Rick Furbush is the Region 8 Advisor for Toastmasters International, which includes all of the Southeast USA and the Carribean. He has acheived the highest honor Toastmasters bestows, the Distinguished Toastmasters Award. I have been a member of Toastmasters under his leadership since 2009. Since his motto has been “Find Your Voice – Make a Difference,” I invited him to come talk with us about how everyone can make a difference in the world to reduce toxic expsoures by improving their speaking and leadership skills. Toastmasters covers all communication skills, from interpersonal conversations to media training..we’ll give lots of examples of how you can communicate in various ways to make a difference about eliminating toxics. www.toastmasters.org

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Finding Your Voice & Speaking Up About Toxics

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Rick Furbush

Date of Broadcast: May 21, 2013

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how we can thrive in a toxic world. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around us in consumer products and the environment, and sometimes it seems all over the news and every place we look, there are many things that we can do so that we don’t have to be sick from being exposed to toxic chemicals, so that we don’t have to be exposed to them at all in the first place. And so we can remove them from our homes, from our bodies, and our lives. And that’s what this show is about.

It’s Tuesday, May 21st 2013. I’m in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we’re going to actually talk about something a little bit different that’s not about toxic chemicals in consumer products per se or alternatives to toxic chemicals, but about how we can communicate better about toxics issues, and thereby be able to work together and make change in the world so that the world at large is less toxic.

There are a lot of things that we can do in our own homes for ourselves, but then we talk out our front door and we go out into the environment whether it’s toxic chemicals and we go into public spaces where there are toxic chemicals, and we send our children to schools where there are toxic chemicals, and we go to hospitals where there are toxic chemicals.

And in order to change on this larger scale, we need to be able to communicate with others and we need to be able to work with others in groups successfully in order to make change.

My guest today is Rick Furbush who is the Region XIII advisor for Toastmasters International. This is an international executive position. He’s in charge of Southeastern United States and the Caribbean. We’re going to talk about Toastmasters and how Toastmasters can help you and everybody in the world actually communicate better, know how to lead groups and thereby find your voice and make a difference in the world.

Hi Rick, thanks for being here with me.

RICK FURBUSH: Hi Debra. It’s great to be with you.

DEBRA: Thanks! So, where shall we start? There’s so much to talk about. Would you just tell us some about yourself? How did you get so interested in communication and decide to devote so much of your life to Toastmasters?

I just want to interject here that Toastmasters is entirely a volunteer organization. And so people who work in executive positions do not get paid to do this. People are Toastmasters because they love it and they can see the difference that it makes in people’s lives.

So, tell us your story, Rick.

RICK FURBUSH: Well, it’s interesting. I was thinking as you were introducing me, what came to mind, I remember hearing a quote: “If you know how to read, and you don’t, what good is it?”

It’s the same thing as if you actually have the answers, but you never communicate them to anyone, how will they ever know?

So, communication is really important. And you can have all the answers, but if you don’t have the ability or knowledge or the confidence to actually talk to groups, then it’s really difficult to get your point across.

DEBRA: It is! And I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’m going to. I just want to keep saying to the audience that’s listening here that there are in the world people who can communicate about toxic chemicals. There are people who get paid a ton of money to go on television and make commercials or to go on television and speak on talk shows or to go to Washington DC and be lobbyists. And the reason that toxic chemicals are winning in the world is because people communicate about them. And we need to have more people who can communicate about toxic-free alternatives.

So, go ahead, Rick.

RICK FURBUSH: Well, that’s great. Taking a look at this, a lot of people will say, “Well, I’m not going to plan to be a public speaker. Why would I want to have anything to do with Toastmasters?” Well, actually, Toastmasters is something very different.

A lot of people get in Toastmasters first to overcome their fear of public speaking. But they realize, the one thing they really get out of Toastmasters is more certainty and confidence in life to do anything!

Like I said, there’s no long line waiting to be a public speaker. But there are a lot of people that want to get more confidence in life. And if they’ve got something they want to say, they want to have the confidence to be able to get up in a speech and not go crazy, go dry in the mouth, so afraid to speak that they can’t stand up.

And the wonderful thing about Toastmasters (and why I got into it) is that you can do things on a gradient. A lot of people say, “Oh, I could never get up and speak. I have to do something in high school or college” and so forth. Well, they did it the wrong way.

If you do something […] in a stage environment where you can make mistakes and it’s not really serious, then you learn very easily.

Well, it reminds me of a time when I first tried to drive a car. I was scared to death! It was myself in the front, three or four souls in the back and the instructor on the right. We pulled out at the downtown traffic in Waltham, Massachusetts at five o’clock. I was petrified. I had the stick shift. And I was white knuckling it.

Then we came driving down the hill, a truck was coming at us, and I’m holding on for dear life, and the instructor said, “Why don’t you let go of the wheel, and I’ll take over from here.” I said, “Wh-wh-what?!” He said, “Let go of the wheel.” I said, “No, no. We’re going to hit the truck.” He said, “Trust me.”

So, I let go of the wheel. He reached over and grabbed the wheel. He had his own clutch and brake. He turned down to a tree road. And all of a sudden, I realized, “It was safe. I didn’t have to be so serious.”

And what happens in public speaking is people never practice it. Once you’ve started driving a car a few times, all of a sudden, it gets better. Nowadays, people do everything in a car besides drive. It’s so easy! It’s second nature. Well, public speaking can be second nature if you practice it a little bit.

And the great things about Toastmasters is it’s made up of clubs—15 or 20 people in a club, they meet once a week for an hour, and they practice impromptu speaking and prepared speeches. And what’s surprising is […] they start to get more comfortable and more comfortable. And you get to a point where you’re just natural, you don’t believe yourself.

So, I joined Toastmasters in 1989 when I already was a paid professional speaker just to improve myself. I didn’t necessarily have to get over the fear. But Toastmasters is for people of all levels, whether you just want to get over a fear, or you want to polish yourself to be a great speaker.

DEBRA: The reason I joined Toastmasters was that a lot of my friends were in Toastmasters. But I had this idea—I didn’t even have an idea of what Toastmasters was except that it seemed to not pertain to me. But I already was speaking as a published author. People would invite me to speak, and I have been on television and radio and everything. And yet, sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

And because I could get up and speak, I thought, “Well, that’s all I need to be able to do.”

And then, I went to a Toastmasters meeting, and I found out what else I needed to know to be more professional. And that’s why I decided to join Toastmasters.

But once I did, I found that it really improved every aspect of my life. For example, one of the things that you learn in Toastmasters right at the beginning is—I was going to say, there’s a series of manuals that you do. And the first one, The Competent Communicator just teaches you 10 basic things about communication. And one of them is simply how to organize your thoughts, so that you know what it is what you want to say. And so, instead of just rambling on, you can say, “Well, what is it that I want to say?” and really make your point.

And that is something that’s really necessary, whether you’re making a speech in public or giving a presentation in business or having a conversation with a friend or if you’re a parent wanting to know your child […]

Whatever the communication is, you need to know what it is you want to say and be able to say it clearly and get your point across.

And I remember the very day that I recognized this. I wanted to talk to a friend, and I wanted to make sure that I said exactly what I wanted to say, and I wanted to have it go well. I sat down and I wrote a speech (not because I wanted to give my friend a speech, but because I wanted to organize my thoughts).

And since that point, I can see that there’s been a huge improvement in how I communicate just in general.

We need to go to break, but we’ll back with Rick Furbush. And we will talk more about improving our communication and leadership skills, so that we can help make the world a safer place to live.

And I’ve invited Rick Furbush to be here today. He’s an international executive for Toastmasters International. And we’re talking about how Toastmasters can help you improve your communication skills.

Rick, I know that you probably have many, many examples—as I do myself—of seeing people coming into a club and just not being willing to talk at all, and after a few weeks or months of Toastmasters, you can’t keep them quiet!

RICK FURBUSH: That is so true. In fact, the other point you’re making just before we went to break about getting organized, this is one of the most important things a person needs to do that they don’t realize.

Let’s say you are impassioned about toxic waste and want to talk about it. You show up to a meeting, and all of a sudden, you’re not sure what to say or how to put it in the right words. You’re a little confused. It’s not quite organized. You finish talking and you look at yourself and say, “Wow! I should’ve thought of this, this and this.”

Well, what’s great about Toastmasters is you actually plan out your speeches. You learn how to put your thoughts together, so they really can make a difference.

And one of the interesting things for brand new people when they come, we have them do—their first speech is what’s called an icebreaker. And this is a fun one. And it’s easy for them because they’re talking about themselves. We get to know a little bit about them. They don’t have to do any research on the topic. They’re talking about themselves.

And what’s amazing is, after they’ve done their icebreaker, and they’ve sat down […], their heart is racing, they finally get finished, they’re so happy, then they got to prepare for the next speech. And they don’t know what to talk about.

DEBRA: That’s right.

RICK FURBUSH: Organize your speech. That’s the actually second one. It is so important. And it’s probably where people really start to realize the value of Toastmasters […]

DEBRA: I think it’s basic to us as human beings to want to communicate and to be understood and have people communicate back to us. And when you don’t know the basic nuts and bolts of how to do that and how to listen and how to have a conversation, I think that so much conflict occurs from misunderstandings or that you feel like that you have, as you were saying earlier, valuable information.

I know many people who are listening have valuable information that they’d like to share about toxic chemicals. But they don’t know how to get up and say something that actually communicates that. And that’s where Toastmasters comes in.

I also want to really emphasize that there’s so much more than simply getting up to speak. That’s only part of it. You get the opportunity to take a look at your grammar and how you use words and um’s and uh’s. Now, I don’t even want to say this because I have not totally conquered um’s and uh’s. But now that I’m aware of this, I’ve practiced so much not saying “um” and “uh” and “well” and “you know” and “like” and “so, well…” and all those little filler words that we fill in with.

And then, now I look or listens to professional radio hosts and TV announcers, and they’re all saying “um” and “uh”. And then, I listen to somebody who is more trained and has removed those um’s and uh’s from their speech and how much more clearly they can communicate what it is that they want to say without the distraction of those words.

And we also learn how to have more vocal variety and use gestures and to things like speak to time. That’s one thing that’s been very useful for me since I’m interviewed a lot on radio and now have my own radio show. They only give me so much time, and I need to make sure that I fit in what I want to say in that period of time.

And that’s something that you learn in Toastmasters. And that can be valuable in all kinds of different areas of your life. So, it really is…

They teach you how to persuade someone else of your viewpoint, they teach you how to negotiate, all these little things that you use in your life or can use in your life if you know how to do them.

And I have to say that it’s the best bargain for personal growth because, as you go through a program, you really need to see parts of yourself. You find out more about yourself. You find out things about yourself that are really wonderful skills that you didn’t know you had. And you find out areas where you have fears and blocks and that you need to get through those in order to accomplish what you want.

It’s one of the most wonderful things that I’ve ever done in my life.

RICK FURBUSH: Wow! I agree with you.
What’s amazing, as you mentioned a little earlier, when you listen, you don’t—when you have lots of uh’s and um’s, you say them, you’re not aware of them. So you actually have to sit down probably your first and second meeting, and they make you the uh’s counter. And you actually have to listen. And what’s a lot of fun is you have an advanced Toastmasters next to the brand new person, and they both count um’s and uh’s and compare notes. [unclear 16:12] would find 35 or 40. It’s shocking!

DEBRA: It is!

RICK FURBUSH: And as you tune in, it’s almost like scratching your nails against a chalkboard when you hear an “uh” and an “um” after a while.

And here’s the thing that the audience may not know, but the only reason you have uh’s and um’s is because people are petrified to have silence. So when you’re trying to think of your next word, instead of a nice pause, they have filler words, “uh… um… uhhh…” They’re just nervous.

So, when you get over the nervousness, you start to get confidence, you can use those moments of quiet as a gesture. A pause is very, very powerful.

In fact, I heard a world champion giving a speech, and he had the most powerful pause. And he told me he had to count to 10 before the next word.

DEBRA: Well, Rick, it’s time for me to put you on pause…

RICK FURBUSH: Great!

DEBRA: …while we go to a commercial break. We’ll be back after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking with Rick Furbush about how to improve our communication and leadership skills.

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Now, we’re back with Rick Furbush, international executive for Toastmasters International. And Rick, let’s talk about the leadership side of Toastmasters. Tell us about how that goes.

RICK FURBUSH: That’s a great point. You know, when you go to learn leadership, when you think about it, did you go to college? Is there a college for leadership? You show up to a business, and all of a sudden, you’re expected to kind of be a leader? How do you learn about it? How do you do it?

Well, Toastmasters is effective because you learn to do it by actually doing it. You learn to speak by getting up and speak. And you learn to be a leader by getting up and leading.

So, what’s amazing about Toastmasters is, first of all, it’s been around for 89 years, number one. Number two, it’s non-profit.

No one in Toastmasters get paid, including the international presidents. And the entire organization is run with volunteers.

In a club, you have seven officers that are elected by your peers for a year. You have a president, three vice presidents, sergeant at arms, treasurer and secretary and so forth. And above that, you’ve got an area governor who’s over five clubs.

Then above the area governor is the division governor over five or six areas and 30 clubs. And then, you’ve got a district governor who’s over 200 clubs let’s say. And then you’ve got 86 of these districts around the world.

So it’s pyramid-shaped where the leadership is done on a voluntary basis. And you actually learn to be a leader by doing.

There’s training involved, but so much doing. And you actually get those abilities by the experience of doing Toastmasters.

So, not only do you learn to speak, but you learn to lead.

As you’ve noticed, there’s never been a great leader that wasn’t a great speaker. So they go really hand in hand.

DEBRA: They do! And I really appreciated this. I’ve been a Toastmasters since 2009. And I’ve done a lot of the manuals, Learning to Speak. But I’ve also done most of the leadership side up to—there’s a designation called Distinguished Toastmaster which is the highest award that you can get in Toastmasters. And it leads you to learning a lot about speaking and a lot about leadership and that you need to do certain different projects in order to get this.

And I’m about to get this award on June 30th. I’ll be done with all of my qualifications. And it is the most valuable thing that I’ve ever done in my life because it does teach you these basic skills of communication and leadership.

And so, I needed to do things like, first, I was the president of my club. And then, I moved up to being an area governor. And I was expected to do things like be in charge of putting on a speech contest. Well, I have never done that before. Where would I learn how to do that?

But they do teach you how to do this. They teach you how to be a leader. They teach you how to get a group of people together united around your purpose and be able to work together as a team.

Now, how valuable would that be for you to get a group of your friends and neighbors together and go down to the city council and make an effective presentation and stop fluoride in your water or something like that.

And this is what is needed to make change in the world. It’s for people to work together. I’ve been in so many groups, local groups, where they didn’t know how to work together. And yet Toastmasters teaches you how to do that. And you can put together a group of Toastmasters, people show up, they do what they agree to do, and they actually produce something like a speech contest or whatever it is that they want to create together. They have the skills to work together and communicate and not fight with each other and disagree—

It’s not that we never fight and disagree. But we have the skills to be able to come together and say, “Alright, this is going to be our accomplishment. And this is how we’re going to get there and do it together and have fun doing it.”

As you said, Rick, where else would you learn that?

And now I feel like I could lead anything! It’s just that you learn those skills. And now I could go into a corporation, be an executive or I could run a non-profit or I could gather together people and make some change in my community because I know how to lead.

And that’s what I’ve learned in Toastmasters. It’s an amazing thing!

RICK FURBUSH: That’s fantastic! What’s very interesting is so many people don’t know how to run a meeting!

DEBRA: That’s another thing I’m going to have to do.

RICK FURBUSH: People have heard of this thing called Robert’s rules or parliamentary rules. They haven’t got the foggiest idea. And of course I think the British came up with it so it’s very confusing. But you learn not only the procedure but how to run a meeting, a democratic meeting, effectively, on time, getting things done.

And we do this every day in Toastmasters, so when you go out to the world, you’ve got an edge up. You can go and run any meeting.

And most meetings that you’ve been to, they run over time, they never get things correctly. They don’t know how to run it. And this is the basic thing you learn in Toastmasters every day in your meetings.

DEBRA: Yes, these are basic life skills. And I’m having Rick here on the show because this is a show about toxics, and these skills need to be learned and applied in the world of toxics so that our voices can be heard, so that we can go to a meeting, and as the meeting is not being run correctly, we can stand up and say, “Okay, let’s do this,” and everybody will follow you and listen to what’s going on with you because you can just bring order to the room. You can call on people to be able to speak and have their voices heard.

It’s just an amazing, amazing thing. And I want people to know that this is what Toastmasters is about, that you can learn those skills there for very, very little money—like really very little money, isn’t it, $46 for six months or something.

RICK FURBUSH: Yeah, it’s equivalent to a cup of coffee a week. It’s very inexpensive. It’s non-profit.

The whole idea, the purpose of the organization which started 89 years ago was to help make the world a better place through communication leadership. And it’s that effective, and it’s doing it every day.

DEBRA: Wouldn’t it be amazing for people to understand? We usually think that there are leaders, and then there are the followers. But what Toastmasters does is it makes everybody a leader.

One of the things that I am so impressed with the way Toastmasters is structured is that you learn the different roles that are necessary to the meeting. And you can just go to any Toastmasters meeting in the world and step in and fulfill that role.

We’ll be back after the break. We’ll talk more about Toastmasters and how you can be empowered to speak and lead.

I just really see people blossom when I go to a Toastmasters meeting […] I’ve been in Toastmasters since 2009. And I just see people who come in and won’t speak and sit in the back of the room, after a few months, they go talking and participating—and their whole lives change.

I know that my life has changed because I really amped up my ability to communicate and communicate well and organize my thoughts. And that’s how I got a radio show actually. I decided that I was going to be able to communicate my message in a way that would make sense to other people and that I’d be able to do it clearly and that I would take a leadership role in my field, create that.

And so, Rick, this is the last segment. Let’s talk about how people can join or create a Toastmasters club for themselves.

RICK FURBUSH: Good point. In fact, I wanted to just [unclear 27:37] people first. I know they were listening for toxic, and then we’re talking about communicating. But the point I want to make is when they use Toastmasters or anything else, you really need to overcome that fear if you’ve got it and really be able to communicate well. And we have found—because it’s so good.

It’s the leader in the field. It’s so inexpensive. And it’s such an ability-building organization—that Toastmasters for us has worked so well. And that’s why we’re talking about it. and

But we’d like to encourage you to go on and use whatever you can to become better speaker.

DEBRA: I agree.

RICK FURBUSH: And I’d like to share a couple of tips because people are going, “Well, I’m going to have to speak next week” or “I’m going to be the maid-of-honor. What should I do?” Well, here are a couple of tips—a couple of tips right off the bat.

If you go to Toastmasters.org, right on the front page, they have the tips. You can just print them down.

But the first couple of tips, one is you want to be prepared. You want to know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing worse than have to get up sort of impromptu and try to wing it. You want to really be prepared. Write down your speech—practice it, and practice it, and practice it. And you’ll have so much more confidence.

That’s probably one of the big tips I can help people with.

But second of all, if you’re going to be going and speaking to a group, see if you can’t go out and introduce yourself to as many people as possible. You’ve sort of broken the ice, and you have some friendly faces in the audience that you got to talk to, and it makes your nerves start to go away.

So, those are two great tips for anyone whether you’re Toastmasters or not if you want to go on and speak.

DEBRA: Those are all great tips. And I would say that, on the other hand, one of the things that you learn in Toastmasters is to just be able to speak extemporaneously off-the-cup. There’s a whole very fun part of each meeting called table topics where you get asked a question, and then you just get to give a 1- to 2-minute reply. And that comes in very handy at parties or if you’re at a job interview, or if you’re meeting somebody for the first time, or if you’re on a radio show and you have to answer a question.

RICK FURBUSH: I think that’s probably one of the most valuable things for me that I get out of Toastmasters, having the competence to be able to [field questions].

If you noticed, some of these politicians, you ask them a question, they don’t answer the question. they tell you what they want you to hear. It’s very amazing! But it sort of has this art of impromptu speaking geared the way they want to go.

So, if you’re really good, you’ll actually be able to answer the question and sound intelligence just because you have that competence with having practiced the impromptu speaking.

DEBRA: Yes. And I know a lot of people are experts in a field of something (like I’m an expert in my fields of tactics. But just because you know your field or doesn’t mean you know how to communicate. And I think that that’s a great area people still need to be trained so that you can communicate what you know and sound like you’re somebody who knows what you know. If you don’t have those communication skills, you can know all the facts you want and somewhat come across as being the intelligent person that you are.

DEBRA: Yes, very good point. In fact, as you’ve mentioned, you asked—before we run out of time—“How could someone join Toastmasters?”, it’s very simple. You can go to Toastmasters.org. And on the front page, it says “find a club.” Click on it, and it’ll say, “put in your zip code.” And it’ll bring up the 20 closest clubs to where you live. There might be one around the corner.

And just here in Pinellas County, there’s 48 clubs in Pinellas county and almost 50 over in Hillsborough. And every major city in the world has a lot of Toastmasters club. They meet either morning, noon or evening. So it’s easy to find a club.

In fact, I suggest that people go and visit different clubs because these clubs have a different personality. But you’ll find that the one thing they all have in common is they’re very friendly, and they’re very warm. And everyone’s in the same boat.

If you show up and you’re afraid of public speaking, they either are or they have been. They know what you’re going through.

So it’s a safe place to go visit and overcome your fear of public speaking.

DEBRA: I totally agree with you. As area governor particularly this year, I’ve had occasion to go to different clubs. The first couple of years, I just stayed in my own club. But I’ve been going around visiting different clubs. And I do see that if you want to go some place, if you just moved to a new city, and you want to meet some new people, and you want to go some place, you don’t have the confidence to say go to a bar and strike up a conversation with someone, go to a Toastmasters club because, when you walk in the door, somebody will walk over and talk to you, I guarantee it.

RICK FURBUSH: That’s absolutely true.

DEBRA: They’ll be friendly, and they’ll be interested. And they’ll introduce you to somebody else. And it won’t be like going to a party and just standing in a corner.

RICK FURBUSH: In fact, I have to point out that when I went to Hong Kong last summer—I was there for two to three weeks—the first week I was there, I’ve been through four Toastmasters’ clubs. And they all spoke English. And it was an incredible experience! They had 40 or 50 people in each of the clubs. And they have over 50 clubs just on the small island of Hong Kong.

I mean China, India, South America, South Africa, you name it, there are Toastmasters clubs anywhere.

So, if you’re traveling, what a great networking experience!

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

RICK FURBUSH: So, I feel like, now, I could go any place in the world and I can be part of a family anywhere. If I ever needed something, if I needed to meet people, or I was in trouble in a strange place, I could just find a Toastmasters club, and they would take care of me. That’s not really what it’s for. But I know that I have friends everywhere because I’m a Toastmaster.

DEBRA: Absolutely!

RICK FURBUSH: Well, the call-to-action simply is, if you want to get over that fear of public speaking, it’s a safe, easy place.

Just go online, Toastmasters.org, put in your zip code, find a club and go visit it. It’s friendly, it’s safe. They won’t have you get up and speak. You go at your own pace. And you’ll be shock!

My wife didn’t get into Toastmasters until she was over 50 years old. And she wishes she had done 40 years earlier. It’s made all the difference in her life. And she’s been very public speaking-petrified! And now she does stand-up comedy for fun on weekends.

RICK FURBUSH: Yes, I’ve heard her. And I’ve seen her even just over the past four years that I’ve known her, the transformation that’s gone on with her.

One thing I want to make sure that we do mention before our time is up is that there’s two kinds of Toastmasters club. One is what’s called an open club. And that’s open to the public. And then, there’s also what’s called a closed club. And there are actually a lot of closed clubs. And what a closed club is is a club that is formed around an interest group. A business can have their own closed club where you have an employee of that business or a member of a church or a member of some organization. And so, in that way, people within already established groups can get to know each other and learn to work more effectively together.

So, for example, if you belong to an organization, say a non-profit that’s working on a toxics issue, you could form your own Toastmasters club for that group. You only need to have 20 people to have a Toastmasters club.

And if you have an organization or a business that’s making non-toxic products or something like that, you can form your own Toastmasters club, and then you will be more effective operating as a group, but then you could also go out in the world and speak more effectively about whatever is the purpose of your organization or the purpose of your business.

Say you have a business selling organic vegetables. Maybe you’re a farm or something, and you want to sell more organic vegetables. It would be so much easier for you to go out in the world and talk to people about your organic vegetables if you have the skills of communication.

So, I just really see this as a tool that so many people could use to be more effective to do their toxic-free purpose. And it’s available to anyone everywhere. And if it isn’t there, you can make it be there.

RICK FURBUSH: Very good point. And if they really want to start a club in their group, they just go online, Toastmaster.org.

There’s a place where you want to start a club, and they just fill in the information. They will connect you off with someone in your area to help you start a club. It’s very simple. It’s almost nothing to do. Just find a group of 20+ people, and they’ll come in and do a kickoff meeting, show you how it’s done, and help you start a club!

DEBRA: Well, here’s the red light, Rick. We need to stop. Thank you so much for being—this has been—

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I will see you tomorrow.

My guest is Dr. Doris Rapp, one of the first medical doctors who began to associate toxic chemical exposures with the symptoms of her pediatric patients. A board-certified environmental medical specialist, pediatric allergist, and homeopath, Dr. Rapp served as Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo until January 1996. Dr. Rapp practiced traditional allergy medicine for 18 years. After learning about environmental medicine in 1975, Dr. Rapp began to incorporate the principles of environmental medicine into her pediatric allergy practice. Dr. Rapp is a past President of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. She is also the author of the bestselling books, Is this Your Child and Is this Your Child’s World, which help identify and provide practical methods of treatment to eliminate substances which can cause illness and behavioral changes in both children and adults. Her book Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call tells how chemicals damage your body, brain behavior and sex. www.drrapp.com

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Many Ways Toxic Chemicals Affect Your Health and What You Can Do

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Doris Rapp

Date of Broadcast: May 01, 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, we don’t have to let them make us sick. We don’t have to have them in our homes. We don’t need to have them in our bodies. And we can live toxic-free, healthy, happy, productive. It can be a great life and a great world.

It’s Wednesday, May 1st 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we are going to talk with one of our most knowledgeable doctors about exposure to toxic chemicals and what they can do to your body and what we can do to be happy.

My guest is Dr. Doris Rapp and she was one of the first MDs to learn and use environmental medicine. She treat her pediatric patients way back in 1975. I first learned about toxic chemicals and products and their health effects in 1978. And so Dr. Rapp and I have known each other for many years and have been both working in parallel in our respective fields to be handling problems with toxic chemicals with her clients and patients and me with consumers.

I’m just going to get right to the phone. Dr. Rapp, welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio.

Doris; Oh, it’s a pleasure to hear your voice and talk to you ear-to-ear. I’ve read your many books and I can’t get over how much practical, sensible information that you give people, to get it down to the nitty-gritty and you tell them what they need to do and then, it’s up to them. You can lead them to water, you can’t make them drink. But most of them are going to drink because they have fate in what you say and the suggestions are practical and will definitely improve their health if they listen.

DEBRA: Thank you. Yesterday, my guest told me that when she became ill with toxic chemical exposure that she got one of my books and she followed it to the letter religiously and she recovered from just doing what I outlined in my book.

That was an old book. We know so much more today that I just really feel that it’s not a question of information. It’s just a question of getting people to understand that there is a problem with toxics and there’s something they can do about it.

I want to ask you to tell us your story of how you got interested in this? But first, let me just give the little bio that I failed to give, so that you don’t have to talk about how you were a board certified environmental medical specialist, podiatric allergist and homeopath, you served as a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo until January 1996.

Dr. Rapp practiced traditional allergy medicine for 18 years. And then after learning about environmental medicine in 1975, Dr. Rapp began to incorporate the principles of environmental medicine into her pediatric allergy practice.

She’s the past president of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, the author of the bestselling books Is This Your Child?, Is This Your Child’s World?, Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call and several other books. You can find out all about everything that she does and everything that she’s written and everything that she has to offer at her website, DrRapp.com. If you go to her website and you subscribe to her newsletter, she will send you all kinds of free information about toxic chemicals in your house.

So all that said, now tell us about those point in your life where you discovered environmental medicine and how you began to observe what was going on with your patients?

DR. DORIS RAPP: I was practicing allergy just like everybody else until 1975. And then fortunately, I went to a medical meeting and the man there said that he could put a drop of an allergy extract in your arm and produce your symptoms and that different drops cause different symptoms and that they could be treated by giving them a dilution of whatever made them sick.

I was really irate because I’ve been trained that you couldn’t treat food allergies and that this wasn’t possible. And yet this man claimed that he could do this. So I said to me at the meeting, I said, “Show me” and he brought in five people, five patients and he caused asthma and he caused their bellies to swell up and he caused all kinds of symptoms right in front of our eyes. I said, “I can’t figured out how he’s fooling me, but this can’t be for real.”

I decided to go to various offices of environmental medical specialist and see if they could really do what they said they could do and I was really astounded. If you had problems with your belly after eating a food, they put a drop of that food in your arm and immediately, in eight minutes, you had the bellyache. And then they give you different dilutions.

Our bodies are so smart, so much smarter than the doctors that one drop of a substance in your arm can mess up your whole body – your pulse will go up, your blood pressure will go up, your breathing will become worse, your belly, you can’t walk, you can’t talk sometimes, you don’t act appropriately. All this happens from one drop of an allergy extract.

And then the second amazing thing is that a dilution of that drop, a 1:5 or 1:25 or 1:125, one drop of the right dilusion and in eight minutes, the whole body goes back to normal. It sounds too good to be true. It sounded so good that I didn’t believe it.

And then I went back to my office, I tried it, I found I could do it and it meant that the next 20 years, I had someone hired in my office who do nothing, but photograph what was going on because the reactions were so dramatic that nobody would believe them.
The disappointment to me is that it’s now 2013 and most doctors and most patients and most people with severe allergies do not know that it can be turned on and off like a switch using provocation, neutralization allergy testing.

With provocation, you put a drop of something into the arm and you see if you can provoke. The provocation test is to provoke symptoms so you might produce slight asthma or difficulty walking, talking, thinking, an area of your brain to be affected (any area of your body could be affected). And then you would turn it off with a fivefold weaker dilution of that same substance that caused the problem.

You say, “Well, how could it be that a drop of milk would enable you to drink milk without difficulty if you put a drop of diluted milk solution in the mouth” and all I can say is the body is an awful lot smarter than we are because we don’t have the answers.
There are some theories as to why it might work that explain it, but the bottomline is if you have a food allergy, it can be treated. It you’re allergic to dust, mold and pollen and chemicals, most of those can also be effectively treated with the right dilutions of an allergy extract.

If you want to find a doctor that knows the method that I’ve just talk about, you call the AAEM, that’s the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. 316-684-5500. That number again, 316-684-5500.

It’s just astounding to me and unquestionably, the best thing I ever did my whole life was to go to that one medical meeting because it opened up a whole new world and the result was that patients I’ve help that I never believed in a million years that I could help.

I can remember one woman that had severe herpes and cancer – herpes, shingles. She was walking up the driveway to my office at that time. I looked out the window and I said, “Doris, how do you think that you could possibly help this patient? You’ve never seen a patient like this and you just think you can do it by using a dilution of flu vaccine?”

I said, “Well, it’s what I learned and I’m going to try it.” Sure enough, I tested the patient. I treated them and the herpes didn’t spread to the eye, which could cause blindness and the pain was gone and the patient was better. It was just a whole new world of medicine. I had no idea that people could be treated so effectively. And if you combine the allergy testing and treatment with good nutrition and a proper diet and you did make some [inaudible 00:10:46] to get rid of the toxic chemicals and things stored in your body, which is called natural detoxification, there’s no doubt in my mind that most people will improve and some people will become entirely well.

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we have to go to station break. But we’ll continue talking with Dr. Doris Rapp after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.

DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with Dr. Doris Rapp. We’re talking about allergies and chemicals and all kinds of things.

Dr. Rapp, you and I started in the same place although I started with provocative neutralization testing, but I was on the patient end of it. That really proved to me that there was something going on my body that it could be turned on and off by being exposed to a toxic chemical.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Did they diagnose you with having a psychiatric problem because you have this illness that affected any area of the body?

DEBRA: No because I didn’t go to any other doctors. The first doctor I went to was a clinical ecologist. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was having all kinds of symptoms that seemed to be not related to each other. It was actually my father that went.
My mother was dying of Cancer. My father took her to a doctor practicing environmental medicine because he was the only one that would give her intravenous vitamin C as a treatment. He’s sitting there waiting in the office for my mother watching the technician perform provocative neutralization testing and watching these symptoms turn on and off as a result of drops for food and pollens and toxic chemicals. He’s looking at this and going, “That’s what’s wrong with my daughter” because I would just start crying at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason.

And so he wanted me to go in. He told me about it. He wanted me to go in. I said no, I wouldn’t go because at that particular time, one of my symptoms that I didn’t recognize as a symptom was depression and not being willing to do things to help myself.

He was being aware that I needed to do something to help myself. He just went into the office and listened and watched and found out that if somebody was having a reaction, that they could take Alka Seltzer in a gold package and it would stop.

So one night while I was having a reaction, he got some Alka Seltzer in a gold package. He had gotten it just for this very moment. He had put it in the glass and he said, “Here, drink this.” I took the glass and I said, “I am not going to drink this” and threw the glass against the wall, smashed it.

He had to go make another glass of Alka Seltzer gold, wrestle me to the floor, hold my nose, opened my mouth and poured it down my throat.

After about two seconds, suddenly, it was like I had woken up from a dream like, “Where am I? What just happened?” I had completely come out of the reaction from whatever it was I was reacting to in about two seconds, very fast.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Absolutely amazing!

DEBRA: He knows.

DR. DORIS RAPP: But if you don’t have Alka Seltzer gold, any of the people that are listening can take a quarter to a half of teaspoon of baking soda and a half a glass of water or enough water so they can swallow and they can stop a food allergic reaction in about 10-15 minutes. And if the baking soda relieves it, you know you’ve got a food allergy. And once you know what’s causing it, you can either get treated for that food or stop eating it or try eating it only at a 4-day interval.

DEBRA: I did all of that. I went on a rotation diet. We identified what my food allergies were. I went on a rotation diet. I was on that diet for a year. And at the end of that year, I wasn’t allergic to any of those foods.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Isn’t it amazing that help is there for everybody that’s listening if they have food allergies?

DEBRA: It is.

DR. DORIS RAPP: If they find somebody that knows environmental medicine, you can be treated or you can treat it with just a diet of eating individual foods every four days rather than in sequence every day.

DEBRA: Well, here’s the most amazing thing that I found. After I saw how well this worked, I went to work for the doctor administering the provocative neutralization testing.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Who was the doctor?

DEBRA: What was his name? I don’t remember the first one. But then I went to work for Dr. McGovern. You know McGovern?

DR. DORIS RAPP: Oh, yes. Dr. McGovern was an absolutely wonderful doctor.

DEBRA: Oh, absolutely! And then I went to work for Dr. Allen Lavine. I’m sure you know him too.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Yes. And he’s more a research doctor than he is a clinical doctor I think, but he’s absolutely brilliant.

DEBRA: Yes, he is. Absolutely. So I had all this time observing people while I’m giving provocative neutralizing testing. Dr. McGovern got me started doing consulting by sending me off to the patients’ home to find out what toxic chemicals they were being exposed to.

The most amazing thing that I included from my observation was that one day, one of my patients went on vacation for two weeks. She came back and she said, “I can eat all my foods I’m allergic to.” What we figured out was that it was the toxic chemical overload that was making it impossible for her to eat the foods. It was too much on her body to have both chemical exposure and the food exposures. And when we went in and took the chemicals out of her house, her food allergies just went away.

DR. DORIS RAPP: It’s amazing. It really is like a barrel. If your barrel is overflowing, you’re having symptoms. If the things that fill up barrel are dust, mold, pollen, foods and chemicals, you can’t get rid of everything, but you can get an air purifier, a water purifier, eat organic foods. Just that would make you better because you’re going to have less in your barrel. And the more that you can decrease the number of allergenic things that you’re getting into, the more [inaudible 00:19:48] you are, the emptier that barrel, enough that you can get into things that previously caused trouble, you will not have difficulty.

DEBRA: That’s right. It’s just an overload. Wouldn’t you say? It’s just an overload.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Absolutely! An overload. So you don’t have to change everything. I hate to say this, but you don’t have to do everything that the doctor asked you to do. But once you got their barrel lowered below the tap, it won’t overflow and your symptoms will not come back. But if you binge –
Many times, for example, I have people that can’t eat a certain food and at Christmas, they’d like to celebrate, I might tell, “Go ahead and eat” the food they haven’t been able to eat if it doesn’t cause a really bad reaction and sure enough, they can eat it.
But if they binged every single day, they’d soon find that they were sensitive to it again. You have to use…

DEBRA: That’s what I found for myself too. We’re coming up on another commercial break in about 10 seconds, so I don’t want to ask you another question until we come back. I’ll just announce again, Dr. Rap’s website is DrRapp.com. If you go to her website…

DR. DORIS RAPP: And let me add this. They don’t have to buy my book. Go to the library for all the books. They have my book, Is This Your Child?. It came out 20 years ago, but it was a bestseller for good reasons. Read it and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it helped you.

DEBRA: I’m sure. Anyone who has a child should read this. You’re listening to 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. We’re here today with Dr. Doris Rapp. One of her books is Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call. Chemicals damage your body, brain, behavior and sex. I’m sitting here with this book right in front of me on my desk.

Dr. Rapp, let’s talk about the poisoning aspects of this. Certainly, people can get help as you’ve described in the first part of the show. A lot of people think, “Well, I don’t have allergies” or “I don’t have symptoms,” so they’re not motivated to do anything by the fact that they’re sick. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not being poisoned.

So can you tell us about some of these toxic chemicals and what they’re doing to our bodies?

DR. DORIS RAPP: Well, if a man sprays the lawn next door with toxic chemicals and he decides to conceive a baby, he’ll have trouble. His sperm will be damaged for at least a month or two. If a woman gets into toxic chemicals the first 90 days of her pregnancy, the first three months, she has a 70% chance of having a miscarriage, a stillborn or birth defect of the baby.

I think one of the thing that we have to do is test young couples that if they would like to reproduce, both the male and the female have to spend a few months getting their body in shape. They have to get rid of toxic chemicals. They have to stop the chemicals from going into their body and they have to get rid of all the toxic chemicals that they can and build up their nutrition. If they’re not willing to do that, then they shouldn’t be conceiving a child and putting them in our polluted world.

The average newborn baby now floats in 287 toxic chemicals. This means that baby is marinated for nine months in uterine fluid that is not good for it. It’s amazing to me that the baby is withstanding it as well as they are. There is no doubt that these chemicals cause birth defect, causes sterility (the male sperm count goes way down, the females also are less fertile), it causes problems in their immune system.

Many of these exposure to chemicals puts stresses in the body and allergies become evident that weren’t evident before. These chemicals can cause diabetes and thyroid disease and I believe that it contributes to Alzheimer’s and autism. Everone says, “What can we do about this cancer epidemic?”

My question is, “Why the hell are we doing it? We know what causes cancer and yet, we are doing as a country or as a nation or as a world, we are not doing what needs to be done so obviously to cut down on the known causes of cancer.

If you buy yourself a new synthetic mattress or carpet, the smells of toxic chemicals and paint with toxic paint and put all kinds of toxic furniture in your house, you will not be well. And if you get cancer, you may get better after the treatment, but you go back into that house and sleep on the same bed mattress and you breathe the air from the same bed, don’t be surprised if it comes back again.

Your body is precious. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, this is it! This is the best it’s going to be. Take care of your body. It is so precious. Clean it out, get rid of the chemicals, get on organic food, get a water purifier, get an air purifier and you’ll find that you’ll feel much better, you’re going to live longer.

There’s no sense in living longer in a line-up of other people in a wheelchair and a wet diaper. You have got to live longer, but feel better and you can do that, but you simply must take care of your precious little body by giving it the right nutrients, by giving it organic foods, by not eating processed foods and canned foods, by breathing good air and good water.

You’ve got more than a fighting chance to stay healthy. And if your children learn how to have a healthy baby, you’ll be much happier as grandparents.

DEBRA: I couldn’t have said that better. I frequently see advertisements and get emails for people wanting donations for cancer research and research for this disease and that disease. I just look at that and I say, “Instead of asking for money for research, why not just reduce toxic chemicals?”

We know! We know! There’s no question. There’s study after study after study these chemicals cause these diseases. And yet people continue to say, “Oh, I’m going to live my normal, toxic life and it must be caused by something else.”

We need to understand this as a nation, as a world. We need to really understand that toxic chemicals are what is making us sick. They’re the primary, underlying cause of virtually every illness and symptom. That is the thing that needs – we don’t even need research dollars. We just need people to stop using toxic chemicals. Wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you agree with that?

DR. DORIS RAPP: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We already have the answer and the big question is why haven’t we as a nation or as a world decided that we’ve got to put an end to it. How much worse does it have to get before we say, “Enough already”? When are we going to say stop using 24D on the lawn? We know it causes lymphomas. Why is it banned in many countries, but not banned in this country? How are we allowing the corporations to hire the lobbyists who then affects the politicians who pass the laws that allow increased pollution of our air, food, water and genetically engineered foods.

We have got to find when we vote for somebody what their opinion is of the environment and how important is it to clean it up. If they’re not interested in the environment, they’ve never passed any bills that shows that they want to protect and help our air, food and water stay pure, they’re not the right man to vote for.

DEBRA: I completely agree. And again, we’re coming up on the commercial break. So I’ll announce again that Dr. Rapp’s website is DrRapp.com. She’s got a lot of information. Go to her website, see her books, see what else she has to offer and sign up to be on her mailing list and she will you lots of information about toxic chemicals and allergies and how to be healthy. It’s just a lot.

Also, you can go to my website. An easy way to get there is by just going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And across the top of the page, there’s a menu that will take you to different parts of my website. One is enormous Q&A where you can write in and ask a question and I and my readers will answer. We’ve got over 3000 questions and more than 2000 answers. I’ve got a director with more than 500 websites that are selling non-toxic products. So there really is no reason why everybody in the world can’t live in a totally non-toxic way. We have all the information. It’s just everybody making the choice.

So we’ll be back after this station break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be back with Dr. Doris Rapp on Toxic Free Talk Radio.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Doris Rapp, pioneering medical doctor in the field of environmental medicine and author of many books on toxic chemicals and how they affect our body including Is This Your Child?, Is This Your Child’s World? and Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call.

Dr. Rapp, give us some of the dramatic cases that you had where you saw really amazing kind of damage from chemical exposure and then amazing recoveries.

DR. DORIS RAPP: One of the most impressive things is the air purifier. I can remember one mother that put the air purifier in her infant’s bedroom and in about an hour later, she went rushing in the room thinking the baby had died. It was the first time the baby was breathing quietly. She didn’t realize that babies don’t make noise when they breathe at night. That was pretty dramatic.

I was seeing hundreds and hundreds of children that diet and just tried to diet in my book, I never saw them. It’s the book, Is This Your Child?. They tried to diet within five to seven days, the children changed and one mother said, “My bananas kid is gone. In the past, he would take a hose from the basement and slide all over the basement in the water that is spread around.”

I had so many children who wanted to commit suicide who had put their heads, broken every window in the house, broke every mirror and piece of glass in the house. They were just violent and the mothers were desperate, in tears, absolutely frantic. They put the child on the diet and in five to seven days, the child was better.

If it’s dust, mold, pollen and chemicals, the air purifier may have a miraculous effect. You can buy one purifier, put it on wheels and put it in the various rooms in your house for two to four hours on high and the air in that room will be clean. The sickest person in the house should put it in their bedroom four hours before bed, shut the door, turn it on high and then close and open the door when they go to bed and you’ll find that that air in that room will be so good, then they sleep better than they ever slept.

So the sometimes, the answers are easy – one day with an air purifier. If it doesn’t work in a month, you can get most of your money back and you can check on that by calling 480-905-9195. You can get a discount on the air purifier. That’s 480-905-9195.

The diet is right on my website. You don’t have to go any place to get it. You can try it. Also exclude any food that you absolutely crave. For example , if you’re sunflower seed-aholic or a [inaudible 00:42:09]-holid or any kind of a –holic. Whatever it is that you crave that you can’t live without, if you have a food allergy, that would be the substance. If you write your two favorite foods and two favorite beverages and you’ve got a food sensitivity, stop those for a week and you’ll probably see you’re better in five to seven days and then add them back one at a time, find out which one causes trouble. And if it’s approved, baking soda is very effective in stopping allergic reactions. As little as an eighth or a quarter of a teaspoon in a glass of water will stop many allergic reactions in 15 minutes. It’s a good thing to have in your person if you have allergies because it helps right away.

And there’s a whole book on it called the pH Miracle. Dr. Robert Young who wrote the book feels that it prevents cancer. There’s a lot of evidence that if you can keep your urine alkaline by using a pH stick checking it, if your urine stays alkaline, you will be much more well than you would otherwise. There are even claims that you don’t develop cancer if you can keep your body alkaline.

DEBRA: And toxic chemicals actually make your body acid.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Oh, yes.

DEBRA: So that’s another reason to not be drinking tap water and have toxic chemicals in your home because it all makes your body more acid.
Which air filter do you recommend?

DR. DORIS RAPP: I use the Austin because it’s the only that I know that takes 3000 chemicals out of the air and therefore, I like that one.

DEBRA: Mm-hmmm… good…

DR. DORIS RAPP: They all take out 99.6% of dust and mold and pollen and particulates and all those things, but you have to have one that takes off the chemicals because the chemicals…
DEBRA: Right, that’s exactly right.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Every place, from every place, you’ve got to take it. And if you do that, everyone in your family will be better. If you don’t do it, then they will be more prone to become sick.

DEBRA: Also, I just want to – because an air filter can be a really powerful thing as you’ve described in order to show the difference between living with chemicals and living without and protecting yourself. So I just want to make sure that everybody understands when Dr. Rapp says air filter, she’s not talking about a little, tiny air filter that you might find at a discount store.

DR. DORIS RAPP: Right! It’s a machine that’s going to cost $250 to $700. It really purifies the air. You put it in a room and go in an hour later, you’ll smell the difference.

DEBRA: You will smell the difference. When I was first dealing with my own environmental illness, the first thing that I did was I got an air filter. And not I only got an air filter for my home, I got one for my car. There was a period of time when I had to go work as a temp in an office and I thought, “How am I going to sit in this office? I have to make some money.”

I got a tabletop filter as opposed to a whole room filter and I brought – but this tabletop filter, this big, round canister that was about a foot across and about three feet high. I just put it on my desk in a big, open room and people would come have their break at my desk. They couldn’t quite put their finger on it, but they knew that they felt better when they were standing around my desk. So air filters can make an enormous difference.

DR. DORIS RAPP: It can change your life. I have parents buy them for the classrooms. The problem is at the end of the year, the teachers notice that if you put one in your child’s classroom, the infections goes way down. That’s because it takes dust, mold and pollen and chemicals out of the air, which cause the nose to get swollen and so you have more allergies and infections in your sinuses and your ears.

They notice that everybody, they had less illness in the classroom, the academic performance went up in the classroom. And when the child was leaving for that year and went into the next classroom, the teachers almost always bought an air purifiers themselves for the classroom because they saw that it was so effective.

And of course, ideally, in a wonderful world, the school systems would put in ventilation systems that purified the air and cleaned the air, so that the children aren’t sick with infections and allergies needlessly. That will come in a new world when it gets there.
DEBRA: The new world that we’re creating.

DR. DORIS RAPP: As far as I’m concerned, we really have to buckle down right now and decide we want to save this planet because we cannot do what we are presently doing and think for a second that we’ll make it to the end of the century.

You can’t kill off all the bees with chemicals. You’re not going to have any bee-pollinated food or crops. You can’t spray the ground with toxic chemicals so that the foods aren’t able to be eaten for several years. We cannot genetically-engineer everything in sight. Read the book Genetic Roulette by Jeffrey Smith and Seeds of Deception. When you read these books, you’ll understand that you absolutely have to read the labels and make sure they say that they’re not genetically-engineered.

And of course, the people that are in the chemical industry are trying to pay the government to forbid from putting any signs on the labels saying that something is genetically-engineered or not genetically-engineered because if you can’t find out, it’s not written on the label, you’re going to buy the product anyhow.

DEBRA: Well, this has been a wonderful hour with you, Dr. Rapp. I’m sure that everybody is listening is inspired to make some changes. I just feel very privileged that you came on the show. We’ll certainly have you on again.
DR. DORIS RAPP: I just want to say something if I can…

DEBRA: Sure!

DR. DORIS RAPP: …and that is if we could clone people like you, the world would be a much better place. You’ve spent your whole life trying to educate people with fast, easy, inexpensive ways of coping with environmental challenges. And so I want to pay a tribute to you right now because you’ve done so much – probably eight books. If you haven’t read the book, you don’t know how much work it is to get it right. It means that you’ve spent much more time than the average individual trying to contribute to our world and that’s a real tribute to you.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. Well, we’re at the end of our time. Let me give Dr. Rapp’s website again. It’s DrRapp.com. You can go there and sign up for her newsletter, her mailing list and she’ll send you lots of information. You can also go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can sign up for my newsletter too. There’s lots of free information on both of my sites. We are united in our passion for making this a toxic-free world and you can help, each one of you can help. We can achieve this.
That’s all for today . This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

The man who started this campaign—Andy Igrejas, National Campaign Director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families—joins me to discuss their “Mind the Store” campaign. We’ll talk about the campaign, the results so far, why each of us as citizens and consumers need to be involved in changing what’s on the shelf in stores, and what we can do. As consumers we have power. Stores sell what we want to buy. We need to let them know we don’t want toxics. mindthestore.saferchemicals.org

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Petition Asking Top 10 Retailers to Stop Selling Products That Contain the “Hazardous 100” Chemicals

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Andy Igrejas

Date of Broadcast: April 25, 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’s toxic chemicals all around, we can still be healthy, happy, productive and make the world a better place.

This is Thursday, April 25th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about the Mind the Store Campaign that’s being done by Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And they’re asking the top 10 retailers to remove from their shelves products, all products, that contain one or more of a list of a hundred hazardous chemicals.

My guest today will be Andy Igrejas. He’s the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And he’s running this campaign.

But before I introduce Andy, I want to tell you something that happened to me yesterday. I want to talk to you about choice—which has everything to do with what we’re talking about today and everything to do with toxic chemicals.

Yesterday, I received in the mail a letter telling me that I was part of a class action suit for a product that I had purchased during a certain time period which was found to be defective. And since I was one of the people who had purchased it, and my name was on a list of having purchased it, that I was now one of the people that was part of the class action suit.

And what was disturbing to me was that they didn’t write to me and say that there’s a class action suit, “Do you want to be part of it?” They wrote to me and said, “There’s a class action suit, and you’ve been named. And if you want to opt out of it, you can.” I read it, and I found that there was no financial compensation, that what I would get is this product again. And there was $830,000 of legal fees. And I wondered, “Well, if I’m somebody who would benefit from this, am I responsible for my portion of the $830,000 of legal fees?” I got about that far, and I decided I didn’t want to have any part of this. And so, I filled out that form.

Now, what it took for me to opt out of something that I never agreed to be part of in the first place was that I had to fill up the form, I had to copy it front and back—and I felt like I needed to make a two-sided copy so the second page where all the signature was would not get lost—and then, I had to address three envelopes, send it to three different attorney’s offices, all to say no to something that I didn’t agree to in the first place.

Now, this is also a tactic that’s used often where they say in some advertising, “Well, here, try this free for 30 days. We won’t charge your card until day 31, but you have to opt out.” And of course, if you forget to opt out, then your card gets charged, et cetera, et cetera.

So, what I would like to see is I would like to see that we all have a choice to opt in instead of being required to opt out. And it’s the same thing with toxics.

We live in a world where the default is to be exposed to toxic chemicals, yet there’s no form that I can fill out that says, “I’m opting out of this toxic world. I want to live in the clean, safe, healthy world.”

And what we need to do is be creating that world. We can create it within our home to a very large degree enough that we can restore our health. But there’s other things that we need to do for us to be opting in to a safe world. We need to be creating that world because, at the moment, it doesn’t exist.

So, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have Andy on today so that we can talk about something that we all can do to make a difference to get retailers to pay more attention to the kinds of products that are being sold in mass market stores.

Andy, welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio!

Andy Igrejas: Well, thank you very much for having me here. I appreciate it.

DEBRA: Thanks for being here. Let me just tell my audience something about you. You’re the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And prior to that, you headed the Environmental Health Program at the National Environmental Trust for seven years. And you’ve helped chemical policy reform on the national agenda through work on the Kids Safe Chemical Act. And you’ve also worked on Chemical Security Right to Know Food Safety California initiatives and a list of a whole lot of things that are way too long. But I think everybody gets the idea that you have a lot of background and you’ve done a lot on the level of legislation and organizations to be working on that other retail and regulatory part (where I’ve been working for the past 30 years on helping consumers navigate the non-toxics from the toxic stuff when they’re making consumer product choices).

It’s become really clear to me recently that I think it’s just a new level of awareness on my part of the necessity of changing regulations and getting retailers to do a different thing. So that’s why I’m having you here today, because I want all my listeners to understand the importance of this as well.

But first, tell us how you personally became interested in working in this field.

Andy Igrejas: Well, that’s interesting. I haven’t been asked that in a while. I’ve always been interested in these issues and maybe it does get back to that agenda. I grew up in a very industrial neighborhood [unclear 06:24]. I really grew up right underneath Exit 148 […]

DEBRA: Mm-hmmm…

Andy Igrejas: There are a bunch of factories there. There was a tube plant, […], packaging plant, a pharmaceutical plant all humming with people. All of them has since closed. They’ve just gone to other things because you can make the same stuff more cheaply in developing countries unfortunately and not abide by the rules and regulations and pay people peanuts. I grew up there. And so I’ve always had an interest in the human health impacts of environmental issues.

I started a club in my high school to work to publicize the dangers of the incinerators that was planned for the nearby city of Newark. And when I dug into that as far back as high school, we found that, well, what makes the incinerator ash toxic. And it’s that there are toxic chemicals used in the packaging basically the products that people send to the incinerator. You release some of these chemicals when you burn them. And in other cases, you actually create compounds called combustion byproducts.

And that started for me my interest in “Gee, isn’t there”—part of the problem is what are these chemicals in the first place, what are things made of in the first place. And at different times, at different points in my career, I’ve worked on trying to move the concern from just the air and the water up to a more fundamental level of what do we make things from and how can we switch those things from being toxic things to being safer and healthier things.

DEBRA: Yes, that’s been my interest too from not as young an age as you. But when I was in my early 20’s, I became very ill from exposure to toxic chemicals in ordinary consumer products in my home. And my first question was: “Well, what are these chemicals? I have never had any attention on them at all.” And suddenly, I was wanting to know “Well, what’s in the toothpaste? What’s in the hair spray? What’s in the perfume? And how come they’re toxic? And how come they’re making me sick? And where can I find a product that doesn’t have this in it?”

And those questions where—I mean I couldn’t just go down to Wal-Mart, for example, and buy the non-toxic perfume. And this is what we’re dealing with in the world today—as I’ve said earlier in the show, choices. How do we have those choices? How do we know those choices?

So, now you’re with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Tell me about that organization.

Andy Igrejas: Sure! Well, we organized this a few years ago because we felt that there was a need to have a campaign from all the different groups who worked on this from different angles. Together, we were really trying to put chemical reform on the national agenda. And it required big, national environment groups working closely with the community-based groups, working closely with health organizations that don’t have an environmental focus, that are just focused on individual diseases like autism and breast cancer and other things and working with health professionals.

So that’s what Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is. It’s a coalition that came together to advocate for reforming the federal system so that it addresses these issues.

DEBRA: And we need to take a commercial break. I need to stop you because we need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio with Debra Lynn Dadd.

Andy Igrejas: Igrejas is fine.

DEBRA: Igrejas. He’s a national campaign director for Safer Chemical, Healthy Families. And we’re talking about their Mind the Store campaign.

I interrupted you as we went to the commercial break. Was there more you wanted to say about your coalition, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families?

Andy Igrejas: No, that’s fine. Just that this coalition is environmental and health groups. Health professionals and businesses came together and demand comprehensive overhaul for chemical policies so that we are ensuring that the products that end up on the shelves and that we take into our homes contain chemicals that have really been assessed for their safety and they’re being used safely and using the latest scientific recommendations that have been proposed the American Academy of Pediatrics, […]

There’s legislation to do that, the Safe Chemicals Act. And we’re fighting hard for that.

But at the same time, the chemical industry has really mastered the art of promoting gridlock in Washington, powerful companies. Exxon Mobile, a lot of people think of it as an oil company only, but it’s also one of the top two chemical producers in the country. Dow Chemical Dupont, they’ve really banded to block the reform.

And so, in the meantime, we created this Mind the Store campaign—people can see it at MindtheStore.org. sort of our world’s colliding, you and me—to try and take the power that consumers can have to make better decisions about the chemicals in there that are in the products we’re buying and to increase the power of that by focusing on the retailers.

It’s very hard for the average person to keep track of so many chemicals. But the retailers can! And so we’re asking let’s ask them to take a bigger bite out of this problem and promote broader health and safety goals than just BPA In baby bottles or phthalates in nail polish.

DEBRA: Consumers, I just want to underscore what you’ve just said about the power of consumers. Consumers have so much power. We don’t even know how much power we have. What stores wants to sell, what ends up on the shelf is what you are buying. And so whatever it is that we say that we want via our dollars, how we spend our dollars is what is going to end up on the shelf.

If we were to all say that we were not going to buy any toxic chemicals for a week, say—well, I don’t ever buy them. But if we could get enough people together so that Wal-Mart or Target or any of these stores were to have no sales of toxic chemicals for a week, that would make a big impression on them. And they would say—

I mean, we already see Wal-Mart is already having some less toxic products. Target is having less toxic products. In fact, if you go to MindtheStore.org, one of the things that they have is a list of the top 10 retailers in it. They tell you what these retailers have already done or haven’t done.

And so, over a 30 year period, I see that there has been a change. I see that there’s more and more non-toxic products as when there were 30 years ago, more choices for us. It’s not a shortage of products. It’s a shortage of awareness and commitment and of course having the opposition of the chemical companies that don’t want to give up their chemical production.

But we have the upper hand, we really do. And so if we can’t get the legislation pass because of what the chemicals are doing, we can’t get things changed in the stores by the choices that we make.

So, go on about your campaign.

Andy Igrejas: No, that’s exactly right. And I think it’s hard. The awareness of this issue for your activism and people like you around the country has increased, and it really has changed the marketplace. And in some places, it’s changed it fairly decisively. The markets for certain products, certain chemicals, have dried up fairly quickly.

The chemical industry fears that because you can buy off congressmen basically, but you can’t buy off everybody.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

Andy Igrejas: That costs too much money. And people, when it comes to sticking up for their own health, people don’t see these trade-offs between—most people don’t believe, and they’re right enough to believe it, that not having toxic chemicals means that we won’t have products, that things will grind to a halt.

At the same time, it’s hard to just use your individual purchasing power because a lot of the toxic chemical that are in things that they don’t associate with chemicals. It’s not just the cleaners and the perfumes. It’s the flame retardants that are in the polyurethane foam in your coach.

I’ve been working on these issues for a while. And I have to admit, when the flame retardant thing really started breaking, I realized, “Hey, I have one of these pillows. I’ve been sleeping on this thing that I thought was cool and modern Swedish foam pillow that fits my neck.” And it had this weird smell I remember when I got it. I was like, “Man, I’ve been working on this for a while. And I was bringing a flame retardant-laden pillow after doing this stuff during the day.”

So, we created this campaign to say—I also think people will look after their own families. But I think most people, good people, get the bigger picture and recognize that we need to take care of each other. And it shouldn’t just be “Well, I can afford it, I can go to the healthy products in aisle five. But some other poor slob can get the cheapest thing in aisle two.”

I think we recognize it, especially for some of the most dangerous chemicals we’ve known about for a long time. Nobody really should be exposed to them. And we should be driving it out of the marketplace.

DEBRA: I agree, we should.

Andy Igrejas: So, this is an attempt to do that. It’s to give you some tools by focusing on your retailers—and you can do it by email, you can do it when you go into the store and ask them what are they doing about this bigger list, this list of the Hazardous 100 we’re calling it. Ask the retailers.

I appreciate what you said about the website. We try to give them credit. Many of them have taken steps to address these things. But they’ve sort of done it after things have been in the press for a while, et cetera. And this says, “Well, what if we address a bigger group of chemicals and all the retailers do it at the same time? They could really make a very big difference.”

And they do care about what their customers are asking them to do.

So, we hope that it’s a way for people to not just look out for yourself by not buying this or that, but also to take a bigger action, help by focusing on the retailers that will protect broader groups of people from more chemicals.

DEBRA: Very good. So when we come back from the break, I’m going to ask you some questions about this list of the Hazardous 100 chemicals and how—well, I’ll wait and ask you the question when we come back.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.

So Andy, let’s talk about these 100+ hazardous chemicals. Here’s my question. I’ve been looking at products for more than 30 years as you have. And the biggest problem that I have is disclosure. I can look at a label. And if they give me the names of the chemicals, I can look up those chemicals.

I used to look them up in a chemical dictionary and toxicology books. But now, you can just look them up online. You could type in “formaldehyde” and “BPA” and find out what the health effects are.

And yet, because of regulations, and because of trade secrets, and all kinds of other reasons, there can be toxic chemicals in products that are never going on the label. You can find them out in ways by looking at trade journals and things like that (which I’ve been doing all this time). But there are so many differences between formulas and materials that are used. And the labels are not accurate.

So, if I were a retailer, I could say, “Okay, I’m totally in agreement with you with your Mind the Store program. Let’s just get rid of the Hazardous 100 chemicals. How am I going to do that?”

Andy Igrejas: They have some experience with this already. So, Wal-Mart, when it first started getting involved in this issue, and I’ve talked with them—some directly, and then their colleagues have dealt with that more. And then there are some things they talk about freely and others I think that they’re proprietary about. They’re motivated partly to get in front of consumer preferences so they didn’t have another thing like they had with those BPA baby bottles where the market evaporated for it, and they had already bought next year’s baby bottles. They also had, from my understanding, some environmental compliance issues where, believe it or not, they were—and this makes sense as a bunch of your listeners do. They would get rid of some inventory as solid wastes. And some of it turned out to actually classify as toxic waste because of chemicals in it. And it made them think, “My God! How does this work? Who’s minding the store?” And they realized that they had to.

So, in terms of how they would do this, they’ve shown that, especially with the market power they have, but I think also for the other people on this list, they can actually say to their suppliers, “Hey, we need to know if you’re using any of these chemicals.”

And it’s a bulletin they can send out to all their suppliers, “Do any of the products that we buy from you have this list of chemicals? We need to know. And if they do, we’re going to ask you to stop using them by this date or we won’t want to sell your product.”

And they have done that kind of thing. A couple of years, it became publicized. They sent a note to their suppliers about a number of different flame retardant chemicals. And it leaked to the press. But it was basically issued in December and said, “By June, we don’t want any product that contains these chemicals in it.”

DEBRA: I love that that’s been happening at Wal-Mart. I know people who work at Wal-Mart, so I know that that’s been happening. Kudos to Wal-Mart for doing that.

But on the consumer end, when I walk into my Wal-Mart store—which is not that often, but I do occasionally go to Wal-Mart.

And if I do, I’m looking to see where are the non-toxic products and how would I know that?

And as a consumer…

Andy Igrejas: You wouldn’t.

DEBRA: I mean there’s no label on it that says “Wal-Mart has determined that these chemicals are not in here.”

I’m trying to see the connection between how we can—like you have a coalition of different organizations and interest groups and bringing them altogether around legislation. This is so interesting to me that you’re doing this because I really see that, in order for this really to change, there needs to be a cooperation between consumers, retailers, manufacturers and regulations.

Andy Igrejas: That’s right.

DEBRA: …and that there needs to be communication, that there needs to be a decision that we’re all going to come out of this together in a way that makes economic sense.

I’m certainly not trying to make Dupont go bankrupt. What I would love is for Dupont to start making non-toxic products. I would like everybody to see that if we’re going to be healthy, and if we’re going to have a planet that’s not destroyed, then this is the direction that we need to go—to have there be disclosure on labels, to have there be—

I don’t really want there to be a central organization that verifies. But if Wal-Mart has a program—and I see that they do—where they’re saying to manufacturers, “We don’t want products that have X, Y and Z chemicals on them,” then somewhere, you should be able to go to their website or something, and there should be a list or a shelf-talker or a sticker or something that says, “This is part of Wal-Mart’s Mind the Store program” or whatever they’re going to call it. “You can go online and find out we have verified that it doesn’t have this and this and this in it.

Now, it might not end up being perfect because one thing that I see is that I have my own list of hazardous thousand or more chemicals that I don’t want to see because I’m always assessing products and choosing ones that don’t have the chemicals I want to avoid.

So, I can see that a product might say, “Well, it doesn’t contain formaldehyde. But what else does it contain?”

So there’s many different levels. I’m just really interested in what if Target comes to you and says, “Okay, let’s take out all these chemicals” or some smaller retailer than Wal-Mart, what do you see is the process that they’re going to follow?

Andy Igrejas: That is a good question. And I think it’s a more sophisticated question. It makes sense for Toxic Free Talk Radio that you’ll be ahead on the curve on this. I think you’ve put your finger on a number of things.

I think one of them is consumers have a certain amount of power, but one of our themes for this campaign is with great market power comes great responsibility. People who buy huge quantities of things in bulk has market power. So it is the case with any one of this retailers. In their world, they really have the ability to get answers to the questions that they want if the penalty is that they won’t sell something.

What we would like to do is have each of them respond that they would like to work with us on how to implement this in ways that are achievable for them and are meaningful for the people that sell to them.

So, we’re hoping to have a meaningful process where we can work this through with them.

DEBRA: Good! After the break, let’s continue this […] because I’d like to hear if anybody has responded; and if so, what did they say?

But we’re going to take a break first. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.

And before we go on with the interview, I just want to make sure that you know how to get more information about the campaign. You go MindtheStore.org. And if you want more information about Toxic Free Talk Radio, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And from there, you can also go to links for other parts of my website including Debra’s List that have more than 500 websites where you can buy non-toxic products (even though they’re not on the shelf at Wal-Mart). I have a huge Q&A with thousands of questions and even more thousands of answers. And you can call me for a consultation if you want. There’s lots of information on my website about how you can find, choose and purchase and toxic-free products.

So, Andy, in this last segment, tell us what the response has been from the retailers. Anybody responded?

Hello, Andy?

Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize, I hit the mute by mistake.

None of the retailers have responded officially yet except to say that they have the request and that they’re considering it. In our letter to them, we gave until June 1st. And we recognize that it’s a big request. It’s a leap from doing this for a handful of chemicals to doing it for over a hundred. And we wouldn’t want to get a negative response because it seems like we were asking them to do something impossible and let them absorb some of the materials and other things that we’ve provided that do show or suggest how to do this.

So, June 1st is when we’ll find out what people’s official responses are. And I’m hoping that they’ll be positive responses and that that’ll be the beginning of a process with us to develop a policy internally to identify where they have these chemicals in their supply chains and to move away from them.

But you raised a point before. You asked them what the response was. I just wanted to come back to it. It was the idea that, even if you get something that doesn’t just have formaldehyde, what does it have. On the website, you’ll see there’s a bullet called Resources for Retailers . It’s very much about this phenomenon. We don’t just want to move from known bad to unknowns. You want to move from known bad things to known good things.

DEBRA: Let me interrupt you for a second. Hold on, wait. I’m looking at your page right now at MindtheStore.org, and I don’t see that Resources for Retailers.

Andy Igrejas: It’s over on the right. There’s a list of The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100. Then it that it says Resources for Retailers.

DEBRA: Oh, mine says “Why Mind the Store?” I don’t have “Resources for Retailers”. I have The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100+, And Why Mind the Store?. I have A Letter to Retailers.

Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. If you click on any one of those, that becomes a choice for you. It’s not on the home page.

DEBRA: Oh, I see. So, listeners, what you need to do is click on any one of those three buttons. It’ll take you to another page.

And then, there’s a menu on the right that has The Top 10 Retailers, Hazardous 100+, Why Mind the Store Resources for Retailers, Methodology and Partners.

And so, there’s a lot more information inside once you click on something than there is on the home page.

Okay, thank you, Andy. Go ahead.

Andy Igrejas: Well, part of the reason we know this works is the most advanced experienced in this country anyway with this kind of thing has been with the healthcare sector, in particular, Kaiser Permanente and the Western States version of the Catholic HMO’s. They used to be called Catholic Healthcare West. Now it’s called [unclear 32:08].

And they, as part of their mission to reduce harm to their patients—first, do no harm—they put policies together to try and at first just identify the chemicals of concern that people were exposed to through medical devices like IV tubing and IV bags.

But they [unclear 32:30] to include the building materials in the facilities—the sheets, the fabrics, and now they’re even getting on to the food that they serve.

They sent these specifications that, basically, “We have all these purchasing power as Kaiser and as Catholic Healthcare West in this market. And we don’t want things that have these chemicals of concern.”

But also, when you don’t bring those things, you also want to make sure that what you’re replacing it with doesn’t have any of these characteristics.

And so, they set those specifications. And they specified what the standards were for what they substitute it with. And it was interesting. it had this ripple effect. It’s changed the marketplace and increased the market for safer building materials, flooring, carpeting, medical devices.

And so, in the Resources thing, you’ll see that there’s something from a group called the Business NGO Working Group (or Biz NGO for short). It’s a guide for how to implement this kind of policy. And it mostly comes from that healthcare experience.
And so, we’re trying to take something that has worked and some techniques that have worked, just some very practical things, and have the retailers use them in a broader way and apply them to a broader set of chemicals.

DEBRA: This is very good news. I really want our listeners to understand that, behind the scenes, there’s a whole lot going on to make the world a less toxic place to live. And what we mostly see in the mainstream media is sensational stories about BPA and phthalates and fire retardants and all those kinds of things because the mainstream media is pretty sensational.

But there really has been progress if you know where to look. We have things like Kaiser Permanente like Andy just described. And we have more non-toxic products to choose from. And there really is a trend.

Wouldn’t you say there’s a trend in the right direction?

Andy Igrejas: I do feel and believe there is a trend. It’s hard to measure if it is keeping up with the problem. In other words…

DEBRA: I understand what you’re saying.

Andy Igrejas: But I think there is a trend. I think part of this little letter that I wrote on this book that I called Why Mind the Store? is that I think we need to accelerate the trend. The thing you just described, which is a real difficult thing for activists when you’re being ethical. We want to educate the public about these threats, but kind of like you mentioned, it’s just another story about how there’s something bad in something. And it seem like you can’t do anything about it and the world is coming to an end. That’s very much not what we want.

We want to educate people so they’re aware of the problem and they can take meaningful action to help improve things.

I think a lot of these improvements hopefully do have to happen through policy changes because only the government can force the testing of those chemicals as a condition for them depending on the market.

But in the meantime, we have seen that these marketplace initiatives can really make a big difference. But they need to be more than just the chemical of the month. It can’t just be “Well, BPA is in the news. So okay, we’ll deal with BPA.”

So, that’s what we’d like to think. We’re making it easier for the retailers to basically go, “Oh, okay. Here’s this combined fire power of a lot of the non-profit community. They’re saying ‘focus on this group of chemicals’. They’re giving us credit for what we’ve already done. And we’re giving consumers a hook to also say, “Well, here’s a way to use the [unclear 36:20] as a consumer and focus on something bigger than the chemical of the month.”

And so, we’re hopeful that we can accelerate that trend you’ve described. We have a trend, but I think the trend, it needs to be accelerated to really match the scale of what is worth doubling back to that the scientists, the doctors keep telling us more and more that we’ve been they think understating the role that chemicals play in the chronic illness and the health problems that we have in this country.

DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely! A few years ago when Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families first started, you published a really excellent report about how toxic chemicals are contributing to various health problems and the cost of how toxic chemicals are contributing to the cost of healthcare which I have been linking and linking and linking and linking to ever since.

Andy Igrejas: Thank you.

DEBRA: It’s so important for people to understand that. I think that—not to get off the subject—a lot of people still don’t even understand that there’s a problem.

But we only just have a couple of minutes left. So I want to encourage people to go to your website, MindtheStore.org. I encourage you to go on and look at the website for Safety Chemicals, Healthy Families is doing overall.

And as we finish up—we have a minute left I think, about a minute left—just tell us quickly what consumers can do in our every day lives. What can we do to help this?

Andy Igrejas: I think the basic thing is that we know make a difference for reducing your own chemical exposure are things you probably go over a lot in this show. There’s avoiding processed food because the packaging is a big source of chemical exposure; eating more whole foods (organic ones if you can get them easily and afford them).

There’s a certain big ticket things like the flame retardants. So, buying mattresses and furniture that don’t have these flame retardants in them, avoiding the chemical-intensive cleaners and cosmetics, those are things you can do to protect yourself.

There’s a bunch of resources. It sounds like you have the best catalog of anyone.

DEBRA: I think I do.

Andy Igrejas: But I think in the meantime…

DEBRA: [unclear 38:36] in the marketplace, in terms of the marketplace, helping retailers understand. You can go to MindtheStore.org. And right there, you can send a letter to the retailers. You can put in your first name, your last name, your email and your zip code. Just click the green arrow and send your letter.

Andy, thank you so much for being with us today. I’ve learned a lot about what you’re doing. I have more appreciation of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families as an organization. And I’ll talk to everybody tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we’re going to just have open phones. So I want to hear from all of you. I want you to call me and tell me what you’re concerned about, what your questions are.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Toxic Free Talk Radio.