires that new drugs go under extensive testing to show health effects and also efficacies (so does it do what it says it’s supposed to do). So new drugs that come out in the market have gone through extensive animals and human testing before they’re allowed to be marketed. And this came from historical issues—for example, thalidomide, it caused birth defects when thalidomide was consumed through organogenesis by the pregnant women.
So, we have a strong history of a very precautionary approach with putting new drugs on the market.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that with new chemicals going in the market.
DEBRA: Wait, wait! I want to ask you a question about drugs. So all these drugs are tested, but what are they tested for in order to be able to be allowed on the market. If anybody watches television at all, you can’t watch television without seeing these advertisements for all these drugs, and then they say in a very nice voice while children are playing in the meadow and the butterflies are flying and music in the background, “And this drug will cause blindness and death and liver problems. And be precautionary.” But these drugs are on the market with all these side effects.
STEVEN GILBERT: And actually, that’s good to know about that. And that’s what a lot of the testing of these compounds try to determine—what are the potential side effects.
And what they try to do with the drugs is have the exposure to the drug low enough so you don’t encounter the side effects.
And that’s part of the trick, knowing at what level a drug becomes toxic and the benefits are outweighed by the hazards of that drug.
And the new drugs, they try to determine what might be the potential hazards of those chemicals through animal testing and also through a lot of experience with human testing. And they’re required by law to read them off. If we had the same thing happen with industrial chemicals we’re exposed to, we’d have a much better idea of chemicals in our products.
DEBRA: Oh, wouldn’t that be great? That would be so great.
STEVEN GILBERT: There’s no law that requires what fragrances are put in dryer towels and things like that. We don’t know a lot of chemicals we’re exposed to. But we’re not required to list them.
So that’s the problem. We don’t have the same precautionary approach putting new chemicals on the market. Most people on this call will be excreting bisphenol-A in their urine. And I’ll bet nobody gave permission to be exposed to bisphenol-A.
DEBRA: Let’s use bisphenol-A as the example for this question because you can read things and books like Our Stolen Future that talk about the health effects of bisphenol-A. And then you can read all kinds of other things that say, “This government agency and this doctor say it doesn’t hurt us.”
I was reading something this morning that just came out last week. There was a new study that showed that not only is there lead in lipstick. This was an article in the New York Times. I don’t know if you saw this.
STEVEN GILBERT: I saw that.
DEBRA: In that article in the New York Times, which I’m going to be putting up on my website this afternoon, in that article, they talked about how there’s all now these eight heavy metals that they found in lipstick. But just in terms of lead in lipstick, the amount that they found was one part per millionth, but the FDA limit for lead in candy is one-tenth of that, 0.1 part per millionth.
And the CDC says there’s no safe level for lead.
So how are we supposed to know, as consumers, what is okay for us to be exposed to?
STEVEN GILBERT: You know, that is really tough. You just pointed out a great example of the contradiction of regulatory fields where lipsticks should be regulated like candy, at least, because you lick the lipstick off your lips. You’re being exposed to them younger and younger. Using lipstick, you’re exposed to lead which is a known hazard. And there is no safe level to lead exposure. So to have this standard is silly.
DEBRA: I think it’s silly too. It’s just more and more, as I study everything about life, I see that there are basic things that need o be understood. And yet, we have people running the world who don’t understand basic things.
And toxicology is one of those basic things. It should be taught in every school, that the things that we’re talking about here, everybody needs to know. And if people who are making regulations don’t know these things, we’re not going to get them on the labels.
There’s so much I could say. There’s probably so much you could say.
STEVEN GILBERT: It is really difficult because the regulatory system sometimes gets disconnected from the health issues and trying to prevent disease. Lipstick is a great example. Mercury in fish is another one. Bisphenol-A is another one.
A recent book just came out on bisphenol-A called Is It Safe? It gives all the history of the BPA, and the struggle to define the safety of chemicals by Sarah Vogel. And that gives a really great background on the controversy around BPA and the vested interest that often promote these products.
Lead, for example, has been promoted for decades in lead-based paint. It was added to gasoline. It took a lot of work to get lead out of gasoline. And it’s even more work to ban lead-based paint.
And if you look at what they did in Europe, they banned lead-based paint in Europe in the 1920s when the League of Nations said they recognized they can be hazardous to the developing nervous system. We didn’t do that in the United States because there’s vested interest in putting lead in paint because they’re making a lot of money from the mining and use of lead.
DEBRA: And I have to interrupt you again or else the commercial is going to interrupt you. I’m here with Dr. Steven Gilbert. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s a toxicologist and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. And he has a very extensive, easy-to-read, informative website called Toxipedia.org. It’s T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A dot org.
Dr. Gilbert, I know that you want to talk about managing chemical exposures at the state and national level. So since we’re now in our last segment, let’s talk about that.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you. So I just want to mention that the federal agencies, the FDA and the EPA, work very hard trying to protect public health. And they attach safety factors to different drugs or chemicals that are on the environment. Those safety factors are meant to protect people that are potentially vulnerable.
The problem is that there are vested interests that push back on this really hard. BPA is a great example where the chemical industry is a billion-dollar a year product. And it’s in all kinds of products that we touch—even our cash register receipts. It’s all over the place, even liner cans and things like that.
So, trying to get trials on chemicals is very difficult. And they just limited it in baby bottles. It was not used in baby bottles. But that mostly came about because the States passed laws banning BPA from baby bottles and Nalgene drinking bottles for water.
So, it’s really a combination of trying to get the federal people to be more proactive on protecting human health.
And when we look on internationally, it’s been a big issue. We are trying to replace TSCA, the Toxic Substance Control Act. It was passed in 1976. And that’s not going well. It’s still bottled up in Congress. We’ve been trying for almost a decade. It’s the oldest law, environmental chemical law, that hasn’t been modified since the TSCA of ’76.
And Europe has moved ahead with a program called REACH—Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals—trying to provide more transparency and more data on these chemicals. TSCA doesn’t require the companies to produce a lot of data and health effects of chemicals, unlike the FDA, which it does require drugs to have all these chemical, all these data, to back up the potential side effects or point out potential hazards of a drug. We do not have that for standard chemicals.
In addition, we don’t have a good law to give us transparency, so we know what’s in the products that we’re using—which I think we have a right to know.
DEBRA: We do have a right to know. I just want to back up what you’re saying here and really emphasize it because in order for us to make a decision about our exposure to toxic chemicals. We need to know what’s in the product, what toxic chemicals are in the product, and we need to know what are the health effects of those toxic chemicals.
And unless we have both of those pieces of information, we can’t make a decision.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think that’s really important point. We have a right of information. We have a right to an environment that we can reach or maintain our full potential, particularly for children. We expose children to PCB’s and lead and alcohol and mercury. They rob them of their potential. And it robs adults of their potential. They get older and age.
So we have a right to a healthy and safe environment. And that’s not being honored by our regulatory structure right now.
DEBRA: Well, we have an alienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the first one is life, and toxic chemicals take life away to some degree.
STEVEN GILBERT: They do, they do. They have a lot of long-term effects. Lead, you damage the developing nervous system with lead. It’s a lifetime effect. They lower their IQ, increase the probability of attention deficit disorders. It’s really tragic. And we’ve made this mistake again and again.
You look internationally in Nigeria, 400 kids died from lead exposure because of gold mining. The same thing in the Amazon over mercury exposure. We know better. We know what not to be doing.
DEBRA: Well, we know better. And also, I think that within each one of us, we have consciences. We know that we should be doing the right thing. And it’s the right thing to continue to allow this to happen, or is it the right thing to do what we need to do to clean it up.
This whole thing about toxic chemicals in industry is less than 200 years old. And granted that there are toxic things you’ll find on Dr. Gilbert’s website, the toxic exposures go way back into ancient times. But this whole thing would be constantly bombarded by toxic chemicals, toxic chemicals, toxic chemicals, 24 hours a day, and everything that we do is less than 200 years old, and the results of our industrial culture.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think it’s good to read on that. I’d really recommend it, Doubt is Our Product by David Michaels. He goes into the history of tobacco industry and how the tobacco industry for years said that their product was not toxic. And that industry has manufactured uncertainty around toxicology data.
So, it’s a very important book, Doubt is Our Product by David Michaels. It delves in the history and how industry has responded to regulatory process.
DEBRA: Thank you. So we only have a few minutes left. Let’s talk about the precautionary principle. Tell us what that is. That’s one of my favorite things.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I love the precautionary principle.
So, the precautionary principle is really an approach to decision-making. It really says that you put the burden of responsibility on the proponents of an activity. The proponents of an activity should show that the chemical is safe, efficacious and not cause hazards.
And it also has a component of education, to hand people a transparent process and educating people about it.
So, an example is the Food and Drug Administration does take a precautionary approach putting drugs on the market. We don’t have that same approach with putting industrial chemicals. So the burden of proof, the burden or responsibility is put on the proponents of an activity.
I spent years doing research on lead and mercury funded by [tax-free] dollars while industry spent all their time arguing that lead was safe and was no problem. Instead of having the burden or responsibility if they’re putting it out in the environment, they should be funding the research to demonstrate safety.
So, the precautionary approach really shifts that around and says “the proponents of an activity have to invest, have to provide the data that show its product is safe.” I think that’s the base of the precautionary principle. And it really says that uncertainty should not be a reason for not taking action.
So, even if there’s some uncertainty about the potential health effects, we take action on the preponderance of data and not demand proof. And that’s what hung up the tobacco industry to make decisions, this industry. How do you prove tobacco products cause cancer?
And for years, we went round and round that circle. But the preponderance of evidence was that tobacco products do indeed cause cancer and nicotine was addictive. It was finally proven. But we have to jump through a lot of hoops to do that. We spent millions of dollars while industry makes a lot of profit from these products and not taking on the responsibility of health and safety to the general population.
DEBRA: So I’ve been working in this field for 30 years not as a toxicologist but as a consumer advocate. And so I’ve been in the position of making decisions and giving advice about helping consumers find products that are less toxic. And so in order to do that, I need to be able to make a decision about what I think is toxic, and what I don’t think is toxic.
And the way I’ve done that is to read as much as I can about what scientists have to say about these chemicals, but also to see what my own body is doing when it comes in contact with these chemicals. And I do listen to anecdotal evidence.
And I was writing about how toxic carpets were long before there were any measurements of toxic chemicals coming off of carpets because I could see people getting sick from them.
And so my viewpoint about this is that if I can observe a negative health effect or if there’s any question about it, I’ll go on the side of precaution. I know the more experience I have, the more I’ve been—now, I’m wanting to really be able to differentiate between what is a chemical that some people might have some individual response to versus something like DDT, for example, or lead, where really, it’s going to be dangerous to anybody.
And even if somebody isn’t visibly showing a poisoning response, that eventually, enough will build up into their body, where it’s going to cause a health effect.
And if I suspect that that was going on by what I’ve read or what I’ve observed, then I’ll say, “We should just stay away from this because I found that there are less toxic ways to do almost anything.”
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I think that’s a great example. If you take a precautionary approach based on your own observations or your own individual sensitivity, and looking for alternatives—that’s one of the points of the precautionary principle, Pick a lesser hazard.
Using flame retardants is a good example. Cotton and wool are naturally flame retardant. But if you use these synthetic fibers, they have flame retardants in them. And we just don’t need to go there. We don’t need to be doing that.
DEBRA: Yeah, we can stop because there’s an alternative.
STEVEN GILBERT: There are good alternatives. And we also need to know more about our products. That’s really the case. We should not have to worry about lead in jewelry, or lead in candy, which are obviously not the way to do it. We are still bombarded by products that have lead-based paint on them—lead in candy and…
DEBRA: And we do, and it’s not on the label. And I think if we could just get this stuff on the label or even if it’s not on the label, if you could go online and look up a product and see “even though it’s not required by law, this is what’s in it,” the whole economy would shift because people would be looking for products that didn’t have toxic chemicals in them.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, knowing what products have phthalates, and the cosmetics that have phthalates or that carry fragrances, or nail polish, we should know what’s in these products, what we’re being exposed to, and how much we’re being exposed to.
People that work in nail salons get differentially exposed to these products as well as in day-to-day use of these products. There’s just no reason not to know what’s in these products.
DEBRA: And we were coming up on the end of the show now. So thank you so much, Dr. Gilbert, for being on the show.
STEVEN GILBERT: You’re very welcome. I enjoyed it.
DEBRA: And I would love to have you on again. We’ll talk soon.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you very much.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Is This Futon Less Toxic Than My Sofa?
Question from Erin
Hi Debra, We have two young children and I’m worried about their toxic exposure.
My husband has finally agreed to ditch our conventional sofa set — as long as I don’t spend money replacing it.
We also have a 2-year old all-cotton futon (non organic, treated with boric acid) with an untreated hardwood frame that could replace one of the sofas.
I think pesticides do break down over time—does boric acid also?
Even though I know it is not a perfect solution, this seems to be a *less* toxic option, but I wanted your opinion first. Thanks for all you do!
Debra’s Answer
Yes, this futon and frame is less toxic than your conventional sofa set. Well done on your progress!
What Makes a Rug Pad Mold/Mildew/Moth Resistant?
Question from Greenmom
Hi Debra, Do felt/jute pads for area rugs have fungicide or pesticide? They claim to be Mold/mildew/moth resistant and I’m wondering whats used to achieve that?
Specifically, I’m looking at this: www.rugpadcorner.com/shop/ultra-premium/
Thank you for all the help, you are a great resource!
Debra’s Answer
Well, I called the company (you can call them too) and was told there are “no chemicals, glues, or adhesives” in any of their products. They only use recycled or natural materials.
They may be making the claim to be mold/mildew/moth resistant because of the natural latex rubber. I specifically asked if there were pesticides or fungicides and they said that the manufacturer says there are none.
This pad might smell like latex, but otherwise, this site looks like a good find!
Household Hazardous Waste—What to Do With the Toxics You Want to Trash
My guest today is Victoria Hodge, President of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association (NAHMMA), a professional organization dedicated to pollution prevention and reducing the hazardous constituents entering municipal waste streams from households, small businesses and other entities that are not included in other toxics disposal regulations. She is also the Municipal Sales Manager for the Central Region for Otto Environmental Systems, where she works with the field sales team to build municipal business in both products and services. Among other activities in the field of solid waste and recycling Victoria set up a pharmeceutical collection site that received regional, state, and national awards as a result of its success. We’ll be talking aabout which items in your home are considered hazardous waste and how to legally dispose of them. www.nahmma.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Household Hazardous Waste—What to Do with the Toxics You Want to Trash
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Victoria Hodge
Date of Broadcast: August 21, 2013
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. There are toxic chemicals all around us, in consumer products that we use, in the environment. They’re just all over the place—even in our bodies. But there are things that we can do to make less toxic choices, to remove toxic chemicals from our homes, from our bodies, from our workplaces.
And today, what we’re going to talk about is what to do with all those toxic chemicals that you might be removing from your home. When you decide to go toxic-free at home, or toxic-free in your workplace, what do you do with all those toxic chemicals? It’s actually illegal to put them in your trash.
And today, we’re going to be talking with Victoria L. Hodge who is the president of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association. Hi, Victoria.
VICTORIA HODGE: Hi, Debra. How are you today?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
VICTORIA HODGE: I’m doing well.
DEBRA: I forgot to say that today is August 20, 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And where are you, Victoria?
VICTORIA HODGE: I’m in the beautiful Denton, Texas, just north of the Dallas Forth Worth Metroplex.
DEBRA: I’ve been to Texas. It’s a beautiful place.
VICTORIA HODGE: Yes, it can be, absolutely.
DEBRA: Victoria, you have a long list of credentials in working in solid waste. What made you interested in working in this area?
VICTORIA HODGE: Well, I started off working for the City of Denton in quite a few years ago. I was working with the Solid Waste Department. And they decided they wanted to start a Household Hazardous Waste Program, and I thought that would be a great opportunity for me to make a difference in my community and in the environment. So, I decided to take on the challenge and do it.
DEBRA: Can you tell us something about the history of Household Hazardous Waste? I know that, when I was born, there was no such thing. And actually, 30 years ago, when I started writing about toxic chemicals in consumer products, there was no Household Hazardous Waste Program.
The first one I ever heard of—and I don’t remember the date—it was a collection day that you couldn’t go take it in at any time, and we had to save up our pesticides and our paint cans and everything. And then once a month, there’s something. There’s a collection day, and we’d have to go take things to the collection day.
Tell us about the whole idea of Household Hazardous Waste, why it’s important, and how we came to have Household Hazardous Waste Collection.
VICTORIA HODGE: It’s funny that you say that you remember being able to go once a month to drop off items because I know a community still today that don’t have drop-off collections at all. And the ones that do sometimes only have them once a year.
And we’re lucky that some communities are able to incorporate an ongoing facility or ongoing collection. Each community is different when it comes to that.
DEBRA: Where I live right now in Florida, I can just take those in at any time. It’s five days a week, they’re open. Anyone can take in their household hazardous waste collection. I actually thought it was that way all across the country.
VICTORIA HODGE: Unfortunately, it’s not. And you’re very lucky because the State of Florida is one of the leading states that is pushing everyone onwards of getting everyone else involved and onboard. And you mentioned earlier that I’m the president of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association, which we lovingly call it NAHMMA, so I’ll call it NAHMMA from here on out.
The State of Florida, their chapter is the strongest chapter in our organization.
DEBRA: Yay, Florida.
VICTORIA HODGE: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: So what’s the difference between when somebody throws a household hazardous waste in the garbage can, just the regular trash, versus taking it to Household Hazardous Waste Collection? And I was assuming because it’s illegal where I’ve lived to put household hazardous waste in the trash, that it was that way everywhere. Is that the case?
VICTORIA HODGE: It is not the case. Since it is a consumer amount—let’s say, you buy a bottle of cleaner as an individual, it may have the same chemicals, and it does. It has the same chemicals that a corporation when they buy or make big, huge, large amounts of it. They’re just regulated, where they have to dispose of it in a certain way.
We, as consumers, when we buy that cleaner in our little bottle from a grocery store or a home improvement store, there’s no regulation on how to dispose of it, so we are able to throw it legally into the landfill, into our trash, which eventually would probably go to a landfill in those communities.
Obviously, we know that that’s not the best solution. And fortunately, many communities do have Household Hazardous Waste Collections, or ongoing facilities where people can drop it off.
DEBRA: What if somebody lives in a community where they don’t have that?
VICTORIA HODGE: One of the things that I’d like to recommend is if you have a chemical, if you have a product that you have used and either you don’t like it, or you’ve used all that you need of that, see if any of your neighbors or friends need it before you try to dispose of it. That way, you’re not throwing it out into the environment, or into the landfill. It might be someone else’s favorite product. Just because you didn’t like it or needed it anymore, it might be something that they would normally go to the store and buy.
And so that way, it’s being completely used. And the person that you’re giving it to has, fortunately, saved some money.
DEBRA: Well, what is a household hazardous waste site look like? How is it different from a landfill? When I take things to the collection, where does it go?
VICTORIA HODGE: The household hazardous waste collection site, it’s usually the chemicals, the items, are separated by their class of chemical, and it’s either recycled or disposed of properly, either into a hazardous waste landfill that’s a landfill that is certified for hazardous waste, or it is incinerated.
So it can be either recycled, obviously, reused is the best thing, recycled, and then unfortunately, either incinerated for destruction, or the worst that would happen, I would think, would be having to landfill it into a hazardous waste landfill.
DEBRA: And what does a hazardous waste landfill look like? Is it lined in some particular way?
VICTORIA HODGE: Correct. There is a specific type of landfill. We have many different types of landfill, and I’m not the expert in that. That’s a whole other topic for someone. But there are different types of landfills. There’s the landfill that—the municipal landfills which is where our everyday trash goes into, and then there are hazardous material landfills, and those are specially regulated, specially lined, very impermeable surfaces, so that that material that is in there will not go into, and has no chance of going into the ground water.
DEBRA: That’s great. So basically, what we’re trying to do is keep the toxic chemicals out of the ground water. That’s the whole point.
VICTORIA HODGE: That’s the whole point.
DEBRA: So I’ve seen instructions sometimes where it says, don’t put it in the trash, pour it down the sink. Is that a good idea?
VICTORIA HODGE: Well, it depends on the chemical itself, and the type of product that it is. Some items can go into the drain.
It’s better to pour it down your sink because once it gets to the waste water treatment plant, it could be treated. You would rather it go into that versus going into the storm drain.
We’d like to keep it out of all of it.
DEBRA: Well, we’re coming up on a break now. We’re talking with Victoria L. Hodge, and she’s the president of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association. And when we come back, we’ll talk more about household hazardous waste, so that you can know what to do with the toxic chemicals that you want to trash.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Victoria L. Hodge, president of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association. And we’re talking about household hazardous waste.
And I was actually surprised to learn at the beginning of the show that not every community has a household hazardous waste collection like I do here in Florida. And so when we’re talking about, as you all know, who have been listening to this show for days and days and weeks and months, and have read my books, that my whole message is about us not being exposed to toxic chemicals in our homes. And well, the Household Hazardous Waste Programs exist to keep the toxic chemicals out of the ground water, and to preserve our environment.
We need to, each of us, be interested in these programs because when we decide to remove toxic chemicals from our homes because we don’t want to use them anymore, we need to make sure that we do that in a responsible way that doesn’t hurt other parts of the environment and other species.
So we’re going to be talking about what should be taken to household hazardous waste. But before we do that I want to make sure that all of you listening, if you don’t already know where your local household hazardous waste is, I want to just give you some tips on how to find one.
Now, you may or may not have one, and you may need to go to another nearby community in order to find yours. But the first thing—I wrote about household hazardous waste in my book, Toxic-Free, and it starts on page 33. And I have some instructions that I’m about to tell you on page 35. And then on page 36 and 37, it has an extensive list of things that are considered to be household hazardous waste, which we’re going to discuss.
So the first thing you need to do is find your local household hazardous waste collection facility. And I found mine by typing in the name of my county and household hazardous waste into a search engine online. And I don’t have any household hazardous waste to dispose of, so I don’t actually use it. But I just wanted to see if my community had a household hazardous waste program, and how easy it was to find.
And so if you don’t get a result, a search engine result for typing in the name of your county and household hazardous waste, I would call whoever it is that picks up your garbage, and ask them, tell them that you’re interested in disposing of your household hazardous wastes properly and where is the closest household hazardous waste collection.
And if you don’t have one in your community, you might consider making a little noise about getting one.
Victoria, if somebody doesn’t have a household hazardous waste program in their community, what are some tips about what they could do to get one?
VICTORIA HODGE: I think you’re on the right track of making some noise with your city county leaders, and letting them know that this is something that you’re wanting because I would guarantee that almost all the programs that have started have come about because their citizens or residents saw a need, and they inquired about it.
Just asking about it, and the more that the city leaders hear, the county leaders hear, that their residents and constituents want something like this, the more likely you are to get what you want.
DEBRA: I agree with that. Often, it’s a grassroots thing. All these good things happen because grassroots, people say, “Let’s have this important thing.”
It doesn’t usually come from the government. I’m not wanting to sound like I’m putting down the government. But this is a government that is by the people and for the people here in America, and we have a right to speak up and say what it is we want.
I’m recommending household hazardous waste because I want you to take all your toxic chemicals out of your home, and dispose of them safely.
But it’s even more important to have household hazardous waste for people who are still using household chemicals that are toxic because they’re going to continue to use them, and continue to put them into the environment where it hurts everybody.
Another thing else I found out about toxic household hazardous waste is that every community has a different list of what they accept and what they don’t accept. And so you really need to find your local facility, and then find out what they’ll accept.
Has that been your experience, Victoria?
VICTORIA HODGE: Absolutely. Every program is going to be different. The list of things that one community will accept and you might live in one community for a long time, and you’re used to taking certain things to it, and then you move to a new community, and you find out that they’re not accepting those same things.
So yes, each program is different, so you definitely need to do a little bit of research, and do your homework before you either drive to that facility, or call to have them pick up your items.
DEBRA: And another thing that I want to mention about household hazardous waste is that there really are two kinds of chemicals that we’re discussing on this show. One is called acute, which is something that if you were to drink the chemical, or even spill it on your skin or something, something like most cleaning products or pesticides, products with warning labels on them, if they’re really toxic, that they will damage you just when you drink them. And you want to keep them out of reach of children.
Those are the kinds of things that are usually household hazardous wastes.
Then there’s another kind of chemical called cumulative. Cumulative, and what those do is you have to be exposed to them day in and day out over a period of time. And they build up in your body.
Those, most people don’t even recognize and don’t go to the household hazardous waste center.
So mostly, a good rule of thumb is to think that the poisons that you would call the poison center, poison control center for, those are also considered household hazardous waste.
It’s time for us to take another break, and then when we come back, we’ll talk about what are some things at your house that are household hazardous wastes.
I’m here with my guest, Victoria L. Hodge. She’s the president of the North Americans Hazardous Materials Management Association, and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’re talking about household hazardous wastes.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about household hazardous waste with Victoria L. Hodge, president of the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association.
Victoria, let’s talk about what is hazardous waste around the house. I have a list here, and I’m sure you have your own list of what is included.
So why don’t you start? I think that I would start with the ones that are the most toxic.
VICTORIA HODGE: Well, you obviously have household cleaners, which sometimes people don’t think of them as being toxic because they think, “Oh, I’m using this is in my house. I can buy it off of the shelf at a store.”
So I would say household cleaners definitely are among the most toxic.
DEBRA: I would agree with you. They’re governed by the Hazardous Substances Act, and they have warning labels on them.
A number of years ago, when I wrote one of my books way back in the 90’s or 80’s, I decided that I was going to list all the household products in their order of how toxic they were.
And cleaning products turned out to be the first chapter. And if people want to just eliminate cleaning products all together, there are a lot of cleaning products that you can make yourself. Just gather everything up, and take it to the household hazardous waste, and just don’t use them anymore.
Or if, as Victoria said earlier, you know somebody who wants to use them, then you can give them to them. But I would say—I ask myself, this is an ethical question for me, do I want to give other people things that I know are toxic? And I decided just the other day that I was not going to sell my copper faucets for a kitchen sink, which I had taken out and replaced with new faucets because the old one had lead in it.
And I thought, this is a beautiful antique faucet, and I’m not going to sell it for its value as a faucet. I’m taking it down to the recycling place, and recycling it, and just having it taken out of the consumer stream because I don’t want people to be using a faucet with lead in it.
And I think that that’s probably the same thing with household hazardous waste. I think that I wouldn’t give it to somebody, but I feel too that if people want to use it, they’re going to use it whether I give it to them, or they go buy it.
VICTORIA HODGE: It’s a double-edged sword.
DEBRA: It’s dilemma. What is the right thing to do?
So you can go to any natural food store, and buy less toxic products. You can make your own. I just use things like Bon Ami, lemon juice, vinegar and baking soda to clean with, and none of those things have to go to the household hazardous waste.
What else besides cleaning products?
VICTORIA HODGE: Well, you also have lawn and garden, and you have the fertilizers, and herbicides, and pesticides, and poisons.
DEBRA: Don’t you think it’s funny that people are spraying herbicides and fungicides all over their gardens, and yet when they need to dispose with, it’s considered to be household hazardous waste?
VICTORIA HODGE: Yes. The stuff that you put on your lawn is the most direct avenue of affecting our ground water.
DEBRA: So people shouldn’t be using those at all?
VICTORIA HODGE: In my opinion, no.
DEBRA: In my opinion also. But if you have any left in a can, it should go to the household hazardous waste.
VICTORIA HODGE: Yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: Okay, what else?
VICTORIA HODGE: Paint and paint-related supplies, whenever you’re painting a wall, or even art supplies. Those can be hazardous and toxic at times, depending on what you happen to purchase.
DEBRA: Well, let me say something about that because there are different kinds of paint. Obviously, oil-based paint is the most toxic, and then the next toxic after that is latex paint.
And I just said, well, you’re spraying fungicides all over your garden, and that’s household hazardous waste. And you’re putting paint all over your walls, and that’s household hazardous waste.
But I wanted to say the difference. And to me, the difference is that if you have paint in a can, it has toxic solvents in it. And once you put it on your wall, those solves evaporate, and what’s left on the wall is actually not a toxic material. It’s a coating, but there are no solvents left.
And it’s the solvent part, the wet paint in the can, that is the household hazardous waste, not the paint on the wall.
VICTORIA HODGE: Correct.
DEBRA: And so if you’ve got leftover paint in a can, I know a lot of people, including myself, we keep those paint cans, so that we can do a touch-up on the wall, but if you have enough left that you feel—it’s still there and you painted the wall another color, and you don’t need to save it, and you want to dispose it, then it needs to not go into the garbage can. You need to take it to the household hazardous waste.
VICTORIA HODGE: Correct. And paint is one thing, especially latex paint. If you happen to not have a program that you can take it to for proper disposal, then there are several things that you can do. You can take an old board, and paint that several times, and you just leave it outside and keep letting it dry, and just keep painting it over and over. That way, you can use up the paint because like you said, once the paint dries, it’s no longer toxic.
Or if you have too much to do that, or if you don’t have time to do that, you can pour kitty litter in it, and just keep mixing that until it dries. And then once it’s dried in the can, at that point, you are able to put it into your trash.
DEBRA: I didn’t know about that one. When I was in California, where I used to live, and where I went to my first household hazardous waste collection, they used to have a paint recycling collection place. They probably still do. I don’t think we have one here in Florida where I live.
But you could actually go to the household hazardous waste place, and buy the can, like half a can of something, or they would also mix the colors together, and sometimes get some strange colors, but there are many times when the color doesn’t matter, you just need to protect the piece of wood, or that you’re just painting a room, that you can reuse somebody’s paint, or recycle it into another use.
So I think that part of disposing of household hazardous waste is to recycle it into something. And I know that in the larger scheme of things in the world that recycling toxic chemicals is one of the things, as you mentioned earlier, if they can be recycled instead of disposed of.
We need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Victoria L. Hodge. We’re talking about household hazardous waste. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Victoria L. Hodge from the North American Hazardous Materials Management Association. And we’re talking about keeping hazardous waste out of the environment and out of our homes.
Victoria, I just wanted to mention that several years ago, I lived in San Francisco for three months. And while I was there one of the things that was going on was that they were doing a big campaign about mercury-collecting from the fluorescent lamps, and collecting thermometers, and anything that had mercury in it because the fish in San Francisco Bay, tuna and swordfish, they had extremely high mercury levels in them. And so people were eating the fresh fish and crab and all those things. They were coming out of San Francisco Bay, and getting extremely high mercury levels up to three times the threshold for Federal Food Regulation to pull the seafood from the shelves.
And consumers just had no idea that was going on.
And so here was a real-life situation where you could actually see in—I’m smiling right now because once I wrote a note to one of my book editors where I used a phrase in my local forest, and she didn’t know what I was talking about because she lived in New York City, and she didn’t have any reality that there was such a thing as a forest where you live.
That’s what popped into my mind when I was about to say that people in San Francisco, and I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area and lived there all my life until I moved to Florida 12 years ago, but there’s a bay, and there’s fish there, and people eat their fish, and San Francisco is famous for their seafood.
And yet, the citizens of the surrounding area were not disposing of their mercury-containing products in household hazardous waste, and it has contaminated San Francisco Bay. And that’s something that local people are now aware of that there are toxic levels of mercury in San Francisco Bay.
This is why this is important because we talked about at the beginning that the point of household hazardous waste is about to keep the toxic chemicals out of groundwater, that where it comes back to the consumer is exactly this example from San Francisco Bay. The consumer throws those mercury-containing compact fluorescent lights, and the tube lights into the trash that goes into the landfill, it goes into the bay, and then you go have sushi, and you’re eating three times the acceptable level of mercury.
VICTORIA HODGE: That’s very unfortunate.
DEBRA: It is. But I think that that’s happening probably all over, and we don’t even know it.
VICTORIA HODGE: It’s highly possible, yes, it is. And speaking of the fluorescent bulbs, I think that one of the unfortunate things is that people don’t realize that you do have to take special care when you dispose of those. They don’t just go into your trash cans.
DEBRA: I know. And I think that a lot of people don’t know that. I actually witnessed an otherwise intelligent woman actually break a compact fluorescent bulb, and pick up the pieces and put it in the trash. And I said, “Excuse me, it’s got toxic mercury in it. You shouldn’t be doing that.”
And she said, “Oh, I don’t care.”
VICTORIA HODGE: Oh, my gosh.
DEBRA: And that was her attitude. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of people just feel that way, that they just put everything in the trash and aren’t aware of where the toxic things are, and that they should be sorted out, and that they should be taken.
I actually tell people not to use compact fluorescent bulbs because of the mercury and that they can use LEDs that have much less toxic material in them because there should be just a collection point for compact fluorescent bulbs.
I think it’s not getting enough education out into the community.
VICTORIA HODGE: I actually agree with you on that. One of the fortunate things is, at least here in the Texas area, there’s a couple of home improvement stores that are now accepting the bulbs. So definitely check with your neighborhood, your local hardware store, home improvement store, and see if they have those programs because there are national programs, national chains that are doing that now.
DEBRA: I don’t use them, so I don’t have any place to dispose of them. But I do know that environmentalists are particularly promoting these because they save energy, and they do. But they also produce toxic chemicals and toxic wastes, and it is household hazardous waste, and as we see, it’s polluted San Francisco Bay.
So that’s not good for our environment.
So tell us some other things that are considered household hazardous waste.
VICTORIA HODGE: There are certain kinds of batteries, definitely the rechargeable batteries need to be returned and recycled. Those are not good, and it should not go into your trash. It should not go to the landfills. The rechargeable batteries do need to be taken to a location that recycles rechargeable batteries.
DEBRA: And what else?
VICTORIA HODGE: Let’s see. We talked about art projects, certain paints and stuff like that. And I think that a lot of, especially children’s art project items are usually non-toxic, so that’s good. But on the adult side, if you have a hobby, or a craft that you do, make sure you’re taking care of your, like you said, of your health, and make sure that you’re using the least toxic item that you can when it comes to that.
DEBRA: One of the big things in terms of hobbies is the adhesive that many people use to put models together. That’s very toxic to breathe, and also is household hazardous waste.
One of the things I want to mention on my list is that I think that most women don’t recognize that some of the things that they’re putting on their bodies every day are considered household hazardous waste like cuticle remover, and hair-removing products, and permanent wave solution, hair straightening solution, and especially nail polish and nail polish remover.
And I think that a lot of women just use those products as if they’re water. You’re just putting on nail polish and indoors where there’s no ventilation, and they are extremely toxic to use. And nail polish remove is the same thing, that if you’re going to use those, go outside and use them, and don’t throw them in the trash. Make sure that you use it all up, so it doesn’t go—or take it to household hazardous waste.
It’s just so interesting to me that so much of what is commonly used is actually considered household hazardous waste.
Also, you particularly did a program about pharmaceutical collection. Can you tell us about why it’s important, what to do with pharmaceuticals because they are considered household hazardous waste.
VICTORIA HODGE: Yes, absolutely. And that is a whole other program that we should get into another time too. You should dedicate more time to that.
Yes, pharmaceuticals are definitely something. We’ve heard for years and years and years to flush it down your toilet if you don’t need it or want it. And that is the worst thing that you can do because our septic as well as our waste water treatment plants are not geared and tooled to get rid of all of the pharmaceuticals that can be in there. So definitely look for pharmaceutical collection programs. There are more and more permanent ones that are popping up all over the country. The DEA has had several collection days, usually in October, and in April, and those are nationwide programs.
So definitely go to the DEA website and see when their next program is.
DEBRA: And what does DEA stand for?
VICTORIA HODGE: Department of—you would ask me that.
DEBRA: I know. You’re used to calling it DEA but nobody knows what it is.
VICTORIA HODGE: I know. My apology. I don’t know off the top of my head. I apologize.
DEBRA: It’s okay. I’m going to look it up while you’re talking. Go ahead.
VICTORIA HODGE: Anyway, that would be a really good thing for people to realize that they do need to dispose of that. It’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Sorry about that.
And so yes, pharmaceuticals do need to be properly disposed of as well. And luckily, fortunately, the DEA is catching onto that and they’re encouraging law enforcement to have collection programs so that they can collect all pharmaceuticals, including controlled substances.
DEBRA: That’s excellent. And we will have you on again to talk about that. Maybe we could have you on in October when it’s time for the collection programs.
So we just have not even a minute left. Are there any final words you’d like to say?
VICTORIA HODGE: I would like to thank you for having me on, and letting me talk about household hazardous waste. If people have more questions, or would like more information, they can go to our website at NAHMMA. It’s NAHMMA.org, and they can find us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
DEBRA: And you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and there’s a link right there. Just look for Victoria’s smiling face, and you can also—we will be posting this show, and you can listen to the archive show, or share it with your friends.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
VICTORIA HODGE: Thank you so much.
DEBRA: Thank you.
Benzene in Cranberry Juice
Question from Michele
I just came to realize that I have been giving my child cranberry juice and found out there is benzene in it.
Cranberries have natural benzoic acid and the company adds absorbic acid (vitamin c) and together they form benzene.
From the samples done that I found documented online the level of benzene is less than 2ppb which is less than the 5ppb allowed in drinking water.
However, I am concerned I could have given my child too much benzene since I have been using this juice for 2 years.
Did I raise my child’s risk for leukemia and is there any statistic that shows the risk? Thank you
Debra’s Answer
This is old news.
I’m looking at a news article from 2006 that says:
Here are the key things that made benzene form
If there is no sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate in your cranberry juice you have nothing to worry about. No benzene was formed.
And even if your cranberry juice did contain these benzoates, it would also need to have been exposed to light and heat. Chances are low that 100% of the cranberry juice contained benzene.
Life Without Plastic
My guest Jay Sinha is co-founder and co-owner (with Chantal Plamondon) of Life Without Plastic, a one-stop shop and information resource for high quality, ethically-sourced, Earth-friendly alternatives to plastic products for everyday life. They founded the business over seven years ago after some tough experiences with chemical sensitivities and following the birth of their son. They sought to avoid the toxicity and awful environmental footprint of plastics but had difficulty finding certain key housewares in a non-plastic form. So they set out to find and source them for others too. Jay has degrees in biochemistry, ecotoxicology and law, and prior to LWP explored jobs ranging from tree planter to environmental consultant to corporate lawyer (most who know him can’t quite believe this one – nor can he) to Parliamentary researcher and policy analyst. This was the most obvious route to becoming a passionate anti-plastic activist and ecopreneur. He loves to walk in the trees – he and Chantal and their son live among the trees in a small dynamic rural community. We’ll be talking about how Jay and his wife manage to live without plastic and some of the great plastic-free products they have on their website. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/life-without-plastic
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Life Without Plastic
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Jay Sinha
Date of Broadcast: August 20, 2013
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 because there are toxic chemicals out there. And the more we know about them, the more we can recognize them, and the more we know that there are safe alternatives, the more we can protect ourselves, our families, all our loved ones, our friends and the planet from the health effects, the emotional effects, the mental effects, the spiritual effects of these toxic chemicals.
And so what we talk about on this show is getting to know these toxic chemicals, so that we can eliminate them from our lives and make healthier choices.
Today, we’re going to talk about plastic. We’re going to talk about plastic and how it affects our health, but also how we can live lives without plastic.
But before we do, I just want to read you a quote. And I’ve mentioned before that, every morning, I send out quotes. You can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and sign up in the newsletter sign-up box, and then it will take you to a page where you can choose words of wisdom, and you’ll get a quote from me every morning, such as this one.
And this is from James Allen. Though you might not recognize the name, you will probably recognize the title of his most famous book, “As a Man Thinketh,” which has been this universally known ever since it was published in 1902. He was a British philosopher and writer. And many, many people have read this book. And he says:
“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”
And what we’re doing here, we’re talking about toxics, is that we are being the acorn, we are being the egg, we are being the seed of something to come. And as we make these choices, and create a non-toxic world together, a toxic-free world, then it comes into being. And that’s why this is so important.
My guest today is Jay Sinha. He’s the co-founder and co-owner with his wife, Chantal Plamondon, of Life Without Plastic, a one-stop shop and information resource for high quality, ethically-sourced, earth-friendly alternatives to plastic products for everyday life.
Thanks for joining me, Jay.
JAY SINHA: Well, thank you, Debra. It’s a real privilege and a pleasure to be here to chat with you.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so impressed with your website because not only are you selling things that aren’t plastic, but you’re also playing attention to the quality of those things, and choosing very high quality products—not things that are going to break or just junk, that you’re really looking at other aspects of it, as well as them not being plastic.
Tell me how you got interested in this subject.
JAY SINHA: Well, it goes back a ways. I’ve always been pretty environmentally-oriented. I mean even going back as far as when I was about 11 years old, I remember doing a project on acid rain, and I was really passionate about that.
But for us, it really began around 2002. We were living in a home that had some pretty serious mold issues. And I happened to be also working in a building that had mold issues. So both Chantal and I became quite sick.
We left. We were able to leave the sources of the problem, the mold. But we both became quite sick for about a year. And this caused us to become more sensitive to environmental irritants, things like perfume, cigarette smoke, and certainly molds and mildews.
So, we began looking for ways to remove toxins from our everyday life. In that same year as well, our son was born. So we certainly wanted to minimize his exposure to toxins.
And we read an article in Mothering Magazine during that period about plastic toxicity and the risks for children. And that was a bit of a light bulb flash for us and got us thinking about all the plastics around us—bottles, Tupperware containers, what we’re using.
So we began looking for a stainless steel water bottle. And this was 2002, 2003. There weren’t many out there at all. We had a really hard time finding one.
DEBRA: Not at the time, yes.
JAY SINHA: We did find one online, ordered it, tried it out and liked it. And we were also looking for glass baby bottles to store Chantal’s breast milk for when we’d be going out or traveling. And they were the norm back in the ’50s, ‘60s, even early ‘70s, but we couldn’t find them anywhere. So again, we did find one supplier eventually, and we contacted them. And they said, sure, you can buy some. But the minimum order is a thousand because they only did wholesale.
And so that got us thinking. We were both feeling rather disillusioned by our jobs at the time, looking for more meaning and more impact in our work and how we were spending our time.
And so that’s really how the company began, with stainless steel water bottles, glass baby bottles, and then some stainless steel food containers as well.
Chantal began at full time. She had taken time off when our son was born. And then a couple of years later, I also left my job and began working full time on the company. And just as it went on, we added more products and focused on things that were hard to find in a non-plastic form.
DEBRA: Yes, there are a lot of things that are hard to find.
So, what are some of the things that you think are most difficult? I know that I’ve been living without plastic for about 30 years, also, from my own chemical sensitivities many, many years ago. And I found that, once I understood plastic and what was going on with it, that I didn’t want to have it. I wanted to eliminate it as much as I could.
I think that it’s unrealistic to think that one could eliminate 100% of plastic—I know I haven’t been able to do it—and still live in a modern technological world. But I find that there are so many things that I can replace that I don’t have to use plastic for.
So give us some examples of some of the early things that you were wanting to replace after the bottles, and what was your success, or lack thereof, of finding those items.
JAY SINHA: Well, you’re absolutely right about the difficulty of removing everything. That’s quite overwhelming when you begin looking at it. So we began with the focus on food and drink, and trying to remove all plastic from coming into contact with what we would put into our bodies essentially.
So, there are the bottles I mentioned. But also, stainless steel food containers, we began using more of and just non-plastic dishes of any sort, we’d use glass, ceramic, wood. For storing food—for example, leftovers—we use stainless steel containers or glass containers which are relatively easy to find.
DEBRA: Yes, they are.
JAY SINHA: Some of them do have plastic lids, but you can certainly arrange it so the plastic doesn’t touch the food.
Another one was bags, for example. Reusable now are everywhere, but we began using just cotton bags, which were relatively easy to find as well.
Those were the main things. Utensils, as well, stainless steel utensils are everywhere. That’s one that didn’t require much effort for us.
DEBRA: I think for me, it was, first of all, just becoming aware of what was plastic in my environment because I think that a lot of people can’t recognize plastic. They just don’t know what to look for.
It really is amazing. I remember back 30 years ago, when I first started asking myself these questions, it wasn’t in my awareness. So people don’t walk around thinking this is cotton, this is plastic, this is wood. And it’s not an issue unless you’re trying to evaluate the safety of all those materials actually.
JAY SINHA: Absolutely! And there wasn’t an issue for us either. We were using plastic quite regularly until all this happened. It made us look at our whole lives. And then, when we began looking at the plastics around us, there were so much. Personal care products, shampoos, soaps, tended to come in plastic bottles. So we shifted more to bar soaps, those things, or bulk.
Buying in bulk is an amazing way to avoid plastic. You can bring your own containers now. Back then, it was very out of the ordinary. Now, it’s becoming a little more accepted and even more mainstream to bring your containers to a bulk store, have it weighed there beforehand, and then fill it with whatever you’re buying.
And there are more and more places that offer natural, non-toxic alternatives to preserve-laden personal care products. So that was another big one that we switched to.
DEBRA: We’ll talk more about this after the break. Especially after the break, we’re going to talk about the dangers of plastic.
Why would you want to stay away from plastic, in addition to the obvious environmental things that the toxicity and not biodegrading, but the human toxicity of plastic—why in our homes would we want do that.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here today with my guest, Jay Sinha of Life Without Plastic. And you can find Life Without Plastic at DebrasList.com, or you can go to his website directly at LifeWithoutPlastic.com.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here today with Jay Sinha from Life Without Plastic talking about how we can live without plastic.
Jay, I want to let you talk about why plastics are dangerous, and I know you have some stories of how people have been affected by that. But first, I want to say just as a background that there are many types of plastics, that they vary in toxicity, and that it’s difficult to identify some types of plastics, and that we should just be, in general, watching out for plastics that I don’t spend so much time saying is this a fiber, or what kind of plastic is it, or how can I identify it.
I just, across the board, eliminate as much plastic as possible.
JAY SINHA: I totally agree. And that’s very much the approach we take as well—a basic precautionary approach is just to avoid plastics.
Plastics are really a chemical soup. They are petroleum-based or natural gas or coal. So they’re coming from fossil fuels that they’re based. And I know you interviewed Beth Terry. And I heard you talking quite a bit about the environmental aspects there. It was a great interview, so I won’t talk too much about that. Those are very energy-intensive. An extraction process is used to just get the base material to make plastics. And all the waste [unintelligible 11:54].
But in terms of the health, you may have a base plastic polymer, but a lot of additives are added to the actual plastic to provide certain quality, such as softness, rigidity, durability. It could be things like actual softeners (which are usually phthalates), flame retardants. And as you say, the toxicity is going to vary from plastic to plastic.
I know you also interviewed Mike Schade about PVC. And that’s certainly, probably, the worst out there. It’s just phenomenal that it is still a consumer product. To give that example, PVC contains up to about 55% of plasticizing additives by weight.
DEBRA: And lead too! You can just touch it, and get lead in your body, just from touching PVC.
JAY SINHA: And it’s still being used to make things like toys.
These are obviously hugely disruptive to the body, and especially to developing system—so children, pregnant women.
But in terms of some of the effects on actual people, we’re in a unique situation this way because we often are contacted by people who share their experiences with us about their experiences with plastic. I really believe we’re just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg of effects of plastics on people.
What we’re finding are there are more and more people out there suffering from allergies to plastics with varying levels of severity.
To give you a few examples, it could be something as simple as someone getting a numbness in their mouth, or even a sore throat from drinking water that’s been in plastic. We’ve heard of that a number of times.
An interesting one, a pianist wrote to us, and he explained the importance of tactile memory in the fingers when playing the piano, especially for difficult pieces that require a lot of concentration.
DEBRA: Yes, I play the piano.
JAY SINHA: Do you? I do as well—not well, but…
But he found, interestingly, when he would be playing a piece, and he may stop to look something up on a keyboard, his plastic computer keyboard, the computer keyboard seemed to have a detrimental effect on his tactile memory. He described it almost as jamming his radars, as he put it. Once he touched the plastic keys, it seemed to erase his tactile memory and make it inaccessible for a while. So it would take him a while to get back into the piece more than if he had stopped and done something else as opposed to working on the computer and went back to playing the piece.
So, he was wondering if it could be a link from certain plastics contributing to something like ADD or general lack of concentration. Any idea?
DEBRA: One of the things that I found when I was writing my book, Toxic-Free, is that I looked up—I started researching so long ago. But I looked up, again, while I was writing the book, about the health effects of could we find toxic chemicals that contributed to health problems of all kinds. And what I actually found was that every single body system is affected by toxic chemicals.
You can actually look up online any body system and find toxic chemicals that contribute to damaging that body system—everything from our DNA to our skin, to nervous system, kidneys, liver, everything, everything, our brains.
And the nervous system is very, very sensitive to toxic chemicals. And any kind of neurological problem, where you’re having sensory touch in your fingers, that would be neurological. The communication between your fingers and your brain would be neurological, all these things.
So that, it seems very likely to me. And as a pianist who grew up playing on ivory keys on a real piano, it’s very different for me when I feel those plastic keys.
JAY SINHA: What you’ve just described, it’s exactly what some of the other anecdotes we’ve heard from people. There’s a lady who came to us looking for a non-plastic toothbrush. She’s highly allergic to plastics. And she said that the last toothbrush she tried had some plastic in it and caused her to go into anaphylactic shock and required an epi injection, a preservative-free one.
And after years of searching and consulting tons of doctors, she’s been able to diagnose her particular condition as a rare genetic disorder called mast cell activation disorder. But she found that the symptoms of that condition were highly exacerbated by exposure to plastics.
But probably the most shocking example we’ve heard—and that’s a very recent one. There’s a couple like this one we’ve heard. This one is from a woman named Veronica Miller who is in California. She would like to get her name out there to try and connect with other people who might be experiencing what she’s experiencing to help them and to get help herself.
For her, since 2008, she’s been suffering from an extremely severe and painful form of what she calls plastic poison. She’s seen tons of doctors over the past five years. And they have no idea how to explain her condition or even certainly not diagnose or treat even.
When she comes into contact with any type of plastic or a food or drink that’s been in a plastic container, her body reacts really swiftly and really violently. She’ll get a burning sensation on her lips, on her tongue or on her throat. If she touches plastic, her hands get red and sting. If she sits on a plastic chair, even with clothes on, it makes her itch and burn.
She’s had multiple surgeries. When you talked about the nervous system, she’s had multiple surgeries to repair severe nerve damage from what seems to be the plastic caused stress in her body. So she’s in a very difficult situation and is really looking to let people know what is happening, if possible, from exposure to plastic and looking for ways to get beyond that.
She has also provided her e-mail if anyone wants to contact her directly. And that is MyPlasticPoisonedLifeVM@cox.net. We can also put that on your blog.
DEBRA: We can put that on the Toxic Free Talk Radio blog. We need to take a break now. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with Jay Sinha. We’re talking about Life Without Plastic.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Jay Sinha from Life Without Plastic.
Jay, is there anything else you want to say about Veronica?
JAY SINHA: Well, just that she’s very eager in connecting with other people who might be feeling what she’s feeling. So yes, I won’t go too much more into—her story goes on and on. There’s much, much more than what I mentioned as far as what she’s being through and the pain she suffers. But that gives you a taste of what her life is like on a day to day basis.
DEBRA: Certainly, I think that plastics can be associated with all kinds of things. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know her at all.
But it may be that what she’s experiencing has been caused by multiple different chemicals that put her body in this position where she’s so sensitive to plastics.
And certainly, if people continue to be exposed to toxic chemicals—I have many, many stories myself of people that I’ve talked to over the years where your body can just get worse and worse and worse to the point where you just have reactions to everything or end up with cancer, heart disease.
Virtually any illness can be associated with toxic chemical exposure. So anything we do to reduce our exposures to plastics have lessened that load on our bodies.
So tell us about some of the products that you have. What are your favorite products on your site?
JAY SINHA: I have a number. One is certainly the air tight containers. They’re a great replacement for Tupperware. We use them all the time for our son as well, for his lunch. They have clips in a silicone seal, so they are air tight and water tight.
I also love a lot of the brushes we have because brushes are something that’s perhaps not as obvious, but most people use a brush for cleaning dishes and there’s obviously the toothbrush.
We work with a wonderful German company. It’s an old family business that makes completely natural brushes from sustainably harvested primarily beech wood and then all kinds of different natural bristles. And brushes, anything you could imagine, for sweeping, for hair, for the kitchen, for toilet brushes with agave bristles.
DEBRA: I noticed that. In 1990, I went to Germany to earth-friendly—they have a word for it, I forgot what it was. But they had this awareness much earlier than we did here in America. And so I went to a trade show to see what all these green products were. And one of the things that I saw was whole exhibits with all these wooden brushes laid out. I had never seen anything like that before because there are so many plastic brushes here in America.
I’m looking on your page, your body care page, and you have wooden toothbrushes, which is something that I love. I want to ask you a question about these. Do these have natural bristles as well?
JAY SINHA: They do. The bristles, it’s good to explain those. The bristles are made out of pig hair. And this is an issue for some people. We looked into quite a bit of detail with the company. The bristles are sourced from a race of long-haired pigs which is only found in China.
The pigs from which they come are used in the meat industry. So they’re slaughtered just for the meat. And in the past, the hairs, which are used for these bristles, has simply been discarded.
So, this company was able to source these bristles in this way. And they’ve tried all kinds of bristles for toothbrushes. And they have found really that these are the only ones that, so far at least, work well as a toothbrush and maintain some stiffness while also being soft at the same time.
So they’re able to source these bristles—and obviously, completely cleaned and sterilized. But they do work well. It’s just it can be an issue, for example, for people who are vegan, definitely.
DEBRA: I was just looking at this because many, many years ago, one of the first things that I wanted was a plastic-free toothbrush when I was trying to eliminate plastic. And I looked all over, and I couldn’t find any in America. But I happened to go to England. This was in 1987.
I happened to go to England. And it’s very easy to get natural bristle, natural handle brushes there because it’s part of their tradition. And so, I bought an animal bristle toothbrush. And I actually liked it a lot. But I understand the vegan issue.
And then, there was a time period where there was a company that was making wood-handled brushes. I think there were natural bristles, but I don’t really know what they were.
And then recently, I just found in a local store some natural bristle. They’re made out of bamboo. The handle is bamboo. But they have nylon bristles. And I actually read a whole discussion online just the other day because of this debating natural bristles, natural animal bristles versus nylon bristles.
JAY SINHA: Well, Beth Terry has an excellent post on her blog all about that with a lot of the debate in there. It’s a good resource for that.
DEBRA: I will look on her blog about it. Good. So let’s go on. Next favorite product.
JAY SINHA: I really love our ice cube tray. That was a really fun product to create as well. It’s based on a model that my mother had from—this would go back to the ‘60s. It was originally made out of aluminum. Ours is made out of stainless steel.
It’s the old style where you have a lever that you pull that actually breaks the cubes.
DEBRA: I have one of those.
JAY SINHA: You do? Oh, good. And they work quite nicely. It breaks the cubes quite cleanly.
DEBRA: They do. That’s what I grew up with, those metal ones that you pull.
JAY SINHA: Yes. So we use that a lot. I really love the wooden comb.
DEBRA: I have one of those too.
JAY SINHA: One thing that we really love are some of our new school supplies and office supplies like the tapes, the paper tape, the cellulose tape. And we just got this amazing glue from Italy. It’s a non-toxic glue that smells like marzipan. It smells delicious, you just want to eat it. It’s certainly, completely non-toxic. It’s made from potato starch and almonds. And it works very well as well. So that’s another favorite.
Our glass containers are certainly [unintelligible 25:44] They have stainless steel lids. And that works well in the fridge. For example, with the stainless steel ones, we often write on them. But some people complain that they prefer to see what’s in the container. And in that sense, glass works better. Of course, it is more fragile, but the lids being stainless steel works well.
Our take-out stuff, we love our sporks. We carry them with us everywhere. It’s a little stainless steel spork, which is a spoon and a fork combined that folds. It has a foldable handle. And we carry them in our pocket, a purse, glove compartment. They’re just super handy for avoiding takeout utensils which are evil.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. But after we come back, I’m going to ask you what are you doing eating takeout anyway in those plastic containers.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with Jay Sinha. He’s from Life Without Plastic.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Jay Sinha from Life Without Plastic. That’s LifeWithoutPlastic.com.
And Jay, I don’t mean to put you on the spot about eating out, but this is something that I was thinking about the other day. I was thinking about going out—and even to go to my natural food store when I’m out. It’s really hot here in Florida. And I do carry water with me. But sometimes, I want to stop and have a green tea or ice organic coffee or something like that.
And even if I go to my natural food store where they use filtered water and organic coffee and organic green tea, they still put it in a plastic cup. And I was thinking, “You know what? I just need to bring my water bottle, my glass water bottle, and say,
‘Here, put my ice coffee in this bottle.’”
JAY SINHA: Exactly. It’s becoming more and more of a norm. The more people that do it, the better because then the retailers get used to it, and it doesn’t become a chore.
But we are also great proponents of eating fresh and eating local as much as possible which definitely cuts down on the plastic waste.
DEBRA: On the plastics, that’s right.
I make 99% of the foods that I eat. I buy it just as raw ingredients, and I fix it myself. And I used to eat out a lot because I actually enjoy going to restaurants and trying food prepared by other people. It helps me learn and it gives me something different, and different taste experience.
But I had this experience that I said on another interview where I was buying a lot of ricotta cheese. I was living in San Francisco and buying a lot of ricotta cheese. And I just kept looking at all these plastic cartons piling up. And I decided, you know what, I’m going to buy organic milk in a glass bottle, and make my own ricotta cheese. And I did!
JAY SINHA: Good for you.
DEBRA: But it’s just a matter of being aware and this vigilance about recognizing where plastic is, and then being creative about coming up with a solution.
JAY SINHA: Yes, it takes a bit of time and a bit of planning.
DEBRA: And patience into yourself.
JAY SINHA: Absolutely, and changing our habits. But if you can begin to incorporate it into your routine—
A great thing to do—and we live in a small community—at the end of the harvest season when there’s all the amazing vegetables in July, August, September, is to do some canning, and preserve things for the winter. It’s really enforced, so the whole idea of canning—which was the norm.
DEBRA: It used to be the norm, yes.
JAY SINHA: And so that brings back—
DEBRA: And dehydrating. You can also dehydrate.
JAY SINHA: Absolutely!
DEBRA: I have a dehydrator. And I haven’t learned how to can yet. I haven’t learned the proper way to put things in a jar and seal it up, so that it doesn’t get any bacteria or things in it. But I do dehydrate. But even more importantly, I eat seasonally. I’m not trying to eat tomatoes in the middle of winter. But I think that canning is great.
There are so many things that can be done in terms of changing our lifestyle about this.
We’re almost to the end of the show. Is there anything that you want to make sure that you say? We’re not down to the last minute yet. We’ve got about five minutes.
JAY SINHA: One thing I really wanted to try and encourage people to do is to educate themselves. Get an idea of, if you have to have plastic in your life—which most of us do. As we said before, it’s almost impossible to eliminate it completely. And it does have its uses. There are uses for it which are important.
But to learn about the different plastics that are out there, especially if they’re coming into contact with your food and drink, things that are going into your body, and becoming you.
And there are tons of resources out there. We have lots of information in our site. Beth Terry’s blog and book are worlds of information. If you’re interested in the marine side of things, there’s Five Gyres and the Algalita Marine Research Foundation doing cutting-edge research on plastic pollution in marine environments.
The Plastic Pollution Coalition is galvanizing and organizing the whole anti-plastic movement. They have information.
The Breast Cancer Fund, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Defense—there’s no shortage of information. And from these sources, it’s somewhat organized and credible and peer-reviewed as well, in most cases.
And then, I would say, just spread the word. Tell your family, your friends, about the issue. And start taking small actions. Don’t try and do it all at once because you’ll be overwhelmed, but bits and pieces. Start with reusable bags, getting a stainless steel water bottle. They’re easy to find. If you don’t want to pay any money, use a mason jar. It’s much better than a plastic bottle.
And if you want to go a step further, start writing to companies that have tons of plastic, unnecessary plastic packaging, and ask them to change, or urge them to change.
There’s so much that we can do. We’re true believers in lots of small actions adding up to huge paradigmatic change.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. That’s what it is. People do get overwhelmed, if you say, change everything at once. But people can change one thing. And that’s why I like to give suggestions about what’s the one thing that somebody can do, and then what’s the next one thing because I changed everything in my life one by one.
And as we’ve talked about in the quote, at the beginning of the show, you start with a seed, you start with an acorn, it becomes a tree. An egg becomes a bird.
There was one question that I actually wrote down that I didn’t end up asking you. We have a couple of minutes. You can answer this.
What about water proofing? This seems to be the one area where I haven’t been able to find an alternative to plastic, and whether it’s a water proof sheet on a mattress, or a plastic layer on a mattress, to keep it clean and dry, or raincoat, or all those times when you need to keep something dry.
Do you have any ideas about what to do with that?
JAY SINHA: That is a tough one. One thing that is starting to become I think more of the go-to fabric for that sort of use could be wool. It absorbs very well. It’s obviously not completely impermeable, but it may be a starting point.
I know it’s used a lot, for example, for diapering more and more. And it works beautifully.
In terms of something that is like a plastic, I don’t have anything specific to suggest right now. I know there are lots of bio-based plastics coming out, but that’s a bit of a murky area, we still feel. And we’re very cautious about getting into it because it’s not completely clear what all of the replacements are. And even the plant-based ones, they usually are mixed with other chemicals in order to achieve a real plastic-like quality.
DEBRA: Do you know anything about what those other chemicals are? I wanted to ask you about that too, about the bio-based plastics because, as I said in the beginning, there are so many different types of plastics. And at one point, I tried to divide them up between the petrochemical plastics, and the bio-based plastics. And you could have the same type of plastic.
I’m trying to figure out one off the top of my head, and I’m drawing a blank.
But the type of plastic could be made from a feed stock of petrochemicals, or it could be made from a feed stock of sugar cane, but it’s still the same type of plastic. And so something could be on a label with that name, and you don’t know where it’s come from.
JAY SINHA: Exactly. You especially have to be careful of the ones that are, what they call, oxo-degradable because they can contain, for example, heavy metals. And they’re often marketed more as biodegradable, and that they will break down completely. But they’re not breaking down into a non-plastic substance. It still can be a plastic.
Those are the ones I would especially watch out for, the oxo-degradable ones. I know some of them do contain heavy metals.
And some of the other additives can be added to the starches to weaken the plastic and cause it to break apart.
I don’t have specific names on the additives themselves, but they essentially allow the plastic to break apart faster, so that the plant-based part can be broken down by microorganisms. But you still have a plastic element there, so it’s not completely being broken down. It’s just in a smaller form, which can be taken up by smaller organisms, and still get in the food chain.
DEBRA: It’s still there. It’s broken down into particles. It’s not broken down into basic elements, basic molecules.
JAY SINHA: Exactly! Hydrogen and water.
DEBRA: Yes, exactly. Well, let’s end on a pleasant note. What positive thing can we say about living without plastic?
I like to say over and over again that I find that my life is much more pleasant and pleasurable living with the natural materials than living with toxic chemicals or plastics or anything. Do you find that’s true for you too?
JAY SINHA: Absolutely, absolutely. As I mentioned, we live in a rural environment. And we try to live simply. And that lends itself to more and more living without plastic.
And appreciating the simple things like eating local and eating fresh is a huge one. And it affects your whole life because, as you’re doing when you are creating food from scratch, it takes time, it takes planning, but it’s incredibly satisfying and so much healthier.
DEBRA: And it’s so much more delicious.
JAY SINHA: Pardon me?
DEBRA: It’s so much more delicious.
JAY SINHA: Absolutely! When you know where your food is coming from as well, that’s a huge element, which we find goes hand in hand with living without plastic. The farmers near where we live, we know them, and we know the food they’re growing.
And that’s another added element. We know the food is grown with love.
DEBRA: And I have to interrupt you now because we’ve come to the end of the show. Thank you so much for being with me.
I’ve been talking to Jay Sinha from Life Without Plastic, LifeWithoutPlastic.com. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Safe Backpacks and Lunchboxes
Question from Question from VA
Back to school time! My son needs a new backpack and lunch box. I know all the shiny, decorative ones are not very safe so my question is between Lands End, LLBean and Kids Travel Zone, which would you recommend most for both backpacks and lunchboxes.
Thanks for your website. Very informative!
Debra’s Answer
Well, let’s see…
Land’s End – nylon, polyester, water-repellent finish, EVA foam
LLBean – nylon
Kid’s Travel Zone – polyester
None of the above.
I would get a cotton canvas backpack
Creating a Fragrance-Free Life
My guest Alonna Shaw has been blogging about what she’s doing to remove toxic synthetic fragrance from her life (the link below has an index to all her posts on the subject). A writer and editor living in Northern California, Alonna utilizes her background in theater, film, television, and appreciation of nature in her work. Storytelling interests include transformative adventures, travel, biography, and social science fiction. The goal of her alter ego, Alecka Zamm, is “no more freakin’ fragrance.” Because of her sensitivity to fragrance, “Alonna’s world has narrowed to nature, away from anything that spews, reeks, or leaves scent trails. Where there is fabric softener, pesticides, plug-ins, scented shampoos, lotions, potions… she shouldn’t go. Alonna may miss a lot, but breathing means more to her than that once exciting city life, even suburban life. There are many doors in life and she’s still exploring what her fragrance-free door has to offer. Life smells much better without perfume.” www.alonnashaw.com/2013/08/my-interview-on-toxic-free-talk-radio.html
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Creating a Fragrance-Free Life
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Alonna Shaw
Date of Broadcast: August 19, 2013
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 because it is toxic out there. There are a lot of consumer products that contain toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to every time we use them. There are a lot of toxic chemicals just in the environment
When we walk out the door, people would have sprayed pesticides on their lawns and there’s car exhaust and people are, well, wearing perfume for one, which is the subject that we’re going to be talking about today.
But we don’t have to be exposed to all these toxic chemicals because we can recognize where they are. We can avoid them in many ways.
We can remove them from our bodies. We can remove them from our homes and our work places, and live healthy, happy productive lives, do whatever it is we want without being affected by toxic chemicals. It’s our choice. We do have choices that are toxic-free.
Today is Monday, August 19th, 2013. And as I just said, our subject today is how to be fragrance-free, Creating a Fragrance-free Life.
And I have been living without fragrance, without anything scented. No scented beauty products or cleaning products or anything for 30 years.
And the reason that I gave up fragrance many, many years ago was because I discovered that if I was exposed to something with a synthetic toxic fragrance—that means a perfume or a fragrance that’s made from petro chemicals. And I’m not talking about something like essential oils made from natural plants. I’m talking about synthetic, artificial fragrance, made in a lab, from petroleoum.
I noticed that when I was exposed to that kind of artificial, synthetic scent, that I would get a headache. And when I stopped, when I looked around and I said, “Well, there’s scent in this, and there’s scent in that. There was scent in my soap. There was scent in my hairspray. There was scent in my cleaning products,” I just went through my house and I removed everything that had any kind of scent—scent in my perfume of course—and I removed anything that had any kind of scent, and I stopped having headaches. And ever since then, I just have been scent-free.
Now, for many years, I have been using natural fragrances. But many people who find themselves sensitive to scent can’t use any kind of scent at all.
And so we are going to be talking and my guest today has created for herself a fragrance-free life because she has found that scents make her sick. And so we are going to talk about how she did that.
But first, I wanted to just read to you something from the CDC. You’ve probably heard that on the news. The CDC says—and that’s the Centers for Disease Control. It’s a US Federal Agency. What I’m reading to you is from my Green-living Q&A blog at GreenLivingQA.com. And it was from 2010, September 14th, 2010. I wrote that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, has made a fragrance-free policy that applies to all of their offices nationwide.
They issued the policy “In order to protect and maintain safe indoor environmental quality.” And that day, I just said, “Hallelujah” because that means that the Centers for Disease Control—and this is the agency that is working with toxic chemicals and causes of disease, that’s trying to figure out what is making people sick, and that is a public health agency that is tying to keep us well in America—they determined that fragrance was an indoor-air quality issue. It so much causes illness that they made a policy not to allow fragrances in any of their offices nationwide.
You can go to this post and you can see everything that they banned from their offices that had fragrances. And this was to keep their workers healthy.
Now if you own a business, you might consider having a fragrance-free policy. If you work at a workplace, you might consider having a fragrance-free policy.
That’s just something to think about. It’s not somebody’s imagination. It’s not a particular sensitive group of people. Fragrances are toxic chemicals, period.
And now I’d like to welcome my guest, Alonna Shaw.
Hi, Alonna! How are you?
ALONNA SHAW: Good morning, Debra. I’m awake.
DEBRA: Good.
ALONNA SHAW: I was concerned that I might sleep through the call.
DEBRA: No, I don’t think you will. I’m in Florida in the East Coast…
ALONNA SHAW: No. No, I meant that I would oversleep.
DEBRA: Oh, yes. Alonna is in California so it’s nine o’clock there for her. It’s noon here for me. So anyway…
ALONNA SHAW: Yes, I’m a bit of a night owl.
DEBRA: Alonna has been talking about what she’s doing to remove synthetic fragrance from her life. And she’s a writer and editor. She lives in Northern California. And she utilizes her background in theater, film, television and appreciation of nature in her work.
So Alonna, tell us your story of how you became sensitive to chemicals. What has happened since?
ALONNA SHAW: It was quite a long journey and kind of a mystery for me. But I’m really glad that you mentioned the natural ones as well. That’s been part of my journey. I am sensitive to every scent—synthetic or natural.
DEBRA: Okay.
ALONNA SHAW: I’d say about 19 years ago, I started noticing that my deodorant and shampoos were very problematic for me. A lot of people would notice rashes. It’s so funny. Now, everything is so obvious to me now. People will say, I’ve got this rash on my neck. And I’m looking at their hair and smelling all of their hair products.
DEBRA: Uh-huh.
ALONNA SHAW: I don’t want to say anything because I don’t want to offend anybody. But it just would be so simple if they would switch their products, they wouldn’t have to go through that discomfort.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: And for most people, that’s all it is. It’s discomfort. But some of us that have MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and other allergies and asthma and things like that, it’s a more serious issue to the point where I had to move out of the cities. I’ve lived in cities for most of my adult life. But I’ve always loved nature. And so it’s not such a bad trade-off.
So I now live in Northern California and I pursued nature, which is wonderful!
DEBRA: I did that as well. I moved from San Francisco. I moved out into the country. And now I live in suburbia in Florida. But it’s in a very natural suburbia. I’ve lived in Oak Forest and the breeze comes in off the Gulf of Mexico.
ALONNA SHAW: I love the gulf. I was there for a little while. I used to track the pollution drift, the EPA site. And I decided, “Oh, the Gulf Coast could be a good place to go.”
So, we went there. But then, I didn’t know about red tide.
DEBRA: Oh.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. That was a bit of a shock. For people that don’t know, it’s basically—what is it, the plankton? I forgot now. It’s been a number of years. They die. I guess that’s part of the nitrite run off from all of the pollution from yards, things like that.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: And then all of the fish—it was horrible walking on the beach and seeing sea horses in person that they were no longer living.
DEBRA: What part of Florida were you in because I haven’t had that here? I have been here for 12 years.
ALONNA SHAW: I was south. I know where you are. I was north in Maples, South of Sarasota.
DEBRA: Okay. Yes. I’m a little bit north from there.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. And I was right to the beach. And it was wonderful after being in LA. I thought I was in heaven. Every morning, I would get up—I did actually get up in the morning—and I would walk on the beach. It was my way of getting my lungs to work again because. It got so bad in LA. I basically was sitting in a chair. That’s how I spent my days. It was crazy because I was super athletic. I’m a world traveler and the pollution was so bad. And to me, fragrance is the same thing.
DEBRA: I agree with you. I agree with you. So we need to take a break.
ALONNA SHAW: Okay.
DEBRA: But after the break, we’ll continue to talk about how you created a fragrance-free life.
I‘m Debra Lynn Dadd, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m here with my guest, Alonna Shaw. We’ll be back in a minute.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I‘m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Alonna Shaw.
We’re talking about Creating Fragrance-free Life. I’m looking on my website here, and I noticed that in my Green Living Q&A blog, I have over 60 questions that people have asked on subjects having to do with fragrance—everything from fragrance-free workplace policies to finding specific products that don’t have fragrance in them.
I also have on my website on DebrasList.com have many, many products that are specifically fragrance-free. So if you type in fragrance or fragrance-free or perfume in the search engine on my website, you’ll get a lot of information and a lot of alternative products.
You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and use that search engine box there to get all that information.
So Alonna, there’s a lot of toxic chemicals in these perfumes. Where should we start? I don’t even know where to start.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. Well, the way that I actually figured some of my puzzle—my life and health puzzle out—was a chemical patch test at my allergy and asthma doctor.
DEBRA: And tell us what is a chemical patch test for people who don’t know.
ALONNA SHAW: Well, a lot of people go through allergy tests where they prick a whole bunch of little spots on your arm or on your back. And then they monitor it while you’re in the office. And whatever little bumps swells up the biggest, that’s what you’re sensitive to or allergic to.
And there were differences between sensitivities and allergies that adds another confusing aspect of this whole thing. But the end result is your life is still kind of turned upside down.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: So, this chemical patch test, if I remember, it’s kind of big maybe, six inches across, and 6-inch square size. And it’s the kind of thing you have to wear it for four days straight. You cannot shower. You can take bath, just you don’t get it wet.
I actually went into my doctor’s office in Beverly Hills and he put it on. And then I had a meeting. And I was still acting then. And it was an important meeting. I was really nervous. It was a big part night. I really wanted to get back to work.
I went to my agent’s office. And he was an agent at one of the big agencies. I go in there. And I’m all excited. I had this stupid patch on my back, but I’m going to keep going.
And I walked through his office. And in LA a lot of people do the kissy-kissy thing on the cheek. And he had on so much fragrance…
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: And I’ve had long hair most of my life. And long hair is basically a giant sweeper. And fragrance sticks to things. It’s like a sticky follicle, molecules floating through the air. But it was actually on him and transferred directly to my hair.
My brain short-circuited. It’s kind of an autistic-like reaction where it’s like sensory overload. Your brain stops. The synaptic connections stop working. And of course, an allergic asthma. At that time, I didn’t know I had allergic asthma. We were still figuring it out.
So then I’m standing there disoriented. And he leads me into the meeting with the director. That was not a good moment.
Thankfully, I had an improv background and somehow my mind was coming back. But I really was not on my game.
And it was a turning point for me. I realized this was going to be next to impossible to continue as an actor.
I did struggle with it for years. I didn’t want to give up dream. I loved the craft. I don’t really like the business. But I loved the craft of acting. But that was my turning point.
That patch test, when it came back, I was basically allergic. The fragrance mix (which is what you were talking about), this toxic soup of mystery, elements that the government basically protects these special recipes…
DEBRA: Well, I actually have some information about that that I put on my blog, and so I want to tell people about it. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and you type in the search box ingredients and fragrances, it will take you to a page about the International Fragrance Association.
ALONNA SHAW: Uh-huh.
DEBRA: And what they do is that they review all the ingredients and decide which ones are acceptable and which ones aren’t. And so they have a list of prohibited ingredients, a list of restricted ingredients. And you can also find out from them what specific chemicals are in the fragrance of a specific brand name product.
ALONNA SHAW: Really?
DEBRA: Now that’s not something that’s listed on the label, but you can go to them and find out.
The part that was appalling to me was that I looked at this list of acceptable fragrance ingredients and there were many that I recognized as toxic such as styrene (that thing styrene, that’s in styrofoam cups), ethylene glycol, phenol (which is extremely toxic), benzene (which is extremely toxic), xylene (which is an extremely toxic solvent), formaldehyde which causes cancer. And some of these chemicals are among the most toxic chemicals that exists and have long been on my list of things to avoid. And yet they think that they’re okay to use.
Now, later in the week—actually, on Thursday—we’re actually going to have a toxicologist on the show. And we’re going to learn more about how toxicology research gets done. I look at one list and another list. I have studies about things that are toxic and yet I see an association like this one saying, “It’s okay to use this in all products.”
So if you’re wearing perfume or any kind of scented product of any kind, these are the kinds of chemicals that are in there. And it’s just…
ALONNA SHAW: What people overlook most—I hate to jump in here, but…
DEBRA: Go ahead.
ALONNA SHAW: Well, laundry products.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: I did my most recent blog post on laundry products after an overload at the laundromat which I avoid like the plaque normally. People have no clue about their laundry, what it smells like. Because once they put it on, they don’t smell it anymore.
DEBRA: That’s right.
ALONNA SHAW: You get used to it.
DERBA: There’s something called ‘olfactory fatigue’ which means that you can breathe something once and you smell it.
And then you continue to breathe it and you smell it less and less and less. And I think this is why people wear so much perfume and after-shave because they can’t smell it anymore.
We’re going to take another break. And we’ll be back to talk more about living fragrance-free. I‘m Debra Lynn Dadd, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I‘m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Alonna Shaw. And you can go to her blog, AlonnaShaw.com., and read about her adventures, finding fragrance-free products.
Alonna, you’ve written several blog posts on this. Let’s start with bath products. When you started looking for fragrance-free products many years ago, how do you go about that process?
ALONNA SHAW: I’m my own test subject and I spend a lot of money buying products and trying products. Anytime that they’re—
Oh, masking fragrances. That’s something that it kind of throws a loop into unscented, fragrance free, scent-free, no scent.
It’s a very confusing world out there. I don’t know. You might be better to clarify how a person really find something that is without scent. But there is this thing called masking fragrance in some products.
DEBRA: Tell us about that. Yes. Yes, there is.
ALONNA SHAW: I get a little confused. I think the marketplace is confused because people use the labels interchangeably.
But just like you read the ingredients on your food packages (which I’m hoping most people do that), you need to do that with your products for the bath as well.
DEBRA: Well, I think you actually need to do that for all products.
ALONNA SHAW: I agree.
DEBRA: For some reason now, it’s even worse that it’s been in the past where the manufacturers are adding scents to all kinds of things.
And so what you want to look for on a label is certainly anything that says fragrance. That’s going to be a synthetic fragrance. Just leave anything that says fragrance on the shelf.
ALONNA SHAW: I agree.
DEBRA: It might also say ‘perfume’ and that also means that it’s synthetic.
If it has a fragrance and it’s a natural fragrance, it’ll say aromatherapy or it will say essential oil and those would be from natural sources.
ALONNA SHAW: I do have a question about that.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: For me, I can’t use those at all. But for the people that can use essential oils. But I’ve been reading lately that there are essential oils that are supposed to be organic but they are actually synthetically manufactured. So it’s a little tricky.
DEBRA: That’s not supposed to be that way.
ALONNA SHAW: Okay.
DEBRA: An essential oil has to be from a plant. But it is entirely possible that there are some people who are not following those rules. And so I don’t know if there’s actually a law that says, “This is what essential oils means,” but for many, many, many years, essential oil has meant a net from a natural source. And if it’s organic, it would say organic on it.
I think I should just interject right here that even though labels can be confusing and maybe misleading, there is an agency of the government. The Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, which has regulations that say, “What you say on a label has to be true.” And if it’s falsely misleading, the FTC will fine you or take your product off the market or something, that there’s supposed to be a code of honor of telling the truth.
And yet, many, many, many people don’t. I mean FTC is citing people all the time for making false and misleading claims.
ALONNA SHAW: Thank goodness they’re there for us.
DEBRA: Thank goodness they are there for us and thank goodness there are laws for those. But the problem is, as with many things, there are so many violations they can’t catch everyone.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes.
DEBRA: They just don’t have enough manpower.
ALONNA SHAW: And you know people starting little shops and maybe doing things wrong and not realizing it, it may not be malice. Who knows?
DEBRA: That’s true. An awful lot of people don’t know about toxics in ingredients. And they just think things that sound good. And they don’t understand it at all. So I would say…
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. Thanks to the marketing.
DEBRA: Yes. It’s just marketing. And I see this all over the web too. I’ll go to a website and they’ll be saying things, and I’ll go, “Wait a minute! I know that this is wrong.” But their marketing people don’t.
And so this is why we, as consumers, need to be so careful. And I would say that if you do want to use natural fragrances—not you, Alonna, but the listeners
ALONNA SHAW: I can’t use them.
Well, I take that back. My one natural fragrance is going out and getting fresh air, drinking that through my hair and on me and that is always the best scent ever.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. I’m going to finish what I’m saying and then I want to say something about that. But if you do want to use natural essential oils, get them from a reputable organization. And if they are reputable, they’ll tell you all about where they got them from. And some of them grow their own herbs and plants and things.
And so just watch out. Here in Florida, we have something called The Dollar Store where everything’s a dollar. I would not like the scent when it’s…
ALONNA SHAW: Well, if it’s a dollar, and it’s an essential oil, it’s not real.
DEBRA: Who knows? Maybe from China or something. But there are a lot of good aromatherapy essential oil products…
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. And the people that make them are very proud. And they’re more than happy like you said to share every tiny, tiny detail. They’re very, very proud of their products, which is wonderful, to have pride in what people make.
DEBRA: Now getting back to fragrances and indoor air pollutants. I had a woman on last week or the week before from the American Lung Association. We were talking about the importance of lungs and the importance of breathing for good health, and that when we breathe indoor air pollutants (of which perfume and fragrance is one), then it actually damages our lungs.
And it makes it more difficult for us to breathe and that impacts our health.
And that’s in addition to whatever other health effects may happen from the toxic chemicals that are contained in those fragrances.
But you have exactly the right idea because going outdoors in a clean air place. Breathing that clean air is one of the most healing things anybody can do.
And I know that you live up in the Sierra Mountains near Lake Tahoe, right?
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. For now. I move a lot. I’m going to stay in Northern California I think for a while. It’s a wonderful area.
DEBRA: But the air there is really nice.
ALONNA SHAW: Mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: The air is wonderful up here. Well, there are fires right now.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: That’s probably the easiest way for people that are not fragrant sensitive to understand fragrant sensitivity.
When there’s a cloud of smoke, everybody kind of gets that it’s hard to breathe. It gets on you. And it’s really unpleasant.
And for people that are fragrance sensitive, all of this fragrance trails that people—as you walk down the streets, if you have clothing washed in—I hear music.
DEBRA: Yes, well you can just finish your sentence.
ALONNA SHAW: So it’s just like the smoke. We can tell the fragrance just like regular people that are not MCS can have problems with smoke.
DEBRA: Yes. And we’ll be back after this. My name is Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re talking about living a fragrance-free life with Alonna Shaw.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I‘m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today we’re talking about creating a toxic-free life with Alonna Shaw.
And Alonna, during the break—we didn’t end up talking about masking fragrance. And I just wanted to go back to that for a minute.
During the break, I looked that up online just to make sure that I got the definition of it right. And actually, what a masking fragrance is is a fragrance (which is a chemical fragrance) designed to block the odor of other chemicals in the product.
So it is considered to be a fragrance. It isn’t necessarily on the label. But if you go to the Material Safety Data Sheet (or MSDS for short), it says fragrance on the material’s safety data sheet.
And the point of an MSDS is to alert people to the toxic chemicals that are in a product. And if fragrance is listed, it’s a toxic chemical.
ALONNA SHAW: Those sheets that you mentioned, a lot of people (including myself) are intimated by them. But it’s something to get friendly with because there’s so much good information there once a person can really understand what’s being offered in the…
DEBRA: It really is something that I think that every single person—they should teach in school how to read these things. In fact, there should be a whole thing in school that teaches kids about toxic chemicals because we live in a toxic world and they should know how to read these things.
What you want to do is if you wanted to look for a particular product and find out if there’s any kind of fragrance in it, you would just go to your favorite search engine. You would type in the name of the product, XYZ Laundry Powder and then put the letters M-S-D-S after it. And then a site will come up where the manufacturer has put the material safety data sheet for that product.
You just click on it and you go look at it, and there’s a section that says hazardous ingredients. And they’re required by law to list these hazardous ingredients now. They don’t have to list all the ingredients that are hazardous. But there is a list of “hazardous ingredients” that are agreed upon hazardous ingredients that need to be listed on these sheets.
ALONNA SHAW: At least it’s a good lead. It’s something for us to work out of.
DEBRA: It’s a start.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. For me, the ultimate test for me since I’m sensitive to so many things is that I really just have to try it.
Sometimes a product will work for a week, and then I develop an issue. It can be dermatitis, it can be breathing issues, just general unpleasantness, a whole host of issues. But I have to just trial and error. But it does help to have these labels.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
I do want to make sure that we just say, for the listening audience, that there’s a difference between something being toxic (like in a toxicology book) versus somebody having an individual reaction to it. And when you’re having your individual reaction—and we all can have our own individual reactions—that’s different from like doing a study and finding out all the rat’s died.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes.
DEBRA: And in my work, I have to not be looking at people’s individual reactions, but looking at what did the study say. And if I can identify from the studies something that’s toxic, then nobody should be using it.
And yes, Alonna and others have their own individual reactions to perfume and fragrance. And they need to test just like Alonna does. But I can’t stress this enough. Fragrance,artificial fragrance, synthetic fragrance is a toxic chemical. It’s on material safety data sheets. It has been declared by the Centers for Disease Control as an indoor air pollutant, as a toxic chemical.
And so it’s just something that if you want to remove one toxic chemical from you life, just go around your house and identify all the scented products that are in your home and get rid of them.
ALONNA SHAW: And If I could interject.
DEBRA: Please do.
ALONNA SHAW: Take a look at your pets, their reactions. They don’t have voices. But a friend of mine used that carpet spray stuff to make the carpet seem clean. And the cat would always run and hide behind the TV stand because that was the only place that that carpet stuff couldn’t be applied. And the cat would just stay here.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: The cat was very uncomfortable. Animals know what isn’t healthy.
DEBRA: They do.
ALONNA SHAW: And if we just watch some of our pets—I mean, don’t walk your dog when you’ve just applied pesticide.
Don’t spray that stuff on your carpet and then put your pet right on there. I wouldn’t use any of that on my carpeting anyway.
I wouldn’t have carpeting if i had the choice.
DEBRA: I haven’t had carpeting in 30 years, so I haven’t had any of that stuff in my house.
But also, just keep in mind—here’s another thing about pets and children—their bodies are so much smaller than our bodies are. Even the biggest dog is a lot smaller than an adult human body. And so they can’t tolerate the amount of things that we might be able to tolerate. So we do need to look at these things objectively, know where the toxic chemicals are and don’t use them in our homes.
Even if we’re not being affected by it, our children and our pets most likely are. They just don’t have the same immune systems and the same detox systems. And it’s just a sheer volume of more fragrance that their bodies just can’t handle.
ALONNA SHAW: So any way I could impress on people to be aware of marketing. Get what you need, but you don’t need all of the fragrances and everything. Even if you love fragrance and you have the most expensive bottle of fragrance in the world, realize you’re undermining that wonderful scent with all of these inexpensive, horrible scent that are permeating every other product you’re buying.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: Go unscented and then wear your nice, lightly applied high quality scent.
DEBRA: Yes. One thing that I often think about is that—I forgot what I was going to say.
ALONNA SHAW: I’ve got some things I want to say.
DEBRA: Go ahead. You talk.
ALONNA SHAW: You see, my solution is I walk around this world and I dodge these clouds of perfume. But there are a lot of people that are supportive. You can find work environments if you let people know that you’re sensitive.
After a car accident, I ended up going to work on “The Drew Carey show”. Even though I had starred in movies, I was background, extra. And as a background, I’d do small parts, just utility parts, stand-in for a year and a half (that was basically three different seasons).
Because the environment was supportive—Kathy Kinney is sensitive to scent. I don’t know to what degree. I never actually spoke with her about it because I was too shy. But the work environment was supportive. Nobody there wore strong fragrance or strongly-fragranced products.
So, find a place that’s healthy for you. Don’t try to make an unhealthy place work. Think about the long term. Do you want to have asthma? Do you want to have other issues by having long term exposure to these things?
When I share my story with somebody, if I’ll be standing in line at Starbucks or something, there’s fragrance, I’ll say something to the woman at the register, she’ll go, “Oh, me too…” or if I’m at another store and somebody walks by, somebody else will say, “Yes, me too. I have this problem, but I can’t get out of the store. I have to go outside and get fresh air when I can.”
Try to share with people. There are supportive people out there. Sometimes people aren’t so nice because they don’t understand. They get offended. But I’m not trying to attack somebody when I say I’m fragrant sensitive. I’m just letting htem know that…
DEBRA: No. I think that’s a really important point. If we keep continuing to be exposed to toxic chemicals on the job and say,
“Well I have to do this because I have to work and earn money, and all work places are like this,” I have found in my own life, I just decided that I needed to create my own work and my own money because I couldn’t go work in an office or a store or something like that. I didn’t want to be exposed to toxic chemicals. I was extremely sensitive at that time.
But I ended up empowering myself in creating my own work and helping others and making more money than I would have if I had worked for somebody else then.
For me, deciding to rid my life of toxic chemicals opened up a whole new world of being able to be in a safe place, but also having control over my life and being empowered to make my environment the way I wanted it to be instaed of just being a victim of somebody else’s environment. And everybody could do that.
ALONNA SHAW: Yes. It’s an excellent example of being brave and just walking through a new door that opens.
DEBRA: Yes.
ALONNA SHAW: We have been throughout life. That’s what life is. One door closes, another opens—that is life. And when a strange door opens and you don’t understand, do some research and go through it.
DEBRA: I completely agree with that. I just see in my life that life has been a constant new opportunity to open doors and open doors and that things get better and better and better. So just have that courage.
Alonna thanks so much for being with me today.
ALONNA SHAW: If I could mention something really quick. You should check out my blog site for MyDestination.com. It’s my solution to recharging my lungs.
DEBRA: Good. Alright! Thanks. We have to go. But thank you [inaudible 00:36:53]. We’ll be back tomorrow.
Lead Exposure from Antique China Cabinet
Question from Jenny, NS
My grandmother watches my two children and she has an old antique china cabinet in her dining/eating room. It is just there as decoration and no one uses it however it was probably a hundred or so years old and I am sure it is coated with lead paint. Do I need to be concerned with this around my children if they only eat in that room and don’t touch or play with the cabinet? It has a high sentimental value so i cant ask her to refinish or remove. Thank you
Debra’s Answer
No, you don’t need to be concerned if all they are doing is eating in the room and don’t touch it.
Lead is a particle, not a vapor. The danger comes through being absorbed through the skin or ingestion, such as children eating paint chips. Exposure could also come from inhaling dust that contains bits of lead paint, such as from sanding lead paint off of woodwork.
I think your kids are fine.
Chemicals Used in Leather Processing
Question from outgassing from new leather couch
I just purchased a new leather couch and it is really off gassing. What do they usually treat leather with and which chemicals are off gassing? Also, is there anything to do to move the process along faster.
Debra’s Answer
Here’s a link that gives a list: International School of Tanning Technology: Chemicals Use in Leather Processing. However, it doesn’t list all the specific chemicals, some are groups of a type of chemical. And it gives no indication of toxicity.
I’m clicking around looking at websites that sell chemicals for leather tanning and they are talking about chromium, polymers, styrene, acrylic, aldehydes…
Regardless of the specific chemicals, if you want to speed up the outgassing, use heat. Put the couch out in the sun or in a small room with space heaters.
Or just return the sofa.
On the other hand, there are some “green” products for leather tanning that are much less toxic, such as those made by Chemtan.
And different types of leather may use different chemicals, so the only way to know for sure is to ask the manufacturer.
Latex Strips on Wood Slat Bed Frame
Question from
I have sensitivities to multiple chemicals as well as a latex allergy and petroleum products.
We are having to replace our mattress and have settled on a wool bed such as you have described, with topper, wool pillows and a slat frame bed which has been finished and has off gassed x 3 years plus. However, I’d like to have latex strips applied having had an opportunity to lay on beds with and without the strips.
The bed frame we hope to buy had 60/40 strips applied 3 years ago and we are told there is still a slight odor but nothing like when they were new. We will be buying sight unseen (unsmelled) and I’d like your opinion as to these strips after several years – would you worry or do you know of any other alternative to apply to the slats on the bed frame? Our thinking is to go with this opportunity and hope for the best but know we can remove the strips if I react – I’ve heard of a coir bed rug but it too has natural latex and the maker admits to it having a smell so thoughts anyone? Thank you all!
Debra’s Answer
I have these latex strips on my wood slat frame and at first they smelled. I left them outdoors for about six weeks.
I’ve had them for, I don’t know, seven or eight years now and they still smell a bit.
Given your sensitivities, I would be extremely cautious about using them. I agree they do make a difference, but I would rather use something else. I’m thinking of making wool felt pads. I’m going to talk with Shepherd’s Dream.
Farmhouse Sink Installation
Question from Bonnie Johnson
I have always loved farmhouse type sinks. I have an old home and wanted to get one put in when I do the new countertop. I am looking at granit or some sort of stone for that. My understanding from my contracter is that I would not be able to handle the seal etc used to install a farmhouse sink and there are questions about bacteria growth? Does anyone here have one and if so what did they use to have it installed. Debra what are your thoughts?
Debra’s Answer
I love them too and wanted to install one in my kitchen but it was beyond my budget.
Readers, has anyone installed one and can answer Bonnie’s questions?
Fire Retardants in Nap Roll
Question from Erin
Hi Debra, My son needs a nap roll or sleeping bag for naptime at preschool. I didn’t want to buy a regular one new (I am concerned about fire retardants that might be added). So I was going to send him with a vintage one from the 70’s. It is cotton with polyester fill. I figured it would have off gassed by now. But, were these types of items treated with fire retardants back then? My husband is not excited to spend 10x the price to get an all cotton or wool one. Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
Well, not only could a product from the 1970s contain a fire retardant, fire retardants then were even worse than the fire retardants used today. <
This from Huffington Post: Flame Retardants Remain Widespread in Children’s Products
Organic Body and Bath Products in Plastic-Free Packaging
My guest Cory Trusty is President of the family owned business Aquarian Bath. She is an herbalist, organic gardener, and mother of two active girls. Cory and her husband are both concerned about the environment and take care in making their products. Their soaps and other products are free of chemical fragrances, SLS-free, Non-GMO, dye-free, and palm-oil free, with no animal testing. Most products are vegan. Plastic-free shipping materials include paper, starch, and biodegradable cello bags. Cory’s background is in Cell and Molecular Biology study at the University of Washington as well as Masters study at a Traditional Chinese Medicine Institute. Cory and her family enjoy nature biking and the beach in their free time. She is also Vice-President of SolarNetOne Inc, an innovative solar computing company. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals in bodycare products and why and how they package their products without plastic. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/aquarian-bath
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Organic Body & Bath Products in Plastic-Free Packaging
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Cory Trusty
Date of Broadcast: August 15, 2013
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 because it is a toxic world out there. There are toxic chemicals all around, but if we know how to recognize them, and we know what the alternatives are, we can choose wisely to choose toxic-free products for our own homes, we can choose to remove toxic chemicals that can make us sick from our bodies, and we can choose to, together, create a toxic-free world because it really all comes down to our choice.
So what this show is about is about learning what’s toxic and what’s not, and finding out what you can choose from to make your own toxic-free life.
Today is Thursday, August 15, 2013. And today, we’re going to be talking about organic body and bath products in plastic-free packaging.
Before I introduce my guest, I want to read a quote to you, and this is from William Morris. William Morris, you may not recognize his name, but you’ve probably seen his art, which was made in the form of patterns for fabrics and wallpapers back at the end of the 1800s. And it has a very distinct style, it has lots of flowers and birds and things in it. And you would probably look at that and say, “Oh, yes, I recognize that.”
But it was at the time, actually, in England, when industrialism was taking over art and that prior to making things in factories, things were made by artisans. And William Morris had one of the last artisan workshops before industrialism took over, and he was fighting for beauty and art.
And I went to his house in England, and I remember—I don’t have the quote right here, but I’ll find it. And it was a woman who had visited his place of work, where they were making the materials and the housewares that he was designing. And she was talking about how beautiful it was, and how the breezes flowed, and that she could smell the scent of flowers, and that they were using all these herbs and things to dye the fabrics.
And it was just a really beautiful description, not anything like the dusty, dirty, toxic factory.
And William Morris said, “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
And this is one of my guiding statements in my life, it’s that I want things to be both useful and beautiful. And so in my house, if I’m buying a product, I’m always looking for, well, what’s the most beautiful, useful thing that I could buy?
For example, I went to a Shaker Village some years ago, and they had carved measuring spoons out of wood. And so my measuring spoons have been hand-carved out of wood because I thought those were the most beautiful measuring spoons that I had ever seen and toxic-free as well and made by hand.
And I chose this quote today because my guest makes some products that are truly useful and I believe them to be beautiful, that she has both that element of making something organic, making something that’s toxic-free, and making something that’s beautiful.
Hi, Cory. This is Cory Trusty. She’s the president of the small family-owned business, Aquarian Bath. Hi, Cory. Thanks for being with me.
CORY TRUSTY: Hi, Debra. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your show. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Good! So Cory, I see from your bio that you studied molecular biology. And now, you’re making bath and body products out of organic ingredients. How did you become interested in making things that are toxic-free, and why specifically bath and body products?
CORY TRUSTY: Well, actually, I was studying Chinese medicine after I studied the cell and molecular biology because I was interested in a larger perspective on the human body and holistic medicine. And I found that I was interested more in topical application of herbs, so I started out making herbal salves for my family. And then, from there, we expanded towards soaps and shampoos because everybody needs soap. So that helped expand the business.
And then, I was also interested in really having products that were not going to create pollution for my customers. The shampoo of ours, they’re really an exciting product because it’s a solid soap-type product, but there’s no bottle, no plastic bottle required. So that’s exciting.
I’m interested in biodegradable ingredients, so that goes hand in hand with using the essential oils and other botanical ingredients, rather than chemical fragrances and dyes, and things like that.
DEBRA: Did you always feel this way about wanting to use natural things, or were you just a regular American consumer?
Was there was a point in your life where you changed your mind?
CORY TRUSTY: I was always interested in environmental things. I studied biology in college at University of Washington. And so a lot of the classes I took were more environmental-minded. I was interested in conservation and things like that.
Also, I’ve been helping my husband with his company during purchasing and receiving. And when you do that type of work, the plastic waste from the packaging can really build up quickly. And that was disturbing to me, so that narrowed my focus on wanting to make sure that I wasn’t contributing that type of waste to customers when creating products and shipping products.
DEBRA: I had a similar experience actually, not too long ago, several years ago, where, in my household, for years, my ex-husband used to empty the garbage. And so I would go to the store, and I’d buy something, and then I would just throw the packaging in the garbage. And even though I was aware of plastics and I knew the toxicity of them, still, there are things that you think that you just can’t buy unless you buy it in plastic.
And then I went and I lived in San Francisco for three months just on a temporary basis. And suddenly, I had to empty my own garbage. I had to take my garbage out to the garbage can. And I started looking at what was in my garbage.
And one of the things that really made a difference to me was that I was eating ricotta cheese at the time. And I was buying ricotta cheese in these plastic containers like you buy yoghurt in a plastic container. And I kept having these ricotta containers.
And finally I said, “Well, wait a minute. Isn’t there a way that I could buy ricotta cheese without a plastic container?”
And I ended up learning how to make ricotta cheese. And it was so much more delicious than the ricotta cheese in a plastic container. It doesn’t take that long.
At that point, I was walking everywhere because I was living in Downtown San Francisco. And I just walked to the little corner organic food store, and I bought organic milk in a glass bottle. I bring it back to my little apartment, and make my ricotta cheese. And then I’d take the bottle back, and exchange it for another bottle of organic milk. And then I’d make another batch of ricotta cheese.
And it’s a wonderful experience when you start thinking outside that little plastic.
We’ll be right back after the commercial break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Cory Trusty.
She’s the president of Aquarian Bath, and after the break, we’re going to be talking about bath and body products.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking about organic body and bath products in plastic-free packaging. My guest is Cory Trusty, president of the family-owned business, Aquarian Bath. And her website is AquarianBath.com.
And you can also find a link on my website—well, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and it’s on that page, in the description of the show. And you can also find it on DebrasList.com where I have hundreds of links to websites like this—a lot of small producers, family-owned businesses that are making toxic-free products.
So that’s a place you can always find her as well.
Cory, why would somebody want to use organic body and bath products? What kind of toxic chemicals are found in them?
CORY TRUSTY: Well, some products have chemical fragrances in them. And a lot of those fragrances have phthalates, which have been associated with hormone disruption and cancers. Also, the thing about chemical synthetic fragrances is that, like the plastics, they’re proprietary. So you don’t necessarily know what the ingredients are inside.
DEBRA: Actually, I would make a stronger statement than that and say you don’t know what the ingredients are.
CORY TRUSTY: Pretty much, yes. The lab processing is quite expensive.
DEBRA: Yes, if it says perfume or fragrance on the label, then it could have thousands of ingredients that are available that could be in there. And each one of those is made up of at least a hundred ingredients. And you really don’t know what they are, or where they’ve come from, and it’s completely secret, which is, you can’t even find out.
CORY TRUSTY: And they get into the water supply also because they’re going down into the ground. So if you’re not thinking—just about the immediate consequences, you can think about the chemicals going down into the ground water, and consequences down the line.
DEBRA: Probably, the first don’t like perfume ingredients
CORY TRUSTY: Yes, I doubt it. What else?
DEBRA: What are some other ingredients that people might find?
CORY TRUSTY: Dyes, which are made from oil-based ingredients like petrochemical ingredients—so not necessarily biodegradable. SLS, which is a foaming agent, which can cause skin irritations for some people. What else? Some of these “glycerin soaps” like the clear soaps, those melt and pour soaps, a lot of those have been clarified with high concentration of alcohol to clarify it, so it’s more dying on the skin, compared to handmade soaps.
Also, other types of soaps that you get at the store might have the glycerin extracted from them. And the glycerin is a natural by-product of the soap reaction. When the oil reacts with the sodium hydroxide, it creates the soap, and it also creates the glycerin. The glycerin is naturally moisturizing.
The glycerin isn’t extracted like it is from the soaps that you buy at the store.
DEBRA: I think that’s a really important point because I’m always talking about the wholeness of things. A whole food, for example, has all its nutrients and fiber and it’s the whole thing that your body needs to have all those elements. And I think that most people don’t know that when you’re buying soap, soap is, as you said, the natural reaction between sodium hydroxide and the fat or oil, and it makes its own natural thing, which I would call a whole soap that includes the glycerin and everything that comes out of that reaction between those two substances.
And then if you go buy most soaps that are on the shelf in a big supermarket or something, they have now taken that apart, like industrial likes to do, and they sell the glycerin separate from the soap. And so you don’t have those moisturizing factors, and I think that that’s one of the big differences between an industrially-made soap and a handmade soap, is that you get those nourishing factors.
CORY TRUSTY: And the other thing about—actually, not just those soaps available from the store, but a lot of other handmade soaps, they add the chemical fragrances which doesn’t necessarily—they might smell good, but they might make you have an allergic attack.
One of the reasons why I avoid the chemical fragrances is from a young age, I’ve had allergies and asthma. I don’t anymore. I have allergies, but not asthma. But if I go through the grocery aisle that has the detergents and things, it can really set me off from just smelling all of that.
DEBRA: I understand. That’s true for a lot of people.
We need to take a break fairly soon, and when we come back, let’s talk more about soaps, your soap in particular. I want to encourage people to go to your website, AquarianBath.com, because these soaps are just so beautiful. Actually, all the products are beautiful.
There’s one, as you see the little strip go by on the top of the images in it, there’s one, I think you told me it was a salve that is shaped like a little sun inside the can.
And everything that Cory has done is just beautiful, as well as effective.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be back to talk more with Cory Trusty from Aquarian Bath.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Cory Trusty, president of Aquarian Bath. And she’s got some really beautiful, effective and different sorts of body and bath products on the site. And we’re going to talk about some of those because they’re so interesting.
Cory, I’m looking at your unscented soap page. Let’s start there because I know that a lot of people that are listening are very sensitive to fragrances, and they’re always looking for unscented products. And you have so many of them, and they’re unique.
Let’s just go through and talk about some of them.
The first one on your list is the sea salt soap, and I’ve been using that and I totally love it. It’s completely different than any other kind of soap I’ve ever used. And as you say in the description, it’s harder than other soaps because it’s got so much sea salt in it. And I really find that it exfoliates my whole body, and it stimulates.
There’s enough resistance there that it stimulates that my skin and I just feel very, very clean.
CORY TRUSTY: Good. I’m glad you like it. I really love to use that one during the winter, if I’m having any type of eczema patch crop up, and I like to use it if I have any acne crop up or anything like that. It’s really nice for taking the itch out of the skin. Generally speaking, it’s good to smooth and polish the skin.
DEBRA: And I haven’t seen a soap like that. Is that something that you created yourself?
CORY TRUSTY: I can’t remember the name of the person who invented that type of soap, but I modified their formula. I never got their formula, but it’s basically our own formula, and there are other people who make that similar type of soap.
Mine is formulated to be a little more gentle, and it’s unscented.
DEBRA: It’s just perfect. It’s just got the right amount of—what’s the term for that? A texture to it.
CORY TRUSTY: Exfoliation?
DEBRA: Exfoliation, yes.
CORY TRUSTY: That blue unscented one is actually my personal favorite, and that’s the original version. And then I have a vegan version of it also for people who are sensitive to having a vegetarian type of formula.
DEBRA: So tell us what are the oils that you use. You have a regular set of oils, and then you have a vegan formula?
CORY TRUSTY: For this particular soap, it’s coconut oil, lard and castor oil. And for the vegan version, I use coconut oil, organic cocoa butter, and castor oil. And then about half of both of those recipes is sea salt. And there’s a bit of isatis, which is woad, or indigo powder. There are a bunch of different names for it, but the blue comes from an herb that I use.
DEBRA: It looks beautiful in the picture.
Here’s another one that is unusual, but I imagine a lot of people do it. You have a soap made with extra stout beer. Does that have a benefit to it, or it just makes it smell like beer for guys?
CORY TRUSTY: It’s more of a novelty type soap, but it’s also natural. It was made with beer in the water phase, Guinness extra stout beer in the water phase instead of water. And other than that, it’s just basically a regular soap.
The sugars from the beer make a little bit extra lather, but overall, it’s just a regular soap.
DEBRA: Okay, good. I think that’s a great idea. I could see that that would be a great gift for any man in somebody’s life. And just so that the listeners know how you think, the tag for this particular soap is upcycled from the Guinness beer pack.
So she’s using all these materials.
And I really like the way you stamp, instead of putting a label on it, that you stamp things into the soap. I have a local soap maker here where they stamp the size. They just break them up and weigh them, and then they stamp the weight in it. And I just think that that’s wonderful, so that it eliminates that packaging layer.
So tell us about your shampoo bars.
CORY TRUSTY: Shampoo bars, my original shampoo bars were the neem shampoo bar, and the sesame aloe shampoo bar.
And I designed them initially thinking about people with sensitive scalp type, these types of things because I was really initially interested in the herbs.
And then they got very popular, so we expanded that line, and now, we have a lot that are scented with different popular scents like our rose shampoo bar is very popular. We also have a patchouli shampoo bar that’s very popular.
And these are all scented with essential oils or botanical resins or waxes. Some of the other ones that we have right now are tea tree with eucalyptus, coffee butter, lavender orange, key lime and bay rum.
So we have, all in all, I’ve counted, I think we have 15 shampoo bar types now. There’s quite a variety and for different hair types. I have a couple for oily hair types and a couple for standard dry hair types. But most of them are formulated for normal scalp and hair. There are a couple like the sesame aloe and the neem shampoo bars that are more for people with sensitive scalp types—sensitive scalp types basically.
DEBRA: I really like that you have different ones for different hair types because I haven’t tried your specific ones, but I have tried shampoo bars in the past where they only just had one type. And because it wasn’t the right type for my hair, then I didn’t have a good experience with it. So I’m really looking forward to trying your shampoo bar for my type of hair because I do want to get away from those plastic bottles.
We have another break here. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Cory Trusty, president of the family-owned business, Aquarian Bath, and we’re talking about her wonderful organic body and bath products that are with plastic-free packaging. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here with Cory Trusty, who is president of the family-owned business, Aquarian Bath. That’s AquarianBath.com. And during the break, I was just reading about your zeolite detox soap with activated charcoal and bentonite clay.
I didn’t see that the first time when I was looking through your website. But it’s very interesting. I clicked through to your blog post about avoiding radiation in daily life.
So tell us about why you put together this bar of soap.
CORY TRUSTY: Well, we were concerned about radioactive fallout from Fukushima. My husband has been following the accidents since the beginning in 2011, and we have a Geiger counter going here. And we take it out with a—if it’s raining, we take in the car, or if it starts to rain, we basically check to see if the clicks start to go up.
DEBRA: Are you still monitoring?
CORY TRUSTY: Pardon?
DEBRA: Are you still monitoring today? And are we still having radioactive particles?
CORY TRUSTY: Yes. It’s ongoing because of the tropopause. Every time there’s a cold front, we see a spike in radiation levels. And also, we took a trip up north. We’re in Florida, and we took the Geiger counter with us on a trip to Washington DC for 4th of July. And basically, there was a gradient as we went further north. The rad levels went up.
And we wanted to have the soap for cases when we go out, if we get caught in the rain, that we want to come home and be able to use the soap that has extra scrubbing power. So we use the zeolite and the scrub, as in, absorption power. The zeolite is specific for radioactive cesium.
And the activated charcoal and bentonite clay are also good for binding radioactive particles.
I talk more about that in the blog post. You saw the one on avoiding radiation in daily life. But I also have a blog post about avoiding radiation in the garden, which—
DEBRA: Yes, I saw that. I think this is amazing and something that’s very, very necessary. And I appreciate knowing that you’re accounting this because if we’re not looking at these meters individually, then you don’t know. There’s no place. You just would have to trust what they’re telling you or not telling you.
Also, you may or may not be aware that I’m promoting, and take myself a product called Pure Body Liquid Zeolite, which removes heavy metals, toxic chemicals and radiation from your body. And I’ve been taking that regularly since even before the accident.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing for that.
But zeolite is the thing for radiation, so I think you’ve got it right on.
We only have a few minutes left, so I want to make sure that we talk about your plastic-free packaging. So tell us more about that. What made you decide to be plastic-free and how do you do plastic-free packaging?
CORY TRUSTY: I don’t like bubble wrap and other types of plastic packaging coming in to my home, Styrofoam and things like. And so I don’t want my customers to experience that from our company.
I use crafts, paper-padded mailers instead of plastic bubble wrap mailers. And I use cardboard boxes with paper tape. For filler, I use either paper or cornstarch peanuts that are biodegradable. And I encourage everyone who has a small business that ships to go to Uline.com and you can find all these packing materials. And you can ask them to leave a note in your account that you only want your products shipped with paper padding when they send you a box of mailers, instead of plastic, their mailers, it will have paper—just bulk, round, recycled paper type thing.
DEBRA: You sell other products, in addition to soaps. I want to make sure that we don’t miss those. Can you tell us what the other products are, and how they’re packaged?
CORY TRUSTY: I sell deodorants in glass jars or tins. And I sell tooth powders in tins or in biodegradable cellophane bags. A lot of people will call a plastic bag cellophane bag now. These are actually real—it’s a wood product, it’s a real cellophane bag, so you can choose to have tooth powder in a cellophane bag, or in a tin.
I sell cedar soap decks that are handmade for your soaps. I also sell lotion bars, which are—they’re like chapstick consistency.
They’re hard that you can rub on your hands or skin.
DEBRA: Those are the ones that look like sands.
CORY TRUSTY: Yes, they’re like snowflakes.
DEBRA: They’re just so pretty in the tin. Every time I look at that, I just go, “Oh, how beautiful.”
CORY TRUSTY: Okay, cool. It took me a long time to find the right mold for that product. Some other things I sell are herbal salves and balms, perfumes that are scented with botanical ingredients, not chemical fragrances. I sell flaxseed, microwaveable pillows, or facial masks for TMJ that cover your jaw and forehead.
Those are all made with certified organic flax. And for the neck pillows, you can choose scented certified organic herbs like lavender or spearmint or rose or chamomile. And we basically make those to order. They make great Christmas gifts.
And those can come in a bag or without a bag. It’s your choice.
I sell gift sets for Christmas, and different holidays. We had a nice holiday gift set last year that we’ll bring back again. It was a shampoo bar and a soap of your choice with two cedar soap decks and a lip balm. So it’s a nice gift for someone who might have sensitivity or they’re trying to reduce plastic in their life. It’s a thoughtful gift.
I think those are the main things. Lip balms in tins, in slide tins.
DEBRA: I’ve tried the toothpaste too, as well as your soap. And I liked it very much. It has a wonderful licorice taste, and it really got my teeth very clean. I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate your deep level of integrity about what you’re doing. And just your overall viewpoint about wanting to be safe for all life, safe for your customers and safe for the environment, and I see that in everything that you do.
CORY TRUSTY: I’m really glad you like the product, and I appreciate the compliment.
DEBRA: Thank you very much for being with me today. And good luck in everything that you’re doing. I’ll certainly do what I can do to let people know about it.
CORY TRUSTY: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a great day.
DEBRA: You too. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re here every day, Monday through Friday. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and find out about all the shows, future and past—well, not all the shows in the future, but you can find out who’s coming up for the week. You can find out all the people I’ve already interviewed. You can listen to all the past shows, and see who’s been on. All of these shows are so interesting. I’m learning so much. I’m meeting so many wonderful people. And we really are talking about the crème de la crème of people who are doing the least toxic things on the planet.
Some of these people have been working in this field for decades, like I had. Some people are new to it. But everything is about how we can remove toxic chemicals from our lives.
In addition to listening to the shows, if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can also look across the top of the page, and there are many other parts to my website. The first link goes to the Q&A, where you can leave a question, and I will answer it, and my readers will answer it too. And some of my readers are very experienced in this topic.
You can also go to Debra’s List, which lists hundreds of businesses like Aquarian Bath that are selling toxic-free products.
Some of them are very individual. They’re very specific types of products, and some of them have hundreds of products just on one site that they’ve chosen very carefully.
You can also go to the next link. It’s called Body Detox. And that tells you how you can remove toxic chemicals from your body.
And we’ll talk about more tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow, you can call in with your question. It’s Free for All Friday, where I take your questions on the air.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
PLA Fibers in Organic Mattress
Question from Lana
Dear Debra. I am researching a mattress for my daughter. I wanted cotton or wool or both, and the most affordable so far for me is Naturepedic organic cotton quilted deluxe.
The only problem – it contains PLA fibers somewhere in the mattress. I know it is polyester derived from plants, but is it ok to have it inside the organic mattress? They said that it was tested for off-gassing.
They also said they don’t use any fire retardants and are able to comply with the law due to this mattresses design.
Is this possible? Can I trust this statement? I also liked White lotus green cotton wrapped in wool mattress, but since green cotton is not organic I thought it didn’t make sense. The organic option of it is double the $. Thank you so much. Lana
Debra’s Answer
Yes, it’s all true. I don’t see that PLA fibers are a problem. It’s a plant fiber. It doesn’t offgas.
You can trust the statement about no fire retardants.
The First Affordable Natural Sofa
My guest Emily May Bird Kroll is CEO and Founder of Ekla Home, which makes custom natural upholstered furniture. On the day of our interview, she will be launching a new natural sofa “with a design that more people can afford.” Emily has successfully designed, manufactured, and distributed custom furniture since 1992. She has created custom and contract furniture for notable interior designers, celebrities and large corporations. Emily is passionate about changing the way the furniture business works in the United States where production is notoriously wasteful, and many toxic chemicals are used. Determined to make the process of producing furniture safe for her craftsmen and clients, Emily launched EKLA HOME in 2007. The granddaughter of a furniture designer on one side, and an architectural and scrap metal recycler on the other, EKLA HOME’s approach is rooted in Emily’s DNA. A lifelong Southern California resident, Emily is at the nexus of a close beachside community that holds environmentalism as a way of life and a business model. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals in sofas and how to avoid them by choosing a safa made with natural materials. Elka Home is no longer in business.
In addition, Leigh Anne Van Dusen, Co-Founder and General Manager of O Ecotextiles spoke about the textiles used to make Ekla Home upholstered furniture. O Ecotextiles is committed to changing the way textiles are being made by proving that it’s possible to produce luxurious, sensuous fabrics in ways that are non-toxic, ethical and sustainable. Co-founders (and sisters) Patty Grossman and Leigh Anne Van Dusen created O Ecotextiles in 2006 and the collection has garnered accolades and honors since it debuted at Decorex in 2007, where it won Best Merchandise from House & Garden magazine. In 2009, Environmental Building News and BuildingGreen named O Ecotextiles one of the top 10 Green Building Products of 2008. www.oecotextiles.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The First Affordable Natural Sofa
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Emily May Bird Kroll
Date of Broadcast: August 14, 2013
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 because there are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products, just walking down the street, and falling from the sky, and the water we drink, and the food we eat. And sometimes listening to the news, it seems like every day, there is a new toxic chemical to worry about.
But there are many toxic-free alternatives available, many consumer products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them, many ways to remove toxic chemicals from our homes and our bodies and our schools and every place.
And we can live in a toxic-free world. It’s just a matter of each of us making choices and one by one, putting all of those choices together will have fewer and fewer toxics, and more and more health and happiness, productivity, and anything else that we want, not impeded by toxic chemical exposures.
Today, we’re going to talk about sofas. A lot of people have been asking me about sofas because of all the news about fire retardants. It has been on the news a lot in the past couple of years. There are also some new regulations going in the State of California about fire retardants.
And also, today, my guest is releasing the most affordable organic sofa I’ve ever seen. I just took a peek at her website before the show, and I didn’t see that it’s up yet. But she’s going to be telling us all about it.
But first, I want to tell you about my personal experience with sofas. I have had a toxic-free sofa for—let’s see how many years it has it been now, probably almost 30. The first toxic-free sofa I had, and let me tell you that the sofa was one of the first toxic things I got rid of in my house.
The first one that I had was, I was living at my parents’ house actually, and my mother had chosen a very modern sofa that had a back that was made out of canvass, flat, cotton canvass. And then it had pillows. And all the whole frame was on metal and it had chrome arms. And then you would put these pillows in.
And the pillows themselves were made out of all kinds of synthetic materials and probably had fire retardants on it.
So I just took all those pillows off, and I made my own big pillows out of cotton fabric, organic cotton fabric, stuffed them with organic cotton, and I had a lovely sofa.
But then, for some reason, I don’t remember why, it didn’t fit in the small places that I was living, and I just wanted a regular kind of sofa. And about 20 years ago, I decided to make my own sofa. And this was before I could go to a place and have one custom-made by somebody who has all the natural materials available to them like my guest.
And so what I did was I went to an auction, and I bought an old sofa that had a nice frame, and that had spring cushions, the old-fashioned kind. And then I took it to an upholsterer and I said strip everything off of it. And he stripped it down to the wood frame and the metal springs.
And then I got 100% natural linen upholstery fabric, and some cotton upholstery fabric. And he stuffed everything with organic cotton. And it cost me, I don’t even remember, $2000 or $3000 to have this done 20 years ago. But I can tell you that I still sit on that sofa and it still looks as beautiful as the day I got it.
And fortunately now, we have plenty of places where there are people who know exactly what they’re doing, know the materials, you have lots of choices, and they can custom-make whatever it is that you want. And there are also sofas that are already designed that you can just order.
So, I want to introduce my guest, Emily May Bird Kroll, who is the CEO and founder of Ekla Home. Hi, Emily.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: Thanks for being with me.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: Instead of me reading your bio, why don’t you tell us about your background and what led you to start doing custom-building of furniture from non-toxic and sustainable materials?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, I started in the furniture business in 1992. And I worked for a company that was making reproductions of 18th and 19th century farmhouse furniture. And from there, I was asked by the company to investigate upholstery, meaning sofas, that we could add to our collection of pieces.
So, I began researching upholstery, and was introduced to a manufacturer of sofas, and started the process of developing this collection for the company I was working for.
That company was then sold. And I had decided I was a little more interested in learning about the soft side of the business, meaning, the upholstery side of the business. And I went to work for the manufacturer that we were working with in the former company.
I developed a couple of designs for him and learned the process of manufacturing as well as learned about the ingredients and so forth in upholstery pieces during that period.
Shortly thereafter, I opened my own store, my own retail store, which is in Santa Monica, California. And I designed my own pieces for that store. And I originally had the original manufacturer make pieces for me for my own collection.
During the ‘90s, I became aware that the furniture industry was responsible for pretty much raping two-thirds of the world’s forests for its furniture production. And that really upset me. My family, we’re in the recycling business in Europe. And I grew up in a consciousness which involved no waste and lots of reuse. And I just was upset that our industry was responsible for such devastation.
So, I started investigating sustainable wood, recycled wood. I started working in reclaimed wood in the mid-90s as well. And I started working in alder for my [unintelligible 07:22]. And alder wasn’t really used in those days for case fits. It was considered a waste crop. But it is a sustainable crop. And it has [unintelligible 07:29]. So we started doing the wood.
And then, as the years went by, I became aware that the upholstery side of the business also was environmentally harmful in many different ways. These are the chemicals, again, the waste of the wood, et cetera.
So, I started researching in 2003—2002 or 2003—about doing a more sustainable product on the upholstery side of the business. I researched for several years. And that led me in 2005 to writing the business plan for Ekla Homes which was to create an entirely organic collection of upholstered pieces.
And then, I launched the brand in 2007 to get a little bit of funding to do the project. The business started in 2007, but we launched our first collection in 2008.
DEBRA: When I read that your core values on your website that they are very deep, I liked them very much. Would you tell us your core values, so that I don’t read them?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, I would say that it’s really important that we—one thing is we’re making these pieces that are healthy for consumers, but also, again, in our industry, the workshops. Unfortunately, many of the people that are working in a furniture workshop have been affected by the carcinogenic chemicals that they work with every day in making conventional pieces.
So many of the guys that have been working for many years in the business, their hands are chewed away from the toxic chemicals that they had to work with, and cutting fabrics, and handling fabrics, and handling foams. Many of them have respiratory problems.
I have one builder that I’ve been doing wood with for years who I honestly think has been affected by the vapor he’s inhaled because it’s just not as clear as he was a number of years ago when dealing with him.
DEBRA: We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back and we’ll talk more about this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Emily May Bird Kroll, CEO and founder of Ekla Home. We’re going to talk about sofas and other furniture.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Emily May Bird Kroll, CEO and founder of Ekla Home, where they make sofas, chairs and upholstered bed frames, and anything else?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Ottomans, pretty much anything that can be upholstered.
DEBRA: Yes, basically upholstered furniture. So Emily, tell us more. You were starting to talk about the chemicals that workers are being exposed to, and also then the consumer would be exposed to those same chemicals, although the workers would be exposed to more of them. But tell us about some of those chemicals, and how they might affect our health.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Do you have Leigh Anne on the line, our on-house chemist?
DEBRA: She’s on the line, yes. Is it time to bring her in?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Yes, I think she’s the best one to—because she has the most in-depth knowledge of the effects of the chemicals themselves.
DEBRA: Okay, Leigh Anne. Hi.
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: Hi.
DEBRA: Are you there?
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: I am here.
DEBRA: Emily, would you introduce Leigh Anne, please?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Leigh Anne Van Dusen has a company called O Exotextiles, and O Ecotextiles is our exclusive supplier of fabric. They work to the highest standard for health and sustainability in the production of the fabrics that they create.
Leigh Anne and her sister, Patty, both have backgrounds in chemistry and has worked tirelessly to develop their collection of helpful fabrics.
DEBRA: So Leigh Anne, tell us about the toxic chemicals that you’ve learned about that are in textiles.
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: Well, we have been studying since we started, which is about the same time Emily started her company, maybe a year or two earlier, but we started doing the same thing—learning about what is involved with textile production.
What we found is we were horrified by the chemicals used in textile production because they include some of what I would consider most dangerous chemicals that are used—lead, PBDE’s (which are the fire retardants we hear so much about now), but also alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEO’s) which are endocrine disruptors, and formaldehyde is used a lot. I think I mentioned lead, but mercury and lots of the heavy metals are found in the dye stuff.
So, the fabrics—a finished fabric is, by weight, about 25%. This is the fabric made of natural fibers. It’s about 25% synthetic chemical. So it’s really important that you know what those chemicals are or that you have a third party certification that warrants that your fabric is safe because your skin is the biggest organ of your body and it’s busy inputting all these chemicals, not to mention the fact that they [unintelligible 13:32] they saw into the air, and then you can breathe them in. And some of them outgas, the ones that, at ambient air temperature, those that evaporate.
So there are lots of chemicals used in textile processing that are just not good for us. And we see a lot of times, fabrics that are advertised as being made of organic cotton. And that’s fabulous. We really support the organic agriculture.
But if you think of organic apple sauce, if someone started with organic apple, and then added red dye #2, and preservative chemical emulsifiers, the final product couldn’t be called organic apple sauce.
DEBRA: No, it couldn’t. Could you tell us some more about this because I think that there’s an assumption that if something is organic, then people are going to handle that material in a less toxic way, all the way through the line. And it sounds like you’re saying that’s not necessarily true with organic cotton.
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: Organic cotton is just that. It’s the fiber. But there are a lot of steps in textile processing. That fiber has to go to a mill where it’s spun into yarn. And then it goes to the weaving mill where it’s put on a loom, and they have about six or eight steps […] that involve washing with detergents, bleaching. Almost every natural fiber has to be bleached before it’s dyed. And then it’s dyed.
And then there’s finishes applied often. And the finishes, for example, every permanent press finish has formaldehyde in it. It’s a formaldehyde resin.
And so there are many steps after the fiber part where the chemicals are introduced. So even though you start with organic cotton, and a lot of manufacturers advertise their organic cotton sheets or whatever it is they’re advertising, that’s just the first step. And, as I said, it’s great to start with organic cotton, but if they’re processed conventionally, and you aren’t paying attention to the chemicals that are used in the dyes, and the optical whiteners and all that stuff, then you end up with a fabric that’s 25% by weight synthetic chemicals, many of which are not good for you.
DEBRA: Well, that explains why sometimes I’ve looked at—once I needed to buy a prop for a TV show, and I wanted to show an organic sheet. So I just went down and I bought a sheet that was labeled organic cotton. And I took it out of the package, and it had this sheen on it, and this finish. And I thought this doesn’t look like an organic sheet at all.
And that explains that because that isn’t always—you don’t always get on the label. In fact, most of the time you don’t get on the label what’s been done to the fabric, what’s been done to the fiber. You just get what is the type of fiber that’s used in the making of it.
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: I was just going to say the same is true for the latex on the market, which are the films used in supposedly eco-furniture. Natural latex in the U.S. can be a blend of petroleum product, as well as other chemical binders, and can be labeled as natural latex, the wools and the cottons as well in the actual eco-furniture pieces.
Again, as a consumer, one has to dig beneath the surface, and request documentation of those items that they’re purchasing.
DEBRA: Good. We’re going to talk about this more after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here with Emily Kroll from Ekla Home, and Leigh Anne from—I’m sorry. I don’t have it in front of me.
We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Emily Kroll from Ekla Home and also Leigh Anne Van Dusen of O Ecotextiles. And let me just give you their websites. Ekla Home is E-K-L-A Home dot com. EklaHome.com. E-K-L-A.
Emily, does Ekla have some meaning? I got it.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: It’s just my initials.
DEBRA: Emily Kroll LA. Now, I got it. I thought maybe it was some Swedish word for extreme [cross-talking 00:18:58] or something.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: It’s just my initials.
DEBRA: Okay, so I got it now. O Ecotextiles is O and then Ecotextiles.com. And they’re in Seattle, Washington. I haven’t been to that website yet, but I will absolutely be going there.
Before we go on, I just want to read the homepage at Ekla Home because it’s just so beautiful. It says exactly what the furniture is about. It says, “At Ekla Home, we strive to make the least toxic furniture on the planet. Our organic collection consists of sofas, chairs and upholstered bed frames made with pure, non-toxic ingredients. Each piece is made with certified organic natural latex, certified organic wool, and certified organic cotton barrier cloth. Our fabric collection is exclusively supplied by O Exotextiles, and all meet the Global Organic Textile Standard for sustainable, non-toxic textiles. Each piece is made from FSC-certified wood, non-toxic adhesives, recycled steel springs, and zero VOC finishes. Best of all, we use no chemical fire retardants. Our entire collection is handmade in Southern California with love.”
And I can’t think of any set of standards that would be better than that. I think you’ve done a great job, and beautiful designs.
So tell us more about, either of you, can tell us more about how you make your furniture, about these extraordinary materials.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, I can tell you that these extraordinary materials are, unfortunately, very, very expensive and it’s been a constant challenge for me to really get the pieces out in the world which my goal is to get these pieces into people’s homes rather than toxic pieces that affect them.
And so I’ve had such a challenge in trying to figure out ways to make these pieces more affordable for people. Unfortunately, that latex is a commodity and the commodity is exchanged, and its price fluctuates with the world market’s demand on it as a product. And so we have to absorb the price fluctuation that generally has gone up because there’s a greater demand for rubber for tires, in the developing parts of the world.
And so it’s a constant battle to try to pass along savings to people. It’s the hardest thing really as a manufacturer to try to—I would love to be a non-profit organization but I’d be out of business because I couldn’t pay for my own living expenses, and we really are working on the tightest margin as possible, to even call ourselves a for-profit business, just so we can get these pieces out in the world.
DEBRA: Well, I think that this is really an important thing to talk about because it seems that in the world today that people have much more attention on price than how much something costs, or how much money they can save. Their decisions are more money-driven than they are driven by supporting their health or the environment.
And I can understand that because we’re in a tight economy.
But at the same time, it’s really important to support businesses like yours because you’re the future. I mean, you’re the present. You’re here right now, offering this product. But this is the standard for the future. If we want to hope to have life on earth, these are the kinds of products that everybody should be using.
And I know for myself, I’m not an independently wealthy person, but I always am willing to spend the money. I don’t know if you’ve heard me at the beginning of the show, I was talking about many years ago, having a sofa custom-upholstered. And it was $2000 or $3000 then. And it’s not that I have $2000 or $3000 that I can just write a check every day for all kinds of expensive products.
But it’s so important to me to have non-toxic things in my home that I make my decisions about what it is that I want, and then I see how I can come up with the money for them.
Right now, there’s something that I want, and I’m looking around my house, and I’m asking myself, what do I not need anymore? What can I sell? And turn that unused item into some money, so I can buy this non-toxic thing.
And we can also simplify our lives. There are many ways that we can fill dollars from here and there, get an extra job, whatever it is. I have consistently made these kinds of decisions in my life to come up with the money to be able to pay for things.
I appreciate very much that you’re looking at how can you make it as inexpensive as possible. But I also want people to understand, as you said, these are very expensive materials, and they are more expensive. But look, I’ve probably—how many thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars have I saved on medical bills.
When I look at something that cost $4000 or $5000, I just ask myself, “How much does cancer cost?” And I know how much it costs because I know people who have cancer, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Certainly because many of these trends that we’re discussing like eating better, and obviously, the furniture issue that I addressed, are trends that have started and have taken grasp in the United States.
And I’ve gone to Europe, well, there is now, with regard to the environment, but in my industry, there hasn’t been much interest in sustainability in the furniture industry. And I think that it’s just the point that you’re making. In the United States, we don’t have nationalized health care, and God forbid, anyone gets ill, the cost of illness in this country can completely wipe out a family financially.
And so I think we are more aware because the need to stay healthy in the present, and in the coming years, to avoid, high health care cost. I think that’s constantly on one’s mind.
DEBRA: It is constantly on my mind. We need to take another break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more with Emily Kroll of Ekla Home, and about her new, more affordable sofa. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: Okay, we had a little technical problem there. I’m hoping you can hear me now. This is Debra Lynn Dadd at Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m here with Emily and Leigh Anne—Emily Kroll from Ekla Home, and Leigh Anne Van Dusen from O Exotextiles.
So Emily, would you tell me—you went through this whole process and worked very hard to come up with this more affordable design. Tell me some of the problems that you ran into, and some of the solutions you came up with.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, it’s a case of raw materials and laborers. Again, we’re producing our pieces in the United States. And I just want to mention something that in the 90’s, you said you spent a couple of thousand dollars to have your piece re-upholstered. In the 90’s, a mid-range sofa, because I sold things at retail, a mid-range sofa in our industry went between $2000 and $3000.
Now, when the Chinese came in, and literally dumped, their currency manipulation to get products into our country, they dumped furniture into this country. And they were selling, undercutting our entire industry, to gain the market.
And so they were selling sofas at $500.
And these are the same pieces that, again, the quality wasn’t the same, but they flooded the market with these types of items.
And what has happened is that these types of things are still on the market. You see on television ads for an entire sofa, chair, loveseats, set, at $599. And you think, how on earth can that piece be made?
It’s not only the labor that’s less expensive, but they’re actually manipulating currency to do so.
So people’s consciousness has changed about what things cost. And the majority of the manufacturers did go off shore when this happened, and they started producing their pieces in China. So we even have American manufacturers that had been producing all over Asia now for a decade or so, and these are pieces that you see on the market here from the big manufacturers, American manufacturers that maybe $1000, $1500 each.
The pieces look great, and those people would be happy to have the pieces in their homes should they not have chemicals in them. But it’s literally shifted people’s consciousness about what things cost.
So we’re actually producing still in Los Angeles. I’ve always produced in Los Angeles. We’re producing in Los Angeles. We’re paying a living wage. So we have laborer’s cost involved in making these pieces, as well as the raw materials’ cost.
So what we had to do in value engineering the pieces was to try to make the piece that was quicker to make than one of our more complicated pieces, thus, reducing labor cost per piece in creating the pieces.
We also had to look at the materials used and how we could—I wouldn’t say eliminate, but design a piece that was structurally sound while using less material than our 300-pound sofas that we’re making now, the piece on the main collection.
So we’re calling our new piece, we’re calling it the Athens sofa, which is the piece that’s democratized, that everyone can afford. And we changed construction in the base. We’ve done, basically, a one-step type of upholstery that can be sewn, and pulled onto the piece, and upholstered more quickly than our more complicated pieces. So we’ve, and again, streamlined the materials. The piece, it’s an armless sofa. Imagine a futon, but it’s nicer-looking than a futon, but it gets the job done for a piece to sit on, that people can lay on, sleep on, watch TV on, but has no toxic chemicals in it.
So it’s taken a lot of work. And again, it’s not a piece that is $500 or $1000. It’s still coming in just under $2000, but that’s literally the best that we can do between value engineering, making pieces in the States, and raw materials.
DEBRA: Well, I think that that is actually a reasonable price. It may be more than people want to spend, but I put an announcement of this show in my newsletter yesterday, and a gentleman went to your website, and I said very clearly in the announcement that you are going to be releasing this new sofa today.
And he wrote me back and he said, “Oh, all the sofas cost so much money. Can’t you get them to do a sofa that costs $3000 instead of $4000, $5000,” whatever they are.
And I wrote back and I said, “Yes, there’s one for $2000. It will be available tomorrow.”
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Actually, I think he may have been confused when looking at our pricing because our pricing is all from $2000 to, probably the sectionals are more obviously, because it’s two sofas in one, but we do have sofas certainly just under $3000, and then averaging to about $3,500.
DEBRA: He was looking for a sectional.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, the sectionals, people have to remember that it’s two sofas in one, so it’s double—double the labor, double the materials, when making those pieces.
DEBRA: Now, these are all custom-made, yes?
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Well, they’re all handmade to order, so we have the line that’s shown in the photograph, on the site. And we make those pieces, and their prices are on the pricelist grid. And we can also make custom pieces for people.
So if people see something in the conventional world of furniture that they like, a style, we can generally make that piece in organic materials. There are a few pieces that are impossible, but other than that, we can make pretty much anything.
But otherwise, they’re handmade to order, each piece.
DEBRA: Good. So I don’t see the picture of the new Athens on the site.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: It was supposed to be up last night. Our web guy was having some technical issues. And so I would anticipate it being up later today, or I’m hoping—I hope today or tomorrow.
DEBRA: I know what it’s like with these technical issues.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: As we all know. Unfortunately, you plan for the best, and it’s production, you’re going to have a glitch somewhere. So it’s due up.
DEBRA: So anybody who is looking for it, you can look for it tomorrow online. And it probably should be there. You can also go to the website EklaHome.com, and you can e-mail them and tell Emily that you’re interested in it, and when it’s up. She can probably let you know or give you some information about it. You can also call them, and they may even be able to make something for you custom with fabrics that you are interested in, or whatever.
This is a company that is dedicated to having non-toxic sofas with organic materials and no chemical fire retardants.
Thanks so much for being with me today, Emily and Leigh Anne also. I really admire what it is that you’re doing, and I appreciate your being with me.
LEIGH ANNE VAN DUSEN: Thank you so much, Debra.
EMILY MAY BIRD KROLL: Thank you for having us.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and learn more about the upcoming guests. And also, you can listen to the archives of all the guests that have ever been on the show.
You could listen to this show again if you want to. And if you’ve enjoyed those, please tell your friends and family and neighbors and anybody that you would like to know more about how to live toxic-free because it really is, each of us, learning to live toxic-free, and making those toxic-free choices that is going to create a toxic-free world for all of us.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House
My guest is Carol Venolia, author of Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House, one of my most favorite books about building. This context of integrating your home with nature in the place where you live provides a foundation for all other decisions made regarding design and materials. Natural light from the sun, natural cooling from breezes, natural insulation from earth allows you to eliminate many toxic chemicals as well as aligning with nature. Founder of Come Home to Nature website, Carol is an architect with a passion for reconnecting humans with the rest of life. She wrote the e-book Get Back to Nature without Leaving Home; wrote Healing Environments: Your Guide to Indoor Well-Being; penned the “Design for Life” column in Natural Home Magazine for 9 years; and has designed eco-homes, schools, healing centers, and eco-villages. 
Carol has been honored by The Green Economy Post as one of ten pioneering women in green design, and was named a Green Design Trailblazer by Natural Home Magazine. We’ll be talking about how everyone can become more aware of nature surrounding our homes and use natural flows to our benefit. www.comehometonature.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Amazingly Natural Toothpaste (It Really Is!)
My guest Darryl Bosshardt developed Earthpaste—”amazingly natural toothpaste”— “because we couldn’t find a natural toothpaste we loved for our families.” He is passionate about healthily living, healthy eating, and life-long learning. After growing up working for his family’s salt and mineral business (Redmond, Inc.) in Utah, he earned a Bachelors of Science degree at Southern Utah University and an MBA at Western Governor’s University before returning as a third generation family member at Redmond. In his spare time Darryl enjoys the outdoors, hiking, fishing, canyoneering, beekeeping, and just about anything else he can get is hands on. We’ll talk about toxic chemicals in toothpaste, good dental hygiene, and the simply healthy ingredients in Earthpaste. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/earthpaste
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Water Filter for College Dorm?
Question from Chris
We would like a to find a way to provide safe drinking water for our child who is moving into a college dorm. Any recommendations? Unfortunately, she won’t have a sink in her room. There’s a big bathroom down the hall. The Brita pitcher would be convenient, but I’ve heard they aren’t terribly effective.
Debra’s Answer
I agree Brita filters are not very effective.
If you need a pour-through filter, your best bet is a Berkey. Their Travel Berkey filter makes 1.5 gallons of water and is sized for apartments and hotel rooms.
Vegan-friendly Bedding
Question from Lisa
Hi Debra, I appreciate all the research you are doing to provide safe alternative products for all. Do you know of organic bedding, matresses and toppers, that are “vegan friendly”, that do not use silk or wool?
Thank you very much,
Lisa
Debra’s Answer
Check Debra’s List: Textiles: Beds & Bedding recommendations. Nearly all the recommended companies have mattresses and bedding made from organic cotton.
You might consider wool if it has been sheared in a “friendly” way. I’ve read that some wool is a byproduct of sheep slaughtered for meat and there is cruelty in the handling of sheep in the wool industry.
But I know for a fact that some wool (such as the wool used by Shepherd’s Dream) is sheared from the living animal in a humane way. Not all wool comes from “the wool industry.”
Dentures for MCS
Question from Cindy
Does anyone with mcs have dentures? Has anone gotton them and sucessfully wearing them.Im concerned aout the outgassing and any toxic material in them..Im told there are different materials used and different “grades” of dentures.. such as the best or top of the line and going down…also the materials sues to keep them in.. some people dont have to use anything others do.. I am facing having to get dentures and I would appreicate any help or sugestions or your storys ….. I dont know what they are made of.. Im still checking into all this.. but it seems I may have no choice..
I sincerely thankyou for any help.
Debra’s Answer
I have no experience with dentures.
Readers, any suggestions?
How Can I Block Scotchguard?
Question from Help please
Hi. We are staying with family for a few months while in transition to purchase a home. My sister just purchased a kitchen set and used scotchguard to protect the chairs. They were sprayed outside but then brought into the house. We moved in a week later. She is never going to replace the set and doesn’t agree with my thinking however is there anything I can put on these chairs to remove the scotchguard or eliminate it as much as possible. We basically live in the kitchen. And the kids are always sitting here. Thanks so much!!
Debra’s Answer
Since you just need a temporary fix, aluminum foil will block any fumes that are outgassing. If that won’t hold up, you can get something called “foil-backed building paper” at any home improvement store and tape it over the chair cushions. That would be easy to remove when you leave.
The Benefits and Comforts of Sleeping on a Wool Bed
My guest is Sarah Sunshine Smith, owner of Shepherd’s Dream. Since she was only 2 years old when her mother, Eliana Jantz started the company, Sarah has been surrounded by natural bedding nearly her whole life. Naturally, she became a part of the company at a young age and has played a key role in Shepherd’s Dream operations for more than 15 years. Sarah took ownership of Shepherd’s Dream over 6 years ago and has been nurturing it’s growth and well being ever since. Sarah is honored to have the opportunity to provide the purest, natural bedding imaginable to people worldwide. It is of great importance to her that each product is made with local, organic materials whenever possible, that the sheep who offer their wool fleeces live happy lives on green pastures and that each product is made with patience and love. Sarah is committed to providing a quality product line that contributes to a sustainable, green planet that will provide a beautiful home for our future generations. We’ll be talking about how wool beds are made, from the sheep in the field to the handstitching. I sleep on a Shepherd’s Dream wool bed, and have known Eliana almost as long as I’ve been writing about toxic free products, so I’ll share my experience too. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/shepherds-dream
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Negative Ions for HVAC System
Question from Dorothy
Hi Debra, We are building a new house and our ventilation contractor recommends a product that is installed in home furnaces from Global Plasma Solutions. There website is www.gpshvac.com
The specific product (GPS 2400) is listed below. Have you ever heard of this product? They say it does not create ozone problems and helps kill off various things like MRSA and ecoli.
” The GPS-2400 is a carbon-fiber needlepoint, bi-polar ionization generator rated 2,400 CFM or up to 6 tons nominal capacity. The GPS-2400 is designed for air handler mounting. The GPS-2400 housing is made from formed ABS plastic and includes ion output indication and an integral mounting tab for easy installation to the air handler wall or fan shroud.”
Debra’s Answer
It looks to me like it’s a negative ion generator designed to be mounted in your HVAC system. I don’t see a problem with it.
Why is your contractor recommending it? Is it needed?
Aquarian Bath
All-natural handmade bath and body products that come in plastic-free packaging. Soaps, herbal products, tooth powder, deodorant salve, mosquito repellant and more, made with clays, herbs, and essential oils. You can even purchase their premium ingredients and make your own.
|
Listen to my interview with Aquarian Bath President Cory Trusty. |
ECOLunchbox
A collection of nontoxic and waste-free items to use for packing food to take on the go…to school, work, travel, picnics, and anyplace else. They carry everything in one place to create a back-to-basics carry-your-lunch solution using traditional materials. Food containers, resuable sacks and napkins, utensils, and bags.
|
Listen to my interview with ECOLunchbox Founder Sandra Ann Harris. |
Life Without Plastic
This extensive website was put together by a couple who wanted to help people reduce their plastic consumption. They quickly realized that to accomplish this, they needed to be able to point them toward non-plastic alternatives that could replace the plastic items currently used in day-to-day life. Today their website sells plastic-free items that are scrupulously reviewed by them for quality, health, environment, and worker conditions, showing “the beauty and simplicity of a life without plastic.” Child and baby products, food storage, tableware, water storage, bags, toys, home and body care, kitchen, glassware, school and office supplies, travel and takeout, pet care, water, gifts.
|
|
|
|
Which Broiler Pan is Best?
Question from Emma
I like to cook chicken on my broiler pan a lot. I have been using the pan that came with my Kitchenaid oven, which I am thinking is probably aluminum. I have been shopping for a new one and seen stainless steel or porcelain coated steel but not sure what would be better. Can Debra or readers a recommend a good broiler pan?
Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
Of the two you mentioned, the one with the porcelain coating is better. Porcelain coatings are like putting a layer of glass over the metal, so in effect it is like cooking in a glass pan.
Especially avoid broiler pans with plastic nonstick finishes.
Odor Eliminator for Incontinence
Question from Mary
The woman in the apartment below me uses some sort of air freshener/disinfectant that smells like a gas station bathroom. It smells like somsething that would be hard on the liver. Rather than a spray, I think it must be some sort of electrical device that constantly emits this odor. She has little use of her legs, so I suspect she has a problem with incontinence. Many days this odor comes in here through an open window, or up through the floor if the window is closed. She is also deaf, so I have to discuss this with her mother who has been very defensive in the past. I’d like to know what this product they use is if anyone has any best guesses, and I am wondering whether anyone can think of a substitute that would be less toxic. Even natural products like essential oils would be a problem for me. I don’t know whether an air filter would solve their problem. I am wondering what others with incontinence problems use. Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
I suggest that you contact Daliya at www.nontoxic.com, 800-968-9355. She would love to talk with you. She has several products that are not scented that may work. Write back and tell us what she says.
Exposure to New Carpet While Pregnant
Question from Tanja
Hi Debra, What a great blog you have!
My husband and I are moving into a new apartment next week. They are replacing the old carpet and putting in new wall-to-wall carpet everywhere. Probably of a lower quality too because the landlord wants to save money (we offered to pay more in rent if he puts in hardwood instead but that didn’t work).
I try to live as green as possible, eat mostly organic, am replacing old furniture, etc. and I was worried from the beginning but everything else about the place is great so I couldn’t justify passing it up.
Now a couple days ago I found out I’m pregnant with our first child. Needless to say, I’m freaking out about the carpet right now. I already know I want to move when the lease is up in a year before the baby stars crawling but what about the pregnancy? I’m planning to vacuum a lot and get an air purifier but I feel like I just want to break the lease. I can’t think straight right now. What should I do? My husband understands my concerns only to some extent. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
The best advice I can give you would be to break the lease.
New carpet has a long list of hundreds of toxic chemicals, and your baby is most vulnerable to toxic effects while in the womb. I don’t want to scare you, but exposures to toxics while in the womb can result in developmental effects later on in life. If there is one point in life to be careful, it’s now.
A Toxic-Free Bed & Breakfast
My guest is Terry Mandel, owner of North Berkeley Hills Homestay. Terry began hosting short-term guests from around the world in 2002. After becoming ill in 2005 from the VOCs in paint, she began a journey of toxic-free renovation that has turned her inn into a refuge for people with MCS and EI, and others who prefer a toxic-free environment. Terry loves to share simple ways people can detox their homes, work spaces, and lives. We’ll be talking about toxic travel, how to choose less-toxic lodging, and what Terry has done to make her home a safe place to stay. www.hillshomestay.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Toxic Phenol + Toxic Formaldehyde = Nontoxic Bakelite
Question from chemistry
Discuss the preparation of bakelite when phenol reacts with formaldehyde?
Debra’s Answer
I am not a chemist, but here is my layperson understanding.
Phenol and formaldehyde are two toxic chemicals, but when they react together, they form a nontoxic material called “bakelite”. This is similar to lye and fat having a chemical reaction to make soap. Lye can burn right through your skin, but when mixed with fat, it becomes soap that is very gentle to skin.
It’s created by an “elimination reaction” in which atoms in a molecule are eliminated and replaced with different atoms to make a new material.
All About Latex Mattresses
My guest Barry Cik is a co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses…and now also adult mattresses. As an environmental engineer Barry understands toxic chemical issues better than most product manufacturers and has a “no compromise” policy when choosing materials from which to make Naturepedic products. Some of the new Naturepedic adult mattresses are made of latex. We’ll talk about everything that has to do with latex: natural vs synthetic, Dunlop and Talalay, certified organic latex, and more. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/Naturepedic
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH BARRY CIK
- Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified “Nontoxic” By New GOTS Standard
- Why Your Newborn Baby Needs an Organic Crib Mattress
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
All About Latex Mattresses
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Barry Cik
Date of Broadcast: : July 31, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, this is Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world because there are many toxic chemicals around us in consumer products and in the environment, and just walking out our front door, it can be a toxic experience, as well as being inside our own homes because of so many toxic chemicals from consumer products.
But there are many, many things that we can do to choose less toxic products, to make things ourselves that are less toxic, to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and all kinds of things that we can do, so that we can create a safe, healthy world for ourselves, in which we can be happy, healthy, and productive, and do anything we want without being stopped by toxic chemicals.
Today is Wednesday, July 31, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining, no thunderstorms today. We had a big one last night though.
Today, we’re going to be talking about latex—latex mattresses. But before we do that, I want to give you a quote from Thomas Paine. Now, Thomas Paine has been called the Father of the American Revolution because he wrote back in the 17-something, he wrote a little book called “Common Sense.” And Common Sense was about being independent, and not being under the tyranny of British rule.
And he said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
We have it in power to begin the world over again.
And from Thomas Paine saying that in this little book called Common Sense, very brave and courageous people made the United States of America to be independent from being a British colony. And in that same spirit, we can make ourselves to be independent of toxic chemicals.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again, and how that not be toxic.
My guest today is Barry Cik, and he’s been on the show, a couple of times, but he has so much to say and so much that we can learn from. He’s the co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now also are making adult mattresses.
So I wanted to have him on to talk about that.
As an environmental engineer, he understands so much about toxic chemicals, so I’ve learned so much from him. And he knows more than most product manufacturers because of his environmental engineer background. And he has a no compromise policy when it comes to choosing materials to make Naturepedic products.
So we’re going to talk today about the adult line for Naturepedic and, specifically, about latex, because there are some things we all should know about it, and some new things happening in the world.
Hi, Barry. Thanks for being with me.
BARRY CIK: Thank you. Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m great. How are you?
BARRY CIK: Great. Thank you.
DEBRA: Good. First, just tell us a little bit about your background. I know that I keep saying you’re an environmental engineer, but would you tell us exactly what an environmental engineer does because I think some people may not know what that is.
BARRY CIK: I suppose it’s a pretty broad term these days. My particular background is, I’ve been chasing chemicals for a living for 30 years or so. But my background was mostly, or my experience was mostly in the industrial side, not so much in residential or consumer products on the residential side.
Back then, nobody was even thinking of issues with consumer products. They were just not on the radar until recently, until the last, I don’t know, 10 to 15 years, when things started to change. I was part of that change.
DEBRA: Well, we’re so happy that you are. So then what happened? Tell us the story of what happened about how you came to be making mattresses for babies and then adults.
BARRY CIK: 10 years ago, my wife sent me to a baby store to buy a crib mattress and a few other things for our first grandchild. And I have to be honest about it. Until that day, I had never been in a baby store in my life. My wife used to take care of those things, and that’s just the way it was.
So 10 years ago, here I am, I walk into the store, read the product labels, read the law labels at the bottom of the mattress that says “under penalty of law, do not remove,” and so on. And I realized that the products contain all kinds of materials that have issues, and certainly, fire retardant chemical issues, plasticizer issues, and so on. And I wasn’t comfortable with that for my own grandchild.
I asked the salesperson if there’s anything else. And she said, “No, these are the way you make quality crib matresses.”
And I said, “Really?”
I was pretty surprised.
And then we went back and forth, and back and forth. And finally, she says to me, “Come on. If it wasn’t safe, the government wouldn’t allow it to be sold.”
So that was the moment of truth, when I realized—what I really realized is that the single biggest problem that we have is we really trust the government, and we really trust that if a product is on the shelf, the government will make sure that it’s safe.
DEBRA: Well, I used to trust the government before I found out that my immune system had been damaged by all those products that I trusted were safe.
BARRY CIK: Exactly.
DEBRA: I think what you just said, and what I just said is something that everybody needs to understand because I think that most people do trust the government, but we know from our experience, not only with—well, I know because of my own physical damage, but we’re learning more about the regulations, both of us, I know, that you’ve done a lot with that, that the regulations just aren’t there to protect us. And that’s part of what is being addressed by organizations, such as Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and organizations like that, that are working to get better regulations. And we very much need them.
I’m sure you agree with that.
BARRY CIK: Yes, absolutely. But along with that, everybody needs to understand that you just can’t assume that something is safe or healthy because it comes in a nice, pretty package. That’s just not the way it works.
One of the lessons that I learned on the corporate side, from the industry side of things, is that in virtually every corporate office, the unwritten rule is that safety equals compliance. If you make sure that your product is compliant with whatever regulations happen to be out there, then you have a safe product.
And your average typical corporate safety person or safety officer, his or her job is to make sure that the product is in compliance. They don’t go beyond that. Nobody thinks beyond that. Their attitude is, it’s not their job to think beyond that. It’s their job to produce products that are in compliance with the law.
DEBRA: So that’s showing that the corporations are just like the consumers in that they’re saying, “Well, the government is setting the standards, so the government must be right, and we don’t need to do anything beyond what the government tells us.”
And yet, other people, like you and I, think outside of that box.
BARRY CIK: Exactly. If the government is not focused on the issues, or not properly focused on the issues, and if Corporate America isn’t going to go beyond whatever is absolutely required of them, and if a typical consumer believes that, “Well, the government is taking care of that. I can’t deal with that issue. The government with deal with them,” then you end up with a big, huge, gaping hole, and nobody is paying attention.
DEBRA: So it’s a good thing that we are. We have to take a break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses. They’re at Naturepedic.com, and we’ll be back right after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Barry Cik. He’s the co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses, and soon to be the leading brand of adult mattresses.
Barry, so let’s talk about latex because I know that you don’t include latex in your babies and kids mattresses, but you chose to have some latex mattresses for adults, and that I want to be clear that not all of your mattresses, adult mattresses have latex.
But you chose to use that. And so I want to talk about all of the issues that have to do with latex starting with—let’s talk about what is latex.
I have some things to say about it too, but I want us both to talk. So why don’t you start by telling us what latex is.
BARRY CIK: Well, latex is a more natural alternative to petrochemical foams, and it serves its purpose very nicely. It’s a more sustainable product, of course. It doesn’t have all the questionable chemicals that are found in petrochemical foams and so on.
And so it works.
Latex really comes from latex sap. There are many forms of latex, of course. But what’s important to us, it comes from latex sap, or rubber sap. The rubber that we know is mostly artificial, of course. But rubber, once upon a time, was actually a natural product.
Rubber sap comes from a tree, a rubber tree. It sounds almost funny, but it’s true. There are trees and this is mostly in Southeast Asia—Sri Lanka, Malaysia and so on, where rubber trees are very common. And you pretty much tap the tree similar, in general, similar to the way you might get maple syrup out of a tree.
It’s really not all that different.
So you tap the trees, and then you collect the sap, and then you can turn it into a foam. And that foam happens to be very comfortable, and it’s very easy to make a mattress, the filling of a mattress from that foam, and it works, and it replaces some of the petrochemical foams.
DEBRA: Now, I have mixed feelings about latex. And I agree with everything that you’ve said. It’s a more natural alternative to a petrochemical foam. But also, we know—it’s quite well-known that latex, people can develop allergies to latex, and that there are a lot of people who are allergic to it in many, many products. And that people are often looking for latex alternatives because of that.
In fact, I just had the occasion to go buy some disposable gloves because we’ve been having some health care going on in my home, and the health care worker wanted some gloves. And I went down to the store, and I had my choice between latex gloves and the non-latex gloves. And it turned out that the non-latex gloves were made out of polyvinyl chloride.
I thought now, “Which one of these two do I buy?”
But the reason that there has been a lot of discussion about latex, especially in hospitals and things is because people were developing latex allergies to them.
So you want to say anything about that?
BARRY CIK: Sure. So there is even a bigger point here that needs to be made, and that is when you’re looking for natural materials, or you’re looking for organic, these are all basically wonderful, and they sound wonderful. But sometimes we’re being a little bit too simplistic about it.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Poison ivy is natural and probably organic, that doesn’t mean that you want to play with it.
I’ll give you another example.
When people get too focused on organic and don’t want to see the bigger picture, here’s my response. “Go please take a walk in the forest and start eating all the wild mushrooms.”
Within an hour, you’ll probably be dead, and guess what will kill you? Guess what we’ll kill you? An organic mushroom.
So there’s more to the issue than just the simplistic notions. And now, you could take that broader perspective and apply it to latex. Latex is basically a natural type product, but it happens to be allergenic. The proteins in the latex are allergenic, or potentially allergenic. Not to everybody, of course, but they are too to a large number of people.
Approximately 8% of the population is or easily becomes allergic to latex.
Now, the latex people try to minimize that by washing the proteins out of the natural rubber latex. And to a great extend, they are able to do that, of course, and that reduces the risk factor. But still, the point is, not everything that is natural is necessarily 100% perfect. That’s just not the reality. And latex is one of those items we are—yes, it’s a good alternative to petrochemicals, and as far as your gloves is concerned, if you’re not allergic, it’s probably the better alternative to the PVC.
DEBRA: I would agree.
BARRY CIK: But if you’re potentially allergenic, or had allergy issues, we probably would want to avoid the latex. And that’s why we’ve made a decision to make a distinction between baby products and adult products.
If you’re an adult, it’s a reasonable assumption that you know by now if you have any allergies, and certainly any allergies to latex, you would know that by now.
But for a baby, you just don’t know. And it’s even possible that a baby could become allergic even if a baby would not otherwise.
So for baby products, we take the position of no latex whatsoever. For adults, we go both ways. If you’re comfortable with the latex, we’re fine with it too.
DEBRA: Okay, good,. We need to take a break. And we’ll be back after this to talk more about latex with Barry Cic, co-founder of Naturepedic, and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses, and they’re now making adult mattresses too, which is what we’re talking about today.
I just wanted to say, before we get back into our conversation, Barry, just one more thing about what we were talking about before the break about allergies to latex. I want to make a distinction between people having individual allergies to something versus a substance being toxic.
To me, the difference is that a toxic chemical would be something that’s more universally injurious to cells in the body, regardless of one’s individual state. And then an allergy could be very individual. It’s a different system in the body.
Sometimes, I think, people get those two things confused.
So for latex, I would not say that latex is toxic. I don’t consider it to be a toxic material at all. But some people do have allergies to it, and allergies can be developed to it. It’s a choice that—it’s something you need to know about, and a choice that you make, just like if you know you’re allergic to seafood, you wouldn’t eat seafood. If you know you’re allergic to latex, you wouldn’t sleep on a latex mattress.
But it’s not something that is particularly going to harm you like a toxic chemical.
In my particular case, my body doesn’t like latex. I remember being exposed to it when I was a child. My grandmother had a sofa that had latex foam in it. And every time I sat on that sofa, it made me sick. And it wasn’t until I was an adult and I smelled latex, and I knew it was latex that I identified what it was.
And so I won’t buy a latex pillow or a mattress, but that doesn’t meant that I don’t recommend them for people who don’t have problems with the natural latex. It’s a natural material. There’s no reason why not to use it if it if you don’t have an individual problem with it.
All that said, let’s go on to—now, there are two different types of latex besides there being natural versus synthetic. There’s also the question of Dunlop or Talalay. Could you explain what those two things are?
BARRY CIK: The original process for curing latex is the Dunlop process. The Talalay process just adds several steps in terms of how they cure it, and how they mix the latex. And so the Talalay latex, until recently, has been considered a better latex. I’m using that in quotes. Some people say it’s a more comfortable latex. Some people say that maybe the second one is the more true, and that is that some people say that the Talalay latex feels a little bit more smooth and comfortable, and it’s more consistent. And that may be true.
But at the other hand, the Talalay latex does contain other ingredients, and it’s not as simple a process as the Dunlop. And that’s why when you go to natural and certainly, when you go to organic, you have to stick with the Dunlop, the more simple process, and stay away from the Talalay. The Talalay is not as natural a product as the Dunlop.
DEBRA: So you mentioned organic. There is now a Global Organic Latex Standard. Tell us about that because I know your latex is certified.
BARRY CIK: Correct. We only use GOLS—Global Organic Latex Standard.
DEBRA: Tell us about that and what is the standard for that.
BARRY CIK: So let me first tell you the background, so everybody understands how this happened. Basically, the latex rubber sap itself, the material that comes out of the tree, that’s under USDA National Organic Program Regulations. If you want that latex sap to be treated as organic, and you want to be able to call it organic, you have to enroll in the USDA Organic Program, of course, you can’t use pesticides and so on, and that latex can be organic.
The problem was that the USDA was not willing to certify the final latex foam that was created later on from the latex sap because that was outside the USDA jurisdiction. It’s been processed, it’s been treated, including some chemicals, not a lot, but it has been treated, and it’s just outside the USDA process. The USDA process basically does not want to go beyond the strict agricultural product. As long as it’s agricultural, USDA will certify it under the USDA. It can be certified under the USDA program.
Once it becomes some other kind of product, it’s been processed, the USDA just backs away at that point.
And so the latex foam people could not get their natural latex certified.
Now, let’s make a quick point here. The real problem is that the public, when the public is buying latex, they don’t know what they’re getting. Most of the time, it’s petro—I’m sorry?
DEBRA: Yes, I was just agreeing with you. They don’t know what they’re getting.
BARRY CIK: They don’t know what they’re getting. Most of the time, latex is petroleum, completely synthetic. So then the manufacturers who wanted to sell natural latex, they started calling it natural latex, but still, the public didn’t quite understand the difference, and then there was no certification.
And so natural became diluted as well because the term “natural” has no legal definition. So much of the natural latex is mixed with petroleum, so if it’s 51% “natural” and 49% petroleum, they can still call it natural. Once again, the public has no idea what they’re getting.
So some private people actually, some certifiers, the Control Union, which is well-known, very well-established, very well-respected, certifier in the organic world, they said, “Look, why don’t we just create a standard where if it’s really all natural latex, and it comes from the real rubber sap, let’s create a standard and let’s certify it.”
And they did. And the standard does recognize that it’s going to get treated in a factory, and there will be some chemicals that are used to treat it with, but at the end of the day, you can be sure that if it’s certified, it all comes from the rubber tree, and it’s basically a very natural product.
DEBRA: Good. We’ll talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, and we’ll be right back with more about latex and mattresses.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, especially find out who’s going to be the guests. All the guests for the week are listed at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And you can also go to the archives and listen to guests from all the shows. They’re all listed there. If you like this particular show with Barry Cik, you can go listen to his other shows. You can find out all the different guests that had been on, and it’s all there at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
So Barry, tell us about your new adult line. What’s special about these mattresses?
BARRY CIK: So it’s as follows—the growth of organic mattresses has been pretty spectacular for the past—or easily, 10 years, organic mattresses have come on the market and have pretty much exploded.
Organic mattresses, there are two sides to an organic mattress. One side is the fact that organic manufacturers tend to try to remove harmful chemicals as much as reasonably possible, they tend to avoid flame retardant chemicals or fire barriers, pretty much across the board, and just try to use healthier materials.
And then that’s the other side of the coin is what constitutes the healthier materials that they’re going to use instead of some of the conventional materials. And that’s where the term organic comes into play. And an organic mattress is a mattress that tends to use healthier materials.
Now, the industry has grown. There are many manufacturers and many fine manufacturers and each manufacturer has their own way of doing things.
The biggest single way that organic manufacturers make organic mattresses is they use organic or at least natural, more natural latex. Like I said at the beginning of the program, latex is a pretty good sustainable replacement for petrochemical foams. And so it lends itself to an organic mattress.
But the irony, of course, is that there’s so much latex in the organic world that consumers now are saying, “Do you have any other way to make an organic mattress?” And Naturepedic actually does not focus mostly on latex. Naturepedic focuses on using encased coils where we have steel coils encased with organic cotton. We use that as the core for most of our products, and we use organic cotton fill as filling over the core for most of our products.
So we use latex also, but not quite as much as some of the other manufacturers. The way we use latex is as one component.
We might have a layer of latex to add to the comfort in a particular mattress. We have one model which is a conventional all-latex mattress.
But that’s a minor part of our company. Most of our models have a combination of latex and encased coils. And then we have some models that are entirely latex-free for those people who don’t want latex.
And like I say, if you’re an adult and you know whether you’re allergic or not, and if you’re not allergic and you don’t care, either way, that’s fine. But if you do care, well, we’ll make the mattress without a drop of latex in it.
So we go both ways.
DEBRA: And you’re certified to make organic mattresses.
BARRY CIK: Correct. So there are three—
DEBRA: There are only one or two companies in the world that’s certified to make organic mattresses, isn’t that right?
BARRY CIK: Pretty much, yes, but it’s growing. The way it works is there are three certifications now that relate to mattresses.
The biggest of the three is GOTS, G-O-T-S, Global Organic Textile Standard. And those mattresses are, or those products, GOTS is not just for mattresses. GOTS is for any textile-related product. But it includes mattresses.
So the mattresses that happen to be certified under the GOTS Organic Program, there are two manufacturers who are certified under that program, and Naturepedic is one of the two. If you’re making just a latex, an organic latex bed, then there’s a new certification which is the GOLS, instead of the GOTS. And the GOLS stands for Global Organic Latex Standard, and there are now more than two manufacturers who are making the mattresses under that standard. There are three or four now who are making mattresses under that standard.
The third standard that’s applicable is what’s used to be known and still is the Organic Exchange 100 Standard. That standard—they used to be an organization called Organic Exchange. Now, it’s called Textile Exchange. And the organic certification program from that certification agency is now going to be called the Organic Content Standard.
But whatever. The point is that under that standard, they will certify that your claims to your organic components are, in fact, correct. That certification doesn’t apply to every single component in your mattress that applies to those components that you’re claiming are certified organic.
In any event, the GOLS, Global Organic Latex Standard, we are one of the few companies that are certified under that standard and all the latex in our beds are only GOLS or GOLS, some people are just calling it GOLS, certified latex.
DEBRA: Good. So I also want to say that you’re a family-owned company, and that all your products are made in the USA, and to very high workmanship standards. And that you have a very clean workspace, clean in the sense that people aren’t smoking or wearing scented products or things like that.
I’ve actually been to the Naturepedic—what do you call it? Workspace? Factory? I don’t want to call it a factory because it’s so un-factory-like. I haven’t been to the new one where they are right now, but I’ve been to the previous one, and it was just such a beautiful, I don’t want to use the word clean again, but it was just beautiful and orderly and simple and restful, not restful in the sense of, like there was no activity going on. But it was restful in a sense of just how it felt. And it felt good. And I can sense that good feeling in the mattresses. It’s just the kind of thing that you would want to sleep on.
I was very pleased at how well you’ve put your business together.
BARRY CIK: Well, thank you very much. The fact of the matter is that we do not allow any toxic chemicals in the facility whatsoever at any time. And it’s very clean, old-fashioned, kind of atmosphere.
Most of the employees are Amish craftsman, and they’re very good, they’re extremely good, frankly, at what they do. They don’t make very many mistakes, and when they do, they own up to it, and they make sure that it’s corrected.
They’re really highly motivated, highly qualified people, and they do an excellent job.
So yes, the joke that we have is that our factory really is your grandfather’s factory. If you can imagine—not that we don’t have modern equipment, yes, we do, but the overall atmosphere, it’s more of an old-fashioned, almost handmade kind of operation where everybody works together, and it’s—
DEBRA: Yes. I would like to—I have this picture still in my mind of seeing it because it’s so different. I want people to understand that this is a room, a big, clean room, there’s not even dust on the floor, and there are people working in an assembly line in the sense that one station are doing one thing, and then it gets passed onto the next station, and the next station.
But there are no conveyor belts. It’s not that kind of an assembly line. And so there are all these people doing their part of the mattress-making in a room together, cooperating together, to make this product. And this very caring family-feeling about the whole entire thing, and you really experience that being in that atmosphere, and I want people to know that this is not—these mattresses are not coming off of a factor assembly line. It’s not that kind of that thing at all. And I think that that really adds to the specialness of the product.
BARRY CIK: Thank you. And I should just mention—I don’t mean to go back to the old topic but I really do want to mention that one of the nice things about latex is that latex has a certain—people love this memory foam feeling. Of course, we would never use memory foam.
DEBRA: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you because we’ve reached the end of our time. We have the music. So I guess we’ll have to you see on again. Thanks for being here. I’ve been with Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedics at Naturepedics.com. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Are These Bed Sheets Safe?
Question from gb
Bought a set of wamsutta non organic egyptian cotton 750 count sateen sheets, color is chamise which is a light taupe, do u think this product would have formaldehyde or other harmful dyes? The organic set i purchased in the past is no longer available. Thanks
Debra’s Answer
Formaldehyde is generally on bed sheets because of a no-iron or permanent-press finish. The description of this product does not state that it has any such finish, so I would assume there is no formaldehyde.
My rule of thumb regarding dyes is that if the dye is color-fast and does not bleed out of the fabric during washing, it’s OK.
Is It Dangerous to Live Near Old Coal Mines?
Question from curious
We are contemplating purchasing a home and I just found out that the next street over used to be old coal mines a hundred years ago. I believe they refer to them as culm banks. People have been living in the area for hundreds of years, but I was curious if living so close to one of these culm banks would be dangerous to our health, especially our children. The house we are purchasing was NOT built on this, but it was previously just wooded ground. Thanks
Debra’s Answer
I didn’t know what a culm bank was, so I looked it up. It’s a bank of fine-grained anthracite coal produced as a waste byproduct in the mining process. So it’s not a coal mine, it’s a pile of very fine coal. It may have plants growing on it, and look like a natural hill, but it’s a pile of coal underneath.
Now, is it harmful to health to live near one?
Researching the answer to that question, I came across an interesting passage from a book called Environmental Justice by Peter S. Wenz.
He says:
Good Scents for Moms, Babies, Toddlers, and Kids
My guest Fran Loudas is the Founder of Belly Buttons & Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008. Fran has 18 years experience as a Certified Aromatherapist, Aromatherapy & Facial Procedures Specialist, Oriental Diagnostics Consultant, Herbal Remedy Specialist and is certified in the Design & Production of Aromatherapy Skin Care Products. She has also taught Aromatherapy online and writes for various health related websites. And above all, she’s a Mom. We’ll be talking about the difference between toxic fragrance and beneficial essential oils, and about the importance of using natural products before, during and after pregnancy as well as for babies, toddlers and children. www.bellybuttonsandbabies.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Good Scents for Moms, Babies, Toddlers and Kids
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Fran Loudas
Date of Broadcast: July 29, 2013
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. Even though there are lots of toxic chemicals out there in consumer products we might use every day, in the lawn, we might walk across, at our children’s school, all kinds of places at home, and then our own bodies, we don’t have to have toxic chemicals because there are many things that we can do, many non-toxic products we can buy or make to put in our homes. There are ways to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and these are the things that we talk about on this show—how we can be healthy, happy, productive, and do anything we want in our lives unhampered by toxic chemicals.
This weekend, I had a great weekend this weekend because I spent all weekend selling things—having a garage sale, and also looking at what I had, in my garage actually, that had been sitting there that needed to be repaired.
One of the things that I love about garage sales is that so often there are so many things that are old but still can be reused, and they aren’t toxic. One of the things that I’m actually having repaired, and this is something that you can do—instead of buying a new toxic product, you could get an old one repaired.
I have a little spare ceramic heater that’s in a metal case, totally non-toxic. And when you try to buy those nowadays, they don’t make them anymore, I don’t think, the one exactly like I have. And I’ve had mine maybe 10 years.
And it’s really hard to find a metal, ceramic, non-toxic, electric, plug-in heater.
But the motor inside can be repaired, and I found somebody this weekend who came to my garage sale who can repair my heater. And I think I’m going to get my washing machine repaired instead of getting a new washing machine because the washing machine itself is so perfectly good, it’s just one little part that is now functioning.
And in this way, we can save resources, and often, these older products still have many years of life and service in them, and they’re not toxic, and they cost less. And there are some things, if you start getting really old things, there are some things that you have to watch out for like lead paint and things.
But a lot of products that are out there at garage sales, in thrift stores, you can just continue to use them and not be exposed to toxic chemicals. Be careful because it doesn’t apply 100% of the time, but that’s a good source of toxic-free products—just use something again.
Today on the show, we’re going to be talking about personal care products for moms, babies, toddlers and kids. And our guest today is Fran Loudas. She’s the founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008.
Fran is a certified aromatherapist. She’s had 18 years’ experience as an aromatherapist, aromatherapy and facial procedure specialist. She’s an oriental diagnostics consultant, herbal remedy specialist and is certified in the design and production of aromatherapy skin care products. She’s also taught aromatherapy online and writes her various health-related websites.
And I was interested in having her on because she wants to talk about the importance of using natural products before, during and after pregnancy, as well as for babies and toddlers and children. And I want to talk about the difference between toxic fragrance and beneficial essential oils.
So we’ll be covering all of that today.
Fran, thanks for joining me.
FRAN LOUDAS: My pleasure.
DEBRA: So before we get started talking about all those things, tell us how you got into aromatherapy and all these natural things that you’re doing.
FRAN LOUDAS: I’d be happy to. When I first started, I was making bath salts—very simple, very easy, but I found it really interesting. A friend of my daughter approached my daughter and said—she worked for the Children’s Aid Society, and she said, “We’re having a silent auction. Would your mother be interested in donating some products, a gift basket?”
I said, “Sure, I would be happy to.”
I did that. Long story short, my gift basket ended up at a firemen’s silent auction, and one of the firemen’s wives was an aromatherapy teacher, had her own store in another city, got the basket and alled me. Everything I made, she wanted to carry in her store.
That’s how it started. And then I took aromatherapy. I became a certified aromatherapist. She’s a certified teacher of aromatherapy, and I took the classes with her, and then one thing led to another, and it expanded, and it just snowballed from there.
And I took all these courses. I was very, very interested, and I found I preferred making the product. And I also preferred making products for pregnant women. I thought they seemed to be so forgotten. It’s difficult to find products for them in the marketplace.
So I thought, “Well, I’m going to start experimenting.” I’m really interested, and the one thing led to another, and I thought, “Well, if it’s for mom, it’s got to have something for the baby to make their skin soft, less damaging and toxic-free for them.”
The first product I made, My Mom and Baby Cream, I made in 2008, and beginning of 2009, I won an award for it from Parent Tested Parent Approved. And then it’s just snowballed from there, and that’s how I continued on. And we’ve won many awards since then from various organizations.
So it’s something we’re really proud of.
DEBRA: Well, it’s very important for moms, especially if you’d look at babies, they actually start in their moms, of course. And what pregnant women are putting on their bodies, or even before they conceive, the toxic chemicals that they use before conception can still get into the baby after the baby has been conceived.
So the women who are interested in having children, they really need to start looking at their toxic exposure way before they even get pregnant and during pregnancy.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. A lot of these toxic chemicals get through the skin, they get into the bloodstream. And then it’s in the bloodstream, and this is what is fed to the baby. So you’ve got to be really, really careful.
I find I’m a true believer that if you’re using natural essential oils before, during and after pregnancy, the benefit are—there’s a million benefits, so to speak. And with these essential oils, even the carriers, you’re not supposed to put essential oils directly on your skin.
So if you have a carrier, such as a really nice, say, sweet almond oil, or jojoba oil, put a couple of drops in there, and rub that onto your skin. It’s beneficial for your skin, keeps it smooth. If it gets into the bloodstream, it doesn’t matter. There’s no toxicity, so it’s not going to affect the baby, it’s not going to affect the mother.
DEBRA: But in aromatherapy, the essential oils have benefits too.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. While you’re pregnant, there are basically six essentially oils that have the greatest use for a woman while she’s pregnant, and they will not harm the baby because five of these six essential oils can then be used from the time the baby is born up and forever.
These oils, first one, lavender, it’s amazing. It’s excellent in a bath, for a massage, as a room freshener, even as a facial oil.
DEBRA: And what’s the benefit?
FRAN LOUDAS: The benefit, it soothes some aching backs, legs and ligaments. It’s relaxing and has anti-depressant properties. It has a mild sedative action, so it will help with insomnia. It is one of two essential oils that can be put directly on the skin, and the other one is tea tree oil. But I wouldn’t use tea tree oil when I was pregnant. I would wait until way after.
DEBRA: We’re going to hear more of about this after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas. She’s the founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, and that’s at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. We’ll be back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, my guest is Fran Loudas of Belly Buttons and Babies at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. And we’re talking about aromatherapy versus toxic perfume and scent, and why that’s important for moms, babies, toddlers and kids.
Before we go on though, I want to tell you where I do this radio show. I do it at home. And I’m sitting in my office where I have about 17-feet of windows that look out in my backyard. It’s under the canopy of oak trees overhead.
And so I’m constantly glancing out the window, and I see all kinds of birds and butterflies. Recently, I’ve had a lot of butterflies going by my window. And during the break, I was just watching a zebra long wing, which is black and yellow on the head, these big, wide wings, which happens to be the state butterfly of Florida. And I’ve been having a lot of them go past my window recently.
It’s a big butterfly summer. I don’t remember seeing so many butterflies. So this is great. It makes me feel optimistic for the environment.
So Fran, let’s go on with you.
I just get excited. My friends, when I’m talking to my friends on the phone, I say, “There’s a cardinal outside my window.”
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s amazing. I love waking up in the morning, hearing the birds. That’s what I wake up to every morning.
DEBRA: I do too. I hear birds every morning as well, and it’s fun to learn what their bird calls are.
FRAN LOUDAS: And you can listen to them. My husband can imitate one of the birds, and if he hears them, he starts whistling, and it’s like they have a conversation going. It’s hilarious. And it just sounds so nice.
DEBRA: It does. When I got married—actually, I got married in a forest in California, and we had a video. And you could hear, when you watch the video, you could hear the bird’s song getting louder and louder and louder, and more and more birds, as the wedding ceremony went on. It was like all these birds came around and were serenading us while we were getting married.
FRAN LOUDAS: That’s so nice. That’s so nice.
DEBRA: It was. It was great.
So back to the subject at hand, so what I want to talk about for a minute before we go on is, I want to make the distinction between artificial fragrance, which is in a lot of products, and aromatherapy essential oils. And because there are so many people who are being made ill by toxic artificial fragrances that people look at something, anything that’s scented, there’s a lot of people—and I’m not saying that this is the wrong thing, but a lot of people are looking for unscented products. And I want everybody who is listening now and in the future to understand the difference between there are unscented products, there are toxic scented products, and there are aromatherapy products.
And they’re three very different things. And if you want to stay away from toxic fragrance, that doesn’t mean you have to stay away from aromatherapy products. So let’s talk about that for a few minutes. Just go ahead and tell me your viewpoint about that.
FRAN LOUDAS: Well, I agree with you. You can have a beautifully-scented product that’s made with essential oils. A certified aromatherapist or someone that has the same certification I do, creating custom blends, you can mix two, three, four, five different types of essential oils together and come up with an absolutely beautiful scent. And it’s all natural, and it will have benefits for whatever that might ail you, for instance.
For instance, I make a body lotion for a pregnant woman that’s got pink grapefruit essential oil in it. Pink grapefruit is known to ease nausea, morning sickness.
Now, you can buy grapefruit-scented products, but that’s synthetic. The difference with the fragrance is they cause certain ailments in people, such as headaches, dizziness, breathing disorders, allergy, rashes, skin disorder, you can start coughing, some people might vomit or get depressed or become hyperactive, irritable.
The list can go on and on.
Plus, fragrances have up to 400 separate ingredients, 4000 separate ingredients, and you don’t know what they are. It could be something that is petroleum-based that’s not good for you.
DEBRA: They usually are petroleum-based.
FRAN LOUDAS: Well, yes, exactly. With the fragrances, it can interfere with your metabolism, the hormones, endocrine disruptors. The list can go on and on.
One company, or one website that is really good is Environmental Working Group. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. You’ve heard of it, correct?
DEBRA: Yes, and they have a section called Skin Deep, where they evaluate beauty products and personal care products.
FRAN LOUDAS: We have our products listed there. We’ve gone through all the testing for that. There’s another one here in Canada called Environmental Defense, where they do something similar. We’re listed with them as well.
I find it’s really important not to pollute your body, and especially when you’re pregnant, because you’re not only polluting your body, you’re polluting the baby’s body. And you don’t know, the baby might end up having allergies that may not have ever had in their life.
DEBRA: I wanted to ask you personally because part of what I’m attempting to do here with this radio show is to—we’re going to have to wait until after the break. I’ll ask you the question. I’m interested in why, you personally, you don’t want to pollute your body, that you think that’s a good thing to not pollute your body because not everybody in the world feels that way. And so
I’m always asking my guests why, what is it that made you decide that that was important to you.
And we’ll find out the answer to that question when we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, from Belly Buttons and Babies.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Fran Loudas from Belly Buttons and Babies. And before the break, I asked her a question and now, we’re going to get the answer about why it’s important to Fran to not pollute her body.
FRAN LOUDAS: Hi there. Well, for me, first off, I don’t think it’s fair that I do that to my body. I eat properly, I look after myself, I look after my children, feed them properly—everything that a mother should do.
Personally, in my family, my mother, she’s a breast cancer survivor. When that happened to my mom, it scared myself and my sisters. And being an aromatherapist, you never think that it’s going to happen. And then, I thought, “Well, I’m an aromatherapist. I know better.”
So I’m going to make sure that anything I use is not going to carry any of these chemicals that can be cancer-causing. I don’t want to trigger—I don’t know if I have the gene, and I won’t want to aggravate it if I do.
DEBRA: Whether we have the genes or not, I think it’s estimated that 70-something-percent of cancers are caused by environmental exposures to chemicals that cause cancer. And so everybody has the opportunity to reduce their cancer risk right now, today, by deciding to not use chemicals, not use products that contain chemicals that cause cancer, and you can remove chemicals that are already in your body that cause cancer, and then you’re doing the things that you can do to reduce the cancer risk.
If you’re being exposed to—and this applies to anything in life, if you do something, and you know there’s going to be a result at the end, whether it’s a bad result or a good result, then you’re responsible for that result, having chosen to do it.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. When we were growing up, my parents, we had a garden in the backyard, we did not have any processed meats, any canned foods in the house. We grew up, everything was made from scratch, natural.
And then when I got married and started having children, I did the exact same thing.
DEBRA: Good for you.
FRAN LOUDAS: Thank you. I’m teaching my children for them to do that. I made my own baby food, all this stuff. And now, I’m interested in making—so what goes in is good, but what goes on the skin has to be good too because you can’t do one without the other.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. I’m going to say something that I’ve said many times before in the show, but it’ worth repeating until everybody can say it in their sleep. What goes on your skin is as important as what goes in your mouth because people are aware that things that you eat or drink can be toxic because it goes right into your stomach.
But actually, if you put something on your skin that’s toxic, it goes into your blood system faster because when you eat or drink something, it goes into your stomach, in your intestines where it mixes with proteins and fats, and it slows down the absorption process.
But when you put something on your skin, it goes right in.
I’m sure everybody has touched a garlic, and then you’d taste garlic on your tongue within seconds.
FRAN LOUDAS: Debra, I also found with babies and children, they’re more vulnerable to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: Yes, they are.
FRAN LOUDAS: Their immune system, central nervous system, they’re still immature and still developing. And their bodies are less capable of eliminating these toxins. So why slather and feed them toxic when you don’t have to? It’s not necessary.
DEBRA: It’s not necessary. It’s a choice.
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s absolutely not necessary. And that’s one of the reasons why I do that. I figure, if I’m an example, the children will follow me, and hopefully, they will.
Well, I think back to me, with my parents, everything was done naturally, fresh—everything. Honestly, we did not know what butter was in our house until I was about 14 years old. We never had butter in the house. When we ate bread, it was without butter or anything. We had jam.
Actually, we went to the creek that was behind our house, and we would pick the wild raspberries and gooseberries and she’d make jam for us.
So it was really quite nice. I try to do that with my children.
Nowadays, you’re exposed a little bit more with—don’t get me wrong, I would love to, every day, eat a hamburger and French fries. I would love it, but you can’t. Realistically, I can’t do that. Plus, I don’t want to. I’d like to, but I won’t.
DEBRA: I understand. But fortunately, there are many lovely and wonderful fragrant and delicious things that we can have that are healthy for us.
So let’s get back to aromatherapy. You were telling us at the beginning of the show about what was it, six oils that are safe for moms to use and safe for the baby?
FRAN LOUDAS: They’re excellent oils to use while you are pregnant. And the one I did mention, it was lavender.
DEBRA: And tell us about some of the others.
FRAN LOUDAS: I have my list right here. Mandarin is beautiful. It’s a very calming, gentle, and cheery oil. And it’s a bit of a fresher smell than orange, and it’s excellent for leg and ankle massages. And anyone who’s been pregnant knows your feet swell.
Mandarin eases fluid retention. And if you put a couple of drops in the bath, it will help with fatigue. It will just make you not so tired.
Another great oil is neroli. It’s a little bit more expensive, but if you can afford it, and you get it, it’s wonderful on your face. If you’ve got dry, sensitive skin, it regenerates the skin cells, it helps with nervous tension, as in anti-panic. And it’s calming and relaxing. It promotes healthy skin cells, especially when you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: That sounds great. We’re going to hear more about Fran’s products when we come back after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, and she’s at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. That’s spelled out A-N-D, Belly Buttons, A-N-D, Babies dot com.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, the founder of Belly Button and Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008. And we’re talking about essential oils that are good for mom and safe for baby.
Fran, go on with your list. What are the essential oils for moms?
FRAN LOUDAS: I’d be happy to. I earlier mentioned neroli essential oil which is a little bit—
DEBRA: What does that smell like? I’m not familiar with that one.
FRAN LOUDAS: Neroli, it smells like—I’ve had an orange tree where you get the small, little oranges. It’s almost like an ornamental orange tree that I’ve been growing. And when it flowers, when I walk into the room, that’s what it smells like. It’s a little bit stronger. It’s almost—I want to say woody. It’s very distinct. I love the smell. Not everyone likes it. It’s strong. It’s a little bit heavier.
The neroli comes from the flowers. It’s like a bitter orange smell is what it is.
DEBRA: I think I would like that.
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s beautiful. I think it’s absolutely beautiful. As I mentioned, neroli is a little bit on the expensive side, but there’s another one that comes from the leaves and twigs from the same bitter orange tree, and it’s called petitgrain. And it has similar properties, but it’s less sedating, and the scent is a little bit more fresh.
And as I mentioned, it can be used a cheaper alternative to the neroli. It’s great for dealing with depression, either prenatal or postnatal. If you can get mandarin, neroli and petitgrain essential oils, all three of them, and make a blend with a jojoba carrier oil, you will have a total balanced massage oil that is perfect for treating depression.
DEBRA: Sounds good.
FRAN LOUDAS: It is. It’s very nice. Tangerine is another essential oil that’s beautiful. It’s happy. It helps prevent stretch marks, great for massage while you’re pregnant. It’s calming and gentle. It’s good for the nerves. It’s good for the skin. And because it’s so mild, it’s excellent for babies, children and for elderly people.
Now, Ylang ylang is an exotic oil, and ylang ylang is one oil that is used in the production of perfume. It’s relaxing, it has aphrodisiac powers, and it helps lower high blood pressure. And it’s really nice for pregnant women if they’re tense and worried about the upcoming birth, they don’t know what to expect, especially for your firstborn.
It’s nice to be used in baths and massages and as room fresheners.
That’s all the oils that are recommended to use while you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: That’s good to know what that list is because I know that there are a lot of cautions for pregnant women that pregnant women shouldn’t assume just because something is natural that it’s safe. And so it’s good to know the positive list of what’s okay, especially lavender. I love lavender, and it’s easy to remember those too—lavender, mandarin, ylang ylang. How do you say that again?
FRAN LOUDAS: Ylang ylang. What I can do for your listeners is put on my website, the essential oils to use that are good when you’re pregnant, essential oils—
DEBRA: You know what would be great is that on my website, I have a blog that archives all the shows. And so you get your own blog post for this show, and if you send me the list, then I can post it along so people who are listening can have that list just right there.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. I can do that for you. A lot of people, I know a lot of people read about essential oils, and how they’re used, and what you can use, and what you can’t use. But you’ve got to be so careful, especially when you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree.
FRAN LOUDAS: If you have epilepsy or sensitivity of your nervous system, you should consult an arometherapist instead of trying to treat yourself.
DEBRA: That’s really good advice because I think that there’s a lot, if you can go to the natural food store, and there’s a lot of things on the shelf, and the reason there are professionals is because these things are powerful. They work. And you need to get the right thing.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. You can even talk to your doctor about it. Say, “I want to use this essential oil while I’m pregnant.
I’ve read about this, this and this.”
The doctor will more than likely know, “No, you can’t. That will cause a miscarriage.”
For some people, if you’d had a miscarriage, I would not use any essential oils in the first trimester of my pregnancy. And a lot of people don’t know that. It can be dangerous.
DEBRA: That’s why they should go to a professional.
When you said ask your doctor, you may have noticed that there was a moment of silence from me because I was just shocked. I was shocked that a doctor would know that answer.
FRAN LOUDAS: I know up here a lot, they’re starting now with aromatherapy, with homeopathy, and naturopathic. They’re starting to recognize it.
DEBRA: That’s good. I think it is good to have a doctor that has medical training, but also is familiar to what some of the natural alternatives are, and that’s why I look for when I’m looking for—I want somebody who’s really good at diagnosis, and then to tell me, “Now, please take this vitamin.” But that they can also write a prescription for me if that’s what I actually need.
FRAN LOUDAS: If there’s an infection or whatever. You just can’t fight it. Sometimes you have to.
On another note, pregnant women should also only use essential oils that are derived from flowers and not herbs. And herb would—
DEBRA: What’s the difference between those two?
FRAN LOUDAS: With the herbs, there’s a whole slew of essential oils that should not be used when—you should avoid them while you are pregnant. And a lot of them are herbs, such as peppermint, rosemary, basil, juniper, savory, sage, cedarwood, slary sage, sweet marjoram, clove, marjoram, tarragon, thyme, fennel, parsley.
Those are all the essential oils. And some people might like the way they smell and figure, “Well, I could use that while I’m pregnant. I’ll put it in some of this oil that I’m going to get my husband to give me a bath, massage or something.”
No. Stay away from those.
I will send you the information, Debra. It’s a concern to me. When I was teaching aromatherapy online, I found there were a lot of people—one essential oil, wintergreen, should not be used ever. And there was someone who was advising other students, “Yes, get wintergreen and mix it with spearmint and peppermint and this and that. You have a nice foot cream.”
I almost fell off my chair.
You can’t be giving me advice on stuff that you don’t know about. I’ve trained for it. I took many years of training, and understanding where these oils come from, why are they used, what are they used for, how to use them properly, you just can’t—
DEBRA: It’s just really important that people, especially on the internet—I hate to say this because I’m on the internet and you’re on the internet, but I think it’s necessary for people to evaluate where the information is coming from, and how experienced and trained somebody because there’s a lot of things that you just got to search engine and you type in a word and you end up on a page where there are no references, nobody tells what their experiences. It’s just like, “Here’s what to do.”
And that’s not going to rest for me. I need to know that something is safe. So I do look at my sources.
We’re just about out of time. Thank you so much for joining me today. Are there any last words you just like to close with?
FRAN LOUDAS: Other than pregnant ladies, please, please be careful what you put on your skin, and make sure that you’re using essential oils. Check Debra’s website, her blog, I will send the information. Please use the correct essential oils on your body. It will help you and your baby in the long run.
DEBRA: It will.
FRAN LOUDAS: And thank you so much for having me on your show. It was fun.
DEBRA: Everybody says that. That is the word that all the guests use. They always say, “That was so much fun.”
FRAN LOUDAS: And it went by so quick. I can’t believe.
DEBRA: It did. And now, I have to sign off because the music is going to come up, and I need to say, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and get more information about this show and our featured guest. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thanks for being with me today.
Nontoxic Products at Ikea
Question from Stacey
I went to check out Ikea because of the low prices I see advertised. However, I realized some of the prices are low because a lot of the furniture is made with particleboard. I will purchase some curtains, though, which are made of 100% cotton or linen and are a great price. I also need blinds for windows, and Ikea has cheap ones. Some are “solid wood” with a clear lacquer. A lot of products (baskets, furniture, blinds) have this clear lacquer finish. Is this okay? What about aluminum blinds? are those okay? (Blinds To Go has a lot). I also saw some wood hangers at Ikea with an “acrylic lacquer” or “acrylic paint” and am wondering if these finishes are okay too, since the price is so much cheaper than other wood hangers I have seen. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
Ikea is one of my favorite stores because the prices are low and the style is simple. But you have to be very careful. Fortunately they are one of the best at disclosing materials used, so you can avoid the plastics and particleboard in favor of the solid woods and natural fibers.
I haven’t checked the ingredients of their clear lacquer finish, but I have never had a problem with anything I have purchased there that had that finish.
I have my eye on those very wooden blinds, but I don’t have…oh! I just figured out the perfect place to put them! My desk is up against an east-facing window and the sun often gets in my eyes in the morning. I have a shade that I pull up and down but those wooden blinds would be easier to open and close. I’m not concerned about their finish.
What I like most about Ikea is the cotton curtains and the many pieces of unfinished solid wood furniture. Just read the material list carefully and you can get some good nontoxic bargains there.
Bonded Marble and Wool Blend Felt
Question from Donna
Hi Debra,
It seems like I can’t buy anything without worrying about it. I’m trying to do a sports themed kid’s room and found a light fixture made out of bonded marble. Is bonded marble toxic and would it be more so when the light is on and heating it up? I also wanted to use a baseball pennant for a wall hanging, but the pennant is made of a wool blend felt. Do you know if wool blends would contain formaldehyde? Again, thank you fo all that you do.
Donna
Debra’s Answer
I understand the feeling. The solution is to just keep learning what’s toxic and what’s not and over time you will gain confidence in choosing materials.
Bonded marble is made from powdered marble (a naturally occuring stone) mixed with powdered resin. Now resin occurs in plants (pine sap is a resin, for example) but is also made from petroleum. One article I read said, “For the most part…”resins” are actually made with synthetics, which as cheaper and easier to refine. Synthetic varieties are much more stable, predictable, and uniform than natural ones as well, since they are made under controlled conditions without the possibility of the introduction of impurities. They are made by combining chemicals in a laboratory to stimulate a reaction which results in the formulation of a resinous compound.” That’s why they do it, with no thought of whether it is toxic or not.
Using bonded marble allows a manufacturer to make a product that looks and feels like marble by using a mold instead of carving the marble by hand as an artist would. Resins are often made from polyester or urethane. So in a lampshade, heat from a lightbulb would tend to cause a release of these plastics. I wouldn’t use this lamp.
When I was a child, my mother loved modern design. I remember once she bought for my bedroom a very cool lamp with a heavy cylinder base and a big round plastic shade, like a half sphere dome. I remember the smell of that plastic even typing here right now. Of course I didn’t know it was plastic and I didn’t know it was toxic, but now I look back on that childhood memory and see I was being poisoned night after night. We didn’t know then, but we know now and can make choices.
Wool blend felt is wool mixed with another fiber, often polyester. I don’t know for a fact that they don’t contain formaldehyde, but to the best of my knowledge I have no reason to believe that it does. Formaldehyde is used to make permanent press finishes, which are not found in wool felt.
As for the pennant, smell it. Plastic inks are used to print the name of the team on the felt.
How to Find a Lead-Free Lipstick and Other Safe Cosmetics
You’ve probably heard there is lead in lipstick, but do you know how to find a lipstick that is lead-free? Lead is not listed on the label. My guest Kristin Adams is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Afterglow Cosmetics and her company now has a special process to make lead-free lipstick, which they sell along with other organic cosmetics. Kristen is also a beauty writer and advocate for stricter cosmetic safety standards. She is actively involved in The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and is an expert on natural/organic and gluten-free cosmetic formulations and ingredients. The Afterglow line was born out of Kristin belief that women shouldn’t sacrifice color, performance or quality when choosing natural and organic make-up. Afterglow Cosmetics is a full line of organic infused, all natural, bio-active make-up. The cleanest line of make-up on the market, Afterglow offers professional coverage and a striking range of shades. Since its inception in 2004, Afterglow Cosmetics has been featured in top media outlets across the country. Thanks to Kristin’s expertise, Afterglow is a prime example that quality can be achieved naturally without the standard, and often toxic ingredients, petrochemicals, parabens gluten, and synthetics found in traditional cosmetics. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/afterglow-cosmetics
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Find a Lead-Free Lipstick and Other Safe Cosmetics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kristin Adams
Date of Broadcast: July 25, 2013
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 even though there are a lot of toxic chemicals in many consumer products and in the air we breathe and the water we drink, food we eat, et cetera. There are also many safe products and safe places to be that have minimized the toxic exposure if not eliminated it entirely.
So that’s what we’ll talk about in this show, how to identify the toxic chemicals, where are they, what are they doing to our health, but also, the most important thing is to be able to construct a life that is free from these toxic chemicals and the health effects and mental effects and spiritual effects that they cause.
So today, we’re going to be talking about cosmetics and beauty products. My guest has created her own line of cosmetics and beauty products because of her interest in having them be exceptionally toxic-free. The reason why I invited her on – I know about this company before and I actually have it listed on my website.
You know, I forgot to tell you the date. The date is Thursday, July 25th 2013 and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida.
My guest today created her own cosmetics line. And the reason that I decided to have her on the show is because I’m obviously on her mailing list and I received an email promotion that said, “Is lead lurking in your lipstick?”
Now, I’ve written a lot about lead and lipstick and I’ve also tried to find lipsticks that did not have lead in them. As I started calling around to different places (I didn’t call her company at the time), when I was trying to look for lipsticks that had no lead, I would call at people and they would say, “Oh, yeah. We don’t put any lead in our lipstick. There’s no lead in our lipstick,” but as it turns out, it’s not necessarily on the label. And when I started learning more about what they’re doing to make their lipsticks 100% lead-free by a new process that they’ve developed themselves, I thought, “I need to have her on the show, so we can talk about this and other aspects of what’s toxic in cosmetics and what’s not.”
Kristine, are you there?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes, I am. Thanks for having me on.
DEBRA: This is Kristin Adams. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. So Kristine, let’s start. Tell us why you’re interested in having things not be toxic.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, it started – we’re on our ninth year. It started way back nine years ago when I was investigating for myself how to address my own skin issues. I knew that I was eating healthy, I was eating organic. I had a really lifestyle for someone in their mid-twenties, but I still had lots of skin conditions. I had very sensitive skin. I had acne that wasn’t necessarily coordinated with my menstrual cycles. I was starting to investigate, “Okay, if it’s not something I’m eating, what is it topically that I’m putting on my body that’s causing me to react in this way?”
I really feel that what happens on the skin is an expression of what’s going on inside and what you’re doing to your skin on the outside. I started investigating and I immediately went after – and that was back in the early 2000s. There weren’t as many options, but I immediately went after those options that said that they were more natural, more green – no one even talked organics in make-up at that time – and started looking at the ingredients that they actually had in those products and realized that I didn’t even want to use those ingredients on my body once I started investigating each individual ingredient that they were actually claiming as natural.
It got me really angry at first. And then I decided that I could start making the products for myself. I had a background in art and painting. And so for me, making a color pigment is not that different than mixing a paint from scratch.
So I started making it for myself. And many years later, now I work with chemist. We’ve grown and expanded and I reach out to women all over the world with more natural products. But the origin was really how can I honor my body and really advocate for myself and my own beauty.
DEBRA: I totally understand because that was very much situation too where I could see that although I was going away beyond skin problems, I wanted to say two things. I wanted to respond to what you said. One is, first, I wanted to say I can see you’re artistic aesthetic-ness in your products.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Oh, thank you.
DEBRA: …that that really comes across to me, that you’re an artist. And when I put color on my face, when I put make-up on, I do think of my face as being like a painting, like a work of art and that I’m putting colors on to enhance it and make shadows and accents and things. It very much is an artistic thing for me.
But I also wanted to point when I was writing my book, Toxic-Free, I studied a lot about how the body detoxification operates and there are actually different symptoms that you can observe to see when toxic things are getting built up in your body, that there are specific symptoms that actually give you different degrees of showing how toxic what your body burden is.
Skin breakouts is one of the levels. I don’t remember which one it is. It’s in my book. But when people have their skin breaking out, it’s a sign that there’s too much toxic stuff in your body and that your body is trying to get rid of it.
So you did exactly the right thing to be looking at what are you putting your body because it’s getting in there in your skin.
And also, I want to point out because I know most people don’t know this that from a toxic exposure viewpoint, what you put on your skin is actually worse than eating it or drinking it because if you eat something that’s toxic, let’s say pesticides on food, it goes into your digestive system where there’s a lot of proteins and fats and it gets all bound up with everything that’s in your digestive system before it goes into the rest of your body.
When you put something in your skin, it goes straight in to your bloodstream in seconds. And so what we’re putting on our faces and on our bodies is extremely important to have it be as pure as possible because it’s the quickest way it’s going to get into your body.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah. And just to add on to that, a lot of times, people approach that fact with disbelief because it just doesn’t make sense to them because they’re not actually putting it into an orifice. But if you think about the birth control patch or the nicotine patch, those are just simple patches. They go right on your skin and are quickly absorbed and alter your complete body chemistry. So it makes perfect sense.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So this is great. So, let’s talk about lipstick for a minute. I know we’re going to run into the break and I’m going to have to interrupt you, but let’s just get started with that. Why don’t you start with telling us how come there’s lead in lipstick? How does it get there?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah, on your intro, I heard you mention lead isn’t in the ingredient list. “I looked for lead and there was no lead in my ingredients list, so I’m good.” Lipsticks are essentially oils. Most commercial lipsticks use petroleum oil as their base. They might have a few different binders to hold everything together. And then it’s pigments. The pigments come from two different places in the lipstick.
The pigment can come from dyes, FD&C and like dyes among others, which are synthetic pigment that makes the color of the lipsticks or they can come from a natural source.
Most commercial lipsticks still use very readily lots of natural ingredients, natural pigments in addition to the synthetic ones that they use.
The natural sources are normally iron oxide. Iron oxide are a series of pigments. So you’ll see iron oxide in the ingredient list, but then it’ll have a few different numbers. Those numbers indicate which mutation, for lack of a better word, that iron oxide is, whether it’s the black one, the red one, the brown one, the yellow one.
That mixture adds in to make that color. Those iron oxide are mined from the earth and the earth has lots of different contaminants when they pull out that iron oxide that come out with the pigment.
DEBRA: Okay, we’re going to need to go to the commercial break. We need to go to the commercial break, so we’ll continue this in a moment. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with Kristine Adams. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re talking about lead in lipstick and other toxic chemicals and our organic alternatives.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kristine Adams, founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re talking about lead and lipstick. So Kristine, go on, you were just telling us about how lipsticks are made still with iron oxide. Tell us what’s going on with iron oxides.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes, so iron oxide is probably one of the most common pigment ingredients that’s used in make-up in general. There’s nothing wrong with iron oxide, but what it does when it is mined is it brings out of earth lead, arsenic, mercury that comes with it. And just like anything else that’s mined from the earth, gold for example, when you mined gold – and sometimes, this is a much easier analogy for people to understand, gold comes in different purifications.
A very common purification is 24k gold, which means that it has trace elements within that 24k gold. That has nickel and other alloys. The same goes with iron oxide that’s mined from the earth. It too comes with its own trace elements that also come from the earth like lead.
The difference between the iron oxides that some cosmetic companies use and the iron oxide that we use is a purification level.
So iron oxide, to get a wee bit technical, is essentially the oxidation of iron or rust. That’s what gives it the color. But when it is mined from the earth with those trace metals and not purified enough, it goes right into the product and then directly onto your skin.
I guess the question would be…
DEBRA: Wait, wait. I need to ask you a question. I see iron oxides on the labels on all kinds of cosmetic products.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Absolutely.
DEBRA: I mean, everybody is using this mineral product. Just a few months ago, it came to my attention, there was a particular brand, which I won’t mention, but it’s been around for many, many, many years, like from the ‘70s, it’s got lots of iron oxides in it. You can look at any ingredients list for all these mineral make-ups and it’s iron oxide, iron oxide, iron oxide.
And so I always thought that iron oxide must be okay because it’s natural. But what you’re saying makes perfect sense to me. So now, we really need to be careful about which brands we’re buying because of the purification of the iron oxide, yes?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, yes. Even though the FDA has done studies about acceptable levels of lead in cosmetics by this point because of the scare of the studies that were done previously, yes, iron oxide is a commonly used ingredient in all cosmetics, not just natural cosmetics, not just mineral cosmetics, but all cosmetics and that’s where the lead is hidden.
When people don’t see it on their ingredient list, they wonder, “Why is there redness in my lipstick?”, it’s really coming from the iron oxide – not the iron oxide itself, but it’s kind of latched on as a trace metal within the iron oxide. Just like when you look at your 14k gold and say, “Why is it not as pure as that 24k gold and why is it harder?” It’s harder because it’s nickel. And some people that are allergic to nickel are also allergic to 14k gold and that’s because it carries nickel within it because it’s not purified.
DEBRA: For iron oxide, is there a rating number like there is for gold? I mean, how would we know as a consumer. I know when I was calling people, I would say, “Is your lipstick lead-free?” and they would say, “Well, of course, we’re not putting lead in our lipstick,” but they may not have known about lead being in there as a trace contaminant in the iron oxide that they’re using just like I didn’t know.
KRISTINE ADAMS: There are multiple complications with that. One, when you call a customer service rep especially for a company that isn’t dogmatically focused on the natural, pure, organic, as clean as possible as we are, they just aren’t trained to answer that question.
Nowhere down the line of their company have they ever probably asked their chemist, the formulator of that product, “Where are you sourcing this ingredient from? How clean is it? What other trace materials does it have? Does it have any certifications that certify it as clean so when we add it into the product, it doesn’t test out on the other end as something that would be unsavory?”
The customer person, they’re so far removed from that process that they just don’t even know how to begin to answer that question.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Wow! Wow! To me, this is one of those things where what you’re saying makes total sense to me, but it’s like how would anybody have ever known unless somebody like you, we searched it out and found it out and are letting people know about it because it’s just not one of those things that’s known.
So I really appreciate the degree of research that you’ve done. This is really exceptional. Just thank you. Thank you.
KRISTINE ADAMS: And thank you or spreading the word. I really appreciate it.
DEBRA: Okay! So I guess what’s the guideline that people should be using? If they don’t want to have lead in lipstick, obviously, they could use your lipstick at Afterglow Cosmetics, which is at AfterglowCosmetics.com. But if they wanted to find out about lead and lipstick from some other company, what’s the question they should be asking?
KRISTINE ADAMS: So there are some regulation, regulatory bodies like EcoCert that certify pigments for much more intense level standards than are acceptable by the FDA. They are specifically looking at pigments now because there hasn’t been any organic regulation.
And EcoCert is a private organic regulation body that works a lot in Europe and it works a lot with food ingredients and it’s starting to certify more products and ingredients. I hope in the next few years, there will be a standard for cosmetics, but right now, there isn’t.
So what we do at the company when we are formulating any product and with working with our chemist is that I need to make sure that each one of our ingredients is sourced from a place that does get those pigments certified EcoCert.
DEBRA: Good. We need to take another break. We need to take another break. We will be back after the break with Kristine Adams. She’s the founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’ve been talking about lead in lipstick and why there’s oftentimes lead. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here today with my guest, Kristine Adams. She’s the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics.
Kristine founded Afterglow Cosmetics out of the belief that women shouldn’t sacrifice color, performance or quality when choosing natural or organic make-up. Afterglow Cosmetics is a full line of organic-infused all-natural bioactive make-up. She says that it’s the cleanest line of make-up on the market.
So Kristine, tell us more about your make-up line and what makes it special and everything and everything you’d like us to know about it.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, I think what makes our make-up most special is that it is – we really are dogmatic. That’s the best word I can use to describe it. I’m so empathic about making sure every single ingredient can be at its purest and cleanest. That isn’t marketing talk. That is, really, every time we use an ingredient, I want it to have active properties. Even every organic ingredient needs to contribute some way to the formula. We do that with a focus on skin care, so if the make-up is sitting on your face all day, it shouldn’t just act as pigment. It should do a great job there, but it should also contribute to helping your skin to retain its vitality. And we do that using a lot of certified organic ingredients.
We use aloe vera, organic aloe vera as the base of many of our products. It’s a beautiful carrier for pigment and really helps nourish the skin while the pigment is on there.
DEBRA: I love the aloe vera.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes.
DEBRA: I’ve just been recently putting aloe vera on my skin every night because here in Florida, we get a lot of insect bites. Even with the best insect repellant, we still get insect bites. It really takes away the itch, but it also makes my skin feel so soft.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Right! And it’s so soothing. It’s not heavy. It’s calming. Since we are so natural, focused on organic and use very few ingredient and really avoid a lot of even natural ingredients that are skin sensitizers, we attract women that have skin issues – rosacea, eczema, acne. And just by virtue of ingredients like aloe vera being in our products, it soothes and heals our skin in a way that an average run-of-the-mill cosmetic even the natural one doesn’t do.
DEBRA: Yes, I can see that. I can see that. Yes, that makes sense to me.
KRISTINE ADAMS: And also, I think another thing that’s very unique about our cosmetic line is more about the culture of the company and all the way to the customer service rep that answers your call. We’re all educated on what is actually on these products, what they’re actually doing, what’s the philosophy behind sourcing every single ingredient was and why, why we don’t use [inaudible 00:30:26], why we don’t use carmine colorant in our products and why we use organic.
I’m concerned about trace metals and other trace contaminants at every single level and that includes the botanicals that are in our products. We go that step further to make sure that you don’t have trace residue of pesticide in your make-up because if the product is not reaching for every single organic ingredient it can, you are also putting on your face trace pesticides obviously.
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
KRISTINE ADAMS: If the botanical in your product is not certified organic, that’s what you’re doing. So it’s so important. See, I’m using this. My mother is using this. My sister is using this. My friends are using this. All these women that have made up our community are using this make-up. That has to honor all of us. The choice has to do that.
DEBRA: Yes. Also, another thing is that it’s gluten-free make-up. So how did you come to that decision to make it gluten-free?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah! Gluten is an issue for some and not for others. Some peoplesay gluten will eventually be something as an issue for everyone. My sister, my mother has Celiac Disease. They’re highly gluten intolerant to the point where if they eat any gluten, they get very ill.
My sister was using a lip balm that she’s empathic about. Very, very clean with her diet. She never has any gluten contamination. Once she does, she knows it because she get very bad stomach problems. She had been [inaudible 00:32:06], got a lip balm that was – a beautiful lip balm from a very well-known brand, but one of the base ingredients of this lip balm was wheat, wheat germ oil, which is gluten. And it is emollient, it helps heal the skin and it feels great in a lip balm, but it is wheat. So if you’re allergic to wheat, you are essentially ingesting and dosing yourself multiple times a day (you know how we apply lip balm) and she started to get really bad stomach issues and she could not figure out what she was until she followed it all the way back, traced it all the way back to that glutened lip balm.
DEBRA: Wow!
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah! I have the power to make a gluten-free lip balm because of what I can do in my company. If I can source the ingredients, our chemists are fantastic and we make it. So of course, I made them gluten-free lip balm.
And all of my other products, I’ve never used a gluten ingredient to begin with, but the entirely line is certified gluten-free and we are the only make-up line certified gluten-free. So just like you can trust us to be the cleanest, you can also trust us to be gluten-free. You don’t have to pick and choose, “Oh, with that ingredient, that product is and that product isn’t.” No, it’s a company philosophy. And we are certified, which means we’re not saying it, we’re not just talking about it, we know and we have third-party verification that test each batch to confirm it.
DEBRA: You’re telling me a lot of new things that I had never thought of about cosmetics. In fact, I eat a gluten-free diet itself, but I only think as far as the food itself. It never occurred to me that gluten would be in the wheat germ oil. I think of gluten as being something in the flour or something. This is fascinating, how far these things extend in life. Wow! I have a feeling that before when people talk about gluten-free, it’s not just food. But I haven’t seen the connection until you just explained it.
We need to take another break. But after the break, we’ll come back and talk more with Kristine Adams, founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here today with Kristine Adams, founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re learning so much about cosmetics. It’s amazing. Kristine, I know that you’re involved with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. So can you tell us a little bit about what are some of the toxic ingredients that women should really be watching out for besides lead in lipsticks? And what’s going on on the regulatory front and what is Campaign for Safe Cosmetics doing?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is founded by a collection of non-profits including the Breast Cancer Fund out of San Francisco. They are very much focused on – instead of just researching and devoting more money at cancer and breast cancer specifically from some of the research side, they’re really looking to educate women so they understand that perhaps many of the reasons why the rates of cancer have increased is because of our exposure to toxins on so many levels. And one of them is the body burden that we incur every day from all the products that we put on our skin that may be building up within our body and provoking issues that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
So what the campaign for safe cosmetics does on many levels is educate women and educate communities about how they can learn about what they’re buying. Many years ago, when you take up a box of cereal, you didn’t have that nutritional values fact on the back of it.
DEBRA: Right.
KRISTINE ADAMS: But through much regulation, because people did want to know and advocated for this, what was in that cereal that they were eating or in that packaged product that they were actually eating, how much sodium was really in there. Now, it’s second nature for us to do that, to pick up a box of cereal and what-have-you and look at what is actually in that pre-made product.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is very much advocating for the same standard for transparency and disclosure of personal care products. So if you are [inaudible 00:41:24] like Afterglow is, you have confirmed that you will not use many, many, many ingredients that may be harmful to the body within the product.
DEBRA: That’s very good. I’m glad…
KRISTINE ADAMS: They’re still working on the regulatory front – with the bureaucracy, that is – the government to bring that to fruition.
DEBRA: There is a lot that needs to be done. It seems like in every radio shows we have been doing, we’ve been talking about disclosure in ingredients and how we can find out. I think that this is one of the difficulties that I’ve had for all the number of years that I’ve been writing about safer products and harmful chemicals. It’ll be so much easier if we could just go to a product label and actually see what’s in a product. And yet, there’s so many products that don’t disclose.
I really think personally that disclosure is going to be the next major issue for manufacturers and I think that there’s a big push to get that disclosure and that companies like yours who are giving the disclosure and talking about their ingredients I think are leading the way for what other companies are going to come to need to do.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah.
DEBRA: I’m not even sure that it’s going to be a regulatory thing as much as if some companies start doing it and start doing it correctly, then consumers will know about that and then they’ll start demanding it from the other companies.
I’m trying to remember the company, the Johnson – I get confused with Johnson & Johnson and the Johnson Company. They’re two different companies and they make all these [inaudible 00:43:33] and everything. They have this big campaign about we disclose what’s in our products. I went to their website and I looked at it and I said, “Well, this is a really good disclosure, but they’re disclosing to us chemicals that I don’t want to put anywhere near my house.”
KRISTINE ADAMS: Exactly! They’re great, but…
DEBRA: Yeah!
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah.
DEBRA: Well, I’m glad that they disclosed, but people often don’t know that they could read – this is the other problem. Consumers knows so little about ingredients that if somebody is like that company could disclose their ingredients and the consumer could read it and go, “Well, that sounds fine to me.” It’s unfortunate that it’s so necessary for people like you and me to have to study, study, study, study, to find out about the ingredients because we should be able to live in a world where we don’t have to be so educated, that it’s the general rule that product is going to be safe and life-affirming and eco-friendly and that they’re going to be good for us. Don’t you think that’s how the world should be?
KRISTINE ADAMS: And unfortunately, here are lots of ways to game the system. One, when you read that ingredient list for cosmetics, it’s very difficult to understand because they’re not common chemicals often. The second is that the FDA doesn’t require disclosure of many ingredients that might be lurking in those cosmetics because they simply don’t. The FDA doesn’t require any disclosure of ingredients under 1%, which can include parabens and many other things you might be trying to avoid.
You can game the system by using a lesser known name for the same ingredient. And since there’s not enough regulation to catch those slights of hand, they get away with it and then you pick up a product that you think is clean, they’re hiding stuff inthe word perfume or under 1% of the product, they don’t have to disclose or in a poetic use of a different term for an ingredient you might be trying to avoid and you’re stuck in the same situation – not to be dire about it, but that’s the fact.
DEBRA: No, I understand because I see this in every field. It’s not just cosmetics. In food, they don’t have to list the ingredients on ingredients. So for example, if you were buying, say, frozen quiche and it says it’s got eggs in it and ham, they don’t need to tell you all the additives that they put in the ham. The nitrates and everything that’s in the ham because all you need to do is list the ingredients. That’s a big situation like that in food.
But for me, I just eliminated all processed food entirely. I only eat things that I cut myself from the actual food that I can see the whole food in my hand and then I prepare it because who knows what’s in those other things?
But when it comes to cosmetics, you have beautiful cosmetics and a consumer wants to be able to buy those cosmetics – in our culture, it’s considered to be a good thing to enhance the way we look by putting cosmetics on our faces – if we don’t understand what those ingredients are, we don’t have a company that we can trust or that companies can’t be trusted because they’re not talking about their ingredients or they don’t have that ethics to be life-enhancing, that they’re just doing what’s the standard thing, then the consumers just don’t know.
I used to think quite innocently that I can just look on the label and choose the ones that didn’t have toxic ingredients. I’ll just find one without toxic ingredients and choose the ones that don’t have it. It’s all these little things about how they don’t have to put it on the label or it’s a trade secret. What we need to do is we need to get rid of all that mystery around the ingredients. And I think it’s going to start happening because businesses who have nothing to hide are going to just disclose.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes. And it’s interesting, we are certified by Leaping Bunny, which is part of the Humane Society and Anti-Vivisection Society. It’s a cute, little leaping bunny logo that actually certifies as cruelty-free. But it does in a much more intense way than PETA.
We just got audited, so I know this intimately. They look at every single product that you make and every single ingredient and they want a statement. So we have to go back for every ingredient that we used to that manufacturer that made that iron oxide or whatever ingredient we’re using and get a statement from them swearing that they are not testing at any point this ingredient on animals. So it’s not only our end product. It’s also every ingredient every step of the chain.
And it’s interesting that there is certification available that is that intense because PETA is not, but to give those that are very interested in making sure their products are cruelty-free, that peace of mind, that there’s not something similar for humans, that there’s not like human cruelty-free certification that we could get that has the same level of integrity and intensity as the Leaping Buddy certification.
DEBRA: It just doesn’t exist right now. I’m going to say this really fast because we’re going to run out of time really quickly here. A lot of the behind-the-scenes GotoWebinar and things like this that people within industry are talking, there’s [inaudible 00:49:39] where somebody has compiled the toxicity information about ingredients that all companies can go to.
Everybody has to do their own research from square one to figure out what the toxic ingredients are and that’s part of the problem.
I’m thankful that you joined me today, Kristine. Thank you so much. I hope we’ll talk again.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Bye bye. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Great talking to you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Tune in tomorrow.
Choosing Toxic Free Toys
My guest Bethany Gonzalez Moreno is the founder of B. EcoChic and the B. EcoChic Seal of Approval. As a childhood cancer survivor, she knew when she got pregnant with her first child that she needed to find safe, non-toxic products for her little one. She decided to launch B. EcoChic to help other parents in their search. She’s been featured on ABC / NBC affiliate First Coast News and has been interviewed for many websites and magazines like Kiwi, Woman’s World, and E: The Environmental Magazine. We’ll be talking about how Bethany chooses toxic free toys for her Seal of Approval, toxic chemicals in toys you want to watch out for, and where to find the safest toys. www.b-ecochic.com (no longer in business).
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing Toxic Free Toys
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Bethany Gonzales Moreno
Date of Broadcast: July 24, 2013
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. Even though there are many toxic things in the world today, in consumer products, in the environment—it seems like every time we turn on the radio or read the newspaper, somebody is talking about some new toxic chemical in some other product.
But there are many, many products that are not toxic. There are many wonderful things that we can do that are not toxic, there are many ways that we can remove toxic chemicals from our homes and from our bodies, and there are many people who are doing wonderful things to make our world a less toxic place to be.
And I have talked to many of them on this show. And this is what we talk about—it’s how to be less toxic, more healthy, happier, more productive, and making our dreams come true.
Today, we’re going to be talking with a young mother, about how she chooses toxic-free toys and other products, and why she does this, and her whole story about choosing toxic-free.
But first, I want to give you a quote from Buckminster Fuller. If you don’t know Buckminster Fuller, he went from 1895 to 1983, so hearing about Buckminster Fuller was something that I grew up with. He was a wonderful architect and a systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist. And he had a lot of great ideas.
And here’s one of them—and I actually live by this statement.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
And that’s what I’m doing here with this radio show, and everything that I do, is that I’m building a new model of how we can live without toxic chemicals that are so prevalent in the old model, and showing you what the ideas are, and where you can find the products, and how to think about this—that we’re really building a new toxic-free world by choosing to be toxic-free, buying toxic-free products, making things that are non-toxic.
And by actually making this happen, we’ll building a new world. And I just love this statement and totally agree with everything I’ve ever heard Buckminster Fuller say. So you might want to look him up and get to know him better.
My guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno, and she’s the founder of B. Eco Chic, and the B, that’s the initial B. Eco Chic Seal of Approval. And she is a cancer survivor, and for when she had a child, it became even more important to her to choose non-toxic products.
Hi, Bethany. Thanks for being with me today.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Hi. Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us your story. What happened in your own life?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So, I got Hodgkin’s disease when I was 15. And after a few months of chemo, they said that I could stop, and they would be checking on me. And I became more interested in healthy living and green living after that.
And I was launching B. Eco Chic right before I found out I was pregnant, and once I became pregnant, all of my research turned to how to make my house and my life safer and healthier for this child that was coming into the world.
DEBRA: I want to point out, so that everybody makes the connection here, you say on your website about yourself, you said, “Like most of you, I was raised with toxic chemicals. I’d played with plastic toys that likely leeched endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates. I ate food that was laced with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides. And yes, that is the story for each one of us.”
There’s a book called Silent Spring which, I think, probably everybody has heard of, but not everybody has read it. And when I read it a couple of years ago, I found out that virtually everybody who was born after 1944, which is you and I, at least, everybody who was born after 1944 was already born with toxic chemicals in their bodies because they were already ubiquitous in the environment.
And so we hear today about penguins in the North Pole having pesticides, and having toxic chemicals in their body, even there where they’re not being used.
That’s how it moves around the ecosystem. And that was already happening in 1944.
So the sequence here for you was that you were born with toxic chemicals, you were exposed to toxic chemicals, and by the time you were age 15, you were diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.
And that could be the future for any child, and I’m very happy that you went through your treatment, and that you survived, and that you regained your health. And that’s not the case for everybody.
This is why it’s so important that we be looking at what are the toxic chemicals we’re being exposed to, and particularly, women who are about to conceive, want to conceive, women who are pregnant, that the babies are getting the toxic chemicals right through the mother’s body.
And so this is the underlying thing that we need to keep in mind.
So the important thing here, why I was really interested in having you on the show is because you are evaluating products one by one, and you’ve come up with a method of doing that. So I want us to talk a lot about that—about how you go through that process.
Let’s go ahead and start talking about what you do and how you do it.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So there are other people who research products, and one of the methods that they use, and that I used at first was finding a product they wanted, writing to the company, and hoping somebody would answer me and tell me what was in the product.
And that did not work well. And often times, I would get conflicting answers or I would get answers back where they were wrong. And I found out later.
So I said, “I’m not going to do it this way. I’ve done all my research. I’m going to create a standard of how I want things to be if I’m going to allow these products into my own home, and then I’m going to invite the companies to apply, and that’s the only way that I’ll recommend their products or review them or let them into my own home.”
So I started with a safe toy guide, and I have developed an assessment. And it was very complex because there are a lot of different kinds of toys and activities and things for children, so I have to think about a lot of different materials and ingredients and things like that.
And then the companies had to apply and fill out the assessment. Not everyone wanted to apply or tried to apply made it through. A lot didn’t. But I was quite happy with the selection of products that I came up with at the end that I felt comfortable recommending to all of my readers on B. Eco Chic that I had.
DEBRA: I want to point out to everyone who is listening that everybody, each of us, as consumers, even though we’re not making a guide like Bethany has done, or like I do, even though everybody does not make a guide, as consumers, we each go through this process of making decisions about products.
And how do we make that decision? Do you make a decision based on advertising? Do you see a commercial on TV, and they tell you—I just have to say this. There’s a commercial running now on television, not that I watch that much TV, but late at night, when I’m falling asleep. There’s this commercial running now about use your Mastercard to stop cancer.
And I haven’t gone to their website.
You laughed. So did I.
And that really is the slogan. They say, “Use your Mastercard to stop cancer.”
And they’re showing a picture of a guy driving out to a fastfood window or something.
And the point, I think, of the advertisement is to get you to use your Mastercard, and then Mastercard will make a donation to the American Cancer Society or something. And I haven’t gone to their website to find out exactly what they did.
But the point I wanted to make is, they want you to buy something, so that they get more business, and then they’ll make a donation to cancer. Why don’t they just say, “Let’s get rid of the cancer-causing chemicals.”
And we’ll talk about that after we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic. That’s the initial B, Eco Chic. And it’s B-Eco C-H-I-C dot com. B, hyphen, E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com. B-EcoChic.
And she has put together a list of—are you there? She’s put together a list of toys that she has reviewed to make sure that they don’t have toxic chemicals.
Bethany, are you there?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes, I’m here.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So let’s go on discussing that consumers make choices based on different criteria. And Bethany, going through her process here, and me, when I go through my process, as consumers, we’re not just following a commercial on television or an ad in the magazine, or we’re not looking to see if the label is pretty. What we’re doing is we’re actually looking at the materials.
So Bethany, tell us more about how you look at those materials, what you’re looking for, and the process that you go through because I think that every consumer needs to be doing this. And people like Bethany and myself, and environmental working group, and other people who do this, we’re doing that assessment for you. But this is what every consumer needs to be doing for every single product.
So go ahead, Bethany. Tell us more about this.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: That’s pretty overwhelming for a consumer, which is why we’re doing it for them. There are so many products out there.
The first thing is we can’t buy into any of the marketing. You were talking about the credit card, curing cancer, and I just, over the break, was just thinking about how they’re made with PVC.
I don’t know if it’s irony or hypocrisy since PVC is so polluting in the production of it, or that PVC is toxic.
DEBRA: Yes, let’s use cancer-causing chemicals to make a credit card that we want to fight cancer with.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Make-up companies do have toxic ingredients who have pink ribbons all over their stuff. I can’t! I can’t buy into that.
Every single product is different. For toys, I decided that I was going to ban four ingredients right away. If they have it in their packaging or their product, I just said, “No, you can’t apply.”
And those four were Bisphenol-A which is found in polycarbonates and can disrupt hormones; and PVC, polyvinyl chloride, which is toxic; and phthalates and flame retardants.
Questionable plastics, I would say questionable plastics—I prefer polypropylene or polyethylene to approve because those are considered the safer plastics, as you know. And I didn’t want polycarbonates because of the BPA leeching.
And then for soft toys, I prefer the organic, but what I was really looking at is what kinds of dyes were being used, that they weren’t using heavy metal dyes, that they weren’t using toxic flame retardants in their toys because those are still used in stuffed animals, which I just think is not okay.
And then paint on wooden toys—there’s been recalls for lead paint on wooden toys and plastic toys. So I had lot of them send me their test reports, so I could see the actual levels. They couldn’t just send me their certificate of compliance or whatever.
They had to send me their actual level, so I could see them for myself because some of the levels that the government approves, I don’t approve of.
DEBRA: I agree with you. There are a lot of government regulations that I don’t approve of either.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I had to do a lot of research on heavy metals, but I came up with my own thing that I was comfortable with. Even if the government approves it, I don’t necessarily approve it, especially if I saw other companies were able to do it with much less of whatever heavy metal it was in the paint. I said, “No.”
DEBRA: Good for you. Don’t you think that’s something that you and I should be setting the [unintelligible 14:43] instead of the government?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes. It’s very complex. There are so many chemicals out there, and it’s just extremely complex, and no one person seems to know everything that they need to know, and especially people who are making the regulations. They’re trying to teach themselves just like we are. And they’ve got other things they’ve got to deal with.
I’ve talked to a few people in different states about how they’re dealing with the problem in their state. And it’s a lot to learn for them.
DEBRA: It is. It is a lot to learn. It’s a lot to learn. What are some examples of products that you find—tell me the toxic version of a product, and then the less toxic version that you find. Say, a stuffed animal. Let’s just take a stuffed animal, if they were to get a toxic stuffed animal versus a non-toxic one.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: There weren’t even brand names, but I’ll just say that there’s a major toy company, and some of their stuffed animals are found to have flame retardants in them. There are safer versions.
Two of the companies I approved. One was Pebble. I know they’re fair trade hand-knit toys from the UK, based in the UK; and then Apple Park is organic toys. And neither one of them have any flame retardants.
The traditional rubber ducky is not really made with rubber. It’s made with PVC, and it can leech phthalates and lead and chlorine. It’s not something you want your baby mouthing in the tub. So you can get a natural rubber duck from [inaudible 16:30], or you can get—well, that’s the only one I can recommend right now for rubber duck.
For wooden toys, I love PlanToys. They use formaldehyde-free wood glue for all of their toys. They use safe paint on their toys.
Sometimes there’s, like on Etsy, there’s one company called Smiling Tree Toys that got the seal of approval, and they’re made with natural wood, like organic vegetable oil they grow on their farm. So if you really want to get natural, that would be where to go.
DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about this after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno.
She’s the founder of B. Eco Chic, and the B. Eco Chic Seal of Approval. And I want to make sure you can get to her website.
It’s B-EcoChic.com(no longer in business). And she has a seal of approval, and you can go to her website, and see the list of toys and other products that she’s approved of according to her standards.
Bethany, do you find these products that meet your standards, do you have find them in any kind of retail stores, or do you need to order them online? Are they more expensive? Tell us what your experience is like shopping for these products.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Some of them are major retailers, but many of them aren’t. Some of them have been getting picked up more. Some of them are more expensive, but as I always tell the parents and subscribers, I always tell them it’s worth your money to just buy one set of the wooden blocks instead of a bunch of the plastic stuff. It’s a better investment and your child doesn’t need a playroom overflowing with plastic junk that’s going to break anyway.
So, it is a little more expensive. And you usually do have to go online to get many of them.
DEBRA: I have found that too. I have noticed in going to the website that have more natural products that they have a different concept of what play is about as well. Have you noticed that?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes. It’s sort of [unintelligible 19:24], simple toys, open-ended toys, not a whole lot of license, the characters, it’s about the child learning and growing and using her imagination with the toy she has instead of getting a doll that already has shape features. With a simpler doll, she can always imagine different expressions.
They are a little different.
DEBRA: They are different, and I really appreciate that, that they’re cultivating the child’s imagination rather than trying to, as you mention, sell a brand, that you don’t find natural toys made of natural materials, selling the latest super hero. It just doesn’t happen on those kinds of websites because it’s not industrial/consumer-oriented. It’s about developing the child and their imagination and their creativity.
One of the things that I love is the colored silk scarves because you can use those with so many different things. They could be veils, they could be flags, they could be kites—all these different things, and it really gets the children looking at how they can play and create together.
It really is a whole different thing, and I think very worthwhile for parents to explore.
For me, it’s been a process of seeing that there’s this toxic industrial commercial world, and then there’s this whole other world that’s made up of natural materials, and safe and healthy, and they’re going to have different orientation.
And so it’s very good that you’re promoting that and that you are finding those toys, and finding that they’re safe.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It has another benefit. The toys look gorgeous in your home. That may not matter to some people, but a lot of people think like, “I’m going to have a child, and my living room is going to be taken over by brightly-colored plastic.”
And that just isn’t the case.
You can buy a gorgeous wooden walker that looks great in your living room. There’s no chunks of plastic just laying all over your floor.
DEBRA: Isn’t that wonderful?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Green Toys makes recycled plastic toys, and we have some of them, and we love them.
But my daughter does love her wooden toys, and some people are really surprised that. She loves the wooden toys, she loves the open-ended toys, and I love how they look in my house. They look great.
DEBRA: Also, when I first started doing this work, I remember meeting somebody who had lived a very toxic life, and he then looked at what I was doing. I was like wearing a jacket made out of cotton, that I had wooden utensils in my kitchen and things like that. And his observation was, “Oh, these materials feel so good.”
They just feel comfortable with your body that your body says, “I want to be wrapped in cotton,” or my food tastes better because I’m stirring it with a wooden spoon.
And I think that babies and children notice that. They may not know it intellectually, but they know that it feels good. They know that their mother’s body feels good. And these are the materials of nature, and it’s what all living things grew up with.
And so I think that babies, this is my extrapolation here, I think that babies would feel more comfortable, and children would just feel more comfortable touching the wood, and touching the natural fabrics, and it just gives them a much more connected experience with the rest of creation.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I wrote a prose about that one time. It just feels more real. It has a link to it. And also, it lasts. If you have several kids, you’re going to keep that wooden toy for the whole time.
All my friends are always selling their broken plastic toys, or throwing them away, or donating them.
I can pass so many toys down to my grandchildren honestly. They’re good investments, they’re better for the environment, and they look nice, and they feel nice. Overall, I think they’re good investments.
DEBRA: I think so too. And it’s ironic to me to notice that plastic toys, that if you think of plastic, it’s lasting forever, because plastic does last forever. In the environment, it’s very hard to break down. But the toys themselves, the plastic gets brittle, and the toys break very easily.
And yet, something like wood will biodegrade easily. You could take that wooden toy and put it out in your backyard, and it will be gone in a couple of years. But as a toy, being used as a toy, and being handled and protected in the house instead of out in the ecosystem, it will last and last and last.
And I just think that’s a very interesting dichotomy as well.
We need to take another break, and we’ll be back with Bethany, I’m going to get it right this time, Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And you can also get a [inaudible 25:15].
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. My guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno. Did I get that right? I’m sorry, Bethany.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: No, I think you did.
DEBRA: Bethany Gonzalez Moreno. And her website is B. Eco Chic, and her website address is B-EcoChic.com(no longer in business). E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com. And she has a lot of information on her website, in addition to the list of non-toxic toys.
I’m looking at a page right now for homemade baby wipes, and it tells you how to make them yourself, and they’re reusable, so you can save lots of money on baby wipes, and make baby wipes that are toxic-free.
Bethany, tell us more about the different things that you offer and services that are on your website.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Right now, I have—in addition to the wipes, the very first thing that I wrote was a cloth diaper guide because I bought a lot of cloth diapers for my daughter. And I’ve got a safe toy guide, and product reviews about 80 different products. Most of them right now are toys because they were samples sent to me last year as a part of the assessment process. I have a healthy eating guide, and you can learn how to make your own green cleaning products, or learn how to choose safer ones. You can learn how to choose safer lunch and food storage options.
I’m actually writing a baby steps course right now for my e-mail subscribers, to help them fight overwhelm, and slowly change their family’s lives and homes to be healthier and greener because I know it’s really overwhelming. That’s what I’ve heard, and it is for me too.
DEBRA: It’s interesting that you say that because I know that toys are something that the baby and kids are using that are white, up close and personal, so to speak, in their hands, in their mouths. And it’s a good place to start.
But really, the child is being affected by the entire home environment, and a pregnant mother is being affected by the entire home environment. And so to have a safe place to raise children really requires making an entire toxic-free home. It goes way beyond the toys, way beyond the clothes that you buy, or the crib, all of those things that you buy personally for the child need to be toxic-free.
But then the entire environment needs to be that way as well.
So it’s good that you’re giving all these recommendations from your personal viewpoint as a mother. That’s one thing that I can’t do because I’m not a mother. I can look at all the baby and kids products, and I can say, “Well, they meet a criteria that I’ve established for what I think is minimally required.” But I have no personal experience with any of these products like you do because I’m not a mother. So I have to rely on others for that personal experience.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It’s terrifying. Once you start realizing how many chemicals are there—you read one article, and then you do a lot of research, and everything starts to multiple, and that feeling is, once I started gathering research from all the corners of the internet, I wanted to put it on B. Eco Chic, so that other mothers wouldn’t have to do this searching that I had to just to get answers.
Mothers really have to—they have a lot on their plate, especially when they have a newborn. And I want mothers to realize that—do as much as you can, and it doesn’t have to be perfect because the kind of mother who is researching this stuff is the kind of mother who wants to get it right, who has high standards already.
DEBRA: Yes, I understand that.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So myself included, I think I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so I had to tell myself that I’m doing the best I can, I can’t get everything, I can’t control everything that my child comes into contact with. I could just do my best, and keep making small changes.
So that’s the message I’m putting out there for other mothers, to help them just tackle it one tiny step at a time because that’s the way you got to do it. There’s just too much—
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. When I started my own non-toxic journey for a completely different reason, I got really sick myself from the exposure to chemicals just in my own home. And when I learned that it was toxic chemicals in the everyday consumer products I used every day, I just wanted to get them all out. I just went in in one fell swoop and took out everything that I had learned with toxic, and I had an empty house.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I was reading the book, and I was like, “Wow, she really went [unintelligible 30:46] everything out.” It’s kind of like there’s nothing left.
DEBRA: But not everybody can do that. Different people have different situations. I knew that toxic chemicals were making me sick, and I just wanted to get rid of them because they were making me sick. I was having symptoms right then, and I knew that I needed to eliminate all the toxic chemicals I could in order to lessen my symptoms.
But for somebody who is healthy, you can prevent getting cancer as Bethany did, or having immune system problems as I did, by making changes one by one. And every time you go to the store, decide you’re going to get a different non-toxic product.
You can start by buying one cleaning product or one bar of soap or getting organic catsup instead of regular catsup.
It really doesn’t matter where you start—buy your children non-toxic toys.
It really doesn’t matter where you start. It matters that you start. And then as you start making the changes as time goes by, then your health goes from being very toxic to being very natural. And it feels different to live in that kind of house
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It is a lifestyle, and it requires you to change habits. And those take a while. It took me a long time to switch to vinegar, to cleaning with vinegar and water. And as soon as I found out that I was pregnant, I made the final switch.
But I resisted just because I didn’t like the smell of vinegar, and I would buy the natural cleaning products. But then I decided,
“You know what? I just want the most natural cleaning product that I can have.”
So you have to be patient with yourself too. It’s hard to give up sometimes the convenience of some of the other options, or to cook food from scratch when you don’t even know how to cook an egg, which is what I was four years ago.
DEBRA: I understand. It is. We do need to learn how to do these things. And a lot of it is doing things for ourselves and not relying so much on consumer products. It’s empowering ourselves to make our own decisions to our own standards, and then making those things happen to our own standards in our own homes instead of just sitting there watching TV and having someone else tell us what it is that we’re supposed to buy.
Not that I think that advertising is bad, but advertising too often is advertising something that is not good for us. And lately, there have been better products that are being advertised, but still, there’s a lot of advertising going on which none in the industry is green washing where they’ll advertise something and say a good thing like it saves energy, but they don’t tell you there’s mercury, there’s toxic in that light bulb that saves energy.
So there’s a lot of misleading in advertising, and as consumers, we need to be deciding for ourselves, and sometimes we need to make things for ourselves, and invent things for ourselves, and look and see how people used to do them in another time period.
There are thousands and thousands of years of history and experiences that people, having babies, preparing food, going through every aspects of life without toxic chemicals. And we can learn from that. And we can do things differently. We don’t have to just accept this.
So Bethany, we have a couple of minutes left. Is there a final statement that you’d like to make sure that people remember when they stop listening to this show?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I would just say that if you’re a parent or you know a parent—I have some grandparents on my list who want safer products for their grandchildren, just to check out the site and use the shopping guides to help you first get an idea of which products are safer. Read some of the guides I have to teach you what you need to know to make better decisions yourself.
Everyone’s on a different level of what they know so far.
And for businesses, I’ve just branched out, and I’m starting to do stainless steel baby bottles. I just did one by Organic Kids that got approved. I just did a body wash by Belly Buttons & Babies that got approved yesterday. So we’re going to have a nursery guide soon coming out.
I think that we should be conscious consumers, like you were saying, and make our own decisions and don’t just believe what we’re being told because we’re not always being told the truth.
DEBRA: We aren’t always being told the truth, and we’re not even always being told everything that there is to know.
I so appreciate what you’re doing, Bethany. I’m sure that many mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers and babies are appreciating what you’re doing.
Again, the website B-EcoChic.com (no longer in business), B, hyphen, E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com, and you can go there and find out everything that
Bethany has, all the products and services and information in order to create a less toxic life for your babies and children.
And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Coolmax on Mattresses
Question from Coolmax
Hey debra, what do you think about coolmax material they put on mattresses?
Debra’s Answer
According to their website, it’s polyester, made from petroleum. Their whole point is about breathability. Natural fibers breathe naturally. It’s synthetic fibers that get clammy because air doesn’t pass through them. So now they’ve made a synthetic polyester fabric that breathes. It’s still polyester.
What Can Happen When Toxic Chemicals are Not Regulated and What We Can Do As Citizens to Get the Regulations We Should Have
My guest is Peggy Cahill, who became ill after being exposed to isocyanate chemicals from the offgassing of ordinary spray foam insulation. She will tell us how this affected her health as well as her efforts to educate, create awareness and advocate at the state and local level. Peggy’ s professional experience has spanned over 30 years working as an advocate at the state and local level for underserved groups, including children and adults with developmental and physical disabilities, inner city children at risk and adolescents with mental health challenges. She holds a Master of Education degree and is presently working as a program development consultant and freelance writer, creating art and culture programs for those living with Alzheimer’s disease and their care partners.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
What Can Happen When Toxic Chemicals Are Not Regulated and What Can We Do As Citizens to Get the Regulations We Should Have
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Peggy Cahill
Date of Broadcast: July 23, 2013
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. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around us, in the consumer products we use, in the air, and soil, and water, in the environment, it seems like sometimes that there are toxic chemicals everywhere.
And there are. But there are also many products and places that don’t have toxic chemicals, and there are also many ways that we can remove toxic chemicals from our own homes, from our own bodies, and have a relatively toxic-free life, in fact, toxic-free enough to make a huge difference in our health, our happiness, our well-being, our productivity, and having the things that we want in life.
Today is Tuesday, July 23, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And if I sound a little different today, it’s because I’m having technical problems with my computer. And so I’m calling in this show on the regular telephone, instead of my high-tech, state-of-the-art audio equipment, but it will get fixed fairly soon.
And today, we’re going to be talking about what happens when toxic chemicals are not regulated, as many of them aren’t, and people like you and me get exposed to them, and how they affect our health, and what we could do about them, so that at the regulatory level, things get changed.
But first, I want to just tell you about what’s happening in my life this week.
Oh, my god. A lot of chaos is occurring, lest you think everything is always smooth with me. It’s typical. When you decide that you’re going to make a big change as I’m going through, making some big personal changes in my life. What happened is that there’s all this confusion, and there’s all this stuff going on. Actually, it’s all moving in the right direction. But it looks pretty chaotic, and sometimes things don’t work properly, like my computer, or people don’t show up, or whatever, and you go, “Oh, my god. Is this ever going to be over?”
I know that I’m moving towards a beter place in my life, and that things are going to be more organized, and I’m going to get more work done, and all the things I want to do. And it’s just a little crazy right now.
It’s that way with toxic chemicals too, because for a long time, everything seems very peaceful when we were just sitting there, not knowing what was going on with toxic chemicals. The commercials used to say when I was a kid that we’re living through chemistry, that as long as we didn’t know anything, it all seems rather peaceful about toxic chemicals. We’re just going through our lives being poisoned. And then we started finding out that there were toxic chemicals.
And now, there’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of people protesting, and we’re thinking about what to do differently. Some people think we should do this, and other people think we should do that. And things need to change. There needs to be a change.
So things can seem crazy, but just like I’m going to get through what’s going on in my life and come out the other end, so are we as a nation, as a world, we’re all going to come through this toxic chemical thing, and there is going to be a world at the other end of it where we get to have a wonderful toxic-free world to live in, because there’s so many of us that are creating it day by day.
So my guest today is Peggy Cahill. She became ill after being exposed to some chemicals that were off-gassing from ordinary spray foam insulation.
Now, many, many people have this very same spray pump insulation in their homes. And she’s going to tell us how it affected her health, and what she’s doing to educate people, and create awareness and advocate at the state and local level, so that there can be regulations that protect people from this kind of thing.
And just as a coincidence really, this week, I received an e-mail from somebody, a question from my Green Living Q&A Blog.
And she said, “We insulated our attic with sprays from insulation last year.” And she gave me the brand name and says, “Well, it doesn’t have a fishy smell, but I’ve read about it on the internet, it has an odor, a sort of a sweet smell. We only smell it if we go in the attic, when we come home after a few days of the house being locked up and warm. I want to have an air quality test then. Any suggestions on what to have tested?”
Now, this is interesting because I think that there are probably many, many, many more people who are being affected by the chemicals that are off gassing from spray foam insulation and don’t even know it. We’re going to talk about those kinds of things today.
Hi, Peggy. Thanks for being with me on Toxic Free Talk Radio.
PEGGY CAHILL: Hi, Debra. How are you? It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Thank you. So tell us what happened with you. You had some spray foam insulation, and then something happened.
PEGGY CAHILL: Back in 2010, I moved into a small cottage in Massachusetts where I lived that had been recently renovated, completely renovated, including winterization from the exterior walls, and spray foam insulation within the wall. It was a 1940 cottage. It hadn’t been inhabited in a long time. So I was the first occupant. I moved in and lived in that space for seven months.
Within about a month or two of moving in, I began having various kinds of symptoms that were unusual. I had always been healthy before moving into the cottage. I had acid reflux, and some episodes of even chest tightness, short of breath.
I went to the ER a few times. They couldn’t determine anything.
I went back into the cottage and continued to live there. I started having some food reactions that I never had before, first, to wheat, gluten, and then dairy. My immune system appeared to be now, later, I understand reacting to the chemicals that I was breathing in.
Eventually, I started having broader systemic inflammation, soreness in my hips and ribcage and pelvis. So I was in and out of the doctor’s office, and then being referred to a variety of specialists for this array of symptoms—which really no answers were found. It was very mystifying.
And no one was considering an environmental source, including myself actually, that could be at the root of the problem.
Five months into this cottage, I developed left upper quadrant pain, and it was eventually discovered that I now had inflammation of my pancreas, also known as pancreatitis, and again, for unknown reasons, and I had always been healthy, and had a healthy lifestyle.
Essentially, I spent the entire winter in this enclosed building, with no screens or windows, or ventilation system in this cottage.
By spring, which was a total of seven months now in the cottage, a rainy day came, followed by heat, where apparently, the walls of the cottage and exterior were saturated and then got hot. There was a noxious smell in the cottage for the first time.
Several people came into the cottage and noticed it and said, “Something’s very wrong here.”
And I realized then that I vacated immediately, and that it became clear to me that there was an environmental trigger to what was happening with my health.
We moved out.
I got pulmonary function test, and they determined I had reactive airways, which is a form of asthma. And the pulmonologist referred to it as isocyanate asthma, of which he has seen a number of cases, isocyanate as being one of the noxious ingredients in the materials of spray foam insulation.
So during my cottage days, I had three ER visits, 20 doctor visits, tests, x-rays, EKGs, CT scans, blood tests, and there were no real answers until eventually, the pancreatitis. And then when I moved out, after pursuing physicians that might have more knowledge, I got more answers, including the reactive airways in my lungs.
That is how that unfolded.
DEBRA: Yes. Unfortunately, your story is typical of many people who are exposed to toxic chemicals and don’t know that it’s toxic chemicals, and then continued to be exposed to them day in and day out for a period of months, until somebody figures out that, “Oh, this is something.”
I’ve actually never heard the phrase isocyanate asthma. So it’s interesting to me that you went to a doctor that identified it as such. And I’m very happy to hear that they’re putting isocyanate exposure together with asthma.
Just after the break, it’s coming right now, we’re going to talk about isocyanate, and about polyurethane, that is what is used to make spray foam insulation, and so that you can understand what the chemistry is, and what else, other ways that you can be exposed to, in addition to spray foam insulation.
I’m talking with my guest, Peggy Cahill. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here today with my guest, Peggy Cahill, and we’re talking about unregulated toxic chemicals that made people sick, unknowing that they’re even being exposed to them.
Before Peggy and I start to chat again, I want to just read some portions to you the person who wrote to me that I read their e-mail earlier, about the polyurethane foam insulation that was making them sick. She sent me a link to the product description sheet.
I’m not going to give the brand name here, but the first thing to know is that it has the word natural in it, it’s got a leaf on it right at the top. The first two things you see is the word natural, and then there’s a leaf. And then down at the bottom, it says, “superior green building performance.”
Now, those are the first things, three things, that you see. And it is legitimately is a green thing because it’s there to save energy. But green often, particularly in this case, has nothing to do with being non-toxic. It has to do with other totally legitimate environmental benefits.
So, it says then it’s a [unintelligible 11:28] product. It’s part of a two-component polyurethane foam insulation system, and that it needs to be applied. Wait, I need to find this place. It has to be applied by a certified applier, and that they have to wear approved chemical protection equipment, OSHA-approved respirators are required. They have to be trained.
If you inhale this when it’s being applied, you have to remove to fresh air, and seek medical attention.
And there are more details on the material safety data sheet.
And if liquid is swollen, seek medical attention immediately.
Now, I know that there are some, and this is an important point, there are some materials like paint, for example, which is more toxic when you’re applying it, and then when it dries or cures, then it’s supposed to be less toxic. But in this particular case, with this spray polyurethane foam insulation, a lot of times, there are cases where it doesn’t quite cure. It’s like epoxy glue that comes in two parts, and you have to mix it, and then it makes a glue.
What polyurethane foam is, is a combination of isocyanate plus polyols. And polyols are the plastic part, and the isocyanate, I forgot my chemistry here—Peggy, do you want to tell us more about isocynate?
PEGGY CAHILL: What I learned is that the spray foam insulation contains insocyanate. It’s also referred to diisocyanate.
They’re the same thing. Ammonia byproducts, flame retardants and a reputable Boston physician told me also there are two proprietary chemicals that are not disclosed by the companies because they have a patent, but that those are very noxious.
She said the bad chemicals that they don’t even know what they are, this reputable Boston person. It’s a mixture of things.
It’s timely that this person has e-mailed you, and I’m really, really glad to hear that. I hope my conversation with you can be of use to this person in some way because this physician told, and I learned from many physicians, the material is often not mixed properly, it doesn’t cure properly, and is leaking and bubbling in the wall.
DEBRA: That’s exactly is. In this particular case for this particular product, it’s not like you put it on the wall, and then it dries like paint. There’s so much room for error because—
PEGGY CAHILL: There’s a lot of room for error.
DEBRA: —if you don’t mix it right, if you’re not trained right, if the […] applier is on drugs, or drunk, or didn’t study…
PEGGY CAHILL: …or otherwise, not well.
DEBRA: …or just not paying attention, or he’s having a fight with his wife, or whatever, you could easily end up with a chemical mixture in your walls that is not going to cure.
PEGGY CAHILL: There’s a great room for error. There’s no oversight. There’s no one monitoring. The cottage was granted an occupancy permit. The material was never checked because I learned that the building codes in Massachusetts were old and outdated, and didn’t have any real clear parameters about the checking of the material.
And just to mention, I was also told by a different physician, a very fantastic Harvard-educated physician at an occupational health clinic that even if the material works perfectly, and it is cured, it still creates stale, stagnant air the can pose a health risk without adequate air exchanges and air flow through the space.
So you absolutely are supposed to have mechanical ventilation and/or a system where there is adequate air flow.
Buildings are being made too tight, and it’s creating this poor air. And people don’t realize it. So it’s very worrisome [cross-talking 15:54].
DEBRA: I just want to say a little more about this because it used to be prior to about the 70’s. I started becoming interested in this subject because there’s my own illness at about the same time that houses and all buildings were being tightened for energy efficiency.
I remember when I was 16, and I got a car, I got a Firebird Formula 400 with a huge 400-cubic-inch engine, and I could outrace Corvettes in this car. I’m showing my racing side here. It’s all I wanted when I was 16 was a fast car.
And I got one. My father gave me one for my birthday, and taught me how to drive it.
But I had to sell my car a couple of years later because I couldn’t get a hundred-octane gas anymore. And I remember that that was the time when the energy crisis started because I couldn’t get gas for my car. And then that’s when they started tightening the buildings. And that’s when we started having indoor air quality problems.
And prior to that, I want to make sure people who are listening understand, prior to that, the houses and buildings were built what was referred to as leaky because there was air coming in the cracks. They were not filled up, the cracks and all of those things. And so there was actually ventilation going on even if all the doors and windows were closed.
We need to take a break, but we’ll be back with Peggy Cahill, and we’ll be talking more about isocynates, polyurethane foam insulation, and regulations. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here today with Peggy Cahill. We’re talking about how she was affected by being exposed to ordinary polyurethane toxic foam insulation.
I can’t talk today.
Peggy, I want to go back to this e-mail that I received from my reader. She asked that she wanted to have an air quality test done, and what should she have tested. Now, I want everyone to know that if you want to get an air test, you do need to have some idea of what to test for. Otherwise, you could be testing from thousands of chemicals, and not get the one that’s actually causing the problem.
So if you think you’re having a problem with a particular thing, like this woman is asking about her polyurethane spray foam insulation, find out what the chemicals might and have them test for that.
So what do you think she should test for?
PEGGY CAHILL: Well, this is a little tricky because when I first moved out of the cottage, I made a lot of phone calls, including to the State Department of Public Health and asked about air testing. And I was told that the science wasn’t there yet, that there was no way to test the human body from the matabolites, or to test the air. And that the product is on the market without adequate information available about the health effects.
Later, I was told by an occupational health clinic physician that there is a way to test the material by going in, having one of only two reputable testers that she mentioned. She said there are a lot of people out there that don’t really know how to test well. But one of two would go in and drill into the wall and see if the material is actually leaking and bubbling because that is what she said is the best way to test.
Other than that—
DEBRA: But that doesn’t tell you what the chemicals are.
PEGGY CAHILL: No, it doesn’t.
DEBRA: I suppose testing for leaking and bubbling, you would then know that it’s not fully cured, and that the chemicals of some sort or another are being released. If you wanted to sue somebody, that would be the way to prove that.
PEGGY CAHILL: That would be one way to establish the clear evidence of what the problems causing a health risk—the materials are causing a health risk.
But I can’t adequately speak to what other testing because I’ve been told there really isn’t clear cut testing for the materials.
DEBRA: Your experience, that’s very valuable to even know that.
PEGGY CAHILL: I actually want to mention—I don’t want to fail to mention this. I called a company that produces spray foam insulation after I moved out, and said I was a homeowner wondering what I had to consider using the materials in a small space because it was all throughout the cottage, around the walls and in the roof line, et cetera.
But he’s a building technologist at the company who said to me, “Using the material all over the house is like putting a plastic bag over the house.” He said, “For health, you need to have fresh air and air exchanges, and you need to have mechanical ventilation to keep the air clean, or it will pose a health risk to the occupants.”
DEBRA: Oh, my god. They need to put that on the label and the product.
PEGGY CAHILL: I know, and I agree with you about green. It’s completely misleading because they say it’s conservationist, but as you said, when workers are covered from head to toe with masks and things to protect themselves, that’s a clear cut indication that the material is quite toxic.
There are some studies, some well-established facts, just to mention. the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has a study out that isocynates are irritating to the GI tract, respiratory tract and mucus membranes [inaudible 21:37] workers who’ve had severe asthma attacks. There’s a guide to chemical hazards that they’ve created, indicating spray foam insulation, which contains this [unintelligible 21:47] that causes adverse health effects to the respiratory system.
There’s a journal of occupational and environmental medicine of a study showing increased lung cancer risk among female workers in the polyurethane foam manufacturing industry. The EPA issued a call-to-action in April of 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency, citing potential health effects that might result from exposures to isocyanates.
I called the EPA after reading that. They said they had gotten a lot of calls after issuing that. I said, “What can be done?” And they said, “You can file a report on the Consumer Product Safety Commission,” of which I did. I would recommend anyone listening that they consider doing that. You can document what’s happened, and if they get enough published accounts of stories and adverse health effects from the product, they will take action.
So there are public reports there. You go to that website, Consumer Product Safety Commission, and you put it under “report an unsafe product” and you write down what’s happened, or urge others to do that.
The EPA itself, you can make a report. It’s a public report, but I’m not sure about the efficacy of that because they’re really not taking action at this point.
DEBRA: But even if they aren’t taking action, they are collecting the information. And at some point, it’s worth having your information on file [if we’re not ready to act on it now] or even better, that if they start getting hundreds of thousands of reports, that’s what makes them get their attention. And that’s why people should write.
PEGGY CAHILL: Exactly. Everyone has to become empowered to write, to document what’s happened.
I wrote a letter to both town and state, stating what happened. So I’ve met with the town that I lived, and the building inspector, the town administrator, of select men, and articulated the problem, and asked how it became occupancy-permitted this property, and learned that there were old codes, and asked them to write a letter to the state, which they did, to say change the code. You’ve got to be concerned. One of our citizens became ill from this material.
Then I went and followed up on that letter to the state, and testified to the Department of Public Safety in Massachusetts about exactly what had happened, and all the research I had learned, urging them to be aware and take to steps to provide better education and protection for consumers, for residents of the state.
So those are concrete stuffs—writing down what’s happened, documenting it, and we can create a body of evidence. And that’s what we have to do.
DEBRA: That is exactly what we have to do. I had to learn a lot about how chemicals got evaluated for being toxic, and when I started asking questions about consumer products that have toxic chemicals in them.
And what gets respected is when there’s a scientific study. And years and years ago, when I started hearing about myself and other people going to doctors and saying, “Well, I was exposed to this and this is one of my health situations is.”
And for many people, doctors, scientists and regulators, they say, “Well, if there’s not a study where official scientific people did this study, then these problems are going to exist.”
It’s called anecdotal evidence. They discredit anecdotal evidence as if it didn’t happen.
But if you get 100,000, 500,000 people all writing the same letter that says, “I was exposed to x chemical, and y symptoms happened,” then that’s how studies can then be done, or doctors and scientists can look at them and say, “Wait a minute.
There was a half-a-million people who use this product and had a problem.”
And so it isn’t insignificant.
We have to take a break. But I’ll finish my sentence after the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking with Peggy Cahill about regulations and toxic chemicals and polyurethane foam, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be back in a minute.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Peggy Cahill, and we’re talking about toxic chemicals and regulations and polyurethane foam.
I just want to finish what I was about to say before the break about anecdotal evidence, and that is when I first started writing about toxic chemicals in consumer products, it was very clear to me that there were toxic chemicals in wall-to-wall carpets, synthetic wall-to-wall carpets. And the reason it was clear to me, and that I wrote about it, is because practically, everybody I met said these carpets are making me sick. And nobody was doing those studies, and nobody was talking about this, and I was the only one writing about it, until, I forgot the year, but the EPA installed in their building some synthetic carpet, and everybody got sick.
And suddenly, the EPA had a whole bunch of people having anecdotal evidence, and they started testing carpet samples, and they found that there were hundreds of toxic chemicals in them.
And that’s the value of anecdotal evidence.
And the other thing I want to make sure that I say is that polyurethane foam that we’ve just been talking about in the past almost an hour, is the same polyurethane foam in this insulation, it’s the same polyurethane foam as in your polyurethane foam mattress.
It’s the same. Those mattresses are made from polyols and isocyanates. And the difference between them—this is the only difference that I could find, is that when you spray it into the wall as a foam, you are on the spot, taking isycyanates and the polyols, and mixing them there. And then they make the foam the mattresses are made out of, they mix them in the factory, and then they actually are baked, like baking a cake.
PEGGY CAHILL: I didn’t realize that.
DEBRA: And so it cures it. And so when you search for information about the toxicity of polyurethane foam, you get piles and piles and piles of reports about the toxicity of polyurethane foam spray insulation, but very little about polyurethane foam used in a mattress or anything else made—seat cushions or whatever.
In those cases, the thing that is even more toxic is the fire retardant. And I’m imagining that there must be fire retardants in polyurethane spray foam as well because it’s extremely flammable. This polyurethane foam is referred to as solid gasoline, and it’s all flammable.
PEGGY CAHILL: There definitely are flame retardants and ammonia byproducts.
DEBRA: Yes. This is just not a good substance to be putting in your walls. It’s not all.
PEGGY CAHILL: It’s not a substance. It’s not a safe substance for children, for anyone, for adults, for elderly. It’s really unfortunate. But I commend you on the work you’re doing to bring information to the public, to try to just person-to-person get the news out, and help people become more aware because it’s really essential.
For me, it’s been a very lonely journey trying to find information out, dealing with sensitization, and dysautonomia, autonomic nervous system dysfunctions, as a result of this exposure, trying to learn about that, find physicians who support and help you, which you can find.
But it’s really important to find some way to educate and advocate, in whatever way you can, whatever pathway the person feels comfortable, and to just find something to become empowered somehow to take a step, even a single step. Even if it’s talking to friends and loved ones, making sure that they know.
DEBRA: I completely agree with you because the same has got me through when I became chemically injured so many years ago. The things that got me through it was, number one, just a huge desire to being well and not be a victim of it, but also, secondarily, I wanted to tell other people.
It was a puzzle for me. It was a mystery that I wanted to solve.
And it’s like, how come these consumer products that are being sold, I thought the government was regulating these things.
And it turns out that they aren’t.
And so how could there be toxic chemicals in them? What are those toxic chemicals?
And it was the burning desire to find out what were the toxic chemicals in the products, so that I could avoid them, so that I could find the safe products.
They’ve got me out of bed every morning instead of just lying there being sick.
PEGGY CAHILL: To get you to wellness, you have to go…
DEBRA: Exactly! [inaudible 31:11]. I used to drive fast cars and I was a professional musician. And that’s what my life was like prior to being injured from my toxic chemical exposures. And I completely gave all that up and just said, “This is the most important thing that how can I, how can anyone else, function in life if you’ve been poisoned.” And I knew that I could get well.
PEGGY CAHILL: And we want to prevent this from happening to others.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That was exactly when I got it. I understood that I didn’t have to go through all that misery of having been poisoned. I was, “Oh, my god. I need to tell people because I know this, because I know that this is true from the bottom of my soul.” And I can see that that’s your viewpoint as well.
For me, I can see, and I’ve seen this in other people, that there’s this kind of anger like, “Why didn’t somebody tell me this?”
PEGGY CAHILL: That’s right. They’re absolutely justifiable anger and frustration, but you have to give yourself permission to feel that too, and then use it as a catalyst in some way to take a step, take a step in some direction, some kind of action, like we talked about, write a letter, tell your friends, write to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Call the EPA. Make a phone call. Bring the attention and the awareness to people because there is a lack of awareness.
I mentioned to you the on point piece by Tom Ashbrook, OnPoint, WBUR.org, he did just a recent piece on toxic chemicals in this country. And that’s really worthy of listening to. I’m recommending others to listen too. It’s just a general framework of understanding what’s really happening.
So getting informed, and determining some way to try to make the situation better.
DEBRA: I think it’s important to talk about how people are getting sick, but also what the safe alternatives are. And especially right now, the whole issue of regulation and disclosure is on the table for the United States of America, and manufacturers, because we have enough people now who are interested in saying we need to know. We have the right as consumers to know what is in our products, so that we can make decisions.
But I think the manufacturers know that if they were to actually put all the toxic chemicals on the label that are in the products, that nobody would buy them. And so there has to be a transition into safer products.
But at the same time, there needs to be a transition into disclosure, and actually saying this is what is in the product.
You mentioned before that a doctor told you that there were chemicals in the spray foam that nobody can find out what they are, and I started hearing that 30 years ago from Poison Control Center. Even the Poison Control Center is not told what these trade secret chemical ingredients are.
And by allowing those trade secrets, then we don’t get to find out what are the toxic chemicals that are harming our health.
And that’s a regulatory thing. There should be regulations, I believe, this is my opinion. I think that the labeling regulation should be across the board, the same for all products, and it should list every single ingredient.
It doesn’t have to list it in the amount, and anybody who has ever cooked anything knows that amount is critical if you want to duplicate something. So I think that you could tell everybody in the world that to bake a cake, you need to put in sugar and eggs and flour, but if you don’t tell them how much, they will never be able to make a cake.
So this whole thing about trade secrets, I think, is ridiculous.
PEGGY CAHILL: I agree with you. Transparency is really important. Disclosure of ingredients, transparency, people getting educated through an environmental working group, going to their databases of products they’ve studied, and learning what’s in the products for yourself, what you’re using, and what is better alternative, safer alternative.
DEBRA: But I think what would be even better would be to live in a world where we didn’t have to do that. Let’s report that.
And I think that that’s where regulation really comes in.
I know for myself—there are different people in the world, and I have different viewpoints. But I know for myself that I have an ethic, a personal ethic, of wanting to do the right thing. And for me, the right thing is doing something that supports life. And if am given a choice between doing something that creates life to be better, or something that harms life, I’m going to choose the thing that creates life to be better.
PEGGY CAHILL: A life-affirming thing, right.
DEBRA: A life-affirming thing. And I think that each of us have that within us, and that we just need to have—if the manufacturers would just say, “We’re going to choose the life-affirming things,” there would be no need for regulation. But since they’re not doing that, then as a nation, we should be stepping in and saying, “Please do the life-affirming thing. And if not, we’ll fine you.”
And that way, everybody gets to be safe.
PEGGY CAHILL: Let’s have a campaign—the life of farming campaign.
DEBRA: Yes.
PEGGY CAHILL: We’ll get you a solar-powered fast car, because you like fast cars, but it will be solar-powered, and you will wear this hat that says, “Debra’s Toxic-Free World,” or whatever.
DEBRA: Right. Thank you so much for being with me today, Peggy. We’re out of time.
PEGGY CAHILL: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Fire Retardants in Sleeping Pillows, Comforters and Quilts?
Question from natalie
Hi Debra,
Do pillows, comforters and quilts also have fire retardants in them? I used to think only matresses and mattress pad need to have these flammability requirements. But what is the real life scenario, is it a common practice in USA that bedclothes are also FR treated? Thanks a lot for youe help.
Debra’s Answer
There are definitely toxic fire retardants in sleeping pillows. In one study, a portable x-ray analyzer found sleeping pillows and vehicle seat cushions at the top of the list for key sources of flame retardants (see Environmental Health News: Pillow, vehicle seats key sources of flame retardants). This doesn’t mean all sleeping pillows contain flame retardants, but a polyurethane foam pillow certainly would because polyurethane foam is extremely flammable. Natural fiber pillows generally do not have chemical flame retardants. The study found a wide variation of PBDE flame retardants in pillows made of different materials:
* pillows made of polyurethane foam (3,646 parts per million)
* pillows made of polyester fibers (107 parts per million)
* pillows made of feathers (6 parts per million).
As for comforters and quilts, these aren’t generally made from flammable materials and haven’t been found to be the source of fires like sleepwear and mattresses. I was unable to find a regulation about them. Still, one should always ask about flame retardants and choose natural materials over synthetics if you want to avoid toxic flame retardants.
How to Kick the Plastic Habit and Improve Your Health and the Environment
My guest is Beth Terry. After learning about the devastating effects of plastic pollution on the environment and human health, this Oakland, california accountant began an experiment to see if she could live without buying any new plastic. Since then, she has reduced her plastic waste to less than 2% of the national average. That experiment turned into the popular blog 
MyPlasticFreeLife.com and new book Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too. A founding member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Terry gives presentations on plastic-free living and why, despite what some critics assert, our personal actions really do make a difference. Her work and life have been profiled in the award-winning film Bag It, as well as Susan Freinkel’s book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and Captain Charles Moore’s Plastic Ocean. – See more at: http://myplasticfreelife.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Kick the Plastic Habit and Improve Your Health and the Environment
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Beth Terry
Date of Broadcast: July 22, 2013
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.
Just because there are toxic chemicals all around us doesn’t mean that we have to be affected by them. It doesn’t mean that we have to damage our health or destroy the environment. We can do things to live without toxic chemicals.
Today is Monday, July 22, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining after more than three weeks of rain every day. The sun is shining today here.
We’re going to talk about plastics. The whole hour is going to be about plastics. And I have a guest who is an expert in living without plastic. And I’m going to tell you about here in a few minutes. I’ll tell you about my plastic experience this morning.
I’ve been living without plastic since the 80’s. It was one of the first things that I identified as being toxic, and I set to remove it from my life. So I’m sure that my guest tonight will have plenty to talk about.
But this morning, I have a dear friend staying with me after being in the hospital. And at 4 o’clock this morning, we had to go back to the hospital. And as I was sitting there in the emergency room, they had put a plastic sheet.
They transferred him from the bed to the gurney to get him into the ambulance. They put him on a plastic sheet.
When I got him to the hospital, I was sitting next to the bed, and I could smell it. It smelled like PVC. And I thought, here I am in a hospital where people are supposed to be getting well, and they’ve got people lying on toxic plastic sheets.
The Center for Health, Environment & Justice talked about PVC being the most toxic plastic that there is.
And then, I went down to the cafeteria to have some breakfast, and all the food was being served on Styrofoam plastic plates and cups. I just looked around, there was no organic food.
And this is a hospital, again, where people are supposed to be regaining their health. And the entire place is full of plastic. The bag where the IV is dripping out is plastic.
And so we really do live in a plastic world now. And today, we’re going to talk about how we can eliminate plastics from our life.
My guest is Beth Terry. After learning about plastic pollution on the environment and human health in 2007, Beth began an experiment to see if she could live without buying any new plastic. And since then, she’s become plastic-free.
She has a blog called MyPlasticFreeLife.com, and also a book called Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too.
Welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio, Beth.
BETH TERRY: Hi, Debra. Thanks so much for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I just want to start by saying that I love your book. There are some books that I read them and I go, “Dang, why didn’t I write that book?” because I’m so much in agreement with the depth of information and the practical suggestions and the easy format in which it’s written. I highly recommend it to everybody because it really goes through all these plastic things.
I mean, the website does this too. But the book is like a guidebook to what’s plastic and how you can get rid of it.
Kudos to you! You did a fabulous job.
BETH TERRY: Thank you so much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us how you got into—what was that moment where you got interested in plastic?
BETH TERRY: I’ve discovered over the years—I started this in 2007. and I’ve talked to a lot of people since then who have found a different entryway into this topic. And for me, it originally started with animals because I’m a huge animal lover. I have cats, and I love just all sorts of animals.
One night, in June of 2007, I was sitting alone at my computer, and I stumbled across an article about the plastic pollution problem in the ocean which was bad enough. At that time, I didn’t know that plastic was a problem in the ocean. I had no idea.
DEBRA: Tell us more about it because I think that some of our listeners still don’t know.
BETH TERRY: Well, what we’re finding is that all the plastic waste that we generate, if it doesn’t make its way to where we intend to send it, if it doesn’t get recycled, or if it doesn’t make its way to a landfill, if it gets loose in the environment, eventually, it will make its way downstream, and end up in the ocean.
And the first area in the ocean that was discovered to be full of plastic is within the Pacific Ocean, the North Pacific Gyre, and it was discovered by a sea captain named Charlie Moore many years ago. But it’s only in the last few years it started to get real media attention.
And now, what researchers are finding is that it’s not just this one area of the ocean, but many areas of the ocean are full of plastic.
There are areas in the ocean called gyres where the currents swirl around. They collect the plastic, and they sort of trap it there.
And people may have heard the term, “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” That’s what we’re talking about except it’s not like—people say it looks like a float. It’s like an island. It’s more like a plastic soup. And the plastic goes all throughout the water column. And the problem is that it gets mixed up with the plankton at the bottom of the food chain.
And then fish eat it, and bigger fish eat those, and so it gets passed up the food chain, actually, to us. And we’re finding a lot of food fish full of little plastic particles, which end up being pretty toxic because plastics in the ocean—they already contain their own toxic chemicals, and they also absorb toxic chemicals from the surrounding seawater.
And so the food fish that we’re eating are ending up with a lot of these toxic plastic pieces inside them.
DEBRA: And then, of course, those toxic pieces would end up in our own bodies. But if they’re accumulating in the fish bodies, they would accumulate in all bodies as well.
BETH TERRY: Exactly. Back in June of 2007, when I read this, what I saw that shocked me the most was a photo of a dead albatross chick, which is a bird that lives on Midway Island, which is halfway between the United States and Japan, thousands of miles from civilization. And this bird’s body was completely full of plastic because the mama birds were flying out over the ocean to gather food for their chicks, and they were mistaking plastic for food, and bringing it back, and feeding it to their babies.
And so that utterly stunned me, and that’s what made me decide I needed to change my life.
But then, as you know, and as you’ve known for years, it’s not just mama birds that are feeding plastic to babies.
The human mothers are feeding the chemicals in plastics to our children as well, every time we feed them out of plastic containers, every time we give them plastic or vinyl toys to play with. Everything that they’re surrounded with—things that off-gas, things that can leech into their food and water.
So it’s affecting all of us.
DEBRA: The reason that I knew this morning at the hospital that my friend was lying on a PVC plastic sheet was because I remembered that smell from many years ago when I opened a cookie can full of delicious imported, foreign [inaudible 00:09:28]. And they were packed in a PVC little, packing thing.
And the odor of PVC was so strong, when I opened that tin, I had to find out what it was. And once you know what it is, you never forget that smell.
It’s just everywhere. These plastics are everywhere.
So when we come back from the break, we’re going to find out more from Beth about what the plastics are, and we’ll discuss some of the health effects, and then later on, we’ll find out what to do about this.
We’re here with Beth Terry—author of Plastic-Free. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here with Beth Terry—author of Plastic-Free, and also blogger at MyPlasticFreeLife.com, which is full of all kinds of tips and ways that you can eliminate plastic from your life. And the book itself is a really good guidebook to help you understand what the issue, and step by step, remove plastics from your life.
So Beth, what do you think is the number one plastic we should be concerned about?
BETH TERRY: Absolutely PVC, I think, is the most toxic.
DEBRA: I think so too.
BETH TERRY: I was really excited to see that you had Mike on last time because that organization has been so helpful in helping me understand the problems with PVC and what to do about it. And in fact, in one of the chapters of my book where I talk about deciding which plastics in your house to eliminate first, PVC is right up there.
And the Center for Health, Environment & Justice has a report where they say, instead of collecting your PVC and sending it to the landfill, take it to the hazardous waste facility.
And I actually did that.
DEBRA: Great. I love that. I love that because that’s where it belongs.
BETH TERRY: Yes, exactly. Of course, when you show up with your shower curtain, they might look at you funny.
But seriously, those things are full of all kinds of chemicals. They’re full of phthalates, they’re full of lead, heavy metals, all sorts of terrible stuff.
And so that’s what we did. We went through our house, and anything with that new shower curtain smell, that smell that you were talking about, we packed it up, anything with a #3 on it, which is PVC, and we just took it to the hazardous waste facility.
DEBRA: Wow. I think that that’s the thing to do.
BETH TERRY: So here’s the thing though. There are chemicals in plastics that we know for sure are hazardous.
So PVC is one of them. People have heard probably about bisphenol A, BPA, which is in some hard plastics like polycarbonates, and also lines the inside of metal food cans, and coats cash register receipts.
These are plastics that people are aware of.
But what most people don’t realize is that all plastics contain additives, and manufacturers aren’t required to disclose to us what any of their additives are because those formulas are proprietary. And some of the chemicals that are being used to replace BPA, and some of the chemicals of concern, may be just as hazardous for us.
There was a study that I talk about in my book, you may have mentioned this at some point, where they studied over 400 different plastic products—containers, wraps, and different kinds of items. And they tested them, they exposed them to human breast cancer cells, and 90% of the plastics, whether they had BPA in them or not, were found to be estrogenic, meaning, that they caused those breast cancer cells to grow.
And so the problem is that we aren’t told what all the additives are in various types of plastics.
So just looking at the number on the container doesn’t tell you if a plastic is safe or not, which is another reason why I’ve decided to limit my use of all plastics, not just PVC and ones with bisphenol A and other things like that.
DEBRA: Yes. Eliminate the use of all plastics as well. If I absolutely have to use a plastic, there are some that are less toxic than others. Here’s an example of one time where I decided to use a plastic. I got rid of my plastic shower curtain years ago, my PVC shower curtain.
I’ve moved several times, and each time I move, I install glass shower doors.
I think most people don’t know that you can go down to Lowe’s or Home Depot, and get glass shower doors for less than $100. And anyone with any kind of handyman skills can install them themselves. That’s my solution for plastic shower curtains.
But I was staying in a rented apartment, I rented furnished apartment, full of plastic, in San Francisco for three months. And it didn’t have a shower curtain. And I thought, “Oh, my god. Now, what am I going to do? I can’t go buy a plastic shower curtain.”
But it turned out that Ikea has shower curtains for just a couple of dollars that are made out of EVA, which is a plastic that is a lot less toxic than PVC.
And so if you have to have plastic for a waterproof layer or something, there are less toxic plastics.
BETH TERRY: There are.
DEBRA: My position is to eliminate them wherever I can.
BETH TERRY: Yes, and we can’t necessarily always eliminate every single thing. And so choosing the less toxic alternative is definitely better.
One thing that I stress in my book and on my site is not to try to do this all at once. I knew for myself that if I try to go through my house, get rid of every single plastic item, and just stop buying plastic, it wouldn’t work. I would give up in frustration.
And so I took it step by step.
So that is why I have questions for people that ask themselves to figure out what their priority should be, what their first step should be, and their second, and so on because it’s taken me years to get to this point where I am.
It’s taken you years to get where you are.
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. It’s not an overnight thing. Because of my experience being made sick by toxic chemicals, I kind of went on a rampage. And one day, I just went through and took everything out of my house that I can identify as being toxic, which left me with an empty house.
And so it’s a very slow process to find the alternatives that were not toxic. But I found that even having done that, I still, as time goes by, I find out about more and more things, as there are more and more studies, and more and more information, and more and more new chemicals to be concerned about.
When I started doing this, nobody knew anything about BPA. Maybe it existed, but nobody knew about it.
So when we come back from the break, we’ll talk more about alternatives to plastic with Beth Terry—blogger at MyPlasticFreeLife.com, and author of Plastic-Free. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: We’re talking with Beth Terry, blogger at MyPlasticFreeLife.com and author of Plastic-Free.
Beth, I was just looking through your book at the break, and I found something that I didn’t know. Here’s a shocking fact from Beth’s book. Chewing gum is plastic. Do you want to tell us about that?
BETH TERRY: I am constantly discovering new things that are made of plastic that I had no idea about. And when I found that out, I was shocked too.
This is another example where manufacturers don’t necessarily have to tell you what’s in it. If you look at the ingredients of chewing gum, the part that’s chewy will just be called gum base, and gum base can be lots of different things. It could be natural rubber from a tree, but usually, it’s plastic, polyvinyl acetate.
Canada was considering actually banning that chemical.
Even some gums that advertise and sold as natural like Glee, which is made with natural [inaudible 00:19:06] from a tree, it’s combined with plastic in the gum. And the only way you find that out is by calling the company to ask.
They say that they’re looking for a more natural alternative, but as far as I know, they haven’t changed their formula yet.
There was one plastic-free gum that I found. It’s made in England, and it’s called Peppersmith. And the beautiful thing about it is that the gum itself doesn’t have plastic in it, but also, the packaging doesn’t have plastic in it.
DEBRA: In Europe, there were so many things that were ahead of the United States.
BETH TERRY: Yes, they are, in a lot of ways.
DEBRA: I also wanted to ask you about—I know that your book was specifically made to use minimal plastic. So tell us more about how—what did they do to use less plastic?
BETH TERRY: I didn’t even realize when I wrote the book that hardback books had plastic in them. It was my publisher, Skyhorse, that let me know that. And they decided, if they were going to publish this book called Plastic-Free, they were going to make the book itself without any plastic.
And so they found a plastic-free glue for the binding. They have no coating on the cover. It’s just plain board. And the jacket is plain craft paper.
On the book cover, minimal plastic was used in publishing this book, but I believe that there isn’t any plastic at all.
But my editor was concerned in case something turned up that he wasn’t aware of later. But as far as I know, there isn’t any plastic at all. So you do have to be careful.
DEBRA: Well, I just really like the way it looks. It’s not shiny and white. It looks like recycled paper. It’s got a nice gentle color to the paper that is easy on your eyes, and this nice, little cardboard, and nice brown—it’s just very simple and lovely.
What was the most difficult thing that you found that you tried to replace, and had difficulty with?
BETH TERRY: Well, some things I’ve had to learn to live without, and it’s actually been for the better. I used to live on frozen microwaveable meals in plastic. And of course, we know now, you should never ever microwave plastic or heat plastic. But that’s what I used to live on.
And also, energy bars in plastic wrappers.
And I did not want to have to change. I did not want to have to learn how to cook. I wanted to be able to continue heating up food in the microwave.
And so I went to the store, and I bought just about every brand of frozen dinner that’s imaginable whether it was Lean Cuisine, or whether it was Organic Amy’s or anything in between. I bought them all just so I could see what the packaging was inside.
When I found brands that came in a cardboard tray, I thought I was doing better until I learned that any cardboard that’s leak-proof is coated with plastic inside now.
DEBRA: Plastic is used ubiquitously to make things waterproof.
BETH TERRY: So milk cartons, ice cream cartons, coffee cups—all of these things have plastic in them as well.
And when it comes to coffee and things like that, these are hot liquids that are in contact with the plastic.
So I had to learn how to eat whole foods, and that was an added benefit of giving up plastic.
DEBRA: And isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you like it like that?
BETH TERRY: I do. I absolutely do. And it was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. I had this idea that I was going to be stuck in the kitchen forever and never doing anything else.
DEBRA: No, it isn’t that way. And I know—I love to eat, and I also love to cook. And I love to go out to eat. But at this point in my life, I rarely go out. I only go to restaurants that fix food from scratch, from organic ingredients because the restaurant industry, if you ever watch a show on TV like Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on the Food Channel?
I watch it just because it’s entertaining. If I can’t fall asleep at night, I’ll watch it. And it just horrifies me to see what they’re putting in their food. There’s sugar, they use just those big five-gallon white plastic buckets. And they put hot food in plastic. It just goes right into the food.
And most restaurants just don’t have a clue about all these plastic things. They actually put saran wrap, a plastic, on a dish, and then they’ll put it in the oven, and bake it in saran wrap.
BETH TERRY: And you know, what’s really sad is that schools do that too.
DEBRA: It just amazes me.
BETH TERRY: Yes, it’s awful. There’s a café down the street from me that I used to go to. Well, I still go to it. Their coffee is great and organic. You can even get organic milk in your coffee.
When I discovered how they make their tea, I stopped ordering tea there because they put it in plastic pitchers with the tea inside the plastic pitchers. Hot liquid. And I was just astounded by that.
DEBRA: I have, where I live, not too far away, there’s raw, organic, vegan café, and they serve their tea—if you order iced tea, it comes in this plastic tea maker that they say, “Here, let it sit here for five minutes. We’ll come back and tell you when it’s five minutes.”
And then you squeeze it, and the tea, the hot tea, comes out into a cup of ice and becomes iced tea. But it’s only after it’s absorbed those plastics from the container.
We just need to do more education, Beth, because there are all these well-meaning people who just don’t know these things about plastics.
BETH TERRY: So that’s why it was so important to me, as I blog, and also in this book, to include information about speaking up and talking to restaurant owners, store managers, asking for what we want, writing letters, because we need better choices. We can only do so as individuals.
DEBRA: We do. We’ll be back after this break with more with Beth Terry, who is a blogger at MyPlasticFreeLife.com, and author of the book, Plastic-Free. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Beth Terry, blogger at MyPlasticFreeLife.com, and author of the book, Plastic-Free. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Beth, let’s talk a bit about plastic package versus plastic products. And by that, I mean, I’m looking at products, I don’t want to use plastic products, but it’s so much harder to avoid products that might be organic, yet it’s packaged in plastic. So tell us about that.
BETH TERRY: Yes, so that’s so ironic to me. And a lot of times, I find that that’s the choice that we have to make. Organic food is grown without toxic chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides. And such care is taken to make sure that there are no hormone-disrupting chemicals in the food.
And then a lot of times, it’s packaged in plastic, which could be adding hormone-disrupting chemicals right back into the food. The packaging is actually an ingredient in the food.
And so I found lots and lots of way to buy foods without plastic packaging, without any packaging at all, a lot of times, by shopping the bulk bins, bringing my own bags and containers, glass jars with me, to shop the bulk bins.
Now, as I say in my book, and I have a whole section about bulk bins, and how to shop from them, how they’re cleaned and sanitized, but the truth is that sometimes, the food in the bulk bins themselves were delivered to the store in great, big plastic bags, so it’s not always plastic-free, but it’s less plastic.
DEBRA: I used to think if I bought a good in a glass jar that it was fine because it wasn’t in a BPA can. Well, actually, I made that decision a long time before there was BPA. I didn’t know about BPA in cans.
But I was at a farmer’s market one day, and somebody was selling pasta sauce. And I tasted the pasta sauce, and I was assuming that they were making it from fresh tomatoes. But I asked them, “Well, what about the tomatoes? What kind of tomatoes?”
And he very proudly said, “Oh, the finest Italian tomatoes from Italy.”
Yes, Italian tomatoes. And I thought, “Here’s BPA tomatoes in a glass jar.”
So you can’t always know that if it’s in a glass jar, those other ingredients haven’t been in plastic. Plastic is used in—
BETH TERRY: And the lids, the metal lids on glass jars, often contain BPA or some type of plastic inside the lid itself. But it’s a lot less plastic than if you were to buy a can that’s completely lined with plastic.
And so, I do still do that to some extent, but that’s why I feel like it’s so important to, whenever possible, look for whole, fresh foods from the farmer’s market because those things are not packaged at all, and you can see that they’re not packaged.
But I’m really glad that mentioned packaging as well because another issue about packaging and health is that even if the packaging isn’t actually touching our food, it’s still impacting us because anything that affects the environment is affecting our health. And all plastics are produced in petrochemical plants that give off toxic fumes, they pollute the water, they pollute the air.
People who live in communities where plastics are produced often have higher incidences of certain cancers or endometriosis, lots of different illnesses. And the more BPA, and the more toxic chemicals that are produced in this world, that go into the plastic packaging, even if that plastic packaging isn’t necessarily leeching into our particular food or item, it’s still contributing to pollution on our planet, and pollution that we breathe, and that we drink.
And so that’s why I feel like it’s so important to reduce plastic packaging. The most recent post on my blog is to Lotus Foods, the company that makes a stainless steel rice cooker, which we decided to get because we didn’t want to be eating out of an aluminum rice cooker anymore, or one coated with non-stick chemicals.
So we were so excited to get this stainless steel rice cooker. I opened up the box, and there was a huge chunk of Styrofoam in there, and everything was wrapped in plastic.
And so I wrote to them on my blog, and I said, “I really appreciate this product of yours. I appreciate how you’re trying to make us more healthy by giving us a stainless steel option, but these plastics and Styrofoam is actually #6 plastic. These plastics that you’re using for packaging are polluting our planet. Please switch to something safer.”
And someone from Lotus actually did respond in the comments. And so I’m hoping that writing that letter, that open letter on my blog, and that other people writing letters to companies, will help them realize that the packaging is just as important as the product that’s in the packaging.
DEBRA: Just as important. I agree with everything that you say. And all those toxic go into the environment do come back to us because we’re breathing the air, we’re drinking the water, we’re eating the food that is grown in contaminated soil. And we can’t think that the environment is separate from us and our health, and our well-being.
It’s all one system.
So every piece of plastic that we can not use goes a long way. And I think it’s really important to, as you just did with Lotus Foods, that when we find good products that we want to use, that we do write to the manufacturers and ask them about packaging.
One of the dilemmas that I’m going into about plastic packaging is, especially with healthcare products, personal care products, body care things, where they used to all be in glass, and now, they’re all in plastic, because glass breaks. When you take a bottle of shampoo in the shower, and what are you supposed to do?
Well, you and I know that the alternative is shampoo bars.
I’m not sure that shampoo bars work for everybody. I’m trying out a shampoo that’s just made from—it’s a really good shampoo, and it doesn’t have any, what I would call [inaudible 00:33:31] in it. It’s just made from all natural things. And it still comes in a plastic bottle.
And we need to be getting away from that. We need to be really as committed as you and I are. Everybody needs to do this. I didn’t come into being much until the mid-50s. And prior to that, everything everything was pretty much natural materials.
BETH TERRY: That’s one of the things that’s really important is to ask ourselves, how do we use to do things?
You can run into some issues though with getting things second hand. Buying things second hand is one of the things that I recommend in my book to avoid the packaging, to avoid new plastic. And yet, we still have to be careful with that too because there are issues of lead, for example, in some ceramic products that we might buy second hand.
So we have to ask ourselves if the newer things might actually be a little bit safer than the older things.
As you know, there’s a whole chapter in my book on personal care and cleaning, and lots of recipes, and lots of DIY. But sometimes people do have favorite products, one favorite personal care product or something that they just love, and it comes in plastic, and they don’t want to give it up.
So that’s another situation where you want to write to that manufacturer, tell them how much you appreciate what they’re doing, and ask them to change their packaging, and why. Explain why.
DEBRA: I know that on my website, on Debra’s List, where I’m recommending non-toxic products, I had to draw the line and say, I’m not going to be evaluating packaging, because if I were to eliminate every product that has a plastic package, there would be very few products left.
But I do make a note as best as I can if people and companies are using paper packaging instead of plastic, making a point to be plastic-free. Publicize that for them because it’s a really important thing. At this point, I don’t feel like I could eliminate everything that has a plastic package, but I agree that plastic packaging needs to go.
We just need to move away from these things.
BETH TERRY: Yes, and I feel like we just need to speak up because as long as companies don’t realize that this is an issue, or don’t realize that their customers care about it, they’re not going to make those changes.
Everybody has different priorities. For me, the plastic packaging is just as important as the product itself. But that’s my mission. That’s just what I decided what’s going to be the focus of my life. And there are lots and lots of other issues that other people have taken on.
So I do understand your decision about that, but the more we can at least—I don’t know. Let them know when they have a product that they want us to review, mention the packaging to them. Don’t just let it go because that’s the only way they’re going to realize that it’s important.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. And in fact, I’m going to do that from now on. I am really going to be looking at the packaging. I’m not going to say that I can’t recommend a product if it has plastic packaging, but I’m going to mention to people about how they can be eliminating plastics.
This has been such a pleasure to talk to you, Beth. And I wish you all the best with everything that you’re doing.
BETH TERRY: Thank you so much.
DEBRA: And good luck to you too with your work because I think everybody should just listen to you and see what you say.
BETH TERRY: Thanks so much, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Does Furniture Get Less Toxic Over Time?
Question from Stacey
I would like to replace our livingroom furniture which is a leather set from Bernhardt Furniture. I know it contains flame retardents, and hate to see my kids playing on it; however, I can’t afford a new couch made without the chemicals right now. The leather set is about 6 years old. Does furniture get less toxic with time? Is leather better than a synthetic upholstery? Also, I have a couch in my basement about 8 years old that had been coated with Scotchguard. Does this get less toxic with time? Just wondering what really needs to go… Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
Yes, furniture gets less toxic over time, but something like a fire retardant or Scotchguard is designed to last for years. If you buy a piece of furniture and expect it to be flameproof or stain resistant, you would want it to continue to have that protection for the life of the piece of furniture.
So you are asking about
Personally, I think both need to go.
My personal decision has been and continues to be “if I know something is toxic, remove it NOW, and then figure out how to replace it with something less toxic.” Years ago I had an empty house when I couldn’t afford to buy new nontoxic replacements, or I didn’t know what to buy that would be safe.
For me, it’s more important to not expose myself (and especially not children) to toxic chemicals than it is to have anything in my house that is toxic.
But that is my decision. Everyone gets to decide for themselves how much toxic exposure they want to have.
How Vinyl Affects our Health and The Environment—And What We Can Do
My guest is Mike Schade is the Markets Campaign Coordinator with the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ), a national environmental health organization that was founded in 1980 by Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs. Lois became involved in toxics issues after finding out her entire neighborhood had been built on a toxic waste dump. Today CHEJ helps communities form strong local organizations in order to protect neighborhoods from exposure to hazardous wastes. Mike has over a decade of experience working on environmental health and justice issues. For four years, he was the Western New York Director of Citizens’ Environmental Coalition, where he coordinated community, marketplace and policy campaigns, including the Toxic-Free Legacy, Bucket Brigade and Kodak Corporate Accountability campaigns, resulting in substantial victories for environmental and public health. He also worked for the Buffalo Coalition for Economic Justice. At CHEJ, Mike has coordinated the successful national PVC and BPA Marketplace Transformation Campaigns which has convinced some of the world’s biggest companies to phase out PVC, phthalates and BPA. Ethisphere Magazine listed Mike as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics for 2007 and the PVC Campaign received the “Path to Victory” Business Ethics Network award. He is the author or co-author of numerous reports including the Wasting of Rural New York State-Factory Farms and Public Health, Volatile Vinyl-the New Shower Curtain’s Chemical Smell, Baby’s Toxic Bottle-BPA Leaching From Popular Baby Bottles, No Silver Lining-An Investigation Into BPA in Canned Foods, and Toxic Toys R Us. He has a BS in Environmental Studies from the State University of NY at Buffalo. http://www.chej.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Vinyl Affects Our Health and the Environment—and What We Can Do
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Mike Schade
Date of Broadcast: July 18, 2013
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.
Even though there are toxic chemicals in consumer products, and in the environment, and in the water we’re drinking, and the clothes we wear, and everything else, there are many people who are working to change things, make safer products, help us take toxic chemicals out of our bodies, and all kinds of other things, so that we can live healthier and happy lives.
And these are people that I’m talking to every day, Monday through Friday right here. And I know that in my own life, reducing my exposure to toxic chemicals has made a big difference for me. And it can make a big difference for you, and for your families.
I am on lots of different lists for inspiring quotes, and I get them every morning—in addition to sending them out every morning too. A couple of days ago, I got this one from Dr. Robert Goddard.
“It is difficult to say what is impossible. For the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”
And I can really see that in my own life. I am—how old am I now? Oh, my god. My memory is going. I was 58 years old this year, in June. And I can see in my own lifetime what a difference my life is to now than it was when I was a child.
And in 1960, for example, we didn’t have computers. Nobody had computers. We didn’t have cell phones. There were computers. I don’t know. I guess the government had computer, or the CIA or something.
But we didn’t have personal computers. We didn’t have cell phones. What else didn’t we have? Nylon stockings, pantyhose, we didn’t have all kinds of things that we have today. And I even know that when I started working on toxic issues in 1978, there were so many toxic products and so few toxic-free products.
And now, we have a whole lot of toxic-free products to choose from. And that any of us who choose to not use toxic consumer products can do so because they exist.
And so just because something looks like it can’t be changed right now, or that we need to do something to make a change, doesn’t mean that it can’t happen because everything starts with an idea, a desire, a dream, a thought, and then we put those things into action.
Today, we’re going to be talking about vinyl with Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
And what the Center for Health, Environment & Justice does—we’ll probably be calling it CHEJ, is that they can help you and your community, if you’re facing an environmental health risk.
So they work with things like if you have a leaking landfill, food or drinking water, or incinerators, any kind of hazardous waste sites, they can help you with these community things.
Thanks for being on the show, Mike.
MIKE SCHADE: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Well, first I want to hear, and I want my listeners to hear, how the Center for Health, Environment & Justice came to be starting with Love Canal.
And I remember in 1978, was it, or 1980, 1970-something, the whole story about Love Canal was in the news. But I know that not everybody is as old as I am, so they might not have been there at the time. So why don’t you tell us the story?
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, definitely. Our organization was founded out of the struggle at Love Canal around 1981. But our story goes before it. Our story begins before that.
In way back when, in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, [inaudible 00:04:21] and other businesses dumped over 20,000 tons of toxic waste into a canal, in the City of Niagara Falls. And back then, we didn’t know as much as we do today, about the hazards of chemicals in our environment. This is, in fact, even before Silent Spring.
Many of the chemicals that were dumped in the canal were some of the most toxic chemicals on the plant docks, and even waste from the Manhattan Project, from the first atomic bomb was dumped in the canal.
And in their wisdom, the land was eventually sold to the City of Niagara Falls for just $1. That’s how valuable it was because they knew that this was a toxic nightmare.
So unfortunately, in their grand wisdom, the City of Niagara Falls eventually decided to build two schools on top of and next to the canal, as well as hundreds and hundreds of homes adjacent to the canal. Many of the families that moved there were first-time homeowners. Many of them were newlyweds that had just graduated from high school and college, and wanted to start their dream homes there.
And so one of the people that lived there was a housewife, a woman by the name of Lois Gibbs, who is our founder and our executive director. She was 27 years old at the time. She had two children. And she had discovered that her child was attending a school, an elementary school, built on top of this canal, so is with 20,000 tons of toxic waste.
So Lois, as a concerned mom, she started going door-to-door because her children started getting sick, and she was wondering whether there were other people in the community that were also suffering from health problems.
And she soon realized that her children’s health problems were not an isolated incident, but many other people in the community were also suffering from health problems, including birth defects, miscarriages, cancer, and other severe health problems.
So Lois, working with her neighbors, they organized a community group, and they forced the government, after years of organization and protests, even at one point, holding two members of the EPA hostage, where they didn’t harm them, but they actually fed them milk and cookies, but they wouldn’t let them leave Lois’ home, they forced the government to close down the two schools and to relocate the entire community of Love Canal.
Over 800 families were relocated from this toxic site. And this was history in the making. This was the first time in the history of the United States that a community was relocated due to a toxic site.
And it really awoken the nation to the dangers of chemicals in our community. And it led to the creation of the Federal Superfund Program which, of course, is the program that cleans up toxic waste sites. And it also raised a lot of awareness among community members from coast to coast that, hey, maybe it’s not such a good idea to build a school on top of, and a community next to a toxic waste site.
And the struggle at Love Canal really helped spark the creation of the Grassroots Environmental Health Movement here in the United States today.
So our organization was formed after Love Canal. At the time of Love Canal, Lois started getting calls from people all across the country that were concerned that, “Hey, I might have a Love Canal type envirometal problem in my community.”
And at the time, Lois had called many other national organizations. And unfortunately, many of them basically just blew her off. While they sympathized with her, they didn’t really have the capacity or the tools to help Lois and her neighbors, until Lois realized that there was really a vacuum in the environmental movement.
So with just a little bit of money in the bank, she moved her family to Washington D.C. t form our organization, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, to assist and empower communities across the country that were dealing with environmental health hazards in their communities.
And since 1981, our organization has assisted over 11,000 communities across the country, very similar to Love Canal, all across the country.
Our organization was really formed out of the struggle at Love Canal back in 1981.
DEBRA: And I so appreciate it. And I’m sure others too that you exist, so that you can help on a community level.
I didn’t know that you’d helped 11,000 communities. That seems like a very large numbers of communities to have these problems, and it makes me look outside my window, and ask myself, “Is that kind of problem exist here in the community that I live in, and that we don’t even know?”
So toxics can be everywhere, and so I’m glad that you’re there to help on a community level.
After the break, we’re going to talk particularly about vinyl, and the toxicity of it, the community. But I want you all to know that Mike, in addition to working for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, has his own long pedigree of environmental work that he’s done and many, many things.
So I’ll tell you about a few of those, or he’ll tell you about a few of those after the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here today with Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. And before the break, we heard all about the history of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, which started with the situation at Love Canal, which had houses built on a toxic waste dump.
But I wanted to let you know that Mike has been doing environmental work, exceptional environmental work, for the last decade himself. He has his own history on some of the things. And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can read his bio.
But I want to mention that he’s had over a decade of experience, working on environmental health and justice issues. He was the New York director of Citizens’ Environmental Health Coalition. It’s so long.
So he’s coordinated the successful national PVC, polyvinyl chloride and BPA, bisphenol A, marketplace transformation campaigns, which convinced some of the world’s biggest companies to phase out PVC, phthalates and BPA. These are chemicals that I’m writing about all the time, and telling you about.
So he’s the author of numerous reports, including one that I have already linked to, No Silver Lining: An Investigation into BPA in Canned Foods. He’s also done one called Volatile Vinyl—The New Shower Curtain’s Chemical Smell.
And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today—it’s vinyl. And so this man knows all about it. He’s done the research, and he’s going to tell us about it.
So Mike, start by telling us where we can find vinyl. Maybe you should start by telling us before that about what is vinyl, and what’s in it besides vinyl.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, I’d be happy to. So vinyl is commonly used plastic. It’s also referred to as polyvinyl chloride, PVC. And it’s a plastic that is, unfortunately, the most toxic plastics for children’s health and the environment.
From production to use to disposal, vinyl uses and releases some of the most dangerous chemicals on the planet, including chlorine gas, which was originally used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, mercury dioxins, phthalates, lead, PCBs—the list goes on and on.
So it’s a fundamentally hazardous plastic to me. There’s no safe way to make it, use it, or dispose of it. It’s toxic throughout its life cycle.
DEBRA: I had a question from somebody the other day on my Q&A blog where she said, “I like to wear sandals, and I don’t like the way 100% leather sandals look. So I want to wear the toxic sandals that are sold like at Target. I don’t want to single out Target. Most of the sandals that are made, are made out of vinyl.”
She wanted to know was there a way that she could detox these sandals because it was more important to her to wear this fashionable thing than it was to look at what are the safe materials.
She says, “I have to wear my fashionable sandals.”
And yet, all of these shoes that people love the style of, they’re all made from vinyl. And I want people to understand this—that vinyl is in all kinds of things that we don’t even think about.
So tell us some other places that we might find vinyl.
MIKE SCHADE: So vinyl is most commonly used in building materials. The number one use of vinyl is PVC materials.
So for example, piping—the white piping that you may have in your home is vinyl. The flooring—vinyl flooring in your home or in your kid’s school is PVC. Other examples include carpet. A lot of times, carpet is stacked with PVC.
And so it’s found in all sorts of building materials in our homes. It’s also found in building materials in schools, playgrounds, the linings of windows and doors.
So the number one use of vinyl is in building materials in our homes and schools. Other uses—it’s also commonly found in all sorts of consumer products. You mentioned apparel, so it’s sometimes found in certain clothing items, such as fake leather products like vinyl purses, for example.
It’s also found in consumer products like three-ring binders, vinyl three-ring binders, school supplies and office supplies, plastic paperclips. Those colored paperclips that we often use are vinyl.
Other products include vinyl shower curtains, and even children’s back-to-school supplies, such as backpacks and lunchboxes. It’s even found in electronics products like computers and laptops.
Unfortunately, to manufacturer, use and dispose of this product is nothing short of an environmental nightmare. It’s widely considered to be the most hazardous plastic on the planet.
And when we buy these products that are made out of vinyl, we’re contributing to the contamination of environmental justice communities in places like Louisiana. We’re exposing ourselves to hazardous chemicals like phthalates and lead. And finally, when these products are eventually disposed of, when we throw it out, we’re releasing dangerous chemicals like dioxins into the environment, which eventually, make their way through the food chain and get into our bodies.
So we’re actually contaminating ourselves when we’re using these products, when we’re buying vinyl plastic products.
DEBRA: The other day, I went into a large office supply discount warehouse. And I was looking for a cardboard binder because they had sold them for a while. I could just go in and buy them at the store instead of ordering them by mail.
And they discontinued them. And every single binder on the shelf—it was probably 100-feet of shelving for binders. They had vinyl, vinyl, vinyl binders in every color of the rainbow, and every size, and every single one of them was vinyl.
That just amazes me, that they can’t do better than that.
And I also want to make a point that it’s so important to understand that whatever we put into our bodies comes back—whatever we put into the environment comes back into our bodies because we’re breathing the environment. We’re eating the environment. We’re drinking the environment.
So just because something’s going into the environment doesn’t mean it’s not coming to us as well.
We need to take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here with Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. We’re talking about vinyl—the health effects, the environmental effects, and what we can do to protect ourselves.
We’ll be back in a minute.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, also known as CHEJ. And we’re talking about vinyl, or PVC, it’s also called, and where it is in products, and what we can do about it.
Mike, what’s going on in the market? Are they moving away from vinyl?
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, absolutely. So as we talked about, vinyl is really considered to be the most toxic plastic on the planet. So in response to these concerns, there has been a huge market shift away from the use of PVC. And just about in every major sector of the economy, you’ll see major Fortune 500 companies that have adopted policies to phase out the use of vinyl and phthalates.
DEBRA: What are some examples?
MIKE SCHADE: Among retailers, big retailers like Target and Wal-Mart and Ikea, are working to reduce the use of vinyl and phthalates. In fact, Ikea worked to eliminate these PVCs over 20 years ago, going back to 1992.
Automobile manufacturers like Honda and Volkswagen, even electronics companies like Apple and HP and Dell.
So for example, if you buy a new Apple MacBook or iMac, it’ll be completely PVC-free.
So just about many major Fortune 500 companies are dissing these hazardous chemicals because they recognize that they’re not safe for the environment, they’re not safe for children’s health, and they’re also bad for companies, bottom line, given that there are many countries and governmental agencies across the world that restrict the use of vinyl, or really just chemicals.
DEBRA: Is there a PVC-free list?
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, absolutely. We have been compiling all sorts of information in about both the hazards of PVC and safer alternatives. Folks can visit our website at PVCFree.org, to get involved and learn more.
So for example, in terms of a PVC-free list, every year, we publish a back-to-school guide to safer school supplies, so that parents can identify safer products for their families. We’re actually just about to publish a new list in a couple of weeks.
We also have an interactive website called This Vinyl School, where you can see information about what are the most common products in schools that are made out of vinyl, and what are safer alternatives that we can encourage our schools to use, especially because we know that children are really vulnerable to the health hazards of the vinyl and phthalates.
The good news is that there are safer and cost-effective alternatives that are available, that are safer for our environment, but most importantly, healthier for our children. And if you go to our website, again, that’s PVCFree.org.
DEBRA: I’d like all the big box office supply businesses to carry cardboard binders instead of PVC binders. That’s the change that I’d like to see because as a writer, I’m always needing binders, and I have to order them online.
And people should be able to go into any of these stores, and be able to buy them for their children to use at school.
The children should not be using vinyl binders. Period.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: It just doesn’t make sense to me that these big companies would continue to sell these toxic vinyl binders when other binders are easily available.
MIKE SCHADE: Last year, we published a study which found that many popular children’s school supplies, including binders, contain high levels of phthalate chemicals that are so toxic, they’ve been banned in toys. Yet, they’re allowed to be put into products like binders that children and other vulnerable population come in contact with.
We have seen some movement in the right direction in the case of binders. So Staples for example, if you go to Staples today, you’ll see that many of three-ring binders that Staples sells are PVC-free. They’re actually labeled as such. Now, not all of them are recycled—
DEBRA: Really? I will go right down to Staples and see.
MIKE SCHADE: You’ll see on the side or the cover, many of them are labeled PVC-free.
Now, not all of them are cardboard, per say. Some of them are made out of polymers or other plastics.
DEBRA: They’re made out of other plastics, but they’re not PVC plastics.
MIKE SCHADE: That’s right. They don’t contain phthalates, which is great. And then also, they’re not chlorinated plastics, so they don’t release dioxins when they’re made, and when they’re disposed of—dioxins being some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.
So the market is beginning to move away from the use of vinyl in school and office supplies, like binders.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to be done. And one of the things that we’re doing actually this summer is we’re actually in the process of trying to raise money to test more children’s school supplies, like binders, for the presence of phthalates because last year, we found phthalates in 80% of school supplies that we tested.
Seventy-five of them was so high, it would be illegal to sell these products if they were toys. But because they’re not toys, because they’re school supplies, there’s this loophole in the law that allows retailers and manufacturers to continue to sell binders and other school and office supplies laden with these very harmful chemicals, phthalates, which are linked to asthma, they’re linked to reproductive health problems—the list goes on and on.
So we’re trying to raise funding to test more school supplies this summer, so that we can educate consumers about this problem, and how to find safer and healthier alternatives, as you stated.
DEBRA: And if you’d like to make a donation to help them do that, you can just go to CHEJ.org, and I think it will be apparent what to do once you get there, in order to make that donation.
I would like to really reiterate what you just said about the fact that there are laws that will say that to limit a chemical in one type of product, but not limited in another type of product because I don’t want people to hear that they shouldn’t have phthalates in children’s toys—that’s how toxic they are.
And so they may think, “Well, phthalates have been banned.”
No, they haven’t because it’s only for children’s toys. And so they’re still in all kinds of other products. And I think that’s pretty amazing that if it can be established that they shouldn’t be in children’s toys, why is it okay to be in a binder that a child is taking to school?
And I think that that’s something that needs to be addressed on a government level, that if they establish that a toxic chemical shouldn’t be in one kind of product, or that it needs to be labeled, with a warning label on one kind of product, that it goes across the board.
For example, with another chemical, with formaldehyde, in particle board, it’s supposed to have a warning label on it, but as soon as you cut that piece of particle board, and make a table out of it, for example, it’s now furniture instead of a building material, and it’s not required to have a warning label. The exact same material—one has a warning label, and another one doesn’t.
So there really are tremendous variations about how things get regulated. It’s not the same across the board, and that’s a problem we’re facing today.
We’ll be back after this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here today with Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. And we’re talking about vinyl, where it is and what we can do about it.
When we come back, Mike is going to give us some tips for reducing our exposure to vinyl in our daily life.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking to Mike Schade from Center for Health, Environment & Justice. And we’re talking about vinyl—where it is in our homes, how it can affect our health, and how we can reduce our exposure.
So Mike, how can we reduce our exposure?
MIKE SCHADE: Well, there’s all sorts of safer options on the market, as we have discussed. If you go to our website at PVCFree.org, you can download reports and tip sheets for finding safer alternatives.
Just a couple of tips, if you want it, if you’re shopping for back-to-school supplies for your children or students this summer, you should definitely check out our back-to-school guide to safer school supplies that has information on how to find safer school supplies for your children and family.
Secondly, if you’re building or renovating a home, if you’re doing any renovations in your home, for example, if you’re putting a new flooring in your kitchen, bathroom or hallway, skip the vinyl and look for safer materials like linoleum.
Linoleum is a bio-based material, it doesn’t contain phthalates, and it actually lasts longer than vinyl, and is cheaper over its life cycle as a result. And also, it doesn’t require the use of toxic cleaning products to maintain.
DEBRA: What you’re talking about is natural linoleum, and not the stuff that’s just rolled up in a roll, which could be vinyl itself. I think linoleum is a generic term in some people’s mind, but there is something that’s natural linoleum made from—
MIKE SCHADE: That’s right.
DEBRA: [inaudible 00:27:40]
MIKE SCHADE: Exactly. It’s actually a certified bio-based material. It’s made from linseed oil. And it’s widely available. One of the companies that manufactures it is Forbo, and they have a lot of good information on their website there.
So if you’re doing renovations, that’s one place to start. Also, look at other building materials in your home like siding and roofing.
Thirdly, if you have children and they go to a school, encourage the school to adopt a PVC-free purchasing and building policy.
So if the school is doing any renovations, they should avoid the use of vinyl in building materials. They should adopt a green and healthy purchasing policy because a lot of schools buy a lot of stuff, a lot of products like computers and office supplies. We talked about binders.
So if you’re a parent, and you belong to a PTA, you can work with your PTA to encourage your school district to adopt the healthy PVC-free purchasing policy.
We have a lot of great information on our website that can help you encourage your school district to adopt such a policy, and that information is available at CHEJ.org/GreenPurchasing.
A couple of other tips, if you’re buying a new shower curtain for your home, if you’re looking to replace that old shower curtain, definitely skip the vinyl.
We did a study some years ago that found one new vinyl shower curtain can release over a hundred toxic chemicals into the air. So that new shower curtain smell is actually the smell of hazardous chemicals that you’re breathing in.
Today, a lot of major retailers like Ikea, Bed, Bath & Beyond, even Wal-Mart and Target, most of the curtains that thy sell these days are PVC-free. So in searching for a shower curtain, I prefer a PCV-free one.
DEBRA: Yes, I found that. I was renting an apartment when I was staying in San Francisco a few years ago. I rented a furnished apartment, but it didn’t come with a shower curtain. And I was astonished that I can just go down to Ikea and get a completely odor-free, PVC-free, clear, plastic shower curtain. But I think it was $2.
MIKE SCHADE: That’s great.
DEBRA: It was made from EVA, not PVC. And I think that’s one of the best deals there is because it’s so easy.
Some of these things, it’s just a matter of knowing that there’s an alternative. Why would you go buy a PVC shower curtain if you knew it was toxic, and you knew you could just go to Ikea and buy a safe one for $2.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: And this is a no-brainer choice. We need to have those alternatives. We need to know what those alternatives are. So it’s so great that you’re providing these.
MIKE SCHADE: And if you just want to learn more about this issue, there’s a really fantastic documentary that was done some years ago. It’s called Blue Vinyl.
DEBRA: I have that.
MIKE SCHADE: You do? That’s great.
DEBRA: It’s great.
MIKE SCHADE: It’s actually available on Netflix.
DEBRA: It really makes the point.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, and I was just going to say it’s available on Netflix, so folks, go onto Netflix. You can just rent that from Netflix, and it’s a great educational documentary. And if you want to educate other folks, you can organize a screening of the film in your community, or for your PTA, or community group, whatever it may be.
That’s another great way that we can all raise awareness, by seeing and sharing that film.
DEBRA: I’d love the way, as I’ve been listening to you talk, I know for myself, my work is very focused on what consumers can do individually. But I love the way that everything that you’re talking about is really pouring into community—how you can get other people involved.
I think that’s the thing that most distinguishes your organization, you really are looking at how toxic chemicals affect your communities, and what can you do as a community, as a neighborhood, to work together to find the toxic chemicals that may be present in your community. And to get them out of community buildings like schools, or hospitals, or hazardous waste dumps, or wherever those things are.
And it’s a whole different level of operating. We do need to be taking care of the toxic chemicals in our homes. I love that your organization is community-oriented because that needs to be taken care of too.
In our last three minutes here, can you just give us some examples of school supplies that are mentioned in your report, so that people can just—if they don’t have time to go look at the site or whatever, and then going out shopping right after this show, give them some ideas of things that they can be looking for, what might be toxic, and what might be the replacement that they can choose.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes, absolutely. And we actually have even a wallet-size version of our school supplies guide that folk can download on our website, so that if you’re shopping on the go, and you’re just looking for quick tips.
So a couple of quick ones—if you’re buying a backpack for your children, and you want to avoid backpacks with the shiny, plastic designs. Those often contain vinyl, and often contain phthalates.
Our study last year found some backpacks containing levels of phthalates 50 times higher the safety standard.
We talked about binders, three-ring binders. We recommend avoiding those that are labeled vinyl. You can buy cardboard, fabric-covered, or polypropylene binders.
DEBRA: Are they labeled vinyl if they’re made of vinyl?
MIKE SCHADE: Most of the time, about 90% of the time, when it says vinyl, it’s PVC. So when it says vinyl, you want to avoid that. Sometimes vinyl refers to EVA, which you mentioned before. But most times, if it says vinyl, it’s PVC.
So generally, when you’re shopping for three-ring binders, you want to look for those labeled PVC-free.
A couple of other tips—lunchboxes are often coated with vinyl on the inside, so look for lunchboxes that are abeled PVC-free. You can also use cloth lunch bags.
DEBRA: Or metal lunchboxes.
MIKE SCHADE: Yes. Those are certainly preferable from an environmental health perspective.
Paperclips—if you’re buying paperclips for your kids, stick to the plain, metal ones. The colored paperclips are usually coated with PVC.
And again, we have a very comprehensive guide on our website that folks can download to identify and procure safer school supplies. And again, that’s at www.CHEJ.org. Check out our back-to-school guide. And we’re going to be updating and releasing the 2013 version in just a couple of weeks. But in the meantime, you can check out our version from last year, which a lot of the products mentioned last year are still on store shelves, thankfully—or still available, I should say.
DEBRA: And I will link to that on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can go there, and go to the archive blog. And all these things that we’ve been talking about, I’ll put links to. So you can just go right to those pages, go right to Mike’s blog page, and you’ll see all that, and you can just click to all these different resources.
Mike, thank you so much for being with us. You taught us so much, and I hope you’ll come back again, and we’ll discuss another chemical.
MIKE SCHADE: Great, I would be happy to. Thank you so much for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
MIKE SCHADE: I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Thanks for coming. Again, I just want to tell you that you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. There are so many resources there. In addition to having the guest listed for the entire week, you can also go back and listen to all the shows that I’ve done, and there are biographies of all the guests.
You can go to the archive blog. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and click on archive blog, and you’ll see it.
Also, at the top of the page, on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you’ll see that there are other links to other parts of my website, and the first one is, it says Q&A. And what that is, it’s my green living Q&A that has more than 12,000 entries. It has 3000-something questions, but more than 12,000 answers to those questions. And I’ve been answering these questions for years.
Also, my readers answer them, and our knowledgeable experts answer them. So if you have a question, it may have already been answered. You can just go at the top of the right-hand column on any page on my website.
There’s a search box just for the site, and you can type in something like vinyl, and everything about vinyl will come up, or you can type in shampoo, and you’ll get everything about shampoo.
So thank you for joining me today. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And if you enjoyed this show, please tell your friends, and come back tomorrow.
Toxic-Free Alpaca Pillows for a Good Night’s Sleep
My guest Robbin Martinelli the Founder and Owner of USAlpaca Company, which specializes in Alpaca breeding and exquisite Alpaca Fashions, Alpaca Pillows and Pendleton Alpaca Blankets made in America. A former Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, Robbin’s life now revolves around the agriculture of breeding fine and rare alpacas. At her farm in Virginia, she gives educational interactive tours and follows her passion of creating new American-made alpaca products. Her mission is to provide the consumer with luxuriously healthy products made from all-natural alpaca, called the Royal Fleece, and the Green Livestock. We’ll talk about toxic chemicals in pillows, Robbin’s alpaca sleep pillows (I have one and I’ll tell you all about it!) and why she loves alpaca as a toxic-free material. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/usalpaca-company
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic-Free Alpaca Pillows for a Good Night’s Sleep
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Robbin Martinelli
Date of Broadcast: July 17, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I just love that song. Every time I listen to it, I think, yes, let’s all be points of light doing good in the world to make this world a better place.
On this show, we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world because there are toxic chemicals all around us, in all kinds of consumer products that are on store shelves, and in the environment, and even in our bodies that have been accumulating during the years of our lives. And on this show, we talk about products that are safe and don’t have toxic chemicals in them, how to remove toxic chemicals from your body, and in general, how to live a toxic-free, healthy, happy, productive life.
And we celebrate those things that contribute to having that.
Today is Wednesday, July 17, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we’re going to talk about pillows and what’s toxic about the pillow that you’re sleeping on, and what is a safe pillow to use instead.
But before I get to my guest, I want to talk to you about changing habits. And I actually had a big success this morning with that. Last week, I talked about skin brushing, about a post that I had put on my Toxic Free Nutrition Blog at ToxicFreeNutrition.com. And that’s still the first post today, if you want to go there. And if you’re listening at another time, you can always go to the search box on my website, which is in the upper right hand column, and you can type in “skin brushing” or whatever it is that you’re looking for. And that item will come up very easily.
But the point about skin brushing is that it stimulates your lymph system, and not only does it make your skin glow, but it actually moves the lymph in your body, so that it can be removed, that the lymph system is not like your blood circulation that’s being pumped by your heart. You actually have to do something to get the lymph moving.
And the two best choices exercise and skin brushing.
And skin brushing will help bring nutrients and oxygen to the outer layers of your skin, it aids digestion and kidney function, it reduces cellulite, and it also stimulates your endocrine system, which is all those hormones that help you lose weight, and give you sex drive—all those good things, and benefit every part of your body.
So do you think that I was brushing my skin even though I knew all about this, and if you go to my blog, you’ll see a picture of my own personal skin brush hanging on the bathroom wall. But do you think I do this every day? Well, no. And after I wrote this, I thought, you know what? I really need to be brushing my skin.
And so does everybody else. This is a quick and easy thing that we can do every morning while we’re standing there, waiting for the shower water to heat up.
And so I decided a week ago that I was going to brush my skin, dry brush my skin, every morning while I was waiting for the shower water to heat up. And day 1 went by, and I didn’t do it. Day 2, I forget. The brush is sitting right there, and I forget. It’s hanging right there, I should say.
So finally, a couple of days ago, I took the non-toxic felt-tip marker, and I wrote on my glass shower door, “Brush your skin.”
And I still didn’t do it.
But you know what? This morning, I did. I remembered. And it was just a matter of making a decision and being determined that I am going to remember this, that I’m going to put this, make this a habit like brushing my teeth. I brush my teeth every morning. We wash our faces in the morning, or whatever it is that we’ve gotten into the habit of doing.
And doing something like skin brushing can be an inexpensive, quick, feel-good thing that you can do to help your body eliminate toxic chemicals, but it’s a matter of establishing that habit, putting it in your routine. I did it, and you can too.
Today, my guest is Robbin Martinelli, and she is the founder and owner of US Alpaca Company. Welcome to the show, Robbin.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Well, good morning, good afternoon, depending on where you are in the country.
DEBRA: Robbin specializes in alpaca breeding and exquisite alpaca fashions, alpaca pillows, and Pendleton alpaca blankets, all made in America.
So Robbin, would you tell us how you got interested—I know you have a lot of information on your website about why pillows are toxic, which I want to hear about in a moment. But first, I want to know what was it that happened in your life that made you get interested in this toxic issue? What about it was so important that made you stop doing whatever it was you were doing before, and decide to give us a toxic-free pillow?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Well, we actually got involved with the alpaca industry about 12 years ago. And we started with about five alpacas. And the reason we got involved with alpaca was because it was a growing industry with a fabulous end product, and a fabulous fiber quality product.
So we were actually very embedded in just the alpaca industry for many years.
We were looking at things to make with our alpaca fiber. So most of our fiber goes to make Pendleton alpaca blankets and things like that, and we use the blanket part, the part that looks like a saddle on the alpaca to do that.
But we were looking at the seconds, which was the neck part and the part around that looks like the saddle part. And we said, what could we do with that?
My husband had actually come up with the idea of making pillows out of it. And as a researcher and a professor, I started looking into the pillow industry. And what I found made me very angry.
When I started researching the pillow industry, I got so angry at what they were doing, and I knew that we had the answer for it.
On top of that, I had a personal experience, which in hindsight, now made sense to me. My father was actually in a fire years ago, and his fiancée died in a fire, and he literally was blown up three times the size from the toxic chemicals that he had breathed in from the fire.
My son is a fireman, and he will tell you that it’s not the fires that burn people or kill people anymore. It’s the toxic chemicals in our lives, in our plastic, in our houses, that actually cause the strychnine effect in the house, and literally, people are dying from this poison that is being released before the firemen could get in to save them.
Well, looking back on those things, it came to me, when I started researching the alpaca, what we could use and putting it into the pillow industry, all of the toxic chemicals that were in our pillows, and I was so alarmed, but I also knew we had the answer for it.
DEBRA: Tell us some of the things that you found about how toxic pillows are because I know on your website, you say if you change only one thing to make your lives healthier, it should be your pillow.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: That’s exactly right. Pillows are made of Styrofoam, which is contains polystyrene. Now, this is across the board from your $8 run-of-the-mill box store pillow, all the way to those memory foams and things like that, which are basically, one solid block of chemicals sitting on your bed.
These petroleum-based chemicals are known to cause symptoms of fatigue, difficulty sleeping, nervous disorders, menstrual cycle problems, alterations in blood cells, chromosome and lymphatic abnormalities and carcinogenic effects in humans.
They’re being directly relayed to things like ADHD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autism—all of these horrible things that are happening in our country are being directly related back to these chemicals, which are found primarily in the pillows that we sleep on.
We’ve got to change the things in our lives—when we buy a carpet, next time, buy a natural one, and things like that. But where is your face every single night? It’s in your pillow. We sleep restlessly because our immune systems are trying to fight that stuff off every single night.
When we take those chemicals out of our bedrooms, we sleep in a more peaceful state. Our body literally becomes at rest.
These things are dramatic for us. Changing that pillow to a natural pillow can make all of the difference in your lifestyle, in your health, and absolutely in every way possible.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk more about that after we come back from the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ret talking with Robbin Martinelli, owner and founder of US Alpaca, about toxic things, toxic chemicals, in your sleeping pillow, and a safe alternative by using alpaca pillows.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Robbin Matinelli, founder and owner of US Alpaca Company. And they make all kinds of things from alpaca, including toxic-free pillows to sleep on.
Now, I actually have one of these pillows, and I can honestly tell you, I’ve had it for I think since last September. And it is the best pillow I’ve ever slept on, honestly, because it has more resilience. And I’ve slept on every kind of natural fill in a pillow that
I think is on the market.
And what happens is that first of all, the pillows are generally not filled with very much fiber, and also, the other fibers tend to mat down, and then I need to replace the pillow after a period of time because it’s just flat, or it gets hard—cotton gets really hard.
And in all these months, this alpaca pillow has been tremendously resilient. It is stuffed as much as you could possibly stuff it with this wonderful, resilient, soft alpaca wool. And it’s just comfortable night, after night, after night. I just love putting my head on it.
I just can’t say enough good things about this pillow.
And Robbin says on her website that this is the last pillow you’ll ever need to buy because if you need the pillow to be refreshed or have more wool put it on or whatever, you just send it back, and she’ll take care of it.
I can’t even imagine sending it back because it’s held up so well already for all these months. So it’s a really excellent product. I am just very impressed with it.
So Robbin, let’s talk more about some of the other chemicals that are in the pillows because you have quite a list here on your website, and some of them I didn’t even know about. I’m looking at your page where you’re listing other chemicals that the Consumer Product Safety Commission lists, used in bedding and in pillows.
But first, before we talk about those, let’s talk about fire retardants because I know that fire retardants are in the news a lot.
And people have a lot of attention on fire retardants. But fire retardants are in more sofas and mattresses. They’re in pillows too.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: They’re in pillows, and they’re in 85% of baby products. The fire retardant aspect, the idea behind it was that this poly-filled stuff burns very quickly. And so they were trying to put something on that was actually going to try to eliminate that. But it’s not effective. It’s only 60% effective.
And so what’s happening is, not only are you breathing in the toxic chemicals from the poly, you’re also breathing in now all of these fire retardant chemicals.
Now, one of my biggest concerns is children. We’re finding out in our research that toxicity levels are showing up in moms.
These tests that have been done by—there’s an article out by Green Living. It was done in 2009 in Eco Friendly Magazine, it actually talks about this, and it states that in the test groups that were tested for polystyrenes, 100% were showing these styrene in their fat cells, and they could not find one lactating mother who didn’t test positive for these chemicals in her breast milk.
We’re handing this down to our children. Babies, just two hours old are already showing 200 of these chemicals and pesticides in their blood cells. Parents of these kids are showing 500. And 90% of the United States are showing these chemicals in our urine.
This is unbelievable to me. This is something that, for me, it turned my head three-ways. I just couldn’t believe that we’re doing this to our children and our moms, having this happen to them.
The one thing that we know about our pillows, alpaca is naturally fire-resistant. We don’t need any of those chemicals.
Because of the alpaca’s properties, it doesn’t burn. So we don’t need any of these chemicals added to our product.
We are 100% natural product. The fiber comes from the alpaca. We don’t call it wool because wool comes from sheep, and wool has lanoline in it. Wool has guard hair in it. Wool is actually twice a heavy.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that you didn’t call it wool.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: No, it’s actually—
DEBRA: Tell us more about that. What do you call it?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: We call it fiber. Alpaca fiber, that’s right, because it has a completely different make-up to it than wool does. Wool is twice the weight of alpaca. Wool has lanoline, which is a grease, which is taken out of the wool with a harsh chemical, usually. Wool also has guard hair in it, and things like that that make it allergic to people.
Alpaca is a miracle fiber. There’s nothing like it. Alpacas are rare. There’s only three-million in the entire world, and 94% of them are still in South America.
Peru holds the most alpaca at two-million, but the United States is the second largest holder at less than 200,000 alpaca.
These are an unbelievable animal. They’re the most expensive livestock in the world, and the most sought after livestock in the world. And the reason for that is because of their fiber quality.
It compares to silk, not wool. It has a very silky feel to it.
DEBRA: Yes, it does.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: On top of that, it has all of these fabulous things about it. It’s naturally water-repellant. It’s naturally fire-resistant. It is naturally hypoallergenic. It has a hollow core system to it, so it’s naturally mite-resistant.
All of these things were the properties that we were looking at when we decided to put them in our pillows. We couldn’t have asked for a better product. And of course, mother nature had provided it for us.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. And I’m glad that you brought that up about the wool because I thought that any fur that comes from, I don’t know what else to call it, any hair, I guess, that comes from an animal, like a sheep, that it was all called wool, like cashmere comes from a goat, but I thought it was called cashmere wool.
So I think some people have confusion about this. I know I did. And so they lump everything together and say, if they’re allergic to sheep’s wool, they’ll be allergic to the hair of any other animal. But that’s not true.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: That is totally false. That’s one of the things we talk about when we do our farm tours every day is that wool is completely different than alpaca fiber in every single way that you can imagine. If you are allergic to wool, you would not probably be allergic to alpaca because it’s not wool.
DEBRA: That’s great to know. And we’ll talk more about alpacas when we come back from this message. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re talking with Robbin Martinelli of US Alpaca.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Robbin Martinelli, founder and owner of US Alpaca Company.
Robbin, the other day, I was talking to somebody actually on this show, and we were talking about mattress toppers. And she needed a mattress that was softer than most natural mattresses. And I said to her, I thought of this, and I even said it to her that I thought you should make an alpaca mattress topper. Do you have any plans to do that?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: We’re hoping to do more products down the road. The problem is that alpaca fiber is hard to get, and to do these products in any kind of large volume. So it’s going to continue to be a specialty product. Everything that we do is considered still a specialty product.
All of our pillows, we also do a travel pillow and smaller kids pillow. We also do a nursing pillow and a side [inaudible 00:18:31].
So those are the things we’ve been working on right now to try to bring that out into the public. But yes, the problem is the fact that we only have less than 200,000 alpaca in the United States. We can’t grow the herds fast enough for the demand of alpaca in the United States, let alone the world.
DEBRA: Well, I think that isn’t there a movement towards having more alpacas?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Well, alpacas are a growing business. The alpacas were only allowed into the country for a few short years from 1983 up until the end of the 90’s. At that point, the doors were shut, and no more alpacas were allowed in the United States.
Every alpaca that comes in has a registration number, and those numbers are all attached to DNA blood cards. The business is about as short as it could be. The DNA blood cards show parentage, as well as ownership, and who that animal is.
Now, what we’re doing here is we’re breeding animals for the highest quality. Alpacas still run wild predominantly in South America. There are only a handful of farms. Most of them are still in wild herds, as they have been for over 6000 years. So it’s a completely different product than what we’re doing here is raising the highest quality alpacas that we can in the United States.
DEBRA: I love alpacas. I don’t know that everybody, the average person, who might be listening has maybe ever even seen an alpaca, or know what they look like. But I’ve seen alpacas. I’ve been to alpaca farms, and I’ve seen them at the county fair and things like that.
And they’re just wonderful, wonderful animals that I always feel peaceful around them.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: I can’t believe you said that, Debra, because you want to know what animal is associated with peacefulness. When mythological Mother Nature of the Peruvians gave them the alpacas in the story, Pachmana is her name.
And she said to them that this animal would bring peace in their life, and it would provide for them everything they needed. As long as they cared for the alpaca, it would continue to bring them peace.
And we named our pillows Pachmana pillows after that concept.
It’s the same thing. The alpaca brings a peacefulness in your life. The pillows bring a peacefulness to your sleeping. It really is there.
I can’t tell you why but there just is a peacefulness around all of the products, as well as the animal.
DEBRA: There are. I’ve never worn an alpaca sweater, but I can imagine sleeping under an alpaca blanket.
When I’m around alpacas—I have been around alpacas, like I said, on a farm, or at the fair, and I don’t even know these alpacas, and they come. It sounds like an alpaca pet. But they come over to the fence, and they’re just right there, and they let me touch them, and they lick my hand, and things like that. And they have these beautiful eyes. And they just have this feeling of peacefulness that makes me feel peaceful too.
They’re not aggressive kind of animals, or scary animals. It’s just the kind of animal that you would just want to cuddle up with and sleep.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: And that’s why they’re great in pillows.
DEBRA: As far as I’m concerned, you couldn’t have picked a better fiber for a sleeping pillow because the animal itself has that quality, in addition to its fiber having that quality.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Alpacas are cousins to the llamas. People are very confused. They think they’re mini llamas.
Alpacas weigh about 150 pounds. A llama gets up to 400 pounds. A llama’s primary use is as a guard. It has a guard and a territorial personality. And the reason is because it’s using that spit as a weapon.
Alpacas are just the opposite. Alpacas run away. They are a shy creature. They have no way to defend themselves other than to run.
The difference in personality, as well as price, a llama cost about $2500. A good quality alpaca sells for $35,000 to $45,000 on average, going up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even up into the million-dollar ranges. They are one of the most expensive livestock in the world, as I said, and one of the most sought after, because of the properties of their fiber.
DEBRA: Wow. Well, I’ll have to really appreciate my pillow even more than I already do.
Let’s talk about how alpacas are raised. What do you feed them? Do they just hang out in the alpaca pen? What’s the life of an alpaca like?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Alpacas are a very hardy animal. They’re part of the camelid family. So we know how camels are, how hardy they are. Alpacas are as hardy, if not hardier than the camel. They can do everything the camel can do, except store water. But they also come from some of the highest elevations in the world, like the Indian mountains, and places like Machu Picchu, which you and I would have a hard time breathing in.
Because of their hollow shaft system, they actually are like a polar bear, in a way. They can withstand the heat and the cold.
That hollow shaft system works like a ventilation system on the animal. It keeps it warm when it needs to be warm, and it keeps it cool, when it needs to be cool. And that’s why our pillows do not get hot because what it does on the animal, it does on us. It does with us. It’s the same thing.
DEBRA: It has that breathing quality that’s really good. It’s not like a plastic pillow or foam pillow. My head keeps very cool at night. I’m very comfortable.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Exactly. And that’s one of the things people ask us a lot about pillows in general, is do they get hot. No because the alpaca fiber is a natural fiber versus this poly garbage that is nothing but chemicals, and it’s basically the plastic.
That’s why you’re getting hot. That’s why you’re breathing in these chemicals and getting sick.
The natural products, there’s no comparison to them. Mother Nature knows best. Let’s just face it. We can’t ever compete nor should we be competing. We should be going back to natural things.
DEBRA: Exactly.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Exactly. I agree.
DEBRA: And we’ll talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And if you want to go see an alpaca, and take a look at these pillows, you can go to USAlpacaCompany.com, or you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and there’s a link there. And if you don’t see the link, you could just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and type “alpaca” in the search box, and it will come right up.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking with Robbin Martinelli, founder and owner of US Alpaca, about pillows.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Robbin Martinelli, founder and owner of US Alpaca Company, which specializes in alpaca breeding, exquisite alpaca fashions, alpaca pillows, Pendleton alpaca blankets, all made in America. And you can go to their website at USAlpacaCompany.com.
Robbin, tell us more about how the alpacas are raised and the fiber is removed. I’m assuming that you shear it like a sheep would be sheared for wool?
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: It’s similar. I want to invite all of your guests any time if they’re in the area to come on over to our farm. The name of our farm is Smith Mountain Lake Farm, and we’re in Hardy, Virginia. And we’re in the Smith Mountain Lake area of Virginia, which is near the Blue Ridge Mountain.
And we do farm tours every single day, all day long. It’s a $5-fee, and it’s about a two-hour tour. And that’s exactly what we teach everybody. When you come in, we teach you all about the history, the science of the alpaca. We also bring you to the moms and babies. We teach you about gestation periods, and the lifestyle of the nursing and the breeding.
We bring you all around the farm, we teach you about the behaviors of the animals. You get to feed them, hold them, hug them, touch them.
And then we bring you back inside, and we teach you about fiber. We have you judge it, we have your hands on it, we teach you about how we make the products we make, and what’s so important about the alpaca industry in general.
It’s doing two things. It’s bringing back the textile industry to the United States. Why? Alpacas are raised here, alpaca products are made here, and are sold here. We cannot raise the herds fast enough for the demand of alpaca fiber in the United States, let alone the world.
The next thing is, it’s bringing back the family farms. Alpacas are a fully insurable animal. They’re not considered exotic.
They’re considered livestock—the most expensive livestock in the world and the most sought after livestock in the world.
And because of that, they’re an insurable investment, and there’s also a write-off for up to $139,000 to buy them with, Section 179(a) of the Tax Code.
So it’s one of the best investments out there whether you want to be a farmer or not. Some people buy alpacas for purely for the investment. We keep them on our farm for $3 a day, if that’s something you’d want to do.
So there are so many things to learn about the alpaca. The alpaca is an easy animal to care for. They’re grazers. They have only one row of teeth, they have a hard plate on the top, like your gum without any teeth on it, and so they mow the grass.
They’re actually the green livestock. There’s no other animal out there that’s as nature-friendly as alpacas are. They have pads on their feet, not hooves. They actually leave no footprint.
They also are communal poopers, and they do this as a way of marking important places to them, which keeps the pastures clean.
The alpacas have no odor. Their fiber has no odor. And their manure, which we call beans, virtually has no odor.
They’re also a quiet animal. They hum to each other. They hum to their baby.
DEBRA: I love it.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: They’re an animal that people want in their communities. There are people out there who just have never understood the importance of the alpaca because they don’t know enough of them.
There are only 4000 alpaca farms in the Unites States today. Remember, this business just started in 1983 when the alpacas were first allowed out of their country. Before that, socialism had been in those countries, which stopped anything from alpaca being sent out.
1983, the first that alpacas are actually allowed out of their country and into the United States.
And so this is what is important about learning about these animals. They are a magical animal. And again, their fiber is absolutely fabulous. The animals are sweet. There’s nothing like them. And the products that we make reflect that.
Our pillows are sold nationally. We have people who call me and e-mail me whose children have had all kinds of issues of asthma and allergies, and they’re sleeping on our pillows, and it’s the first time that they’re not having reactions. They’re having a positive quality of life changes in their lives simply because they’re changing pillows.
Pillows are where your faces eight hours a day. You’re breathing those chemicals in. It’s affecting you. It’s being called the silent pandemic of all of these things—neural development things, neurological, as well as asthma, infertility. It’s through the roof in our country. Why?
These chemicals in those pillows, these polystyrene actually lower the testosterone levels in men and the hormone levels in women. This is why infertility is such a problem in the United States because of things like the pillows you’re sleeping on.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. I just want to interrupt you because I know that this might sound fantastic to somebody listening to this, that a pillow would do that. But I’ve been researching this stuff for 30 years, and what Robbin is saying is exactly right.
We do need to be changing our pillows. We do need to be changing our beds.
We need to be changing everything, and this pillow is—I can’t recommend a better pillow for all the reasons that she’s been talking about. This is the pillow that I sleep on. I think it’s the perfect material for a pillow, and alpacas just are—I think that in some ways, some people think that we shouldn’t be using animal materials. But when we look at all these benefits of alpacas, it just is amazing.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: Why wouldn’t be using them? The animals are not being harmed in any way. This is a byproduct of their fiber. You asked about shearing. We shear them once a year in our farm, and our shearers actually come in from New Zealand and the United States. And these guys are amazing. The two guys that we use quite a bit are fourth generation shearers, and they’re 24 years old.
They’ll shear all 50, 60 of our alpaca in about three hours. It’s an art to watch these guys.
So anything in the alpaca business, any business that you can think that can be related to alpaca is a very lucrative business because the alpaca companies, the alpaca industry is out there, and we’re looking for all of these great product and great quality things that we can bring into our own farm life.
Like I said, it’s bringing back the family farm, it’s bringing back the textile industry. Alpaca is one of the only things you could wear fur because you’re not killing the animal. You’re actually shearing it, and not harming any animal, and having the most luxurious, most beautiful product that you can absolutely imagine to be wearing.
DEBRA: Tell us what else you make. Tell us more about your other products beyond the pillows.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: The products that our farm directly makes are going to be our pillows which are made from the seconds, which is the neck and the part around that blanket area. The blankets of our animals go to make Pendleton alpaca blankets. And we sell them on our farm as well. It’s greatly reduced from Pendleton, but we actually use all of the blankets for that.
And that uses up most of the products that we have. We actually sell other products, socks and things like that, that are also made in the United States. But we also bring in things from Peru, and the reason that we bring in things from Peru is because the fashion industry is still owned by the Peruvians.
They’ve been doing it for years. They’ve got over two-million alpacas, and the cultural artistry in what they do is fabulous.
We’re not quite there yet. But I do have a piece of really interesting news. Not this Winter Olympics, but the next Winter Olympics, it looks like Ralph Lauren is actually going to be using American alpaca for our Olympians. And that is pretty exciting stuff.
DEBRA: That is exciting. Well, Robbin, it’s been great to have you on the show. I’ll just say again how much I love your pillow, and it’s been great to hear about alpacas. The next time I’m in the Virginia area or driving through, I’m going to come see your alpaca farm, and in the meantime, I’m going to see if I have an alpaca farm here locally where I live, and just go visit them because it’s just a wonderful experience.
So thank you for being with us.
ROBBIN MARTINELLI: It’s my pleasure. And any of you are welcome to come to Smith Mountain Lake Farm, and our website is SmithMountainLakeFarm.com. Give us a call. We’d love to see you and get your hands on and get your alpaca hugs.
DEBRA: So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, there are many things that you can find, in addition to the link to be listening live to this show, which you probably already found. There are also the archives of all the shows that I’ve done, and this show, as well as all the shows in the future, and all the shows from the past are available for you to listen to. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and click on “archived show blog.” It’s right there under my picture, and “archived show blog” and you can look at all the shows that we’ve been doing.
I’m just continuously amazed and pleased every day at all the wonderful information that come from all the guests. And you can also find out, I publish the schedule of all the upcoming guests for the week at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
You can listen anywhere in the world, listen to the archives 24/7.
Also, if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, across the top, there is a menu of different parts of my website. Q&A has thousands of questions that I’ve answered. And Debra’s List has lots of products that are toxic-free.
Just go and search around my site, and you’ll find lots of things.
Thank you for joining me today, and tell your friends. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Nuwave2 Cooktop
Question from natalie
How safe is the Nuwave2 cooktop I’m concerned about emissions from this appliance. Thank you
Debra’s Answer
Has anyone used one of these? It looks great! Haven’t seen one yet. But just want to mention, for all of you who want a lead-free slow cooker, it looks like you can put your own pot on this cooktop and program it like a slow cooker.
I need to go take a look at this…
Organic Food Trends From the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal recently ran two articles about organic food: Would Americans Be Better Off Eating a Mostly Organic Diet? followed by A Gap in Organic Food Chain
Their coverage about the health benefits of eating organic food was, of course, “balanced,” leaving the reader to decide which interpretation of the facts is true.
But those of us who want to continue to eat organic food should be aware of the problems regarding its continued availability. Read the article. It redoubled my commitment to utilizing my property to grow as much organic food as I can to share with others (I can grow more than I can eat in my yard) and supporting local organic farms. Of course, agribusiness is trying to grow organic, but we don’t have to accept their shortage. We CAN grow our own food locally, individually and together. More and more it looks like that’s the direction we need to go.
Create a Beautiful Toxic-Free Home
My guest Lydia Corser is a green interior designer and the owner of Greenspace, a green remodeling store in Santa Cruz, California. Combining creativity with a focus on green interior design since 1995 has proven to be a fulfilling combination for Lydia. After helping launch greenspace, Lydia purchased that business in 2007. Today, she is as happy to mix paint as design a green kitchen. Lydia received her Bachelor’s of Science degree in Wildlife Biology in 1986, and an Advanced Certificate and Associate’s Degree in Science in Interior Design from West Valley College in 1998. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals in interior decorating products and how to choose safe products for your home. www.ecolydia.com, www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/greenspace
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Create a Beautiful Toxic Free Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lydia Corser
Date of Broadcast: July 15, 2013
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. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around, we don’t have to get sick from them, or be unhappy about them, or have them affect our body, mind or spirit. We can take control of our lives, and choose to not have toxic chemicals in them.
We could remove toxic chemicals from our homes, from our bodies, and have the lives that we want. And that’s what this show is about.
I’ve got lots of wonderful guests every day. I’m just amazed at how incredible my guests are. So I hope that you’re joining me, so that you can hear all of them. And if you’ve missed any of them, you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the archives because we’ve got just amazing, amazing people saying wonderful things every day.
Today is Monday, July 15, 2013.
Let me go back. Every day, Monday through Friday.
So today is Monday, July 15, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. No thunderstorms on the horizon. So we’ll have power and no problem with that.
And today, we’re going to talk about how to make your toxic-free home beautiful.
I’ve got a great, green interior designer standing by to talk to us. But before we go to her, I want to give you one of my favorite quotes. And this is from William Morris.
William Morris was a designer in England at the time in the late 1800s, just when there was a shift going on between artisan production and industrialization.
So he was looking at the beauty of artisan designs versus the machine-like design and mentality of industrialization and fighting against it in his life.
And he said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
When I was in England, I visited his house, and he did have a beautiful house, but it was very simple. His designs—they’re hard to describe, but if you were to see them, you would recognize them. You just probably don’t know they’re by William
Morris. They’re arts and crafts-y designs.
And he also said, “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
And that’s what we’re talking about here is taking an interest in what you have in your homes, how they’re affecting your health, how they’re beautiful or not beautiful.
And he also said, “A good way to rid one’s self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order, it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to his creative character.”
So if you’re feeling uncomfortable about toxic chemicals in your life, the thing to do is to do something, that there is so much that can be done. We’ll talk about that Monday through Friday on this show. And just do one of those things, and see how good you feel about it.
So my guest today is Lydia Corser. She’s a green interior designer, the owner of a green remodeling store in Santa Cruz, California called Green Space.
Hi, Lydia. Thanks for being with me.
LYDIA CORSER: Hi, Debra. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your life, and how you came to be a green interior designer and not just an interior designer that puts toxic materials all over the people’s homes.
LYDIA CORSER: I know a lifelong environmentalist. And I have an undergraduate degree in wildlife biology with botany and English minors. And then discovered after college, when there was a certain president in office who thought that once you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all, that I couldn’t get a job in my field.
And also, I’m a very creative, artistic person, and science really wasn’t probably the best path for me that I had decided in high school that I had to save the planet.
And so that was the best path that I could see at the time.
And after working for a while to pay down my student load, I ended up taking an introduction to interior design course and loved it.
So I went back and got a degree in interior design, and finished in 1998, five months pregnant with my daughter. And in the midst of that, realized that the built environment is responsible for 30%, at least, of the waste on our planet, and started to think about indoor air quality because sick building syndrome was becoming more and more widely known, and decided to focus my career on green interiors.
And at that point, only really commercial interiors were being supplied with green materials. And so it was quite an uphill battle, and I had to focus all of my student projects in design school on my own because there wasn’t as much knowledge as there is now.
And when I got out of school, I used to say that I was a green interior designer. People used to ask me if that meant that I only worked with the color green. So you can see how far we’ve come.
DEBRA: We have come quite a bit—yes. Go ahead with your story.
LYDIA CORSER: There’s not much more to tell. I have a certificate as a certified kitchern designer, so I’ve done a lot of kitchen and bath work. One of my favorite things is also color consulting. And the store was really the embodiment of my frustration at the distribution channels for green materials. I was carrying the things around in the back of my car. And as they became more available, I wanted a place where people could come and know that everything was pre-screened green. That’s what I tell them.
And so I’m not just looking at toxins. I’ve looked at a lot of different aspects of products to decide what to have in the store. It’s a struggle because there are so many different priorities that people are weighing, and there are no perfectly green products.
None.
DEBRA: Exactly.
LYDIA CORSER: So that’s my story. So I’ve had this store for about almost seven years now. And I’m one of the very few to survive in the Bay Area. The economy has been really hard on the construction industry, as you know. But we’re hanging in there.
DEBRA: Good. Good for you.
LYDIA CORSER: Thank you.
DEBRA: So usually, the guests that I have are focused on some toxics issue. And you’re coming from a green perspective. I just want to say something about the term green, and the viewpoint of green. And you can comment on this too, if you’d like.
There was a period in my life where I, starting in 1987, after researching things, toxic and non-toxic, I said, “Oh, my god.
There’s an environment out there, and I’m affecting it, and it’s affecting me.” And I decided I needed to be green.
But what happened, as I brought all those green criteria into my work, many, many years ago, before the word green was even being used in 1987, what I found was that people who were considering the environment were considering recycling and resource use and clear cutting forest, and all these other things that are very important issues. But what I found over a period of time was that the issues of toxics were not being given the same kind of consideration, like some of those other issues.
And so what I decided to do was just go back to focusing on toxics. Not that the other issues aren’t important, but to me, if people are putting toxic chemicals in the environment from the manufacturer or use of consumer products, that’s doing more to harm life than anything else.
We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break.
My guest is Lydia Corser, green interior designer and owner of Green Space, a green remodeling store. She’s also online. You can find Green Space on my website, DebrasList.com, and we’ll talk with Lydia after the break.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Lydia Corser, green interior designer and owner of Green Space, a green remodeling store in Santa Cruz, California and online.
So Lydia, let’s continue what I was saying before the break and tell me your viewpoint about what the word green means.
LYDIA CORSER: Well, I think environmentalists and green people and toxic experts can talk all day about semantics. I think that it’s really an evolution of thought, as you described it. You start out from one perspective and more and more people now are coming from the perspective where you and I have arrived, that these toxic chemicals and synthesized chemicals that we’ve been creating, humankind, are just the most important thing to focus on really, as ingredients in everything—in food, in indoor air, or finishes, in interiors, and so many aspects of our lives—what our cars are made out of. Everything.
So even though I came from an environmentalist point of view, I’m very much on the same page with you, and I’m feeling like even the US Green Building Council this year, their major focus is on health. They finally figured out how to reach people. And I just can’t believe that it’s taken so long that I’m so happy about it because that’s been the thing that I have used to talk to people about this stuff, and to warn them about what carpet and all these different materials that we use on interiors are comprised of.
And it’s, as you know, a great struggle to find products that are made from natural materials in non-deadly combinations. And I am happy that I can offer them to the public, to the retail store. It’s great.
DEBRA: I’m happy that you’re offering them too because they’re not the kind of products that you can find by going into regular stores. And I wish there were stores like yours in every community in the world.
LYDIA CORSER: But really, the best thing would be is if we didn’t need stores like mine, and they were everywhere, and those were the only choices that we had.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. And just in that regard, I want to say that in 1990, I started a business that I’m no longer part of, but I started a business with some partners where the idea was we were going to open green boutiques—a chain of green boutiques. And so we started doing R&D and I finally said to them, “You know what? What is really needed is for there not to be a need for green boutiques.”
And I think that what’s going to happen is these green products—at the time, we were looking at selling things like recycled toilet paper, and things like that which you couldn’t buy at Staples, but now, you can.
And I said, you know what the future is going to be is that these green products are going to be in regular stores, and there would be no need for green boutiques.
And that is actually what happened.
LYDIA CORSER: To some extent.
DEBRA: To some extent is that we now see these products that I was thinking we needed a boutique for, are now mainstream source.
So that idea didn’t fly. The company went off to do something else to sell green products actually to mainstream stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and places like that.
But that’s how far we’ve come, where in 1990, which isn’t so long ago, in 1990, I felt we needed a green boutique. And now, we can find those products, a lot of those products in regular stores.
But still, the interior design products are more difficult to find—things like paints and carpets and all those things you sell.
Before we get into all your safe alternatives, let’s just talk about what are some of the toxic chemicals that you have found in interior design products that you felt we need to not be exposed to.
LYDIA CORSER: You’re even more of an expert than I am on the actual chemistry. Volatile organic compounds or VOCs, as you know, are known carcinogens that are aromatic. And they can also just be severe irritants because some people have sensitivities and they’ve become very acute because of prolonged or intense exposure to various things.
So those are the things that are the most dangerous really, formaldehyde and so on. There’s a long list.
So I try to focus on products that have zero VOCs whenever I can find them or minimal VOCs that contain plant oils and things that are less harmful.
DEBRA: I do that as well. So you said that you screen things, that everything is already screened for green. Can you tell us more about your screening process? I know that for myself that what I do is my first question is always, is it toxic or not toxic?
And I choose the ones that are not toxic. And once it passes that screen, then I look at the other green things.
So what is it that you’re looking at? And if we run into a commercial, we’ll just continue after the break.
LYDIA CORSER: I look at the exact same things. I look for stuff at materials safety datasheets. I actually use your book, Home Safe Home, frequently to look up chemicals. That’s why I’m a little intimidated about this part of our conversation.
But every day, in this kind of work, is very humbling. So we’re learning all the time.
And so that’s what I look at toxins first and foremost.
So in flooring, it’s going to be the adhesives and the finishes because the materials are typically natural, but the binders and then the way they’re finished on the top to make them durable.
And then in any liquid like paint stain, again, the adhesive or finish, same kind of thing, looking at the chemical composition and trying to find things that are going to be what customers need, as far as durability and maintenance, while not poisoning them.
And then I look at—I like to look at where things are manufactured. I try to find out about the social and economic justice aspects of products. And I look at proximity, if they’re made locally or in the US, or in North America. That’s better because there’s less transportation. And a carbon footprint, which also affects our environment and the air that we breathe.
DEBRA: So we’re going to take a break now. And we’ll back with Lydia Corser in just a few minutes. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lydia Corser. She’s a green interior designer and the owner of a store called Green Space that sells green and non-toxic products that you would use in the interior of your home.
So Lydia, let’s just go and talk about some of these wonderful products that you have. Basically, the types of products fall into categories of paints and stain sealers and finishes and as an alternative plaster. Then there are floorings, there are countertops and tile. And then you have some other products, solar tubes to bring light into the space, and mattresses.
But I’d like to focus on—obviously, we’re not going to have time to talk about everything you have here because you have so many products. But let’s start with paints and what you put on your walls because I know that that’s a big source of toxic exposure for people. In fact, I think that carpet is the number one thing because if people have carpets, synthetic carpet in their home, it’s an ongoing source of time-released toxic chemicals that goes on for years.
But I think that a lot of people get a big toxic exposure when they paint, or put a finish on a wood surface. And then that continues to outgas and outgas, sometimes for years.
So let’s talk about pain first, and then let’s go on to flooring.
So tell us about the various paints that you offer.
LYDIA CORSER: Well, we have, in most of the categories, with carpet too, we have from the greenest of the green, I call it the crunchiest granola, to the lighter green products. And that’s to the paint too. We carry milk paint, which is made from milk casein and mineral pigments. And that works really well for wood finishes.
We have a lot of beekeepers in our area, and they are using it like crazy on their beehives, which I’m happy about.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful.
LYDIA CORSER: Yes. Children’s furniture and all those kinds of things. And then it can be sealed with tung oil from the Chinese nut. And that makes it really durable interior or exterior.
And then we also carry a clay paint, natural clay paint. So it has kale and clay and mineral pigments. And it’s a lovely, lovely wall finish.
Not everybody has the appetite for venture that some of these natural products require. Often they require a little gentler use, or more maintenance, which, unfortunately, in our zip, zip world, people often sadly aren’t willing to invest.
So we do carry two brands of more mainstream paint. They’re both zero VOC paints. And our tinting machine, we have a very sophisticated tinting machine and matching system. So we use zero VOC pigments in our paints, so that they maintain their zero VOC status as they become—
DEBRA: I think that’s an important point to make because there are zero VOC paints, and then they put VOC pigments in them. And that’s something that people need to be aware is going on.
LYDIA CORSER: I’ve had people come in to the store just distressed because they bought a brand of pain that was carried in a more mainstream store that I also carry, and it’s a zero VOC brand, but when it was tinted, and especially in the darker colors, it becomes, of course, more and more noticeable because there are more and more VOCs to create those colors. And the outgassing, I think, you can probably speak more accurately than I, but I read one study that said that paint can continue outgassing for at least three years.
DEBRA: Yes, I read that too, and longer.
LYDIA CORSER: We all thought that it was 30 days or something, but that’s absolutely not the case at all. So it’s crucial that people understand this.
DEBRA: And especially if you’re painting a whole house like if you’re remodeling and you paint every room in the house. That multiples the amount of VOCs.
But even if you’re in a room, say, you’ve just painted your bedroom, and then you go into that room every night, and close the door, that’s not a lot of ventilation.
LYDIA CORSER: And one other important is actually drywall, it goes underneath that paint because most of that has a lot of vinyl in it because it’s a plasticizer that makes it easy for the laborers to work, and it dries more quickly, and hot much especially, they call it hot mud, when they’re rushing to finish a job, they’ll use that, or if they have to do patch.
Vinyl, as we know, is a tremendously toxic substance. And the more supple it is, the more it has dioxin and all kinds of crazy things in it.
Sometimes people will get a whole house project done and not even realize that the drywall paint used, they’re really toxic chemical underneath the paint. And paint doesn’t seal that in because it’s supposed to breathe. And so it can come through, and then people end up blaming the paint even though they’re using VOC paint. It happens a lot.
DEBRA: It’s really important, and I’m sure you’ll agree with this, that if people want to reduce or eliminate toxic chemicals in their indoor home environment, they need to be looking at every single product that is being used in that interior.
I even had a subfloor that was being laid. I was turning a porch into a room, and so I had them lay strips of wood across the cement floor, so that they could then lay a hardwood floor on it. And I said, I don’t want any toxic chemicals.
And I walk in on them working on it, and they’re putting a toxic adhesive down on these strips that I’m having them lay. And I said, “What is this? I told you, no toxic chemicals.”
And they said, “Well, this is standard. This is the way we have to do it. Otherwise, it will squeak.”
And I said, “I don’t care if it squeaks. No toxic chemicals.”
And I made this very clear. This is something that they had agreed to. So you really have to watch it because a lot of these workers, virtually, everybody’s been trained in a toxic way. The only people who are not doing it toxic are people who have specifically decided to not do it toxic, and have sought these non-toxic products that learned how to use them. Otherwise, every worker you might hire has been trained to do it in a toxic way. And they’re just going to do what they were trained to do.
And this is what we need to be watching out for.
My guest today is Lydia Corser. She’s a green interior designer. And we’re talking about toxic chemicals and indoor environment and safe products. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lydia Corser, green interior designer and the owner of Green Space, a green remodeling store in Santa Cruz, California, and online, GreenSpaceCompany.com, I think. Is that it? Did I get that right?
LYDIA CORSER: That’s it.
DEBRA: GreenSpaceCompany.com, or you can also find it on Debra’s List at DebrasList.com. Just type in Green Space.
Well, we’re in our last segment, Lydia, so I don’t think we’re going to get to flooring on this show. So I want to keep talking about paint because I’ve experimented with a lot of these natural paints, and I need to say that the milk paint is my favorite paint because even though it does take more attention, as you said, and that you have to fuss with it, and that you can’t just go down to the store, and have them put in the exact color out of the machine that you want, I had a room painted, and I had to mix the exact amount of paint that I needed because I couldn’t mix the same color again. And I had to mix two different colors in order to get the color that I wanted.
But let me tell you that the results were so worth it because not only is it beautiful, and it has this really softness to it, the texture on the wall, it has this beautiful softness that acrylic or latex paint doesn’t have. And you can take all the VOCs out, but it’s not going to look like this.
And the way it smells when I was putting it on the wall—I could put it on the wall myself, for one. And it smelled like a nice, warm mug of milk.
LYDIA CORSER: That is lovely, identifiable smell.
DEBRA: It’s such a wonderful, natural experience to know that I was taking milk, and mixing it with earth pigments, and making a beautiful color that I could have this creative experience with as an artist, and putting it on the wall. And every time I look at it, it just has this quietness about it. It’s like there’s artificiality about it. It’s just nature on my wall.
And another natural product that I have experienced with is the American Clay Plaster.
LYDIA CORSER: Yes, I have it in my own home.
DEBRA: Let me just tell you that if I could actually get it here without paying a million-dollars to have it shipped, because my house is in Florida, and American Clay is in California. It actually costs me more to ship them than to buy it.
LYDIA CORSER: Yes, they’re in New Mexico. That’s true, it is.
DEBRA: But it has the most gorgeous, gorgeous look to it. I have one of the blues, I forgot what it was called, but I put it in my bathroom, and I put it up high. I tiled wall up seven-feet with white sublay tile, and then above that because I have a very high ceiling, I put this blue clay plaster. And it looks so gorgeous. Oh, my god. And it was so easy to work with.
But just the look of it and the fact that it has variation to the color, and it has texture, so it’s not just this flat one shade. It’s just an amazing experience that every time I walk into my bathroom, I go, “This is so beautiful.”
And if I lived in New Mexico, and I could just go down and get the American Clay Plaster, I would have it on every wall in my house. It’s like you’re living with a different experience.
And so I want people to know that it’s not just about the toxic chemicals. It’s what on the other side of toxic chemicals, this whole other world of beauty and nature that gives you a different experience and a different connection with the natural world.
And I think that that has a value in and of itself.
LYDIA CORSER: It has tremendous value. It enhances our daily lives, and like you said, every time I look at my plastered walls in my dining room and my living room, I have a sense of accomplishment as well. And the softness and the variation and color in the dining room, I used the straw additive, and then you wash it back, so some of the straw shows, the size of the straw stocks, and then it’s just so beautiful.
And that’s where we eat every day. The clay actually is a filter for toxins. And you probably noticed in the bathroom that as it moistens, you can smell it. And then it will dry over time, and so it takes in moisture and then it releases it slowly.
DEBRA: That was one of the things that made me think that this was perfect for a bathroom because a lot of times, I remember when I was originally learning about milk paint, people would say, well, you can’t put it in the bathroom because it will mold because of the moisture.
And yet, the clay plaster is perfect for the bathroom because of exactly that what you just described. It will absorb the moisture, and then as the air dries, it releases the moisture back out. So it never gets wet like a semi-gloss wall that gets wet, it never grows mold.
I’ve had, how long as has it been, six or seven years, I’ve had my plaster walls, it has never grown mold. It has no signs of wear. Nothing. It’s just this permanent, breathing part of the living organism of my bathroom.
LYDIA CORSER: And that’s how we want to be looking at buildings and homes, as an organism, because every part interacts with every other part. And it’s a really important concept to embrace.
And looking at toxins, looking at energy use, looking at every part, they all affect each other just like in nature.
DEBRA: Well, that’s the way it is. In life, everything is interconnected whether we know that it is or not. And that’s one of the basic principles of thinking. There’s a whole different way of thinking about nature from a nature viewpoint versus an industrial viewpoint because an industrial viewpoint says everything is separate, and it all needs to be identical. Every can of paint that comes off the line needs to look exactly the same, and we need to be able to say, this is eggshell. And that’s the color in every single room.
And that’s not what nature is about. Nature really is about this big variation of beauty, and having things be different and unique and changing even, having things look different from season to season. It’s not about sameness. It’s about the life is going to come in differently.
Go ahead.
LYDIA CORSER: I was going to say just like William Morris. It was so odd to see that you opened to show with.
DEBRA: Yes. I’m sure you must know William Morris.
LYDIA CORSER: Yes. As you were talking about it, we just were in Paris and in the Louvre and some of the other museums they have, some of his work, of course, and he’s world renowned. And I was pointing them out to my almost 15-year-old daughter and explaining to her who he was. He was such a pivotal person, swimming against the tide of the time, and trying to get people to become really aware of their natural side, and the beauty and nature, and bringing that back into our daily lives.
DEBRA: Can you imagine what it must have been like that there was this time period in the late 1800s when there were people like William Morris, and Henry David Thoreau, where they were at this time where they were born into a time that was more nature-oriented, and then they’re seeing this industrial mega whatever, this huge thing, just coming in and taking over, and trying to fight against this?
And I just so admire these people from the past, and learn as much as I can about them because they had this vision of how we can be connected to nature because they experienced that themselves. And that they knew, William Morris knew, how to dye fabrics with natural materials because that’s the way he was trained.
And then to see these dyes come in, and why they’re all synthetic and all the colors are exactly the same, and all of that.
LYDIA CORSER: And horrendously toxic.
DEBRA: And horrendously toxic. And can you imagine what an affront to his sensibility that must have been?
And now, here we are a hundred and something years later, and 130, 40, 50 years later, and that there are people like you and I who are saying, “Well, this is a horrible experiment with all this industrialism. We need to get back to what works.”
And so I so appreciate that you’re doing what you’re doing because it’s exactly the direction that I think that we all need to be going. So I’m very happy that you could be my guest today.
LYDIA CORSER: Thank you. Well, I’m very happy to be here just as well. And I couldn’t do my job without you and your books. So it’s mutual, believe me.
DEBRA: Thank you. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And if you enjoyed this show, please tell your friends and come back tomorrow.
Is Potassium Alum Aluminum-Free?
Question from Judy
I am trying to make up my mind about the different kinds of aluminum free deodorants on the market. Some say they are aluminum free when, in fact, they do contain potassium alum. Is this safe to use or is it, in fact, just another aluminum product worded differently? Thank you…
Debra’s Answer
When an antiperspirant claims to be “aluminum-free,” they are saying it does not contain aluminum chlorohydrate, aluminum chloride, aluminum hydroxybromide or aluminum zirconium—all forms of aluminum commonly used in antiperspirants and deodorants. To stop the flow of sweat to your skin’s surface, the aluminum plugs sweat ducts in the top layer of your skin stopping the the natural flow of sweat to your skin’s surface.
This aluminum can also be absorbed into your body where it can then build up as part of your body burden. Alzheimer’s disease and cancer are two illnesses known to be associated with aluminum exposure.
The aluminum in crystal deodorant stones is a different type of aluminum, called alum. The most common form is potassium alum, also known as potassium aluminum sulfate.
Potassium alum (and other alums) is a natural mineral salt made up of molecules that are too large to be absorbed by your skin. They form a protective layer on your skin that inhibits the growth of odor-causing bacteria. While this is a better alternative, it is not completely aluminum-free.
I haven’t used antiperspirant of any kind for decades. More than thirty years ago I started using baking soda as a deodorant, but have given up even that. Sweat is necessary for your body to detox (see Toxic Free Nutrition:Is Your Antiperspirant Preventing Your Body From Detoxing?) and a health body has a lovely smell, not a foul odor.
Antiperspirants and deodorants are an industrial consumer invention, not found in nature.
A Cup of Organic Tea
My guest is Chris Olsen, Marketing Director of Teatulia. They have a beautiful selection of “organic single garden teas”—black, green, and white—plus herbal infusions, sold loose leaf and in tea bags. They grow all of their teas in their single USDA-certified organic garden in northern Bangladesh, where they benefit from perfect growing conditions: The soil is developed with the use of organic cover crops and mulching, while the growing area is irrigated by rainwater. We’ll be talking about how tea is grown, different types of tea, and ways to enjoy organic tea. I myself drink iced green tea every day and love to explore combining it with various other flavors, so I’ll add my ideas too. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/teatulia
Chris gave us a lot of great information about the differences between non-organic and organic tea. Did you know that pesticides are sprayed on tea leaves right before they are plucked, and the first opportunity the leaves have to release this pesticide is in your teacup? I’ll never drink non-organic tea again. And we learned about different types of caffeine (they are not all alike) and how they can act differently in your body. And he spoke about the widespread environmental and social benefits of the Teatulia tea gardens, more than is on the website.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Cup of Organic Tea
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Chris Olsen
Date of Broadcast: July 11, 2013
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.
Even though it can sometime seem that there are toxic chemicals all around us, there are many, many things that we can do to live in a less toxic way that is healthier for us. There are many organic and natural products, we can remove toxic chemicals from our body. There’s so much that’s known now about how to live in a toxic-free way. It’s just a matter of learning about it.
And that’s what this show is about, to introduce you to some new ideas that you can use in order to live toxic-free.
It’s Thursday, July 11th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it’s overcast, so there may be some thunder and lightening, but we’ll see. We’re in thunderstorm season now and anything can happen. But if we get cut off, just hold on because I’ll be right back with some back-up power.
Today, we’re going to talk about tea. And beyond that, we’re going to talk about organic tea. My guest today is Chris Olsen. He is the director of marketing and product development for Teatulia. Teatulia is unique because they have a beautiful selection of organic, single garden teas.
Now, what’s that, a single garden tea? We’re going to find out from Chris. Hi, Chris.
CHRIS OLSEN: Hey, how are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
CHRIS OLSEN: I’m doing well this morning. The sun is up here in Colorado, so I’m sorry to hear about the rain in Florida.
DEBRA: Oh, it’s okay because we need rain. And this is just the summer pattern. I’m used to it. I get wet every day. So tell us, how did Teatulia start? Who started it? How long has it been around? What was the idea behind it?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah! Well, there are some brothers that lived in Bangladesh that in 2001, with their father, they actually started the garden or planted the garden. It’s a hundred miles of Darjeeling and it’s right on the border of Bangladesh and India.
So as that grew that they created as a social enterprise basically to create jobs, but they realized the tea tasted really, really good. People really loved it. So they had a plant where they decided that they wanted to create their own brand and introduce it to either Europe or the U.S. and Canada.
So one of the brothers in Bangladesh, his name is Anis, he was friends with the CEO of Teatulia who’s Adam. They met in college in New York years ago. He happened to be out for a work trip staying with Adam and Linda and he basically asked Linda if she wanted to help consult on a tea company that he wanted to launch in the United States. So she did and she found out that there was a great opportunity here and a huge point of differentiation, so they decided that she wanted to be a part of the business.
So the branch launched very small at a farmer’s market. It was about 2006. And then it was accepted into Whole Foods in 2009. And now, just as of last month, we are in the shelves of Target nationally, which is pretty exciting.
DEBRA: Wow!
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes! so we’re definitely growing. Our message is resonating it seems to be at least with a lot of the retail buyers and consumers as well. So that’s pretty much the history of Teatulia and how it started.
DEBRA: That’s great. So I think that probably most people don’t know much about just how tea is grown in general. So you refer to it as a garden, rather than a farm or a ranch. Are all teas grown in garden?
CHRIS OLSEN: Well, the term is more marketing than anything. Other common terms are ‘single estate’ or ‘single source’. We’re just playing with ‘garden’, ‘single garden’ because the whole garden-to-table trend, which is extremely popular here in Colorado in the Pacific Northwest, that seems to really resonate with people a little more than ‘single source’. A lot of coffee companies, they talk about direct to source, single source, so I don’t know, we just kind of like the feelings that the word ‘garden’ evokes in people, so we’ve been using that.
But traditionally, tea, the tea plant – let’s say it’s a tree and they trim it down and it’s like plantation-grown. It can either be grown under the shade or it can be grown under the sun. It just depends on what style, what region, what variety.
We have one of the world’s largest organic gardens. It’s at 2000 acres and we can keep adding to it because where they decided to create this garden was in an area where there’s a lot of room, a lot of space to do that. So that’s how we have the ability to be a premium brand or a large brand and have single source. Other companies don’t. They have to source from different gardens and they blend it together in order to have enough inventory to fulfill the demand.
DEBRA: Yeah. So I would presume that one of the benefits of having a single source tea is that you could know what’s going on with how it’s grown and where it’s grown and not be wondering that. I know when I lived in California, I belong to what’s called a CSA (a community-supported agriculture) and I could go to the farm where my food was being grown, I could talk to the farmer, I could harvest the food myself if I wanted to, I could plant seedlings, whatever level of participation I wanted. I could actually really know how my food was being grown.
I think that that would be the case here with having your single source organic teas that I see in the description on your home page. It says, “The soil was developed with the use of organic cover crops and mulching and the growing area is irrigated by rain water.” That just sounds so lovely to me to know that the tea is being watered by the rain and not by industrial water that may have all kinds of chlorine and fluoride and all kinds of other things in it.
So that would be, I’m presuming, the advantage of having a single source tea. Any others?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely one of them. I think we could add to that just the purity of the flavor of single source. It’s like a single estate wine compared to a blend. It tastes better usually. Obviously, taste is subjective, but that’s what we think here.
One of the big things too is the overall global footprint. For other key brands, larger key brands that do blends, they go to tea auctions. And then they purchase tea. So it’s shipped around from warehouse to warehouse to warehouse until it’s finally blended and put into a teabag.
With ours, it’s direct. We order it from the garden. We have processes in place and it comes right to where we need to get it packed. And then it goes right to the consumer. So it’s a lower overall global footprint for sure. We’re utilizing way fewer resources.
It’s also fresher than a lot of the other teas out there because as it’s sold from different tea market to market and moved around, some tea can be a year to a year and a half to even older by the time it reaches your cup where most of our teas, it depends where you’re at, the velocities of selling, but it’s fresh – six months, four months, it could even be three months or so.
So I will definitely add those two components to just have – well, and the accountability like you mentioned. Yes, we can document what we’re doing in the garden, we can show videos. We could kind of make that connection. We’re organic, we’re Rainforest Alliance, we’re kosher, more direct trade. So we can prove all the money that’s coming in and that we’re giving back to help these people. We can show pictures and tell the stories, which well get into this later in the show just the impact that it’s actually having there.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I just have this sense as I’m looking at your website – it’s Teatulia.com and you can also find it on my website at DebrasList.com – you do have pictures and we can look and see and it’s like I’m seeing this hand harvesting the tea leaves and it’s like my own hand pulling the leaves off of an herb in my garden, my very own garden. So I really make a connection between your garden and my garden.
And we need to take a break, but we’ll be back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m talking with Chris Olsen from Teatulia. And when we come back, we’ll talk about what are the pesticides and things that are used in ordinary teas. So stay with us.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. So Chris, tell us something about how teas are ordinarily grown.
CHRIS OLSEN: Ordinarily grown? Well, most teas out there are non-organic. So obviously, they’re using pesticides in the growing process to keep infestations at bay. Tea gardens are large and what that kind of does to the land, you don’t really see many bugs, you don’t see animals or birds. I like to equate it a little bit to kind of this barren wasteland. I mean, sure, the plants look good, but there’s really nothing else kind of going on.
So traditionally – well, not traditionally, but recently, that’s how most tea out there has been grown. A lot of the really big brands that you’ll find at the big box retailers are not organic.
DEBRA: And are there any other toxic exposures that people might get from tea like teabags, bleach form teabags or anything like that?
CHRIS OLSEN: Well, it depends. I mean, yeah, there’s lots of different packaging out there. For teabags, we have two different formats. One, we use a pyramid teabag, which is also called fuso and it allows one to brew a whole leaf, like have the whole leaf tea brewing taste and experience, but the convenience of a teabag.
The only other option you have in that regard is brewing that loose. But people consider that to be a little messy.
So the teabag that we use, it’s corn based, so it’s fully compostable. But there’s some other brands out there that use plastic instead of this corn material we use, so obviously, when you’re brewing tea at temperatures in the hundreds of degrees and it’s plastic, it can definitely seep toxin. So I would say you definitely want to be aware of the large pyramid teabags.
As far as the common pillow packs, these are the ones you would find in a Lipton or a Celestial Seasonings. It’s the paper bag. I would definitely recommend doing unbleached just because the paper is not treated, less toxins in the paper as well.
The best to remove all toxins is really just to brew it loose, which was the way the tea was meant to be brewed. But other than that, I would say no. I mean, a lot of it I guess does depend on the water and how they irrigate things and what could be in the water and how that gets into the tea. As you mentioned earlier, we use rainwater and what-not, so it’s purer and cleaner.
But I would say that’s pretty much all of the toxins that you can get into really.
DEBRA: I brew my tea. I drink a lot of tea. I drink tea every day. I’m not particular a coffee drinker. I will occasionally drink coffee. But I drink tea every day. I usually drink green tea. I’m a big fan of green tea because it gives me a little bit of perk, but it doesn’t have a lot of caffeine in it and I like the flavor of it. I usually mix it with some other types of tea just so that I have a variety of flavors. Like today, I’m mixing my green tea with mint. And a few weeks ago, I was mixing it with a tea that had a lot of citrus in it.
But I always brew it just loose and my favorite way to do it is I have a French press coffee maker. I don’t know if everybody knows what that is. It’s a glass beaker and then it has a plunger on top and it presses the little screen down so the water goes through. But then, usually the coffee grinds would be at the bottom. But I use it for tea. And so my tea goes to the bottom and the rest of it stays on the top. It works better than anything I’ve ever used.
I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s a brilliant piece of food preparation item. To use it for tea I think is perfect.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular method for sure. We sell to a lot of restaurants and a lot of restaurants prefer to serve it in a French press as opposed to a teacup.
DEBRA: Good! I didn’t know that.
CHRIS OLSEN: Traditionally, when we think about tea, it’s been teacups and it’s been – I think a lot of people especially in this country are – you know, some people love it. They love that old aspect of it, but a lot of people are just brewing it differently and using different means to brew it as well. I’ve seen people brew it through coffee makers. That’s where they get their fix, fine restaurants and it tastes amazing.
And I’ve seen people pack it into their own handmade teabag and stuff too. It’s cool! It’s pretty amazing all the different methods of brewing tea and how people really, as we say, geek out over it.
DEBRA: The most unusual one I saw as in a restaurant recently where it had a container that the loose tea went in and the hot water. And then after it was brewed, they brought it to me and they’ve said, “Now, this needs to steep for three minutes. We’ll come back and tell you in three minutes.” And so, they came back.
And then what I was supposed to do as a customer is to squeeze a little handle and then the tea comes out the bottom. I ordered it as iced tea. So you don’t need a glass of ice. I squeezed the handle and the tea came out, the bottom of the tea thing into the ice and it was the perfect glass of iced tea. It was pretty amazing.
But there are a lot of other ways.
CHRIS OLSEN: There are. You bring up a really good point though. I mean, a very important note in brewing tea –and I think just in this country as tea is slowly emerging and becoming more and more popular – is one of the problems (and everybody has probably seen this or have done it themselves. I mean, I’m certainly guilty of this before I joined Teatulia), I would throw my teabag in to the cup. I would put hot water, I would brew it and I would just leave the teabag in. That is the absolutely worst mistake you can make if you’re drinking tea.
DEBRA: Why?
CHRIS OLSEN: …because when you over-steep tea, that’s when it gets really better. That’s when it gets really astringent and doesn’t take good. So that’s when people are throwing milk and sugar and stuff into it to sweeten it. I mean, sugar tastes good, but it’s necessarily the most healthiest thing for you when you’re pumping a couple of packets of that.
So there’s proper ways to brew tea. It’s important to be very cognizant of that. Three minutes, that’s good that they said that. Have a tea timer or whatever just to make sure you brew it correctly, so it tastes really good.
DEBRA: That’s a very good point and we’ll talk more about that after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Chris Olsen from Teatulia and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here today with Chris Olsen from Teatulia. Chris, I’m looking on the Teatulia website and there’s a whole page that talks about how your growing practices are more organic than organic and that you practice natural farming practices. Can you tell us about that?
CHRIS OLSEN: Ah, yeah. Well, I mean, this is just like using natural rainwater. I always had trouble in pronouncing his name.
DEBRA: [inaudible 00:27:27]
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes, I always – I can never. I don’t know. My tongue doesn’t go that way. But we really pull a lot from his teaching. And basically, that’s to do nothing gardening. You just kind of let it come about. This is like the natural kind of wild way of farming. We pull a lot from that. At first, we were 100%. But obviously, we need to weed a little bit. We kind of have to maximize growing potential and stuff too. So if we have the dry season, sometimes, we kind of have to help out a little bit, so we could ensure that we still have some tea.
But we’re not using irrigation. We’re not using sprinkler systems for water. All the water that we are using that we might have to pump over is rainwater that we’ve collected. So that’s essentially better than organic. It’s perfect for the environment.
We’re actually in the process of closing the loop, using like a biodiesel factory for how we’re processing the tea. And when I say ‘processing’, we’re not changing the chemical compound. It’s drying the tea. That’s how you get white to black. So we’re in the process and I think mid to next year, early to mid next year is when we plan to totally close that loop.
But also, the social side of things. We’re not just organic tea, but we’re a direct trade type of a tea. We’re not certified because the certification doesn’t exist in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries. I think it’s rated the second poorest country in the world and we’re kind of the armpit of the armpit, so to speak.
So we have a really strong mission on the social side of things. Traditionally, when the British came and they started growing and cultivating tea, they went up to India and they essentially would kidnap well-calved females from India, pop them down in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, other parts of India. And it was like indentured servitude. They wouldn’t pay them any money that they could spend outside of the plantation because you know, the plantation would have a general store, a bar, whatever. So that’s where they would go to get their essentials. They wouldn’t educate them. They wouldn’t give them shoes.
So I actually visited some of these garden that have been around for 150 to 200 years. It’s a depressing place. I mean, the energy is just sucked out and the people aren’t happy. We’re trying to make a difference. We created this garden to create jobs. We have a literacy program where every Thursday, the tea pluckers and members of their family, but only women because we really are trying to support females here, they go and they learn to read and write.
It’s kind of a cool story, but when we went to visit them, me, being the marketing director, we have this entourage of photographers and videographers, I had this idea. Let’s interview some of these ladies. It’ll be great content on YouTube, typical American thinking.
The first lady we interview. We had a translator, but I asked how do you feel about the literacy program and the response was, “I just learned how to count. I realized the men at the bazaar had been robbing me my entire life and now that’s not going to happen.” She was 33 years old. I mean, our jaws just dropped and it really put it into perspective what we’re doing over there. It’s quite amazing.
And then we also have this – if you know microlending. It’s an evolution of microlending. It’s our cattle lending program that we do over there. That’s just to create jobs and to create limited – not limited wealth, but wealth for a lot of the Bangladeshi people around there. That’s successful. Now, we’re ten years into it and a lot of their kids are still in school.
One family, their kids are in the University. So I can go on and on, but these are things that we consider more than just organic.
DEBRA: Yes, it definitely is. I can really see from all the things that you’re doing that you’re reallyconsidering this tea as part of not only the ecosystem, but the social system of the place. Part of natural farming is to leave the ecosystem intact and include protecting the wildlife and all of those kinds of things, so that there’s an ecosystem there and it’s not just clearing the land and planting the crop. I think it’s really beautiful the way your company has integrated everything.
And all of that is I think essentially there in a cup of tea when you drink it. It’s like it’s all there. You can see all that goodness. I mean, for me at least, I think about where everything comes from and the effects of everything. That is so present in what you’re doing.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah! isn’t that wonderful?
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, yeah, it actually is. You know, one other important note just so I don’t forget. I wanted to kind of just talk about organic and non-organic tea really quick if I have some time. Is that okay?
DEBRA: Okay, sure. Yeah.
CHRIS OLSEN: Okay! So one thing that we noticed when we were outside – I mean, you never really hear about this in the media. I haven’t. But when we visited the non-organic tea, we learned their growing process. The leaves are plucked basically every eight to ten days. It depends on the rains. But after the leaves are plucked, they spray it with a pesticide that in Bangladesh in this particular garden, it had an LD of five. LD stands for lethal dose and I was told that 10 is harmful to a human. I don’t know in what parts or what-not, but that’s what I was told.
So they spray the plant again right before plucking with the same level of LD and then they pluck the leaves and it goes right into processing. It’s cut up and it’s put into a teabag. So the first time the leaves are rinsed off the pesticides is when you infuse it in your cup.
DEBRA: Oh, my God!
CHRIS OLSEN: It’s disgusting. It’s shocked us.
DEBRA: I had no idea.
CHRIS OLSEN: So it’s really important. And it’s great to hear, we were at a function a couple of weeks ago and we heard the CEO of Honest Tea and he’s talking about that now. That makes us feel good because obviously, Coke bought them. It’s been kind of hush-hush I think within the industry, but it’s a scary thing. I will never drink non-organic tea.
With coffee, it’s kind of okay because they spray a cherry and the coffee bean comes out, so it doesn’t affect your body as literally. The same thing with fruit. You can peel fruit. But with tea, you have no option at all. The pesticides come right out in the cup.
So I definitely want to just bring that point up because it’s quite shocking for a lot of people.
DEBRA: I’m so glad that you did because I didn’t know about that. Wow! Well, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. We’ll be back in a moment and find out more about organic tea.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. Chris, I’m still thinking about what you just about how non-organic tea is sprayed with pesticides right before it’s picked. It just made me – you know, there’s so much tea available. Some of it or most of the tea that I buy, I buy at the natural food store although I’m going to start ordering from you directly.
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, that sounds good.
DEBRA: Yeah! A lot of it is organic. It’s a natural food store. But also, there are these tea stores now in the mall and they have all these different flavors and they’re not always organic. In fact, most of them aren’t organic, but they’re so appealing.
And now, I’m thinking, “No, if I wanted to taste like mint, I think I need to grow mint in my backyard and put it in my green tea.” You just re-organized my thinking about tea because that’s horrible, what they’re doing.
CHRIS OLSEN: Usually, they cave.
DEBRA: Not something I want to drink. We have just this last segment left, so tell us about the difference between black, green and white tea.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, for sure. It’s quite interesting because a lot of people think that they’re just totally different teas or plants, but they’re not. They all come from the same plant. So if you’re called a tea or considered a tea, you come from the camellia sinensis plant. The difference between white and green and black and oolong and pu-erh, these are all types of tea, it’s all in the processing.
So when they pluck a leaf, for white tea, it’s minimally processed. Usually, it’s the white bud. That’s why they call it ‘white tea’, it has the white hairs on it. It’s before the leaf unfurls. So usually, they just pluck that, [inaudible 00:40:57] to let it sun dry and then that’s essentially what you’re drinking.
Studies that have come out that white teas contain the highest level of antioxidants and the least amount of caffeine.
For green tea, it’s processed a little differently. And there’s two different ways. The Asian – well, I guess Bangladesh is in Asia, but the Chinese or Japanese way is it’s plucked, it’s oxidized a little bit longer or sit out in the sun a little bit longer. And then they pan fry it and that’s why you get the toasty taste. They pan fry it just to break the rest of the membranes, so it doesn’t start to ferment or go back.
We steam. On the other side of the Himalayas, typically, it’s a steaming process here we steam it to dry out the rest of it. So the steaming has a little more of a grassy, earthy taste and the pan fried is a little more toasty.
Then for black tea, it’s fully oxidized. That’s where it’s set out in the sun for maybe a day or two or three. It just depends on weather conditions or what-not. That’s considered to have a high level of antioxidants as well and then the highest amount of caffeine.
But one more important note is that most Americans tend to classify caffeine as all being the same. And it’s not. Caffeine, there’s a lot of depending factors here. How does your body absorb it? Some people can drink coffee before they go to bed. Other people can’t. Same thing with tea. I can’t really drink green tea because it gets more wired than coffee. But I can drink black tea all day long and be fine.
So when I say like high levels of caffeine, low levels of caffeine, what does that really mean? The caffeine different. The caffeine that’s in coffee is different than the caffeine in tea, it’s different than the caffeine in chocolate.
I always find it fascinating when we in this country try to clump the caffeine conversation into, “This is exactly how it is and it’s black and white…”
DEBRA: I thought it was all exactly the same caffeine. I really did.
CHRIS OLSEN: No.
DEBRA: This is the first I’ve heard of this. Wow! I’m going to research that some more.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah. I mean, in chocolate, it’s the theobromine. I can get really technical here, but in tea, it’s the theophylline. I forget what the actual Latin term is for coffee, for the coffee bean, but yeah, it’s all different types and your body absorbs it differently. It’s quite fascinating once you start reading up on it.
DEBRA: Well, I’m certainly going to do that. Occasionally, I don’t want to be drinking lots of caffeine all day long, but it’s nice to have – I don’t want as much as in coffee, but I’ll have a little piece of chocolate or I’ll have a cup of green tea and I had no idea that there was any difference. Probably the caffeine in Coca-Cola is something different altogether.
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, yes! And Redbull, it has that chlorine.
DEBRA: Industrialized caffeine.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, Yerba Mate, it has mateine in it. And then you have like the coca plants that they do cocaine and stuff like that from. That has its own type of – so yeah, it’s quite interesting and fascinating. So that’s the primary differences between tea. You also have herbs.
DEBRA: Yes, tell us about that.
CHRIS OLSEN: The correct term is ‘herbal tisane’ or an ‘herbal infusion’, but it gets a little confusing here, just as tea is re-emerging, so a lot of people call it herbal tea. But those, like a chamomile does not come from the Camellia Sinensis plant. So therefore, it’s not a tea on account of the flower. They consider that an herbal tisane.
Rooibos or Yerba Mate, those are also considered herbals. Even though with Mate, there’s caffeine in it, it doesn’t come from the Caellia Sinensis tea plant, so it’s considered an herb. There are thousands of different types of herbs out there obviously as well. Some of my favorites are Mate and the Rooibus, the hibiscus.
DEBRA: I like those too. I like those too. So tell us, are there health benefits to tea?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes, there are health benefits of tea, but we have to be a little careful because the FDA these days are really tracking down on certain health claims. So I guess my answer to that would just be yes, get online and kind of research what kind of benefits you’re looking for and you’ll find all the information that you probably want to make an educated decision online.
But yes, tea is a healthy alternative to drinking sodas, drinking a liquor or whatever every time. Everybody is different. It could be healthier than coffee for some people. It just depends on how your body absorbs things and what-not.
Yes, in a lot of studies – we haven’t had RT study just to preface that – but RTs in other regions of the world, it’s found to have really high levels of antioxidants, high level of other nutrients like l-theanine, magnesium, things like that. So yes, tea is definitely healthy.
And that’s one of the reasons I kind of got into tea. I used to be a big soda drink being a typical dude from Colorado. I hit a certain age and my metabolism has changed and I realized, “Hey, I don’t feel as good as I did when I was 22 drinking them out and do every day.” So that’s kind of how I migrated over to tea.
It feels good to preach the word of helping people just kind of migrate over to tea and just try to enhance their healthy eating habits.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I like about tea is that first of all, I think that it’s really important for people to drink water, but I think that tea is like a good step, the closest thing to water that has flavor because it’s mostly herbal kinds of things, it’s plants. The benefits of those plants are getting into the water and you’re drinking them, so there’s flavor, but there’s also as you mentioned the minerals and things that could be enhancing the water. It gives me a little flavor without giving anything – well, as long as it’s organic – without giving anything that’s negative that I can identify. It’s just so pleasant.
And also, I was thinking, I hadn’t thought about this until we actually started the interview, but there’s the whole thing about the tea ceremony, the Japanese tea ceremony. Such a beautiful thing of the whole ritual of making tea and putting attention on the drinking of tea and the benefit of tea. I think about that when I’m drinking tea. It just has so many positive things associated with it.
You can do things like make hot tea, make iced tea, add a little fruit juice. You don’t have to necessarily put white sugar in it. It’s great with honey. It’s great with any of the natural sweeteners. There’s so many infinite varieties of things that you can do with tea. It’s pretty amazing. It is a great alternative to soda, it really is.
CHRIS OLSEN: It feels great. You can create your own blends and your own flavors. That’s kind of what I do here, I handle the new product of [inaudible 00:48:56]. It’s a blast because you’re just mixing things together. Sometimes, it works and sometimes, it doesn’t.
So one other important note that I would just like to mention is going back to brewing tea. I know a lot of people like to cold steep and they like to sun tea. Just what I found is a lot of the herbs and stuff out there, not all companies treat their teas and so there will be microbes in them. I would always recommend brewing your tea hot and not making a sun tea or not cold steeping it especially if you have herbs in there because you just never know what could be lurking in those herbs that could get you sick. So it’s always smart and we always recommend people to always hot steep their teas.
DEBRA: And that’s a great way to end our time. Thank you so much for being with me, Chris. I learned so much about tea that I didn’t know. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And if you enjoyed this show, tell your friends.
Natural Solutions for Bugs
My guest Annie B. Bond has been researching and writing about safe DIY alternatives to toxic products for more that twenty years. On this show, Annie will bring her vast knowledge of how to control pests, including ticks, mosquitoes and other summertime bugs, and I’ll share my experience too. Annie and I have been kindred spirits since her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green (Ceres Press, 1990) . She is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). She has been the editor of a number of publications, including “The Green Guide.” Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Solutions for Bugs
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: July 10, 2013
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 because even though there are toxic chemicals all around us—in the air we breathe, in our consumer products—there are many things that we can do in order to remove toxic chemicals from our homes, remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and live a toxic-free, happy, healthy, organic, natural, wonderful, happy life without toxic chemicals that can affect us in so many ways.
It’s July 10th 2003. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And the thunderstorm report today is it’s starting to cloud up. So we may have a thunderstorm coming on, but I am just intending that we’ll have no thunderstorm and we will have power for the entire show.
My guest today is Annie Berthold Bond who I’ve known almost since we’ve been doing our respective work for almost the same period of time. Anyway, I would say that we’re kindred spirits in that we both have had our own story of how toxic chemicals have affected our health. We’ve both recovered. And we’ve both gone on to figure out the non-toxic alternatives in a different way.
Our work is very complementary where I’m mostly focused on what consumer products we can buy. Annie has been very focused on how we can make things ourselves that are less toxic alternatives—including cleaning products, pest controls and all kinds of do-it-yourself things around the house.
So, welcome, Annie. I’m very happy to have you on again.
ANNIE BOND: Well, thanks, Debra. Thanks so much for having me. I’m in upstate New York. And we have a massive thunderstorm coming soon.
DEBRA: [cross-talking 02:04]
Well, I guess it’s summer on the East Coast. And for those of you who don’t live on the East Coast, they’re not like working around thunderstorms every day.
But we had an absolutely stunning thunderstorm last night, Annie. I was driving west, and there was a thunderstorm over the Gulf of Mexico just offshore. And so I was just driving right in that direction. So I was watching it develop. It went right through the windshield in the direction that I was going. And it was at sunset too. So I had this big thunderhead with the colors of the sunset shining behind it. And then, there were these bright lightning bolts.
And by the time it got home, it had turned into such a thunderstorm just all churned up. There were flashes of lightning like every second.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: It was just flash, flash, flash and roaring thunder, thunder, thunder. And it was just absolutely gorgeous.
ANNIE BOND: Well, I’m glad you were all snug. Did you like race from your car to the house? How did you get in?
DEBRA: Well, it was still off in the distance. I could hear it, but it wasn’t raining right where I was. And so I didn’t have the rain, but I had the beautiful light show. And then I could continue to watch it through my windows at home. Nature can be so stunningly beautiful.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome! That sounds really great.
DEBRA: Sometimes, nature and the color, it’s just absolutely gorgeous. No artist could paint something that looks like that.
And it was just one of those moments where I just felt saturated with the colors. It needed to go into my memory. I just needed to remember what this looked like because there was no way you could take a photograph, there was no way you could paint it. It was just…
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly. It’s one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” kind of thing. So sometimes, the colors of nature is so spectacular.
DEBRA: It’s like the most gorgeous art there is, is of nature. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.
ANNIE BOND: Yes! That sounds so fantastic. I mean I’m glad you look at it that way instead of in fear. You were like, “Oh, my gosh! This is gorgeous.”
DEBRA: Well, you know, when I was a little girl, my father, we lived in California where we don’t have—I didn’t grow up in thunderstorms like we have here in the East Coast in California. And usually, they would happen at night. It would be a big light show and lots of noise. And my father would come get me out of my bed and put me in front of the window. He’ll hold me on his lap so it was safe. He’ll have me look at the thunder and lightning.
And because he did that, I was never afraid of it. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, I was always in a safe place.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s awesome. What a wonderful thing for him to do. That’s great.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we’re here to talk about toxic chemicals. So I’ll just introduce Annie for a minute and say that she’s the author of Clean & Green which was full of—still, it’s still I would say a classic toxics alternatives book that belongs on everybody’s shelf. It’s still on my bookshelf.
ANNIE BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Then there was Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment. And most recently, her most recent book was True Food. And that was the winner of the Gourmand Awards’ Health & Nutrition Cookbook in the World.
What an honor!
ANNIE BOND: That was a great honor.
DEBRA: So, Annie has been around a long time. She’s got a lot of information. And I consult her books all the time.
So Annie, before we go on and actually start talking about our subject which is going to be natural solutions for bugs, especially summertime bugs (mosquitos and ticks and all those kinds of things), just tell us for a few minutes—you’ve been on the show before, and we’ve discussed your story. But just tell us in a few minutes how you came to be interested in the subject. What is your personal motivation?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I was sort of whacked over the head. I was leading a perfectly fine, normal life. Then back to back, I had a very powerful poisoning experience. I worked at a restaurant that had a gas leak. It sent 80 people to the hospital. And I got what the doctor said permanent central nervous system damage at that time.
And then, our apartment building—I didn’t yet know about the permanent central nervous system damage. Our apartment building was exterminated with a pesticide that’s been taken off the market because it was so neurotoxic.
So, that back to back exposure for me was very devastating. I was in the hospital for three months. It took about eight years to find a place to live. I finally got properly diagnosed, thank goodness, because this was 1981 by then, and there were very few environmental medicine doctors around. And just by the grace of whatever, I ended up with one in New Haven, Connecticut.
I learned bit by bit. I had to learn how to live without chemicals. And so I became a bit of a nomad. I’m very sensitive to pesticides. And where we move in upstate New York, there were a lot of pesticide drip from farms.
So, I became a nomad. We moved 10 times in four years. But in the process, I really learned how to live without chemicals.
And I finally got into a healthy home. And I was like a wilted plant that hadn’t been given water. Clean air was my water. And I just popped back so fast, it was unbelievable.
I got well enough. My doctor said I could have a baby. I had her in ’88. And after she was born, my concern sort of broadened from my own personal tragedy, really, and crisis in my life to wanting a better place for her and her world. And so, I started researching alternatives.
I stumbled upon your books, Non-Toxic & Natural. I was a complete, devoted fan. I’m from Northern New England. I just got interested in sort of the formula side of things. I just tapped into down-to-earth, down-home kind of instinct I had from my growing up. And so I just jumped right in and never looked back.
It’s been one of those greatest payments/the greatest gift kind of stories.
DEBRA: Yes. You know, I would like to also say that about my experience. People look at chemical poisoning as being a tragedy. But it was the greatest blessing in my life because it gave me an opportunity to take a look at things going on in my life and make my own choices.
We’re going to take a break right now. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Annie Bond. We’re going to be talking about how you can protect yourself from all those summertime bugs without toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Annie Bond who has been developing and collecting all kinds of natural do-it-yourself kinds of things to live a less toxic life for many, many years—decades in fact. I don’t want it to sound like an old lady.
ANNIE BOND: I just turned 60. I’m not proud.
DEBRA: Well, happy birthday!
ANNIE BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: A wise woman… one of our people that we should be listening to.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s a graceful way to put it, thank you.
DEBRA: And just before the break, we were talking about how, for each of us, our experiences of being poisoned by toxic chemicals was a blessing in disguise because we each came out of it looking at our lives and the world in a different way and wanting to do something to make the world a better place.
Annie, for me, it put me in a position of choice. And I think that you’ve probably had that experience too, wouldn’t you say, where instead of just taking the world as it was, we started decided how we wanted our small world to be.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that’s a really interesting way of looking at it because, in a way, for me, it took me a long time to see that or learn that particular lesson. For me, that choice was taken away for a very long time, like, “I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do that.” And would I like to live any way differently than I live now? Not at all. I’m thrilled. And it’s been a wonderful thing to be able to provide such an incredible sanctuary to my family. What a gift that is to them!
And so, that’s a nice way of looking at it, Debra. Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Well, I think that we’re always at this point where we’re saying, “Well, what can I do? And what can’t I do?” And we can look at it as saying, “I can’t do this… I can’t do that.” I remember, in the beginning, I would say, “Well, I don’t want to give up my favorite lipstick. I’m just not going to do it.” But when I did, it actually made a huge difference in my life, just that one product. I’ve done everything except give up that one shade of red lipstick that it took me so long to find.
But there are so many choices that we have. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, the natural things that we can do, the safe things that we can do. And these are things that we can do. And once we do more and more of them, our lives become safer and safer.
So, what would you like to talk about first, Annie, in terms of some solutions for what to do about bugs?
ANNIE BOND: I think that something that I would love to talk about are ticks actually.
DEBRA: Okay.
ANNIE BOND: When you’re saying you got rid of your favorite lipstick, I have a new challenge. I mean I live in a non-toxic world as you know. I have dogs. And I don’t put Frontline and other chemicals on them—for their health as well as mine (I couldn’t have them in the house if I did that). I’ve suffered a number of cases of Lyme Disease. And I have a relatively new puppy.
I decided that I wouldn’t even care—I mean I care about not getting Lyme disease. But I really mostly care about being able to let her sleep on my bed. So I’m really waffling on that one—same for the lipstick—where I need to just say, “Okay, you can’t even be in my bedroom” because the dogs get ticks (of course, because they go in the woods where I live).
But I’ve spent a lot of time doing a lot of research about ticks and what to do about them, repellant for ticks. As I said, I won’t use Frontline. Actually, if you read the fine print on a lot of those kinds of chemicals, they’re incredible central nervous system depressants. Your dogs can get very depressed. And having had a pesticide exposure myself, I just can’t bring myself to give that to my dogs.
DEBRA: Right!
ANNIE BOND: When I was writing Better Basics for the Home, I really dug deep in herbalist books. I came across rose geranium as something that has been called—it used to be even called tick weed. It’s an essential oil that you can find in most health food stores. They have at least geranium. It’s a very, very powerful repellant for ticks.
So, what I’ll do is I’ll take a drop of it. And I’ll put a drop of it in my dog’s collars—a couple of drops. Dogs are incredibly sensitive to smell, so you can’t put too much on. But I found that to be very, very successful for repelling ticks (and probably, my number one go-to thing for repelling ticks).
But many of us don’t live in the cities. Most of us facing ticks don’t live in the cities anyway. We have lawns and strawberry and that sort of thing.
I’ve been reading. I don’t know how I missed this until more recently. But I’ve been reading a lot about sulfur and how the reason we have so many ticks maybe because of a sulfur imbalance in the environment. And the ticks hate sulfur. They’re really repelled by it.
And so, you can buy sulfur in a farm store kind of place. And you can get it in flakes and put it around on your lawn. It will significantly repel ticks.
But I also think that garlic is very, very heavy in sulfur. And it may be one reason why garlic has always been talked about as something to give to pets. And I think it may be because it increases the sulfur.
And I’ve been taking a lot of garlic just as a repellent, just eating it, because it helps me with my Lyme disease. I’ve actually been taking allicin. And that’s been extremely helpful too.
And so, I think there’s just a lot of [fronts] where one could work to protect oneself from Lyme disease and one’s pets from Lyme disease. But in terms of going outside, for me, the top thing is always rose geranium. In terms of holistic care, I’m increasingly moving towards and focus on sulfur.
DEBRA: I think there’s also a garlic spray. I think when I was researching mosquitoes—you can go online, I don’t remember the exact website—they have a garlic spray that you can spray around in your yard.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s interesting, absolutely. That sounds very interesting to me. I’ll have to look into that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE BOND: I was going to start taking a version of sulfur myself because I thought it might help further repel ticks from ever wanting to bite me to begin with.
DEBRA: Yes, yeah. I actually never had a tick bite. But I think that you live in a more wooded area than I do.
ANNIE BOND: I’m in an epicenter here. So there were no ticks until 1996. And then, they arrived. They’re just devastating.
Tick-borne disease can be devastating. Everybody I know has a family member who has it wherever. So that’s why it’s top of mind.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, we’ll talk more about some other insects that we might encounter in the summertime and in other times of year after this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Annie Bond. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie Bond. We’re talking about insects, how to control them and how to repel them.
I just wanted to mention as long as we’re on this subject that, a few weeks ago, I had a guest on from a company called Greenway Formula 7. And it was a very interesting show because they had developed an insect repellant. And it also kills insects made entirely from essential oils. It’s extremely effective. And it also is unscented.
I mean it’s unscented in the sense that it has no fragrance added. But actually, one of their formulas has an essential oil in it that makes it not even smell like the essential oils that are in the formula.
So, this is a product that I use for insect repellant. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And at the top of the right-hand column, there’s a search box. You just type in Greenway Formula 7. And it will take you to my write-up about it. And you can find out all about it.
So, that’s a product you could buy that Annie has all kinds of suggestions about things that you can make at home, which I just love.
So, shall we talk about mosquitoes now?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I cracked open one of my books to mosquitoes because I figured that would be the next on the list.
DEBRA: What do you like for mosquitoes, Debra? One of my main things I just want to say is that it’s so important to remove any stagnant water anywhere near your house—old tires where water is accumulated or old flower pots, anything like that.
That’s just one of the key reasons too. Every time I get mosquitoes near my house even, I’m always like, “Oh, my gosh! Where is the stagnant water.” And so before we go into the specifics of some repellants, I just wanted to say that.
But I’d be curious to know what you—I remember something from somewhere back when where you had some great ideas about mosquitoes. I’d be curious.
DEBRA: I do because mosquitoes have been—that’s probably my single most prevalent pest problem, mosquitoes, because I really don’t like to be bitten. And I would totally agree with you. One of the things that I was just doing this morning—
Well, first of all, as you have all heard, Annie and I both live now in thunderstorm country which means that we’re always getting water every day. And anything that I have that is upright and holds water will hold water every day. And so I go around.
I have two wheelbarrows in my backyard. I have to turn them upside-down. I can’t just leave them there because, overnight—or even during our day—they’ll hold water. And the other containers, I make sure that—I have been known to put holes in the bottoms of things so that the water seeps through, and they don’t collect water. That is the most important thing.
Another thing about mosquitoes, especially indoors, you can have mosquito netting. I used to have mosquito netting over my bed. That works really, really well.
But the simplest thing, and something that I think works just so well, is vinegar. You can use any kind of vinegar. I use apple cider vinegar, the natural kind. And I just put it—you know those little shaker bottles they have in Italian restaurants for the oil and the vinegar? I bought a set of those, and I filled them with vinegar. And I have one sitting next to my bed and one sitting on the kitchen. And if I’m going outside, or if a mosquito gets in the house, I just shake the vinegar on my body, and it doesn’t bite me. And this is actually a surefire, inexpensive way to just not get bit.
And it occurs that you could even make garlic vinegar. And that would probably be even more effective. But you would smell like garlic.
ANNIE BOND: I know! Well, that’s the problem with taking all my garlic pills. I have to stop before important meetings or something. I can’t walk in there and be reeking of it.
Wow! What a great idea. That makes a lot of sense. So it’s like the incredible acid, mosquitoes don’t like that acid.
DEBRA: They don’t. And they also don’t like dark colors. So if you wear black, you’re less likely to be bit by a mosquito than if you wear white, certain colors. I actually wrote up this whole long list. I have to find it. I should find it and put it up on my website again because I have a list of all these things to do to protect yourself from mosquitoes.
So, you really do not need Deet or any other toxic pesticide.
ANNIE BOND: You totally don’t need Deet, I agree.
It’s interesting. I went to Southeast Asia out of a great generosity of a really great friend of mine. She took me and her daughter, her daughter’s best friend. We traveled, and there was a malaria outbreak in Cambodia when we were there. And I was very concerned because I’m so sensitive to chemical pesticides, I know that I would not be able to be near her or her friend—her daughter or her daughter’s friend—if they were using toxic pest killer on themselves. I knew that I certainly couldn’t.
This is a lot of responsibility, to ask people not to use a Deet-based spray because I didn’t want anybody to get malaria of course.
And so, I did a lot of research online. And I found a company that had done all the tests. And it was equally, if not more effective, than Deet. So I felt very confident in buying it and giving these bottles. I bought bottles for each one of the four of us.
And I just felt great about it. It was a very strong essential oil.
I think it was Buzzz Off. But it was a number of years, I can’t quite remember, I’m sorry. But I usually don’t need something so powerful around the house. So I haven’t bought it again.
DEBRA: Yeah. Here in Florida, we really have a lot of mosquitoes. It’s so hard to go out in the summertime and not get bit. So I do a combination of vinegar and also—I mean one or the other. I’ll use vinegar or I’ll use the Greenway Formula 7. I find it to be very effective. And also, it just smells like cloves. There’s no citronella or any of those kinds of things in it. So those are the two that I use, and I’m pretty mosquito-free.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that’s really great. You know, the list of herbs that I’ve researched have worked really well for mosquito repellants. They were essential oils. You could make your own or whatever.
One thing you want to do when you’re using essential oils, when you put them on yourself—as you know, Debra—you don’t want to put the essential oil straight on your skin because they can burn. So put about a tablespoon of whatever household oil you have, like olive oil, and then add like 10 drops or something to a tablespoon of the oil. And then you could dab the essential oil mixture onto your skin. And that’s a good way to do it.
But eucalyptus oil is a really good repellant, as is cloves actually. Did you say cloves?
DEBRA: Cloves, that’s the major one in Greenway Formula 7.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s definitely on my list. Geranium also works for mosquitoes. Peppermint, rosemary, lemon balm, or citronella, they’re good ones.
DEBRA: Great! So we need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with Annie Bond. And we’re talking about how to protect ourselves from summertime bugs. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of Clean & Green, Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment. And her most recent book is True Food.
All of Annie’s books, Clean & Green, Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment, those are three great books to have on your bookshelf. Each one of them is full of do-it-yourself things that you can make at home that are natural alternatives to products that contain toxic chemicals. Her website is AnnieBBond.com.
So Annie, what else do you want to tell us about controlling or repelling pests?
ANNIE BOND: Well, what do you think? We’ve got ideas for mice, for ants, for head lice, whatever. What would you suggest?
DEBRA: Oh, I like ants.
ANNIE BOND: Okay!
DEBRA: I want to tell what I do for ants. You can tell me what you do for ants.
ANNIE BOND: Fabulous! So, why don’t you go first?
DEBRA: My tried and true thing is that I just—you know, ants come in in a line in looking for food. And so I just look for that line of ants. And in one hand, I have a damp sponge. And on the other hand, I have a bottle of Elmer’s white glue. And I just keep wiping them up with the sponge, and then you find a point where they’re coming in the house, and you just put some
Elmer’s white glue, and it fills up the hole.
And then, the next day, they’ll find another way to come in. And you do exactly the same thing.
And I find it doesn’t take more than three or four days in doing the same thing over and over—either I’ve gotten all the holes, or they just decided not to come in anymore. And this has solved every ant problem in every place I’ve ever lived.
And of course then it’s done. You never have ants again in your house because you filled up the holes.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that sounds great. That’s a very good overlay for mice too. I mean I’ve done everything under the sun for mice. And yes, I can repel them. But it’s not until you fill up the holes that you don’t get them back.
So that’s a really great solution, Debra, for ants. I like that.
I have a solution that is very fun if you’ve got kids around. And that is making a sugar ant hotel. This is one of my daughter’s main events in the spring.
DEBRA: Oh, that sounds like fun. Tell us about that.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, we would have fun. We’d bring a big bowl out on the counter, and I would mix half and half borax and sugar and mix it up—or we would. And then, meanwhile, all year, we accumulate the little—or marinated artichoke heart jars.
So they’re just about the right height for making your own sugar ant hotel. You’d get a hammer and a nail, and you punch holes on the top of the lid for that.
And so, you just scrunch up some toilet paper or use cotton balls and stick them in the bottom halfway up or so in the jars. And then, you fill it up about halfway with the borax and sugar mixture. Fill it with water up to about a quarter of an inch or half an inch to the top. Screw in the top. And then, put them around where you would normally put those ant hotels. And the ants just line up to get in. They just love it so much. It kills the ants, but it’s a great way to keep the sugar ants out.
This won’t get the queen. And so you do need to put borax around in some places that are safe from kids and pets. The worker ants will take the borax back to the queen.
Otherwise, it’s a great little project for a family to use, to make the sugar ant hotel.
DEBRA: That sounds like fun. When you say borax, are you talking about borax like 20 Mule Team Borax or boric acid?
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly, the kind that you buy in the laundry section of the supermarket.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that that would work [unclear 30:58]
ANNIE BOND: Well, it probably wouldn’t, but I just am super duper cautious, just to be able to say that. I can’t imagine any pet trying to lick it up.
DEBRA: No, no, no… I meant pests, not pets. I’m looking it up. I was wondering about using it to kill insects.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, I see. Yes! It’s definitely strong enough.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s what I wanted to know.
ANNIE BOND: What happens is the sugar attracts it, and then the borax kills. That’s the thing.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s something that works. Okay, good. It wasn’t that I had never heard of it before. It’s just I always thought when you think of controlling pests, you think of boric acid. So I wanted to make sure that our listeners are not confusing the two.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly. That’s right. People always recommend boric acid for cockroaches. And not living in the city and not having cockroaches where I live, it’s not that easy to find. Because of that, I always use borax, and it works wonderfully. So
I never looked further. And it’s certainly easy to do. So that’s great.
You know, one of the other things…
DEBRA: Well, what about people who are living in the city and they need to control cockroaches?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I don’t know that there’s something much better than boric acid. I think that’s really what I understand.
That’s really the tried and true ingredient, right?
DEBRA: It is! So, we have here in Florida something called palmetto bugs which is like a giant cockroach. And they’re actually pretty scary. The first time I saw one, I thought, “Oh, my God! What’s this?” And everybody has them in their house.
But the way I ended up controlling them was the first thing that I did was, again, I looked for all the ways that they could possibly be getting in. And that reduced them greatly, just simply filling up the holes.
And that’s one of the basic ideas behind natural pest control, to fill up holes, put up screens. You want to put up barriers between…
ANNIE BOND: Actually, it’s just commonsense. That’s the heart of integrative pest management, using commonsense and thinking about it and not just saying, “Oh, I’m going to get something and spray.” Think a little bit, and then you solve it. I mean it’s an amazing thing.
DEBRA: Yeah! Well, I think that’s true for anything that you’re looking for a solution for. Instead of just having a spray or taking a pill or something, there’s something that you can actually do. There’s a reason that the problem is there. And if you take care of the reason, you won’t have a problem anymore.
So, we filled up all the holes where they were coming in.
And then, what else do we do? Oh, then you need to be looking and seeing do you have things like food sitting out or crumbs on the floor or dripping water because pests are looking for food, water and shelter. If you provide those, like papers stacked up—and it’s fine to stack them up to take them to recycling, but then take them to recycling. Don’t just leave them sitting there because they attract pests.
But what we finally ended up doing was—now, I didn’t actually do this, Larry did it. But he mixed boric acid and something into a little bowl (and I forgot what it was that he mixed it with). And then he just put it down in the bottom of the cabinets, so that they were inside and the cats wouldn’t find them. And I haven’t seen a palmetto bug since.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s really great. Yeah, that’s really great.
DEBRA: Oh, I think it was cornstarch—cornstarch and [unclear 34:57] and water, yeah.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, that would make sense. It’s also unbelievably dehydrating for the bug.
DEBRA: Yeah!
ANNIE BOND: I also read here—in Better Basics, I didn’t remember. I’d put this in here—that chickens and geckos love to eat cockroaches. So there’s another option for you.
DEBRA: They do, they do. You know, for a while, I had chickens in my backyards. And we also have geckos. And we would collect the palmetto bugs and feed them to the chickens.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah! Yeah, totally. Well, guinea hens love to eat ticks. I think my dogs will eat the guinea hens, and so they wouldn’t last very long. But that’s another thing. A lot f people I know where I live have a lot of guinea hens around to just eat up the ticks.
There again, that’s one of those commonsense reaction to things.
You know, another thing that we might want to talk about would be fleas. Especially as we’re getting these heat spells, there tends to be a huge flea hatchings…
DEBRA: Well, I would love to talk about fleas, except that we’re almost out of time.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, we are, okay.
DEBRA: Time goes by really fast. So we’ve got about a minute and a half left. Do you have any final words you’d like to say about living non-toxic or about non-toxic pest control […]?
ANNIE BOND: I would just like to say to do it, just to do it. I mean that was the thing. I haven’t drycleaned my clothes for 30 years. I just had to learn how to do without, do it differently. And that’s my suggestion, especially with pesticides. It’s just simply to say, “Okay, turn the page, new chapter. I’m never going to use a synthetic pest control in my life again and search for alternatives.”
They work. They’re wonderful. And you’re not poisoning yourself, and the family, and the neighborhood and the pets and everything at the same time.
DEBRA: Yes, I completely agree. And that’s what Annie and I have been doing for all these many years, finding those alternatives, figuring out how to do it, and writing about how to do it, and talking about how to do it—and doing it ourselves.
So, all these answers are there. It’s just about you all learning how to do it. And together, we can make a tremendous difference in the world to make our own lives safer and the world a safer place for everybody to live.
Thank you so much for being with me, Annie, today.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, thanks for having me.
DEBRA: I’m sure we’ll have you on again.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, thank you so much. Great to be here, Debra. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thanks, thanks. So for more information about how you can live a non-toxic free way, go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top, there’s a lot of links to go to the different parts of my website. And listen again tomorrow!
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
How Do I Get Rid of Carpenter Ants?
Question from Joy
Does anyone have a safe, successful way to get rid of carpenter ants? They are eating my window frame and the framing in the walls.
Debra’s Answer
Readers, and experience with this?
I had carpenter ants in my little cabin in the woods in California and I just vacuumed them out of the walls when I opened them up for remodeling, and that was it. They may have returned, I don’t know.
Being Beautiful Naturally
My guest Joy Wicks is a married mother of 3 who became committed to starting and running NaturalJoyBeauty.com after learning about the toxic ingredients in most makeup and body care products. During her transition to natural and organic products she found that health food stores didn’t really offer what she was looking for. Most of the products they had still contained ingredients she didn’t want to be using. After locating products that met her new ingredient criteria (from many hours of researching) the desire grew to have a store for people that offered them. We’ll be talking about toxic ingredients in makeup and body care products, and how to choose safe ones. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/natural-joy-beauty
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Being Beautiful Naturally
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Joy Wicks
Date of Broadcast: July 9, 2013
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. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around us in all kinds of consumer products and in the environment, in the food we eat, the air we breathe, our personal care products—everywhere we look it seems.
There are many, many products that do not have toxic chemicals in them. There are ways we can remove toxic chemicals from our homes and our bodies. And that’s the kind of thing that we talk about on this show, how we can be happy, be healthy, be productive and do what we want in our lives without being hindered by toxic chemicals.
Today is Tuesday, July 9th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where the sun is shining. It looks like we may not have a thunderstorm until later in the day. So we shouldn’t be interrupted by that.
We’re going to be talking today about choosing organic and natural and toxic-free beauty products, personal care products, and cosmetics. But first, I want to give you a quote that came in my email this morning. This is from Peter F. Drucker who is a very successful businessman. He said:
“Start with what is right, rather than what is acceptable.”
And when I read that this morning, I thought, “Wow! We live in a society where it’s acceptable by many pp to have toxic chemicals in our products. But it’s not right. And there are many of us, including probably many of you (that’s why you’re listening to this show) that know that what is right is to have products and things and practices that we do at home that are contributing to sustaining health rather than damaging health.”
And so, I like that idea, that we should always be considering what’s right, what is contributing to our health, what is contributing to sustaining the planet, what is contributing to life and happiness and health rather than what might be acceptable by people who are not contributing to those things.
So, I’m happy to introduce my guest today, Joy Wicks who is a married mother of three, who became committed to starting and running her business, NaturalJoyBeauty.com, after learning about toxic ingredients in most make-up and body care products.
Thanks for being with me, Joy.
JOY WICKS: Thanks for having me, Debra.
DEBRA: So, why don’t you go ahead and tell your story instead of me telling it?
JOY WICKS: Okay, I appreciate that. Really, I think where it started for me was about five years ago. I was a stay-at-home mother at the time. And I started thinking a lot about the different things that I was using to clean my home.
For some reason, cleaning products and make-up and body care all kind of came together at once in my mind as far as being curious about the ingredients and what effects they may be having on myself and my family. Unlike some of the guests you have who have had health concerns or health issues that have caused them to have to make the changes, I can’t say that my story was really like that. It was more of a curiosity.
As a child, I remember standing in the shower and reading the shampoo labels and just thinking those words were kind of funny words you couldn’t pronounce, not knowing what exactly those ingredients were. And I think some of that kind of came back to me as an adult. I was right around the age of 30 or 31 at the time. And it just really started to make me wonder what we were doing to ourselves every day.
I’ve worn make-up pretty much every day since I was 13 or 14 years old. And I like to use powder make-up over the top of my foundation and things. And I started to wonder, “What am I inhaling? What am I doing to myself?” I was using things like scrubbing bubbles-type cleaners to clean my bathroom. You breathe those things in while you’re cleaning. And so, a lot of that just kind of made me wonder what are these things doing to me.
And as soon as I sat down at the computer and started googling, it was like opening Pandora’s box. There was so much information out there. And I was amazed to start learning about the thing.
And so, I spent literally hours of my time because I was able to do that researching and making a list of the ingredients and things I wanted to avoid.
And your website was one that I found very early on. It was a great resource for me as far as helping me changing dishes and things like that, my house cookware, all sorts of things, the cleaning products.
DEBRA: Thank you.
JOY WICKS: But then, the make-up thing—of course, because of my love of make-up (as I said, I’ve been wearing it since I was allowed to)—that’s where my focus went, with more on the make-up and the body care side of things.
And I was just amazed because I hadn’t shopped at health food stores. I was like the general public. The mass, I would go just to the mass stores. And I didn’t know a thing about it.
So, I assumed that if I walked into a health food store, they were going to have these products I was not learning about. They were going to not include those ingredients.
And I was astounded to go in with my little list in hand and find out that a lot of those products still contained synthetic fragrance and pthalates—well, usually, the pthalates are in the fragrances. Propylene glycol was still in a lot of the things at the health food store and just lots of different ingredients that I didn’t want to be using.
And so, I had to again spend lots of hours researching products. As a mom, I didn’t always have time to spend in the store for hours. So I would write down brand names and then take them home and try to find ingredients.
And then, I found a lot of companies try to hide their ingredient list online. They’re not really open about what’s in the products.
And that’s usually a good way for people to—it’s not always the case. But it’s a good way usually to judge a brand.
DEBRA: I agree.
JOY WICKS: If they don’t openly display their ingredients on their website, they’re usually hiding something.
DEBRA: I totally agree. And that’s one of the things that I look for too.
JOY WICKS: Yeah! And one of the little tricks I’ll use is I’ll put “key ingredients.” I’m sure you’ve seen that where, in the list, they have organic shea butter and all the great anti-aging benefits of it. Usually, the yucky stuff is at the end of the label anyway, down where the preservatives and fillers and things are. And so, that’s what I had found.
And even now, after having my business for five years—it’s been about nine years I’ve been in the natural products, but I’ve had the business now for a little over five—I’m still always researching products and finding out things. And sometimes, I even get disappointed to find out brands aren’t upfront about something in a product. We have to pull it and not sell that product anymore. It’s an ongoing process even for me to always educate myself because there’s always some ingredient I haven’t heard of or that new information comes out about.
And so research is a big part of it I think for the consumer. And I try to do as much of that for the consumer as I can. That’s the premise of our website—so that you can just come on there and trust what you’re buying that researched and assessed I can.
I do try to keep things updated and change if need be what we’re stocking and what we’re offering for people.
DEBRA: I would like to ask you particularly because you weren’t motivated by a health concern where you had some kind of chemical injury or had some other illness like cancer or something where it’s known that there’s a connection with toxic chemical exposure. What was it that motivated you as an average consumer? I heard you say that you’ve just always been interested in these things. But it’s so unusual for someone to do as much as you have that doesn’t have a reason, an urgent reason like “I need to get well.”
JOY WICKS: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I think, for me, I was concerned about my health and my family’s health even though we weren’t suffering from any particular illness or allergies or chemical sensitivities.
So, for me, I can’t say exactly what it was. It felt more intuitive maybe, that my body just wanted to know these things. And I’ve learned a lot more about that. Having gone more natural, you meet a lot of people that are into intuitive types of therapies and trainings and things.
And I really think it was just something that I felt led to do, for lack of a better way to put it. It was a natural path that my mind and my body and my spirit, however you want to put it, all kind of felt led to start following down.
And then, as I’ve said earlier, once I opened up Pandora’s box, it was like, “Wow!” I couldn’t stop.
I even got to a point where—I like to bring this up because I know a lot of my customers mentioned the same sort of issues—you can actually get to a bad place with that information, where you become depressed to think that everything is so toxic in the world and that there are no good products.
DEBRA: Right! But you solved that. We can’t say there are no good products because you found them.
We’re going to talk more about this after the break. My guest is Joy Wicks. She’s the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com where she reviews the toxic chemicals found in consumer beauty products and finds the safe ones so you don’t have to do that research.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Joy Wicks, the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com. And Joy was interested in make-up and concerned about toxics, so she started reading labels to find beauty products that did not contain toxic chemicals.
Joy, I’m looking on the home page of your website. And you have a list of what you won’t find in the products that you carry. So tell us something about the ingredients and their toxicity and what you think are some of the most important ingredients for people to avoid in personal care products.
JOY WICKS: Certainly! We have that list that’s right there on the home page that you’re talking about, a bulleted list that tells the things you won’t find.
We also have under the categories on the sidebar (on the left-hand side of our website), if you go down, there’s actually a little article thing on why natural, why it’s important, but there’s one that says The Ingredients to Avoid. We even recently updated it in the fall of 2012. And that will give a little more in-depth list for people and actually give some of the reasons behind why the ingredients are bad versus just listing them. It’ll give a little more detail for customers.
DEBRA: I just click them. I see that. This is a really good list. Let’s talk about a few of those because some people are listening and don’t have their computers in front of them.
But before we do, I just want to make the point that there are several ways that toxic chemicals can get into your body. And people usually think of, if you eat or drink something with toxic chemicals, that that’s the worst. But in fact, what you put on your skin is actually worse than if you were to drink something or eat something. When something goes into your body and goes in through your stomach and intestines, you’ve got fats and proteins and food that mix with it before it actually goes into your body, into your bloodstream. But with something that you put on your skin, it goes straight into your blood in seconds.
And so, I consider a toxic chemical going on your skin to be even more hazardous than any other way it can go in your body except for breathing. Well, I would say: skin, one; breathing, two; and ingestion, number three.
JOY WICKS: I would totally agree with you. I would totally agree.
DEBRA: Yeah, if people are concerned about what’s in their drinking water or food additives and you’re not paying attention to what you’re putting on your skin, pay attention to what you’re putting on your skin. This is so, so, so important. I can’t emphasize it enough.
So, tell us, Joy, some of the things. You’ve got a long list here, so pick out some that you think from your research are the most important.
JOY WICKS: Okay. I’m going to bring up some that are what I call “greenwashing” ones that you’ll see the most, the brand that claim to be natural.
DEBRA: Good idea!
JOY WICKS: The big thing right now is for brands to say they’re paraben-free. And a paraben is a chemical preservative, for those that don’t know this, that is a hormone disruptor. It’s linked to all sorts of toxicity issues in the human body. And it’s in most products—methylparaben, propylparaben. The word will just be a chemical name that ends with “paraben.”
And a lot of people are learning about that. So now you’re going to see all these brands coming out with paraben-free products. But what they’re doing is a lot of them are using things that are really not any better as a preservative. It’s just not a paraben.
And a couple of those things that you’re going to see, one is phenoxyethanol. That is in a lot of products. They use other names for it too like optiphen. There are different names they kind of trick you with in case you already are learning about phenoxyethanol. It’s really where a lot of these companies are hoping the consumer isn’t educated on the ingredients and won’t question what they’re doing.
But it is in natural products quite a bit. It is carcinogenic. It’s toxic. It may not mimic estrogen in the body, but it has other toxicity and carcinogenic properties to it. So you want to avoid phenoxyethanol.
The other one is germole or germaben. They will contain things like the phenoxyethanol or propylene glycol. Propylene glycol is a penetration enhancer. And that is in a lot of the deodorants, even the ones that claim to be natural. It’s in toothpaste, lotions. It’s in a ton of products. I mean there’s too many to name that have propylene glycol in it.
Japanese honeysuckle is the one that a lot of the popular brands right now that are touting themselves as natural are using as a preservative. And there have been studies out there showing that it does mimic hormones in the body much like parabens.
And so, if you’re putting it in there to replace parabens, you’re really not changing the product and making it any healthier for the consumer. And the customers don’t know that. You see something like Japanese honeysuckle on the label, and it just sounds sweet and natural and harmless. And it’s really sad that people just aren’t aware of it.
And then, fragrance is a big one for me because that’s one that a lot of brands sneak in. A lot of soapmakers—and sometimes, I don’t even know the people that handcrafts them. I don’t think they do it deliberately. I think sometimes, in their cases, they’re not even educated well about the difference between an actual scented oil…
DEBRA: I think that that’s a very important point to make. I think that it’s not that a lot of people are being malicious. It’s that they just don’t know.
JOY WICKS: That’s true. Sometimes, that does happen with companies just like with GMO’s and food and things where they’re deliberately not wanting to change things and hide information. But I do think a lot of the times too that some of the people that are making these products or selling these products are just not educated enough themselves to know the things that they’re putting in there.
And synthetic fragrance is a bad one because it can contain thousands of different chemicals, not just pthalates in it. And a lot of companies are using pthalate-free fragrance oils and thinking that that’s enough, thinking that that allows them to label their soap or their lotions as all natural. And in reality, that isn’t an all-natural product. They should be using essential oils and CO2’s and things like that to scent a product if they truly want it to be 100% natural.
So, in our shop, we don’t allow synthetic fragrance. All of our vendors that we purchase products from are claiming to use actual essential oils or some of them use organic flavor oils so that we can offer some fun flavors that you can’t find in an essential oil because there’s a company out there that provides those. And they’re USDA certified organic.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Joy Wicks who’s the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com. And she has done all the legwork of reading all the labels and finding out the toxic chemicals and finding the cosmetics and personal care and beauty products that are the least toxic that she can find. I was just looking at her site during the break, and she even has toxic-free nail polish.
And so, Joy, you’ve got so many products. Let’s talk about some of them.
JOY WICKS: Sure!
DEBRA: So, nail polish, there’s no toxic chemicals in it?
JOY WICKS: No. Now, on our website, we’ll tell people it’s not 100% natural because there isn’t a hundred percent natural nail polish. You still have to have some acrylic in it. But they have removed all of the things like toluene and the pthalates and the formaldehyde.
Now, one thing you’ll find too, out on the market, there’s a lot of nail polishes now claiming to be 3-free or 5-free. What they mean when they say that is that they don’t have those things that I just mentioned. They’re the three big ones. Some of them will even go as far as to remove five of the main chemicals that cause that horrible smell and toxicity to nail polishes.
But those 3- and 5-free nail polishes will still smell bad. They still have that polished solvents now. And they still contain a lot of chemicals in them, whereas the ones that we carry are all water-based. And the water-based polishes are a lot safer. They don’t contain any of those smelly products. They’re great for people with allergies and sensitivities to the scent. And really, the only unnatural ingredient in them is the acrylic that helps it to stick to your nail.
But the coloring used are all natural. They’re primarily water-based. And there’s a couple of different brands that we carry right now and offer for the consumer.
DEBRA: Yes, I am constantly looking at nail polish. And I think that you’ve done a great job at choosing the least toxic ones available for people who want to wear nail polish.
For myself, I still wouldn’t put acrylic on my nails. But I think that if somebody wants to wear nail polish, I think you’ve done a fabulous job at choosing one that removes the most toxic things.
JOY WICKS: Thank you. And that’s all you can really do when it comes to nail polish because, really, the only other option are some of those natural buffing kits that someone can use and try to buff and do the shine to their nails.
DEBRA: Right!
JOY WICKS: But other than that, really, the ones that we’ve chosen, the Environmental Working Group has their rating system. And for the most part, I usually agree with their ratings—not always on products. I still try to research above and beyond just using their website. But they’re a good starting point.
The Aquarella that we carry, that is the safest rated nail polish even with them, with the EWG. And then, also, like the Kiki brand that we carry—and there are some others that we don’t carry that are good too like HoneyBee Gardens and SunCoat Naturals. Those are a couple of other good water-based brands. And they rate just slightly higher than Aquarella. Aquarella was the cleanest. And the cleanest of the Aquarella would be the conditioner, the clear polish. If someone is extremely concerned, that would be the lowest as far as the ratings there on the toxicity scale with the EWG.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve done a good job on that.
So, tell us about, of all the beauty products and cosmetics, what do you think is the most important one or the most important few that people should be concerned about and find an alternative for besides nail polish. I would say nail polish is the most toxic one.
JOY WICKS: Yeah, it’s pretty toxic. But also, women cover their—not all women, but there’s a good chunk of women in our society that wear foundation. You’re covering your entire face with that all day long. If I had to pick out a make-up, mascara is probably going to be a little less on the scale because mascara, especially if you get it taken off at night before you go to bed so that it’s not sitting on your skin (the residue of it isn’t sitting there overnight), mascara is sitting on your lashes, for instance.
Even though I think it’s important to change, it’s not my top priority.
But foundations, the eye shadows, the things that lay on your skin for hours, those are the things that I worry about. Lotions are big because you’re covering a massive amount of your skin, your largest organ of your body, with it. And obviously, you do absorb those chemicals as we know because even the drug companies and things make medications that are absorbable—topical application medications—because they know that it will get into your skin.
DEBRA: …and patches.
JOY WICKS: Yeah, and the patches, exactly. It’s the same thing with putting lotion on. If it has bad ingredients in it, you’re going to absorb that over a really large part of your body.
And I think shampoos and things like that are really good too—and soap—because you’re covering yourself with those while you’re in the shower. And yes, you’re rinsing them off, but they’re on your body long enough. And most people shower everyday. So, those are things that, on a regular, you’re absorbing.
I think toothpaste is another one because we all pretty much brush our teeth two or three times a day—or should be. And there’s a lot of things in our toothpaste too. So it does go beyond just even the make-up. We have a lot of different body care products that are on our website.
He toothpaste we carry, you could honestly swallow it, and it wouldn’t even do any harm to your body because there’s just none of the toxic ingredients or the fluoride or any of those things in it.
DEBRA: Yeah, I was just looking at your homepage, and you have a video on your homepage right now. What’s the brand? It’s called Earth Paste, amazingly natural toothpaste. I didn’t try that actually yet, but it looks fabulous. It looks very natural.
JOY WICKS: It’s great. And their video is really funny. They’ve got a cute, little spoof of a video that they did to keep it light and to show humor, but also educate the consumer about the things that are in toothpaste.
That’s just one of those things a lot of people don’t think about. They don’t think twice about what they’re brushing their teeth with. And the dentists and everybody else are telling you you need the fluoride and you need these different brands.
You know, triclosan, that antibacterial agent, is one of the things that they’re putting in all the antibacterial soaps and things.
They’re now introducing that into a lot of the toothpaste like the Colgate Total thing.
DEBRA : Oh, my God!
JOY WICKS: And customers don’t realize that. When you see the commercials where they show how someone’s breath stayed fresh for 12 hours, it’s because they’re putting antibacterial agents in there. And so it’s not bad enough that we’re already absorbing it through our skin with all the hand soaps out at places or that people are bringing into their homes, but you’re also absorbing it through things like your toothpaste. They’ve put it in deodorants and things too.
Dateline had a report. We had it posted on our Facebook page and shared it with our customers. But they did a report where one of their producers actually did her blood test prior to doing her report to check for toxic chemicals in her body. And she did do some changes in how she heated up things in plastic containers and micowaves and stuff. But one of the things she did was she changed the make-up that she was wearing. And her levels were really high in BPA and pthalates and all sorts of chemicals. She changed her make-up and stopped heating things up in certain products. She then did her blood test, and her levels were down significantly just by making a few changes.
DEBRA: Yeah, BPA actually doesn’t stay in your body very long. And so if people have high BPA levels, it’s because they’re being continuously exposed. You just stop using it. And within a week or less, you won’t have some of the BPA in your body.
And that affects your endocrine system.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Joy Wicks from NaturalJoyBeauty.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be back after this message.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Joy Wicks, owner of Natural Joy Beauty where she has done the leg work of looking at all the ingredients and studying which ones are toxic and not toxic and choosing the products that do not contain toxic chemicals. She has everything from cosmetics to facial care, hair care, an apothecary, baby and mom, coconut-free products, gluten-free products, vegan products, laundry and cleaning products.
There’s just so many things that you can use basically for household and personal care on her site where she’s already done the work to find the toxic chemicals and choose products that don’t have them.
Joy, this is our last segment. Is there anything that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t talked about?
JOY WICKS: Well, I just think a good thing that I want people to know—I brought it up earlier in the show—about how it can be really overwhelming once you do open up to educating yourself and to learn about things. It can be really scary trying to find products, and overwhelming.
And I like to tell people to take it a day at a time, a product at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to make the transition to where you just are in a panic mode. Understand that each thing you eliminate, each toxic product and ingredient that you eliminate out of your daily routine, is going to be beneficial for you, to realize that that’s all going to add up in the end, and that it’s okay if you can’t afford to change everything all at once. Baby steps works just fine.
If you can afford the luxury of just learning about things and changing all of your products, that’s great. Do it! But for a lot of people, that’s not practical. And I think they need to realize that.
Another thing we like to do on our particular website is we do carry samples of a lot of the products too, so that customers and can really try things before they buy the full size and make sure it’s the right fit for them, the right color for them.
DEBRA: That’s great, yeah.
JOY WICKS: In the case of all of those with chemical sensitivities and allergies, they can test for allergies and things with the product because even natural things, you can obviously be allergic to. You mentioned that we have coconut-free products.
That was one I was not aware, people with coconut allergies. There are people with that allergy, and they can’t use commercial products because those chemicals are coconut-based. But then, they go to the natural products, and they’re all containing coconut oil in the soaps and things.
So, we found vendors who make products that don’t contain any coconut oil for those people that need that.
DEBRA: Yes, you’ve got a lot of these things covered.
I agree with you that people should take just two things one by one because it can be overwhelming. I know in my particular case, once I discovered that toxic chemicals in my environment were making me sick, I just wanted to get rid of them all at once—and I did. I just went through my house and I took out everything that I could identify that was toxic which left me with kind of an empty house.
But then I had to find products. And when I was doing this back in 1978, it was very much, polyester was the most popular thing. We didn’t have all those natural products that we have now in 1978. And to even find something like a bar of soap, back then, people were using ivory soap because it was the purest stuff that existed, but Ivory is very highly scented with synthetic fragrance. But still, it was the most natural product you could find in 1978 when I started
So, we’ve come a long way. There are so many products that are available now that it’s not a matter of them not being available, but a matter of people choosing them and finding the ones that worked best for them.
There’s a lot of reasons why a lot of products need to exist, because everybody has their own individual preferences and sensitivities. But you’ve given a really good selection. And I think that a lot of people will be able to find exactly what it is they need on your site.
I can’t say enough good things about what you’ve done, Joy. You’ve done a really great job.
JOY WICKS: Well, thank you, Debra. I appreciate that. And you were, as I mentioned before, a big part of my journey in the beginning too. And throughout the years, your website has been a great resource. I always tell people about it because there’s so much valuable information on there that can help change the things that they’re using, not just in their bodies, but in their homes.
DEBRA: Thank you. So, I think the question that I would like to ask you personally is tell us about especially mineral make-ups. There’s a lot of new mineral make-ups on the market. Are there ingredients in the mineral make-ups that we should be watching out for?
JOY WICKS: There are. Bismuth oxychloride is one that a lot of people are sensitive to. It’s not necessarily toxic, but it is one that can cause sensitivities. It’s in the major brands (without naming names) that most people see on infomercials and in the mall. They use bismuth oxychloride; a lot of the popular brands do.
A lot of the ones you’re going to find at your drugstore, the traditional brands of make-up, have all come out with their own versions of mineral make-up. They’re putting parabens, they’re actually still using paraben preservatives which you don’t need in a dry mineral make-up, so I’m not sure why they’re putting it in there. And they’re using talc. That’s something that we avoid in the products we carry.
A lot of the other issue are the nano-particles. You may hear about that where the particles are so small that they’re getting into the bloodstream, and they’re easier to be inhaled and cause problems for the body. So we like to even offer options with that.
None of the products that we sell are nanoparticles or contain nanoparticles, I should say. But we do offer pressed and cream make-up and things like that for those that are just extremely concerned about inhaling any of the powder products. We do have options for them to help minimize inhalation or take it away by being a cream eye shadow or cream blush or cream foundation.
But the bismuth oxychloride is a big one. As I’ve said, those other companies are putting in lots of the same chemicals that they’re using in their regular liquid foundations and things. They’re just putting that in the mineral make-up for whatever reason.
And so, the other thing to watch out for is that, even if you get into a mineral make-up line—a lot of times, the powders may be fairly safe. But start looking when they have primers and mascaras and things that are cream or liquid-based.
Watch out for those things we talked about earlier like the phenoxyethanol and the Japanese honeysuckle extract, and synthetic fragrance, because a lot of times, they sneak those things into those products , and you don’t realize it. You just kind of buy into the line because it’s mineral make-up. And the primary products like the facial, make-up and blushes and things are safe—or fairly safe ingredient-wise. And you don’t realize that when you start buying the other thing from the brand, they may not be what you’re actually looking for.
DEBRA: Yeah! Once of the things that I’ve realized as I talk to manufacturers, but also I talk to people who are looking at regulations and various things. But there’s an awareness level that needs to change.
And you and I and others are all working on this because it needs to change on the consumer level, but it also needs to change on the manufacturing level and on the regulatory level because manufacturers, they aren’t a lot of manufacturers, who really understand the issues as well even say you and I understand them.
JOY WICKS: True!
DEBRA: Yet they are. We need to be really focusing on those manufacturers who do understand and are trying to do their best, and are producing the purest products, and then bring along the other manufacturers as well.
I can imagine from the viewpoint of a manufacturer that’s making a really toxic product, their entire income and their business are all based on producing toxic products. And maybe they didn’t know that they were toxic in the beginning (although a lot of toxic things have been known for decades, and people still use them).
But there needs to be a change. There needs to be a shift. And it needs to happen across the board where we all start learning what are the toxic chemicals and what are the non-toxic chemicals and be making the products out of those materials that are safe.
Most of the time, they’re not going to be man-made chemicals (although there are some synthetic chemicals that are not too toxic). But it’s going to be the small shift to turn around and start figuring out a new way to make things. And that needs to be supported by consumers. Consumers need to understand and want to buy the products that exist, so that we’ll continue to support that market. Wouldn’t you agree with that?
JOY WICKS: I would. And a lot of times, it’s cost because a lot of the chemicals are a lot cheaper to use than the natural, organic ingredients. But sadly, I don’t think these companies realize that consumers would gladly pay an extra dollar or two for a product if we’re going to be safer for them.
And that’s where there has to be more education. As you said, I don’t think that all of the companies are bad guys, per se, or doing it intentionally. But there are companies that are knowingly putting out toxic products just because of the cost, and so they make more money off of it.
And I think that there does have to be more awareness, more education, as you’ve said, with the companies themselves, with the consumers and consumer demand. As we’re seeing now, consumers are saying, “Hey, we want our food labeled whether or not it has GMO’s in it.” And I think the same thing is going to need to happen with the beauty industry.
Some of these companies actually produce safer products to sell in Europe and other countries, safer versions of baby washes and things like that, that they won’t sell to us in the US. And it’s all because of profit margins. And the consumers in the US don’t really understand and aren’t educated enough to ask for something different.
And so I really think that your show is a great platform for educated people. And that needs to happen.
DEBRA: Thank you. And here comes the music, and so that’s the end. Thank you so much, Joy, for being with us. Again, her website is NaturalJoyBeauty.com. If you’re looking for some beauty products, go over to Natural Joy Beauty and see what she has.
JOY WICKS: Thanks again, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Thanks for listening.
Bathroom Caulk
Question from Janice
Hi Debra- We had our bathroom gutted and redone about a year and a half ago and had 100% silicone caulk sealing the area where the tub meets the tile. I was very careful about the products used and although the silicone was very stinky for a couple of days it was fine once cured. The problem is it’s developed mildew stains and must be removed. Any ideas about what we can use? What do you think about EcoBond Kitchen Bath Plumbing. Thanks so much for your help.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience with this product, but the description looks very good.
Has anybody tried this?
Clean Soap from Vermont
My guest Larry Plesent is the Founder of Vermont Soap, which makes “100% natural and non-toxic alternatives to the chemical based personal care products now in general use, including; handmade bar soaps for sensitive skin, anti-aging products, 100% natural shower gels, castile liquid soaps and non-toxic cleaners. Most products made by Vermont Soap are certified to USDA organic standards.” We’ll be talking about Larry’s very nontoxic way of living in the Green Mountains of Vermont, toxic ingredients in soap products, and how they make their organic soap products. Larry is also a writer,philosopher, restaurateur and farmer. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/vermont-soap
If you have MCS, this is a great interview to listen to. Larry gives his story of how he became chemically injured, and how his own “reactive body” and lead him to making soap after he tried more than 70 bars of soap he couldn’t tolerate. Now he makes many soap-based products that are unscented, or scented with natural essential oils. If you’ve been unable to find bodycare products you tolerate, try these.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Clean Soap from Vermont
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Plesent
Date of Broadcast: July 08, 2013
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, even though sometimes it may seem like when you watch TV, or listen to the news, or read the newspaper, that everything is toxic.
One day, they’re talking about toxic this, and the next day, they’re talking about toxic that.
In reality, not everything in the world is toxic, and what we do on this show is talk about the natural, organic, non-toxic things that are out there that we can use, and things we can do, in order to create a non-toxic home, in order to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and have a happy and productive life.
Today is Monday, July 8, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to be talking about soap and personal care products. But before that, I just wanted to tell you that something I realized over the weekend.
I was shopping, and I picked up actually a box of cherries.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with cherries. But I looked at it, and I said, “Wait a minute. Do I need to buy this?” And even though I love cherries, and I really wanted to eat them, I thought, “Now, wait a minute. Is this necessary? Is this an essential thing for me to eat?”
And that was actually the first time I’d ever had that thought. Not that I hadn’t thought about the ide aof what’s really necessary, and what’s really important before, but I haven’t stopped myself from buying something before. I hadn’t put my hand on a product, and then said, “Wait, stop,” especially, something like cherries.
And I realized that what I really needed to do was pay attention first to buying the foods that were essential to my nutrition, and the health of my body, and cherries was not one of those. Certainly, cherries has nutrients, and they’re refreshing and delicious.
But it was more important for me to buy eggs, and pecans, and lettuce, and vegetable and proteins first. And then if I had money left over out of my food budget, then I could buy the cherries.
And just thinking about things like importance—of what’s the most important things that we’re spending our money on, and the most important things that we need to have in life, and buying things that are not toxic—I think, goes right at the top of the list.
And some of these products may cost a little more. I’m not even sure if the products we’re talking about today cost more, but I do know that sometimes people think about, “Well, it costs more to buy things that are non-toxic or organic.”
But it’s so worth it because the value that you get from that little extra that you’re spending is so much more. The benefit is so much more than the extra money that you’re spending.
And if you’re on a budget, like I am, just spend more on the good stuff and buy less. It’s really more important for me to buy organic soap, for example, even if I have to give up my cherries.
So keep that in mind, that there is a way for you to be purchasing the non-toxic products that you need.
Okay, so now, I’m going to introduce my guest, Larry Plesent, from Vermont Soap. He is an eclectic person. He’s a farmer, a philosopher, and the founder of Vermont Soap, and has his own experience with chemical injuries.
Hi, Larry. Are you there?
LARRY PLESENT: I’m here. Hi, Debra Lynn. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good.
LARRY PLESENT: And hello to everybody out there listening. Thanks for tuning in. Great, thank you. Thanks for this opportunity to speak with you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us first about your own personal experience that led you to be interested in toxic issues.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, for me, I really didn’t have any choice for that matter. I was injured—and I don’t mean like I fell, but my insides were injured as a result of repeated chemical exposure in the workplace.
I was a window cleaner, and for seven years, I was the guy swinging from a rope, hanging off buildings, cleaning the windows. I thought my job was dangerous, but little did I know that my job was much safer than the cleaning chemicals I was using back then.
And so at least when I was hanging from a line—at least when I was hanging from a line, I had a safety line. If my main line should somehow get caught or compromised and cut, I had a safety backup. Everything was double back safety.
But when I was using the cleaning chemicals, there was no double back safety. So it was only the cleaning stuff.
And even back then, I was a bit of a chemist, and I made our mix of cleaning chemicals. And it was all things that I bought in the supermarket, as amazingly enough, as it was in. I’m happy to share, anybody who wants to make the stuff I made—of course, I was using a squeegee and special equipment.
But we started with water, and to that, we had a good, healthy squirt of Lemon Joy. It really works good on the windows. And then I put in a good sprinkle of Spic and Span, which is a powdered detergent—and al very powerful.
And then when it got a little colder, I would put windshield washer fluid in there, which is methanol.
Little did I know, methanol is incredibly poisonous, and not only that, but it’s linked with all of these other molecules, all these various detergent concoctions that I was cleaning the windows with. And I actually pulled it to my skin.
Even though I tried very hard to—I wore ski pants even in the summer to repel water, and all these things. They would get in my boots. And every night, my socks would be soaked.
And so literally, the source of over-absorption of detergent chemicals, and related chemicals that are found in our detergent concoctions, I absorbed them all, and along with this methanol, which created some liver damage.
So as a result, I became detergent-intolerant. And along with a host of other molecules that are just common things that we encounter all the time, common cleaning molecules, artificial colors, started irritating me. I couldn’t eat anything with artificial colors.
The list seemed to be growing.
And I had some trouble finding the words. We talked about this earlier in our pre-show discussion, as you will recall. What words do you use?
So first I started to say, “Well, I’m, kind of, sensitive. I really shouldn’t be using that.”
And they go, “Oh, he’s sensitive. That’s nice.”
I live in the country, and drive a pick-up truck. You can be tough and sensitive, but you’re not supposed to be wimpy sensitive.
So other than trying to overcome it with, say, a bigger truck, I had to figure this thing out.
And so I stopped saying I’m sensitive because it never got me anywhere. I go in a restaurant and I say, “Well, I’m a little sensitive. Could you tell me what’s in this?”
“Oh, he’s sensitive. Hey, Joe. He’s sensitive. Let me get the dishwasher out here. He’s sensitive too.”
So that didn’t get me anywhere.
And then I started saying, “Well, I’m chemically-sensitive.”
And that would either elicit this quizzical look—people look at you funny, or they’d say, “Oh, my god. Should I call 911? Should I get an ambulance waiting, so you don’t drop dead on my restaurant floor?”
So that didn’t work either.
Finally, after many years of this, I finally hit on a phrase that really, I think, described my condition and the condition of many other people, who have been injured by environmental exposure. And I called that having a reactive body.
And somehow when I say, “Sorry, I can’t be in the cleaner aisle in the supermarket because I have a reactive body,” and sometimes, people might look at you, “I’ve never heard that before.”
There’s none of the strangeness of the other two, and I don’t have to deal with my tough guy image being tarnished by being too sensitive to the cleaning products aisle, the toilet paper aisle.
DEBRA: Well, I think that reactive body actually is a good term because one’s body is reacting to the toxic chemical exposure, and so that’s very accurate, in terms of what’s going on.
LARRY PLESENT: Absolutely. And so my own journey, the first things, it started with, I said, “I must be allergic to these things.” I didn’t understand the mechanism—
DEBRA: But it’s not an allergy.
LARRY PLESENT: It’s not an allergy. Allergy is an antibody reaction to a protein invader. What’s this lovely music?
DEBRA: This lovely music is telling us that it’s time for a break, and that we’ll have to continue your story in a few minutes.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, stay tuned to hear the rest of this.
DEBRA: Stay tuned to hear the rest of the story, yes. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap. And we’ll be back after this. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Larry Plelsent from Vermont Soap. And we were talking before the break about how Larry became interested in toxic chemicals as a window cleaner, breathing toxic fumes.
And so Larry, tell us something about—what did you do? You then created your own non-toxic world in Vermont, yes?
LARRY PLESENT: Well, I did. And I had no choice for the matter. Just to back the journey up, the first thing I did is I went to a doctor. And I said I’m sensitive. And they just looked at me funny.
DEBRA: And you said, “But here’s my truck.”
LARRY PLESENT: Here’s my truck. That didn’t work. So then they did a bunch of scratch test, I think, 120 scratches on my back. And that’s a good way to tell if you’re allergic to something, and I found out something very useful. I found out that along with at least 40% of the population of this country, I am highly allergic to dust and dust mites.
That was very useful information. And it helps me every day to avoid dust and dust mites.
And I did learn that dust mites also—up here in Vermont, we go all summer when it’s nice and warm. We don’t fire up our heating systems, whatever they might be. But when they turn on in about mid-September or so, people have very strong skin reactions, and they get very irritated, and you can see that their faces are very rash-y.
And that’s because the dust mites are burning off the heating system.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that.
LARRY PLESENT: Now, whatever you use whether it’s a stove pipe with dust on it, whether it’s a heater, baseboard heater, or a heater that gets blown, blowing air around. Whatever you have, wipe it down with a damp rag, and get that dust off of it, and you’ll have a much easier time.
Also, I always recommend opening all the doors and windows, turning the heat on, and going out, and having something healthy. Do something healthy for yourself. And then come back and blow all that air out of there. And then you’ll have burned it off.
That’s a good tip, kids. So remember that when heating season comes around in about three or four months.
So that was the start of it. And then I came to realize that regardless of the mechanism, I had become intolerant to all detergent chemicals, and most colors, and artificial flavors. There’s a whole host of things. There were some preservatives I couldn’t quite prove that I had become sensitized to.
Some of this, it is very hard to figure out.
And so I became very depressed because I couldn’t use any bar soaps, I couldn’t use any liquid soaps, I couldn’t use any detergents, I couldn’t use any hand cleaner, I couldn’t use any laundry detergents, or any laundry products.
I get a pair of clothes, and I just wear them endlessly. My social life was in the gutter. No one wanted to hang around with me. I didn’t smell good because I couldn’t bathe regularly.
It was horrible. I’m telling you, I was almost suicidal, Debra Lynn.
And so that lasted about three days. And being that I’m an optimistic person, I said, “Well, if I can’t use these things, there must be other people like me out there. And since I’m an amateur chemist, I’m going to figure out what works, and how to do it, and I’ll make a business out of it. Maybe I could make sure, at the very least, that I’ll have what I need and maybe make enough money on the side as well, to at least feed myself and my family.”
And that was almost 21 years ago. Vermont Soap has grown. We’re not a giant, mega company, but we have two-dozen employees. And our mission is to replace yucky stuff with yummy stuffy.
And we go right through the catalog, replacing items as best we can.
So the first thing I did was—there was no soap of any kind I could use. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I tried, literally, over 70 bar soaps. And each one gave me a rash. It was pitiful.
One day, I picked up this bar of handmade soap, and it happened to have some goat’s milk in it. I was able to use it. And not only that, within a few days, my contact dermatitis of eight years cleared up.
And so I said, “Well, there’s either something miraculous about goat’s milk,” in which case, great, we’ll get some goats, or, “There’s something miraculous about farm soap,” as they called it because it was this bar that was made on the farm. And I said, “What kind of soap is this? It’s soft, and strange, and looks like cheese.”
And they said, “Well, it’s farm soap, and we put goat’s milk in it.”
So I knew right away that this is either an ingredient story—goat’s milk is magic, or it’s a process story—farm soap, the process of making soap the farm soap way is magic.
Well, it turned out that there was nothing magic about goat’s milk, and I was glad because I was smelling like goat.
Again, my social life was being affected by smelling like a goat. And I didn’t really like the way it felt.
But I did like the way the farm soap felt on me.
I said, “I know. I’m going to perfect this method of making ‘farm soap’” which we now call cold process or handmade soap. And this is before 14,000 little companies popped up, and people started making it.
We were, in fact, the third actual company—meaning, more than one person, in the United States, manufacturing this kind of product.
And I always got into it, not to make a few bars and sell it at the craft fair, but to really make, literally, a million bars a year.
And so we got going on that. In about seven or eight years into it, I started getting interested in liquid soap products. I have a family of vegetable oils—meaning, coconut oil, in particular, and other oils, turned into soap.
Sometimes that’s called castile soap, which is confusing because sometimes bar soaps are called castile soap. I can’t figure out why.
DEBRA: What does castile mean? I thought it meant that it was coconut, or that it’s Spanish or something.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, both are almost correct. So in the region of La Castilla-La Mancha—anybody who really speaks Spanish will know immediately that I’m faking it on my accent. But in that region of Central Spain, there were a lot of olive trees growing. And that region became very famous for a mild, liquid soap made primarily from olive oil with a little bit of coconut oil. I think it was about 15% coconut oil to harden the soap.
And this was the detergent. This was the liquid soap. This was the laundry soap. This is the hair shampoo. This is what those who could afford it, the very wealthy and privileged and royal Europe—this is what they used.
So it was very famous. It’s mild. Eventually, it was a bad year, and instead of making all out of olive oil, they started using mostly coconut oil, and a little olive oil. And that became what’s now known as castile liquid soap.
We turned that into a number of products. We learned to turn it into a thickened shower gel, or a spray for your surfaces, a pet shampoo, or a foaming hand soap. And that’s the basis of most of our foaming liquid products.
DEBRA: And I’m going to cut you off for the break before this note of music is expired. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking with Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap, and we will continue after the break.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap.
Larry, I’m looking at your website, and you have so much information here, so many products. Most of them, you say, are USDA organic-certified, which is great. I’d like to see all those organic ingredients.
I’m especially interested in what you’re saying about your soap and different skin types. As I’m looking at this, I’m thinking—well, I’ve heard of this before—skin types. I know that I have oily skin. But I think that my skin has changed over my lifetime. And now that I’m older, which is only a relative thing, I think my skin is drier, number one.
But how would I know which kind of soap to use on what kind of skin type?
LARRY PLESENT: Well, we have everything, hopefully, clearly marked out. And on our website, to help you do that, we have everything sorted by skin type in the shopping cart. Actually, we sort three different ways, which is like having three shopping carts in one, so you can sort by product type, product category or by skin type.
You’re absolutely right, Debra Lynn. Our bodies change so much, obviously, when we’re born, when we’re infants, we’re very different than when we we’re toddlers, very different than pre-teenagers or teenagers, young people, as we go through life, middle-aged, the various stage is there, and become, finally, respected elders in our community.
Our bodies change. And the products we need change.
So one of the main things to think about is the stringency, and the stringency is related to pore size. So people who have skin pores that are genetically very tiny will have less oily skin. People who have larger pores, like me from the Southern Mediterranean region, from my ancestry, and I have larger pores, darker skin, I tend to burn, I tend towards oily.
As I got older, that of course, faded away in my 20’s, and I began using products that were less astringent.
And so one way to adjust for stringency is essential oils. Some essential oils, like peppermint oil, very, very effective at closing down pores. So you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you need to cool down—peppermint oil soap will close those pores and dry you up.
But Debra, if you use that in, say, Vermont winter, where you’re taking that outside air and heating it up 50-degrees or more, and drying it out, you’ll find that a moisturizing bar, such as the butter bar for dry skin, is a really good way to go.
DEBRA: So it might depend on your environment, as well as on your skin type.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right. Your age, what is going on around you—
DEBRA: Anybody might want to have a variety of different types of soap for different environmental conditions.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right.
DEBRA: And that you would be aware of how your body is being affected by its environment.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right. That’s exactly right. It’s part of your first aid kit, your non-toxic first aid kit for life’s little inconveniences.
DEBRA: I haven’t even really thought of that before, but I really like that and it makes sense that our bodies are interacting with the environment all the time, and the different things are going on, and that we’re usually not aware of it that people think that you buy one thing, and one product, and you figure it out, and that’s good forever.
But I can see that these different environmental conditions would cause your skin to need different kinds of buffers or different kinds of support. And I haven’t ever considered that.
As I’m saying that, I’m thinking, “Gee, that doesn’t sound very smart.” But I think it just has to do with—lack of education.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, mostly, they’re obvious once you see—it’s very obvious to you now. Now, you’re like, “How come I never saw that? I actually should have maybe something like a lemongrass for when I’m working outside, in that Florida weather.”
“But sometimes I feel dry or maybe I’m bathing a second time because I want to go out later. And I want something that’s not as astringent.”
And these are very simple. You’re not spending a lot of money. Vermont Soap products are incredibly inexpensive, plus we have a customer loyalty program. You can save 5% with every order. And we run specials.
We wanted to be affordable to live naturally. You shouldn’t have to be a Rockefeller to eat healthy and use healthy products. That just doesn’t make sense.
At Vermont Soap, we cut out the middleman, and you can go right to the factory.
DEBRA: It says that if you sign up for the newsletter that you can get specials for up to 50%. So it’s worth it to sign up for your newsletter, for people to sign up for your newsletter, and find out when they can get these specials.
The thing that I wanted to say is that in the past, until I just had this stroke of genius realization, what I would do is I would pick my soaps by what the ingredients were, like if they had goat’s milk in it, or something. But I’d also pick them on what kind of fragrance because It’s really wonderful for me to get up in the morning, and have a shot of peppermint in the soap.
And my favorite combination—
LARRY PLESENT: Well, you tend towards oily, so that makes perfect sense.
DEBRA: But I wasn’t doing it for oily skin. It was just that I like having peppermint.
LARRY PLESENT: But your body knows.
DEBRA: The body knows, yes.
LARRY PLESENT: Your body knows. So for example, let’s say I’m doing some demos or something like that, and I have different—say, we’re demoing bar soap products. And I go, “Well, I just want to show you, well, smell them.”
And I find that 9 out of 10 times, people are attracted to the scents that are proper for their skin type. And we’re talking about real essential oils. We’re not talking about fake-y fake scents.
DEBRA: So you’re putting real—I’m just assuming you’re putting real essential oils in your products.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, it takes a room full of lavender to make a gallon of lavender oil. So that’s very concentrated.
DEBRA: And you also have unscented, if you want unscented ones.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, that’s a big, big part of our business. And not only do we have unscented bar soaps, but we also have—our most popular liquid soap is unscented castile liquid soap. It’s very, very simple.
We also have a new zero VOC cleaner concentrate that’s coming up, I think, within two months, we’ll have it in the marketplace. We have the spray cleaner already, and the concentrate in gallon forms, coming up right behind it.
At Vermont Soap, we release new products about every three or four months, which is pretty unusual. It takes a lot to move a new product through the testing. Some products, we started working on nine, ten years ago, and now, they’re just now in the marketplace.
But we’ve moved into—as I’ve said, we started with bar soaps, and then liquid soap products, and many different kinds of liquid soap products. We also do organic oral care products, and some really very exciting anti-aging products—which my wife and I are using, by the way.
DEBRA: We’ll hear more about all these products when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
My guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap, and he’s at VermontSoap.com. You can go to their website, and see all of the different products that they have, which we’re going to hear more about after the break.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap. And we’ve been talking about all of his organic soap and personal care products.
Larry, tell us more about some products that you haven’t told us about yet because you’ve got so many things on your website.
LARRY PLESENT: I’m a compulsive formulator. I can’t not formulate just like you can’t stop writing books.
DEBRA: I can’t stop writing books.
LARRY PLESENT: I’m working on my fourth, but you’ve got me topped with six, except you publish yours, and I just collect mine. But the one I’m working on now is the Handbook for the Reactive Body. I’ve got a good dent in that. So stay tuned. Maybe sometime in the next year, a year and a half—
DEBRA: Well, you know, Larry, when you’re ready to publish, I’m learning all about self-publishing and how to do it easily and inexpensively. And I’m about to have a lot more books because it’s now the tools are there for people to create really high quality books, and have the distribution be easy.
LARRY PLESENT: But the editor is the key—having a good editor is absolutely key.
DEBRA: I’m a great editor. I’d love to edit your books.
LARRY PLESENT: You edit my books, and I’ll edit your books.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk.
LARRY PLESENT: But that’s another show. I was thinking during the break that it’s really important to pass on very useful tidbits that people can use right now. If you’re listening to this show, you probably have a reactive body, whatever you’ve called it.
And by the way, having a reactive body will make your emotions more reactive. So it’s really important to remember that when you have a reactive body, when you’re exposed to your triggers, it’s like having body asthma. It’s like a body has a reaction, and then it’s a flare-up.
And it’s important to stop and go, “Okay, I’m having a flare-up. I’m having a flare-up.”
And then you’ve got to reach in your toolkit. And it’s very important that you learn things all around you that help reduce your symptoms during a flare-up because it’s very dangerous to be walking around all flared up. You might end up acquiring new reactive triggers because you’re in such a hyper-reactive phase.
DEBRA: Tell us some of the things because I do know that a lot of people with reactive bodies are listening to this show. So tell us some of the things that you’ve done that were successful.
LARRY PLESENT: Let me count the ways. Rule #1, fresh air, fresh water, and lots of it. So very often, my triggers, I walk in, and somebody says, “Oh, look. I’ve got this whole new computer system. Isn’t it great?”
And they just pulled it out of the crate, and it’s off-gassing all the plastic, and the mold releases—when plastic is released from a mold, there are mold releasers that some of that is still on the outside.
And I’m breathing all of that stuff, and I feel my knees start to buckle.
So the first thing I do, and I learned this from my friend, Jimmy Brown. God, I love you, Jimmy. Thank you for this one. Jimmy works with toxic stuff all day long. I said, “How is it you’re still alive?”
He says, “I practice not breathing.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “As soon as the slightest, that first molecule of scent enters in my nose, I stop breathing.”
He said, “I know I’ve got about 30, 40 seconds.” I know what I’m doing, and I leave the room.
I said, “Okay.”
So I practiced not breathing. That gives you a few seconds, and then leave the room. So you need lots of fresh air, and you need lots of fresh water.
Just as with regular asthma, if you have this “body asthma,” if you have a reactive body, drinking lots and lots of water will reduce your symptoms every time, right away—fresh air, fresh water.
DEBRA: And it needs to be pure water, so you’re not drinking water pollutants.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes. Don’t drink plastic water. For example, if I’m feeling reactive and I drink bottled water, it makes it worse because I’m triggered from all petroleum products. Plastic, plastic water, that’s all bad stuff.
Now, if you have to drink plastic water, drink the less expensive stuff in the #2 milk jug plastic, the ones that come in those gallon jugs. It costs about a tenth as much as the fancy bottle. That’s what you want. Get that stuff because #2 plastic is—we’ll use your phraseology—less less toxic than #1 plastic.
From my perspective, #1 plastic is the one that should be banned, not the bisphenol #7 carbonate plastic, which is rarely used. Rarely used.
But the most commonly used plastic is #1, and that is PET, which is made of phthalates, P-T-H, phthalates with PTH. P-H-T-H-L-A-T-E-S. So phthalates.
And phthalates are estrogen mimickers. If you want to be filled up with estrogen, and then just keep on doing it.
DEBRA: For people who don’t know, you can look at the bottom of the bottle, and it will tell you what the number is—these numbers that Larry is talking about, you can just look on the bottom of the bottle.
LARRY PLESENT: And I’ll give you a real good tip that was taught to me by a Ph.D. biologist who runs a cancer research laboratory. And what she told me was the more flexible the plastic, and the clearer the plastic, the more off-gassing. And the amazing thing about that is they’ll off-gas into oily stuff like butter, or oil like olive oil or something that’s in a plastic container.
It’ll off-gas into alcohol, if you get cheap vodka in a plastic container.
DEBRA: So you really want to watch out. That is a very big thing to watch out for plastic containers.
Now, tell us about plastic containers because I don’t want to put you on the spot here, but you have some plastic containers.
LARRY PLESENT: I use PET containers because natural soap, especially with essential oils, does something which is called in the industry, paneling, which means they dent in. It looks like they belong in a dented can discount store.
And so we originally came out in #2 plastic, and no one bought our stuff because they all looked dented. So we came back in #1.
I’m very comfortable with that.
DEBRA: So tell us why because—
LARRY PLESENT: The phthalates are not going through your skin and poisoning you. What’s that?
DEBRA: Other soaps use PET as well, and people ask me about this. They say, “Well, should I buy soap in PET containers?”
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, you’re fine. You’re not drinking it.
DEBRA: Tell us why.
LARRY PLESENT: You’re just fine. We have seen zero evidence of any kind that buying soap or shampoo or any other external use product in your plastic bottle is going to hurt you far, far, far more important if they get it out of the food and water supply. Far beyond.
Once we’ve gotten there, and we’d figured out a way to put liquid soap in—you bring your glass bottle to the co-op and fill it up, that would be ideal. But first, get it out of your insides. That’s so much more important than what we’re talking about here.
So we’ve never seen anything to indicate that there’s anything to worry about.
Would I prefer selling it in glass? I would, but guess what? It’s soap and water and glass and naked people standing around in bare feet, not a healthy combination.
DEBRA: Let me ask you this, because I know people have their attention on this. So you use these products, and you have a reactive body, and you haven’t seen any problem using PET bottles.
LARRY PLESENT: Oh, gosh, no.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s what I wanted to know.
LARRY PLESENT: No, not at all. And we look at plastics very much. We were using a—here’s an example, which is called the drum liners. This is like a big plastic bag that sits inside a 55-gallon drum. And we were concerned that the soap might interact with the metals from where they welded up the drum.
And so we wanted to put in the plastic bag. And we wanted to buy a good plastic bag that was environmentally sound. So we bought one with recycled materials.
It turned out, the recycled bags had formaldehyde. So somebody tested our soaps and said, “Your soap isn’t clean. There’s something wrong with it.”
And I said, “What’s wrong?”
They said, “There’s formaldehyde in it.”
And we traced it back to the bags. Isn’t that crazy? That’s crazy. So that was LDHPE, a low density polyethylene.
So we switched to a bag that contained only virgin material—not recycled material. And we tested, and we tested without formaldehyde.
Unfortunately, we lost a client. We lost a client.
DEBRA: So the recycled LDHPE had formaldehyde, but the virgin LDHPE did not.
LARRY PLESENT: Did not. It might have been the brand we’ve got, whatever it was, but that’s how it tested with our soap. I don’t want to make a broad statement about every LDHPE with recycled material. But the one we got did.
And there’s no way of knowing until after the fact.
So the principle—really, I was thinking, on my drive into work today, I’m thinking about this phone call. I said, “What’s the one thing I really want our audience to walk away with?” What’s the one thing? Maybe besides my website…
DEBRA: Yes, this is the time to say the one thing because you’ve got about a minute left.
LARRY PLESENT: Okay, this is it. Here’s a handy tip from the soap man, and you can always learn more and read my blogs at www.VermontSoap.com, now on our 21st year. That’s the pitch. But what I want to leave you with is that have everything that goes onto your body and into your body must be must be medicine.
Not only is it non-toxic, it’s got to be healing and good for you, and especially if you have a reactive body. If you have a reactive body, everything has to be optimized. Everything. You can’t just eat an apple. You have to eat a super apple.
You don’t just need those phytonutrients, you need super ones.
DEBRA: I totally agree with what you’re saying because the music is going to start any second now. And I just want to reiterate what you said about the things that you use need to be not only non-toxic, but healing, because most people think there’s toxic, and there’s not toxic. But then there’s this other whole group of…
Thank you so much for being with me on this show today. It’s been a great show. You’ve been listening to Larry Plesent of Vermont Natural Soap. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Natural Clothing “Exclusive of Decoration” and the Toxicity of Dyes Used on Cotton
Update January, 2020: Read these more recent articles:
Bamboo Click-Lock Flooring
Question from SheriB
We are about to lay wood/bamboo flooring in an above ground section of the house that is a cement floor. It connects to other areas of the house that are over a full basement and have wood sub floor.
We will need to put down a 6 mil plastic vapor barrier over the concrete. We haven’t had any water come in, but want to have the preventative layer.
If we put in solid hardwood, the expense is very high because we would first have to lay a plywood sub floor about an inch high. It also would make the threshold into this area an inch or more higher than the rest of the flooring.
So we were looking into solid strand bamboo click lock flooring from US Floors. Resins are used in creating the solid strand bamboo. The flooring’s outer coating is baked in the factory the same as hardwoods. Have you had any experience with bamboo flooring?
I have severe MCS. We were opting against tile because the floor would be very cold in the winter.
Debra’s Answer
I have no personal experience with this flooring, but can’t recommend flooring made with unknown “resins.” See if you can get more information.
I understand ceramic or stone tile is cold in the winter, but it’s the safest flooring for someone with “severe MCS.”
Brand of Oven/Range that Outgasses the Least?
Question from Angelique
Any thoughts about the brand of oven/range combo that would off-gas the least and/or fastest?
Debra’s Answer
I purchased a new oven/range about five years ago. At that time, outgassing didn’t seem to be much of an issue. I purchased the one that had the best features for me.
I chose a Frigidaire gas range and have had no problems with it of any kind.
Readers, any suggestions?
Eco Wool or Organic Wool for Mattress?
Question from Stacey
I need to purchase bedding and am trying to keep costs down. I have bedding from Lifekind (latex mattress), and Shepherds Dream (wool mattress). I am happy with both, and will most likely purchase from whoever offers the best deal. I did just discover White Lotus (from your site) and like the prices; however, to choose organic wool adds to the cost significantly (otherwise I would choose White Lotus this time).
I’ve read that you have an organic wool comforter from Shepherds Dream, but I thought they did not have organic wool. Shepherds Dream states they use “Eco Wool” which seems just as good to me. So did you specifically request organic wool from Shepherds Dream?
I see White Lotus uses virgin wool from New Zealand, but not sure if I am comfortable with this. I’ve read of arsenic detected in this wool…
Can you tell me if you still prefer organic wool over New Zealand wool, or even “Eco Wool?” Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
First, here is the description of EcoWool from the Shepherd’s Dream website:
Eco Wool Batting
All of our products are filled entirely with our Premium Eco Wool Batting. Eco Wool is entirely derived from local flocks of sheep that are raised following specific criteria that ensures top quality wool. Our Oregon grown, Eco Wool batting is produced at the Woolgatherer Carding Mill, located down the road from Shepherd’s Dream.
And here’s what they say about organic wool on the same page:
Is Eco Wool Organic?
This is a question many people ask. Eco Wool is not certified organic. At this time very little organic wool is available on the market; almost no organic wool is grown in the United States. We find that Eco Wool is actually cleaner and of higher quality than the organic wool currently available. Eco Wool is produced to the highest standards; some of these standards are beyond those specified for organic materials. We have access to organic wool from New Zealand that is pure and clean, though due to it being only one type of wool, it doesn’t offer the kind of resilience or bounce that our Premium Eco Wool does. Our Eco Wool is a blend of about 7 different types of wool varying from fine to coarse in order to create the most ideal wool fiber for use in bedding. We prefer the quality, loft and sustainability of our Premium Eco Wool, though if you require certified organic wool, you may call our office to put in a special order.
Now let me tell you from my own personal experience. I was actually there many years ago when the Eco Wool standards were written. I helped write them. Certified organic or not, the intent and practice is as good if not better than certified organic.
Concrete Paint and Sealer
Question from Joshua
My brother has a project where he simply wants to paint the concrete floor in his bedroom with white/off-white, then color, then a seal/finish. Can you recommend a paint that can be used on concrete?
Debra’s Answer
Here’s a link where you can find nontoxic paint and sealer for concrete: Green Building Supply: Concrete & Masonry Sealers.
I love painted concrete floors. I think it can be a beautiful and creative solution.
How to Choose and Find a Holistic Vet for Your Pet
My guest is Linda Ferguson, Managing Director of VetLocator, an online directory of more than 40,000 veterinary and pet health care professionals including Emergency, Holistic and House Call specialty directories. VetLocator also helps pet owners get immediate dialogue with both pet professionals and other pet owners in the community in their very popular Q&A section called Ask A Pet Pro, which has 100s of pet owner questions and answers covering a wide variety of topics related to pets. Raised from an early age by a mother who embraced holistic solutions and a natural lifestyle, Linda knows the negative impact industrialized living has on the health of all living things, which is why having holistic alternatives for pet owners while serving all pet owners is important to her. In 2002, she used her skills as an internet marketing maven to to help launch VetLocator after seeing the need for pet owners to have choices on who to choose to take their pets to. We’ll be talking about holistic choices for pet care, why choose a holistic vet, how to choose the best holistic vet for your pet, and more. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/vet-locator
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Choose and Find a Holistic Vet for Your Pet
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Linda Ferguson
Date of Broadcast: June 27, 2014
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 even though there are toxic chemicals in everyday consumer products and in the environment and in the air we breathe and the food we eat. It seems like, every day, we turn on the news and find out about yet another toxic chemical.
There are some places in the world where there are not toxic chemicals. And there are a lot of things that we can do to remove them from our homes and from our bodies and be happy and well and productive and do whatever we want to do with our lives.
So, today is Thursday, June 27th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re not having a thunderstorm. But I think we will later. Yesterday, oh, my God, we had a thunderstorm. I think this is actually one of the most extreme weather places in the world. We had a thunderstorm yesterday. I was in the middle of it. The wind was blowing so hard that the rain was horizontal. I was driving, and I couldn’t see two inches in front of me. The rain was really coming down. We’ve even had this week some tornadoes and water spouts. So it’s been a lively week for weather in Clearwater, Florida.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to choose and find a holistic vet for your pet. And my cats must know that’s what we’re talking about today because they’re romping all around and making a lot of noise in the background. I don’t know if you can hear it or not, but they’re here right with us. I got kittens a couple of months ago, and now they’ve already turned into cats.
But before I introduce my guest, I want to just talk for a moment about sweat. Now, this is the hottest time of the year—or I should say the sun is at its peak. And it’s hot (though it might not be the hottest). But what happens when we’re out in the heat is we sweat. And it’s a natural thing for our bodies to do to remove waste.
Sweat does two things. it removes waste. And it cools your body off. And in pre-industrial times, our bodies went through this natural cycle of not sweating in the winter, and then sweating in the summer. So it was like your body is like giving itself its own sauna.
And nowadays what we do is that we wear antiperspirants and go sit in air-conditioned buildings. And so our bodies don’t have the opportunity to do that seasonal sweat. And so then we need to go sit on a sauna or a steam room. But it’s absolutely free to go outside and sweat!
So, I want to encourage all of you to become accustomed to being a little warmer than maybe you’re comfortable with and get your body sweating. Have a little moderate exercise so that you get hot. And make sure that you drink some pure water and take a little full spectrum salt to replace the liquids and the minerals that gets lost in the sweat.
This is the ideal time to gently be removing toxic chemicals from your body by a vey natural process. And if you want to read more about that, you can go to my website, ToxicFreeNutrition.com. And there’s a blog post that I just put up there today. You could read more about it.
So, my guest today is Linda Ferguson. She is the managing director of Vet Locator, an online directory of more than 40,000 veterinary and pet healthcare professionals including emergency, holistic—which is what we’re interested in—and house calls specialty directories.
Hi Linda.
LINDA FERGUSON: Hi Debra! Thanks so much for having me on.
DEBRA: Well, thank you for being here. Tell us how you got interested in making, of all things, a pet directory, and why holistic.
LINDA FERGUSON: Well, it’s interesting. I was raised by a mother who embraced health foods and healthy living early on.
And in our household, we had a lot of animals. So I experienced eating health foods, doing regular cleanses and sharing that experience with our animals.
Then as I grew up, I got interested in the Internet. I married someone who is a programmer. And we put together a website for veterinarians when we moved to a new area and discovered that there was no easy way to find a holistic vet.
So, VetLocator.com is a directory. It actually has over 67,000 different veterinarians. But a lot of them will be two or more to a practice. And we divided those into specialties so it would make it easy for a pet owner to find just what they were looking for because when I looked—it’s been over 12 years now—I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
DEBRA: I think that’s the way a lot of people get started doing what they’re doing. I started doing what I was doing because there was no place for me to find non-toxic products.
And today, I think I am the leading directory of non-toxic products. If you want to find something non-toxic, I’m the person to come to—not that nobody else is doing it, but I think that I have more than anybody else. And I think you have more than anybody else too. If somebody is looking for a holistic vet in your area, they’re likely to find it on your website.
LINDA FERGUSON: Well, it’s interesting. There are different sites that have holistic vets. And there’s an association of holistic vets. Sometimes, going to different sites, you’ll find that it’s either hard to find exactly what you’re looking for, or in the case of googling keywords, they’re usually location-specific, but you don’t get the variety that you might want when you’re looking for a specialty, which is you want everything. You want everything and everyone that’s around you wherever you’re sitting.
So, I’ve used your site before. And I have to say, one of the things that most impressed me about it was how aesthetic it is and how easy it was for me to find things.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you.
LINDA FERGUSON: And I’ve used other sites to look for holistic things for pet owners. One of the unique features about our website is, if we don’t have an answer for a pet owner, well, actually, one of our team members will try and find that answer because I know how important it is as a pet owner, when you’re stuck trying to figure out exactly what to do with an ill animal who may not be able to communicate to you well, and you need help now, where do you turn?
So, we try and have an answer. If we don’t have an answer, we’ll try and help you get that answer which is to find a professional that fits your needs.
DEBRA: I do that too. That’s why I have my Green Living Q&A, so that people can write in and people can call me for a consultation. But even people who don’t want to pay for a consultation or can’t afford it, they can still write in to my Q&A and get answers about all kinds of things—including pets actually.
Linda, do you have pets?
LINDA FERGUSON: I do! I happen to have two cats. They are office cats.
You know how sometimes, in the way of the universe, you get something that is life-teaching for you?
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
LINDA FERGUSON: So, we have two cats that are part of our office. And it’s a brother and sister that looked nothing alike.
They’re both rescues. The sister is a runt, the runt of the litter. And so even though I had great experience helping other pet owners with pet issues, I’ve always had extremely healthy animals until now.
And so my approach to healthcare has always been a very simple one which is, if at all possible, don’t go to a doctor. Most things can be handled by diet, exercise, staying away from toxins, and a lot of liquids. And it left me a little less sensitive to people who really arrive with problems.
So, the cats, I have two cats. One is healthy, big and does great. And the little one has an immune deficiency. And so she’s extremely sensitive to fleas or anything that bites her. And she’ll get a histamine reaction that just drives her insane.
DEBRA: Well, you can tell us more about that after the break. We’re talking with Linda Ferguson. She’s the managing director of Vet Locator at VetLocator.com. And after we come back, she’s going to tell us more about the different resources that Vet Locator has to offer as well as what’s going on with her cat. And we’ll probably talk about my kittens too.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
And in order to give you full disclosure, Linda and I actually both live in Clearwater, Florida, and we’re friends. We know each other. And during the break, we were talking about Linda going for a walk in the beach this morning and how beautiful that was.
Linda, why don’t you tell everybody about what you saw this morning? And then, I want to say something about that.
LINDA FERGUSON: Alright. We had dramatic storms yesterday (which Debra alluded to). Our sky would go from blue sky, maybe a few scattered clouds, to a raging thunderstorm, black with tornado warnings within literally 10 minutes or something.
So, this morning, after all that drama, it was very nice and cool. This time of year in Florida, it’s usually really hot, over 80° (80° to 85° when you first wake up). I went to the beach with my husband this morning. And it was very cool up because of the storm. It was beautiful. And we saw just a few feet offshore pods of dolphins. There were lots of new babies and they were jumping and frolicking, literally clearing the water which is unusual. And a lot of birds…
And it’s the time of year when sea turtles come in from the gulf and they nest. So there are areas that get roped off so nobody disturbs the nest. So it was just this strolling, cool air with lots of frolicking birds and dolphins and fish jumping out of the water and sea turtles nest dotting the sand for an incredibly beautiful morning stroll.
DEBRA: That sounds so wonderful! And I know the beach. I go walk on the same beach that Linda walks on. And so I can imagine everything that she’s saying. I’ve seen the dolphins. It’s wonderful to live in a place where dolphins are just jumping out of the water when you go to the beach. It’s not something that I ever saw in California. So, Florida is its own interesting paradise.
But what I was thinking when she was talking to me about that is that we have our pets that are domesticated animals, but we also have our own relationships with the environment, the wild animals. You may not feed them. And they may not come purr in our hands like my cats do. But we have a responsibility for them in the same way as we have a responsibility for our pets in that we have a responsibility to have a good, healthy environment, and that they can live and grow and flourish and be happy and healthy just like anything else.
When we use toxic chemicals in our homes, they go into the environment, and they cause damage to the animals that are in the environment.
A couple of days ago, I was talking about that they measured levels of lead in songbirds and found this ever dangerously high levels of lead in songbirds. They’re picking it up from a lead mine. There’s many things you can look up on the Internet about animals being affected by toxic chemicals in the environment, not the least of which is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson where she talks about the death of songbirds from pesticide exposure.
So, Linda, tell us the difference between holistic and traditional vets?
LINDA FERGUSON: Holistic and traditional. Well, traditional veterinary care is the same as traditional medical care where the veterinarian has been trained in a protocol that involves the use of a lot of drugs and vaccinations and so on as well as how to fix and set bones and other things. If the veterinarian is a surgeon, then how to perform surgery and so on.
And it really does pattern and align itself to the choices that we have for our own health all the way down to—traditional vets, very often, do not get along with holistic vets.
DEBRA: In the same way doctors don’t get along with alternative doctors.
LINDA FERGUSON: Uh-huh, exactly the same. But what I’ve seen over time—
Oh, one of the features on our site is called Ask a Pet Pro. It allows pet owners to do like your Q&A. They’ll ask a question.
And I used to have regular vets answering questions. And some would be very free with their advice. And others would say, “You know, you’re going to get sued if you give any advice to a pet owner. They’ll just come back and sue you if it doesn’t work out.” So, I saw that and thought, “Okay, that’s pretty interesting.”
But if a holistic vet would give advice and a regular vet saw that advice, it started this controversy. And I learned early on our website deals with both sides. And there are a lot more traditional veterinarians than there are holistic vets. And the training can be different.
So, what I did was I always just take that non-controversial point. And over time, I found that there is a way that both those things exist together, and that many traditional veterinarians were bringing holistic or complementary veterinary care into their office because it has a place.
DEBRA: I think that it does. I think it does. And I’ve seen that. I’ve been in this field for more than 30 years in also dealing with my own healthcare. I’ve seen, over time, from the point where complementary healthcare was just considered something that an MD wouldn’t touch to now there being much more integration.
I have an MD who tells me to take vitamins before he’ll give me a drug. And I think that that was not the case not too long ago.
So, there was something I wanted to ask you. And now I forgot what it is. But I’m sure I’ll remember.
LINDA FERGUSON: I do have something to say if that’s okay.
DEBRA: Oh, go ahead.
LINDA FERGUSON: I started talking about two cats. Animals teach us lessons. We just need to listen to them. So the youngest cat has an immune deficiency…
DEBRA: And now we have to go to break again. I promise, Linda, when we come back from the break, we’re going to talk about your two cats. I won’t talk about anything else until we talk about your two cats.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Linda Ferguson, managing director of VetLocator.com where you could find a holistic vet near you.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is my friend, Linda Ferguson, managing director of VetLocator.com where you can find holistic vets.
And I had promised Linda that she can tell us about her two cats…
LINDA FERGUSON: Well, I’m just going to finish this story on the two cats. The youngest cat has an immune deficiency. She was born with it being the runt. And the lesson that I learned from owning this particular cat is that pet owners who have a challenged animal, an animal that has a health issue, have choices. The choices can be all drug, all natural or a combination of both.
I’ve always leaned towards all natural, as I’ve said before. But in this instance, it did not help this cat. And she suffered. The alternative was all drug which is primarily Prednisone and other things that handle histamines and that I knew would shorten her life. So, what I opted to do was a blend.
Now, for this particular cat—and for all animals—she also have the choice of keeping them indoors 100% of the time (which just limits their exposure to things that might trigger problems), keeping them outdoors 100% of the time (which exposes them to a lot) or a blend of in and out.
I tried keeping her indoors, and she spiritually started to die. She started to waste away—and not because she wasn’t receiving adequate care, but because her soul needed to be outside.
DEBRA: I agree.
LINDA FERGUSON: Yes. And it was just remarkable. She was skin and bones and was losing fur. And then, I let her go in and out. She immediately put on weight. She started itching more. Her furs grew back quickly because she was in her natural environment. And what I need to do today is blend drugs—which I keep that at a minimum because drugs typically will shorten your animal’s life when they depend on them, but they can suffer too much otherwise.
And I keep pests off of her by dusting her with diatomaceous earth which she will lick off. It keeps the fleas off. I have to do it every couple of days. And she looks like [unclear 20:24] because she’s dusty. But then, that as a solution also is very good for internal and intestinal parasites as well. And so she’s doing well. She’s doing very, very well. So it’s a good thing.
DEBRA: Yes, I also use diatomaceous earth on my cats. And when we got these two kittens, they actually had a little bit of a flea problem. But I put on the diatomaceous earth, and it quit right up. They aren’t scratching or itching. No fleas around. It works very, very well.
I remember what I wanted to say. Well, I want to say two things. Now, I want to say about six things. Okay, let’s do this.
The other day, I had a guest on, Nathanael Johnson, where we were talking about his book, All Natural, which the conversation was about the difference between the industrial viewpoint of doing things versus the all-natural viewpoint. And our whole hour was devoted to that. I think that we live in a time where we want to be all-natural. But even if we wanted to do it 100%, we often can’t for two reasons.
One is that we’re tied to the industrial complex, most of us, in order to get things like food and water (although we could go off the grid. I mean, there are ways to do it). But if you want to have things like the Internet and the life that we have now, movies and cars and things, then that’s an industrial life. And you can’t do it 100%.
But there are many, many things that we can do to be moving in the direction of being more natural. And it’s really important that we do that because our bodies really are of nature. And I think that pets even more so.
They’re animals. They’re not thinking in the same way that we’re thinking as human beings. And they need those cues from nature. They get excited, the cats get excited by seeing the birds and the lizards or the grasshoppers. It’s like they belong with them. And I think that animals need to have a natural environment. They need to be able to go in and out. That’s my viewpoint.
But I also think that there’s a problem today with—this goes to the holistic vets. There’s a problem today with animals getting illnesses that they didn’t use to get that are human illnesses like cancer and thyroid problems and things like that. And I think it’s because of the toxic chemical exposure.
I don’t think that there’s been a lot of studies done. I know that there’s one book that used to be on print that I don’t think is any longer. But I don’t think there’s a lot of studies on what are the effects of toxic chemicals on the home on household pets.
There are studies on how household toxics will affect humans, but not pets. And pets are much, much smaller. We get into this when we’re talking about children and their exposures to household toxics versus adults in that their bodies are smaller. So the concentration of the amount of toxic chemicals compared to the ratio of their body size is much, much greater than an adult would have. And if you compare the size of an adult human body with the size of say a cat, it’s just so many times. I can’t even calculate how much more they’re getting in relation to their body size.
So if, for no other reason, people who love their pets should have a non-toxic home.
LINDA FERGUSON: I agree with you. There are a lot of regulations that require a pet owner to apply toxics and poisons to their pets.
DEBRA: What kind of regulations? Tell us about that.
LINDA FERGUSON: Vaccinations, vaccinations in the immune system.
In most city living areas where there are cities, you’ll find that there are requirements that you have your pet vaccinated for a particular stretch of time. And those vaccinations are toxic to your animal. And most animals will build up a level of vaccine in their system that doesn’t disperse. It just continues to build up.
So, one thing that pet owners do is they do—I think the term is “titer.” But it’s drawing blood to see what the levels of vaccine are as to whether they need a new one.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with Linda Ferguson, managing director of VetLocator.com. And we’re talking about toxic chemical exposures that affect your pet and finding a holistic vet. And we’ll talk more of these subjects when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Linda Ferguson, managing director of VetLocator.com where you can find a holistic vet, ask a question and get connected with the right professional.
Linda, in the last segment, we were talking about your choices with your cats about being part drug and part natural. And before we go on with another subject, I want a second thought. For me, personally, as a human body, I am always looking to be as natural as possible—and also with my pets. I think that’s the right thing to do because that’s our nature. Our bodies come from nature.
But we also live in an industrial world. There are illnesses that our bodies have that are industrial. And I think sometimes I find it necessary in my own life or with my pets to—where the natural thing doesn’t work.
And sometimes, the natural thing doesn’t work. And it’s not because nature fails in my opinion. It’s because we’re being exposed to all these toxic chemicals that are out of the realm of nature, and we can’t always use natural thing to handle the problem.
So, I just want to say that I’m totally in agreement with you, that if there comes a time where it’s a life-saving thing, or not even waiting until there’s a question about it being life-saving, there may come a time when we’re very grateful that those things are there. But we don’t want to take the risks of using them unless it’s absolutely necessary.
So, Linda, tell us some of the services that a holistic vet would offer.
LINDA FERGUSON: Here’s a list of things that you can search by on our website. You can search by acupuncture, aromatherapy, chiropractic, Bach flower essences, Gold Bead implants, herbal treatments, straight holistic (just a generalized term), homeopathy, hydrotherapy, massage therapy, NAET allergy treatment (which is a very extensive treatment using the allergen to cause someone to not be so allergic by a gradient approach), oxygen therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, reflexology, Reiki, T-touch or therapeutic touch, and then holistic pet workshops so that the owners learn how to apply some of the treatments to their pets, as well as a pet communicator (you can look up a pet communicator on our website).
DEBRA: Like the horse whisperer.
LINDA FERGUSON: Like a horse whisperer, yes.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. Well, I think you probably communicate with your pets really well.
LINDA FERGUSON: I do!
DEBRA: I do too. And my cats, I’ve had cats—all my pets. I’ve never had a pet that wasn’t a cat. But I noticed in the past that there are certain ways that my cats would communicate with me. If they wanted food, they’d kind of herd me over to the food bowl.
But these cats that I have now, they communicate with me with pictures. And so, all of a sudden, I’ve got a picture in my mind that “Oh, I better go feed them.” And I think that’s pretty cool. I like that.
LINDA FERGUSON: That’s interesting.
DEBRA: I just get an idea. There was one night—we have a cat door, so they can go in and out. And there was one night that one cat was inside, and the other cat was still outside. And this one inside just came and got me and brought me over to the cat door. And she was just really broadcasting to me “You need to find the other cat.” And it was very interesting to see how clearly I could get that intuitive message from her.
Okay, so what are the most popular treatments?
LINDA FERGUSON: It’s a blend. But I wanted to bring up something here because my experience in working with pet owners—and a lot of times, a pet owner will say, “Who do you recommend?” And just like working with a doctor, the very first thing that a pet owner needs to find is someone who has similar beliefs as they do, and yet knows a lot more.
DEBRA: I love that. Well, that would apply to choosing a practitioner as a human too.
LINDA FERGUSON: Sure!
DEBRA: Yeah.
LINDA FERGUSON: It’s challenging. And I have an interesting story again about the same cat, the same poor, little cat that I have. A friend was watching her. She got out over the holidays when we were gone. And both the cats got out. Someone took the brother and adopted him right away. And someone different turned the little one into the pound.
And so, we got both the cats back. But she was so traumatized that she immediately got very ill. It was still the holiday season.
And it was over the weekend. She started sneezing and wouldn’t eat. And I couldn’t find a regular vet that was open. But I did find one that was a homeopathist. I’ve never used that as a treatment, but I knew that this cat would die if she didn’t receive treatment.
And so, in she went. And the practitioner was formerly a veterinarian who chose to go a holistic route and voluntarily gave up his license to practice traditional veterinary medicine.
DEBRA: Wow!
LINDA FERGUSON: Yeah, that was pretty interesting. He tended to be somewhat of an angry man person to person. But person to animal, he was incredible. And I could tell, the energy that he gave to my cat saved her life. She had to take drops and do a variety of things. But she almost immediately responded to the treatment.
And my observation was that he was certain he could save her life. And because he was certain, I was certain it would work as well. And because of both of our certainties, the cat responded in that same way.
The end shot was she’s still alive and doing well today. I have a huge respect for people who learn a challenging thing.
Homeopathy is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. And it definitely has a very good place for people who want to try it to see if it works. It’s an interesting technology and interesting application. I don’t use it that often. But when I need it, I’m glad it’s there.
DEBRA: Yeah, I had some homeopathy done on my own body. It’s a very interesting thing. I used to live in Marin County, California. So I think I’ve tried all the natural remedies, alternative remedies that exists in Marin County, California. I think I’ve experienced them all.
LINDA FERGUSON: Yeah, I have to make a trip out there. I like that area a lot.
DEBRA: So you mentioned some treatments that I’m not familiar with in that list that you gave us earlier. Gold Bead implants?
LINDA FERGUSON: Yeah, again, it just depends on the pet owner’s belief and who they’re working with. It’s one of the treatments that they may be offered. It’s not something that I have a whole lot of familiarity with. I think that acupuncture and putting certain metals that create an energy around a certain area of the cat’s body is what that is. But I’m not 100% certain what it is. I know that a number of our practitioners have offered it. And they’re the ones who swing very far to the left of alternatives.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that there’s a lot of different practices out there, all of which can be appropriate at the right time for the right person and the right pet. It’s just a matter of making your choice and getting a good match, wouldn’t you agree?
LINDA FERGUSON: I would absolutely agree. I wanted to really just validate you for your work with toxins.
DEBRA: Thank you.
LINDA FERGUSON: I think what a lot of people miss is that if you start out in a very toxic-laden environment, if you surround yourself with things that are toxic to you, to your pets, in the space that you’re in, you start out already having to solve problem […] And maybe they don’t affect you directly, but as in the case of me inheriting a very fragile pet, it affects the pet. And it can affect your children.
And if you would just take steps in your life to eliminate those things, you’re already so far ahead of the curb that, should you become challenged later, it’s a lot easier to fix the problem.
DEBRA: Yes, it is, it is. It’s like why get up every morning and have your life start by bottling toxic chemicals when it’s so easy to remove them.
We’re almost at the end of our hour together. I so appreciate you having been here, Linda. I want to just close by saying that I talk a lot about humans taking liquid zeolite as an easy way to remove toxic chemicals from your body. I’d love for people to know that pets also can take liquid zeolite. You can just put it in their water bowl, a few drops, and it will remove toxic chemicals from their bodies too. And since they’re exposed even more than we are, that’s something that I think is a good thing to do.
So, if you just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look for the magnet and click there. It’ll tell you all about using zeolite.
And I think that that’s about all the time we have today. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
LINDA FERGUSON: Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: Thanks, Linda.
How To Remove Odors of Almost Any Kind From Almost Any Thing
My guest is Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven, who knows more about removing odors than anyone I know. Daliya became “a chemical injury statistic” while working as a realtor, viewing and showing toxic new homes or homes with new carpets, paints, and cabinets. After becoming extremely disabled in 1993 with multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and a broken thyroid, Daliya started educating others on the dangers of toxic chemicals and later began providing healing healthy solutions for a nontoxic environment. After 20 years Daliya is still providing solutions for surviving in a toxic world. We’ll talk about the products she sells that remove and control odors of various types and the thought process she uses to solve odor problems. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/nirvana-safe-haven
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Remove Odors of Almost Any Kind From Almost Anything
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Daliya Robson
Date of Broadcast: June 26, 2013
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. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around us, we can protect ourselves by choosing less toxic products for our homes and workplaces by removing toxic chemicals from our bodies and all kinds of other things so that we are in control, being healthy, happy, productive, and doing whatever it is we want to do in our lives instead of being sick from chemical exposures.
Today is Tuesday—well, it’s Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, June 26th 2014. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And it’s getting to be a little cloudy, so there may be a little thunderstorm coming before the show is over. If you lose me because the power goes out, I’ll be right back. But I think it should probably be fine.
Today, my guest is Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. And we’re going to be talking about removing odors of almost any kind from almost anything.
Daliya is my go-to girl for when somebody asks me a question about how do I remove this odor or that odor. She’s the one I ask. And you can ask her too.
But before we get to Daliya, I want to just read you a quote. I send out every day a little newsletter called Words of Wisdom that has my favorite quotes. And I’ve been collecting them for so many years. I have more than 2000 quotes. And the other day, I sent out one that said:
“When we are grateful for the abundance that is present in our lives—love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure—we experience heaven on earth.”
And that was said by Sarah Ban Breathnach who has written a number of bestselling inspirational books. And I just want to remind us, I just want to keep mentioning, we’re talking about toxic chemicals and their dangers and things that are difficult in the world and making changes to protect ourselves, but there are so many things in life that the greatest pleasures in life are beyond physical things that may be toxic or that we need to find a safer alternative for.
Having love and family and friends and work that we enjoy and being out in nature and doing what we love, all those things are not toxic. And they’re the most important things in life.
So, I think it’s important to keep perspective that these are the important things. And in order to do those things, we need to have things in our life that are not toxic so that we have our health and we move forward with doing what we want to do.
So now, I’d like to introduce Daliya Robson. Hi Daliya. Thanks for being with me.
DALIYA ROBSON: Hello, hello. And thank you so much for your work. Thank you for your work.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
DALIYA ROBSON: What are your questions? Oh, by the way, what we should do because I may not have all the scientific explanations, I’ve got flyers and brochures with details, give people my phone number and tell them to leave their address clearly, and I’ll send them a catalog like product use, guidelines. There’s four pages on zeolite. There are three pages on
Mystical. There’s TuTuff and all kinds of sprays. And I might not be able to go over the science of it very easily… .
DEBRA: Well, you probably won’t be able to because we won’t have time for all of that. But we will give your phone number.
It’s 1-800-968-9355. I’ll give it again, 1-800-968-9355. And Daliya’s website is simply NonToxic.com. So she’s very […]
DALIYA ROBSON: Oh, by the way, I must tell you, my website, I wanted to upload a new library, and it distorted the whole website.
DEBRA: I saw that.
DALIYA ROBSON: You saw that? It’s chaos! So, I’ve asked my expert to fix it. Actually, he was the cause of the chaos because he did something to make that go.
So, don’t rush to my website, but just write it down—or go down and forgive me for the mess.
DEBRA: Well, I just went there, and I saw it, but I could still read it.
DALIYA ROBSON: You can read it, but I still need to apologize. So don’t rush. And if I’m not in, leave your phone number or your address and details—and even message or whatever the issue is. I’ll get back to you with brochures and call you back.
Okay, let’s go!
DEBRA: Okay! My first question is—I know you’ve been on the show before, but I’m sure that there are people listening that didn’t hear your introduction before. So why don’t you tell us about how you got interested in toxic chemicals and handling odors and what your experience is in this.
DALIYA ROBSON: Oh, I got poisoned by chemicals. And I became another statistic for chemical injury—multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, broken thyroid, brain fog from food. I was completely disabled.
I started a website to warn people about chemicals. And of course, the sentences were incoherent (and maybe they still are). And my daughter says, “How can you have a website with all these mistakes?” I said, “I’ve got brain damage!” She said, “Well, they don’t know that.” I said, “Anyone that’s been chemically injured will know that.”
But here’s the thing. That’s how I started. People ask me what to do. And I needed to know what to do. So I spent 20 years researching, I say, how to survive in a toxic world. And I kind of got it right, you know?
DEBRA: Yes, you did.
DALIYA ROBSON: …for my own protection.
And the first thing is to have absolutely nothing synthetic, toxic, in a bottle, or anything, in a tin. Don’t have it in your house.
Don’t even buy it.
DEBRA: I agree.
DALIYA ROBSON: A piece of soap that works as a hair shampoo, that’s all you need in a bathroom, simple things like that.
The first thing is to avoid it all.
But then, if you have a situation, you need a solution. So maybe you could ask what you need to ask.
DEBRA: Okay! So, what I really like to hear is about your different products that you have for removing odors. But before we go into each one of them, I know we were talking the other day, and you were saying, “Well, it really depends on what it is, what is the odor that you’re trying to remove. And then, you need to choose the right method. And it may or may not work.” But you’ve got a nice handful of tools that people can work with.
So, we only just have a couple of minutes before we need to go to the break. So why don’t we just take those couple of minutes for you to show us what is your thinking process if I were to say, “I have perfume.” You probably want to know what is the thing, the odor, you need to remove and what is the material you need to remove it from.
So, let’s say that somebody has perfume in a wood cabinet, how would that process go?
DALIYA ROBSON: Okay! Okay. Well, let’s say perfume in other people’s bathrooms, 20 years of detergents and perfumes and cleaning materials. Well, it depends how bad it is and how long. But what I would do is I would start with something simple like Mystical. It’s not going to do the whole lot. Mystical lifts of odors. Photocatalytic Spray lifts a lot of odors.
But if it’s a closet of 20 years, and you can’t change the wood, you can do the Mystical, then you could cover up with carbon fabric. If that isn’t enough, you could put in a few packets of zeolite. If that doesn’t work, you could seal it six times.
But if it’s just from one year, it will work very well. If it’s 20 years of odor, it might be best to change the wood in the closet. It just really depends.
But the zeolite helps. The Photocatalytic Spray changes odors into carbon dioxide and water.
DEBRA: Okay. So we’re going to take a break now. We’re going to explain what all those things are, Mystical and zeolite and Photocatalytic Spray. We’ll just go through one by one all the different things. You can explain it.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And you can find out more about the show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
My guest here is Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. And we’re talking about removing odors from almost any kind, from almost anything. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. You can call her at 1-800-968-9355 or visit her website at NonToxic.com.
Okay, Daliya, let’s start with Photocatalytic Odor Control. Now, I’m looking at your website…
DALIYA ROBSON: Yes, this is a simple 2% titanium dioxide that works with the effective ultraviolent and sunshine and changes a chemical or a biological odor—tobacco, wood smoke, musty closets, urine, mold, blood, pet odors—it would change that to carbon dioxide and water.
For example, I had a situation where they put a new roof in my house, but they didn’t take away the old insulation. So I had a musty smell in my bathroom. So I paint—I can’t be bothered standing to spray, although if you have a very big area, you can buy a fogger. I just paint that particular ceiling and wall with Photocatalytic.
I have a UV light in my bathroom. And for at least two or three years, I don’t smell anything. Maybe next year, I won’t. But that’s how I would use it.
In a new car, if the dog peed on the carpet, you could use various things. You could use Mystical in the same way (which is a non-toxic carpet cleaner). You could spread zeolite and then vacuum it up after a day or two. Or you could use a Photocatalytic if things are very bad. You would spray it on, leave the lights on, and forget about it. And in a day or two or three, there would be no odor.
It depends. If you have a constant odor like in a basement or a crawl space, you could use the Photocatalytic as long as you have light there. Spray all the walls and the ceilings. You could use zeolite on the ground. And then, you would cover it with TuTuff which is a vapor barrier that’s completely inert. And that would stop mold smells coming from the ground.
DEBRA: Wait, wait, wait. Back up for a minute. What did you call that?
DALIYA ROBSON: TuTuff. TuTuff is a vapor barrier, which are—let’s say crawl spaces are really bad places. Or even if you just had a flood and you haven’t got time. The insurance hasn’t come yet, and the place is moldy, and you can’t fix it yet, you would spray or paint the wall or the ceiling with a Photocatalytic. You would put a UV light on. After a couple of days, you would put the TuTuff which is a vapor barrier over it. So the odors, if there’s anything coming through, you could block it. And you would do that in the basement as well.
DEBRA: Is that like T-O-O…?
DALIYA ROBSON: No, T-U-T-U-F-F. It’s a vapor barrier for building houses, but it’s inert. There’s no odor. And it’s absolutely indestructible. Now, here’s another…
DEBRA: Okay, I’ll have to look for that. Wow! I never heard of it.
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, I mean we’re just talking about basements and molds and different ways of blocking fumes.
Now, let’s say somebody has to go home to a hotel, and you’ve got toxic carpets. Well, if you’re there for a long time, you could send them a gallon of Mystical and ask them to spray the carpets and the furniture with Mystical. If you’re coming for two nights, you could cover the carpet with zeolite if you have it in the car, or you could cover it with carbon fabric, or you could even cover it with TuTuff. It’s a big piece of plastic. The only problem with that is you slip and slide around. But as an emergency, that would block the fumes for long enough.
If I had a serious problem in my house—like I have a very old home. And the condo people, the authorities, are not very good about fixing stuff. I could smell mold from the old insulation. They wouldn’t do anything about it. So I took TuTuff and plastered it against the wall and had another wall board put against it. So, my kitchen is a half an inch smaller than it was before. I’m going to block this 30-year old insulation from me because they won’t do it.
So, I put the TuTuff against the wall, put a new wall board, and then of course put my new kitchen against that.
DEBRA: What about using foil?
DALIYA ROBSON: I don’t know much about foil. I hear a lot of people do it. But I don’t know how long it lasts. I mean the TuTuff is indestructible.
DEBRA: Well, foil, I’ve been recommending for years to people because this is what I learned to do 30 years ago. You could use regular aluminum foil, like heavy-duty aluminum foil. And the weight I don’t think matters in terms of blocking the toxics. It’s just that it holds up longer. So, I use heavy duty.
And you could also get aluminum tape. I’ve heard of people wrapping their entire telephone in aluminum tape.
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, that sounds good. I’ve had a lot of people doing that. I’ve never done it myself.
DEBRA: And then, there’s foil-backed building paper which gives you the blocking of the foil, but it holds the foil together because it’s got paper.
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, that sounds good.
DEBRA: Yeah, I think that between TuTuff and the foil, that somebody could block anything if you have a whole wall that needs to be done—or the inside of a closet or something.
DALIYA ROBSON: Yeah, sounds good, sounds good.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. We’ll be back after the break and talk more with my guest, Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven about the different ways that she handles different types of odors. She’s got a lot of information, so stay tuned.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. Her phone number is 1-800-968-9355. And her website is NonToxic.com.
And if you have an odor problem of any kind, she’s the person to talk to because she has a lot of experience and unusual product—I would say her products are unusual in the sense that you don’t see them everywhere. You’re not going to go to your local store and find these kinds of odor removers. They work! And she has experience with them.
So Daliya, tell us now about Mystical because you’ve been mentioning that.
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, Mystical was originally a carpet cleaner and a spot cleaner. But the manufacturer found that it lifted odors from everywhere even vinyl. This is very important in a new car with vinyl dashboards and ceilings, and children’s toys.
Everything that a child uses—their little chair in the car—everything is vinyl or plastic.
Now, I don’t think it works so well on plastic, but it’s fabulous on vinyl. So if you have new equipment, and it’s got those vinyl hoses, if you have…
DEBRA: Well, people ask me about hoses in the washing machine.
DALIYA ROBSON: No, no, not in the washing machine. No, no. It’s too expensive. What you do with new clothes with formaldehyde or odors, you soak them in a basin overnight. I’ve even left it two days. Then you hang it out in the sun. The sun helps lift the fumes. And then you wash it. I find that it does not work on nylon and synthetic stuff, but it works very well on cottons—so new sheets, new clothing.
If you have a jacket, for instance, or a suit, you can’t soak that, but you can spray the outside and hang it out in the sun for days. And then, you turn it inside-out, and you spray the inside and hang it out.
I’ve managed to do that with clothing that a very good friend insisted on giving me. I said, “Oh, my God! I can’t handle the Downy.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll hang it outside with Mystical and whatever will be will be.” I gave most of them away, but I have to keep a few of them, so my friend sees that I’m wearing her clothes. And I would say that they’re 90% effective.
But they were out in the sun for about a week—inside and outside, and inside again.
DEBRA: Do you know what the active ingredient is?
DALIYA ROBSON: No, it’s a trade secret. And I have material safety datasheet here for people. You could drink it. It’s so safe.
I’m suspecting that it works like photocatalytic, but he’s not prepared to tell us.
If there’s nothing toxic in it, they can do a trade secret thing. People who are afraid to use it end up not having the advantage.
I’ve had people who’ve said, “I react to the Mystical,” and that is not correct. The Mystical smells like water. But you react to the odors it’s lifting out.
So, if you have a toxic carpet, and you spray it—not a new carpet, but just one that’s been contaminated with Febreze or other cleaning—then the odor is worse before it’s better because the Mystical is lifting out the fumes. And then, you would shampoo again. That’s for a carpet.
For vinyl, it’s fabulous. I bought a cheap $180 sauna. So I put Mystical on the outside of it, left it outside for two days, and Mystical on the inside, and now my little plastic sauna works with no odors. You know those infrared saunas where your head sticks out?
DEBRA: Yeah!
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, you can pay $2000 or $3000 or you can pay $180 and a bottle of Mystical.
So, that’s how it works. It lifts vinyl smells. If you have a vinyl floor…
DEBRA: So, do you think that it’s actually changing the chemicals in some ways so that it isn’t there like in the Photocatalytic.
You said that it changes it to carbon dioxide and water. Is it just removing the odor or is it actually removing the chemical exposure?
DALIYA ROBSON: It’s removing the fumes. I mean if there was blood there, it will remove the bloodstain eventually. If there was urine, it would remove the urine. If there’s chemicals, it removes the chemicals.
DEBRA: That’s pretty amazing.
DALIYA ROBSON: It changes it to carbon dioxide and water. But it has to have sunlight—either sunlight or a UV light.
DEBRA: That’s for the Photocatalytic.
DALIYA ROBSON: Yes. But for the Mystical, it works the same. And that’s why I’m suspecting it might be a photocatalytic process, but it’s not admitting it. It’s a trade secret, so it’s not telling us.
DEBRA: But on the Photocatalytic, what that does is—well, photocatalytic means that you need to have light in order to make the catalyst happen.
DALIYA ROBSON: That’s right. And Mystical doesn’t work without light either. That’s what makes me think it’s very similar.
DEBRA: Oh, okay, okay. That was the part that I didn’t understand.
DALIYA ROBSON: Yeah, I think it’s the same, but he won’t tell me. He says, “You can make it in the kitchen, and I’m not going to tell you because then I’ve lost my business.” But everybody asks me. And the people who don’t trust me end up still living with their mold and their formaldehyde on their clothes. I keep saying, “Look, you’re living in a house full of formaldehyde. Isn’t that worse than trusting this safe product?”
DEBRA: Well, yeah, I think it’s worth trying things. But if you have a situation where you have toxic chemicals and you need to do something about it, why not try something…
DALIYA ROBSON: People are scared, people are scared, especially if they’ve tried things and they got worse.
But anyway, that’s the Mystical. That’s the Photocatalytic. You use it anywhere, everywhere. It doesn’t always work 100%.
DEBRA: Why would you chose one over the other?
DALIYA ROBSON: Because one is cheaper. For instance, if you go into a house, and you have an enormous house, and it’s something that you’re just about to buy, but there’s something wrong with it. What I would do is get 10 gallons of Mystical and a fogger, spray absolutely every corner from top to bottom, put in a half a dozen UV light, spray the carpet, the closets, the walls, spray everything, wait a few days, come in, and then, if you need to, you seal the walls (if not, it’s better).
DEBRA: Okay! So, we need to take another break. This is fascinating. You’re giving me a lot of good ideas. People do ask me these questions. You have a lot of great solutions.
DALIYA ROBSON: Right! Now, the Photocatalytic…
DEBRA: Wait, wait, wait. We need to go to break.
DALIYA ROBSON: Okay, okay.
DEBRA: We can continue after.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. And we’ll be right back to talk more about how to remove odors of almost any kind from almost anything. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here today with Daliya Robson from Nirvana Safe Haven. Her phone number is 1-800-968-9355. And her website is NonToxic.com.
So Daliya, we’re in our last segment here.
DALIYA ROBSON: Oh, Debra, I have to tell you how to use the Photocatalytic in a very, very important manner.
DEBRA: Alright!
DALIYA ROBSON: Let’s say somebody’s got two little children, always sniveling, always with colds. You take every single toy they have, and you spray it with Photocatalytic. Preferably, get a fogger because you use so much less. You spray all the toys, and you put them out in the sun. And there will be no germs there for two years.
And you spray the handles of the bathrooms. You spray the toilets perhaps. And you have a UV light on in the bathroom.
You’re free of bacteria for many years as long as there’s the light on. I would use that.
DEBRA: That is very important because people use some very toxic antibacterials. And if you can use that to kill germs, that’s amazing and something that everybody should be doing.
DALIYA ROBSON: And I have to tell you this because we have to understand how cynical our government is. There was a company selling Photocatalytic to me. And they were put out of business because they called it a pesticide. They’re not allow to say that. They’re not allowed to claim that it will kill the SARS virus. They’re not allowed to say anything like that.
But here’s another place that I would use it. And I did it a few years ago. When I went into surgery, I was scared of re-infection.
So I sprayed all the things in my room—the bed, the table, the handles of the bathroom, the rail in the bathroom, even the little remote that they give you for the TV. And I put a UV light of my own in the room. And I thought, “I at least have to protect myself from some other infection.”
DEBRA: I think that’s so important to know. I was just thinking…
DALIYA ROBSON: Yeah, something like that, yes.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Okay, good.
So, I want to make sure that in the time that we have left that we mention activated carbon salt, zeolite. And you mentioned sealing, using something to seal for six times.
So, let’s start. I just want you to explain these other three options so that people can see the wide variety of things they have to work with. So, if you were going to seal something, what products would you use to seal?
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, it depends if it’s particle board or what. There’s AFM products for sealing particle boards.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve used those.
DALIYA ROBSON: The AFM products have seals to seal walls, painted walls. If you have a new floor or you have an old floor, you want to reseal it with Polyureseal. So AFM has many products that are much safer.
But I want to warn everybody never to put two or three coats on in one day. You have to have a thin coat and wait a whole day for it to cure before you put another coat on. If you don’t do that, you smell the first coat and the second coat through the third coat. So, even though it says up to 1 ½ hours, you can do another coat, never do it. Wait a day. And then, it works.
DEBRA: That’s very good advice.
DALIYA ROBSON: And the carbon fabric, carbon absorbs toxic chemicals in water purifiers and air purifiers. So if you had a fabric with trillions of little particles, it’s going to absorb the chemicals on a shelf, on a drawer, in a hotel room over furniture, over mattresses.
The zeolite that you provide people with for removing toxins in the liver also removes fumes from the closet. But of course, it’s not…
DEBRA: Yeah, the zeolite is wonderful stuff. It removes no matter where you put it. It will absorb toxic chemicals.
DALIYA ROBSON: It will absorb. And moisture, and moisture.
Now, it’s rather heavy. I mean if you have a musty basement, and you have to put 12 or 24 packets of that, they will work. But in this case, like a musty closet or a basement, I would use the Photocatalytic on the walls and the ceiling, put a UV light on, and it’s more effective. But not everybody has heard about that, but they have heard of zeolite. And zeolite will do that too. It will absorb fumes and moisture.
And let me think what else. This little booklets, I have four or eight pages on all these things. So if anybody wants to know more on how to use it—
Like in a refrigerator, if you put zeolite in there, you’re going to absorb the moisture. The vegetables are not going to rot. It will absorb the ethylene gas from the fruits. So that’s not going to rot. And things last longer. Very, very healthy stuff to have around.
DEBRA: People are accustomed to putting in baking soda in our refrigerators for odors. But this will also absorb the moisture and the ethylene gas, you’re saying?
DALIYA ROBSON: No, using zeolite is more effective. You can buy it in bulk. I mean if you have some old socks that you’re not using, you can put some zeolite sand or chips in the socks, sew up the edge, and put them all over the place. Children, adolescent’s running shoes, I mean what could be worse?
So, they have zeolite powders that the children can do their feet with—or the husband […] And they have zeolite powder for feet, for deodorant. They even have carbon soap for deodorants.
DEBRA: Wow! I never heard of that.
DALIYA ROBSON: You absorb the bacteria under your armpits, and there’s no odor.
Anybody can call me. I mean if I’m not in (because I do tend to have lots of medical doctor appointments at my age), leave a message of any length. Leave your phone number. Leave the issues. And I’ll get back to you.
DEBRA: Tell us more about how somebody might use the carbon [felt]. There’s a picture on the website. When I first heard about this, I had a hard time visualizing its design. It’s like a blanket. It’s like a big blanket.
DALIYA ROBSON: It is. But you use it mainly for a toxic mattress. Now, there’s no additives in the felt. So it’s very soft. It’s just compressed carbon, so it’s very effective. It’s what they make good masks off of. So someone buys some of this. They cover their toxic mattress. They’ll buy a toxic bed. But if you have done it, you cover it up, and then you need to put two or three sheets on the mattress pad over it, so your body doesn’t sweat into the carb and the movement doesn’t ruin it. So that’s a disadvantage.
If you go into a hotel room, the fabric is cheaper and sturdier, but it has 1% adhesive. That’s why it lasts longer. But if you had three sheets over there and the mattress pad (or two sheets and the mattress pad), you wouldn’t be bothered by the adhesive.
The fumes on the bed are much worse than the 1% adhesive.
DEBRA: So, why would somebody use a carbon blanket rather than TuTuff?
DALIYA ROBSON: TuTuff is plastic, and it crankles. It’s not really…
DEBRA: It does, it does. So the carbon […]
DALIYA ROBSON: I mean the carbon, you forget about. But the TuTuff is not absorbing anything. It’s just blocking. Eventually, if you use the carbon, you won’t have the fumes in the bed. After a few years, you take it off and you realize, oh, it’s absorbed the fumes.
DEBRA: Can you put the carbon blanket out in the sun or something to release the chemicals?
DALIYA ROBSON: Yes, [cross-talking 35:07]. Yeah, about once a year, twice a year, like at the beginning of the summer or the end of the summer.
And if you’re asthmatic, you have to be careful because there’s no adhesive. And so there’ll be little particles. So you have to vacuum the bed. And you have to make sure you’re not absorbing the particles. So if you’re asthmatic, you’re probably better off with a fabric (though it doesn’t work quite as well).
DEBRA: Okay. So there’s a fabric, and there’s a blanket?
DALIYA ROBSON: There’s a fabric, and there’s a felt.
DEBRA: Okay, felt.
DALIYA ROBSON: The felt is very pure. The fabric has 1% adhesive.
Now, we use the fabric for things like blocking the fire smoke, blocking the neighbor’s Downy smells, inside the drawers and the shelves. Let’s say you’ve cleaned with Mystical, you’ve put zeolite in, it still smells. So you would line it with fabric, double it up with…
DEBRA: Oh, I see.
DALIYA ROBSON: And that fabric is safe enough to put in a drawer. I mean you’re not making a mask out of it.
DEBRA: Right, right. I see. This is how you can take things and salvage cabinets and furniture and things that have odors.
DALIYA ROBSON: Yes. But as I’ve said, I live in a very old house. And my closets are 35 years old or 40 years old. And they still had a formaldehyde smell when I came—not severe, but enough to irritate me.
And when I washed the shelves, I got contact dermatitis at the bottom of my arm. You know how you put your arm down to reach? So, even after 40 years…
DEBRA: So, I need to stop you because we’re coming to the end of our time, and I just want to give your phone number again, 1-800-968-9355. And you can go to NonToxic.com. Thank you so much for being with us. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DALIYA ROBSON: Well, thank you for the work you’re doing. I can’t thank you enough.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
DALIYA ROBSON: Alright! Thank you. And bye bye.
DEBRA: Bye!
Does the Natural Approach to Life Really Make Us Healthier and Happier?
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Does the Natural Approach to Life Really Makes Us Healthier & Happier
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Nathanael Johnson
Date of Broadcast: June 25, 2013
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.
Yes, there are toxic chemicals all around. And we encounter them every day, but there’s something we can do about it. We can eliminate toxic exposures in our own homes. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. We can support legislation that limits toxic exposures in consumer products and choose to have a toxic-free life where we can think clearly, our bodies will feel good, we can feel good, and we can be productive and happy and do whatever we want.
That’s the point of this show, is to get to those solutions and find out what we need to be doing in order to have a toxic free world.
My guest today is Nathanael Johnson. He’s the author of a book called All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier.
But before we talk to him, I want to tell you about a summer vacation I had a few years ago. I went to Concorde, Massachusetts, home of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. And for those of you who don’t know who these people are—I have discovered that some people in the world don’t know these people—I grew up with them and that probably ages me.
Louisa May Alcott is the author of a very famous book called Little Women which has been a movie also. Her father was a big mover and shaker in social change going on at that time. And Henry David Thoreau wrote a very famous book called Walden, which he—well, I’ll tell you about him in a minute.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the greatest philosophers of all America ever. And he wrote a number of philosophic books about the importance of nature and the importance of spirituality. And all of these people were living at a time in the late 1800s when industrialism was coming to America and getting established and the whole American scene was changing from being agricultural and having lots of open spaces and lots of wild land to being more industrialized. And instead of having artisans making things, they were being made by machines and factories.
Henry David Thoreau was one of the most outspoken people on this. And his book, Walden was about his experience living for a period of time—I don’t remember how long he lived. But he built a house with his own house on the shores of the lake there which is still there (the lake is there, the house is no longer there). He built the house and Walden is the story of him living there and what he spent his money on and how he went for walks and how he grew his food and all these different things.
What he was trying to do was keep connected with nature at a time when we were fast losing nature to industrialism.
There’s a wonderful museum there in Concorde that addresses this very issue. I learned a lot by going there. I highly recommend a visit to Concorde, Massachusetts to anybody who would like to go on a nice vacation, an instructional vacation.
Right near Concorde is also Lexington where the Revolutionary War started. So there’s a lot you can learn about the founding of our country going to that area.
So, that’s essentially what we’re going to be talking about today, the struggle between nature and industrialism.
Nathanael, thank you for being here with me.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: I took a look at your book, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an interesting conversation.”
So, I’ve read part of your book. I haven’t read all of it, but I’ve read enough of it to get the idea of what you’re going to be talking about. So first, let’s start by having you tell our listening audience about your childhood and how you came to write this book. What motivated you to write this book?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I had parents who were really influenced by those transcedentalist philosophers that you were just talking about. And they really believed that it was healthier to embrace nature rather than trying to protect ourselves from nature using technology.
And so, this meant that I had this childhood where you grew up in a small town up in the hills of the Nevada mountains. We ate a lot of natural foods. There’s a lot of kale and brown rice. We’re backpacking in the mountains every summer. It was really an idyllic childhood in many ways.
My father went so far as to ban diapers even because that was unnatural. The idea was that here are the kids in the fastest period of growth wearing these big, bulk things between their legs, it would warp the bones. And so, this is yet another example of technology causing problems with nature.
I mean, I really had this wonderful childhood. In some ways, I also got a front row seat from which to observe the ways in which it failed. The diaper thing, as I checked that out as an adult, there’s really no evidence that diapers deform bones. And 99.9% of Olympians, pretty much everybody, had some form of diapers and they’re fine.
So, I really became conflicted in some ways. This idea that what’s natural is good is deeply wedded to my sense of childhood innocence and purity. But at the same time, I thought these ways in which it kind of went to crazy places.
And so, as an adult, as I was trying to make decisions for my own children—my wife and I just had our first daughter—it’s no coincidence that the daughter and the book came around the same time. I started doing all these research to try and figure out if there was a way to logically pick through the wisdom and separate it from the craziness.
DEBRA: Well, my background, just so you know, is kind of the opposite in that I grew up in a very technological childhood—on TV dinners and television. And then, I got to a point in my adulthood where I got pretty sick pretty early in my adult life. At age 24, I was disabled. And it turned out to be from exposure to toxic chemicals. And I had no idea there were toxic chemicals in my home. I thought that manufacturers were ethical and wouldn’t give us anything that was bad for us, and that the government was watching out for us. And yet, here, my ordinary American home was making me sick—very sick.
And I had to re-examine everything about the technological world because I had to take everything I owned and look at it and say, “Is this toxic? Or is it not toxic? Is it making me sick or not sick?” And the answer for me was to look to nature and see that my body belonged to nature.
It came from nature like any other species. And things more natural would make more sense.
And as I made my life more natural, my health improved and I did become healthier and happier.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: There’s a certain logic to that, right?
DEBRA: Yeah!
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We came from this world. We spent thousands of years living in this world. Our bodies are adapted to this world. And now we’ve begun to change it very rapidly. And we changed it in some ways in which our bodies are not adapted.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk more about that after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. It’s the longest subtitled in the universe.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Nathanael Johnson, author of author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. His website is AllNaturalBook.com (no longer in business).
And I thought that this would be a very interesting conversation to have since I’m very naturally oriented. And this is what I’m talking about on my show all the time, is to say “Let’s get closer to nature. Let’s get closer to nature.” But I also know that it’s very difficult to do that.
Again, Nathanael, I’d just like to tell you something that I’ve experienced and see how your experience corresponds or doesn’t.
When I first “discovered nature,” I had an experience where I said, “Oh, my God! Nature is there.” It’s like I didn’t see it before a certain point in time. And I said, “All the answers are in nature. All I need to do is look at nature and do what nature does because, after all, all the other species are doing fine. It’s the humans that don’t know what they’re doing.”
And so, I started to try to pursue that path and very quickly found that it actually couldn’t be done, that I couldn’t completely leave the industrial world. And so I had to have one foot in nature and one foot in the industrial world.
And at the time, I didn’t know how true that was. But now I know that there really isn’t a place on earth that we can go where nature actually exists in its pre-industrial state.
I know that a lot of your book is about looking at the pros and cons. So tell me what your experience was in that dichotomy of having these two worlds of nature and industry.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, the question of finding all the answers in nature is a tricky one. I mean, obviously, we don’t want to completely go back to nature. There’s a lot of bad things. I think that sometimes people who are very technology-oriented use this kind of facile argument where they say, “Well, hurricanes are natural. Tornadoes are natural. Nature isn’t good.” And I think that that’s not what we’re saying.
But there is a need to distinguish between what’s good in nature and what’s dangerous. There are a lot of toxic chemicals I read about in plants.
DEBRA: Yes, there are, there are.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: And that’s something that we’ve lived with and evolved with and adapted to. But there’s some evidence that, perhaps, we could make our lives longer if we started parsing out some of those and finding them. If we go back completely to nature, our lives would certainly be shorter.
So, I say that early in the book. I want to return to nature, but I’m not willing to give up antibiotics. I’m not willing to give up space travel or movies or all of these things that I love about technology at the same time.
DEBRA: Well, you know, honey has natural antibiotics. Why not just take honey?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I would say pretty much all antibiotics are natural. Penicillin comes from mold. So, all of these things—
The line between what’s natural and what’s technological gets very fuzzy when you look closely at it. Penicillin comes from mold, but it’s grown in petri dishes and it’s refined by giant corporations and turned into antibiotics. So then it feels less natural.
It gets harder to parse what’s natural and what’s not. And I really think that this division says more about us, that we divide the world into these two spheres than it says about a real division that actually exists out there.
DEBRA: Well, I think there could be the argument that—well, first, I would argue that we, as human beings, are part of nature.
And so, anything that we do is as natural as anything that a tree does—except that my observation has been (right or wrong) that other species don’t think as much as we do as human being and that we have our ability to change things, whereas…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We are environment-changers. That’s something that’s very different. The scale with which humans use technology—you can argue that there are some animals that’s very interesting. Crows use tools. Chimpanzees use tools.
We use technology that’s altering the planet […]
DEBRA: That’s right. So it’s not like when a tree grows, for example. It’s altering the environment, but it’s altering the environment in a way that is harmonious. And so it takes nutrients from the ground, but it also produces nutrients. And it produces shade and environment and food and all kinds of things. Whereas, a lot of what we’re doing as humans is destructive. And it’s not that we couldn’t make choices that are more life-sustaining. It’s that we haven’t been.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I wouldn’t argue with that. The question if you’re trying to distinguish between what’s your natural antibiotics and which are unnatural antibiotics, it becomes very fuzzy very, very quickly. I just don’t think that’s a useful dividing line in choosing how to cure an illness.
DEBRA: Well, I would say yes and no. That’s a question that I can’t comment on in the next nine seconds.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We’re coming up on the break.
DEBRA: Yeah. So let’s come up on the break, and we’ll be back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Nathanael Johnson. He’s the author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. We’ll be back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier.
So, Nathanael, does the natural approach to all those things really keep us healthier and happier? What did you finally come to decide about that?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I wish that there was an easier answer. It certainly would be better for my book sale if I could say, “Just embrace nature in every way” or “Just chuck nature out the window and be space age.” But of course, like we were saying, you only have to think about for a few seconds to think of parts of nature that are dangerous and parts of technology that are truly harmful.
And so, the conclusion I ended up coming to is that you really have to go through and assess the evidence on a case by case basis.
DEBRA: I totally agree. For me, what I came to—I mean, I went through that same process of saying there’s good and bad things about each. But what I finally came to was that the whole point of life, what it’s trying to do is sustain itself. It’s trying to survive. And so, if you say “Does this contribute to survival or not contribute to survival?”, sometimes the natural thing is going to contribute to survival, and other times, it won’t. And the same for the industrial thing.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I think there is that basic evolutionary wisdom, that there’s some logic to embracing nature because we come from nature. We figured things out over many, many years. And now we’re starting to experiment with all kinds of new substances.
And in doing that, I just want to do it in a systematic, thoughtful way rather than embracing all one side or all the other.
DEBRA: Well, I would agree with that. I could agree with that totally.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Okay! We have our platform to start with. Now maybe we can build out from here.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So now that we agree on that, tell me some examples of things that you decided that you wouldn’t do because they didn’t contribute to what you wanted to have happen that were of nature and some things that you decided to not include in your life from industry.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Okay, let’s see. What’s a good example? I mean I mentioned the issue with diapers. So that’s an industrial product—even cotton diapers are an industrial product—that I opted to us.
I think the bigger issue with nature, what I didn’t end up doing, when I was growing up, I really struggled with trying to improve my performance as a distance runner. I was an athlete in high school. I tried all different types of things and spent a lot of time in health food stores trying different things. And I came to the conclusion that I was kind of spinning my wheels.
There are all these people that were extremely committed to being healthy and were taking all kinds of different supplements, but didn’t seem healthy. They were just so nervous about their health and are kind of knocked down by any little thing that happen to them…
DEBRA: I know people like that.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I didn’t want to be that way.
At the same time, I really come to this from the other direction, from wanting to make sure that I didn’t take industrial medications that were going to do more harm than good. There are thing like Vioxx as a good example, this heart medication that’s really done terrible things in worsening people. And so, I really wanted to be critical about the industrial medical complex.
And as I started looking into that deeply and developing the skills to figure out the science and where they were cheating and lying, I saw that I needed to apply that same science to natural cures as well and be just as critical.
So, I think the medical area is one where I’ve become much more—I think a lot of the things that we think of as “illnesses,” we immediately look for a fix, whether it’s a big pharmaceutical drug to make us feel better or numb the pain or a natural supplement. And often, our physical problems have to do with the way our lives and our emotions and the people that we surround ourselves with much more than any biophysical problem.
DEBRA: I would totally agree with that. And what I’ve come to after all of these years dealing with my own health problems has been that I think that most illness is caused by the things that you’ve just stated and also environment, lifestyle choices. I don’t think about how to solve almost anymore. I think about how to build health and create health. If I do things like get proper nutrition and get adequate rest and exercise and give my body the things that it needs, including social interaction—
And a big one for me, as you and all my listeners know, is stop beating ourselves over the head with toxic chemicals. And we’ll have a lot more health.
An example I like to give a lot is that there’s formaldehyde resins on bedsheets. And formaldehyde causes insomnia. People who are sleeping on those formaldehyde-soaked sheets every night over and over again are spending billions of dollars buying sleeping pills.
Now, if people would just change their sheets, then they wouldn’t need to have sleeping pills. It’s really that simple.
So, that’s where I see that people could make a change towards something more natural and that it would help all around.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I didn’t know about that. I just want to point out—I don’t know how much formaldehyde is on the sheets, but formaldehyde is something that we manufacture in our liver. In small quantities, it’s something that’s necessary for life.
So, again, definitely, you don’t want so much of it on your sheets that it’s keeping you awake. It shouldn’t be a blanket fear.
DEBRA: It shouldn’t be a blanket fear. But I’ll just say very quickly (because we need to go to break) that there is a difference between a naturally produced chemical and the same chemical formula or the same molecule produced industrially. We’ll talk about that for a minute when we come back from the break because there is a difference in that.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural—and a very long subtitle—when we get back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. I said it all in one breath.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: All Natural is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation.
DEBRA: Alright! So, before the break, I had said to Nathanael that, in fact, if you have two identical molecules and one is made in nature and that the other one is made from petroleum in a laboratory or a factory that they actually are physically different.
And there’s a lot of research on that that comes out of the natural supplement industry—and not just supplements, but I’ve read this in books that have nothing to do with nutrition. If you take these two molecules, and one is manufactured and one is made by nature, that they have a fundamental difference in that they will bend light differently, and that there are certain parts of the molecule where it turns right instead of left. And I don’t have it right in front of me to give you all the science all about it, but this is something that I’ve read widely in many different places.
And I think that that’s right because if there’s one thing that I know about nature is that nature has its own way of doing things.
And I don’t think that it can be duplicated in a factory. And as close as you might come, there’s always going to be something different, something missing.
And I know that if I take natural vitamins, like whole food vitamins that comes strictly from food instead of vitamins where those same nutrients are manufactured from petroleum, I feel completely different. My body responds to them in a completely different way.
So, I wouldn’t agree with you on the point that industry could duplicate nature. It might be a very fine line, but it’s enough of a line that I think our bodies can tell the difference. And that’s just my viewpoint on that. And I don’t want to take a lot of time…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, I just want to respond very quickly.
DEBRA: Go ahead, yeah.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I absolutely respect your personal experience. I think that that’s important. When it comes to science, I’m convinced by peer-reviewed substantial evidence. And the scientific consensus is different than what you just stated.
But I haven’t seen all the stuff that you have. And I’d be interested in learning more.
DEBRA: I can send it to you. I can send it to you. I look at all that science too. But my experience has been, over 30 years, that science doesn’t have a nature viewpoint and that there are a lot of assumptions that science make that I have a different assumption because I’ve learned some things from nature.
And I think it would be great for scientists to learn more about nature.
DEBRA: I think that you’re right at a fundamental level, but don’t tar all the science. There’s some wonderful, amazing…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, no, no, no. I’m not trying to tar all the science or industry. In fact, I just want to tell you—and I know some people are going to be horrified to hear me say this—that I’m so naturally oriented that I will go to great lengths to not do something industrial. And yet recently, I started taking an industrial drug to save my life.
DEBRA: And because I was doing everything natural, and I had done it for so long, and I was just at a crisis where I was going to end up in a hospital if I didn’t take this drug, I took it. And all my symptoms started subsiding.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: And I think that it’s something that I need to say because I think that people do become too extreme, as you say, one way or the other. They won’t do something industrial if they have an all-natural viewpoint or the industrialists won’t do something natural. But it comes down to what’s the right thing to do.
We live in a world right now where, as I think I said earlier, there’s no place to go on earth where we can be pristine natural—there isn’t. And so we need to do some industrial things to correct industrial problems. If my body is sick because of industrial reasons, I might need to use an industrial solution in order for it to get well. And it may be that the traditional, natural things just don’t work.
I’ve heard from doctors who do things like chiropractic adjustments, for example, where they’re now saying those natural remedies aren’t working because our bodies are so full of toxic chemicals that they need to do something to rid our bodies of toxic chemicals before the natural thing can work.
And so, we really are in this state of push-me/pull-you between these two extremes.
So, I appreciate your saying that we need to be considering both.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: The point is there are some lovely, lovely scientists who do have a truly natural perspective and just have this wonderful balance.
DEBRA: I agree. I agree with that. I agree.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: And it is true that there is a type of science that focuses very narrowly on individual molecules. It tends to sometimes miss the bigger picture. And I think that is maybe what you’re getting at. Because you’re so focused tightly on how this one molecule acts just the same as this other molecule, that you miss the big picture that one comes from an organic farm that makes the world a more lovely place and one comes from this awful, industrial [unclear 33:10]. The bigger picture is really worth looking at.
DEBRA: Yeah. And just during the break, I checked my email. And I got an email with a story in it from the Environmental News Network called The Lead In a Songbird. And it was talking about that there’s dangers for people who work with lead, but there’s also dangers for birds who live near lead mining district. They said “about half of ground-feeding songbirds collected from a historic lead mining district in Southern Missouri contained toxic levels of lead in their blood and internal organs.”
If we weren’t digging up these things that belong underground and turning them into industrial products, then the songbirds would not be exposed to them.
So, this is where it just would be nice if everybody had a bigger viewpoint. And I don’t want to be making generalities about all scientists or all people with a natural viewpoint because I can see people who have strange ideas on both sides. But I think there are laws of nature that can be applied, there is commonsense that can be applied and that there is an inherent desire to survive in everybody and wanting to do the right thing that leads to health and happiness.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: There’s an interesting article just recently looking at obesity. We know the obesity epidemic is rampant. But the interesting thing is that we’re seeing weight gain across the board in other species as well.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t know that.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: So there seems to be an indication that there’s something else going on. I mean, obviously, our food system has big problems with it. But perhaps there’s something environmental that’s really intrinsic across the board.
DEBRA: Well, it could be endocrine-disrupting toxic chemicals being in the environment.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s one theory.
DEBRA: Yeah, because they affect our human weight gain and other animals are being affected by them too in the same way.
Or it could be sun spots or it could be all kinds of things.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, there’s lots of theories. But that’s certainly one of the leading ones.
DEBRA: Well, Nathanael, we’re getting to the end of our hour, is there anything that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I think there are some things out there like bisphenol-A which is something that we don’t have proof-positive that it’s hurting us yet, but I think the evidence is sufficient that we really should be getting rid of it. And in America, much more than Europe, we’ve opted to make ourselves guinea pigs. And that has some benefits in terms of we all have fancier iPhones and stuff. But we also—
This is one area where if you go through and look at the evidence, I think enough is compiled that we really should be getting rid of it.
DEBRA: I agree, I agree. And I think that there are some other chemicals as well that we can do that.
I read the last line, the last paragraph from your book, so I know what your conclusion is. But I don’t want to give it away if you don’t want me to.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: It’s fine. Either way, either way.
DEBRA: Okay, then I’ll just say that Nathanael’s conclusion, what he was looking for, the idyllic-ness of the natural picture that he had in his mind really had to do with his childhood and his experience of family. It all came down to that […] So, it’s a very interesting book to read.
Thank you so much for being with us.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, it’s such a pleasure.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Waterproof Mattress Pad
Question from Heavens
I am in the market to buy a waterproof mattress pad.
The first company that came to mind is Naturepedic because I have a couple of their mattresses and they use food grade polyethelene to waterproof them. I just checked your website here and found a similar question and a reference to the waterproofing on the Naturepedic mattress pads as being done with polyethelene.
I have heard otherwise so called Naturepedic to confirm: The waterproof layer in the mattress pads is a polyurethane film, not polyethelene. It took a lot of questioning as the rep didn’t know. They call it something like “dryguard” without specifying exactly what that is. After insisting that I needed specifics, he was able to come back and tell me that it was, in fact, a polyurethane film.
That being said, the cotton is organic and they are GOTS certified and Greenguard certified regarding outgassing. Polyurethane is a very dirty word in my house. Can you please clarify the safety of sleeping on this?
Debra’s Answer
I actually recently did HOURS of research on polyurethane. Polyurethane itself, as in a film is actually pretty nontoxic. It’s when you combine polyurethane with other toxic chemicals that it gets a bad name, such as combined with chemicals to make polyurethane foam or combined with solvents to make polyurethane wood finish. But polyurethane itself is not the problem.
I have known the owners of Naturepedic for years and have had many discussions with them about the toxicity of various materials. The founder, Barry Cik is an very experienced Environmental Engineer. They have a “no compromise” policy about toxic chemicals. So if Naturepedic is using a material, I feel confident that it is safe for babies.
Organic Clothing for Women, Handmade in the USA
My guest is Lucretia Bohnsack, Executive Director of Esperanza Threads, an organic, sustainable fiber clothing manufacturer that combines comfort and fashion with socially environmental values. Located in Cleveland, Ohio they make products for adults, youths, babies (and people with multiple chemical sensitivities) as well as bed and bath items. Founded by Ursuline Sister Mary Eileen Boyle in 2000, Esperanza Threads is a non-profit training facility teaching those needing skills for employment how to sew on industrial machines. . Currently Esperanza Threads is collaborating with the Cleveland Catholic Charities Migrant Refugee Services to train newly arrived people from around the world. Other agencies in the area such as El Barrio Workforce Development Center, and neighboring Churches refer individuals who are in need of skills for employment. Esperanza Threads also helps with job placement at sewing facilities in the Greater Cleveland area as well as currently expanding a new apprenticeship program for promising sewers in their manufacturing facility. Lucretia Bohnsack accepted the role of Executive Director in October, 2012 after serving on the Board of Directors from the beginning. We’ll be talking about how they make organic clothing and why choosing organic clothing is an important toxic-free choice for our health and the environment. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/esperanza-threads
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Organic Clothing for Women, Handmade in the USA
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lucretia Bohnsack
Date of Broadcast: June 24, 2013
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 there are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products that we use every day, in all kinds of things that may be in our homes, out in the environment, and the air we’re breathing, and the food that’s on the store shelves. But there’s something we can do about it.
We can make better choices about the products that we choose to put in our homes. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. We don’t have to drink water with toxic chemicals or eat food with toxic chemicals because there’s a toxic-free alternative to everything that’s toxic. We have a lot of control and choice over this in our lives. And that’s what we talk about here on this show.
It’s Monday, June 24th 2003. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where it’s a beautiful, sunny day. We have no thunderstorms—at least not until around this afternoon.
My guest today is from a wonderful website where they make beautiful, beautiful clothes out of organic fabrics. And they’re made right here in the USA. So we’re going to talk to her in a minute.
But first, I want to talk about something that I saw at a supermarket I happened to be wandering through—not buying anything, but just walking through. It was a headline on the cover of Real Simple Magazine. It said, “Is your house making you fat?”
Now, I know something about houses making people fat. What happens is there are certain types of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. And they are all over your house unless you’ve chosen products that don’t have them.
One of the endocrine disruptors is bisphenol A, also known as BPA. And what these endocrine disruptors do is they can make you fat. And because your ability to lose weight or retain weight is governed by certain hormones in your endocrine system, when your endocrine system gets disrupted, then it makes it really difficult for your body to lose weight, and people gain weight.
There’s actually a word for these types of chemicals. And it is obesogenic.
And so, I bought this magazine, Real Simple because I thought, “Oh, this would be a great article to talk about on my radio show.” Real Simple Magazine is showing where the toxic chemicals are in your home that make you fat.
But sadly, it had a big headline that said Is Your Home Obesogenic? Then they had a little asterisk, and they said that the definition of this word is that it’s something that causes obesity.
And when you turn the page, it says, “re-arrange the food, stock your food choices smarter, ditch the giant containers, vinyl salad plates…”
Now, none of these things have to do with toxic chemicals. These are all good habits that you should change. But here, they used the headline like Is Your House Making You Fat? like being exposed to something in your home make you fat. Then they used the word obesogenic which is often used in the world of toxic chemicals to refer to chemicals that are endocrine disruptors. And then, instead of talking about using those terms and phrases to talk about toxic chemicals, they’re talking about changing your eating habits.
So, I think it would’ve been great had Real Simple Magazine actually wrote an article about the subject. But I’m also concerned about people using phrases and terms that relate to toxic chemicals and using them incorrectly. And that’s actually a whole different subject of people being able to read and understand words and having vocabulary.
But I just wanted to make the point here that there are toxic chemicals in your home that can make you fat. In fact, there’s a whole article on my website about this. And you could find it by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top, there’s a menu bar that says Health Effects. If you click on there, and then scroll down the page, under Health Effects, it says “obesity.”
And if you click on that, there’s a whole article about how toxic chemical can be making you fat. If you’re having trouble losing weight or you’re gaining weight, then that’s a great article to read.
So now, I want to introduce my guest. Lucretia Bohnsack, she’s the executive director of Esperanza Threads. Lucretia, are you there?
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: I am! And thank you for inviting me on your show today. In Cleveland where we are located, it’s bright and sunny too. We’re having a wonderful day.
DEBRA: Oh, good! Good, good, good. I drove through Cleveland once, but I’ve never spent any time there. But I have to! I see Cleveland on television sometimes, and I think, “That was like a nice place to live.”
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Yeah, it’s a beautiful area. We’re right on the Lake Shore. I can probably look out the window and see the lake right now. So it’s a great place to live. I’ve lived here my whole life, so I love it!
DEBRA: Well, tell us about Esperanza Threads. Tell us what you do just in a nutshell because we’ll talk about the details of it later. But just give us a general description and how it came to be.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Okay! Well, it’s a long story. We started in 2000. And an Ursuline sister by the name of Sister Mary Aileen Boyle began this process. She had connected with some people in New England who were making organic clothing, but their main focus was to help people become entrepreneurs—learn how to sew, learn how to manufacture, learn how to market clothing, healthy clothing, and make it into a home industry or even expand it.
And so, Sister took that idea and brought it to Cleveland and started Esperanza Threads. What we did is exactly what she said. We started little, having people, gathering people to be with us and to learn how to sew. We were doing a lot of sewing in people’s sewing rooms, in their homes, in basements, teaching people to sew and hopefully sending people on to become entrepreneurs.
Well, two things happened. The first was some of the husbands said, “You got to move this out of our house. We want our houses back.”
And so, we did just that. At the same time, the Vincentian Sisters of Charity offered a space on some property they owned in Bedford, Ohio which is a suburb of Cleveland. And we moved our business over there.
Sister also began to realize most of the people she was training were not entrepreneur-minded. They wanted to learn how to sew. They wanted to manufacture. They loved the idea of creating. But they also wanted to move on into businesses where they could get jobs.
And so, we kind of morphed our whole process into more of a training facility. And so we do two things here. We train people how to sew. And then we help them, along the way, to get jobs. We also help them to actually create and make clothing that we are selling which helps us to further our ministry and our mission of teaching about organics and why organic clothing is so important to our society—
Also, helping those people to get jobs who, otherwise, are lacking jobs many times because they don’t have skills, they’re out of work. We have a whole myriad of people we work with. We talk with charities that gives us people. They refer people to us.
They’re refugees. And we also have people who are from the neighborhood who are unemployed. Churches send us people. We have a couple of agencies that are working with the welfare-to-work programs to help us to get that moving forward. Really exciting!
DEBRA: Yeah, I am very excited about it. And after we come back from the break, we’re going to hear more about why it’s so important to wear organic clothing and why it’s so important that you’re teaching people to sew it.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Lucretia Bohnsack from Esperanza Threads. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Lucretia Bohnsack, executive director of Esperanza Threads. And before we go any further, I want to just tell you that you can go directly to their website at EsperanzaThreads.com where you’ll see their beautiful clothes. Oh, my God, are they beautiful. You know, when I went to the site, it’s just the kind of clothes that I wear. I just wanted to buy everything.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Well, I’m glad to hear that.
DEBRA: So, tell us why it’s important to wear organic clothes. Why is what you do important to your organization?
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Okay! One of the things that I don’t think people realize is how much—well, specifically, our main product is cotton fibers. We do use wool. We also use silk hemp. But our main product is cotton. And the amount of chemicals that are used to process a simple pound of raw cotton, the one pound of raw cotton, it’s going to take one-third pounds of chemical fertilizers. And that’s not counting the insecticides that are spayed on them and things such as that.
And in the processing, we add more chemicals because the raw cotton isn’t pure white. And of course, people like pure white.
And even for dying purposes, they need to get to a pure white color. Well, they’re using heavy metal dyes to dye these items.
And many of those chemicals are being washed into the soil. They’re being flushed into our sewer systems and things such as that.
All of that, first of all, it’s impacting our natural water and pure soil resources. But then we’re taking all those chemicals because it’s impossible to get them totally out of the fabrics. And we’re putting those against our bodies.
We know how many people have chemical reactions and people who don’t understand where their rashes coming from. “Why am I itchy?” And many times, it’s the very clothing we’re wearing that is causing us to have reactions.
DEBRA: I agree. And there are so many chemicals too that are used in finishes, things like formaldehyde-based resins that are used on permanent pressed cotton. It’s just a joy to go to your website and see all these things that are so hard to find.
I’m looking at a page right now that has organic cotton sweat clothes. You could get a hoodie. You could get drawstring sweatpants, [elastic] sweatpants. There are two kinds of sweat shirts. I mean you just can’t find these in stores. And even if you find them online, a lot of times, they’re mixed with a certain amount of synthetics or lycra or something to make it more stretchy.
I can’t tell you how many sites I go to where they come up as organic cotton in say a Google search. But then you go there, and it’s 87% organic cotton or whatever. I know that those people think that they’re doing by having it go in the right direction because they’re using a lot of organic cotton. But then they use these other synthetics which some people react badly to those synthetics or they are uncomfortable.
I just have to commend you for putting together a line of clothing that is so attractive and so pure. It’s very unusual. It’s very unusual.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Yeah, we try to keep our workshop isolated from any of those other kinds of chemicals and things, insofar as we’ve even asked our employees not to wear perfumes to work, so that none of those things are actually getting on to the fabrics—and it’s healthier for our employees as well, to be not exposed to all these different chemicals.
And that kind of flows into the environment we like to have here. It’s a peaceful environment. People are happy to work here.
We are hopefully fulfilling some of their needs and being responsive to their needs as well.
And part of what we also do—I am the executive director. Unfortunately, Sister had a heart attack about a year ago. And we realized at that point that she was way overextended. And so we took some of her roles away. I took on the business end of it.
But Sister still talks about fair trade.
We always think about fair trade coming from outside the country, but we are very firm here to make sure that our employees are being paid fairly, that they’re treated in a fair and kind manner. We also work at trying to educate people about all of these.
Sister Mary Aileen goes out on the weekends to churches and takes some of our products with them to share them with people and explain why is organic so important, why is fair trade so very, very important because nobody else is really talking about—and along with the product.
I think you hear it in the news. So what can I do about it? Well, we have a solution as far as purchasing things that are manufactured in the United States. The cotton we’re getting, most of it is from the United States.
Unfortunately, we’re running out of land that is pure. And that’s a very definite thing that, in order to get organic cotton, the soil has to be pure. And it takes an unbelievable amount of time for the chemicals to leave the soil.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. But it really does take people like you deciding that you’re going to do things in a certain way, offering products and educating the public and making a different choice available. We can educate and educate all we want. But if there aren’t then products that you can go buy that are actually doing these things, then it makes it a lot more difficult.
We’re going to talk more with Lucretia Bohnsack, executive director of Esperanza Threads after this break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. This is Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here talking with Lucretia Bohnsack, executive director of Esperanza Threads, an organic, sustainable fiber clothing manufacturer that provides comfort and fashion with social and environmental values. They’re in Cleveland, Ohio. And you can go visit their website at EsperanzaThreads.com.
Lucretia, during the break, I was just looking at your website more because I just love looking at the clothes. I know I’ve been saying that over and over again. But I’m just so thrilled!
You have clothes available for women and men and children and babies. And people with multiple chemical sensitivity can wear them. And you have them in all kinds of sizes, everything from extra small to extra, extra large. I know that it’s difficult for larger women to find organic clothing, especially in styles that would look good on them.
So, I think that, for many, many reasons, your website really is a find.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: The points that you just made about the sizing and how difficult it is for some people, because we are manufacturing individual piece here on site, many times, we’re able to adapt to people’s special sizing needs. And we pride ourselves in that, that someone can call us and we are willing to work with them to try to get the sizing right for them.
It’s difficult! It’s difficult for a woman or a gentleman to get something that’s comfortable, looks nice, is nice fabric, but in a size that normally is not off-the-rack in the stores.
DEBRA: Yes, it is.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: And our prices, we really work hard to try to keep our prices competitive because, obviously, when you go into a store—it’s very difficult for us because things that are coming out from sweatshops out of the country are being priced hundreds of times their value where we can’t do that. We try very hard. The fabric is expensive. We try to be very aware of what the fabrics are and try to keep the cost within people’s budget. I think that’s a hard thing to do because of that.
So, sometimes, when somebody says, “Whoa! This is a little expensive,” not really when you consider the cost of the fabrics and the cost compared to things that are—I keep referring to this as sweatshops because that’s where many of the things—even to the finest clothes we’re wearing are made in sweatshops. That’s why the fair trade aspect of our business is so important.
One of the things we’re doing right now, and can hopefully make things more readily available to you, we are looking at going into a bit more of a wholesale model where we will actually be placing our products in stores. So, people can go to a website in the future, and there will be a link there that will tell them to go to—I’m trying to think. Revel is one of our area stores. Go to Revel, and they will have our products there. You can purchase that right on-site as well because people like to touch and feel and know what the fabrics are like.
DEBRA: Oh, yeah, yeah.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: And that’s really an important thing.
And also, along with the good quality organic fabric, we’re also working at teaching people how to sew, giving people the opportunity to have a future and have a skill that they can take to a manufacturer. We’re working with many of the companies in Cleveland. We have some major manufacturing companies in Cleveland who are hiring our people and helping them to get those jobs and to go on for further training. So they’re able to get insurance. They’re able to get a job where they can help their family and provide for their family without assistance. And that’s a very important thing.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful, that you’re offering training for a job that exists in your community. And in the process of offering that training, you’re also producing a really excellent product that those trainees are making.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: I want to go back and just talk about pricing again for a minute because I think that people are, in general, looking for the lowest priced thing. They’re going to stores that sell cheap products, and they say, “Well, that’s all I can afford” or whatever.
And I understand that. I’m not a wealth person. I have to budget my money and figure out how I’m going to spend it.
But a long time ago, I realized that it was better—even if I only had one shirt. It was better to have one shirt that was organic and well-made and that the people were paid fairly. I was participating in a real economy that is based on what things really cost instead of an economy that’s just a throwaway economy. It’s cheap goods, and people aren’t being paid enough and all those things.
What you’re doing is you’re looking at “Here’s the real cost of a good piece of fabric and has environmental benefits to it. And the person who’s making it is getting a wage that they can actually live on.”
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: That’s correct.
DEBRA: That’s such a different model. And we, as consumers, need to stop saying, “Well, I don’t have very much money. I’m going to buy this cheap thing,” and instead say, “I’m just going to buy less and buy something that’s good quality” or say, “I’m going to make more money.” And usually, what I do is I say, “I’m going to make more money.”
It’s just people don’t know how to budget for things anymore. They buy things on credit cards and stuff. Btu the way to do it is that you figure out what is the amount of money that you need to live, you budget for things of good quality that you want to buy, and that’s what you buy.
And I don’t think that your products are excessively priced.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Oh, no.
DEBRA: I think that your products are—we’re talking about all these, the quality and fair trade and stuff. But I think that your products are extremely reasonably priced. It’s not like going and buying something at a discount place, but it’s not expensive.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Right! And we find, without naming name brands, we’re probably much lower than many of the prestigious name brands that we’re going to see.
One of the things we were talking about costs—I don’t know if you saw our linens that are online. We have a towel…
DEBRA: Actually, we need to take another break.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Okay, great.
DEBRA: We’ll come right back, and then we’ll talk about your linens.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m talking to Lucretia Bohnsack, executive director of Esperanza Threads. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with my guest, Lucretia Bohnsack, executive director of Esperanza Threads. And they make beautiful organic cotton clothing for men, women and children.
And Lucretia was just about to tell me about the linens before the break. So, go on with that.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Yes! One of the nicest things we have is energy-efficient towels and wash cloth. They’re a waffle weave fabric. They’re organic. We preshrink them. But what I love about them is, first of all, they’re a little bit rougher than a terry. And so they’re nice for exfoliating your skin. And also, the beauty of them, we call them energy-efficient because the waffle weave allows the water to leak off of them. So when I take my shower, and I hang my towel up, in a few minutes, it is dry. So we’re not getting that mildewy smell that so often you get.
And so I’m able to use my towels for several days without having to wash them (of course wasting a lot of water and soap or whatever I’m using to wash with). When I wash them, and I put them in my dryer, they’re going to dry even quicker. So we’re saving tons of energy that way, plus having a pure product next to our skin, especially when our skin is so vulnerable because it’s wet and the pores are open and everything. We have a pure product that we’re using on them.
And then, we actually do make bed linen on special request and for people that have some sensitivities. And most people rave about that. That’s not one of our bigger sellers. But when people do buy them, they love them.
DEBRA: Do you do custom work? If I wanted to send you some fabric, would you sew my fabric?
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: We would if it was organic. We do have an area that’s away from our main selling area that if somebody wanted something made that was non-organic, we would work with that away from everything else.
But if you had real organic fabric, we would definitely work with that and help you to get something that you would love to have and enjoy.
DEBRA: Because I know periodically people will write to me and ask me if I know anybody who can sew for people who are chemically sensitive. Particularly people with multiple chemical sensitivities have difficulty finding clothes. And I see on your website, you have a whole page devoted to talking about working with people with MCS.
And also, I just noticed that, on each product, it says sample swatches. So are those pictures or you’ll actually send physical swatches?
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Yes. And if someone were to call and ask us, we’d actually even send them samples of the fabric so that they could feel it and know what it’s like, what are we using, and find out if it’s something they would like.
Our t-shirts are a heavier fabric than you would normally get in most stores. So it’s a little bit different. It’s a little bit more luxurious to be honest.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Wow!
So, tell us more about some of the people who are actually sewing your clothes.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Okay! We have a number of different people from different areas. As I mentioned earlier, Catholic charities, migrant refugee services in Cleveland actually sends us people to work with. We’ve had people from Bhutan and Burma and Sudan, different areas in Africa. We’ve gotten a lot of people from the African nations who are refugees, and unfortunately, with some very sad tales to tell of abuse and things in those countries—Iran, a lot of the Hispanic areas, Cuba, Costa Rica.
We also work with an agency that happens to be about two blocks down from us that is actually—they’re called the Centers for Family & Children. And they work with the County Assistance Program. So they’re sending us trainees to work here to learn skills while they’re on assistance, so that when they get off the assistance, they have a skill to go and get jobs with. We also have many of the churches in the area sending us people.
We happen to be in a Hispanic neighborhood. So a lot of the people that are coming to us are Hispanic. They’re learning many skills because, many times, they don’t speak English. So we’re trying to work with them to emphasize the need to start learning English, beginning to speak English. So when they go out and apply for jobs, they’re more “marketable,” to use that word. So they’re able to get job.
A lot of people have never had jobs in the United States. And so we’re trying to teach them the culture. So to be a good employee, what do you need to do? Culturally, in many cases, we’re very different. Something as simple as, in many countries, lowering your eyes and looking at the floor when an authority is talking to you is a sign of respect. In our country, “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they looking me in the eye? What are they hiding?”, something as simple as that.
So, we’re teaching people how to work in an environment with multi-cultures. And we have some wonderful volunteers that come in and help us. I don’t know what we’d do without our volunteers. And so it really is making a difference for us to achieve what we want to achieve, training people.
We have people who are home seamstresses that volunteer. We have people that are retired professional seamstresses that come in and are sharing the skills that they learned for 30 or 40 years in the sewing industry. So it’s really a wonderful thing.
DEBRA: I want to ask you a question. And I think that probably some people are thinking this which is why I’m asking. I haven’t actually seen your clothing except see it in pictures, but I’m assuming that it looks professionally sewn when you receive a garment, that it’s professional quality.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Oh, definitely.
DEBRA: If I tried to sew something, it would like I was a home sew-er.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: No, we’re not teaching home sewing. We are actually teaching industrial sewing which is different than home sewing. And our head seamstress worked for years in the sewing industry throughout Ohio, throughout the Cleveland area. And as I said, we have women that are volunteering to teach people the skills.
Home sewing is very different. We always think of when our moms used to make us homemade—which is something not as professionally—it doesn’t have some of the little nuances that you need for the things to tuck down properly and things like that. But no, what we create—as I’ve said, we’re selling them professionally in stores right now. And so those people would not take something that look like it was something that the person who had one course in highschool is now sewing.
DEBRA: So what is your favorite item of clothing?
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Oh, I think probably my favorite is our t-shirts. They’re so soft and cuddly. They’re just comfortable.
When you put them on, and when you wash them, you’re going to get the same quality out of the shirt. It’s just a soft, luxurious kind of feel to it.
And we do them in all different styles, from camisoles to lady tees to high neck and short and long sleeves.
We also have a variety of imprints. We have a local transfer company that actually transfers on to our shirts. And we can even do shirts for a person. If somebody have a picture they just love—someone recently (around Christmas time) had all their grandchildren put on a shirt.
DEBRA: Oh, good idea.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: I mean, we use a different kind of dye process with those shirts. It’s really a direct print. So there’s no run-off. There’s no heavy metals. It’s a much more environmentally-friendly process.
DEBRA: One thing that I do want to mention about your products is the page with the jackets. I have had so much difficulty finding natural fiber jackets. I mean you might be able to get a linen jacket, but then it has this synthetic lining. And I really like jackets that are just loose and unlined. And you have some beautiful jackets.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Right!
DEBRA: And right now, they happen to be on sale.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: Yes, they are!
DEBRA: So, if anybody from XS to XXL needs a natural fiber jacket, I would suggest you hurry up and go over to EsperanzaThreads.com and look at their jackets. These are so difficult to find. The styles are so beautiful. I just think that anybody would enjoy wearing these.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: And a lot of those are our silk hemp jackets. So they’re soft and flowing. They’re very pretty.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, we’ve come to the end of our time. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you, Lucretia. You’re doing wonderful work. I so appreciate that you’ve been on with me today.
LUCRETIA BOHNSACK: And thank you so much for inviting us. We really appreciated it.
DEBRA: Thank you. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Affordable, Basic Platform Bed Frames
Question from Stacey
I am searching for affordable, basic platform bed frames for my organic mattresses. I came across one that is “formaldehyde free” but uses an “oil based polyurethane” which “takes a few weeks to outgas,” according to the website (Lifekind). Would you recommend these as safe, or recommend something else… Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
I don’t recommend oil-based polyurethane. Water-based polyurethane would be OK.
I would suggest that you find your local unfinished furniture store and see what they have to offer. Buy an unfinished frame and finish it yourself with a finish from Vermont Natural Coatings.
Bee’s Wrap
Bees Wrap is a wonderful alternative to plastic wrap…made of organic cotton muslin, beeswax, jojoba oil, and tree resin. “This combination of ingredients creates a malleable food wrap that can be used again and again. Simply mold the Bee’s Wrap to the top of your dish by using the warmth and pressure of your hands to create a seal. When the Bee’s Wrap cools (within seconds) it holds its seal. Use the same method to wrap cheese, vegetables, bread, and baked goods. It is not recommended for meat…The beeswax and jojoba oil have antibacterial qualities that help to keep your food fresh.” Comes in four sizes.
Toxicity of Fiberglass Drywall?
Question from Dewbra
We are building a closet and finishing our laundry room, side by side in our basement. I react to the paper on sheetrock/drywall and want to us the Fiberglass drywall as it is recommended for basements and damp areas. Do you have any info on how it would be for a SEVERE MCS sufferer. We have a dry basement only through use of dehumidifiers. Debra
Debra’s Answer
I have no experience with this product. Readers? Any comments?
How to Choose and Use Liquid Zeolite to Remove Toxic Chemicals From Your Body
My guest is Eddie Stone, Founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. I’ve been using and recommending Touchstone Essentials’ zeolite detox products and wholefood supplements since the company began in February 2012. Eddie created Touchstone Essentials with the vision that only real farm-fresh food offers real improvement in body, mind and personal well-being. On this show we’ll focus on their PureBody liquid zeolite product and talk in detail about why everybody needs to take zeolite, their two zeolite products, how their zeolite is different from others, and how you can get your zeolite and supplements FREE (I do!). We’ll also talk about how their wholefood supplements complement liquid zeolite to help your cells detox every day. debralynndadd.mytouchstoneessentials.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH EDDIE STONE
- The Amazing Benefits of Doing Daily Detox With Liquid Zeolite
- The Best, Easiest, Most Affordable Body Detox
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Choose & Use Liquid Zeolite to Remove Toxic Chemicals from Your Body
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Eddie Stone
Date of Broadcast: June 20, 2013
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. There are toxic chemicals all around us unfortunately in consumer products, in the environment, in the air we breathe and the food we eat. There’s a lot we can do about it so that we don’t have to be exposed to them or suffer the ill effects of those exposures if we are. We can remove toxic chemicals from our homes. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. And we can live a healthy, happy, productive life despite the dangers all around us. That’s what the show is about, is how to do that, the practical things that we can do every day.
And today, my guest is Eddie Stone. He’s the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. And Touchstone Essentials makes some wonderful products that help your body detox, and also take the nutrition that your body needs in order to be healthy in an easy and affordable way. Very effective products!
But before we talk about the products themselves, before I introduce Eddie, I just want to talk about traveling. Summer time is the time when everybody wants to travel. And I love to travel. I travel as much as I can. And I know our guests travels a lot.
Eddie travels a lot talking about the products all over the United States. And as far as I know, he’s a very healthy person. I’ve never heard of him being sick.
But the thing about travel is that you’re exposed to so many toxic chemicals that you aren’t exposed to at home. You might be able to find a toxic-free hotel room or an organic restaurant. But these are few and far between. And if you’re just traveling around staying in ordinary hotels, eating in ordinary restaurants, flying on airplanes, riding around in taxi cabs with deodorizers, you’re being exposed to toxic chemicals that you probably wouldn’t be exposed to when you’re at home.
And one of the things that you can do about this is to take Pure Body Liquid Zeolite which is actually the subject of our show today.
Eddie, thank you so much for being with us. Are you there?
EDDIE STONE: Yes, I am, Debra. And thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to everybody.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
I’ve had Eddie on as a guest before. So he’s told his story. But would you tell us again because I’m sure we have lots more listeners who haven’t heard you.
EDDIE STONE: Well, I guess I’m somewhat here by accident, although that accident is some 20 years ago. Fairly traditional background, just in business. But all of a sudden, for a variety of reasons—one being my mom’s personal health, and then my own health concerns—I became intrigued about food, where it came from, what it was grown with, fungicides, pesticides, the air that we breathe. I just had this realization.
Although it’s one of those things that didn’t happen over time. I guess I’m a little slow. Over time, I just began to appreciate where our food comes from, how it’s grown, the chemicals that are used, the chemical in the air that we breathe in our home, outside of the house.
All of these things have a great impact, not only the obvious, which is our vulnerability to degenerative diseases (which you talk about all the time on this show), but also the quality of life—how you feel when you get up in the morning, how you feel about yourself when you look at the mirror because these things affect your skin and how the skin looks and accelerate the aging process.
So, all of that conspired in the last 20 some years, meeting people like yourself. It caused me to not only pursue my interest personally and professionally as a health advocate, but I’m also an entrepreneur. And so, I see that there’s an opportunity for those that are willing to work hard and create solutions for people.
DEBRA: Yes. So, what you offer in Touchstone Essentials, tell us about the package or products that you offer. And then, we’ll talk specifically about the Pure Body Zeolite throughout the show today because it’s a very special product that does very special things. But tell us about the whole, big picture.
EDDIE STONE: And you mentioned travel which is probably the right place to start. By the way, on my drive in to work today, on the news was a tour guide in Singapore complaining to the radio interviewer that they weren’t able to do tours right now, they weren’t able really to make money because the pollution was so bad that nobody wanted to tour the city. I just had a friend return from Shanghai in China talking about how her family was so desperate to spend the summer away because of the pollution. And so it’s really a global issue that’s out there every day for us.
For me, what I realized is that the role that food plays in our life is really life or death. We don’t tend to think of it that way, but it’s really a life or death issue. When you break it down and look at it from a day to day basis, I think most people realize what they should be eating and what they shouldn’t be eating. If they’re eating something that was passed to them through a driveway window or that type of thing, I think they realize it’s just a fuel stop and not their primary choice.
And so, I see this gap or gulf that exist between where people are with their habits, what they wind up eating day in and day out, and where they want to be. They know all the answers. It’s just a question of access and quality and affordability.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I think that’s exactly right.
EDDIE STONE: Right! You experienced this yourself. If you travel, there’s nothing you can do about this.
DEBRA: Actually, I want to interrupt you for a minute because I want to tell you something out of my own experience about that moment of deciding that you have to eat better food and the difference between having made the decision and then being able to actually implement in your life.
I remember I really grew up on fast food and pizza and Jack in a Box and McDonald’s. Everything was out of a package and TV dinners. But I remember when I realized—I don’t remember the year. But I remember the moment when I realized that I needed to eat more fresh vegetables. It was as an adult.
I went to the supermarket. And the fresh fruits and vegetables looked so unappetizing. I bought some and they tasted so terrible that I didn’t want to eat them. I thought, “How could this be good for me?”
And here we are now, fast forward all these years later, and we have your wonderful supplements that I take every day. And the difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables that go into your supplements and the quality of food in the supermarket is night and day. It’s like not even the same food.
And so, I think that you’ve done a public service by making the foods that we should be eating available in these capsules. I often think of when I was a child and we started having astronauts going out into outer space. They were eating food capsules.
I thought, “People should be eating food, not capsules.” But I’ve changed my mind about that. I know that when I take my Touchstone Essentials supplements in the morning, and I get those vibrant foods that have only had the water and fiber removed from them, that I’m actually getting all these nutrition that I’m not getting from the foods that I buy in the store.
And that was just a huge thing for me, to go to the store and see, “Well, fruits and vegetables, what’s in these fruits and vegetables that tastes terrible and have pesticides all over them?” Well, I eat these, and it was amazing.
EDDIE STONE: Well, I think you’ve summed it up brilliantly just in terms of who we are. We basically recognize these challenges that you’re describing because they’re faced by all of us every day. And so what we’ve gone out and done is procure whole fruits and vegetables, pick them at their peak of nutrition. These are things that have grown with organic practices. We’ve used technology to process them with really no heat. And so we’ve provided to the consumer portable nutrition.
I don’t know of another way to say it. I know it doesn’t sound very fancy, but this is a chance for a person to bridge the gap.
DEBRA: But that’s what it is.
EDDIE STONE: That’s right, that’s right. It bridges that gap. That’s right. It bridges that gap between where they are and where they want to be every day with their health choices because it does matter, what you put in your body.
DEBRA: It absolutely does. And especially, I know when I travel—and of course you know this because I know you’re traveling all the time—it’s really hard. Often, it’s really hard to get good food to eat. And I’m going to just admit something—actually, we’re going to go to break, and then I’m going to admit something.
EDDIE STONE: Okay!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Eddie Stone who’s the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Eddie Stone, founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. And since I just had a Touchstone Essentials commercial on during the break, I want to mention that Eddie’s offering a discount for the summer starting now through August 31st. And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and it said in the commercial, look for the broccoli, and click there, it’ll take you to a page where it describes all the Touchstone Essentials product. But it also has a link to the gift certificate. So, this is a time where you can save as well as get some great supplements.
The thing that I wanted to admit before the break is that I hardly ever watch TV, but I do like watching two channel—the Food Channel and the Cooking Channel because I love to eat, I love food, and I learn things about different kinds of food and how to prepare them or how not to prepare them. And one show, I like to watch for fun, strictly for fun, is Guy Fieri going to diners, drive-ins and dives. I never eat in those kinds of restaurants, but he’s very entertaining to watch.
But the reason that I bring it up is because they show you how they prepare the food. And oh, my God, just watch this show some time and just see what they put in food in restaurants. There’s sugar in everything—white sugar in everything. A lot of what gets put in is packaged foods that are already processed foods.
So, if you think that you’re eating fresh foods in most restaurants, you aren’t. They’re cooked in microwaves and all these kinds of things.
So when you’re traveling, and you’re eating in restaurants, this is what you’re eating.
A couple of days ago, I went to a restaurant that was organic, raw and vegan. But you don’t find those very often, especially if you’re traveling.
And so, what you want to be able to do is get that nutrition in your body, especially when you’re traveling, especially when you’re under stress being away from home. Wouldn’t you agree?
EDDIE STONE: Absolutely! And one of the things people don’t realize as they’re shopping in a conventional grocery store, and they’re going to the butcher or the meat counter in that store, they look at that meat and it looks untouched or unprocessed. What they don’t realize is most of those meats have 20 to 40 different chemicals and preservatives that were injected, applied, utilized even after that meat was butchered—not including how it was conventionally grown.
So, it’s very difficult to eat clean.
DEBRA: Wow! Yes, it is very, very difficult. This is why it’s so important to me personally that I take these supplements because it is clean food, it is good nutrition. And so no matter what else I eat during the day or I don’t eat during the day, I’ve got the nutrients. I know when I take those capsules in the morning, I’ve got the nutrients. And it’s made a huge difference in my health, it really has.
So, now we’ve talked about the supplements, I want to spend the rest of the show actually talking about Pure Body. Pure Body Liquid Zeolite is a unique product in and of itself. There are other zeolite products on the market. But the way this one is prepared and the effectiveness is just so far above anything else that I’ve seen. It’s really amazing!
Before we actually talk about the product, Eddie, would you tell us why it’s important for people to take it? What’s going on in the world that they should take those?
EDDIE STONE: Well, let’s just think about all the things that you have been talking about and that I’ve been talking about here in the first part of this show. I just think it’s just an overwhelming amount of evidence that’s all around us just in terms of chemical exposure either through pollutants or household products in your home, automobiles, just living from the food supply.
There really shouldn’t be any denial by anybody—and I guess there’s a few people that’s got their head proverbially stuck in the sand. But we just live in a toxic world.
Just the title of your book and your show and everything that you do in your blood, it’s a toxic world, and we need to take a defensive posture. If you don’t, it’s going to cost you in terms of your health.
It’s hard to quantify it. I can’t say for the listener what does it cost in terms of longevity or quality of health, but we know it has an impact. It makes you more vulnerable to degenerative disease. It shortens your life. It makes you age faster. So you need to do something about it. And it needs to be a daily strategy almost like getting fresh servings of whole fruits and vegetables and supplements.
DEBRA: I agree, it does need to be a daily strategy because our bodies—
Well, first, I want to say that, a lot of times, people think that if they’re not having symptoms, that they’re not being affected. But that’s not true.
What happens with a lot of toxic chemicals is that they build up in your body. And when they get to a certain amount, then there’s a long-term effect. It’s very similar to smoking cigarettes. You could smoke cigarettes, and it takes 30 years to get cancer, or you could be cleaning your kitchen with toxic chemicals, and it takes 30 years to get cancer, or children are being born deformed.
If women who are not even pregnant are exposed to toxic chemicals, and then get pregnant—or the fathers also being exposed to toxic chemicals, then conception occurs—the toxic exposure of both parents are already affecting the child who is not even conceived of yet. And when that conception occurs, it sets up a lifetime of poor health if the parents are exposed to these toxic chemicals.
So there’s all kinds of reasons why we need to be concerned about this. And what ends up happening generally is that when people actually start taking the steps that they need to take to reduce the toxic chemical exposure and remove toxic chemicals from their bodies, then they start experiencing a change in their health and well-being which is really astonishing.
And we’re going to talk about that more after the break which is going to happen in about 10 seconds. I’m a little early.
EDDIE STONE: Thanks, Debra.
DEBRA: Five, four, three, two, one…
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here today with Eddie Stone, founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. And Eddie makes fabulous whole food, organic nutrition and zeolite products that remove toxic chemicals from your body.
Okay! Eddie, let’s just start with the zeolite itself. Why zeolite? Why does it remove toxic chemicals?
EDDIE STONE: Zeolite, it’s an actual mineral. The mineral comes from an environment where a lava collides with lakes or salt water. We know a lot about them. They’ve been around a long time. Any time you have clay soil, it usually has a content of zeolite. There are multiple kinds of zeolites.
But the type of zeolite we use, it’s called clinoptilolite. It’s a sheet-like zeolite. And we know a great deal about it which is important. In fact, it actually enjoys a GRAS status—which is generally recognized—safe category from the FDA. And so the consumer can consume it with confidence.
And in fact, there’s history of it being used by the Romans, the Chinese some 5000 years ago to stop dysentery. Now, they didn’t necessarily know scientifically what they were using. They just knew that if they added clay to their diet, their dysentery would go away partly because if you look at it under a microscope, it has a sponge-like quality. And it looks almost like Swiss cheese. And inside of these little tunnels or channels or little holes that you think of in a sponge or Swiss cheese, these natural mineral maintains a negative charge which means it has a perfect natural affinity for positively charged heavy metals, voltaorganics, cadmium, lead, mercury, things like these, things you don’t want in your body, things that in quantity in your body are detrimental to your health and can even lead to death. It has this natural affinity.
And here’s what’s great about it. Unlike something like an herbal cleanse which can dislodge something from the tissue, in this case, it’s almost like the north end and the south end of a magnet when the zeolite comes in contact with the pollution. They snap together like the north end and south end of a magnet would. And once they’re connected, it won’t released it. So now, it’s sequestered, for lack of a better word, until it discharges out of your body assuming normal renal function in about a four to six hour period of time. So it’s a brilliant answer to these complicated modern issues that’s found in nature.
But as we find it in nature, as we mine it in nature, it is not prepared or going to be effective in the body. There’s zeolites that are sold all over the globe. And I think most of us are pretty leery on a lot of these things that we see. There’s a lot of over-promising and under-delivering that consumers have to navigate through or fight through. What’s important with the zeolite is that the consumer know has it been processed and do they know those end results.
So, for example, on our website, we publish freely lab results, third-party lab results, to show what it looked like before and what it looks like after. We’ve got to clean it. Think about wiping your counter off in your kitchen and using the same sponge over and over. Eventually, all you’re doing is moving the dirty around. I’ve got a 17-year old son, so I know about watching that activity. They’ll just move that dirt around instead of rinsing that sponge off.
But he’d go over to the sink, and he’d clean that sponge off, and you wring it out, now you go back to the counter, and it’s much more effective at picking up whatever you’re trying to clean.
It’s the same thing with the zeolite. So it’s important that it’s clean.
But here’s one more component, Debra, not just that it’s clean, that we mill it to a size that’s preferred in the body. You might think of it simply just being too large to be effective. And in this case, it’s all about surface area. The more you create, the better off that you are. And as we get down to the smaller sizes, we exponentially increase surface area.
So, most of what consumers see out there are anywhere from two microns to four microns in size. You need it to be at least 0.3 microns in size because you can have that really in a substantive way get into soft tissue and the bloodstream. Otherwise, it’s going to take a cup of powdered zeolite—and most do not want to deal with that on a daily basis—to even be remotely effective. You’d just like to deal with a few simple drops, not a disruption to your day.
And so, we clean it. We put that out there. We verify it with third-party labs. We mill it to a fine point, a strategic point.
And then, I don’t know if there’s going to be time here after the break, we also offer it in an exceptional version, an advanced version where we actually get down to nano-sized particles that fit inside water clusters (and hopefully, we’ll have a chance to speak about that).
But it’s important that it be clean, it’s important that it be small to increase surface area so that it can be effective, and the good dollars that you’re spending on the program actually are efficacious and work for you as a consumer.
DEBRA: Well, let’s wait until after the break to talk about the super extra strength ones. There’ll be plenty of time for you to do that. But we still do have a couple of minutes. And I just want to comment that one of the things that I like so much about this product is that it really focuses on removing the heavy metals and chemicals from your body.
People hear this word, “cleanse,” all the time or “detox,” but there’s all kinds of different ways to do that. And if you do like an herbal cleanse or something, as you were talking about before, it can release some of these things. But the different cleanses are designed to do different things. And this is very much very chemical- and heavy metal-oriented.
So, what if you want to do is remove toxic chemicals and metals from your body, then taking liquid zeolite is perfect. And taking this one [unclear 23:47] that I know of because of all the reasons that Eddie has already said.
So, don’t think that if you’re doing a cleanse of any kind that you’re removing toxic chemicals. This is very, very specific.
And another point about this that I think is very important is that this is just going into your body. The zeolite is just going into your body, it’s going around in different parts of your body, and it’s picking up, like a magnet, the toxic chemicals and removing them. So they come out of your body in four to six hours.
The rest of your body could be not functional at all, as long as you have normal kidney function, and that this can go through that system, your body can remove toxic chemicals. And it doesn’t matter how sick your body is. Even if your liver isn’t functioning, you can still remove toxic chemicals.
And there have been some amazing stories about this. It’s pretty amazing how this works so well. And you don’t even have to be well or drink horrible-tasting stuff or anything. Just take these drops, you drink sufficient water, and it happens. You’re just removing toxic chemicals.
So, we are going to be back in a few minutes about the extra strength Pure Body and how special it is. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
This has been Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re talking with Eddie Stone, the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. And if you want to learn more about these products, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the magnet.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here today with my guest, Eddie Stone, who’s the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. We’re talking about his very pure, whole food nutritional supplements and Pure Body Liquid Zeolite that removes toxic chemicals from your body.
Eddie, I want to make sure that we get this point across, that Pure Body will remove toxic chemicals and heavy metals that are in your body that you’ve just been exposed to, but it also removes what is called body burden, the accumulation of toxic substances in your body.
And some things like heavy metals are especially difficult for your body to process. And unless you do something, like take Pure Body, your body is just going to hold on to these things until they—well, it’ll hold on to them for the rest of your life until you get some illness that’s caused by accumulated toxic chemicals and you die.
That’s just the fact. That’s just the fact of living in today’s world. There’s nobody who is exempt from this. It’s an epidemic of toxic exposure that cuts across all classes. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or where you live, you’re going to be exposed to toxic chemicals.
And every single person needs to do something about it. And if they don’t, they’ll just get sick, period.
EDDIE STONE: Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. What’s at work here and what you’re describing, part of it is the body’s defensive system, or even let’s call it its brilliance. So when your body is exposed to heavy metals, environmental pollutants—I mean think of mercury, innocuous. You think you’re getting amalgam filling when you’re a child from your dentist, no big deal.
The offgassing from that will—
You know, mercury is an example of something that your body does not recognize, doesn’t know how to use. And so your immune system immediately sees something like that. And all it wants to do is to deal with it so that it can’t continue to cause inflammation and harm in the body. And so it sequesters it.
And it generally sequesters things like mercury or other heavy metals or voltaorganics into fat cells. It’s one of the easiest places for the body’s defensive systems to stuff stuff away. You see people that struggle to lose weight. Very often, there’s a toxicity issue involved because the body is just being defensive.
And so if you don’t do something about it, this body burden that you’re talking about builds up over time. And everybody, they’re all caught up in “Well, if there’s no acute issues, I don’t have to worry about it.” Hey, we don’t know. Your doctor doesn’t know where that tipping point is where, all of a sudden, these things create a calamitous type of event at some point in life.
And maybe it’s not in fat directly that the toxicity caused the problem. It’s the accumulation of the fat or other things that resulted in trying to deal with the toxicity.
DEBRA: Yes, exactly.
EDDIE STONE: Yeah, it’s one of the dog chasing the tail type of issues.
That’s why our Pure Body Extra Strength is critical in this regard because we mill it to a size that’s small enough. If people can visualize this, we can use proprietary frequencies, sound waves, to put it inside water clusters. Most people don’t realize that water is made up of a series of clusters. A single cluster of water can exist. It’s got to be in a grouping. We stretch those and use those soundwaves in a stretching process by bombarding the purified water to flip those or put those nano-sized milled zeolite particles inside that water. When you let go of the soundwaves, it’s basically trapped in there. Now, when you consume it, basically, any way that water goes in your body—which is everywhere—now you’ve got a chance to detoxify everywhere which is really not something that we’ve seen before.
It is brilliant in its application. It’s just a utilization of what we find in nature. And the results that people have seen have just been staggering.
So we are very proud to be able to offer this. I’ve seen people talk about these things before. No one has ever gone out there and used third-party verification for what we’re doing. And we truly think that this is one of those products that has a unique place in a day-to-day habits that people have in terms of thinking about their health today, tomorrow, their longevity, quality of health. It’s just a great tool.
DEBRA: Well, I came to Raleigh and visited your headquarters in April to attend a conference. And I heard people talking about cellular health which is a big topic today in the health world. And literally, everything that happens in our body happens in our cells. And the toxic chemicals, the pollutants that we’re being exposed to get into our cells.
And as far as I know, Pure Body Extra Strength is the only thing that will actually go in the cell and remove the toxic chemicals so that you have clean cells. And I think that that is pretty amazing. Did I get that right?
EDDIE STONE: You got that exactly right. It’s a complement to all of these other things we’re doing. It just takes it to its logical conclusion that you talk about on your book and on this show about being conscious of the toxicity in your environment, in your house, where you live, in your food supply. This is just a logical extension of that effort, to take it down to that cellular level which is truly where health is found.
So, our philosophy in our company is cellular health. We want to detoxify the cell. We want to put the good nutrients back in.
We’re very proud of the complementary farmers and people that we work with and people like yourself that are willing to go out there and help share this story.
I said earlier in the call, and I say it all the time if you’ve spent time with me. We’re talking about life or death issues. And it’s pretty exciting to be able to do so.
DEBRA: I think it’s exciting too.
I was talking to a doctor the other day who said to me, “Let’s do this”—and it wasn’t detox because I already am detoxing, but he suggested that I do something. And he said, “Let’s just do this, and then be able to see what’s left after you’ve handled that,” what then needs to be handled. And I thought that that was such a good way to look at things because it totally applies to toxic chemicals.
There’s just amazing numbers of health problems that people have that healthcare cost are sky high now. And people are sick in ways that we never used to see at younger and younger ages.
And my viewpoint is—and I think yours is as well—why not just take the toxic chemicals out of your body and then see how you feel.
I mean, for me, I would suggest—well, I’m not a doctor, and so I probably shouldn’t say this. But I’ll say it this way. Any treatment that you went to for any kind of health problem would be better if you were to first remove the toxic chemicals for your body. And you may find that if you remove the toxic chemicals from your body, you may not need a lot of other health treatments because the toxic chemicals may be causing more problems than you think.
And even if your doctor is unaware of these things—this is something that anyone could do. A lot of doctors who know about liquid zeolite are just putting all their patients on it because why go through expensive, long-term health problems if they can just be handled by removing the toxic chemicals in your body?
And I’ve seen it happen over and over and over. When people remove toxic chemicals from their body, amazing things happen.
And we’re not talking about thousands of dollars here. You can buy a bottle of just the regular Pure Body for as long as $25 a month and just get started with that. Everybody in your family can be on it. It’s an affordable thing.
We only have a couple of minutes left, but I do want to say—what should I say? Okay, here. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, click on the broccoli or click on the magnet, it’ll take you to a page where I have a lot more information about the two kinds of Pure Body, the regular and extra strength. There’s a link there for the discount gift certificate you can get between now and August 31st. You can get a significant discount when you become a member and buy these products.
Also, I want to just toss in that you can also solve these products and help other people and make money at the same time. In fact, you only need to have three other people take what you’re taking in order to get your products for free.
I don’t pay for my products. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually paid for my Touchstone products because other people are buying them through me. And the commissions that I get pay for my products. That can happen for you too.
So it’s something that everybody should be doing. It’s something everybody can do. And Eddie, if you have anything else you’d like to say, as I’m sure you do, I can give you another minute.
EDDIE STONE: Well, I’ll just say this.
DEBRA: Oh, 20 seconds!
EDDIE STONE: Okay, really quickly, what happens if you don’t change the air filters in your home? In 90 days, they’re dirty.
You’re breathing that very same air every day, yet you don’t get the chance to pull your lungs out and change them. Every 90 days, your body has to process all of that gunk. What do you do then to aid the body in processing all of that? And that’s just one simple example.
DEBRA: Yes, yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Eddie, for being on with us.
EDDIE STONE: Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: And thank you so much for coming up with these products. They changed my life. And I think that they’ll change the world […]
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Honey, Health, and Honeybees
My guest is Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw, a leading brand of raw varietal honeys. Zeke gained an appreciation for both home-grown produce and for the rich heritage of artisanal food production on his family’s farm in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Zeke turned this passion into a full-time pursuit of the culinary arts at the University of Montana’s School of Food Management & Culinary Arts in 1989. After earning his degree, he relocated to France to continue his education at the Hotel School of Grenoble and began working under the direction of acclaimed chef, Alain Ducasse. In 1995, following two years in France working with, and learning from, accomplished international chefs, Zeke moved back to the United States where he became a buyer for Dean & Deluca in New York City. Always in pursuit of fine edibles for the upscale food, wine and kitchenware retailer, Zeke discovered the company that has become Bee Raw Honey. Today, Zeke partners with family owned beekeepers around the country to bring high-quality, raw, unadulterated honey to the American table. Zeke also actively promotes the importance of American family-owned apiaries and works to educate the public about the importance of beekeeping and its value in agriculture, so we’ll be talking about toxic pesticides affecting the bees, colony collapse disorder, toxic chemicals you shouldn’t be using in your garden, how to help save the bees, and the process of making and benefits of raw honey as well as ways to enjoy honey. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/bee-raw
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Honey, Health & Honeybees
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Zeke Freeman
Date of Broadcast: June 19, 2013
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 even though there are toxic chemicals around us in consumer products and in the environment. Sometimes, it seems like every time we listen to the radio, or read the newspaper, or watch TV, they’re talking about yet another toxic chemical that is dangerous to our health. But there are many things we can do to protect our health and the environment from toxic chemical exposures. We can remove them from our homes, remove them from our bodies, and in general, do things that support our own health instead of having our health be damaged by toxic chemicals.
Today is Wednesday, June 19th 2013. Yesterday was my birthday. So today is the first day of the next year of my life. And I’m looking forward to having a great year.
Today, my guest is Zeke Freeman. He’s the CEO of Bee Raw, a company that sells varietal honeys—raw varietal honeys, I should say. And they also have a great interest in saving the bees. And you probably heard that our honeybees are—actually, all bees are in danger of extinction. We’re going to talk about that today and what you can do.
But first, I want to tell you that this is actually National Pollinator Week according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. So this is an appropriate thing for us to be talking about.
And what I didn’t know is that not only do bees colonate, but also birds, butterflies, beetles. And that’s our pollinators.
There’s this very interesting website put together by the US Fish and Wildlife Service called Pollinators. It’s at FWS.gov/pollinators. And it shows all the different kinds of animals that pollinates and how we can help them.
Today, we’re going to talk specifically about the bees.
So, welcome, Zeke. Thanks for being with me.
ZEKE FREEMAN: Thanks so much. And happy birthday.
DEBRA: Thank you. I had a great birthday. I went out and I had a raw, organic vegan lunch which was fabulous! I’m not a vegan, but I can tell that my body is, as time goes by, and I eat more raw vegetables, it actually wants more raw vegetables.
I wouldn’t even say that I’m in transition. I noticed that at different times in my life, my body needs different types of food. And right now, what my body wants to eat is raw vegetables. I had a wonderful experience yesterday with that.
ZEKE FREEMAN: That’s fantastic! I’m very much the same. I grew up a corn and potatoes and meat eater. As I’ve grown and learned and eat more, the more vegetables I want in my plate and the less of the others.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly how I am too, yeah.
ZEKE FREEMAN: It makes me feel better, it really does.
DEBRA: It does for me too. And I’m a person who grew up on a lot of fast food and a lot of sugar. I used to eat sugar in every meal and in between. I used to eat like only chocolate cake for dinner, but that is not the case anymore.
ZEKE FREEMAN: You should not be embarrassed about that.
DEBRA: I have been known to eat a whole gallon of ice cream and a whole coconut cream pie. Not anymore!
ZEKE FREEMAN: We may have been separated at birth then because my wife knows just not to buy ice cream because if it’s in the freezer, then I eat it. And that’s just the way it goes.
DEBRA: Yes!
ZEKE FREEMAN: She tried getting mad at me for years. And now, she’s just given up. There’s no hope for keeping sweets in my house because I will eat them.
DEBRA: Yes. Tell us how you got interested in doing what you do, to be selling raw varietal honeys.
ZEKE FREEMAN: I’m very fortunate that I grew up on my family farm in Pennsylvania—spending summers there anyway. And we’re exposed forever to great vegetables and our own meat and our own corn. So I really started my life with great food in my life.
And when I went to college, I decided I wanted to go to culinary school and cook. And after that, I worked around France with a number of famous chefs, as well as in New York.
And when I decided to leave cooking, I knew I wanted to be completely involved in food still. And I worked for Dylan DeLuca for quite a period of time. And while I have been in DeLuca, my job was to buy packaged foods from around the world. And I was in charge of olive oil and vinegar and pea and coffee and everything else that’s in a jar, can or a box. And one of the things that fell under my purview fortunately was honey.
Very much like olive oil and vinegar, there are many different types of honey. And that’s one of the things. When you work in a very high-end retailer whose focus is on the individual providence of a product, you start getting really geeky about it. You start really getting into the individual nuances of where the coffee was grown or how it was processed. And the same was true with honey.
And what I found is we were importing all of these great honeys from around the world—chestnut honey from Italy and lavender honey from France and manuka honey from New Zealand. But we really didn’t have a focus on American honey. We had this one local guy. And he had wildflower honey. And that was it! That’s all we really had for American honey.
And maybe we had another one from California. So maybe we had two or three varietals from the US.
And I went, “There’s got to be all these varietals. For as many flowers as there are, there has to be all these American honeys.”
And that was the beginning of my interest in honey. And 10 years later, here we are.
DEBRA: That’s great! I’m so glad that you “brought it home” so to speak because America does have a lot of great resources, and we should be eating—as you probably agree—as close to home as possible.
I want to ask you a question because I don’t know the answer to this. I noticed on your website that you have a big focus on raw. And I want you to explain later to us, after the break, what that means.
But my most immediate question is it doesn’t say that your honeys are organic. And it’s been my impression for a long time—I haven’t really paid attention. And this is not a criticism, just a question. I have always assumed that whether honey was labeled organic or not, but I was that particularly concerned about pesticides. If there were pesticides, then it would probably kill the bills, and they wouldn’t be coming back to make honey.
So, could you just comment on that, so that people can understand and I can understand? Is there such thing as organic honey? What would that constitute? Should we be concerned about pesticides in honey.
ZEKE FREEMAN: So, organic, as you know just in general, is a fairly convoluted and touchy subject. In some places, it means a whole lot. And in some places, it doesn’t mean so much. When we’re talking about organic dish soaps, how much does that really mean to you?
But in a lot of places—and it has to do with your vegetables and your fruits—it really means something important. There’s no question about the toxic load that you’re consuming into your body.
The problem with honey, generally speaking, is that there are very few places in the world where there is enough land mass that we can get a guarantee that bees won’t pollinate somewhere where pesticides are being used. And this will apply up to three miles in any direction to collect pollen and nectar.
DEBRA: Wait! I’m going to just interrupt you right there because we have to go to the break. It sounds like you have a lot more to say which is great. So let’s just take a break there.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with Zeke Freeman from Bee Raw. And we’re talking about bees, honeys and what you can do to help the bees and eat healthy sweets.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw, a leading brand for raw varietal honeys.
So, Zeke, before the break, you were telling us about organic. Go on with that please.
ZEKE FREEMAN: Sure! Bees fly in three miles in any direction to collect nectar and pollen to make honey. And the problem is that there are very few places in the world where bees can fly and do that without running into some sort of pesticide. And the USDA or the USDA organic honey won’t certify anything in the United States as of this point
So there’s a little bit of Canadian organic honey. And there is some organic honey from South America, but very little. And so that’s the reason why we don’t have any certified organic honey (because all of our honey is from the continental US).
That being said, what we do is we work with beekeepers who place their bee either on wild […] flowers, tracks the flowers that are completely wild (which is wild sage or wild raspberries). And we also work—when we have a varietal bit of a crop that is agriculturally grown, we try to work with beekeepers who place the bees on organic [unclear 11:44] such as organic orange blossoms.
So, that’s what we do to try to keep the pesticides low down as much as possible. And we expose the bees to insecticides as little as possible.
DEBRA: That’s great. So, I know from past experience in other fields having to do with organic that, just because it doesn’t say organic, doesn’t mean that it has pesticides on it or that there’s a lot of pesticides in it. I know that when I moved in California, and I was talking to California wine makers, some of them were making organic wine, and still they were not certified organic because they couldn’t afford the certification process or whatever it was, and that there were actually reasons why some farmers didn’t want to be certified which is a whole different story. But that didn’t mean that the wine wasn’t organic.
So, would you agree that with honey, we really don’t need to be concerned about excessive exposure to pesticides, especially if it’s a honey like your honey where care is taken to isolate where the bees are flying and putting them in particular places? I personally have never been concerned about that.
ZEKE FREEMAN: Yeah, I think that you hit it right on the nose there. You want to be buying your honey from a reputable source, whether it’s a beekeeper at your local farmer’s market, whether it’s a company like ours who really focuses on the beekeeper and working with small family apiaries whose interest is to make honey as opposed to some of the plastic honey bear producers who are producing mass quantity honey. You might have more of a concern there honestly. There’s just less care in the process of making honey.
And so I would say that that’s an important distinction to make. Look for someone who is a reputable producer.
DEBRA: Would you talk about the difference between raw and what you’re going to find in the honey bear and how, typically, honey is processed if you’re not looking for specifically raw honey?
ZEKE FREEMAN: Sure! The fact that honey that is not raw exists is really a shame because there’s really no reason to put honey through any sort of processing. The reasoning for putting honey through any processing is simply a matter of large producers believe that the consumer want that clear, liquid, amber color that you find in the honey bear. And the only thing that processing does is strips all of the good beneficial stuff out of the honey.
They heat it up to a high temperature which kills all the good stuff. and they microfilter it which pulls out the pollen and everything that tastes good. And then they blend it, a darker honey with a lighter honey to get that clear, amber color.
And in the meantime, they’re stripping out everything that’s good about the honey—the flavor, the health benefits—and then, giving us a product that we don’t really need. It’s really a shame that the processing happens at all.
So, raw honey is such a simple thing. It has so many good health benefits. It’s such a great sweeteners because it’s low on the scale of how it affects your body. It’s just silly that raw honey is processed at all.
DEBRA: Well, I agree with you. And I think that this gets back to—I talk a lot on the show about industrialization and how there’s an industrial mindset that says everything has to be the same. And in nature, everything is different.
And so, I think it’s so great that you are focusing on the varietal honeys because then we get to have these different nuances and flavors that we could put in the dishes that we’re eating every day.
And I personally have at least half a dozen different flavors of honey. I buy a lot of my honey at—I actually bought your honey at the natural food store. And I buy a lot of honey at farmer’s markets. And so they tell me, “Oh, here, our hives are in this location,” ten miles from my house. I really enjoy that. And I enjoy having different flavors.
You talk on your website about pairing different flavors of honey. We can talk about that later too. But I just think that honey is such an interesting sweetener. It’s a shame to take away those differences. And then they get all the same flavor in the honey bear.
So, after the break, we’re going to talk about what’s going on with the bees, what is the problem and what we can do to help the honey bees survive.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw. that’s BeeRaw.com. We’ll come back and talk more about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw. And his website is BeeRaw.com. My website is ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com where you can go and learn about upcoming guests. And you can also listen to this and other past shows in the archives. So they’re there for you anywhere in the world 24/7. Just listen, listen, listen as much as you’d like,
So Zeke, now I’d like you to talk to us about what’s going on with the honey bee crisis—or I guess it’s all the bees—the colony collapse disorder. And what can we do to help save the bees.
ZEKE FREEMAN: Well, I’m just going to go ahead and plug what we’re doing right now. And hopefully, it will help your listeners get a very quick understanding of what they can do.
We just launched the Bee Raw Save the Bees Fund. People can find out more about it at BeeRaw.com/SavetheBees. And there are some very simple things that the listeners can do.
One, if they’re so inclined and want to keep it simple, they can donate to the Save the Bees Fund. And we, in turn, work with institutions like Viserys Institute which works for researching and protecting invertebrates, specifically honey bees.
They can sign our Pesticide-Free Pledge to pledge to not use pesticides and insecticides in their yard, and hopefully work with their municipalities to do the same in parks and so on and so forth.
And then, we’re also offering bee-friendly seeds, which we are selling. And the proceeds from those seed sales go to the Save the Bees Funds.
And planting flowers, both perennials and annuals, as well as flowering trees and shrubs, are one of the easiest things we can do all over the country to really help save the bees.
One of the problems with both urban and agricultural [sprawl] is that there are less and less places where bees have good, healthy storage. And nutrition is one of the cornerstones of colony collapse disorders in addition to pesticides and things like the [unclear 20:40]. We can talk about those things as well.
But we’re really trying to offer a very simple way for consumers to get answers and help in the solution by launching the Save the Bees Fund.
DEBRA: I really appreciate that you’re doing this because I like that you are, as a company, taking responsibility for the bees that are providing the product that you saw as well as selling a product. It really shows the consumer the whole cycle and connects the consumer to nature and responsibility for making sure that we continue to have the source of honey.
I just think that’s an admirable thing for you to do as a business. And I totally support and agree with what you’re doing.
I know that one of the things that I often think about and talk about is the loss of habit. And I happen to live in a place which is suburbia (I live in Florida). It’s suburbia, but I have a little piece of land. It’s a very small amount of land. I think it’s only a quarter acre. And it has a house on it. But I have a backyard, and I have a front yard. And I’m always thinking about how I can be making habitat as well as doing things like growing foods that I can eat. And I have a lot of birds and butterflies and bees in my yard.
I know that something that everybody can do that is listening is just go online and type in something like—what we do have them type in is “bee-friendly flowers” or something…
ZEKE FREEMAN: Absolutely!
DEBRA: And you can find the names of the plants that grow in your area that the bees want—in your area. Just plant the plants or toss the seeds on the ground and give your local bees a chance. Just anything that you can do to help in your backyard, or if you live in a high rise, in your community helping their bee […] This is all part of our responsibility as human beings.
So, tell us more specifically about the pesticides that are contributing to the plight of the bees.
ZEKE FREEMAN: Oh, I’d love to. So, we all know that agriculture uses pesticides and have for a very long time, since the industrial revolution—well, probably more specifically, since post-World War II. Many of the pesticides, in fact, were invented originally to be used in chemical warfare in World War II. And then, post-war, there wasn’t a use for them, right? And so they found other uses for them. And they began using them for pesticides.
So that’s kind of a scary thing if you think about just in our food supply before we even start talking about bees.
DEBRA: Yeah!
ZEKE FREEMAN: That’s where things have been since World War II. Industrialized agriculture has grown and grown. So that’s pretty scary.
In the past, 10 years or so, there have been some pesticides released by the large agricultural companies. And those are called neonicotinoids are based on nicotine. And they affect the nervous system of the insect.
The whole idea with the neonicotinoids is they were supposed to be more human-friendly because the half life of nicotine is much shorter prior pesticides and insecticides. And nicotine is not particularly bad for the human body.
Unfortunately, neonicotinoids, they’re actually putting them in the seed. So they’re becoming improving endemic. So, over time, while bees may not be effective the first time, they go to a crop that has a neonicotinoid in it. Over time, they actually build up this road of the chemical in their colony, in their honey. And there were times it actually completely destroyed the colony.
So they’re extremely dangerous. And that’s definitely another one of the cornerstones of why people are having such a hard time today.
DEBRA: Yeah! And what we can do just to make it simple is we should be using organic gardening methods and not use pesticides of any kind in our gardens at all.
Okay! So, we need to take another break. But after the break, we’re going to talk about something delicious, how we can use honey in various ways, particularly raw honey and keeping its raw characteristics.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw talking about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Zeke Freeman, CEO of Bee Raw.
His website is BeeRaw.com. And we’ve been talking about how we can save the honey bees and how to choose good honey.
And now, let’s talk, Zeke, about what to do with your varietal honeys—or I guess varietal honeys or any combination honeys.
One of the things that I have recently had my attention on a lot earlier—and I mean earlier in life—I thought when I used to eat honey out of the honey bear, I just thought of honey as being honey. And so when I started being interested in natural sweeteners, I just thought, “Well, let’s make honey cake. And let’s make honey cookies.”
And I think there’s nothing wrong with that because people who are transitioning out of eating sugar only eat things that they’re familiar with.
But once I started understanding about raw honey, what I wanted to do is make desserts or other dishes that would preserve the health qualities, as you talked about earlier, of raw honey. And if you’re buying raw honey instead of heated honey, to cook it in something (bake it in a cookie or something) kind of defeats the purpose of it being raw.
And I know you have a lot of recipes on your site that have to do with cooking honey. But I also know, because I’ve looked at your site, that you do talk about preserving the rawness of the honey. I was reading a recipe about making iced tea. And you talked about making a simple syrup of the honey by combing it with warm water, not hot water (as you usually would making a simple syrup). So I appreciate…
ZEKE FREEMAN: That’s right. This is my favorite part of the conversation to have.
DEBRA: Mine too!
ZEKE FREEMAN: As a chef and a honey lover, I’d much rather be talking about this than talking about saving the bees. So I’m very excited to talk about this.
So, we like to cook with honey a lot because the individual characters of honey can be brought out in so many different ways.
We also try to cook with honey and offer ways to cook with honey that you grade the honey as little as possible. So we try to play a balancing act there.
One, people often don’t know where to go with honey past toast […] So we want to give them as many opportunities to use honey as possible because it’s a great replacement sweeteners no matter what because of its low glycemic index.
So, when you do a simple thing like glazed carrot which is a fantastic spring dish—some grazed carrots and pearl onion—and you replace what traditionally was sugar with a little bit of honey, the profile in terms of the sweetness and the glaze all remain the same. And you get a slightly different characteristic change. And it’s healthy for you.
DEBRA: It is! And I do want to say and I really want to stress this point. It’s not a black-and-white issue. It’s more of gradients.
If you’re putting sugar on your glazed carrots, and then you put honey on instead, that’s so much better than using sugar. But it’s not preserving the raw qualities of the honey.
I suppose you could cook your onions and carrots, and then put the honey on at the end, so that it would just warm up the honey and not cut everything out of it.
ZEKE FREEMAN: You just sprinkle it, you just drizzle it in the end with the liquids that are there, and it will glaze very quickly.
DEBRA: Yeah, that would be the way to do it.
ZEKE FREEMAN: And then, the other side of that coin is the negative effects that sugar has on the environment.
DEBRA: Oh, tremendously!
ZEKE FREEMAN: There’s that whole other side of the argument that we’re not even getting into.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
ZEKE FREEMAN: So, replacing sugar with honey is beneficial both for the environment as well as your body.
DEBRA: And the point that I was wanting to make was that even if you did make some of these delicious recipes like honey pecan pie where it’s going to be cooking the honey at 350°, it’s still so much better than eating sugar. It’s not as healthful as eating the raw honey because you don’t have all the benefits of the raw honey because it’s now cooked. But still, it’s so much better than eating sugar. I’d much rather have you eat a pie or a cookie made with cooked honey than with sugar.
And that’s what we want to do. We want to move in the right direction.
ZEKE FREEMAN: I agree with that. I agree with that completely.
And the good news is this is not like trading in some vegetarian protein for meat. This isn’t half as good substitute. That honey pecan recipe is awesome! I mean that just is so good, it’s not a trade-off at all. If you look through my website, you’re going to see the cocktails we put together, some of the fish dishes, the barbecue dishes. I mean, these are not trade-offs. These are fantastic, fantastic…
DEBRA: No, they are. They are delicious. And for three years, I published a website where I took every natural sweetener I could find, and I made up recipes using them. And I’m bringing those recipes back. So I’ll be making recipes with your honeys for sure.
But what I found was that I actually preferred eating the desserts made with all these natural sweeteners honey and maple syrup and things because the flavors were so much better than just eating regular sugar. And I don’t even like the taste of white sugar anymore. I won’t eat a white sugar for dessert because it just takes like chemicals!
ZEKE FREEMAN: I couldn’t agree more.
DEBRA: So anything made from honey is an improvement of our eating processed food, of our cooking with sugar. It’s just a delight. And I can’t even describe how wonderful it is because it’s so wonderful.
I’m looking at a recipe for raspberry honey crème fresh with a little […] cookie. And I’ve been finding that as I’ve been exploring raw honey and what to do with it, that a lot of times, what I’m finding is to just put the honey in its raw state on top of something or mix it with something, and then it becomes a dessert.
For example, I love ricotta cheese. And so I’ll take ricotta cheese and just put it on a bowl. And I’ll drizzle the honey on top of it.
I’ll sprinkle some nuts on it or a few raspberries or whatever fruit is in season. And that’s a wonderful dessert.
And I’ve been thinking about how I could make things in a more savory version, and then just drizzle the honey on top.
Tell us some other ways that you think about this as a chef, about what to do with raw honey.
ZEKE FREEMAN: I have to say one of my favorite honeys for cooking is buckwheat honey. And buckwheat honey, we refer to it as the Guinness of honey. It’s like the block gets dark [unclear 34:43]. It’s a little bit tart and tangy. It has this molasses, kind of barnyard-y characteristic to it. So, it’s probably the honey I cook with most.
And to go to your idea about the ricotta, one of my favorite things in the spring when there’s fresh ricotta or really fresh goat cheeses is to take a nice, white platter or plate, pour the buckwheat honey (which is this beautiful black and white color going on), and then put white goat cheese or ricotta right in the middle of it. It’s just really beautiful.
So, it always inspires a lot of ooh’s and ah’s when you put it on the table as well as it’s just delicious.
But in terms of cooking, buckwheat is just fantastic because it really stands up to cooking. So whether you’re barbecuing with it or—I make a fantastic buckwheat honey barbecue braised short rib which really, really just infuses the buckwheat. It really just infuses into a whole dish. It’s just a really rich, hardy winter dish.
And to that end, I also make a miso-glazed salmon which you could probably do about any honey with. I like the buckwheat, I like the lighter honeys with it. I take a little bit of miso, some beer, some honey, mix those together. And then marinate the salmon (or another kind of fatty fish) for half an hour to two hours. You roast it really hot, and you just get this beautiful glaze on the fish. And you get this sweet/salty glaze that’s just really enjoyable. And it’s easy, just tremendously easy.
DEBRA: Yes! it is so easy. And you can just put a bit in your smoothie or in a salad dressing or just put it—like greens, for example, greens are so bitter that you need to have something that kind of sweetens it up. And just as we were talking about with the carrots, just right at the end, you could just add a little bit of honey, and you still have those raw characteristics.
Zeke, thank you so much for being with me today. This has really been a pleasure. And again, Zeke’s website is BeeRaw.com.
Go take a look. Every honey tells you the location of the apiary, the floral source, and different things you could do with it.
Our time is up for today! Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out all about this show, upcoming guests and listen to the archives. If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. I’ll be back tomorrow!
Bee Raw
A wonderful collection of raw American varietal honeys, with location of apiary, floral source, and food pairings given for each honey. They also sell complementary products such as well-paired organically-grown teas and seeds to plant in your garden to help save the bees. Also lots of recipes and information on how YOU can help save the bees.
|
Listen to my interview with Bee Raw CEO (and chef) Zeke Freeman.. |
Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home
My guest Carol Venolia says, “There’s much more to ‘not toxic’ than the absence of toxic chemicals!” She and I agree there is a whole other world beyond the toxic industrial life: the nurturing, nourishing, healing world of nature. Founder of Come Home to Nature website, Carol is an architect with a passion for reconnecting humans with the rest of life. She wrote the e-book Get Back to Nature without Leaving Home; coauthored Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House; wrote Healing Environments: Your Guide to Indoor Well-Being; penned the “Design for Life” column in Natural Home Magazine for 9 years; and has designed eco-homes, schools, healing centers, and eco-villages. Carol has been honored by The Green Economy Post as one of ten pioneering women in green design, and was named a Green Design Trailblazer by Natural Home Magazine. In this show we’ll be talking about how you can improve your general well-being by bringing elements of nature into your home. www.comehometonature.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Carol Venolia
Date of Broadcast: June 18, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And even though there are toxic chemicals all around us, we can do something about them. We can remove them from our homes, remove them from our bodies, remove them from the marketplace and live in a non-toxic world.
Today is June 18th—Tuesday, June 18th 2003. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And it just happens to be my birthday. And we’re going to have a very special show today because we’re going to talk about something slightly different, but very, very related to our toxic chemical exposures. And that is we’re going to talk about what’s on the other side of being toxic. When you stop using toxic chemicals, there’s more to life than simply being not toxic.
And my guest and I today both hold that viewpoint. And we’ve both have gone through similar transformations in our lives where we’ve become aware of the world of nature and how that can benefit our well-being.
Before I introduce my guest, I want to tell you about my own personal website on this subject which is LivingasNature.com. I have a blog where I write about my personal insights about being part of the natural world as my viewpoint of life rather than living in the industrial world.
And as I’m sitting here saying this, my kittens are banging on the cat door wanting to come in from the outside world into the inside world.
But I do want to say I have this story that, since I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days about my guest being on, and that we’re going to be discussing this subject, my kittens have been bringing nature indoors. They’ve been bringing me live grasshoppers in through the kitty door. And I have to kind of laugh at that this morning when I realized that, today, we’re going to be talking about coming home to nature and bringing nature into our lives.
My guest today is Carol Venolia. And she is the author of two books, one is Healing Environments and the other is Natural Remodeling for the Not So Green House. But she also now has a website called Come Home to Nature which is at ComeHometoNature.com. And she has a wonderful ebook called Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
And that’s what we’re going to be discussing today, how you can get back to nature without leaving home.
Carol, are you there?
CAROL VENOLIA: Hi, I’m here. I’m delighted to be on your birthday show. Happy birthday.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I’m delighted that you’re here. Carol and I have known each other for 26 years. We met in 1987 on the same week, I think it was, that I met Larry who I ended up marrying and who’s been my friend for 26 years, same length of time. She had just written her book, Healing Environments and sent me the manuscript, asking me if I would write the foreword—which I did, and that’s how we met. And we’ve been friends ever since.
We used to both live in Northern California. So we were close enough that we could each drive about an hour and meet in the middle and have dinners together and talk. We’ve had many discussions over the years about nature and had a lot of agreement on this subject.
So Carol, let’s start with your story about how you went from being an average industrialized person into having your incredible viewpoint about being part of nature.
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, it all started way back in the early ‘70s (I’ve just dated myself) when I decided I wanted to be an architect. But it also happened to be, I believe, the year of the first Earth Day. And there was a growing awareness of life all over the globe being interconnected and of our role in that wonderful dance. And I began to wonder, “Okay, we’ve got this wonderful web of life, seizing, pulsing dance of being life. What do buildings have to do with that?” I didn’t want to just populate the world with more buildings. I wanted to understand how do these fairly static things, these buildings and towns and cities that we create relate to the living world.
And so that was beginning of the journey that have lasted 40+ years, exploring that question.
And what I found very early on was that the subject of how do life and buildings relate divided itself into two topics—one being human indoor health, and the other being the impact of buildings on the ecosphere. And that division itself says something about our experience, because we get cut off from the natural world by these wonderful places we’ve created to live in.
I shouldn’t say “cut off” from the natural world. We are nature. And that is the biggest insight we’ve kind of lost track of.
DEBRA: Yeah, let’s just talk about that for a couple of minutes. I think that that for me was a huge thing. And it came out of my experience of finding myself being sensitive to toxic chemicals and having them make me sick and having to put attention in my home environment in a way that was beyond say interior decorating.
I mean how many people look at what’s going on in their home except for what color do I want my sofa to be. And I really had to look and see that my home environment was making me sick. And when I got to a point where I have examined every single thing in my home to see what was toxic and what wasn’t, I walked out my front door one day and suddenly realized that there was another environment out there. I know we’re laughing, but when you have that realization, it’s kind of stunning.
CAROL VENOLIA: Right!
Well, yes, it is funny that we’ve come to use the word “environment.” And when we say that word, we sort of immediately think of all the big scale problems—pollution and deforestation and so on. But environment is what surrounds you. And that can be right next to your skin or all the way to the whole planet.
DEBRA: Yes, I actually now think of my body as part of the environment because I don’t think of myself as being my body, I think of myself as a spiritual being. So my first environment is my body, and then there’s my home, and then there’s the rest of the world. But it’s all layers of environment. And it took me a long time to get to that viewpoint. I just remember that day when I walked out the door, and I went, “Oh, well here’s another environment that I now have to look at and see is it toxic or is it not toxic or what’s going on with it.” And even though I have been to summer camp a lot as a girl scout, I still haven’t really seen the environment. I thought of it as being separate.
We need to take a break. But we’ll talk about this more when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Carol Venolia.and we’re talking about nature and being part of it and how to reconnect with it, et cetera, et cetera. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: Hello again. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And it’s my birthday. And I’m here with architect, Carol Venolia. And we’re talking about nature and awareness of nature (or the lack thereof) in our culture today.
So, before the break, we were talking about how most people living in our industrialized world don’t consider themselves to be part of nature. So Carol, talk to us more about that.
CAROL VENOLIA: Okay! Well, let’s start with a simple statistic that a lot of people may have heard which is that, on average, Americans spend 91% or more of our time indoors. What that means is about half of the people spend more than 91% of their time indoors. And when we’re indoors, this is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve created our homes so that we don’t have to be constantly subject to changes in weather and predators and all that kind of stuff. But we get this strange notion that life is about a thermostat and being able to completely control our environment which, in turns out, isn’t all that good for us (and we can come back to that). But it’s like buildings give us both a physical and a psychological message that we are separate from the rest of life and we get to control it. And we’ve seen some serious problems come out of that set of beliefs.
But maybe more importantly, let’s go back to this notion of toxics. When you look at what the human organism needs in order to thrive—you talked about that in your intro, we want to thrive in this world—not being poisoned is a really good first step.
DEBRA: It is!
CAROL VENOLIA: You want to deal with that. But there is so much more, as you’ve said, to being really alive, to feeling your vitality than not being poisoned. And it turns out, as I was doing the research for that first book that you participated in, Healing Environments, you look at light, color, sound, yes, indoor air quality, presence or absence of plants, symbolism, all kinds of factors affect our well-being. And we pretty much lost that sensibility.
And we are intimately connected with everything around us. There’s that famous quote from Winston Churchill, “We create our…”
DEBRA: “We create our houses, and then they create us,” or something like that.
CAROL VENOLIA: Yeah, they affect us, whatever. The idea is we create these environments and then they work on us. And it’s really helpful to start to become aware of that.
And even for people who are dealing with a really dangerous combination of their level of sensitivity and the level of toxicity around them, to begin looking at a lot of these other factors, what kind of light, what kind of color, what kind of sound, what kind of space, what kind of connection with the outdoors, what can kind of greenery would be good for them, that supports the healing process. All of that feeds our vitality and allows us to deal better with the challenges that are not so good for us.
DEBRA: I’ve really found in my life that the more I can recognize in various different ways—and remember, all of you listening, as you’re listening to Carol and I, we’ve been exploring this subject for 30 years, each of us, or more. And so it wasn’t like we just woke up one day and we know everything that we know today. And you can learn a lot about what we know by visiting each of our webistes—ComeHometoNature.com for Carol and LivingasNature.com for me.
But one of the things I want to make sure that I mention is that a large part of becoming aware that we’re part of nature is simply observing nature. And I remember a moment that was one of those defining moments of change where I had started to become aware that there was time beyond clocks and calendars and that there was a time in nature that was governed by the sun, moon and stars and the changing positions of them and that our year, the seasons, is because the earth is moving around the sun, and the sun is at different angles and changes, and the different weather are all governed by the sun.
But the moon establishes the month, the “moon-th.” And I thought, “Oh, I’m going to start knowing when it’s the new moon and the first quarter moon and the full moon and the last quarter moon. And my first thought after I decided I wanted to do that was I better get a book that tells me when it’s the new moon and the full moon.
And that was so indicative of what my mindset was like, that if I wanted to know something about nature, I better go get a book about it and get somebody else’s second-hand information instead of me looking at the sky and seeing where the moon is.
And that was actually one of the first things that I did, was to just look at the sky every night and see where the moon is. And I found out that, sometimes, you have to look in the sky during the day because sometimes the moon is visible at night, and sometimes it’s visible during the day. And that helps you know where it is in the cycle.
And so, just that act of observing something or going for a walk and looking around every day and seeing how your environment is different from day to day—
I read something once about a man who took a picture of the same spot outside in nature at the same time and could see them how it was changing throughout the year.
But we don’t even look at nature. And that’s, I think, one of the most amazing things, is how out of touch we are.
CAROL VENOLIA: And I’d like to add a piece to that, which is, given that we are nature, yes, absolutely, the powers of observation of what’s around us is something that many of us have lost. And it’s profound when you start to just take a moment and tune in.
But also, at the same time, tune in to what’s going on with your body, especially your senses. If you just sit down or stand for a minute from time to time and tune in—close your eyes first. It’s helpful because we tend to be very visual—tune in to what you’re hearing, tune in to what you’re smelling, and tune in to what you feel on your skin, and then you could open your eyes and instead of looking for information, just kind of look around and see what are the colors, how is the light falling, and what’s the shape of the space you’re in, you will probably be very surprised and profoundly effective.
And then, you very naturally start to make that connection between what your body is feeling and perceiving and what’s around you. And then, that sense of separation just disappears.
DEBRA: I totally agree. There’s so much more to talk about here. We need to take a break. But we’ll be right back after these messages. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking with architect Carol Venolia. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Carol Venolia, architect, and creator of the website, ComeHometoNature.com. She has a wonderful book, an ebook called Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home. And it’s about bringing nature into your home experience.
She was talking earlier about how buildings put a separation between us and the natural world and that that’s a good thing in that it protects us from things like weather and predators and, in our world today, burglars and other “dangers” of the outside world, but it also separates us from the experience of being in nature.
And before we hear more from Carol, I just want to comment that, in my own personal process about feeling more like I’m part of nature, I know that I went through a time when I just became more aware of nature in my every day surroundings, such as I’m sitting at a desk made from an oak tree, and it also has, along the edges, a wood called purple heart which is purple. And so instead of just looking at the desk and seeing “I’m sitting at a desk,” I look at the desk and see a tree. This is a tree that went into making this desk and maybe several trees and the skill of a human being that cared about making this piece of furniture.
I can look around at my house and see that what everything is made of here is—here’s a pencil holder made of stone. I have to look around and sometimes acknowledge, well, there’s plastic, and that’s made from petroleum. But most of the time—you know, like I’m feeling the cotton, the soft cotton against my skin and tasting the peppermint oil in my toothpaste.
You can just become aware of all these plants and animals and minerals that are right here in your own home. And then, that wall that separates us from nature starts falling apart.
That was such a special thing when I went through that. I wanted to share that with you.
CAROL VENOLIA: That’s lovely. I feel like I’m right there with you.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you.
CAROL VENOLIA: And I’d like to say something about your desk and your pencil holder. If you touch that desk, even if it’s got—I don’t know what kind of finish is on the wood—you’re feeling something very different than if you were touching a laminate desk, for example. And the same with that pencil holder.
But even without touching, just looking at the grain of the wood, the two different kinds of wood, your eye—whether you’re conscious of it or not—are getting to explore. Your eyes are getting to move around and follow and say, “Hmmm… oh, look at how that goes.”
That is what I call sensory nutrition. Imagine, instead, you had that laminate desk, and maybe it’s black plastic or something, not a lot for your eye to engage. That might seem like an aesthetic difference, but it’s actually a deep biological soul-felt difference. You extend that to your other senses, and you realize that many of our indoor environments and the objects that we have around us are not very nourishing on the sensory level.
And that then becomes part of the way we become a little more dead all the time. Whereas if we can have things around us that engage us, patterns that let the eye follow and go somewhere and wonder, whether we’re conscious of it or not, changes in air movement, in temperature, gentle changes in sounds, rich textures of sounds, all those things are sensory nutrition that’s every bit as important as the nutrition that we take in through our mouth.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. And one of the things that I discovered early on about nature is that, in nature, everything is different. There’s variation and variety. No two snowflakes are alie. And no two fingerprints are alike. Everything is different. No two apples are alike.
And so if I eat a processed food, it always tastes the same, tastes the same, tastes the same. And that’s what industrialism is about, everything being exactly the same. And in nature, you find very quickly that everything is different.
Even when I started to look at time—I followed a sundial one day against the clock. I found that the hours as they showed up against the sundial were not 60 minutes. They all average out to 60 minutes. But when the sun is moving, it’s dividing the day in these other kinds of parts.
And I just found that continuously throughout nature. It’s this incredibly rich variety, yet it all comes together.
And so it really is a world that is almost the exact opposite of industrialism. And so when we live in the industrial world, and all of our attention is on the industrial world, we start acting like machines instead of human beings.
We really are human beings born of the natural world. That’s part of our make-up and what makes us healthy physically, mentally and spirituality. We’ve lost so much of that. We just don’t even have a clue as a culture. We’re totally oriented now—almost totally oriented—to the industrial ways of doing things.
And I think that’s a great loss and something that I personally want to be doing things to reverse. I’m not saying that we should eliminate industrialism entirely, but we need to remember who we are, what we are.
CAROL VENOLIA: And one of the ways to remember is if you ask someone where are you when you feel at your best, when you feel truly alive, they will almost always describe some place far from buildings and cities, some place as wild as possible.
And what does that tell us?
But part of my point with Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home is that the wilderness and living in a building is just different. You don’t have to sacrifice all of that. But you can, through some really simple measures, bring a lot of that experience of variety that you were just talking about, complexity, gentle change. These are all attributes of the living world.
You can have those in your daily lives—whether it’s indoors or by just stepping out the door. You can have it in your garden.
Maybe there’s a nice park down the road that you just don’t think to give yourself time to go to. There are a lot of ways to experience being nature and loving nature in day to day life. And the first step is to believe that a) it’s powerful and b) you deserve it and you have to do it, you need it.
And then, after that, there are some very simple habit changes that don’t even require money or changing your environment—one of which is (unless you’re living in one of the most hostile places in the world) just to get outdoors more often.
DEBRA: Or just open your window.
CAROL VENOLIA: Yeah, yeah, that too, for sure. But I had a client who, once I started asking her, “What’s around you that could be supporting of you?”, it turns out she has this great yard that feels like a nature paradise, and she never spent time there. So, my big job was to get out there every day.
DEBRA: Yeah.
CAROL VENOLIA: And it really helped.
DEBRA: We need to take another break, but we’ll be back. And after this, we’ll talk about Carol’s book, Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Carol Venolia. And her website is ComeHometoNature.com. We’ll be back in a minute.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with my guest, Carol Venolia. She’s the founder of Come Home to Nature, ComeHometoNature.com, and the author of Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
Carol, let’s tell everybody about this book because I find it delightful. I found it to be right in alignment with ideas that I came to myself in my life. But you’ve arranged it in a way that is really wonderful because you’re not just telling people what’s going on or telling the reader what’s going on. You’re also asking them to look and see what their own personal experience is.
So, tell us more about the book.
CAROL VENOLIA: Okay. Well, really, the book is a workbook. It’s got information, but it also takes the reader by the hand and says, “Now try this. Now ask yourself this. Now reflect on this. Now notice how you feel.” And there are places for them to fill in stuff.
And the whole idea is that another thing about this industrialized culture is we tend to think there’s one right answer and there’s one right thing to do. “Just tell me and I’ll do it.” And in fact, the whole world of getting in touch with your own complex nature and what you need from your surroundings and getting it for yourself can be very individual.
And so, I can’t just tell somebody, “Here’s what to do,” whether I’m working with a client or it’s someone reading this book and working through it. The first step is for them to tune into their uniqueness, their own body, how their body responds to a place, what their body longs for, the experiences that they’ve had in wilder environment, what kind of nature gets to you the most. Are you just wild and crazy about birds, or is it more plants, or all of the above?
So, this book really guides people through the process first of finding out who are you as a natural being in your surroundings.
And then, the main point of this book, Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home is to introduce these very simple steps.
These are the things anybody should be able to do fairly easily with little or no expense. There are more complicated steps later if you want to remodel your home or your yard. But these are the ones you can just do.
So they include things like, I mean the impact of being able to see greenery is huge! There have been studies that show that green views from a hospital room allow people to heal faster, get out of the hospital faster, use fewer painkillers and just generally feel better about the healing process. Workers with greenery are more efficient and have fewer errors and even have lower blood pressure. So hey, that can help in your daily life at home too, especially if you have a home office.
DEBRA: I can’t live in a house where I can’t see the green outside. And in fact, I do work at home. And so whenever I’m looking for a place to live, I’m always looking for expansive greenery. And where I live right now have about 20 feet of windows that open onto my backyard where I have a whole oak. I actually live in an oak grove of old oak trees. And so I have all these under-story azaleas and under-story trees. I can look out the window and see cardinals and blue jays and mocking birds. I saw a snake the other day climbing up one of my plants. I’ve got orchids and all kinds of things.
And so, all I have to do is look up from my computer and I’ve got this whole, as you were talking about, variety of stuff to look at and natural light coming in.
And if I just had a wall here and I couldn’t look outside and have this window on nature, I just wouldn’t be able to be in the house. I’d have to go outside.
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, and let’s say there are probably readers who are thinking, “Well, nice for you, girl. I live in a city.” Window plants, if you can open the window, you can put a window box there. You can grow stuff that’s just right there on the window. And then, house plants, a single potted plant in a windowless office has been found to make a huge difference in satisfaction and worker effectiveness.
DEBRA: But I need to tell you, talking about living in a city, I realized just as you were saying this, it’s not that I need to look at the greenery, it’s that I need to have there a window so that I can see what’s going on outside. And I had the pleasure of living for three months at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco right under Coit Tower. And there was no greenery outside my window, but there were clouds. There was sunlight and there were clouds. I was up in the sky. And birds would fly by.
And my bed faced that window. And I could just lie in bed! I’d wake up in the morning, and I’d just watch the clouds. It was the connection with nature that was important.
CAROL VENOLIA: Absolutely! And actually, there are a number of things in what you just said. If we can be awakened by the morning sun—it doesn’t have to be at sunrise—that’s actually very good for setting all of our biological cycles into harmony with each other. And that’s a huge subject… but just looking out the window.
See, there’s this classic thing about students looking out the windows in classrooms, that this is a bad thing. They even created windowless schools. It turns out there’s studies that show that gazing out the window improves student performance.
You and I are not surprised by this.
DEBRA: No, we are not.
CAROL VENOLIA: And just relying more on what architects call “daylighting,” which means sunshine coming through the window actually has tremendous effects on health and productivity. One of the simple solutions I recommend to people is look at where the sun is shining into your house and consider just moving your furniture, so you don’t need electric lighting as much and your body is essentially getting massaged by the changing sunlight throughout the day.
You may have to deal with glare issues. That’s just a little thing you can cope with. But if you can just get your desk, your reading chair, whatever, closer to the window, so that you’re getting more sunlight indoors, it’s affecting you directly, that can make a profound difference in your life as well as what you see by looking out the window.
DEBRA: You know, having cats in the house—I haven’t had a cat in a few years, but now I have these two kittens—I was noticing again as I’ve noticed before that cats sit in the sun. They’ll go find that one spot where the sun is shining in the window, and that’s where they’ll go sit. As uncomfortable as it might be, that’s where they sit.
And we need that connection with the sun. We have this industrial idea that sunlight will cause cancer. And so we stay out of the sun. But we need sun. We need wind. We need rain. We need all these things to be part of our lives. And they can be a part of our homes.
So, tell us more so that the listeners get an idea of what’s in the book. Let’s just take one item.
You talk about being more in tune with the seasons. And I have my attention on the fact that Saturday is summer solstice. And I always celebrate summer solstice and winter’s solstice and the spring equinox and the fall equinox because they’re very, very different seasons and different things are going on in the natural world.
I think a lot of people celebrate winter solstice now—not as many as could. But summer solstice doesn’t get the same kind of attention. And yet I think that summer solstice, that’s when the earth is most alive (at least in our hemisphere, in the northern hemisphere, I know. In the southern hemisphere, it’s opposite). Here in the northern hemisphere, this is the peak of the sun’s energy and the peak of plants flourishing and all these different kinds of things.
And I just think that we should take time when these points occur, like summer solstice, to celebrate, remember to celebrate the powers of nature and the resources of nature and what nature is giving to us, what is the sun contributing to our lives.
I know for myself, I have a friend, Linda, and on the solstices and the equinoxes, we always go and do something together outdoors. We’re going to the botanical gardens and having lunch on Saturday. And our botanical gardens, they have a edible plants exhibit. And we’re going to go see what edible plants we can put in our gardens right here where we live.
And I just really encourage people to do something to acknowledge the change of seasons. What do you think about that, Carol?
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, I think acknowledging season changes is fabulous! There are a lot of wonderful ways to do it. In addition, there’s a very tangible, biological effect. Light is a stimulant. We don’t always think about that. Sunlight stimulates our bodies and our body’s system. It gives us energy. So, what do we have at the summer solstice? We have the greatest amount of sunlight in a day that we have for the entire year.
Summer is about being physical, about being out in that sun, about being active. And the sun seeds that activity by giving us energy.
In fact, people who live in more northern latitudes like Alaska, Scandinavia and so on, can be almost manic during the summer. They’re so keyed up by all that sun.
And for us to feel in our bodies and honor the changes the seasons bring is also really crucial to our vitality. We love being active. We’re a very yang culture. And so this summer energy is great. But then to also let go off it when fall and winter come and let ourselves rest.
That cycle of the year happens in our bodies as much as around the planet. And it’s crucial to our well-being to honor all parts of that cycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I found that too.
Well, unfortunately, we actually only have a few seconds left. So I’ll say thank you, Carol, so much for being with me. And I hope to have you on again. There’s so much more that we could talk about.
And again, Carol’s website is ComeHometoNature.com. And my website for this show is ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
If you have enjoyed this show, please tell your friends. Please join me again. And please listen to all the shows on the archives. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Proposition 65 Warning Label on Washing Machines
Question from Andie
Hi, need a new washer and all of them have the CA Prop 65 (toxic chemical exposures to consumer). Is there ANY way to avoid these chemicals, while doing laundry? Thank you!!
Debra’s Answer
This is the second question about Prop 65 this week! First read Q&A: Breville Glass Kettle and California Proposition 65 Warning about Proposition 65.
I found some posts online that said that products can be required to display the warning if there is lead in the power cord, even if there is no other toxic exposure.
There was one post where a reader asked specifically about what part of the Kenmore clothes water is a concern under Proposition 65
The answer from the manufacturer was “lead (contained in the solder used to attach electronic parts to the printed circuit boards), brass, PVC and a multitude of other everyday materials that contain trace levels of chemicals on the list.”
Lead in the solder and PVC in the drain system of the washer will not come in contact with your laundry. So the Proposition 65 label probably does not contain any toxic chemicals you or your laundry would be exposed to while washing your clothes.
This is a perfect example of how Proposition 65 is not helpful. If we are going to have toxic products on the market we need correct warning labels. Better yet is no toxic chemicals, no warning labels.
Breville Glass Kettle and California Proposition 65 Warning
Question from Lyn
I had been looking for an electric glass kettle and finally found the Breville the Crystal Clear 1800W Schott Glass Kettle. When I opened the box it had the following warning: “California Proposition 65 Applicable to California Residents Only This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.” I called Breville to find out what chemicals in this glass kettle could possibly cause cancer, etc. The answer I received is that they put this notice on all their packaging for all their products to meet California standards, whether or not the product contains any of the hazardous chemicals. The person I spoke with didn’t know whether any part of the kettle contained any hazardous chemicals but it should be OK. I got the same response from William Sonoma where I purchased the kettle. Is there any way that you know of to find out more specifically the possible chemicals this individual kettle may have? Or should I just return it?
Debra’s Answer
This is one of the problems with Proposition 65. It’s not correctly applied. It’s supposed to give you a warning on individual products that contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.
I don’t know of a database that lists all the products that contain the warning and the chemical that prompts requiring the warning. Wouldn’t that be useful? To me “it should be OK” is an insufficient answer.
I’ll tell you though that I used to live in California and these warnings are so common that you get to a point where you don’t even look at them. And that’s partially because they don’t say what the chemical is so you can’t evaluate for yourself.
Here’s an article about the pros and cons of Proposition 65. Los Angeles Times: Are Proposition 65 warning healthful or hurtful?
Here’s a great article about Proposition 65 that includes what steps to take to find out what the chemicals are that make the product require the warning label. American Cancer Society: Cancer Warning Labels Based on California’s Proposition 65
To answer your question, I would just visually inspect the item and see if any part of it looks like it might contain toxic chemicals. Just looking at the photo, there is a metal heating element, and is the base inside the pitcher metal or glass? The heating element might release metals, the stainless steel can release metals.
Nontoxic Glue for Window Screens
Question from Bonnie Johnson
I have old wrought iron crank windows with sceens all over my house. I am getting ready to sell hopefully next year so relacing them would not be cost affective. This year I have carpenter ants in different locations. I have sealed any spot I find them with Elmers glue and it works well. However the screens on my iron windows are not sealed tight in some areas. That is where they are coming in. I was looking for a glue to use around the iron screen from the inside that is not toxic. Last year I had a closet that was sealed by a handy man with a silicone calk and I still can not go in that room. I am trying to avoid that mistake again. Any ideas on what to use?
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience with this. Readers?
Carrageenan Food Additive
Question from Joan
I just found out that CARRAGEENAN is in a lot of the organic foods I buy. My daughter was so excited because she found Applegate turkey w/no hormones and antibiotics but I saw that it has carrageenan. When I researched it on line, it is confusing if it is actually harmful. Do you have any info on this? thanks so much
Debra’s Answer
I’ve not been concerned about carrageenan since years ago I found out it is a seaweed extract. Seaweed is simply boiled to extract the carrageenan. When I was in grade school, as a science project we boiled seaweed we collected at the beach and the water turned gummy. That’s about what happens with carrageenan.
But as carrageenan is now used in thousands and thousands of food products, it has become an industrialized ingredient–not hardly in it’s natural state, more like refined salt and refined sugar. Salt in it natural state is essential to life, but refined it becomes something else altogether.
Here are some articles about the potential health effects of carrageenan:
This brings up an important point I made in my book Toxic Free
Things can come from a “natural” animal-vegetable-mineral source (not petroleum), however, once it has gone through an industrial process, it is no longer in it’s natural state.
And then these industrialized natural ingredients are usually harmful to health.
Are You Drinking Enough Water for the Sweaty Days of Summer?
Drinking enough water for your body to be properly hydrated is essential to health. In fact, many body conditions we think of as “disease” are actually simply dehydration. But every glass or bottle of water you drink may be adding more toxic chemicals to your body. My guest Igor Milevskiy runs Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters, a small, family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters which remove fluoride, radiation, and pharmaceuticals as well as chlorine, chloramine, lead, and other common pollutants…at an affordable price. 
We’ll talk about how much water you actually need to drink during the summer to keep your body hydrated and healthy, and how to choose a filter that will give you pure, clean water right in your home. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/pureeffect-filters
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH IGOR MILEVSKIY
- The Best Water Filter Now Disinfects & Breaks Down Even Hard-to-Remove Pollutants
- The Best Water Filter Just Got Even Better
- Why You Need a Water Filter and the Water Filter I Use in My Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Are You Drinking Enough Water for the Sweaty Days of Summer?
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Igor Milevskiy
Date of Broadcast: July 13, 2013
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world even though there are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products, in the environment, in the air we breathe, in whatever we eat, et cetera.
There are things that we can do to choose less toxic products and to remove toxic chemicals from our homes, from our bodies. Yes, there are toxic chemicals in our bodies unless you’ve done something to remove them. Every one of us has toxic chemicals in our bodies unless we’ve done something to remove them. We can, in general, greatly reduce the toxic exposure and the negative health effects that happen from them.
That’s what this show is about, how to thrive in the world that’s toxic.
Today is Thursday, June 13th, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Right now, the sun is shining, which is actually unusual for summer time here because we have thunderstorms almost every day. But around the edges of those thunderstorms, the sun shines and it’s hot every day for months.
The average temperature is about 88 degrees during the day and about 82 degrees at night. It’s often humid here in the south.
So we go for not just weeks and weeks, but months and months of being hot and sweaty. What happens during those hot and sweaty months here and every place else is that your body loses a lot of water to dehydration. We sweat and sweat and sweat.
If you think that you’re not losing water because you’re inside an air conditioned building, you might be losing even more water because air conditioning pulls water out of everything, out of your body, out of plants, anything that you’ve got in the house, every place it will start pulling water out of. So you can get even more dehydrated by sitting in an air conditioned building.
Now I’m really concerned about dehydration because water is essential to life. Your body is mostly water. Our bodies can only two or three days without water. So if we start losing water, what happens is that not only does it affect all the functions in our body. But as your body gets dehydrated, it tends to hold on to toxic chemicals rather than reducing them. And toxic chemicals become more easily embedded in your body.
So if you’re only going to do one thing to help your body be less toxic, the number one thing really is to drink water, drink water, drink water because it will help flush the toxic chemicals out. When you don’t drink enough water, then your body will more easily hold on to those toxic chemicals.
Today, we’re going to talk more about water. We’re going to talk about getting enough water. We’re going to talk about what kind of water to drink.
My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. He runs Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters, a small family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters that remove fluoride radiation and pharmaceuticals, as well as chlorine, chloramine, lead and other common pollutants.
These are extremely affordable filters. They do an amazing amount for the amount of money they cost. I installed one about six months ago in my house. It’s better than the filter that I used to have that cost thousands and thousands of dollars. This one only costs hundreds of dollars, very few hundreds of dollars.
We’re going to be to talking about all of this today. Igor, are you there?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes. Hi Debra. It’s nice to be with you.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m pleased to have you here as well. Igor earlier was on another show. In case people didn’t listen to that one, Igor why don’t you tell us again your story about how you became interested in making water filters?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Sure! Well, it started when I was younger. I always had an interest in nature and biology.
As a consequence, I have an aquarium. I always had different types of fish. As some people may know, fishes are very sensitive. Water is like air for them. It’s like air for us as water is to the fish. If something is not right with the water, they get sick and they die or they don’t breathe. They need specific conditions.
So I learned about making sure that the water is clean and that it’s properly adjusted with respect to the pH, how alkaline or acidic it is. It’s quite interesting because that led me into cleaning my own water and learning about that and then turning it into a business to help other people, making sure that their drinking water is safe and pleasant to drink.
DEBRA: I’m certainly glad that you did because in all of 30 years of looking at water filters, I can honestly say that I think that your filter does a better job at removing out a wide variety of pollutants. You’re removing them to very high degree better than any water filter I have ever seen at any price.
I have been recommending your filter for the last six months, since I’ve been using it. I’m happy to continue to recommend it.
Just to tell you listeners just right off, you can to go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And I now have a blog, which has all the radio shows on it. You can just go to the blog post for this show and have all the information about how you can go to Igor’s website.
The name of the company is Pure Effect Advanced Water Filtration. I guess it’s the whole title. You can just go to that blog post and it will have all information about how you can order.
Igor’s offering $15 off any filtering tools. That starts today and that’s good through the June 18th. All the links will be there and you can read more about why I chose it for my water filter and that’s the place to connect. So just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for Igor’s show on the blog.
Before we start talking about filters, I just like to say a little bit more about some of the reasons why we need to be drinking water. There’s a fabulous book called Your Body’s Many Cries For Water: You Are Not Sick, You Are Thirsty. Do you know that book, Igor?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: No, but I think I understand the point that it may be making. There are a lot of symptoms people experience that are related to dehydration, but they get misdiagnosed. Is that what you’re talking about?
DEBRA: That is exactly what this book is talking about. It’s written by a doctor. And he says virtually that almost any symptom you can name can be associated with dehydration, headaches, muscle aches or pain, muscle cramps, blood pressure problems, fatigue, anxiety, even blood sugar. It just goes on and on.
He addresses frankly every illness that you can think of in this book. And he basically says you need to drink more water.
Now there are some people who say that we’re drinking too much water. But one of the things that this book says is that other beverages don’t count in the same way that water counts in your body.
Your body is a part of nature. It’s developed by natural even though we live in an industrial world. Our bodies follow what nature [instilled] in them many, many thousands of years ago when the human body was developed.
So our bodies are looking for water, not soda, not milk, not beer, not any other beverages. It’s looking for water and it needs water in order to do its functions. It’s okay to drink anything else you want after you drink enough water.
So I’m actually sitting here all day long, sipping on water, water from your filter in a glass bottle. And I’m not getting dehydrated even though I’m sitting in an air conditioned house or I’m out in the sun. I don’t wait until I get thirsty to drink water. I’m just drinking water all day long. I think that you totally agree with that.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes. Water is the best substance to quench the thirst and to hydrate the body.
Many people drink other things so they may not feel as thirsty throughout the day. But they’re really not getting that clean water that’s used for most, if not all the processes in the body.
I was looking at some researches. Up to 65% in the human body is water. If you’re a child or just a baby, it’s even more. It’s up to 80%. So it’s quite significant to have clean water in the body.
DEBRA: We’ll talk more about this after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here with Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters.
You can find out more about his filters on what we’re talking about today at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters.
Now here’s the big issue. We could be drinking water all day long. But if you’re drinking tap water, you’re polluting your body. In some ways, you’re doing more harm than good because you’re putting toxic chemicals into your body in addition to the beneficial water.
Igor, could you tell us something about what pollutants people are putting in their body when they drink tap water and what some of the health effects might be?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Certainly. Generally, there are two categories of tap water. It’s either well water or city water.
City water tends to have more chemicals that they add like fluoride. That’s a big one because fluoride or fluorosilicic acid has various different chemical forms. But its main ingredient is fluoride.
That has been very controversial. There’s a lot of research showing that it’s actually having more negative effect than benefits that they claim it has. So that’s the first contaminant that I would be concerned about with city water.
DEBRA: And most filters don’t remove fluoride. Most filters don’t.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Most don’t. Most mainstream companies believe that fluoride is good for you. But nature didn’t put it in there in the form that they have it in the tap water.
And it’s actually a by-product. It’s a waste of aluminum industry and pesticide manufacturing. They just found a way to get rid of this waste by selling it to the municipalities that treat the water because it’s very expensive to get rid of it as a waste. So they actually found a way to make money on it.
But if somebody does research, there are some videos they could find on my site that showed that fluoride is actually a drug and it doesn’t belong in the drinking water. So that’s a big one.
Another chemical that’s very common these days is chloramine. Chloramine is a combination of ammonia and chlorine. It’s a more potent disinfectant, but it’s also much more difficult to remove. It lasts longer in the water.
Chlorine evaporates quicker. But with chloramine, that’s not the story. So our filters address that as well with a special catalytic carbon, which is an advanced type of activated carbon designed for this type of chemicals.
Of course we have drug residues, which aren’t even regulated. There are drug residues in the water. The laws for the treatment are outdated. They’re not factoring in that.
These new contaminants, these new drugs are being found. But the law says they don’t have to do anything about it because it’s outdated. So just because your water is legal to drink, it doesn’t mean that it’s safe. So those are the emerging contaminants.
Also there are all types of different by-products forming when all these chemicals combine because they’re all mixing and mingling in the water. Chloramine, fluoride, drug residues, heavy metals, radiation in some areas as well because we have old leaking power plants in this country and across the world actually.
I mean if you’re concerned about Japan radiation, you don’t have to go far from home. Right here in the United States, we have aging nuclear power plants that have leaks quite often if you’re following the news. Some of it gets out into the nature, into the rivers and into the soils.
That’s another contaminant our filters address. That’s actually one of the innovations we did with our filtration systems. It’s radiation removal. Modern day contaminants include that.
DEBRA: They do. And another thing about pollutants is we tend to think of pollutants as being isolated. When they test for the danger of a pollutant such as say fluoride for example, what they’re doing is that they’re testing to see about fluoride just all by itself, like [inaudible 00:18:04] or whatever.
Studies have shown – there are few that have been done – that when we start mixing chemicals together, they become more and more toxic. And this has been around for many, many years.
In my very first book 30 years ago, I wrote about a study. If I’m remembering it correctly, they tested one chemical and then the rats got sick or something. And then they tested two and they got more sick. When they tested three, just three chemicals together, all the rats died.
So we don’t know we’re being exposed to so many chemicals from so many sources. The number of pollutants just in water, we have no idea what their combined effects are, of all those pollutants and how much toxic they can be than what the studies tell us for those individual chemicals.
And then you mix that with the air pollutants and the pollutants in food and also in perfume and everything. Any part of your body where you can remove toxic chemical exposure is worth doing because it lessens that overload.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, definitely. Our bodies are chemical machines in one part. And they’re using chemistry like neurotransmitters, neuro chemicals that send signals from our brain to our body and back and forth. If you’re interfering with that process, it’s going to cause some disturbances in the system, some discords.
DEBRA: I totally agree. It’s pretty amazing what a toxic world we live in. So let’s see. What else can we talk about in a minute? That’s what I’m thinking.
I have a whole list of questions and things to talk to you about. But we have these commercials that come.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: No problem. I mean the filters are of very high quality units. They’re not made in China. They’re made to last. They’re really professional and great systems for the home. It’s something that people will really appreciate when they see the quality.
And the range of filtration is – I haven’t seen a comparable filter on the market. I’m always following the latest. This is one of the most comprehensive units that I could come up with after seeing what’s out there and what’s missing.
This filter fills that gap of people that want an all-in-one system that does it all, fluoride, radiation. It balances the pH, raises the pH. It addresses the modern day contaminants. It’s not made in China. And it makes the water pleasant to drink. It actually tastes great.
DEBRA: The water does taste great. And I can really tell the difference. In fact, my body feels the difference. It’s not just taste. It’s feeling good in my body. I noticed it right away.
I serve it to people who come to my house. And they were “Wow. What is this water?” And people are e-mailing me. A lot of people now have purchased this filter, a lot of my readers. I have many e-mails saying, “Thank you” and none saying, “This is a horrible filter.” Nobody had said, “This is bad.”
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s wonderful. That’s great to hear.
DEBRA: We’ll talk about this more after the break. I’m here with Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filtration Systems. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here today with my guest, Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters.
As we’ve been saying, he has the most comprehensive water filter, affordable water filter that he has found. He created a water filter to fill the niche of people wanting a comprehensive, affordable water filter. I agree that he’s done a fabulous job. I have his filter in my own home.
Today, he’s offering all of his filters. He has filters that you can install under the sink all the way up to filtering all the water in your whole house.
He’s offering $15 off from today through June 18th, 2013 (for those of you who are listening far off in the future, we’re on 2013). You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out how to get to his website and about how to get that $15 discount.
The next thing we’ll talk about is water bottles because a lot of people think that the solution to bad tap water or polluted tap water is to buy bottled water. So tell us what happens to the water when it’s in a water bottle and the quality of that water that they put in bottles and what the bottle can do to it.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, the bottled water – you don’t know how long it’s been in that bottle. And also the plastic they use to make the water bottles is getting thinner and thinner.
They’re also using special chemicals to make it softer. And those chemicals include phthalates. These have been shown to be toxic.
Because bottles are made out of plastic, they’re releasing into the bottled water, especially now that it’s warmer out there and the plastic gets softer with the warm weather. It releases more chemicals. So oftentimes, you’ll even taste or smell like a plastic after-taste when you drink in bottled water.
DEBRA: Especially in the summer. You’ve probably gone to your local convenience store and found piles and piles of plastic bottled water sitting out in the sun or sitting on a truck. Into the sun, that bottle just breaks down and breaks down and breaks down and also plasticizers go into the water. That’s what you’re drinking in a bottle with plasticizer.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah. That’s what we know about. There may be other chemicals we’re not aware of that are put into the plastic they’re manufacturing. Not to mention it’s expensive compared to cost per gallon for example. My system is right around $0.19 a gallon to get filtered water.
DEBRA: Yes, I have a friend who does not yet have one of your water filters, but I’m working on him. I think he’s about [inaudible 00:30:10].
He gets his drinking water in five gallon plastic containers and we don’t have a delivery here. So he actually pays somebody to bring those five gallon bottles back to his house. It’s very difficult to get the water out of it because he doesn’t have a dispenser. You would turn it upside down. He’s got this little pump.
I keep saying, “Get a water filter. Get a water filter” because he’s spending so much money on those bottles of water and somebody to haul them around and he could just have the convenience of having a water filter and having the best possible water that’s right there 24-hours in his home.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I hope he considers us.
DEBRA: He definitely will. Then he buys the filter, and he will, it will be yours. Yeah, I’m sure.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s great.
DEBRA: Then there’s the issue of – especially in the summer time. You need to be having water with you as you go out in the hot sun. Everybody needs to be carrying water.
A lot of people carry water in plastic bottles. But again, you have the plastic going into the water from a plastic bottle. So the solution is to get glass bottles.
I have quite a number of glass bottles listed. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, across the top, there are links to different products in my website. Just go to Debra’s List and then scroll down. Under Water, it says, “Reusable Bottles.”
A number of bottles are listed there that are made out of glass. But they also have various non-toxic covers on them. One of them is covered in bamboo, for example. So that protects the glass bottle from breaking if you should go out. So you can carry these glass bottles around with you full of Igor’s pure water. That’s what I do.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: You can’t filter the water and then put it in a bottle. That’s going to contaminate it definitely.
And I’ve seen that list you have on those bottles. I actually looked at them. It’s pretty good.
DEBRA: Thank you.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I’m glad you found some great bottles out there.
DEBRA: There are some great bottles out there. I have a number of them in my house because what I do is I use the filter and then I fill up quart sized bottles. I just put them in the refrigerator so I have cold water.
I have one where the opening in the bottle is actually big enough that you can put ice cubes in. And then I know how much water I drink because I have all of them measured out.
Actually a lot of the bottles I have came from Ikea. They’re very inexpensive. You can just go to Ikea and get good glass bottles with tops on them. They’re $2 a piece.
So these are not difficult to find. They’re not expensive. You can have all the glass bottled water you want to take around with you. I really think that that’s the way to go with it.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah. Now that it’s getting hot out there, I also wanted to come [inaudible 00:33:45], the under sink filter, the same type that you have is called Ultra UC. What we can do also for people who would like is we can create two output connections on the filter. One can actually go to the dedicated faucet like you have and another connection can go to the fridge line.
DEBRA: Oh, wonderful. I’m so glad you mentioned that. Wow!
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah. So you can get a cool. I mean, sometimes the cold water from the faucet is not so cold during the summer. Some people may want to have it go through their fridge or to make ice cubes directly so you don’t have to put – it’s a little adapter we provide. It doubles the output of the filter. So it’s a little change, but very beneficial.
DEBRA: That’s great. So we’ll come back after the break and talk more with Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters about water and getting enough water, especially in the summer time.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters.
I was just noticing that in other promotion for the show, the title of it is ‘Are you drinking enough water for the sweaty days in summer’? Well, we haven’t talked about how much water you need yet. So let’s talk about that.
The average adult loses about six 8 oz. glasses of water per day just through your own elimination of urine and an additional four glasses through breathing, sweating and bowel movements. So that’s 10 8 oz. glasses of water per day we’re losing.
If we don’t drink those 10 8 ounce glasses per day, then our body is getting more and more and more dehydrated. This is how important it is that we drink water. We need to replace that on a daily basis.
[inaudible 00:40:15] usually supplies about two glasses of water. A common recommendation is eight glasses of water per day to replace the amount of water your body has lost.
Now, it’s summer time. And how much more water are we releasing because we’re sitting in air conditioned buildings or we’re out in the sun and we’re perspiring sometimes profusely? Just think for a minute how much water you actually need in order to replace the water that’s being lost in the summer time. It’s more than you think.
Just take a look at what you’re drinking for beverages. Are you drinking cans of soda? Even if it’s something that doesn’t have sugar in it, it is still – or like I’m thinking of all those beverages even lined up in the cooler at the natural food store or different types of iced tea with different kinds of natural sweeteners in it and things. None of those things are water. And what you need is water, water, water, water, water. I can’t say that enough.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah.
DEBRA: Okay. So the general – yeah. Igor agrees.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: When you’re dehydrated, they don’t offer you a bottle of Coke or a cup of coffee. If you’re dehydrated, the medical – I think the approach is to give you water to hydrate you.
DEBRA: Yes, that is the medical approach. So if you weigh 150 lbs., the general rule of thumb is to drink half your weight in ounces of water. So if you weigh 150 lbs., 75 oz. divided by 8 oz. is nine 8 oz. glasses per day. So if you weigh 200 lbs., you would need about 12 glasses of water per day.
Just figure out your weight. Divide it by two. Find out the ounces. And then divide it by eight. Find out how many glasses that you need.
Now another thing is – oh if you’re doing a lot of exercise, you need to increase the water you drink. You might have a health condition that you might need to increase your water. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, you need more water.
Don’t wait until you’re thirsty to drink water because thirst is an indicator that your body is already dehydrated. Let me say that again. Thirst is an indicator that your body is already dehydrated. By the time you feel thirsty, your body has lost more than 1% of its water. It’s better to drink water regularly throughout the day to replenish vital stores.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes. We’re so busy. We don’t think about it. We don’t focus on it, so we get more dehydrated.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. We are very busy and we’re not thinking about it. I’m sitting in a desk all day long, most of the day. On weekdays, I’m sitting at my desk unless I have to go to an appointment and when I go out. But I think a lot of people are sitting at their desk too.
So we really have an opportunity to just take those bottles, especially if you have a bottle that you know the measurement of and that you can just say, “Okay. This is a quart.” Or “This is how many ounces.” Or “I need to drink eight cups.” However it is that you measure it. If you’re sitting in one spot all day long, you can just put that bottle on your desk and make sure that you drink it.
Another way to do it is you could set a timer say every hour just to remind you to get up and stretch and drink your water. Just figure it out because water is so vital to life.
You’re doing the same, reading about how important this is.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: It’s used to cleaning the body. That’s what the body uses to discrete waste and to remove the impurities that we breathe in or eat.
People have been drinking alcohol more in the summer as well, being outdoors and having fun. Especially with alcohol, you get more dehydrated. The best thing for that is water. You drink a glass before you drink alcohol. And you drink maybe more after that and you may have less hang over too actually because water cleans out the toxins, the byproducts of alcohol and other things as well.
It’s pretty crucial. We evolved with it. Since the earth was created, water was the main ingredient in life. So I think that our bodies have a good resonance with clean water.
DEBRA: Absolutely. Now another thing that people should think about is electrolytes because adequate salt and potassium are critical to proper hydration.
Sometimes people are eating low-salt diets. But what you really need is those electrolytes in order for the water to move properly in your body so that it could be balanced.
I know for myself and in summer time. Especially because we live here in this hot humid environment, I know that people get heat exhaustion because they don’t have enough electrolytes. When they get heat exhaustion, they drink water and salt tablets and potassium tablets.
I know that in the summer time I need to make sure that I eat salt and sometimes I need to take potassium and magnesium and other minerals just so that I have enough minerals to balance out that water. So I think that that’s a really important thing to keep in mind too.
People will think that salt is a bad thing. Actually industrial salt is a bad thing. But something I think that everyone should do is go to the natural food store and get some sea salt or Himalayan salt that has the full spectrum of minerals in it because that will help your body assimilate water and help your body be hydrated.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes. I’ve also read research that a natural sea salt is actually used to create hydrochloric acid, chloric being the salt part, which helps digestion.
I’m not a medical adviser or anything. This is just a research I have done. I have read that salt is crucial to creating the acid that digest our food. So a lot of times when you sweat a lot, you lose a lot of salt that may affect the production of that. So I just wanted to throw that in there.
DEBRA: Yeah, good. I’m glad you did because when you do sweat, you are losing salt as well. It’s not just about drinking more water, but it’s about replacing the water and replacing the salt. You want to replace the water with clean water and replace the salt with natural salts.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah. Our filters actually don’t remove the salt that’s naturally carried in the water.
There are other systems out there like reverse osmosis that takes out all the minerals and denatures the water completely. Whereas our filters target the contaminants, but they leave the electrolytes and the natural minerals that alkalize the water. They leave that in the water. So that’s another benefit.
DEBRA: I think that’s a really important point because water does – if you go out in the nature, water has its own characteristics. And then when it goes through the tap, it gets contaminated. Some of those characteristics do not go through the water filter and then it becomes more changed.
But tell us a little bit more about how your filters actually help the water stay in its natural state or restore its natural state.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: The bestselling system is our ultra units. The one that you have is the Ultra Under Counter.
It uses three chambers and each one has specific media in it. For example, the first one is a very fine half a micron catalytic carbon block. That’s the first step – to take out as many organic chemicals as possible and microbial cysts that may survive this infection. So that takes that out.
Now the water is free to go to the next stage where we have all natural non-aluminum fluoride removal cartridge. Also the company uses activated alumina for that, which is an oxidized form of aluminum.
We use all natural calcium bonded with carbon and it’s even better in performance, at least 20% more effective. So the fluoride gets removed in that stage.
Then the last stage is the third chamber. We have our Nuclear Grade Zeolite, which addresses radioisotopes that may be in the water, as well as ammonia. And we also have Heavy Metal Reduction Media in that cartridge. It’s pretty complicated.
DEBRA: Igor, I will need to [take] you up because we just ran out of time.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Okay, no problem.
DEBRA: Thank you so much for being with me. We’ve been talking with Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters about water. You can find out more by going to the ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you enjoyed this show, tell your friends.
Termite Treatment for Cement Slab?
Question from Susan
We want to pour a concrete slab for a lanai. What all do we need to be concerned about? Our building code requires pre-treating the ground under the slab for termites. I am highly sensitive to pesticides. Would Whitmire Microgen Advanced Compressed Termite Bait also known as Diflubenzuron Bait EPA #499-488 be a safer alternative? I am at a total loss and don’t know what to do. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience with this, but I can tell you that putting a pesticide under a slab doesn’t prevent it from moving out into the surrounding environment through the soil.
Here’s some information on the toxicity of this pesticide. Extoxnet: Diflubenzuron.
Readers, any suggestions?
A Taste of Honey
My guest is Ted Dannard, Founder of Savannah Bee Company. Ted grew up on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, and was first introduced to honey as a 12-year old boy. An elderly beekeeper named Roy Hightower opened his eyes to a world of magic in honeybees. For Ted, the love of bees is a way of life. He kept bees in high school and college. He taught beekeeping to Jamaican farmers in the Peace Corps. Fifteen years ago, Ted had beehives along the Altamaha River. He bottled some of that honey and gave it to a friend who was opening a store in downtown Savannah. When more stores wanted to sell his honey, Ted moved the operation to his garage.With his passion blossoming into a business, Ted decided to quit his job and put all his efforts into Savannah Bee Company. Today Ted is in a 40,000 square foot warehouse on Wilmington Island, Georgia, operating four retail stores, bottling distinct world-class honeys, and creating a luxury beeswax-based body care line. We’ll talk about the health benefits of honey, how to choose pure honey, how to use honey in delicious dishes, and how to pair honeys with various foods. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/savannah-bee-company
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Taste of Honey
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ted Dannard
Date of Broadcast: June 12, 2013
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.
I’m hoping that you’re hearing me because I am once again having some technical problems here this morning. Okay, my producer is saying that he can hear me fine. Good!
Sometimes, we have difficulties finding our guests when we call them. But I’m sure that my guest is going to arrive. Anyway, it’s Wednesday, June 12th 2013. And I’m sitting here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida. No hurricanes today. And today, we’re going to talk about honey as soon as our guest arrives.
But in the meanwhile, I need to tell you something else. So what can I talk about here? Let me talk about honey because honey is one of my favorite foods. It’s also something that is very nutritious. It’s very nutritious. And it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time eating and enjoying.
I was thinking about this. And one of my favorite dishes with honey that I’ve ever had was in a restaurant where they brought me a beautiful piece of bread. I don’t normally eat bread. But I eat bread upon occasion. It was a beautiful piece of toasted, artisan-baked bread. And alongside, there was a little jar, like an old-fashioned jam jar, a little one. And inside was some goat cheese on the bottom—soft goat cheese. And then, there was a layer of honey on top of the goat cheese in the jar. And as the diner, I was allowed to take that combination of honey and goat cheese and spread it on the bread as much or as little as I liked.
And I just thought that that was so wonderful. The thing about honey is that honey has some very nutritious properties, which
I’m sure we’ll hear about later. It’s antibiotic. I think it’s one of those things called the food of the gods.
I read a book once where they were talking about all the beneficial health effects of honey. But in order to have those beneficial health effects, you need to have raw honey and you need to not cook it. And what happens is if you bake with it or put it into some type of—we’re still working on getting the guest.
If you bake with honey or put it in hot tea or anything like that, you get the sweetness, but you don’t get the positive health effects. And so I’m always looking for ways to use honey where I can use it raw. You want to buy it raw, and you also then want to use it raw.
Now, here’s another thing I thought of. As a child, I did used to eat toast for breakfast every morning. And one of the ways I ate toast that was my very, very favorite was that I put butter on the toast and honey, then my mother would grind up almonds in a little coffee grinder. She would put that on top of the toast. And this was the most delicious thing—toast, butter, honey and ground almonds.
And just spreading it on warm toast, it’s not enough to heat or cook the honey. But it warms it up.
Ah, okay! So, my guest is coming on the line soon. My producer says “stand by.”
So, here’s another thing that I thought with that honey. I lot of people like to put honey in tea. And so if you just let the tea cool off to the point where you can actually drink it, and then add your honey, then it would maintain some of those honey properties. And I also thought when I’m making iced tea, that you need to let the honey cool down, and again put your honey in when the iced tea is cool—not all the way cold, but still warm enough to the touch is about the right thing. And then, you’ll maintain those wonderful properties of honey.
Ted, can you hear me? This is Debra.
TED DANNARD: Yes! Hello.
DEBRA: Hello, thank you for being with me today on Toxic Free Talk Radio. This is Ted Dannard—is that how you say it?
TED DANNARD: Yes!
DEBRA: Great! And he’s the founder of Savannah Bee Company which is in Georgia. And they have a wonderful website. It’s SavannahBee.com. And what they do is that they bottle honeys. They have their own honey, but they also bottle honeys that they’ve chosen from exceptionally conscientious beekeepers. And they have a lot of recipes, and they have a lot of different flavors and a lot of suggestions about how you can use the honey. It’s more than just selling a bottle of honey. So I was very interested to have him on.
Thanks for being with me, Ted.
TED DANNARD: No, I’m excited to be here.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you.
So, would you start just by telling us your story about beekeeping and how you came to love bees as a child and what happened after that.
TED DANNARD: Well, it’s pretty simple. I had an introduction to honeybees from an older gentleman. He was probably 70.
And I was 12 years old. He took me in his hives. He put some bees on my dad’s property. We had a hundred acres of land.
And then, he basically took me in a beehive. And once I saw them, I was enthralled and hooked.
And it’s so easy. I mean, even today, I’m literally coming in out of a beehive. I’m covered in sweat under the southern heat. I love it! I love them flying around. I love smelling them, seeing them.
And what I find is that, pretty much, everybody does. Once you get properly introduced where you’re not afraid, you just love them.
So, that’s what happened. And then, forever on, I kept bees. He died, I kept his bees. And when I went to college, I had a landlord that had bees. He taught me a lot of really interesting cerebral facts like how the queen is born a worker bee, and like Cinderella, is fed royal jelly, and she turns into a queen. Workers only live for six weeks, but she can live for five years. And all of these amazing honeybee facts…
And then, upon my graduation with a degree in religion, I thought I wanted to be a professor.
DEBRA: Goodness! Honeybees to religion…
TED DANNARD: Well, I thought, “I want to join the Peace Corp.” They sent me to Jamaica. I spent two years there. They wanted me to work with beekeepers and beekeeping.
So, it kind of was with me my whole life. And then, the business part, which I didn’t really want to do, a friend of mine opened a store, and convinced me to let her a few jars of honey. And then, another store owner saw it in her store and called me saying that she wanted some. And then, another one… it just started snowballing from there.
So that’s how the business got started. And I’ve just been doing crash courses in business trying to learn as much as I can.
DEBRA: I understand that.
TED DANNARD: And it’s been about 12 years. It’s been fun!
DEBRA: That’s great. You know, some of you listening may have seen a bottle of Savannah Bee Honey, but not known it was Savannah. And I know that I had so many bottles of your honey. And every time I saw it, the bottle, I admired it. I wanted to buy it just for the bottle.
TED DANNARD: We put the honey in a flute instead of a wine bottle, a little French wine bottle. It is pretty. It dresses the honey to look as good as it should look. The honey is so good. Now that I know business, I know I was differentiating myself in the marketplace. But when I first put the honey in that bottle, it was just out of pride because I wanted people to know that the honey in that bottle is better than that old sticky plastic bear.
DEBRA: Well, we’re going to talk about that when we come back from the break, which we need to start in just a few seconds.
But I do want to say that, finally, I discovered Savannah Bee as a company and not just a beautiful bottle. And that’s when I took a look at the website and decided I needed to have Ted on the radio show.
We’ll be back in just a few minutes and talk more about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here today with Ted Dannard, the founder of Savannah Bee Company. And they sell honey and other bee products.
Ted, I have to say that honey is actually my favorite sweetener because it’s not only delicious, but it’s probably the purest form, the closest to nature of any of the sweeteners. You can just take it out of the hive. I’ve had bees making honey in hollowed out trees.
TED DANNARD: Right!
DEBRA: It’s not an industrial product at all. It’s something that has existed in nature since maybe the beginning of time. It’s an ancient sweetener. And you can just, if you find a tree, take it out of the tree and use it.
So, you mentioned before the break that your honey was so much better than the stuff in the little plastic bear. So tell us what are the downfalls of honey that you might find in that plastic bear. What’s wrong with honey at the supermarket? And why is your honey so much better?
TED DANNARD: Okay. So there’s a couple of different angles. One comment just on what you were just saying is that honey is one of those things that—the plants are creating it using the sun’s energy, the honeybees gather that nectar and concentrate it into the honey. They take the nectar from about 83% or 85% water. They fan it with their wings down to about 17% water.
And that’s when it’s honey. And it’s the only food that never spoils. It’s good forever.
DEBRA: You know, it never occurred to me that the plants were making the nectar and then the bees were processing it. I always thought the bees somehow made it. So I’m really glad you told us that.
TED DANNARD: Well, they kind of are. They’re distilling it. But to me, it’s kind of the sun’s energy turned into sugar which is a different form of energy. I think it’s really, truly amazing.
And some things like the agave nectar—and I don’t want to disparage other things—there’s a process, like you mentioned. You have to convert the starch into sugars using some process that’s chemical-based. And I really don’t know much about it. But it’s not as easy as just squeezing a honeycomb like you can with honey.
DEBRA: Right, right. I mean, honey truly is the sweetener that is directly a product of nature. You eat it in the form that it exists in nature. But what ends up happening is before it goes into the little plastic bear, they do things to it.
TED DANNARD: Well, I mean with any plastic, you do want to make sure it’s the right kind of plastic that won’t leech into whatever food you have. Honey is pretty good about being innocuous touching other materials.
And then, the honey itself—I mean, there’s really two answers to your question like why would my honey be better. And I’d say that anybody’s fresh honey, any honey out of a tree or right out of a beehive is going to be delicious and good and no worse or better than anybody else. So, it would all be good.
But I do think that some honeys are great. And where that extra little greatness comes from is when you can create a single flower varietal honey where the bees have only been going to one nectar source, one species of flower like a tupelo tree or a sourwood tree. And so you get a completely unique and individual taste from the honey. So it’s going to be different from honey on the grocery store.
Grocery store honey is typically blended for color. And so it’s not made for taste. So you’re going to have different types of honey often mixed in just to achieve a uniform color always.
DEBRA: Well, I didn’t know that either. My goodness!
TED DANNARD: Yes! And it’s not that the honey is bad, it’s just that the taste won’t be there. And then, a lot of times, when you mix different honeys, it can get strange. You can combine two really good honeys that just complemented one another, and it could be wonderful. But you could also get two or three honeys that really kind of compete and make the honey not very good at all. So that’s one answer.
DEBRA: Okay, give me the other answer to the question.
TED DANNARD: Yes, that is one answer.
And so, the other one is a lot of the honey that is in those grocery stores is really heated and really filtered. And the reason you heat and filter honey is to keep it from granulating in the body. In America or the United States, people just are not used to eating honey that’s kind of crystallized which is a completely natural process. When there is that granulation in honey, that doesn’t mean anything’s been added. It’s not sugar added. It’s just that it granulates naturally.
And so, you heat it, and you filter it. And sometimes, in the heating, if you heat it too high, over 140°, or for too long even at 120°, or microfilter it, then you’ve lost some of the nutrients and pollens and the enzymes that made it really nutritional to begin with.
DEBRA: Yes.
TED DANNARD: But full disclosure, there are some of our honeys that we do heat. We try not to go over 140°. And we don’t really filter them very finely at all because we want to live the pollens and all the goodness in there. But the ones that granulate, we will heat them. But the ones that we do not heat, we call that raw on the label. So, raw honey means the honey hasn’t been heated or filtered. It still has the pollens and enzymes that make it so good for you.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
TED DANNARD: And here’s another interesting thing. Honey from a clover flower is going to have a lot of glucose sugars versus fructose sugars. And then, honey from a tupelo flower is going to have lots of fructose sugars versus glucose sugars.
And so, tupelo honey, for a long time, they thought that was the honey that diabetics could eat because it slowly assimilated the fructose sugars. It can never, ever granulate. If it does, it’s not tupelo honey. And it has a really soft sweet. Whereas the clover honey, it’s going to granulate. And it’ll be a little more candy sweet.
And it’s not that the taste of one is better or worse than the other necessarily. Every different honey is a different type of sugar as well or different combination of sugars. So, lots of differentiation out there!
DEBRA: Yes! We’ll talk more about honey and the differences and what to do with them after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest is Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company.
To learn more about Toxic Free Talk Radio, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And Ted’s website is SavannahBee.com.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here today with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company. And we’re talking about honey.
And before I go on with Ted, I just want to give you some of the health benefits of honey. One is that it contains antioxidants which can help reduce the risk of some cancers and also heal problems from exposure to toxic chemicals. It can help ulcers and bacterial gastroenteritis. All honey is antibacterial because honey is on an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide. That’s from the Honey Research Unit in New Zealand. It increases athletic performance. Apparently, ancient Olympic athlete would eat honey and dried figs to enhance their performance. And that’s now been verified with modern studies.
It reduces cough and throat irritation. Now I can vouch for that because when I have a sore throat, I make a concoction that my parents actually made which was pouring honey over sliced onions. And believe me, if you have anything wrong with your throat, put a plate over the bowl so that it just sweats. And then, drink that juice, that resulting juice a few tablespoons at a time. And by the next day, there will be nothing wrong with your throat for sure.
Also, some honeys balance blood sugar if you take it in moderation. It also heals wounds and burns if I ever cut my finger.
What I do is I put honey on it and put a band-aid around it.
And it gives you beautiful skin. Once again, I’ll see that, in my own experience, the best skin cleanser I ever had was an eastern Indian potion that was made with a honey base. Every morning, I would put honey on my face, and you could really see the difference—honey and herbs.
So, Ted, I’m really interested. How do you get bees to just go to one tree?
TED DANNARD: That’s a question we get a lot.
Well, the bees have something called flower fidelity. They determine what is the best source of nectar.
So, if you want to make a tupelo honey, then you would take your beehives out to the tupelo forest and farms really. The trees grow along the river banks. So you take your beehives in there in April. You watch the blooms. And right when they’re beginning to open up, you take all your honey boxes off—and usually, the boxes that have the bees with all their babies and brood (they call it the brood chamber)—you put empty honey boxes on, and that’s the honey they bring in. All that nectar, they create tupelo honey in those new empty boxes. So, they fill them up. And as soon as that bloom finishes, you take those boxes off and extract that honey.
So, it’s a little art, a little science. And then, of course, everything is dependent upon the weather. You can have it where it will end up—the weather could be terrible, and they might not go to that. They might fly a mile away to something else. So you need a lot of forces to cooperate, from bees, to rain, the sun, everything.
DEBRA: Well then, I can understand now why these single varietal honeys—it’s like I’m looking at your site, and you have a list of specialty honeys that are single varieties. Varietal chocolate, we have now; varietal wines, we’ve always had. But now we have varietal honeys.
And I was really interested on your site to see how you used different honeys for different purposes. You have a special honey used for grilling, for example, and how there are different flavors. This is another thing that I think is so exciting about honey.
Honey isn’t just honey. If the only honey you’re buying is in the little plastic bear, you would think that all honey tastes the same—but it doesn’t.
And there’s so many different varieties and so many flavors. And you would really pair honey and foods, right?
TED DANNARD: Yes, absolutely!
DEBRA: Like you would pair wine and food.
So, talk to us about these different uses and different flavors and what you’ve learned.
TED DANNARD: Some of it is personal opinion. Just like in wine, you can drink whatever wine you want to drink with whatever you’re eating. But I have been doing this since I was little, and I’m sort of a honey snob. And so I’m particular. And I do think there are many different honeys that can be good with tea, but wouldn’t be as good with something else. It just depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
I love tea, like green tea and black teas. And I don’t want to overpower the taste of the tea, the subtle flavor. So I would use a really mild-tasting honey and probably with fructose kind of sugars because, those, you taste on the back of your tongue and allows you to taste the tea on the front.
So, it gets kind of complex. But a lot of it is just trial-and-error. One of the honeys that we think pairs the best with cheese is a star thistle honey. We have a bottle of honey that says “honey for cheese.” Just by experimentation, we found like “This honey is so good with cheese. It’s really spicy and apple-y.” And so, typically, I love tupelo honey the most. But this was better with the cheese than tupelo. I just had to acknowledge that and create a bottle of honey that told everybody else how good it was.
DEBRA: But you can really add a lot of variety of flavors to what you’re eating, all of your dishes, by having different flavors of honey. I mean, even if you were eating mostly salad—like I eat a lot of salad—you could make delicious, raw honey salad dressings, and they could all taste different from day to day.
I mean, this is one of the things about you’re eating, especially, lettuce day after day after day. Well, how are you going to get it to taste different? One of the ways you can get it to taste different is to make a lovely salad dressing with a good oil and a nice honey and change those honey flavors. And you would still be able to use the honey at their wild state.
TED DANNARD: Right! Absolutely. And you use this type of honey one day and another one the next day and discover which one you like the most. They really will be different.
DEBRA: I had the pleasure of getting one of your samplers. And I think you have several different sampler packages where you can get three different types of honey in small bottles. And I was tasting them this morning, and I really could taste the difference between the honeys when you taste them side by side.
TED DANNARD: Oh, yeah.
DEBRA: I really recommend that people get small bottles and taste and see what it is they like. I know when I went to the state fair, the Florida State Fair a few years ago, and there was a company that was selling honey—not your company, but somebody else—they had all their different flavors all laid out on the table, I could taste them and I could see which ones I liked.
I think I find for myself I like the ones that have a little more flavor to them as opposed to simply sweetness.
We’re going to talk more about honey when we come back from this break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company talking about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today we’re talking about honey with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company.
You have all these recipes. I was just looking at them during the break. I’m looking at the salted honey pie. Have you tried all these recipes?
TED DANNARD: I have definitely not tried all of them. But we do have some people constantly sending recipes, suggesting recipes. We have some of our folks in our offices and stores, they’re always experimenting and coming up with some—I mean, honey caramels, and these honey cheese cakes. There are some fantastic stuff that they’re coming up with.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I’m going to send you some honey recipes too because, as I said in the beginning, I do love honey. But I was interested in this one, Salted Honey Pie, because I imagine that salt, especially if you get a really good—we have so many varietal salts now that if you got a really good salt and paired it with just the right honey…
TED DANNARD: Absolutely!
DEBRA: I’m laughing because that sounds so gourmet. But yes, there are so many flavors. There really is so many flavors in nature. And we end up eating only the small handful of industrialized flavors that I just love seeing all these variations in the recipe heading here.
We’ve got recipes for beverages with honey, breads, desserts, salad dressings, sauces, marinades, entrees, side dishes, soups, starters; but also, beauty recipes. As I’ve said earlier, one of the best facial cleansers I’ve ever used was honey-based.
But you also have some body care products that you’re making with your honeys. So tell us about those.
TED DANNARD: Well, bees and people or bee products and people go back to the beginning of—people. We’ve been around a long time, like before t-rex even. But no, they’ve got cave drawings depicting people gathering honey from 16,000 years ago.
But really, since then, people have been making mead (which is an alcoholic fermented water and honey beverage)…
DEBRA: I love mead.
TED DANNARD: …and using honey for all of their cooking needs and then for beauty needs. The sugars and some of the peroxides and all these stuff can really be good for your skin. They can soften it, moisturize it, kill all the bacteria. It really cleans it.
When you work with honey, you just rinse your hands off with warm water and honey comes off. And your hands are literally squeaky clean and soft. I think Cleopatra is supposed to have used honey in her baths.
So, what we are doing here is it’s not like we’re necessarily inventing this. We’re kind of re-inventing it and just creating lotions with honey. But not just honey, there are other hive products which may be even more beneficial. The beeswax is really good for you. It makes a really good base for these products, lotions and creams, lip balm and salves. It’s got tons of vitamin A which helps regenerate skin cells.
And we have people writing us telling us, “Oh, this cleared up this eczema… psoriasis…” or “did this… or that… or took that spot away.” But I don’t necessarily think it’s our unique formulation. I think it’s just sort of the magic of the honeybees. The royal jelly that the queen eats is really pack-full of vitamins and lots of goodness that is good for your skin. It’s a big antioxidant.
So anyway, it’s incredible, the products. And so what we’re just doing is trying to re-pioneer stuff. And there’s about a hundred more things we want to put together because it’s really fun to do. And people love it! I think it’s good for them. It makes you feel good.
Beekeepers are supposed to live longer than any other profession. While I don’t know that that will be true for me, it does give you hope that these products are really good for you.
DEBRA: I think they really are good for you. And I’ll just keep saying again and again that honey does have these natural nutrients in them, but also these health-giving properties like having antioxidants in them, for example. People are eating chocolates and all kinds of things for antioxidants, but they could also be eating honey. It’s just a fully alive, raw, natural food—and especially if you get it in its natural state. That is a really important thing, to have it be raw and unfiltered, and then it has a lot of qualities to it.
TED DANNARD: And on that note, the honeycomb, you can get a honeycomb straight out of a beehive. The honey that’s in the bottle, basically, all you do is you take a knife and slice the cappings of these beeswax honeycombs off, and then you spin the honey out in a little basket that’s inside of a stainless steel drum. The honey kind of flings out of the cells of the honeycomb. So you’re just mechanically extracting it from the combs.
But you can just eat the honeycomb itself. And it’s really good. Like I mentioned, there’s a lot of other stuff. Vitamin A is one of the main things. And beeswax is good for you.
But everything is kind of still locked inside the cells of the honeycombs when you’re eating it. You can just grab a piece of honeycomb and chew on it, and then the wax ends up like gum. Or you could put it in between a slice of bread or a biscuit and just put cheese with it. It’s just fantastic! There are so many things you can do with it that you’d never think.
But that is the most raw, I feel like the most beneficial way to eat honeycomb. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s our honeycomb or your beekeeper down the street. But get somebody’s local beekeeper’s honeycomb and give that a try.
DEBRA: The best honeycomb—I was going to say “recipe” but it’s not even really a recipe. The best pairing–that’s the word.
The best pairing of honeycomb I’ve ever eaten is honeycomb and blue cheese.
TED DANNARD: Yes! So good…
DEBRA: Oh, my God! When I tasted that at my natural food store, they were trying to sell the honeycomb and the blue cheese, and they put them together, I took one bite and I bought the honeycomb and the blue cheese.
TED DANNARD: Oh, yeah. It is fantastic! It’s so good. It’s sort of an old Mediterranean of eating gorgonzolas and things. It is fantastic!
DEBRA: Yes! Yes, just the combination of those things.
At the beginning of the show, you were talking about being properly introduced to bees. How does one get properly introduced to bees?
I love bees. And I’ve been around beehives. And I’ve been to workshops with beekeepers and things like that. Btu I know that a lot of people are afraid of bees, and they don’t want to be stung.
And so, can you just say something about your love of bees and your comfortableness being around them?
DEBRA: Yes! Well, I will say that it took me a long time before I was not afraid to be stung. And so when you have gloves, and you’re always kind of concerned and worried, that’s not as fun. But once you can lose the fear and realize the honeybee sting, it’s going to hurt, it might swell a little bit, but it’s not that big a deal—and the more you get stung, the less that happens—when you lose that fear, it’s like a zen-like state that you’re in because you’re just calm. It’s sort of like falling into the rabbit hole. You just get lost in the beehive—the colors, the sounds, the smells. You’ll smell this ripening honey. I mean it makes your heart beat fast.
I mean, even yesterday, this woman that works in our web department, she’s really gotten into working with the bees. But she’s really new. She’s out there, she’s got no veil on. There’s a big, giant lump of bees hanging off the beehive. She got a big handful of them.
And they’re not stinging. They won’t sting unless you squeeze them. They’re not only wiggling and tickling. But there’s almost like a little vibration in there going up your arm.
And we were talking about it. Even for me, the first time I’ve ever been in a beehive, you can’t help but love them.
DEBRA: You know, I think that there is an affinity between humans and all living things. We have some fears that get taught to us in our culture. But if we just understand that if we’re not afraid, that they’re not going to be afraid. That affinity will come through. And why would they want to hurt you?
TED DANNARD: The honeybees die when they sting you.
DEBRA: The more I’m around bees, the more I just calm down and just love them, the more confident I feel that I’m going to be okay. I just love honey so much. I just couldn’t imagine how much you love it. When I read about your experience and hearing you talk, I can just see what a great thing bees are in your life.
TED DANNARD: Oh, they really are.
DEBRA: With that, we’re almost at the end of our time. So thank you so much for being with me, Ted.
TED DANNARD: You’re welcome.
DEBRA: Again, Ted, you’re the founder of Savannah Bee Company. And it’s SavannahBee.com. You’re listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I now have a blog where there is a blog post for each show. So you can go to the blog, go to the show, the post for this show, Savannah Bee Company—I think it’s called The Taste of Honey—and you can put a comment or a question (tell us how much you liked the show or ask a question.
And if you enjoyed this show today, please tell your friends. I’m here Monday through Friday at noon, Eastern time. So please join me again.
Travel Mug for Coffee
Question from LI
What do you use to travel with coffee? We thought stainless steel was the way to go until we read your article. We use glass containers to drink our water, but glass can’t be used for hot items.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t travel with hot coffee, but happened to notice the perfect hot travel mug at Starbuck’s the other day when I was getting an unsweetened iced green tea.
It’s Starbucks Stainless Steel & Ceramic Tumbler. It’s got a stainless steel exterior to keep hot beverages warm with a ceramic inner liner like a coffee mug. Sleek design too, I wanted to buy one just because they were so pretty.
Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified “Nontoxic” By New GOTS Standard
My guest is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses (they now make adult mattresses too). As an environmental engineer with hi first grandchild on the way, Barry was appalled to learn what toxic chemicals were used to make baby mattresses, and designed a safe mattress of his own. Last week Naturepedic mattresses received a new certification for the organic and nontoxic standards of the Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS). Barry will explain this new “nontoxic” GOTS certification, as well as what it takes to have a GOTS certified organic mattress. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/Naturepedic
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH BARRY CIK
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified Non-Toxic by New GOTS Standard
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Barry Cik
Date of Broadcast: June 11, 2013
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And apparently, we have a little technical glitch there, but I’m here now. And it is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. But even though there are toxic chemicals all around, we don’t have to get sick from them, we can remove them from our homes, we can remove them from our bodies. And that’s what we talk about here on this show.
It’s Tuesday, June 11th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re right on the edge of a thunderstorm right now. You may hear some thunder in the background. We may have a power failure. But I’m just going to go on with my show despite the thunderstorms which are a regular summertime occurrence here.
My guest today is Barry Cik who is the founder of Naturepedic. And we’re going to talk about labeling mattresses and certifications of things. But first, I want to read you a quote. And every morning, I send out what I call words of wisdom, inspirational quotations. And this one is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a philosopher from the 1800s in Germany. And he said:
“Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
And I think that’s so applicable to what we’re talking about because things that matter most are our health and our ability to think and our spiritual awareness and our ability to be productive and our families and happiness and creativity. And they shouldn’t be at the mercy of things like toxic chemicals, especially toxic chemicals in products we don’t even need to have. And we don’t need to have toxic chemicals even in products that we do need to have—like beds for example. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
Hi Barry! It’s so great to have you on.
BARRY CIK: Well, thank you, Debra. It’s a pleasure.
DEBRA: Now, I know you’ve been on the show about a month ago. So some of our listeners heard you speak before. But I’d like you to just introduce yourself again and tell us your story of what you’ve been doing in your life and how that made a difference when it was time for you to buy a mattress for your first grandchild.
BARRY CIK: Well, I’m a board certified environmental engineer. And I’ve been tracing chemicals for a living my entire adult life.
I’m also certified by the Institute of Profession Environmental Practice. I’m also a certified Hazardous Materials Manager. I’m an author of a textbook for government institutes. I’m a diplomat forensic engineer which entitles me to testify in court as an expert witness. I’m certified by the EPA and a few other smaller things. So, I’ve had some experience tracing chemicals.
And 10 years ago, that moment of truth came to me when my wife sent me to a baby store to buy a crib mattress for our first grandchild. I walked into the store, and there are plasticizers in the vinyl, there’s fire retardants in the polyurethane foam, there’s some pesticides in some of the products and so on. And I was pretty shocked! I just never realized that baby products would have these kinds of ingredients—not that I recommend them for adults either, but it was particularly shocking for baby products.
And so, one thing led to the other. And while I’ve been an environmental activist all my life, this really gave me a push to try to change the thinking in our overall society. It’s time to take more careful additives about the chemicals that we put into all of our products.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. So then you didn’t like what you saw at the baby store, and you decided to design your own mattress and start Naturepedic. And the rest, as I say, is history!
Now Naturepedic is the leading brand for organic, baby and children’s mattresses. And they also make adult mattresses too.
There are lots of things we could talk about, but we’re going to typically focus today on how mattresses are labeled and certifications and what those certifications mean.
So Barry, would you start by talking about the Law Label, what it says, and where people can find it?
BARRY CIK: Sure! So there are many forms of certifications. The Law Label is actually the oldest form. It’s governed by state law. And Law Labels came about way back when, close to a hundred years ago, when mattress manufacturers realized—or at least some mattress manufacturers—that, “Hey, who opens up a mattress anyways? Nobody! So why do we have to be so cautious. We might make a few more dollars and use cheaper materials or inappropriate materials?”
And in fact, some mattresses, according to what I’ve been told, was just putting garbage inside their mattress. And consumers had no clue because the consumers can’t inspect what goes into a mattress.
So, there was a […] cry back then. It was of course before my time, but this is the way I understand it. There were unsanitary and unsafe materials being sold to the public. So this is really one of the first and earliest manifestations of government oversight and improper certification. And what happened was the state started enacting laws that said you have to put a label on every mattress. And it’s called a Law Label, almost like [unclear 06:56] term, but that’s what it was called. It’s the label that the law required you to do, so it’s called a Law Label. Some people called it a Law Tag. It means the same thing.
In effect, that particular government requirement, the Law Label mandates that the manufacturer indicate the filling material, the primary filling material of the mattress. So when you look at a Law Label, it will not tell you what the surface material is. In fact, the law doesn’t permit the manufacturer to indicate what the surface fabric is. The thinking behind the Law way back then was, “Well, we can look at the surface material ourselves. We don’t want you, the manufacturer, to highlight your nice surface material. We want you tell us what’s really inside it.”
DEBRA: But the surface material, you can’t always tell what the surface material is.
BARRY CIK: Well, that’s true today. But you see, back in 1920, you didn’t have any of the synthetics.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s true. That’s true. Basically, it was like glue and white stripe cotton ticking or something like that.
BARRY CIK: Yeah. So, they weren’t concerned with the surface material. The surface material of the mattress is called the ticking material. They weren’t concerned with that. It was probably cotton. It was probably organic cotton even though there was no official organic program at the time, but it probably was organic cotton.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was “Well, what are you guys stuffing the mattress with? That’s what you better tell us.”
So, until today, that is the requirement. You have to say what’s in the mattress.
Now, they don’t want you to say everything actually. I mean if you have just some thin fabrics that separate layers, they don’t want you to say that. For a long time, if you had a flame barrier, they didn’t want you to say that. They excluded that. Although now that’s changed.
But nonetheless, even though the Law Label is not exactly perfect, it still serves as a basic way to see what you’re buying. If you take a mattress, at one end—usually, the bottom end, but it doesn’t matter—you’ll have that Law Label. It will begin with the words “do not remove under penalty of law except by the consumer.” And that has to be on the mattress. And you could look at it, and it will tell you what the main ingredients are—or at least it will tell you to some degree what the main ingredients are. And it’s a very good way to see if your mattress has an inner spring or does not have an inner spring, if your mattress has polyurethane foam or cotton or polyester or whatever.
Now, the next thing to understand is that the descriptive words that are used (or at least that are supposed to be used) are also mandated. There is a national document that the state officials have put together that describes the wording that is permitted.
And you have to pick one word. Whatever you’re describing, you have to pick the word or the term that they want you to use for that material. And that’s good. That’s good because, for example, they won’t allow you to use brand names. You can’t just say, “This is filled with brand X whatever.” The consumer has no idea what that means. You have to use descriptive terms that the state Law Labels have agreed upon which, fundamentally, is a good thing.
There’s one small drawback. It’s not the biggest deal, but it’s a small drawback. And that is they don’t allow the use of the term “organic cotton.” So if you’re actually going above and beyond, and you’re not just giving the consumer cotton, but rather, you’re giving the consumer organic cotton, the law label cannot use that term. You must use the term that they have decided you have to use.
DEBRA: Do you know why they won’t allow “organic cotton”?
BARRY CIK: Oh, only because the terms that are approved were approved many, many years ago. The term “organic cotton” was not part of the vocabulary at the time.
Really, truthfully, until the 80s or the 90s, the term “organic cotton” pretty much didn’t exist. It was way back when cotton was organic cotton. And one of my little projects for the next few years is going to be “Let’s go to the Law Label people and see if they will permit the use of the term ‘organic cotton’ instead of just regular, blended cotton.” Blended cotton batting, that’s what they want you to say. Although that might not be so easy, to get them to change it because I can see them objecting and saying, “We’re not interested in how you grew the cotton. We’re not interested in the environmental benefits to society. That’s not the point. If it’s cotton, just tell people that it’s cotton.” So I can see them not changing their rules quite so fast. But hopefully, they will.
There is one manufacturer that I noticed has a second label attached to the first label. And the second label says, “Well, the state of California does not permit us to say it’s organic cotton on the Law Label, but we just want you to know it is organic cotton.” I thought that was pretty cute. It’s fine! I fully support that.
DEBRA: I like that too.
But I want to back up for a minute. You used the term “blended cotton.” What’s being blended?
BARRY CIK: Well, let me explain that. This goes back to an earlier era. Where the different parts of the cotton plant were distinguished one from the other, when you harvest a cotton plant, you have long hair fibers and you have short hair fibers.
And the long hair fibers are typically—typically—used, for example, in making a textile, like a shirt or something. The short hair fibers are more commonly used in filling materials.
But the other way of distinguishing the different parts of the cotton plant are that the surface material is the cleanest and the nicest looking. And then, as you go different layers, you start getting more of the leaves that get mixed in and hard to get out.
And then, the worst—I shouldn’t say “the worst.” The least pretty and the least “pure” I guess part of the cotton plan is called the motes. And the motes sometimes get mixed in.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the motes or anything wrong with any part of the cotton plant. But back in the old days, they made a big deal about which part of the cotton plant you were using.
The reason they made it a big deal is because, back in the olden days, almost all consumer products, whether it was clothing or whether it was home furnishings like a coach or a mattress or whatever, all these things were made from cotton. So the part of the cotton plant that you used became very important.
And blended just means, well, it’s a mix of all the parts of a cotton plant.
DEBRA: All the parts of the cotton plant, yeah. It doesn’t mean polyester. They didn’t have such things then.
We need to go to a commercial break. But we’ll be back in a few minutes, more with Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. We’re talking about labeling mattresses—and particularly, organic mattresses. And we’ll be talking more about that after the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. And I don’t know if you just heard that, but we just had a big clap of thunder here. It sounds like the storm is getting closer.
Naturepedic is the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses too.
So Barry, let’s go along chronologically. I think that the first thing that was certified organic for mattresses was the organic cotton that went inside, right?
BARRY CIK: Well, all cotton used to be organic. But then they started growing cotton with pesticides. And the use of pesticides in cotton is tremendous. I mean I don’t remember the exact statistic. But a huge percentage of pesticides used across the world are used for cotton production.
DEBRA: …more than for food. There’s more pesticides in cotton production than in food production. And the pesticides stay in the cotton […]
I don’t know if some people had overseen cotton growing in the field. I have because I live in California. I would drive down the Central Valley and there’s cotton, cotton, cotton, cotton. And so if you’ve ever seen a cotton plant, that ball of cotton grows like a cotton ball that you would buy at the drugstore in the plant, except it’s larger (about the size of a tangerine I think). And then it gets sprayed with pesticides. Whatever pesticide had been sprayed on it continue to be there if you buy cotton batting. The pesticides don’t go away. They’re still there.
BARRY CIK: That’s correct. And so what happens chronologically is, for decades, cotton was treated with pesticides. And at the same time, for decades, synthetic fabrics came into being—certainly polyester and vinyl and nylon and so on. And then, people began waking up and saying, “You know, this is not really sustainable. And this is not appropriate for our environment.
It’s time to go back to a more natural fiber or fabric.”
And of course, cotton is the most commonly used. There are other fabrics of course, other natural fabrics. Cotton is certainly the most common used. People said, “Let’s go back to the natural. But let’s not use all the pesticides.”
So then, here comes the advent of the modern organic cotton. It’s the same cotton as your great grandfather’s cotton. But we have to be careful today that we don’t want to use the pesticides that have come along the way. We want to go back to the original cotton that was grown naturally and no GMO’s either—which is another problem.
GMO’s are all over the place. And the natural community wants to just go back to pure, natural cotton. No GMO’s, no synthetic fertilizers, no pesticides, no herbicides and so on.
DEBRA: So then tell us about the certification for organic cotton.
BARRY CIK: Okay! So there are two certifications that are relevant. And let’s go to both of them. So the first one is the USDA, United States Department of Agriculture. Everybody knows that label because when you go into the supermarket and you buy organic tomatoes or cherries or whatever, you’ll have that circle and it’ll say “USDA Organic.” And you’ll see that on every organic food item. You’ll see that label. And what that means is that that item—tomatoes, cherries or whatever—was grown organically.
Now, there is a program run by the USDA. And if you want to grow your crop organically, you must, by law, be enrolled in the USDA certification program.
Now, the USDA certification program, the way it works is they wrote the bible as to what you are permitted to do and what you’re not permitted to do. Then what they did is they turned around and they approved approximately 50 organizations to certify products under the USDA program.
So, if you want to get your product certified, you have to go to one of those 50 approved certifiers who have the authority to certify you. And then if you are certified, you can put that USDA label on your product which is why, for example, when you walk into the supermarket and you buy organic anything, even like an organic orange juice, you look at the container, you’ll see the USDA logo, and then you’ll also see somewhere on the product who is the certifier. There are many certifiers. You’ll see the name of the certifier. And that name will always be one of those 50 approved certifiers. That’s how the system works with the USDA.
Now, the USDA program only applies to agricultural products. It does not apply to finished goods like a shirt or a mattress or any other finished product. Once it’s been processed, and it’s no longer an agricultural item, you don’t qualify for USDA certification.
Now, the raw organic cotton that goes into our mattresses, like all raw organic cotton, that one item is certified by the USDA because that’s still an agricultural item. The USDA program does not distinguish or care whether you’re going to eat the product or you’re not going to eat the product. So there’s no difference between a tomato plant and a cotton plant. As far as the USDA is concerned, if it was grown on a farm, and it was grown to the organic standards, it’s part of the USDA program.
So, the raw cotton that we use and that goes into any cotton product, even a shirt or whatever, is going to be USDA.
Now, one more point here. When it comes to the raw agricultural product, regardless of whether it’s a tomato or a cotton, by law, you cannot sell that product and call it “organic” unless it’s been certified by the USDA program. There’s no other certification available.
DEBRA: Okay. Well, we’ll hear more about organic cotton and about the GOTS standard, which is Global Organic Textile Standard when we come back from the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses too.
So Barry, before the break, we were talking about the USDA organic certification for cotton and how that only applies to the cotton inside a mattress, but it doesn’t apply to the mattress or any other finished goods as a whole.
So that brings us now to the GOTS certification which does certify finished goods as a whole to be organic, yes?
BARRY CIK: Correct! The next step is the USDA only certifies the raw cotton. Once that raw cotton is transformed into anything, it then goes to a different certification.
For example, even if you just turn that raw cotton into a fabric, once it’s turned into a fabric, it now goes to a different certification which is called the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) or commonly just called “gots.”
Now, the GOTS standard actually doesn’t compete with the USDA standard. The GOTS standard actually goes along with the USDA. It just picks up where USDA drops off. So when the organic cotton gets transformed into something, the USDA drops off and is no longer involved, and the GOTS picks up from there.
The main item on the GOTS side is that 95% of the fiber material in the product that needs to be certified, 95% of that, has to come from USDA certified organic cotton or organic whatever the fiber might be. It could be other fibers like wool or flax or whatever, whatever it is. It’s usually cotton.
So, that’s the GOTS program. The GOTS program then deals with practical consumer goods that are made from the raw organic cotton and so on.
For example, a shirt. If you want to make a shirt with pure 100% organic cotton, you’d go to GOTS, and GOTS will certify the shirt. That’s where GOTS come in.
Now, there are two points here. The first point that’s important to remember is that GOTS is voluntary. GOTS is not mandatory, whereas the USDA is mandatory. Let me explain. If you want to sell raw, organic cotton, you must be enrolled in the USDA program. That’s the law. The only thing in the law regarding organic is raw organic controlled by the USDA. The law doesn’t go beyond that. So if you want to make a shirt, the law does not mandate that you have to have an organic certified to call it organic. You can just say, “You know what? I made this from organic cotton” or “I made this from 30% organic cotton.”
You still have to be truthful of course. The Federal Trade Commission just recently, in the past year or so, published a document called The Green Guide which, among other things, reinforces the fact that you have to be honest and clear about your claim.
But nonetheless, aside from the FTC control and jurisdiction, there are no government organic certification programs for consumer goods made with organic material.
DEBRA: Okay, wait. I just want to be clear for a second that if I was a manufacturer, and I was making a shirt, I could say, “My shirt is made from USDA certified organic cotton.” But I can’t say that it’s an organic shirt.
BARRY CIK: I would agree with you, or to be more accurate, I would like to agree with you. But it’s not quite as clear cut as those of us in the organic industry would like it to be. It’s a little bit of a gray area. If you called it an “organic shirt,” as long as you didn’t use the word “certified”—you certainly couldn’t say “certified organic shirt.” But if you just said “organic shirt,” I don’t think the FTC would like it, and I know that the Organic Trade Association would not like it, but is the FTC going to come after you? I would say no, they probably aren’t because they have much more pressing issue than to deal with some of the fine points. And this is one of the fine points.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
BARRY CIK: So, unfortunately, at the end of the day, there is quite a bit of greenwashing going on when it comes to organic claims in consumer products because there is no very strong, clear standards—at least legal standards. They’re not that strong. They’re not that clear.
But if you really want to buy something and be sure that it’s an organic item, it’s best to look for something that’s “certified organic.”
Now, we get to the labeling issue. If it was certified by GOTS, then you can say, “This is a certified organic item,” whether it’s a shirt or a mattress or whatever. And that’s the value of labeling.
DEBRA: I just want to say something before we start talking about GOTS because I do want you to explain GOTS.
I’ve had a fair amount of experience reading websites. And I say that kind of touch-and-cheek because that is what I do all day, read websites [unclear 31:40] organic products and non-toxic products. But I’ve also been on the other side where I’ve written advertising copy and product labels and things like that.
And I know that one of the things that happens—and I can tell not only from my experience in writing, but also from my experience reading—is that, lots of times, people who are doing this writing—there’s another clap of thunder—really don’t understand what they’re writing about or what the rules are. And so they’ll just say, “This is our organic cotton shirt” or “This is our organic mattress,” and they don’t know what the FTC has to say.
And so, it really is up to us as consumers that if we see places like that, we need to dig a little deeper and say, “Well, is this thing called ‘organic cotton shirt’ made from certified organic cotton?”—or in this case, we’re talking about mattresses.
I’m going to go ahead and let you speak because we’re actually coming to the end of our hour. And I want to make sure that you talk about GOTS. Go ahead!
BARRY CIK: Oh, okay. So, GOTS goes one step further. GOTS also recognizes that, when you make a consumer good, you might need to add—and in fact, usually, you do need to add—certain components that are not organic at all.
For example, on a shirt, you might need to add a button. And you can’t really use cherry pits as your buttons. It doesn’t work!
Nobody will buy the shirt. Or in a mattress, you can’t just fill the mattress with organic cotton because it won’t be a mattress, it would be a big, huge, oversized pillow. So, in a mattress, you need something in the cord to give it shape and to give it firmness and so on.
So, GOTS actually does two things. GOTS will guarantee that the fiber part of the product will be at least 95% certified organic cotton or whatever it is—cotton or wool or whatever it is. That’s one half of the GOTS program.
The other half of the GOTS program is that any accessories that you need in the product has to meet a GOTS non-toxic standard. You can’t just add toxic chemicals. You have to use materials that are reasonably non-toxic per the GOTS program.
And then they will allow you to add those obviously non-organic components into your product.
Now, if you only have organic fiber fabric, then you can only claim that the organic fiber or fabric is GOTS certified. That’s as far as you can really go. But if you present your entire product to GOTS, including the non-organic components that you happen to need for your product, as long as you meet their non-toxic standard, they will certify the entire product under the organic program even though the shirt has buttons or the mattress has an inner spring or whatever.
So that’s how the GOTS program works. And the benefit to the consumer is if the overall item was certified to GOTS, the consumer can rely on that and be sure that this is a high quality product that’s free of toxic chemicals, and it’s a kind of product that a consumer hopefully would want to have. And that’s the essence of the GOTS program.
DEBRA: I need to stop you there because we actually are at the end of our time. You’ve explained everything so clearly.
Our listeners can go see all your certified products at Naturepedic.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to Toxic
Free Talk Radio with Barry Cik from Naturepedic who’s been our guest. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com for more information about the show.
If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Least Toxic Dentures?
Question from “C”
I am facing having to get dentures (false teeth) can anyone offer any suggestions.. I hear there are many different kinds.. and , do they need to offgass… I hate this is happening and I just would like advice on your experiences and any suggestions/help
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any suggestions?
I personally have no experience with this, and you are the first to ask me about them.
Let’s see what my readers say and if there are no suggestions, I can help you evaluate the different materials.
Bamboee Reusable Bamboo Towel
A towel made from certified organic bamboo that you use like a paper towel, but can be washed and re-used more than 100 times. It is stonger, more absorbent, more durable and cleans better than any paper towel, but looks and feels like a paper towel—they even come on a roll that you can put in your paper towel holder. The bamboo is grown and harvested using sustainable practice. By nature, once harvested bamboo regrows new sprouts every year. Trees grown to make paper towels do not regrow once harvested. 1 roll of Bambooee can replace up to 500 rolls of paper towels.
