Art | Resources
Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested?
I remember, more than thirty years ago, when I believed that if a product was sold in a store it was safe. Because the government wouldn’t allow a product that harmed consumers to be sold.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Here’s an article from the New York Times that explains our current situation with regards to toxic chemicals:
Lumber Liquidators Tumbles After Selling Toxic Flooring
I find it very interesting that Lumber Liquidators is having troubles after a story on 60 minutes reported the store was selling flooring that emitted excessing formaldehyde.
There is now a federal investigation going on, their stock has fallen dramatically, their CEO has quit…
If this kind of reporting were to happen for other toxic products, it would greatly speed their removal from the marketplace.
Buckaroo Organics
Organic skin care products for moms and kids, made by a mom who “struggled to find products that weren’t full of harsh chemicals. Products that could actually heal skin issues and were safe for babies.” So she and her husband created a skin care line that is organic, simple, and safe…and even includes a laundry powder that are safe for your skin, made from soapnuts and natural minerals and wool balls to use instead of scented fabric softener sheets. Laundry products contain no fragrance and body care products are fragrance-free or scented with essential oils.
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Listen to Debra’s 2015 interview with Lindsay Herron, Co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics |
Skin and Laundry Products for Baby: Organic, Simple, Safe
My guest today is Lindsay Herron, co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics in Bozeman, Montana. She and her husband make products designed to prevent, heal and soothe skin irritation. “It is a dream job for me,” says Lindsay. “Feeling passionate and dedicated about the work we get to do is such a gift.” In her former career, Lindsay worked as a Mental Health and Licensed Addictions Therapist. She built two practices serving rural areas in Montana. Prior to that she worked as a bilingual counselor serving Hispanic women and domestic violence victims in Raleigh, NC. What she has learned through her work, is that at the core, she loves people. She learns new things everyday and appreciate lessons that are both positive and negative. She enjoys quality time with her family, skiing, and camping…”anything outdoors where I can unplug from technology and connect with the important things in life!” www.buckaroo-organics.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Skin and Laundry Products for Baby: Organic, Simple, Safe
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lindsay Herron
Date of Broadcast: May 21, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Thursday, May 21st, 2015. It’s a beautiful day in Clearwater, Florida.
I’m feeling a little out of breath at the moment because I decided that while the opening song is playing that I would exercise. And so I’ve been sitting here doing arm exercises because one of the things about getting toxic chemicals out of your body is you just need to get your lymph system moving. Your lymph system doesn’t move unless you move your body. It doesn’t have a pump like your heart. And so your lymph fluid just sits there in your body, not moving waste out unless you move. And so I just decided that I was just going to move my body during the opening song.
Anyway, I’m here breathing now, but I think that that’s a good idea. I’m going to just continue to do this. And if you feel like you just want to get up and move while you’re listening to the opening song, when you listen to this show tomorrow or the next day and whenever, just do so. I’m just looking at different ways to get exercise into my life even if only a minute at a time.
But that’s not the subject of today’s show. Today, we are going to talk about skin and laundry products for baby, and my guest – this is a new business, my guest is a lovely woman who has three children. And she wanted to have some simple, safe, organic products that she could use that would be safe for her children’s skin. And so she created her own.
Her name is Lindsay Herron. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics in Bozeman, Montana. Hi, Lindsay.
LINDSAY HERRON: Hey. Good morning.
DEBRA: Good morning. How are you today?
LINDSAY HERRON: I guess it’s morning here, maybe it’s almost afternoon there.
DEBRA: It is just past afternoon here. But people are listening all over the world, you know? And so it could be anytime, anywhere.
LINDSAY HERRON: That is true. I am very, very honored to be here today.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me.
So tell us your story about why you started this and how it all happened.
LINDSAY HERRON: When we got started, anyone that starts something, it was an idea at least for us that came organically, to say the least. We had kids and with having children, I became aware of lots of things that I hadn’t previously been aware of – what kind of stroller I needed, what kind of food we should be eating. All of these things got thrown at me.
And what I really found was this hyperawareness to have the best environment for them to create a healthy environment for their bodies to grow. And so I dug in and started reading and doing research. And I also happened to be married to a chemical engineer that is also very health-conscious.
So by nature, we had that going for us before that. And then when we had babies and we started registering for things, we registered for cloth diapers and we were growing our own food.
We noticed that there were a lot of things that you had to do for cloth diaper care. And with that came detergents. And so our whole evolution of our product line and our mission statement and all of that really stems from our laundry detergent from being a cloth-diapering mom.
What we found is that we needed specialty laundry detergent and it couldn’t leave any residue and all of these things, this laundry list of things that came with that and all this care. And when I dug into the detergents that we need to be using, I found, first of all, that they are very expensive. I also became a bit knowledgeable of laundry detergents that are on the shelves and was also pretty shocked about things that were in it, and then also finding out a lot of health concerns that are linked to a lot of these chemicals that are on shelves that really, I didn’t feel like anyone was talking about in my circle.
And so we started there.
DEBRA: That’s an excellent place to start. So from that beginning then, how did you – I’m always interested to know how a person who isn’t a big business person, how do you start a small business like this to make a non-toxic product?
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, I’m on a learning curve every single day.
DEBRA: I understand.
LINDSAY HERRON: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was a counselor and just went to school to be a mental health and addictions counselor. My husband works in the energy industry. And really, I would say, everyday, what motivates us is our passion and mission to make a change.
And also, we had this idea. Our laundry detergent is very unique and we can talk about that at some point. But really, I feel like God gifted us this idea and then has opened a lot of doors along the way to help us get it started.
We’ve had a lot of people that are experts in the industry, a lot of lawyers and patents attorneys, and things that we are not experts in, come our way. And also, it takes a lot of initiative to do research and be knowledgeable about what we’re doing and passionate, and be able to answer questions, and connect the dots, and be willing to ask questions that I know a lot of people don’t seem very smart.
If I only have to ask them once, so when I ask a question that seems very ground-level for certain experts in this industry, I’m appreciative when I have people that are willing to mentor me and bring me along in marketing strategies and packaging industries and things like that where we had to bring it all together at the end of the day.
DEBRA: Yes, it really is a big thing. I’ve been in my field for more than 30 years and there are times when I think, “Oh, I should just create some products.” And then I look at what goes into creating products, and I think, “I think I’ll just write about products,” because it really is such a huge thing, and especially, you’re not just selling them online, you’re selling them to stores too?
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes, we’re in stores. The thing that I’ve learned too is there’s a lot that goes into it, but it is doable if it’s honest and authentic. So when we go into somebody’s store, there are strict regulations in a lot of these health food stores and coops and things like that. And if your product is true and if the ingredients are true and things that are in it and your labeling, it’s actually a reasonable process if the leg work has been done.
And so that’s also been helpful for us too. Each of our products, we’ve spent a lot of time on really making sure that they’re polished and ready to go. And once that foundation is laid, then things start moving – at least, that’s been our experience.
DEBRA: Yes, you’ve done a really good – not really good, you’ve done a really excellent job of your products. And we’re going to talk about your products. We’re coming up to the break, so I don’t want to start talking about them right now.
But you’ve done such an excellent job of ingredients – we’re going to talk about your ingredients – and your packaging and everything. There’s an excellence about them that even when I just went to your website, my first impression of your website has that excellence about it. I just wanted to call you right up and say, “Come on my show” because I could see the thought that went into the ingredients. And we’re going to talk about that.
Let me just ask you, your husband is a chemical engineer? Does he work developing chemicals?
LINDSAY HERRON: He doesn’t anymore. He works as a consultant in the energy industry for risk for energy and training in risk management. So at one point in college and right out of college, he worked with – I’m missing what it is, but it’s when you go into hospitals and you get a liquid nitrogen. That’s what it was.
So we lived in Houston for a while. And for almost six years, he worked in that industry with the liquid nitrogen for a private company and working with hospitals and then switched and moved into more of a consulting role for trading power. So he’s moved a bit in his career, but the basis is that chemical engineering part.
DEBRA: So he has – when you’re working on developing your products, you had the knowledge of your husband as a chemical engineer?
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes, and really that came in to play with our laundry detergent.
DEBRA: I want to hear more about that when we come back. We’ll talk about – I want you to tell us about laundry detergent chemicals and what you learned about what you didn’t want in your laundry detergent. And we’ll talk about how you came to develop your own formula.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lindsay Herron. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics in Bozeman, Montana. They make skin and laundry products for baby that are organic, simple and safe. You can go to their website at Buckaroo-Organics.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lindsay Herron. She’s the founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics and their website is Buckaroo-Organics.com.
Okay, so Lindsay, when you started making your laundry detergent, what did you not want to put in it and why?
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, the first thing I started with was sulfate and phosphates. But like I said, we started with that cloth-diapering detergent, and previous to that, I think over the years I haven’t been super tuned into my laundry detergent. I think for years, we spent so much time on food, our food sources and pesticides and things like that. And then, like I said, once we had babies and we started cloth-diapering, we really started to hone in on what are all these products.
And so when we started looking at water waste systems and residues that are left behind fragrances, things that when you smell your clothes, they smell good (and I grew up in a family where my mom had this laundry detergent that always smelled good, the sheets smelled good), then when I really dug in to that, I realized that that’s not necessarily a good thing at all. When there’s fragrance on laundry detergent or on your clothes that residue has been left behind and then cleans the fabric that’s sitting on your skin all day and then, obviously, not good for cloth diapers.
And so I started with fragrance and then moved into sulfates and phosphates. And then the list just started going on different chemicals.
And also, when I was reading ingredient lists, especially on liquid detergents, oftentimes, the first ingredient can be water and then it moves right into some kind of sulfate and they’re everywhere. And then phosphates too are being limited in certain states just because the toxic aftermath that they have on our water systems and ecosystems. It’s choking off different waterways and aquatic life too.
When we think about using laundry detergent, the amount that we use every single day, it’s insane on a massive level of what’s being wasted back out into septic tanks and different, various water exit systems.
DEBRA: Yes, it is. It very much is.
So then how did you go through the process of finding the ingredients that you then decided to use because they’re pretty unusual ingredients for a laundry product?
LINDSAY HERRON: I do have an unusual – yeah. And sorry, to the first question that you asked me, I think that was a lot of information. I’m just super passionate about everything that we’re doing, so I jumped in there if I’m overwhelming with some of this stuff.
So when we looked at all of that, I thought there has to be a better way. There has to be something different. I needed it to not be a plant-based detergent or a derivative of a plant-based that has been altered in some way because you can’t use that with the fibers in certain cloth diapers.
DEBRA: Let me ask you a question because I’m not a mom. I haven’t done the cloth-diapering thing although I totally believe in it and if I was a mom, I would do it. But since I haven’t done it, it sounds like you’re saying that when you’re doing cloth-diapering, they give you some instructions about what kind of detergent to use. Is that right? And what are those instructions? Where did they come from?
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes. Well, I’m not exactly sure where they come from. I’m imagining we also come from a town that is the founder here, her name is Kim, and she is the founder of GroVia diapers. And she’s done a brilliant job with her cloth-diapering business. They’re a very big brand in the cloth-diapering world. So she has also just testing that’s been done on her cloth diapers.
So this care list comes with how to wash them, how to strip them, which means that you clean the fibers because there’s an ammonia build-up, and then there’s a list of laundry detergents that have been deemed safe so far. And so then, these laundry detergents kind of post and then there are things that you shouldn’t use on these fibers because the residue clings to them and then clogs them, making them less absorbent for what they need to be functional for.
And cloth-diapering, even if you haven’t done it, moms that do know, it’s an investment. The cloth diapers are upfront, they’re an investment. And if you care for them, you can reuse them for our children. And we have three. And so they do last. And they’re so eco-friendly.
But yes, the instructions, they can be a bit overwhelming at first once you get started. And then it’s easy once you keep going.
So that’s where we started, not wanting that plant-based derivative that could potentially clog the fibers. And so I got a hold of the soap nuts. Have you heard of those before?
DEBRA: Absolutely! I’ve been using them for years. I think I used the first soap nuts that ever came out.
LINDSAY HERRON: Okay. Well, I get excited talking to people about soap nuts because it’s something that I think is a big part of talking about our laundry detergent. If people haven’t heard of them, they’ve been around for a long time.
DEBRA: Well, talk about them.
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, so the soap nuts that we get are grew in the Himalayas. We import them from Nepal. It’s where they come from. And then they’re certified organic here in the States. It’s a berry that grows on a fruit tree actually. So it’s not a nut. And the husk of the berry is made up of pure saponin or a soaping agent. And so once the berry is de-seeded and dried, you’re left with a husk or it looks like an acorn. I mean, you know, but just to talk about them.
And then that husk is pure soap and is biodegradable and works brilliantly to clean things without leaving a residue or a scent behind.
DEBRA: Brilliantly. I think brilliantly is the word because the first time I used soap nuts, I was shocked at how soft my cotton clothing was. It just was soft in a way that I’ve never experienced it before. And I think that one of the things that people don’t realize is how much detergent clings to the fabric. And so you have that whole residue just scratching your skin all the time.
When I first went to your website, I thought, “Oh, she’s doing the skin care products, but she’s also doing the laundry.” I didn’t really know that you started with laundry. I thought the laundry was so that you were focusing on baby’s skin and that the detergent wouldn’t scratch their skin. But you started with the laundry.
LINDSAY HERRON: We did start with the laundry. And our products, we’ve had a few people say, “They don’t just fit really all together.” and I’m like, “What our company has come about is when we found gaps in the industry and found gaps on the shelves, we sought to create something different.” So we have a respiratory rub, and we have a laundry detergent and we have things that we didn’t feel were super acceptable on the shelves including our packaging (it’s all biodegradable).
And so it doesn’t have maybe a sequential look when you look at our whole product line, but we’re really targeting that hypoallergenic skin care of products that are possibly not out there to fill those gaps.
DEBRA: I really got it that you were about hypoallergenic skin care. When I looked at your website I thought, “That’s what they’re doing. They’re looking at every aspect of what might help or harm a baby’s skin and providing something for that.”
And we’ll talk more about your products when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lindsay Herron. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics in Bozeman, Montana. And her website is Buckaroo-Organics.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lindsay Herron, co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics. And her website is Buckaroo-Organics.com.
So just to finish off about your laundry detergent, or laundry – what do you call it? ‘Laundry powder’, laundry something?
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, it’s called soap berry studs, but we just call it a laundry detergent.
DEBRA: Yes, I just wanted to differentiate that it actually isn’t a detergent. Detergent is less a specific word that has a specific meaning. It’s different from, say, soap. And even what you’re doing is even different from soap.
Anyway, what I want to say is usually, if you buy soap nuts, in the beginning when I started using them, you just bought whole soap nuts and you put them in a little bag, three or four of them in a little bag. And then you throw the little bag in the wash. That’s to keep the bits of soap nuts that start breaking down contained in the little bag.
But what you’ve done is you’ve made a laundry product (I’ll just call it a laundry product) that takes those soap nuts and adds other ingredients to them. So why did you do that? Why did you decide to add these other things and grind up the soap nuts and make it into this kind of product? Why should I use your product instead of just plain soap nuts?
LINDSAY HERRON: Wait, what’s different about ours? Okay, so yes, it is a powder. So what we did is we found that the soap nuts themselves weren’t working really well with our hard water system, our hard water, and so we made it something to break that surface tension of the water so that the water itself could do the job and the soap nuts could aid in that.
And so Brad reformulated it. He knows all of the chemical reaction when it hits the water. But I’ll do my best. So he reformulated it to powder it, so that it added those elements of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate to de-scale your machine, soften up water and be able to let the water itself really do its job in conjunction with those soap nuts.
DEBRA: That sounds really good. I can hardly wait to try it.
LINDSAY HERRON: He gets all scientific about it and I do my best.
DEBRA: No, you did really well. So then other laundry products do you have are wool dryer balls. And why wool dryer balls?
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, I have been using them for about 10 years. And then when our company really took off and we started filling these gaps, I thought, “Mine weren’t breaking down a bit,” I thought, “We should do something different.”
And as you said before, we were targeting that hypoallergenic market. And when people actually found us, we have been shocked that the amount of skin sensitivities and allergies that people have to laundry soap and laundry detergent and whatever they’re using. Then we’ve had people crying at our table at tradeshows about how they feel like they’re allergic to themselves and they haven’t found anything that works like our laundry soap.
And so then we found that people are using dryer sheets and still struggling. And so throwing in a fabric softener sheet that coats your clothes with all sorts of residues and your machine and your dryer wasn’t really effective. And so we thought, “Okay, let’s go back to work to really create this holistic laundry room that gives you a great laundry soaping agent and then also helps you to put in your dryer and reduce static all naturally. And then you can add essential oil to these wool dryer balls.”
Have you used them before? You guys probably know about this.
DEBRA: No, I know about them, but I haven’t actually used them. I don’t use dryer sheets either. I just throw things in the dryer. So how will they help my drying experience?
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, first of all, I’m going to send you some, Debra. You need to be on this wool dryer ball train with us.
DEBRA: I want to be.
LINDSAY HERRON: They’re coming your way today. So you use it in packs. We sell them in packs of three or six. And the way that you use them, they’re very low maintenance. You don’t have to care for them or do anything. You throw them in your dryer. Quantities of three would be smaller loads or medium-sized loads. And then the six is for TMA loads or the laundry that I do – you know, shove as much in there as I can and get it done. I would use six dryer balls for that.
So you’re tumbling them with each load of laundry to soften your clothes naturally, reduce static. They’re safe for people with wool sensitivities. They’re handmade with a felted center. They last a thousand loads. It’s also in our mission to create this chemical-free laundry room, we needed it to be affordable.
So our laundry detergent is 18¢ a load. And then the wool dryer balls last up to a thousand loads. So it’s something that’s really cost-effective for families – not just babies. You can use this laundry combination for anyone really.
DEBRA: Wow. I wonder how much you save using your wool dryer balls instead of those fabric softener sheets.
LINDSAY HERRON: I would have to churn some numbers. I haven’t used them in years just because we’re chemical-conscious, but a lot I’m sure.
DEBRA: A lot, just a lot.
LINDSAY HERRON: I know sometimes my mom even throws in two.
DEBRA: You want to get your mom some of those wool dryer balls.
LINDSAY HERRON: She switched over, but we’ve had a number of conversations of just [inaudible 00:32:30]. And like I said, a lot of times, people are – not addicted, but they really have those comfort feelings with your laundry smelling a certain way. But in fact, if we can shift that mentality a bit to understand that those chemicals are sticking on your skin all day, I’m hoping that that’s part of our goal too, to help create awareness about that.
DEBRA: This is just a really important point because one of the most toxic things – I think a lot of my listeners know that sound, but I’ll say it again anyway. One of the most toxic things we can be exposed to is fragrance. It’s an endocrine disruptor. It’s got all kinds of thousands and thousands of chemicals that go into these fragrances. They can disrupt your endocrine system.
And when they’re there in your sheets or your fabric softener sheet or whatever, on your clothing, it’s just going in your body as you’re sleeping all night. It’s going in your body as you wear your clothes all day. And it’s just one of those toxic exposures that we can just do without. Fragrance is not essential to life especially synthetic fragrance.
So if you could just replace all the fabric softener dryer sheets with your wool balls, I would be very happy.
LINDSAY HERRON: I’m working on it.
DEBRA: Okay.
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes, that is the point.
DEBRA: We need to have a fabric softener sheet wool ball exchange campaign.
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes. I’ll turn them in at the end of the day or something. It would eliminate so much. When you think about, like I said, the amount of laundry detergents that goes through homes every day and these fabric softener sheets –
I mean, we all wear clothes. It’s everywhere in our homes – our sheets, our curtains, everything we wash. I just thought this is one step in this laundry room alone that trickles out into our household. Every interaction that we have during the day is touching clothes, touching like if you wash your car, whatever you’re spraying. There are just a lot of things that, like you said, come from fragrance, but also come from directly from that laundry room. And so understanding what’s in there is so important.
DEBRA: It’s so important. We’re coming up on a break here, but I just want to say one more thing. Yesterday, I happened to be in a public place and I took a deep breath and I got this huge breath of somebody’s laundry fragrance who was standing in the room. And it’s just like you’re in a room with a hundred people, how much laundry fragrance is that?
So on to the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lindsay Herron, co-founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics at Buckaroo-Organics.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lindsay Herron. She is the founder and CEO of Buckaroo Organics in Bozeman, Montana. Great website! Your website is beautiful as well as your packaging and your products.
Anyway, let’s talk about your skin care line because, again, you’ve just got these incredibly simple, pure ingredients. So tell us about the ingredients and also what you’ve made from them.
LINDSAY HERRON: Sure! Well, thank you for the compliments, by the way. And the goals with our ingredients were to pick intentional ingredients and group them together so that they were healing what we needed them to heal without all of the other chemical jargon in there that is potentially bogging down our immune system.
So the goal is to give the body something topically on the skin that helps boost the immune system and let the body heal itself. And so when I really, like I said, dug into some of these gaps on the shelves, I was thinking the first two ingredients that are definitely bogging down our immune system. It’s petroleum or petro atom based in some of these [inaudible 00:40:05].
So we sought out to pick ingredients. We looked for something different. And a lot of our stuff has essential oils in them. And so we did a lot of reading and research on essential oils that target skin irritation such as eczema, psoriasis, rashes, things that irritate the skin after wearing clothing, sunburns. And then, of course, being a pregnant mommy at the time, our Mother Hen, which is our organic body butter (which is probably one of our bestsellers) is simple ingredients, but are targeted to keep the elasticity in the skin using frankincense, myrrh, lavender and then shea butter based.
So does that answer your question?
DEBRA: Yes. But tell us more about the different products that you have in your line because I’m looking at a whole page of different, interesting things.
LINDSAY HERRON: Yes. Okay, so we do have that belly butter or body butter. And that is targeting again just stretching skin and/or it’s been – my brother who works with a lot of cardiologists that’s scrubbing water all day, these guys love that Mother Hen product just because it’s so nourishing to the skin and it isn’t water-based.
We have Tough as Nails, which is a skin treatment with antifungal properties as well. And that’s serum-based. So it’s an oil-based product that you use very little of. My husband had a big skin graft surgery and so he needed something for scar tissue on his hands and then in the inside of his arm. And so we created this product that’s also been used for a facial treatment for acne. I’m getting new feedback on this product every single day. This Tough as Nails product has been really great for a lot of people.
We have three different balms. We have a cloth diaper bottom balm, which would be something like a diaper sticker, something that you’d use, but it’s healing and then just really simple ingredients targeting that killing off yeast and then also sealing up the skin and letting it heal itself.
We have a Sleepy Spurs Rub, which is a unique rub in and of itself. It uses a blend of essential oils that relaxes the body. It decreases anxiety and helps increase sleep, originally created for colicky babies and getting babies to sleep through the night.
We’ve also seen a huge increase in women using this product on the insides of their arms, the inside of your forearms for hormone balancing or big hormone changes and maybe menopause times or sleep time. Stress triggers a whole different release of hormones too sometimes. The Sleepy Spur [cross-talking 00:42:55]
DEBRA: And then you have a respiratory rub.
LINDSAY HERRON: Respiratory Rub. We’ve had a lot of problems with respiratory rubs actually. When I dug into respiratory rubs, I learned a lot about essential oils even in some of the natural products. There are three different kinds of eucalyptus and eucalyptus can be really hard on infant kidneys. And so we used a form of eucalyptus that’s called Eucalyptus Radiata and it’s really mild on babies’ kidneys.
So that one is definitely targeted more towards – it’s definitely a baby product as well just because it’s dosed appropriately for infants using essential oils. It also uses a combination of – you know, when you’re talking about children, 12 months, there are only certain essential oils that are safe to use on them. And so it’s limiting in respiratory rubs and so. That’s that one.
DEBRA: And then you also have these fizzy things for the bath.
LINDSAY HERRON: Oh! Our Fresh Farm Fizzies, we live on a property and have chickens and animals. And so all of our products have cheeky Montana names. But the bath fizzies are a bath bomb that you drop into the bath and they fizz up. They come in an adorable, recycled egg crate. And there are little eggs inside. They’re individually packaged. You just drop them in. They all smell like lavender (again, being baby-safe). And they have also nourishing sea salts in them. And then, we use lavender for a calming effect and also lavender can be so soothing for the skin.
DEBRA: I’m just looking at all of these things. I’ve been looking at product labels and ingredients for 30 years and you just have one of these lines that is just so simple and pure. When I look at things that are more complex and synthetic, I just say, “This is so not needed because look, you can do it in such a simple way.”
And I had another guest on who had a similar line of products, but they weren’t baby-oriented. They were adult-oriented. It’s very simple. He just started out with soap because he wanted to make something that people could clean their skin with. They’re just really exceptional soaps. But then he went the next step and made soap nuts laundry product. His is different than yours. He’s just actually selling soap nuts because he wanted his customers to be able to not have their skin be irritated by the laundry. So it’s that same combination of caring for your skin by how you’re cleaning it and having natural things to put on it, to heal it, and also having that really pure laundry. I think it makes a huge difference. I think that people are having so many skin problems because just from their laundry products.
And so I think you have just an outstanding combination here, just really wonderful.
LINDSAY HERRON: Thank you so much.
DEBRA: Yes, you’ve thought it through really, really well.
So we only just have a couple of minutes left. Any final words you’d like to give us, something you haven’t said yet?
LINDSAY HERRON: I just appreciate you having us on. I also just want to let people know, we’ve just partnered with a new company. So we have a program online. It’s called Give 5 Save 5. And so in our effort to create eco-friendly products, we’re also donating 5% of our company profits to clean water projects specifically targeting children and families that don’t have access to clean water.
So we’re just really excited about some of the projects coming down the pipes being only a year old. We’ve had a lot of moving pieces going. This is a side of our business that I feel extremely passionate about. And things have really lined up in the last few months.
So the company that we’re partnering with is called One at a Time. They’re based out in California and I’m just so excited about what hopefully we can do as we start to grow to have an impact to get some people some clean water and families and then also help these youths, empower them to be better and do things in the world as well.
And so again, that’s our Give 5 Save 5 program. That never goes away. So when you check out, you enter Save 5, and we take off 5% off of your total and then we will match that 5% to clean water projects.
DEBRA: That’s so excellent. You just have thought of everything from every direction.
LINDSAY HERRON: I spent a lot of time doing this. I really, really love my job right now. And that’s just been such a gift. I mentioned that before. Just being able to do what I love each day and be creative with it and make it our own, and help people, it’s so much fun every day.
DEBRA: What’s your favorite thing to do with your kids?
LINDSAY HERRON: I mentioned that in my little write-up. I love to do anything outdoors. We live in what I feel like one of the most beautiful places. We live right in the heart of Big Sky Country in the mountains. We don’t have cable and we don’t have some of these technology distractions. And so we have animals and we try to do lots of stuff outside and just connect and keep our bodies moving. And I’m really trying to instill that in our children as well.
And so we try to camp and hike and go hunting and they’re shooting guns and doing all sorts of Montana things. And so I really love to spend time outside with them although we do live in winter most of the year.
DEBRA: Isn’t it cold a lot? We have here in Florida, it’s summer for six months of the year. And so do you have winter for six months of the year?
LINDSAY HERRON: We do! We have winter for more like nine months of the year. But we ski and we hunt and we do sled and snowmobile and do some of those fun things, just different kinds of outdoor things.
And growing up here, you get conditioned to. I mean, I’ve lived in a lot of different places. If you live somewhere warm, you get conditioned to warm weather. But you live cold, you figure it out. They play in their snow suits.
But I do love to spend time with my kids. They’re such a huge part of what we do and why do the things that we do. And we’re so grateful to have this opportunity to talk with you guys today. Just everything that’s come our way in the last year has been amazing.
DEBRA: Well, thank you so much for doing the work that you’re doing because you’re really setting a good example of what can be done. All the best to you! And we’ll keep talking about your products and see if I can send you some customers your way.
LINDSAY HERRON: Well, you’re getting wool balls. They are coming to you. You’ve got to try these things out.
DEBRA: I want to try your laundry soap too.
LINDSAY HERRON: Okay, I’ll send you a little care package and you can see what you think. I’m excited for you to try them since you haven’t before. And again, I just appreciate this.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to all the past shows. I think we have more than 300 now. So ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well.
How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about our blood vessels today—what can go wrong and how to keep them in good shape to carry blood to all parts of your body. We’ll cover problems with blood vessels in the eye, the legs, and peripheral neuropathy experienced by diabetics. There are no drugs for these conditions, but they are highly responsive to supplements, and we’ll learn which to take. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD
- Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
- Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
- Seven Deadly Drugs
- The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
- What We Can Do About Cancer
- The Power of pH
- How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
- Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
- Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
- How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
- How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
- Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
- See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
- Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
- Different Types of Detox
- Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
- How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
- Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
- Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
- How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
- You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
- Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
- It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
- How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
- Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
- Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
- Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing with Supplements
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld
Date of Broadcast: May 20, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is Wednesday, May 20th, 2015. It’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. We’re probably going to have thunderstorms, but not during this hour. It’s a beautiful day.
Anyway, today is Wednesday. Every other Wednesday, my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
She just has so much knowledge about things that can help your body that aren’t drugs and how to get off of drugs and how your body works. She just has so much information and she’s so healthy. She is the healthiest person I’ve ever seen. I can hear they are laughing in the background.
Pamela lives here in Clearwater, Florida with me. Not with me, but here in Clearwater, Florida just as I do and she’s very well-regarded in our community. The first time I met her face to face, I just thought this the healthiest looking person I’ve ever seen.
Anyway, I have her on every other Wednesday, so that she can just give us all her wisdom and knowledge. Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Thanks for the great intro. It’s wonderful to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. Today, we’re talking about vascular health. I’m just going to let you explain to our listeners what vascular health is because I think it’s something that most of us don’t even think about.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And this is a really good topic to talk about because it encompasses a lot of the diseases and a lot of the issues that people face. Vascular health, I want to say in a simpler word, is all-encompassing. It can be explained. The blood vessel health and the ways the permeability of the blood vessels themselves are connected too.
I’m just going to just go through some of the things we’re going to talk about today literally starting from the top of our body, allergies, sinus infections, so on and so forth, glaucoma, eye problems, lungs, asthma, GI, colitis, Crohn’s, leaky gut, your legs, peripheral vascular disease, going all the way down to your body. Your blood vessels and how they’re functioning are responsible for a lot of the outcome of these particular states. So it’s really important that we focus on this.
What we can do to close up the leaky gut membrane, close up the vasculature and also improve the health of it in case things are impregnated and stuck in these particular areas? This is what’s really important.
If you think about it, all these disease states are directly responsible from the vascular health. That’s the very, very foundation of the problem.
DEBRA: That’s so interesting. Before you tell us everything you want to tell us, I want to ask you a question. When toxic chemicals come into your body, they get carried all around your body through the blood vessels, right?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: Yeah. So are they damaging the blood vessels as they’re moving around?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. I went and did a search in the library of medicine. We’ve known this, but there are really interesting studies.
The big thing is the chemicals themselves can cause genes to change and change the expression of them and can cause cancer. Of course, we already know that’s what does cause cancer, if the genes are expressed for cancer. They have to nudge it along, usually the chemical that we come in contact with.
But a particular concern as well is exposure to particulate matter constituents in the air. What we know is that long-term exposure to particulate matter – usually these things, you can’t see in the air because they’re copper, iron, nickel, potassium, sulfur, silicon, things like that, vanadium, zinc, moving [inaudible 00:05:04] around things, get tossed up into the air and these particulates.
And we’re not even talking about factories because we’re not really actually near factories here. But it does apply to other people that perhaps are.
You’re breathing these things in. It is directly associated with the increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Where’s the cardiovascular? Your vascular system.
DEBRA: Right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So we know that for some reason it is directly correlated when people are exposed to these things, these airborne particulates that we breathe in. There are very poor outcomes as far as cardiovascular health. And this actually might explain why cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the country.
DEBRA: The EPA has said that air pollution, indoor air pollution actually is the number one health problem in the country.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.
DEBRA: It’s just…
PAMELA SEEFELD: That would make sense.
DEBRA: That would make sense because we’re breathing all these gasses and particulates coming from consumer products that we have in our homes, unless of course you’ve been listening to the show and going to my website and taking all those out of your homes.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. That’s true. It’s important that people realize that we have some control over these things, but also there are some things that are way out of our control. We have to be responsible and understand that most people are going to have an issue in their lifetime.
Maybe they have asthma. Maybe they have leaky gut. Maybe they have IBS. All these things are related to the blood vessels. That’s why we really need to focus on what’s the very bottom line. The basement membrane is where all these problems originally take place.
DEBRA: Okay. So go ahead and tell us about our vascular system because I learn so much from you with all I think take-in biology and things in school. I think that most people are not aware of what’s going on in their bodies when I ask people. “Do you know what your body systems are?” People would say, “What?”
The cardiovascular system is a very, very important system. But when we hear that word cardiovascular, I think most people don’t know that cardio means heart and vascular means your blood vessels. That’s why anytime you hear that now, just think heart and blood vessels. It’s the whole system in your whole body.
So tell us what the cardiovascular system does.
PAMELA SEEFELD: You have to think of it like the pipeline. All these blood vessels, you have these really small blood vessels, the capillaries, literally these red blood cells that are going through a single [inaudible 00:07:37], these large areas where the blood flow is massive and it’s fast.
The heart is obviously pumping the blood and it’s going through our body. And this is a closed circulatory system or it’s a closed piping system.
What we want to concentrate on is to say that the blood vessels themselves are made of cells, each individual cell and they’re all sitting next to each other, altogether and they form this particular means of allowing blood to go flow through the body and allow waste products, oxygen, these things, nutrients to bring to the cell.
So we know this is the exchange process taking place. What’s really interesting is that when you think about the blood vessel, you have to realize that our blood vessels are sensitive to things that can cause permeability issues.
Let’s talk about the sinus infection. Let’s just talk about that. Sinus infection or the runny nose allergies, when you have this, the fluid has to come from someplace.
What happens is there are permeability issues in the nose and in the sinuses. The fluid that normally is inside the blood vessel is allowed to escape to some degree and it goes into the sinus cavities and then you have to blow your nose. That’s how it happens. It’s got to come from someplace and that’s what happens.
We think about just the simplicity of it. If we use vascular stabilizers throughout the body, we can have the blood vessels in one area like the sinuses – maybe you have allergic rhinitis, you have the allergies, you can affect that. But there are also the other parts.
So I tell people, a good example is when somebody has spider veins or the blood vessels are breaking really easily and they have a lot of bruising. They have blood vessel problems elsewhere.
I see this too in the people that have hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoid, you’re going to have trouble with blood vessels in the eye. You’re going to have allergies. You’re going to have other things too because the blood vessels are swelling and the rest of them are also swelling in other areas as well.
That’s the thing that people really need to get their head around. Inflammation and swelling and permeability issues in one area of the body with the blood vessel can affect another, in fact even vice versa. In a person, in the GI tract, it can also affect our eyes because the blood vessels in the eyes might be affected as well.
This is what’s really important. These things are all interconnected. So if you are having one set of symptoms, you might eventually start having others.
DEBRA: It’s because the basic problem is your vascular system.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Right, exactly. And it’s not confined to just one area because it’s all connected. That’s what people should see.
Say somebody has asthma. We just talked about the [inaudible 00:10:18] and we talked about the sinuses. Maybe someone has glaucoma.
They might also develop having some GI issues as well. A lot of times, the alternative people could classify this like leaky gut. It can be IBS as what maybe the doctor would call it. And maybe the person has issues with – they have diarrhea, constipation. Or maybe they have [body?] cramping. Maybe they feel like they’re having allergies.
The hallmark of leaky gut is the person just feels low when they’re eating certain foods. The reason why is because the permeability of the gut has been compromised and particulates are allowed to go into the bloodstream and make antibodies.
DEBRA: Wait. We need to go break. We’re going to need to go to break. When we come back, I’ll have you just start right there and talk about what happens when particulates are going into the bloodstream. We’ll be right back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs by giving them natural alternatives.
Pamela, before we talk about leaky gut syndrome as we started before the break, tell the listeners about how they can call you.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good. Thank you. If you have any questions about your prescription medications or if you have health issues for not to be on prescription medications, you can call my pharmacy. My consultation is free and I will be glad and very honored to help you and your family. The number here at my pharmacy is (727) 442 4955.
DEBRA: Great. Now, tell us about leaky gut syndrome. The way you just started was so interesting because you explained exactly what was happening.
PAMELA SEEFELD: What’s happening is permeability issues in the leaky gut, the blood vessels are allowing space between them. They’re allowing the fluid to move back and forth more copiously and more exchanging than they should.
As a result of that, the foods that you’re eating, certain things are not supposed to be passing into the bloodstream. They’re going into the bloodstream and you’re making antibodies to them. So all of a sudden, they can make you think you’re allergic to banana or whatever.
That’s what’s happening because these foods are [priming?] the immune system. The immune system will see something in the blood and recognize it as foreign. When people have leaky gut, they have all these food sensitivities and different things like that. What is really happening? It’s the permeability of the gut.
So all of these issues…
DEBRA: Wait. When you say permeability of the gut, I think really what you’re saying if I understand this is the permeability of the blood vessels…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: …in the intestines. So you have intestines…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the micro [colitis?]. The small areas there where the absorption takes place at that particular location, the blood vessels are inflamed.
They’re not just inflamed, but they’re compromised. They’re allowing things to come in and out and the exchange back and forth from the gut in an unreasonable manner. As a result of that, things are getting into the gut and then making people so sick. The case in point, when people eat something, then all of a sudden, they’re just not feeling well, that might be what’s happening and they might have this very issue going on.
And the great part about it is that this particular problem and the ones we discussed prior to that, they are heavy responses to supplements. So this is really a great thing.
I mean when somebody has a GI issue or even some of these things we’re talking about, I usually say the vascular health is highly responsive to supplements. It’s pretty inexpensive and easy to treat. And even just having GI issues, the first thing you should think of is permeability issue. And this applies to somebody that’s getting colitis, somebody that has Crohn’s disease.
Obviously, Crohn’s in some cases will need treatment in steroids and things like that. But most people, when they’re [in re-emission?] or have to prevent a reoccurrence, they can use the things that stabilize the blood vessels and the inflammation in the blood vessels themselves and have a great outcome.
DEBRA: What kinds of supplements would you give somebody for this?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. When we look at what supplements work for allergies, for the eyes, for lungs, for the GI, we can look at several different things.
What the studies show is that flavonoids are highly responsive. That would include rutin, quercetin and hesperidin. I tend to like quercetin quite a bit. But the studies show, especially in allergic rhinitis, that rutin is highly effective for that.
Now, resveratrol is another supplement that works very, very well. Actually the new studies show that when someone actually has a spinal cord injury or they have bulging or hernia or just any kind of back problems, it’s causing inflammatory changes in the body as a result. Believe it or not, it’s all encompassing. They can change the whole body chemistry. That resveratrol seems to help that and it helps the injury on the spine as well.
So that was pretty interesting. Both sequences have vascular stabilizing properties, but they also seem to have some neurological positive outcomes as well. That’s very important as well.
What I tell people too is that using the detox, the Body Anew is important because permeability issues, especially the sinuses or the lungs – when things get stuck in the area, the lung tissue and the sinus cavities and mucus membranes, when things get stuck in those particular areas, we know for a fact that moving it out makes a big difference.
If the area is constantly irritated with particulates like the gut, if the area is potentially irritated with particulates in different areas of the nose, the mouth, wherever the problem may be, especially the lungs of people with asthma, if you don’t get the particulates out, that’s where the problem is.
Remember we were talking about particulates in the air, things you’re breathing in? Well, they get stuck in those membranes and then they’re allowed to stay in there. They’re going to start moving in and out. That’s where some of the issues really are. You need to remove it.
DEBRA: What about bloody noses? What causes bloody noses?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. Bloody nose, first of all, can be spontaneous, which means it just shows up out of the blue.
It can probably be something that’s going on with the blood vessel itself. Maybe the person was blowing her nose so much that it has actually broken a blood vessel, so it continued to bleed.
It could be the person’s platelets are too low. I always tell people that if they’re starting to show lots of bruising or there are lots of bloody noses, things like that, you really need to check your CBC with your doctor and just see where your platelets reside because you’d be surprised some people come out with really low their platelets.
The platelets of most people are probably going to be around 250. That’s the number when the platelets are taken. But you can also see people – quite frequently I see people in the hospital that have 100 and below. And you can have a spontaneous bleed if it’s below 20. I mean you’ll start bleeding anywhere.
Most people will probably don’t think about that. You have to look at it too. Maybe a multivitamin has a lot of vitamin E in it. There are other ways you’re getting blood thinning activity. A lot of people take a baby aspirin for cardiovascular disease and also for preventing cancer. Baby aspirin is excellent for both of those things.
It can really be other factors too. A lot of times, you need to look and see where the platelet count resides because that just gives you clue as to whether you need to look in that particular direction. The platelets will definitely affect whether it’s clotting or not.
DEBRA: Okay, that’s good. We only have a few seconds before we go to break. So I’m not going to ask you a new question.
I’ll just say during these few seconds that you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Pamela Seefeld and her website is BotanicalResource.com. You can go there and get her phone number and find out how to call her and get a free consultation.
We’ll be right back after the break and hear more about vascular health and what you can do.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
And she really does get a lot of people off prescription drugs and feeling healthier and happier. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. You can call her for a free consultation.
So Pamela, talk to us about peripheral neuropathy. I think so many people have a problem with that or so many diabetics in the world.
PAMELA SEEFELD: The peripheral neuropathy is the nerves being affected. When someone has peripheral vascular disease, they can also have…
DEBRA: Yeah. Let’s clear this up. Okay, go ahead.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s okay. It’s alright! [Inaudible 00:27:32] The peripheral vascular disease is important to focus on when we’re talking about vascular health. There are several different things that can cause it, diabetes, smoking, chemicals, those particulates that I was talking about, untreated hypertension.
And it’s really important for your listeners to know that when someone has hypertension and it’s not treated, it does damage the blood vessels. I’m not saying it’s going to cause permeability issues, but it could lead to that. The bad part about it is that it puts strain on the blood vessels themselves.
It’s very important if someone does have high blood pressure and perhaps they don’t want to be on a prescription, they can just give me a call and I can tell them what would work naturally and would be very effective. That’s very important to realize. There are a lot of options for that.
So a person that has abnormal cholesterol is another thing. Say someone is procrastinating and their cholesterol is 290 or 300. Trust me. I don’t think cholesterol is the big demon that they think it is. But most people, that’s how to check the cholesterols in the normal range. So this doesn’t really have anything to do with the cholesterol.
But we know that if the inflammation is there, permeability problems there in the blood vessel and then you add extra cholesterol in the bloodstream, you’re going to have a problem. And that problem will be that the arteries are going to start collecting the cholesterol and letting it form this peripheral vascular disease where it just narrows.
As a result of it, you have this terrible circulation in your legs. You can tell when people have peripheral vascular disease or vascular problems through their legs because they’ll be swollen, they’ll be red. It will maybe lead to what’s called cellulitis, which is an infection to the skin.
And many times, the people will complain of pain. That’s the most common thing. People would be walking and then all of a sudden, their legs start really hurting badly and they can’t walk stairs, they can’t walk across the yard, things of that sort. This is actually preventable.
When someone has a vascular issue, we would want to put them on those bioflavinoids that I was talking about. There’s also a homeopathic product that I use a lot for people that have issues with circulation in their legs. It’s called Circulation, no doubt. Yes, it’s a great name for it. This particular product increases blood flow down to the legs about 90%.
You can also use arginine, which is an amino acid that does have dilating effects on the blood vessels. And there’s a product from Thorne called Perfusia, which I use quite a bit. It dilates arterial blood flow and increases about 40%. So we can use that for the legs.
I also like to mention for our male clients that are listening on the radio today that using Perfusia or using arginine to increase blood flow in the legs also increases blood flow to someplace else. So we use it for erectile dysfunction.
And if you think your blood vessel issue is just delegated solely to your leg or to your eyes or to your sinuses, that might explain some of the other things that are going in the private areas of the body. I think it’s important for people to realize that that’s connected as well.
DEBRA: It’s so interesting to me that you keep saying that all these things are connected and that this one thing in vascular health can be affecting all these different areas of your body. And yet in the world of drugs, there’s a different drug for each of these different conditions.
PAMELA SEEFELD: You are the smartest woman in the world. Yes. Isn’t that amazing that they have a drug for each condition and they have a whole series of doctors for every single condition we’ve mentioned for some specialty?
But really what it comes down to it is the vascular health of your body can be reversed and can be improved simply by doing some simple supplements and realizing early on when you start seeing some of these things happening that you need to literally start treating it. And start treating it with vigor until it’s finished.
That is really important because when one thing crops up, something else is going to show up eventually. I can promise people that. It will lead to something else and to the next thing and to the next thing.
I think this really explains a lot of people, just their decompensation of their body and how, as they get older, they expect states would start showing up. And if they do, it’s like you put it out there and you get it.
Your vascular health is something that is heavily responsive, believe it or not, even to vegetables, eating vegetables in your diet because there are lots of bioflavonoids in your vegetables, having a big salad with lots of colorful vegetables. You can eat bioflavonoids. Those have vascular stabilizing activity.
That’s why people that have a vegetarian-based diet or having lots of plants in their diet have better vascular health and less of these chronic diseases. It’s directly functional to what you’re putting on the blood vessels and what you’re allowing them to be in contact with.
DEBRA: Does it make a difference if the vegetables are cooked or raw?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Not necessarily. In fact, some vegetables actually release more bioflavonoids when they’re cooked.
I want to believe it is carrots and broccoli that might release more than being raw. When they’re raw, digestion itself has to break all these down, especially for carotenoid vegetables. So we’re talking about maybe carrots and sweet potatoes. Cooking actually helps them to release their nutrients better.
But when you take bioflavonoids in a tablet, you would have to be eating a huge amount of produce to get the same results. If you actually want to do a treatment, you really would be best off to say, “I’m going to take some bioflavoinoids.”
The great part about bioflavonoids – resveratrol is pretty inexpensive. It’s not a big cost layout and the results are excellent.
DEBRA: What if the people listening to this are saying to themselves, “Maybe I should just take these supplements to help strengthen my vascular system and avoid problems,” would that be a good idea?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely. Prevention is really the key in anything. You’ve seen the way I have my practice here. You’re preventing problems.
You have to look at the crystal ball of your own life and say, “What am I at risk for?” You look at your family. You look at your blood work, which I do with people. I look at your blood work and say, “Look. I see this is coming. It’s not here yet.”
And if you can look at some of the leg health, if the legs are bruising really easily, if they have allergies that are just not seeming to get better, but then all of a sudden, they start ending up to hemorrhoids and other problems or a man gets erectile dysfunction – all of a sudden, you’re thinking all these problems are just new problems showing up and that’s just the way life is. It’s not because you’re doing things that stimulate and close up these permeability issues that are highly affective.
That’s why really taking some bioflavonoids everyday, especially for your eye health is really important. And it’s easy. Like the quercetin, I use quercetin in liquid quite a bit. And you can even just put it in water and it really has a great effect to fight allergies, hemorrhoids, things of that nature, but also probably ED to some degree.
DEBRA: Wow. This is so interesting to me. Every time we do a show, I learn new things from you.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist. But she likes to give natural substances instead. Her website is BotanicResource.com.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who dispenses natural substances instead of drugs through her pharmacy at BotanicalResource.com.
Pamela, this is our last segment now. We only have about 10 minutes left. I’m going to let you talk about whatever you want to talk about, about the subject.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. You’re so sweet. I would like to repeat my phone number if anyone would like to call me and has any questions in particular. I would like to help you. The number here at Botanical Resource is (727) 442-4955.
I like to talk a little bit about the supplements some more, about looking at preventing these vascular issues.
One of the things that you should probably be taking everyday – we were talking previously about the peripheral vascular disease and how fat deposits can go into the arteries. And there’s permeability issues associated with that as well. And then all of a sudden, there are areas narrow and the blood cells can’t go through there very well and you end up with very painful legs, trouble walking and in some case, you’ll really need surgery.
We can’t prevent the fatty deposits by taking pantethine which works very good to lower cholesterol or red rice yeast. I’m sure most people know about that. But the big culprit in a lot of these is elevated fasting blood sugar, which is causing the lipids to rise in the first place.
What I can tell people is you really want to know what your blood pressure number is. We were talking about hypertension causing some problems and causing problems in the blood vessels. Maybe you want to do some homeopathy if your systolic is a little bit high.
Case in point, if your blood sugar and your fasting blood sugar is anywhere around 100, if it’s getting up to that point, in the high 90s or 100, you need to look at that and say, “Am I at risk for diabetes? And is this elevated blood sugar in particular causing problems with the vasculature itself?”
DEBRA: Wait. Could you talk about that a little more?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: How could elevated blood sugar do that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: What happens is elevated blood sugar is doing several different things. It’s circulating cytokines, which cause inflammation in the blood vessel. It also increases blood lipids, triglyceride cholesterol and LDL.
In turn, when it’s increasing these lipids and there’s inflammation present from the cytokines when they’re enhanced and it was causing them to start up causing inflammation, what happens is the area becomes sticky and allows the cholesterol and the lipids to attach to the blood vessel lining. Peripheral vascular disease could set in, in these patients that are not treating the cholesterol itself.
So inflammation, it all comes back to your blood pressure and in your blood sugar. Those two things really are hallmarks. Remember I was talking to you and we were talking about vascular health and your platelets. You really want to know where they’re at and see if they’re on the low end of normal. That’s something to really watch for bleeding.
In particular, the sugar itself is causing several things. It’s causing increased inflammation. It’s causing increased lipids. And in turn, it’s causing the blood vessels to become occluded. So cardiovascular disease has lots of different tenets, but we know that blood sugar elevation allows for the other damaging aspects to take place.
DEBRA: Very good explanation. Okay, I interrupted you. Go on with what you are saying.
PAMELA SEEFELD: No, it’s good. I like that you have a question in between. What I would tell you are the things that people really should be on. You need to be on fish oil first and foremost. That lowers your triglyceride, 30% of them.
And fish oil does have lots of other effects in the body. We know it has central nervous system effects for cognition. We also know too that it has anti-arrhythmic effects on the heart. The reason why I bring this up is that we’re talking about the heart and we’re talking about the vascular system.
I don’t know if your clients and the people that listen on this show have heard about this. But atrial fibrillation is when the heart is quivering. It’s beating too fast. And atrial fibrillation shows up in a lot of people. This is something I see quite frequently working as a pharmacist and a lot of people are on Coumadin or on blood thinners. The reason why is they have what’s called as AFib.
AFib can show up from several different things. But really it commonly happens when someone has diabetes or is overweight. The ones that are at risk for it also, believe it or not, are people that are drinking. Alcohol can put them at risk for AFib. There are a lot of different things.
When you have AFib, you have to be on blood thinners. And a lot of these people are on it for the rest of their lives.
I would say taking care of your heart and taking care of your blood vessels is very, very important. That might be something that people are overlooking.
I was talking about the resveratrol, looking at improvement from spinal cord injuries, people with inflammation and also had blood vessel disease. Taking quercetin, these are very inexpensive. That would be very good. I think taking fish oil is very important.
And I think taking the Body Anew – we were talking originally about these particulates getting stuck, chemicals and pesticides as well, but also more particularly the things you’re breathing in the air in your house and outside. These things that get stuck in the mucus membrane, in your nasal passages, in your lungs – you want to take that out. And by removing it, you’re going to have a much better outcome. That’s first and foremost.
It’s the Body Anew with quercetin in the water and maybe an anti-inflammatory. I really like taking something called [Traumeel?] or you can use [Chronogies?]. There are different ones you can put in the water. If you drink that through the day, your inflammation will be drastically reduced. So those are very important.
DEBRA: Let me just insert here. Pamela has been talking about drinking things in water. One of the thing that she does with all her clients is that she has – I’ll say S because I’m one of her clients.
Start the morning with a bottle of water and then add things to it that are liquids like homeopathic remedies and things. And then drinking it through the day is being on an IV. Didn’t you say that one?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: Throughout the day…
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right because you’re getting continuous peaks in the bloodstream of the medication. That’s how medications are dosed when someone’s in a CCU or an ICU or something like that. It really changes the dynamics of how things work in your body.
When you take a pill and you swallow it and you get a peak in the bloodstream and then 5 to 10 minutes after that, it’s not around anymore, that’s the problem. You want to have something that’s released all day long.
DEBRA: Right. I’m kind of lazy about taking supplements. People will tell me, “Take one of these at breakfast, lunch and dinner.” And I go, “Yeah, I can’t remember this.”
For a while, I was just taking all my supplements in the morning. And then when I learned this from Pamela, I went “Oh, that’s why they say take it at breakfast, lunch and dinner.” I realized that I just need to train myself to do that because the best way to be taking supplements or medications or whatever is throughout the day.
I have my bottle here. It just sits on my desk all day long and I just keep sipping it. And I have my supplements sitting right here at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It gets rid throughout the day and then my body gets what it needs when it needs it instead of just having it all in the morning. I think that’s just a really important point.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It is. And the continual dosing of the medication and the homeopathic medicines in the water is really, really a hallmark of a lot of things to do here. If you’re just taking it or you’re having it just in the morning, you’re not going to get it all day long.
I’ve been treating some people that have cancer or if they have a really sever infection of some sort – we really want to have even a morning bottle and an afternoon bottle so you’re covered all day long. You don’t want to have it temporarily like you’re just getting a small peak in the bloodstream. That’s why liquids are really the way to go if you want to have a better outcome for patients.
And it’s the same thing with the quercetin. I know quercetin are tablets and I do use those here. But quercetin and liquid will be far more effective for somebody that’s looking for this type of outcome than someone that’s using it with the tablet and taking it three times a day.
You’re right. The compliance of somebody taking something sporadically through the day and capsules is very low. I see that most people don’t do the liquid and don’t drink it through the day and bring into their office, put on their desk. But taking tablets through the day doesn’t really work as well.
I can help people if they have questions about any of the vascular issues we discussed today, especially if that’s affecting you or your loved ones. You can really treat that pretty easily with some bioflavonoids in the Body Anew to really pull that out.
I would really tell your listeners that that’s something that they should really think about, especially we were talking about the peripheral vascular disease. And also allergies are extremely common. Most people realize that this is usually treatable.
And it’s treatable in your pets, your dogs and cats. If they’re sneezing a lot, if they’re scratching, you can use bioflavonoids for animals as well.
DEBRA: This is so interesting. We only have just a couple of minutes left, but I just want to say that one of the reasons why I have Pamela on so much is because she has a unique combination of understanding of how things work in the body because she’s a pharmacist and then she’s applying that pharmacist understanding to using natural substances. It just makes a combination that I’ve never seen any place else, but it makes so much sense to me.
Usually if people want to use something natural or a natural supplement, they just go to the natural food store, they read an article or something. And people are taking supplements not understanding how they work in the body.
Pamela does understand these things. That’s why I just appreciate her so much. Anyway…
PAMELA SEEFELD: I appreciate you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk to these people and help them understand.
Thank you.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Your vascular health is really in your hands. Believe it or not, there are some things you can’t control. There are some things that people come to me and I’m like, “You know what? This is better handled with medicine.” I’m very, very honest about that.
DEBRA: Yes, she is.
PAMELA SEEFELD: There’s not a lot, but this is one that medicine does not address.
DEBRA: Yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Really. Medicine does not address all these things we talked about, the sinus problem, asthma, the colitis, the Crohn, the leaky gut, the peripheral vascular disease. All these things to some degree are preventable and treatable pretty easily with some common supplements. And your outcomes are pretty much better than taking a bunch of medications for these things.
I would tell you that…
DEBRA: Wait. Pamela, Pamela, the music is coming on in two seconds. Thank you very much.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.
DEBRA: Until you’re back in two weeks on Wednesday. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Plant Air Purifier
Question from Noel Kehrlein
Hi Debra,
Do you know anything about this product?
www.plantairpurifier.com
Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
This air purifier sounds doubtful to me.
Here’s their explanation.
The Plant Air Purifier uses a common houseplant to clean the air. Plants have natural air-cleaning abilities, but to use plants as air filters is difficult due to the numerous houseplants necessary to clean air sufficiently and efficiently. This is the capability of the Plant Air Purifier; one Plant Air Purifier has the cleaning power of 100 standard houseplants. The Plant Air Purifier achieves this through a unique design that increases airflow past the root system which is the host of toxin consuming microbes.
Air containing toxic elements passes through the porous growing media and activated carbon by means of a high velocity fan. The activated carbon within the media attracts chemicals and holds them until the microscopic organisms (microbes) eat the toxins. The byproducts of the consumption process are nontoxic food and energy for themselves and the host plant. Over time microbes adapt to their environment and the chemicals they are exposed to; they quickly acclimate to the amount and type of toxins in the air, thus becoming more efficient at consuming these chemicals.
They aren’t using the plant technology at all developed by Dr. Wolverton (the basis of their advertlsing). The plant is just sitting on top of activated carbon and it’s the microbes in the roots that eat the toxins.
If you are interested in this type of technology, the O2 purifier that I recommend is much more specifically designed in terms of collection of the pollutants and presence of microbes. I don’t see any air testing here, and it just seems inadequate in size and power.
Obamacare Alternative Insurance That Includes Holistic Care
My guest today is Kari E. Gray, Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine. We’ll be talking about Obamacare requirements and some options for how to fulfill them, including her innovative new program that cove rs alternative medicine as well as conventional. A passion in Kari’s professional career left by terminal cancer, Kari’s determination to survive by exploring all options despite medical diagnosis of no survival, led a tenacious, driven mother to natural treatments that in time gave her a second chance at life. Twenty-five years later she has an even more amazing story and passion to lead the natural medicine healthcare mission. As an insurance professional, Kari’s knowledge of healthcare including first-hand experience of being denied coverage when choosing natural treatments, empowered her with a commitment to ‘pay it forward’ and help people with life saving healthcare. www.mygreensurance.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
ObamaCare Alternatives Insurance that Includes Holistic Care
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kari E. Gray
Date of Broadcast: May 19, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Tuesday, May 19th, 2015 on a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about insurance, insurance, insurance. Oh, wow! I just want to say what a mess this is.
Okay. So I’ll just say that for the past – I don’t know how many years, four or five years, I had a wonderful little insurance – I’ll say “insurance” – that I pay $69 a month for. What it does is it pays for doctor visits. It pays 100% of labs and it gives a prescription discount. It’s $69 a month. Now, that is ending because of ObamaCare.
So I did my taxes this year. There’s this thing about having to pay the penalty if you don’t have insurance. What I saw in my tax return was that it just asks you, “Do you have adequate insurance?” And then you just get to answer yes or no. I just answered yes because I felt like that I had adequate healthcare. But it didn’t even have a definition of what that meant in the instructions with the taxes.
My guest today knows all about this. Not only does she know all about ObamaCare, but she has a new insurance program that qualifies for being your insurance for ObamaCare that also gives you holistic care. She’s going to tell us all about everything.
Her name is Kari Gray. She’s the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine. Hi, Kari.
KARI GRAY: Good morning. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. And you’re in Hawaii. How is it in Hawaii?
KARI GRAY: It’s wonderful! It’s Hawaii. Is there more to say? We always have sunshine and we have rain. And it’s green and it’s always beautiful.
DEBRA: It sounds like Florida. I’ve never been to Hawaii, but I’ve seen pictures and it’s a place I’d like to go one day.
KARI GRAY: Yes.
DEBRA: Tell us your story of how you got to establishing GreenSurance Natural Medicine.
KARI GRAY: This has been actually quite a long journey. But I’ll focus in on just the most recent part of it just because of the fact that it’s most relevant.
Basically, as you know, we have this ObamaCare legislation. I have written a patent actually for a natural medicine health insurance. Recognizing the bureaucracy of insurance – I’m a licensed insurance professional, so just recognizing how flow change is coming and recognizing that there’s also this love-hate relationship that people seem to have with insurance.
So really, just doing market testing, as we called it, kind of field of testing a product, people were very excited of the idea that there would be a product that would give them alternative medicine, but weren’t [inaudible 00:04:24]. It was kind of strange, the responses that we’re getting from people are strange.
And so continuing the research actually the legislation is how I actually came upon a different kind of application. The law basically said that there were exemptions to the penalty. So I really focused in on what the exemptions were. I won’t go into all of it now. Anyway, there were a number of different exemptions and organizations that qualified. It was a strenuous list and it seems really rather unusual that anybody could even pass this.
For example, they had to be in existence before 1999 and they had to have third party verification. There were just a lot of very ambiguous things. I was like, “Wow! I’m not for sure who else qualifies for this because who would have known in 1999 or before what was coming down the pipe years later.”
Anyway, as I continued to research, then I found that actually there were a lot of organizations to start with that applied for that exemption. But because of the criteria – there were more – they couldn’t pass. And what remained were just a handful of organizations that actually qualified.
That’s how this actually migrated from insurance to what’s called cost sharing. And cost sharing is an alternative. It’s like if you think about the difference between what a credit union offers and what a bank offers.
When you realize that there is a difference between the two, yet the service they provide to individuals feels the same, there is a completely different dynamic that goes into how they do and what they do. And that is for profit is what a bank does and for people or for members is what a credit union does. That’s really the similarity and difference that health insurance has with cost sharing.
We are a non-profit and we’re a coalition of non-profit. What we’re doing is using the federal law to provide something that’s really not done anywhere. And that’s what’s really exciting about this because what that has now opened up – we’re not inside, we’re not mandated by ObamaCare to have all of the kinds of coverage that ObamaCare requires for an insurance company to have, which is what skyrocketed the rate. For example, no one can be turned down. That’s a big problem. So that means everybody has to be insured.
The next problem is that you can have any kind of lifestyle and you can have any pre-existing conditions. All of those things are what are making it hard for all the other people, who, like yourself, may have had one small insurance policy. Now, those are no longer in existence because there are actually 10 different criteria that, according to ObamaCare, an insurance policy have to make. If it doesn’t make that, then that’s why they basically have to put some money to the policy or they can’t even reissue them. So that explains how your policy is lost because it just doesn’t qualify any longer.
There are a lot of people that are kind of thrown under the bus in all of this. Anyway, the great thing is that the cost sharing is a wonderful alternative. It’s not insurance, but it actually serves the same capacity and it gives people also what has never been given before. So it’s not just alternative, but it’s a conventional and alternative approach to medicine and it’s all under the same organizational services that are being offered now.
DEBRA: So now, there are a lot of details that you can give us and I want you to give all these details. But before we get to those, I want to talk a little bit more just because I think that I and a lot of other people don’t understand this. So what ObamaCare wants – and we’re going to run into the break, so you might not get to answer it all and then we’ll finish after the break. What Obama wants is for everybody to get insurance, regular insurance according to the guidelines that they have in ObamaCare. Correct me if I’m wrong. If you don’t, you have to pay a penalty. Am I right so far?
KARI GRAY: Yes, you’re correct.
DEBRA: Okay. So could you tell us about this penalty?
KARI GRAY: Yeah, sure. The penalty basically starts out small. It’s 1% of what’s called your AGI. That’s your Adjusted Gross Income. In other words, it’s not what your income starts out at. If you take some deductions, it’s that final number.
So it’s 1% of that number or $90. I think that’s how it starts. In other words, for a person who doesn’t even make enough that he would qualify for that, then it’s just $90. It’s not too bad, but basically what’s going to happen is time goes by, every year, that number goes up.
Anyway, it’s going to be a lot more significant. Of course, the more income the person makes, the more significant that’s going to become. So it’s going to actually be thousands and thousands of dollars as time goes by because I think by 2016, it will be 3%.
Just to give you an example and just to give your audience an example of what that really means. So if you just estimate what your adjusted gross income is, times that number, times 3%, you can just get an idea. Now that’s just what the penalty is.
That means you still don’t have any options really, but you’ve got to pay a penalty. That’s what it comes down to.
DEBRA: This year, when I was doing 2014 taxes, this is the first time that I saw that penalty. So it’s $90 for the 2014 taxes or 1%. Is that what you said? And then there’s 2015. By the time it’s 2016, it’s 3%. And then does it go up from there?
KARI GRAY: Actually, the legislation doesn’t go into it. This is where the…
DEBRA: Oh, wait! Wait! I have to cut you off because we have to go to break.
KARI GRAY: Okay.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m talking with Kari Gray, the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine about ObamaCare and what we can do to have alternative health as part of our insurance. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: We’re having some technical problems, but now we’re back. Kari, I hope you are still there with me. Are you there?
KARI GRAY: I am.
DEBRA: Yeah. Wasn’t that strange? I’ve been doing this show for two years and I’ve never had something like that happen. So I’m sorry that it happened on your show, but here we are again.
We were talking about – what were we talking about? I asked you a question. I’m sorry. My attention is on all this technical stuff. What were we talking about?
KARI GRAY: You were asking about the penalty. And I said that it’s going to be 3% by 2016 and you were asking if it goes up any further.
From anything that I’ve read, I don’t see anything expressing that right now, but it could be. I read a lot of information. I’ll let that be something that we can leave for another conversation when we have more time to research that. But I know that it goes up to 3%. That’s what I have seen.
DEBRA: So this is like forcing us to get insurance.
KARI GRAY: That’s the idea.
DEBRA: What if we don’t want insurance?
KARI GRAY: Then that’s what the penalty is to coerce a person into. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to. You can’t go to jail for it, but basically though they can seize some assets or freeze assets. Really the way they collect this is through refunds. That’s how they enforce it. It’s through an overpayment of taxes, then the IRS can take it from your refund.
DEBRA: I can’t tell you how unhappy this makes me because what is going to happen for me is that I’m either going to have to pay the penalty or I’m going to have to get insurance that I don’t even use or I can get something like your program.
KARI GRAY: Yes.
DEBRA: Your program is not insurance, but it qualifies under that other thing. So if I were to get your program – I don’t want to call it insurance, your cost sharing. But I guess people think of it as insurance anyway because it’s like [inaudible 00:19:01].
KARI GRAY: Yeah. It’s what most people think of it, but it isn’t and we don’t want to represent it that it is. That’s why we always clarify that it is not insurance.
Basically, I use the illustration about the credit union. Really cost sharing is where people come together with a united purpose. That united purpose is the fact that they basically are going to put their money together. It’s kind of an insurance called a risk pool.
Basically, when you pay premium, then that goes into obviously covering the cost of the insurance and all their salaries in the company and the profits and all that. But then a portion of it goes into what’s called the risk pool. When that claim is paid out, it comes out of the risk pool.
In cost sharing, it’s not the same, but it is similar in the fact that the person makes a donation to the community. And then those community resources are what actually in the end (because they’re combined with other people in the community as well), it actually is similar because it is what pays the medical cost that a person experiences at the end of the day. That’s really what we’re looking for. It’s a way to not go health care cost alone, which is what the penalty is all about or to try to encourage people or force them actually once it becomes more enforced.
It will become more enforced as time goes on. It’s written in the body of law, but it’s not really clear yet what’s going to happen.
But anyways, point being is that what cost sharing does is it gives people a way to really give themselves that protection, which is that they’re not going to be penalized and that they’ve got freedom. What we say is, “Freedom equals choice. And choice is power for medicine.”
If your choice in your health care is not just looking at things that potentially could be toxic. If you want to have some options outside of just the status quo of conventional approaches, then cost sharing actually is what you really need to look at because that’s the only way to get the freedom that, even under ObamaCare, will never be offered.
DEBRA: Okay. We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about this when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guess today is Kari Gray. She has found an alternative program for ObamaCare. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guess today is Kari Gray. She’s the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine.
Kari, before we go on and have you to tell us all the details about your program, you have quite a dramatic personal story of how you got interested in this. Would you tell us your story?
KARI GRAY: Sure, yes. Actually that’s the true beginning of how this started. In 1988 – actually I’ll start with the funny part of the story.
We all remember – or we’re old enough to remember I guess I’ll say. When Oprah Winfrey evaporated in front of everybody when she throws this coat and there was this much smaller version of Oprah and it was shocking to everybody.
And then she followed it up with pulling a wagon that represented all the weight she lost.
DEBRA: I remember seeing that on TV. Yeah.
KARI GRAY: Yeah. It was an epic moment. Oprah had some real epic moments in her career as a talk show host for sure.
That motivated me because I always felt like I was overweight even though actually at the time, I really wasn’t. But anyway, it motivated me to go to my doctor because she had taken this miracle substance called Optifast. You had to go to the doctor and get a physical in order to get on it. That’s actually how I got started.
So I went to the doctor thinking, “I’m going to try this.” So I go and I have a complete physical. When I called to go back for my results, I didn’t even begin to guess where this was going.
I was given two diagnoses. The first one was multi sclerosis. I asked what the cure of it is. There is no cure, they told me. And the next thing was liver cancer. I said, “What?”
They said, “Yes. And the bad news is that you’re too far gone for chemo and radiation. Basically you didn’t have much longer to live. So I’m sorry. There’s really nothing we can offer you.” That was the news I was given that day.
That was very devastating needless to say. And 25 years old and I had a house full of kids and I was dying. It was very, very overwhelming. I was depressed, I was devastated and I was dying and I just went to bed.
So [inaudible 00:29:12] and I really didn’t know what I was going to do. But the one thing that I had the presence of mind to realize was that first of all, I needed to start exhausting options. Maybe there was something that the doctor didn’t know about. That was my first thought. I had no idea at the time what that could be.
And then the second one is I realized, especially when I got the second diagnosis, that the first thing I needed to do – I could feel what’s in me. I was starting to die. I could feel the process happening. It was like psychologically, I was starting the dying process. I recognized that the first thing I needed to do is I needed to stop listening to bad news because that really was creating quite a psychological mind play on my psyche and my will to live.
Anyway, that’s basically how this all got started. I don’t know if you can hear rain or not, but that’s what that is if you do hear it. Anyway, that’s how my story got started, basically just exploring the options.
I felt my eulogy to my children would be that, yes, I died young, but I exhausted every option for their sake. That’s what really pushed me to start reading and researching and talking to people. You got to realize this was before the Internet.
There was a lot of diligent effort on my part. And sure enough, it eventually got me to a practitioner who not only did she immediately, through her testing methods, find the cancer and again confirm that I was terminal with not much longer to live. But the good news for me was that – since I already knew, I told her she wasn’t breaking the news to me. So she felt better.
But she asked me if I believe that I had a chance. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I had a chance. That’s why I’m looking for something other than my doctor and what they told me.”
She said, “Here’s the thing. I believe that you do have a chance because you’re young.” And she said, “But it’s going to require 100% diligence on your part. You got to be fully committed to everything I tell you to do. This is going to take a lot of change on your part.”
But she said this. “Your health insurance, you have insurance, right?” I said yes. She goes, “Your health insurance is going to pay for it.” I said, “Wow! Okay, let’s do it.” I didn’t know what other options I had and I really didn’t have any.
That’s how this shift started in my own personal story. I was just basically trying to survive, a catalyst, the soon-to-be death that I was facing.
What I was found was the problem. I found that there were a lot of things that I was doing wrong. That’s really what was causing the cancer.
Unfortunately, I had a lot of people. Every time we have a health issue, I just went to the doctor. And I usually ended up with a prescription like an antibiotic prescription. I did recognize how the overuse of antibiotics and all the other things in my life, too much sugar in my diet, too much stress in my life, birth controls. All of those things were contributing to setting me up to having a compromised immune system.
So I learned all the things that I was doing wrong. And I learned how to change all of those things, and it was a massive change. She was right when she said it’s going to take a lot of change, a lot of commitment on my part. It really did.
Anyway, here’s the interesting part. Eight months later, I’ve been spending thousands and thousands of dollars on all of this.
First of all, I submitted all my receipts. I thought this is [inaudible 00:33:19]. I submitted all my receipts. What’s interesting is the letter that I got back. They said that not only was I out of coverage for what I was doing, but it was unproven. So I was like, “That’s very interesting.”
I ended up going back to the doctor and I want to suggest seeing if I had made any progress. Now the way that the conversation went from here really again shifted my consciousness.
The first thing is my doctor was shocked that I was alive. “Okay, that was great. That was great news.” So I want to tell her why I was alive and what I was doing. And then I was shocked because she didn’t want to hear it and I was like, “What?”
She said, “Absolutely, I do not want to hear this.” And she said, “We are running new tests and you need to prepare for the works.” And I think she thought maybe I was delusional. I don’t know. But the point is that I spent a few more days anxious of waiting again, more bad news.
But this was where it all shifted for me because when she came in, she had my charts down and she didn’t make eye contact with me. So I sat there in silence for a while. And then I thought it was awkward. So I just decided to break the silence and started talking again about what I’ve been doing. And then she immediately stopped me. So we sat there.
And then finally, she looked at me and she said, “I saw what your original test was like and I see what these look like. And I’m here to tell you, the liver does not do this on its own. I don’t know what you’ve been doing and I don’t want to know. But I know this much, you’re cancer-free. Congratulations!”
DEBRA: We’re going to go to break there. That’s an amazing story, really wonderful.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kari Gray. When we come back, she’s going to tell us about her program that you can use instead of Obama Insurance so that you can get alternative health as part of your program and not just regular doctors. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kari Gray. She is the founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine.
Kari, as we ended off before the break, you were telling us how you did all these alternative things to get cancer-free and that your insurance didn’t cover any of them. So I consider that would be a big motivation for you to come up with a program where people who are having catastrophic situations like you had would have a program where they can get some help and support with the financial and with those kinds of illnesses.
So would you tell us in detail now about your program and what people get and what they don’t get? What does it cover? What is it all about?
KARI GRAY: Sure. There are a lot of things. Basically we let people to be aware of it. Our website actually is a great source of information and it actually is always kept most up to date. So please, if I can mention the website.
DEBRA: Sure.
KARI GRAY: Okay. It’s MyGreenSurance.com.
DEBRA: Is it not .org?
KARI GRAY: Yeah, it’s both. We have .com and .org. Yeah, we own both. Anyway, basically that’s where all of the facts are up. Anything that I’m not covering that people still have, the FAQs is a great page to look at and so is the health plan. It just narrows it all down.
But basically what we’re talking about is this. The purpose of the community approach is that it’s to offer lessened basic treatment to people versus what conventional wants to do oftentimes. That really is nice. People don’t like to be having basic things if they can avoid that.
And it also offers things like it prevents more costly conventional treatment. That’s big because really now you’re getting into more proactive things that you can do for your health.
Just to give an example. In ObamaCare, it requires things like screening. They call that Preventive Treatment Screening. The problem with screening is that if the screening finds the disease, then it didn’t prevent anything. That’s the irony.
But we know more about ourselves, especially once we get educated and become in tune with ourselves. Providers do obviously. I mean their job is to figure it all out. But if we’re really in tune, then that really helps us to stay proactive and healthy.
That just gives you an overview of really what the criteria is. So it really opens up doors to things like acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal regimes, massage therapy, homeopathy, colonics, detox programs, Chinese medicine.
And then if you are talking about some of the bigger things like cancer for example, you have to understand that this isn’t a health plan for people who have cancer. It’s a health plan for people who are healthy who can get cancer for example.
The way to illustrate that is you don’t buy car insurance after an accident. You buy car insurance in case.
DEBRA: Yeah. That’s what insurance is for. It’s the in case.
KARI GRAY: That’s where we get – sometimes people will say, “I have cancer.” It doesn’t work in a cost sharing environment because we can’t keep the rates low if the people that are participating and donating to the cost sharing communities are coming in terminal already.
That’s the reason why unfortunately we can’t put them in the cost sharing. But we do have another program we’re working where they can have access to at least discount services.
Once a healthy member is diagnosed with some terminal illness, things like this will be very important, which is like intravenous vitamin C treatment or we have got things like [inaudible 00:43:32] technology. There are a number of them.
[inaudible 00:43:40] cream, hemp oil, there’s a lot of real specializing for cancer for example. Oxygen therapy, chelation, oxygen IV therapy, there are a lot of things for serious disease that really open up the door to recovery. That’s really what the bottom line is in all this.
It’s not the slow road and the most profitable road to an early to an early grave. It’s actually how to help a person recover their health so that they can have the optimum life. That’s really what we’re talking about, not a managed care or treatment mentality.
That’s really the difference, just the polar extreme between conventional and alternative. While conventional deals with symptoms, alternative deals with causes. That’s really what we’re talking about. It’s opening up this place for people now to start addressing causes so that they don’t have a lifetime dependent on a prescription because that’s actually not covered in the health plan, health insurance either. A short term is, but not long term.
That’s why we use the alternatives, then we can break the symptom dependence cycle, pill for every ill, which is basically often what happens when a doctor is limited only conventional approaches, which is what is part of ObamaCare.
DEBRA: So I just want to be clear because you and I have talked about this. I’m considering getting this program myself. I haven’t made a decision yet if it’s the right thing for me.
But one of the things that I learned about when I was talking to Kari was that it’s not insurance-like if you were to get insurance and then they pay for all your doctor visits and stuff like that. It really is for if something happens in the future that is a big thing like cancer or heart disease or something like that where you have a lot of medical bills, that it covers those kinds of things.
So you still have to pay for going to a chiropractor, going to a dentist, doing whatever. It’s not kind of plan. But when you need it if you need it, it’s going to allow you to get all these alternative treatments that insurance doesn’t cover.
And it’s a very low price. Tell them about the price.
KARI GRAY: Okay. Let me just clarify something here. Just to give your listeners an idea here.
We’re talking about things like accidents, ambulance, X-rays, lab work, emergency rooms, home health care, hospital services, surgery, [inaudible 00:46:27] outpatients, maternity care, prescriptions, surgery, therapy, on and on it goes. I mean it’s not just singular approaches with alternatives, but it’s actually the very comprehensive health plan.
There are a lot of things to understand about it. I know that it’s hard to digest a plethora of information all at one time, but just to give you an idea. This is really part of the excitement that people have when they realize how low cost this really is.
For example, if…
DEBRA: Before you go on, let me just tell you that we only have three minutes left.
KARI GRAY: Thank you for that. So if it’s a single person, it could be anywhere from $249.99 a month to around $380. If they’re married, it could be $349 to $580. If it’s a family, it can be anywhere from $499 to $680.
Those are estimates because everyone falls in those estimates based on their health questionnaire that they complete. So those are just lows and highs, but it’s very, very affordable.
DEBRA: It is very affordable in comparison. I’m so happy that you’re doing what you’re doing because whether it works for everybody or doesn’t work for everybody, you’re taking a step out of the old insurance idea.
And you’re looking at how to bring the alternatives, help people afford the alternatives when they need some help. I think that what you’re doing will grow in the future to have other kinds of plans as well. That’s the way I see it at least.
You really are forging a new direction. I really appreciate that.
KARI GRAY: Thank you very much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. We do have still about a minute left. Are there any final words you’d like to say? Let’s give your website address again.
KARI GRAY: Yes.
DEBRA: It’s MyGreenSurance.org or MyGreenSurance.com.
KARI GRAY: That’s right.
DEBRA: It really has all the information there.
KARI GRAY: Yes. Really what we say is that GreenSurance is about people who are ready for change. GreenSurance is about people who want an alternative to ObamaCare.
GreenSurance has a lot of messages, but really what it’s about is about environment. So it’s about being able to finally start having some control over something as important as your health care. And really isn’t that refreshing?
DEBRA: It is refreshing.
KARI GRAY: Yeah, it’s very fresh and organic. And people are very really excited about that. We have the ability now to become the change that we want to see. How that happens is like-minded people get together for making change happen. That’s why we invite people to join us.
DEBRA: That’s great. That’s great. Again, I’m going to give the URL for the website. It’s MyGreenSurance.org. There’s so much more information there.
When I think about having to pay the penalty, why not take that penalty money and actually put it someplace so that I can get some help if I need that help? This sounds like an interesting place to put it. I’m looking for all kinds of alternatives for making sure I make the best ObamaCare choice.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Lyocell in Clothing
Question from Lanet Morales
Hi Debra,
I recently went to H&M since they are coming out with more of the natural fiber clothing like cotton, linen…. There is an organic cotton line (SUSTAINABLE-CONSCIOUS) which I notice is sometimes mix of 50% organic cotton and 50% lyocell. I have never heard of Lyocell before and I am not sure if it has been treated with toxic chemicals, if the material is natural and something I can wear and not inhibit toxins, comparing to polyester cheap clothing other companies sell.
I also noticed that high brand names of my clothing use Lyocell and Modal as well so I am assuming this is not something cheap like polyester.
Here is the link to one shirt that might help: www.hm.com/us/product/34134?article=34134-A
Thanks!!
Debra’s Answer
Lyocell is a type of rayon. Rayon is made from regenerated cellulose fiber of various types. In the past, rayon was usually made from cotton fibers too short to spin into yarn. Lyocell is made from wood pulp. I’ve not heard of any problems with it and it is used as a blend with many natural fibers to make them less expensive.
Non-Toxic Glue
Question from Cathy Loo
Hi Debra,
I’m wanting to make homemade ollas for my garden using unglazed clay pots. The problem is that I need to take 2 pots and glue them together to make the olla. I’m concerned about what would be the best glue to use to avoid any dangerous chemicals leaching into the soil or water. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is to not use glue, but instead use some type of cement to hold the pots together, like mortar for tiles.
You need to make sure it’s waterproof, and most waterproof glues are pretty toxic.
One that isn’t is TiteBond II, which you can get at Lowe’s or Home Depot.
Also EcoBond has nontoxic adhesives that might work for this.
Prepainted Fiber Cement Siding
Question from Nancy Carew
Hi Debra,
We are building a new house and considering using prepainted fiber cement siding. I inquired about the paint used and was informed it is Olympic PPG Machine Applied Coating. In the information I was sent it says “VOC 0.6 lbs/gal.” Can you help me understand what this means? Also, if there are VOC’s in the paint and it is painted prior to being installed do you feel this is a concern as it will be on the outside of house? Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
VOC’s are volatile organic compounds. These are the chemicals you smell in paint.
“Low VOC” is used to describe a product with a VOC content at or below 150 g/L.
“Ultra-Low VOC” products have a VOC content below 50 g/L.
Now we have to translate that. to your measurement of lbs/gallon.
That math is beyond me, however, it doesn’t matter.
It’s prepainted, which means the paint is applied and dried in a factory. The VOCs are gone by the time you get the product.
