Art | Resources
Fire Rating of Shelving
Question from Sou Belaidi
Hi Debra,
I came across your article regarding Ikea, today I am facing a wall with Ikea.
I am about my first store in London, I am a small business so i wanted to get some shelving unit from Ikea, the KALLAX series but I need to provide to the landlord the fire rating of the shelving units.
I have been calling customer service in Sweden and in the UK and no luck no one seems to know what is the fire rating of these shelves.
Without this information, I will not be able to open my store.
Do you think you can help?
Debra’s Answer
I think I know why IKEA can’t give you an answer.
It’s two things.
First, they probably don’t understand what you are asking for. Do you understand what this term means?
A fire rating refers to the length of time that a material can withstand complete combustion during a a standard fire test.
In the USA, Fire testing of building materials and components of buildings — such as joists, beams and fire walls — is required in mostplaces by local building codes (though I personally have never run into this). Fire tests for consumer products—such as appliances and furniture—are, for the most part, voluntary. Except for certain products such as children’s sleepwear, mattresses and sofas.
In the UK the national building regulations contain fire classifications for building productsYour landlord is probably referring to these.
Why does Ikea not know the fire rating of their shelving?
It may be that there is no fire rating for shelving.
It may be that they are an international company and don’t know the local regulations.
If it were me, I would go back to my landlord, find out exactly what he or she needs, and then go back to Ikea with an exact request rather than a general request. Tell them this is national building regulations in the UK.
One thing I don’t understand is why shelving would need a fire rating? Perhaps your landlord is asking for something that isn’t necessary.
I know this answer seems a bit off topic for this blog, but I wanted to look it up to see if there was a connection between fire ratings and chemical fire retardants. I don’t know the answer to that without a lot more research, but here in the USA flammability laws require sofas and mattresses, for example, to meet fire ratings, and therefore often toxic fire retardants are used. Don’t know about this in the UK.
How I Chose the Best Coffee
Hello Debra,
I really appreciate the legwork, searching, and research you do for all of us. It takes so much time, energy, and expense to check into products, etc… I also appreciate feedback from your readers with chemical sensitivities, or people that just want to live a healthy life as free from toxins as possible. Thus, I want to tell you about something I have found that has made my life a little more enjoyable.
Two of my doctors recommended I try drinking coffee for a couple of health conditions. I haven’t been able to drink coffee for 30 years. Dr C recommended a brand that advertises it’s coffee to be low in mycotoxins. I purchased the decaffeinated coffee, and didn’t feel good with it. Then purchased the regular and didn’t feel good with it. Not giving up, I found Bean Trees Organic Coffee at a local grocery store. I liked it and felt good when I drank it.
Due to multiple food sensitivities, etc., as often as possible, I have a health care practitioner, Dr W muscle test me for all my food, drink, and for actually everything I would use either internally or externally. Thus, I started testing coffees. I purchased several different Varietal Single Origin Organic Coffees and Blends from BeanTrees Organic Coffee. I also purchased other Organic Brands from large and small companies.
THIS IS THE INFORMATION I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT.
So far, I have tested 16 different coffees from 6 different companies, 12 sold as Certified Organic, and NOT ONE has tested good for me. Most of them caused a noticeable reaction, from just not feeling good to blowing blood out of my nose.
More importantly, I have tested 14 single origin varietals and 4 blends from BeanTrees Organic Coffee, all Organic, and ALL, EVERY SINGLE ONE, TESTED GOOD FOR ME. And I love them. I feel good when I drink them. Amazingly, they test I can have them every single day. Unbelievable!
I rotate everything. Dr W doses my foods, and most are every other day, or every 3 days, but BeanTrees Organic Coffee tests every day and tests very strong for me. I may also add, that Dr W never liked coffee, not even the smell. We tested the coffees on him, and likewise, most brands did not test, however he can have BeanTrees Organic Coffee. He now loves coffee with coconut oil and coconut milk in it. This is additional proof that the brand seems to make a HUGE difference.
He and I are both extremely impressed with BeanTrees Organic Coffee. I don’t know why it is better than the others that are sold as Organic. All I know, the ONLY coffee I can drink, and feel good with, is BEANTREES ORGANIC COFFEE. I absolutely love it. I look forward to it every morning.
Lately coffee has been in the news for its health benefits. Dr Mercola had an article March 16, 2015, “Daily Coffee Consumption May Help you Avoid Clogged Arteries”. One thing I learned is that “Coffee beans are one of the most heavily pesticides-sprayed crops.” Purchasing Organic and Sustainable “Shade-Grown” coffee is a must. However, I also learned it depends upon the brand.
I want to share this information with you so you can pass it on to your readers if you think it would also be helpful for them. It can take years to find good things that are not toxic, even though they are advertised as organic or being wonderful. Like I said previously, it takes a lot of time, energy, and expense. And it is so helpful when we can learn from others that have been through it!
I might also add that I make my coffee using the cold-brew method which reduces the acid in coffee by up to 70%. I like the taste better also. I grind the beans with a glass, and non BPA, Hario hand grinder and put the grounds in a large glass measuring cup. I pour structured cold water over the grounds. I stir it with a glass stirring rod, cover it with a glass dish, and leave it for 12 hours. I stir it in the morning, and strain it with cheescloth into a Visionware glass saucepan and heat it up. I prefer coffee heated, instead of iced coffee, and nothing is added. I love, love, love it!
Debra, I am extremely limited with foods I can tolerate, thus I was impelled to share this information with you.
By the way, drinking BeanTrees Organic Coffee has helped one of my health conditions 🙂
Best of Health to You,
Stephanie
Sofa Shopping
Just want to pass along to you a link to the first in a series of posts about choosing a quality, toxic-free sofa.
It’s written by the sisters at OEcotextiles, who know their stuff about organic natural fabrics. But this series goes way beyond fabrics, explaining in detail the different parts of a sofa and how to choose one that will last. (I’ve had my custom-built all-natural sofa for more than 15 years now and it looks like new).
Here’s the link to the sofa shopping blog post: Sofa Shopping.
And here’s a link to a radio interview I did with them on Toxic Free Talk Radio: Fabrics That are Nontoxic, Ethical, Sustainable…and Beautiful.
Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
Today my guest Annie B. Bond, author of True Food: 8 Simple Steps to a Healthier You. We’ll be talking about why slow, local, organic, and whole food matters—for both your health and the Earth. I met Annie many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), and Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008). Her most recent book True Food (National Geographic, 2010), is a winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). Currently Annie blogs and leads the selection of toxic-free products for The True Find. www.anniebbond.com | www.thetruefind.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: April 16, 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, April 16th. I got my taxes done at 9:33. I had to drive across the causeway to take it to the only post office that was open until midnight, but I got it in. There were all these cars and they’ve got people from the post office standing out to collect all the latecomers.
You would think they give us so many days, all of four months, you would think I could do it some time between January and April, but I ended up doing it on April 15th. Anyway, that’s all done now. I can put my attention on other things and so can you.
Today, we’re going to have a delicious show. We haven’t talked about food in a while. And my guest is Annie B. Bond. She has been on the show half a dozen times at least before. And we’ve been friends for very many years.
She’s written a book. She’s co-authored a book called True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. And I just heavily agree with every word that it says about the importance of these particular food choices that we’re going to be talking about today.
Well, we’ll just get right to Annie. Hi, Annie.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here. And I think we’ve known each other for at least 25 years or something like that.
DEBRA: I think so too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, which sounds ages, but nonetheless, there we are.
DEBRA: Nonetheless, there we are.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah.
DEBRA: It just goes to show how experienced we are.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, it does.
DEBRA: Yes, it does. So I just love this book, True Food.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you. That’s an honor.
DEBRA: Yeah. I should say that it’s an award-winning book. It won the Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the world.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. That was quite a feat. I was very proud of that. That was great.
DEBRA: How does that happen? Did your publisher submit the book for the award?
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, the publisher did. Yeah, that’s right. We were all invited to go to Paris to accept the award, but they didn’t fund us.
DEBRA: But did you go?
ANNIE B. BOND: No, I didn’t. It would have been a joy to go there.
DEBRA: Oh, what an incredible thing. But just to have the award is an amazing experience.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, it is. Yeah. And the book is an interesting book because – I wish I can tell you the history of the book at some point, but whatever you want to…
DEBRA: Just tell us right now.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: How did it get written?
ANNIE B. BOND: It started off as actually another. It started off as The Green Kitchen Handbook. Meryl Streep wrote the foreword to it. I wrote it with Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet. I worked with them in the early 90s and I actually was the founding editor of the Green Guide.
I guess the reason that I want to tell the story is just that Meryl Streep and Wendy Gordon got on the Today’s Show around Earth Day on 1989 and talked about Alar in apples.
DEBRA: I remember that.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, exactly. It was the pivotal point. I mean, from that moment on, there was like a hockey stick of interest in organic food.
But Meryl Streep got pounced on like no other in terms of the science behind Alar in apples. It turned out that it wasn’t maybe a carcinogen, but it was a neurotoxin or something like that. It was really unbelievable how the industry came down on her. She was just trying to protect her four kids and was doing the best she could because she was feeding them apples three meals a day and that kind of thing.
So what happened is that Mother and Others for a Livable Planet, which is the organization that Meryl Streep and Wendy Gordon Rockefeller founded ended up getting scrupulous with their science around food. They trained me well at that time. I mean, it was really, really a valuable lesson.
Every single word that went into the Green Kitchen Handbook was vetted by all these food sites just because they didn’t ever want to go through what they went through with the alar in apple story. That’s the background about this book.
So then by the time we ended up pushing it out into a new version of the book, which became True Food, it was just great to know how well vetted the science was. That’s all I wanted to say about it.
DEBRA: I think that that’s really important and that’s something that I paid attention onto myself, to really make sure – and I’ll just talk about this for a minute just because it’s such an important point – really make sure what my sources are.
In the world of writing, there are first hand sources and second hand sources and third hand sources. And for our listeners, what that means is that the first hand source would be if I had an experience and I wrote about it or if Annie had an experience and she told me about it and I wrote about it. That’s first hand.
If you read something, say on my website, that is now second hand source if you were to then write it and say, “Debra Lynn Dadd says, ‘alar in apples cause…’” That is now second hand source. And it goes on and on and on.
Especially on the internet, what you see is a lot of information that has been pulled from other websites. That is actually really encouraged now. You can take courses in how to use other people’s information and repeat it on your site. And if you look up a subject, you’ll see that a lot of the websites say exactly the same thing almost in exactly the same words.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It is because it’s just a waste of time when people do that. There is valuable information that people need to have. So I have been really careful in the past four or five years or something – more careful. Not that I wasn’t careful before. But before, I would sometimes be vague. But now, I know if I say this is toxic, I can show you the study. And often, if you look on my blog, you’ll see that I show, “Here’s the link to the study and here’s the link to a magazine article that’s easier to read about this study.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Exactly. That’s a really, really good solution for that. Certainly, in the news recently too is the value of science especially when talking about toxic. You need to be able to back it up so that you can hold your head up or you’re going to get attacked like poor Meryl Streep. I mean, that was really, really unbelievable and a very chilling message for people.
But you’re totally right about the internet. How many times have you been plagiarized? I’ve had an entire book almost plagiarized completely.
DEBRA: Many, many years ago, after my first book Nontoxic and Natural in 1984, in about 1986, I was watching TV and Ralph Nader was on and I know that he just took something right out of my book because I had written it in a very specific way and he just practically said it word for word on national television.
I was sitting there going, “What? What? That’s my formula. He’s just taking this information right out of my book and not giving me any credit.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Isn’t that something? Yeah.
DEBRA: It is something! I know and I can recognize when people have plagiarized my work. And I know you can too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes.
DEBRA: People just pick up this stuff and repeat it and don’t give sources. People really need to watch out for that and know what your sources when you’re reading something.
I think toxics are so important that if I say something is toxic, there’s got to be a study. There’s got to be some reason and not just because somebody said it and or it was on the XYZ blog. It’s because there’s actual science behind it.
And if there isn’t, then I say, “This person reported their symptoms were… “ or something like that. I don’t try to make it sound like…
ANNIE B. BOND: A fact.
DEBRA: A fact.
ANNIE B. BOND: For everybody or whatever.
DEBRA: For everybody, yeah. Anyway, we’re getting near to the end of the segment. We’ve already gone through a quarter of the show and we haven’t talked about your book.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, no. We haven’t even talked about food.
DEBRA: I know. But we said some other important things. So I’ll tell you what I want to do while we’re ticking down for the last few seconds here. First, I want to read something because this is just so wonderful. It just gives the flavor of what your book is about. This is a dedication I want to read for the listeners.
“To all people whose hands reached out to sow the seed, till the soil, pick the produce, snap the beans, remove the stems and make the meal.” I just think that that’s so beautiful. It really shows that food really is about all these hands and all these hearts doing these things to make the food that’s on your plate.
And we don’t often think about that. We’re going to talk about that today.
You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond, author of many books. But today, we’re talking about True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. And she also blogs and leads the selection of toxic free products for the True Find, which is at TheTrueFind.com.
Lest we go up in another tangent, I just want to say that I was looking at your blog the other day. There is so much good information in there. It’s so beautifully done.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you, Debra. Really, thank you so much.
DEBRA: It’s very aesthetically pleasing to look at the images and to see what you’ve said about all these different natural things. So good work.
ANNIE B. BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: Anyway, let’s talk about the book. Let’s talk about the book because it’s so good. So there are eight steps here. Let’s try to get those eight steps in. So I think we just need to talk about each one of them very briefly. The first one is eat local food.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. It’s interesting. Certainly we all hear about ‘eat local’, but there are some really interesting reasons why that many people don’t necessarily understand. One is certainly the amount of energy it takes to get a piece of produce to you. The [inaudible 00:15:19] further away in terms of gas and fuel.
One thing that a lot of people don’t quite realize is the difference in the nutritional value is the fresher the food is. So if you can go to a farmers market on a Sunday and the farmers will pick that food that morning, you’re getting much very, very vibrant energy that you wouldn’t be getting if it was two weeks old because it would’ve been shipped out from who knows where.
Another concern of food that’s shipped, especially from out of the country, is that they often carry what they call the circle of poison, which are pesticides and herbicides that have been taken off the market in the US and they’re still being used in third world countries. So we often then can get those pesticides anyway. They come in on the turnips or whatever that have come across the border.
So there are pretty good reasons to eat locally.
DEBRA: Today on my food blog, ToxicFreeKitchen.com, I wrote a post about heirloom tomatoes, just buying heirloom tomatoes, local heirloom tomatoes. Just over the weekend, there is a new market that’s opened here in St. Petersburg, which is about 45 minutes from where I live in Florida.
They have local organic heirloom tomatoes from local farmers. So I wrote a post about buying these tomatoes. And there is a little picture of the salad that I made out of them and some more information about heirloom tomatoes.
So having produce like heirloom varieties, which means that they’re ground from seeds that are passed down from generation to generation and not made by multinational corporations that make hybrid seeds, these are true tomatoes. Talking about the title True Food, these are true tomatoes. Whenever you see that world heirloom, that means it’s the true vegetable or fruit. You don’t get those at supermarkets where they’re being shipped in from other states or other countries. They’re just so beautiful. I love heirloom tomatoes. I use to…
ANNIE B. BOND: Well, they are just divinely delicious. One of my very best friends wrote the book The Heirloom Tomato and her farm is not far from mine. So I get basket of her heirloom tomatoes during harvest time. They’re wonderful. I’ll put the photos on the True Find.
I just want to tell a very quick story that might help people to understand the value of going for the heirloom plants. This woman’s husband actually is the one who has put the – if people have heard about the [inaudible 00:17:55]. It’s way up near the Arctic Circle. The seeds are being saved. So if anything, a catastrophe happens on the planet, all those seeds are saved there.
I want to just talk about the Irish potato famine quickly, which was when the Irish farmers depended on two varieties of potato or something. A blight hit and wiped out all the potato and they had this massive starvation. But if they had had a wide variety of heirloom potatoes, they would never have had the famine because at least one or two of these seeds would have been able to withstand the blight. And in fact, there is a seed in South America that happily withstood the blight of those potatoes, that potato blight.
So that shows, in a nutshell, how valuable and important the wider variety of seeds we have for any one species is unbelievably important because it could really stop a famine if you don’t wipe out. You’ve got resistant seeds to different diseases.
DEBRA: That’s so important. When I lived in California, I lived in a very local little valley where a lot of people knew each other. There was a woman there who was growing heirloom tomatoes and she had gone around to old families in the area and collected their seeds from the tomato plants in their backyards. And so we really had our own [inaudible 00:19:25] valley tomatoes. I had raspberry canes from my neighbors.
We were constantly swapping the vegetative materials between our gardens so that we could have just that local thing that was the exact plants that have been growing in our local area. It was just so amazing to do that.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, that totally is. The other thing about eating a wide variety of tomatoes, for example, or a wide variety of food is that you get a range of nutrients that you wouldn’t get from those pink gas-ripened tomatoes that you can get on a grocery store in January.
DEBRA: What nutrients? There are no nutrients in those tomatoes.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, I think there are zero nutrients. Right, exactly. My mother was wonderful at this. We had just a bounty of vegetables all week long, different every night. I always took that to heart, that that was really good for me growing up. I haven’t been as good as an adult, but I try to be especially in the summer and during harvest time.
But the more variety of vegetables you get, the more variety of nutrients you get and the healthier it is for you.
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s right. So I really want to mention that this book is not just about what we eat for our own health, but about supporting the environment, supporting earth and nature while we’re making our food choices which is so important because without the seeds being there and the plants and the soil and all of that, we would have nothing to eat.
I think that sometimes we forget that when we go to the supermarket and buy food and don’t have our hands on the soil and we’re not talking to the farmers and things like that. So this is just a very important book, very important.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of True Food – and it really is about true food – Eight Simple Steps To A Healthier You. We’ll talk more about the eight steps when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking about true foods today with Annie Berthold-Bond, author of – I’ve known Annie so long. I said “Annie Berthold-Bond,” instead of “Annie B. Bond” or “Annie Bond.”
ANNIE B. BOND: You’re never supposed to change your name mid-career. I’m sorry I did. Oh, dear.
DEBRA: Anyway, true foods. So now we actually touched on step two when we talked about eat a variety of foods. So let’s go to step three, “aim for organic.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. Well you talked about how important the concepts in this book are not just for health, but also for the environment.
One of the big crises we have with food production is the damage to soil. The reason you want to switch – I mean outside of for health reasons, for the health of the planet, you want to switch to farms that know how to build and grow soil, so that it’s very full of nutrients and that you don’t have these horrible wash-off of all of your topsoil, which is so key for growing food.
So organic farms are very mindful of the health of the land. And that’s what you want to be. You want to be able to support any farm that is supporting the land.
And also, I find it very important for myself to – I mean, our next step is to eat lower on the food chain. But it’s very important in terms of eating if you eat animal products to eat animals that have been raised in a humane way and on farms where they’re able to eat grass, be outside, get the sun, don’t have a violent death, that kind of thing. Not violent, but they’re not all pent up in a horrible situation.
I do eat meat and I have vowed and I have been very rigid about this for a very long time that I will only eat meat that comes from an organic farm.
DEBRA: Yes, me too.
ANNIE B. BOND: But the truth is that also then for health reasons. It was something that we couldn’t say in the 90s. I was telling you how strictly we’re about what science was available. There was enormous amount of controversy in the 90s about whether organic food is more nutritious. We just couldn’t say it was more nutritious at that time.
Since then, of course, there have been many more studies to show that organic food is being proven to be more nutritious for us. And so that’s a very nice update, a good reason to eat organic food.
But step four, which was eating lower on the food chain was a really interesting chapter to me to work on because that was really about the fact that it’s about the predator-prey. So it’s how much toxic material is stored in our fat.
There are a lot of reasons why organic is important for – or not eating as much meat is important for the environment and that kind of thing in terms of water usage and things like that. But in terms of health, as we hear toxic chemicals are all the way up to the [inaudible 00:30:05] and things like that, is stored in fats. And so the lower you are in the food chain, the less fatty animal parts you’re eating, the less contamination.
DEBRA: That’s right. They just accumulate. They bio accumulate. The toxic poisons go from – I mean, obviously, eating a plant even if it’s not organic would have less accumulation of toxic chemicals than an animal who eats those plants and gets all that toxic accumulation and concentrates it in the fat.
That’s another reason why it’s really important to eat organic as we start moving upto the food chain. But you can also just eat lower on the food chain too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Because even organic – animal fat doesn’t mean that it’s not going to have contamination because everything’s contaminated. That’s the thing. Yes. But it would be better.
DEBRA: At this point in time, everything is contaminated. Organic is a lot less.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: And it’s not because they’re adding chemicals. It’s because the whole environment is contaminated.
ANNIE B. BOND: Right, hence the blubbers on the seals that the Eskimos are eating.
DEBRA: Yes. Okay so then step five is to eat fresh food.
ANNIE B. BOND: And there, you’re going to get all the vibrancy of the enzymes and the nutrients. So if you have a farmers market as I said or community supported agriculture – those are springing up all over the country. They’re called CSAs. So those usually work where you give a certain amount of money at the beginning of the season. And then you get deliveries every week or you go to a farm to pick them up.
This comes back to that heirloom tomato and the flavor in the – I can’t emphasize enough the difference in the taste of fresh foods than non-fresh foods.
DEBRA: I belonged to a CSA for a couple of years until I move to Florida. And in this case, the food is not just picked this morning. It’s picked an hour ago. It goes right into the baskets. You can go to the farm. Like the one that I belonged to. I could go to the farm anytime I wanted and work and see what they were doing. I got to know my farmer really well.
One of the best experiences of my entire life was the day that we had a dinner for all the organic farmers in my little area. There were about 10 or 12 of them and some of us from the CSA. We went around in an afternoon and picked up the produce from all the farms. And then we did all the prep work in this beautiful kitchen at the farm where we did the CSA. And then we served the farmers who had been – I’m going to start crying. They have been serving us our food all season. We served the farmers.
ANNIE B. BOND: Nice, very nice. That goes back to the hands.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: You’re honoring them, which is really, really nice. Even nuts and seeds, the fresher they are, the better they can go stale and rancid.
But I think one of the great things for me – and I’m sure everybody has experienced this – the feeling of how you feel after you’ve had a meal that is just full of all the antioxidants that come out of this kind of food. I mean, your whole body’s sings. And that’s what we want to have happen, our bodies sing because it’s so healthy for us.
DEBRA: I love that, “our bodies sing.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah because you can feel it. You really can. I can just feel about an hour later just, “Oh, it does these things through my body. The Antioxidants are really great.”
But I want to say something about frozen food. If I have a choice in the middle of the winter of choosina non-organic fresh food that is theoretically fresh – I live in Northern Upstate New York, so my winters are really deep winter – I will buy frozen food that’s organic because it will have been frozen at the time of the harvest and it’s going to be the best way to have the most nutritious food.
So you can find the dates. There are places where you can go online and find dates of when food is frozen so you can guarantee that it was done during the harvest time. That, I think, is the way to manage, trying to get as fresh food as you can in winters.
DEBRA: That’s a really good tip. I didn’t know that. We have to go to break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. We’re talking about true food. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond, author of True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You.
It’s really such a great book because it really describes in general and in detail – I mean, we’re talking very generally to get through the whole eight steps during the show. But if you go to the book, each chapter, each of the steps is thoroughly explaining with lots of details and recipes so that you can understand the concept and also understand how to apply it in your life.
And I just want to read just a little quote. This book is full of what are called snapshots of comments that individuals have made who eat this way. She says, “Since eating only fresh and all natural foods, I’ve gained more vitality and feel like the bodily aging process has slowed way down.”
I was thinking as Annie was talking earlier about fresh food that we tend to reach for drugs or remedies or nutrition pills or some manufactured product that’s sold to be healthy. But if we really just eat good food, it has everything in it that our bodies need. Nature has designed food to be everything that a human body needs.
We tend to not eat the food and then look for some other kind of remedy. But if we would get more fresh whole natural local organic food in our bodies, we would feel so much better. And we do. I feel so much better when I eat it.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s interesting. This is a really good natural segue way into the next step, which is step six, eat whole foods. I have a body that just need unerringly needs whole, whether it be clean air, full air, true air, true food or whatever.
DEBRA: Yeah, me too.
ANNIE B. BOND: And so I find if I eat processed food, I finish it and I’m immediately wanting to eat. I overeat. I need something else because it’s not a whole food. It’s not giving me the complete nutrients of whatever that food is.
I’ve been very depressed. The media is overloading me with horrifying stories about the ingredients in processed foods. And it just solidifies more and more and more how off track we are to live on processed foods for people.
But just from my own personal experience, I know that I eat more because if I eat processed food, I need a fuller nutrient. But there is just something about – my point was that the other thing about processed food is that we’re getting a lot of chemicals that are affecting our endocrine system from food packaging too.
So if we eat food that has a lot of plastic in it or canned food that the lining has these bisphenol A, these endocrine disrupting chemicals, it starts falling down our thyroids and the different parts of our bodies that help us with metabolism.
I think that it’s a very, very important to actually really try to draw the line and understand and try to avoid processed food. I think the signs just added up where it’s that now incontrovertible that we need to eat whole foods.
So the other thing I just want to say on the high side about eating natural food is that I’m always astonished at how sweet fresh produce is. I just can’t even believe it. Sometimes I’ll eat a fresh pear or something like that. And I feel like I’m eating a watermelon. It’s so sweet. It’s not like we need to buy sweeteners. These foods are sweet if you buy them straight out and fresh.
DEBRA: That’s right, they are. I noticed that when I stopped eating sugar, everything tasted sweeter to me. I mean, on my food blog a couple of weeks ago, I had a raw asparagus salad and I said, “This tastes so sweet” because it does taste sweet to me. I don’t have sweeteners, especially refined sweeteners I’m not dulling my taste buds anymore. And so I can just really enjoy the sweetness of food.
I want to just say one thing that I thought of. That is that even if you’re buying something – I was at a farmers market and I was talking to somebody about their pasta sauce, which tasted really good. I tasted every sample. So I started asking them questions. It just says ‘tomatoes’ on the label. And I asked them. “What about these tomatoes?” They said, “Oh, they’re only the finest Italian canned tomatoes.”
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh gosh, yeah.
DEBRA: Even though it says ‘tomatoes’ on the label, it doesn’t specify that it’s a canned tomato, so you’re getting all that bisphenol A.
ANNIE B. BOND: Isn’t that something? Yeah.
DEBRA: Yes. That just really stuck home to me that if you’re going to buy a processed food product, even if it’s organic pasta sauce or something, you just really need to check with the manufacturer and see what’s really in it as opposed to what’s on the label.
And I don’t think that they’re trying to cheat you so much as that there are standard laws about how food products get labeled. They’re following the law, but the law doesn’t say that you have to say whether it’s in a can or not.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. And then another example would be I was really pleased with this gluten-free bread I’ve been buying that was delicious. It was very, very high in fiber. It was well-made. It wasn’t full of just starches and that kind of thing.
And then all the story broke about emulsifiers really contributing to obesity and leavening agents too. It was really a breakthrough study about two months ago or something like that. I went and looked at those breads that I’ve been so, “Finally, I found a high fiber gluten-free bread that I didn’t have to make” and all that kind of thing. And sure enough, there was one of these emulsifiers in it. I got it at the health food store of course and everything.
It’s just, once again, an example of – just don’t even take the chance, but make things if you have to. Use these ingredients that are long term considered safe.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANNIE B. BOND: They call them the GRAS materials. And they generally are regarded as safe. And it’s hard to go really wrong when you use those. But I don’t know. It’s not that hard to click from scratch. There are more and more whole food products that are processed available. But you have to read labels like a hawk.
DEBRA: It’s just a matter of checking out the materials in the ingredients and then you know. Unfortunately, things are not labeled the way they should be in my opinion.
Anyway, let’s go on to step seven, which is stock your pantry.
ANNIE B. BOND: I think that if we’re going to be trying to eat more whole foods and move away from packaged foods, having everything at your fingertips just becomes incredibly important. So that means cooking healthy meals is always convenient and nutritious. It also means that you have fewer packaged foods and fewer packaging and all that kind of thing, which helps the environment.
So all in all, you’re just stepping up into your meat-making. You have a healthy diet. So during harvest season, all you need to go out at is get a few fresh vegetables – not few, an abundant amount or whatever. And then you’ve got all the staples at home to make a curry or whatever you want to do. It eases the whole thing.
I guess one thing I just really want to mention, a real issue though that includes this packaging problem is that your pantry is not going to be full of plastic foods that you can throw in the microwave. There is a lot of research that is showing that, especially hot fatty foods –
I used to go on picnics all the time back in the 70s and I’d have cheese that I would buy. It would be in the plastic packaging. I always tasted the plastic in the cheese. You don’t want hot fatty food and plastic combined at all under any circumstances because the plastic leaches into the cheese. We just need to avoid as much plastic in our food as we possibly can.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANNIE B. BOND: So your pantry is with whole foods and things. You go to the bin section of the health food store and you buy your – what I do is I buy a bunch of – I have a ton of glass mason jars. I buy red lentils and they go into the mason jars. And that protects them from the moss and all that kind of thing too. And all my dry goods are in mason jars in a big cupboard I have.
And this is so easy. If I don’t have anything in the house, oh, my gosh, I just open the cupboard in there and I could make a nice dough with the lentils and then I got the herbs and spices and that kind of thing. It’s a real help to speed up the whole process of cooking.
DEBRA: I do that too. I make sure that I have all my spices and the dry ingredients and things so that all I have to do is be shopping for the organic meat and vegetables. And then I can make whatever it is that I want.
And I want to say something that I think is going to sound funny. Before I started stocking my pantry, I would go to my kitchen and I would say, “There’s nothing to eat” and then I’d order a pizza. I know we’ve all been there.
ANNIE B. BOND: We have! That’s so common. I mean, that’s exactly the funny thing. Yes.
DEBRA: I know. And I eat pizza and pizza and pizza and Chinese food and all this delivery stuff because I had nothing in my pantry. But because I always have food in my house now, because I always have food, it’s like I always have cold chicken in the refrigerator. I always have garbanzo beans in the refrigerator, I have these foods that are just my staples. And they’re always there and I always make sure that I don’t run out of them because if I don’t stock my pantry, I’d call the pizza. What else are you going to eat?
ANNIE B. BOND: I overeat, I really overeat if I don’t have that exact same situation. It’s really something. Then I’ve got all these wonderful whole foods that satisfy me…
DEBRA: Oh, my god! I wasn’t even watching. The show is over. I wasn’t watching the time at all.
Anyway, number eight is green your kitchen. Go get Annie’s book, True Food: Eight Simple Steps to a Healthier You. Thank you so much, Annie.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Choosing and Using Home Saunas to Remove Toxic Chemicals From Your Body
My guest today is Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. Wendy highly recommends the use of home saunas for detox to her clients and knows all about them. We’ll be talking about how regular time in a sauna can benefit your health, different types of saunas and which work best for detox, how to use a sauna, and how to choose a sauna to purchase for home use. Wendy is a certified holistic health and nutrition coach in Los Angeles, CA., She is also certified in Hair Mineral Analysis for the purpose of designing Mineral Power programs for clients to correct their metabolism and body chemistry. She is currently seeking her masters in clinical nutrition at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. Wendy hosts the weekly Live to 110 Video Podcast and the Modern Paleo Cooking show on her Live to 110 Youtube Channel. liveto110.com | store.liveto110.com/brands/SaunaSpace.html
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH WENDY MYERS
- Toxics in Your Body? Tests Can Tell You the Truth
- Tests You Won’t Find at Your Doctor’s Office
- Deep Detox With Minerals
- Health and Nutrition Coach on Diet and Detox
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing and Using Home Saunas to Remove Toxic Chemicals from Your Body
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Wendy Myers
Date of Broadcast: April 15, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, April 15, 2015. I hope you all have your taxes done and out doing something fun. I’m still doing my taxes, but I’m doing something fun, talking to you right now. I love doing this show, I really do. And then I’ll finish my taxes.
Then a friend is visiting me today and it’s his birthday, and we’re celebrating his birthday. And so it’s a good day for me and I hope it’s a good day for you too.
Today, we’re going to be talking about saunas. We haven’t done a show on sauna before and people ask me questions about saunas all the time, and I don’t know as much as I should about saunas although I’ve spent a lot of time in saunas. I’ve even done some detox programs in saunas, and I read books where they talked about saunas. And so I know that a good way to get toxic chemicals out of your body is to use a sauna.
And a lot of people buy saunas for their homes, but there are different types of saunas, and they do different things. And lots of questions come in to me.
So today I thought we’d get them all answered by Wendy Meyers who has been on the show before. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And she and I are very complimentary in the work that we do. She does a lot of things about detox and nutrition and she really is trained and certified to do a lot of things in the healing end of it, where I am focused on reducing our toxic chemical exposure. But we both agree that toxic chemicals should not be in our bodies, we shouldn’t be exposed to them, and that they contribute to ill health. And getting them out of our bodies and our homes produces good health. In fact, we both agree (because I talk to Wendy a lot, so I know that she agrees with this), that if you want to get well, you really need to take the toxic chemicals out of your body.
So hi, Wendy!
WENDY MYERS: Hello, and how are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
WENDY MYERS: I’m doing great. Thank you.
DEBRA: So first, before we talk about saunas, I know in my description of the show today, I put all these letters after your name. So you’re actually, Wendy Meyers, CHHC, NC and now, FDN, as of yesterday. So would you tell us about all of these letters mean and what you actually do?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. Well, I’m a Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist. So that means I can play doctor and I do all kinds of medical tests. And I do all kinds of testing, genetic testing, parasite testing, chemical toxicity testing, et cetera, et cetera. I also am a Nutritional Consultant. I got that when I got certified to do hair mineral analysis, which I’m big on, to discovery people’s heavy metals that they have in their body and their mineral deficiencies. And I am also a Certified Holistic Health Coach, which I got when I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
DEBRA: So Wendy has a lot of ways she can help you from her particular viewpoint, anything from detox to all these blood tests now that she can do – or actually, let’s just call them medical tests or diagnostic tests. I’m not sure I should call them medical tests or blood tests because they are more than blood. You’re not a doctor. But anyway, tests, she can do tests of your body and help you in a lot of ways once she knows what’s going on. She has a lot of training about how to use nutrition in order to help get at the root cause of what’s going on.
So let’s start talking about saunas. Tell us why it’s important to detox?
WENDY MYERS: Well, detox is my first love, and I think it is incredibly important to detox your body in order to be healthy. I personally believe that all the dozens of heavy metals and hundreds of toxic chemicals that are known to be in people’s bodies, we have to remove those in order to be healthy. They are one of the underlying root causes of disease.
And after some of your listeners have learned from you how to clean up their toxic environment and use healthier cleaning products and beauty products, you have to do something about the chemicals that are in your body. The EPA has established these studies and found that people have on average 700 chemicals in their body, and the World Health Organization did another study, and they found that we had over 200 chemicals in our body.
So either way you look at it, there are hundreds of chemicals in our body. They are obviously not creating health in your body. And I think that infrared saunas are one of the best ways to just sweat out these chemicals because our livers are so overloaded and most people’s livers are so toxic. They just can’t handle all these chemicals and they’re also being blasted with sugar and alcohol and all the other things that we put in our bodies.
So I think it’s wise to bypass the liver to detox and use an infrared sauna and just sweat them out through your skin.
DEBRA: I agree. One of the things that I learned from studying toxics is, well, first of all, the detox system (as I know you know, but we’ll tell the listeners anyway), the two main organs of the detox system are the liver and the kidneys. But what most people don’t know is that these are the two organs that actually get hit first because both the liver and the kidneys are actually processing the toxic chemicals that come in to your body. So the kidneys are filtering your blood in order to remove things which shouldn’t be there including toxic chemicals. And the liver actually has this whole process that it goes through to turn fat-soluble chemicals into water-soluble chemicals so that they can leave the body through the intestines.
So they get much more exposure because they’re getting all this concentration of all the chemicals that are coming through the body and they’re processing them. These are exactly the organs that we need in order to detox our bodies. And yet, they’re damaged, they’re overwhelmed, they’re overloaded and these poor organs.
And so what a sauna does is that it goes ahead and starts removing toxic chemicals from your body through sweat, through the skin and so they don’t need to be removed through these other organs, and you can start giving them a rest and they can start to heal. Did I explain that right?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly. That’s perfect. I think it’s so important to do this because for a lot of these chemicals, there is no other way to get them out of your body except for sweating. And many people, if they have nutrient deficiencies, the detoxification mechanisms in our liver don’t work properly.
And not only that, but heating up your body with an infrared sauna, heating it up just naturally induces this faux fever, where you’re killing off bacteria, parasites and fungus. You’re killing cancer cells before they turn into tumors. If you have a tumor that you don’t know about or had been diagnosed with, tumors are very intolerant to heat.
So the heat works in a number of ways to kill off chronic infections and parasites and other things you have in your body, candida, et cetera. In addition to activating aspects of your immune system, it activates heat shock proteins. There is about 90 of those that are part of our immune system, and those become activated when you heat up your body. You release human growth hormone. There are just so many benefits infrared sauna has.
DEBRA: As I’m listening to you talking, I’m thinking about, here, we’ve just been coming out of winter and I remember there was a day not long ago and it had been cold here in Florida. Sometimes we get cold winds from the north. And then all of a sudden, the sun came and I was outside, and it was just that feeling of warmth on my body, I think, that we just like it. Our bodies like to be warm. That’s part of the healing process when we get sick. Our bodies naturally, we get a fever and it burns everything up. And as you said, sauna gives the same effect.
So we need to come up to break in about 15 seconds. So I’m not going to ask you any questions because I don’t want to interrupt you. But when we come back, I want you to about different kinds of sauna because I know that the kind that people are using at homes are not necessarily the same thing that you’re going to find in the gym, and why a sauna and how is that different from a steam room, for example. And we’ll talk about those when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is a CHH and CFDN, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And her website is obviously Liveto110.com, lots of information about detoxing and living healthy there. Go take a look. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com, which has lots of information about how you can detox your body and live healthier.
So Wendy, tell us about the different types of saunas.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, well this is the biggest source of confusion for many people. People think that they can just sweat with exercise and that’s not nearly enough. I get that question a lot. People cannot exercise and detox at the same time. When people are activating their sympathetic nervous system, they create this fight or flight mode and you do not detox in that mode.
So just sweating from exercise doesn’t cut it.
When it comes to the different saunas, we have a traditional sauna. This is what most people think of when they think of a sauna. It’s called a Swedish or Finnish sauna, and it consists of a small room or space that’s heated with a heater that sits in one corner. It can be electric or gas or a wood even that powers the heater. But it must be really, really hot to work properly. And this means you can’t tolerate it very long.
Many of these saunas are 200°F and above. I don’t know about you, but I can’t sit in a sauna for more than about 10 or 15 minutes. So you don’t get a ton of benefit. But you are detoxing a little bit.
DEBRA: Well, I once sat in a sauna for five hours. But you can’t sit in a sauna for five hours straight. You have to come out and take a shower in cold water and cool your body down and then go back in to the sauna. But it was a rigorous sauna program for detox. And I can’t tell you if I measured. I didn’t measure, but I know that sauna works to detox if you do it right. So go ahead with what you were saying.
WENDY MYERS: I love my sauna, but the most common infrared sauna that people know of is a far-infrared sauna. And these are the kinds of saunas you see at health spas or acupuncturist’s office, et cetera, beauty spas. Some beauty spas have them. And these use metallic ceramic or black carbon elements, kind of these black fabric panels that you see throughout the sauna. They’re usually in a wooden sauna. And they emit far-infrared energy.
DEBRA: And what is that? What is far-infrared energy?
WENDY MYERS: Well, these are rays that penetrate about one to two inches inside your body. And infrared rays are part of the spectrum that the sun emits. We also emit far-infrared energy from our skin. And that’s actually how night vision goggles work. It detects infrared energy coming from our skin. Yes, very interesting.
DEBRA: It is.
WENDY MYERS: And so these rays, they penetrate inside our body and they heat you up from the inside out. It’s the same mechanism behind how they heat up hamburgers at McDonald’s. They actually use these red heat lamps. They’re like lightbulbs. These are near-infrared saunas and they heat up the food from the inside out. And that’s what they’re doing to your body. They penetrate inside, heat you up from the inside out so you get a deeper benefit, and it vibrates your cells as they release their toxic contents.
So you can have all these toxins coming out from various stored sites in your body that otherwise wouldn’t be able to mobilize to be removed from the body.
DEBRA: Good. You just said far.
WENDY MYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: So the one that you like is near?
WENDY MYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: What’s the difference?
WENDY MYERS: That’s my favorite. Well, far infrared saunas definitely have a lot of benefits. They’re better than nothing. But my favorite saunas are near-infrared saunas. These are using red light bulbs that emit near-infrared energy. They just have many benefits over and above the far-infrared saunas. They penetrate your body about three to four inches. Some people claim up to nine inches. So they can penetrate far deeper, and you get some color therapy from them as well. Additionally, they are very inexpensive. And these light bulbs are even found at most hardware stores.
So they’re not expensive, people can build their own, and you can just put them in. I have mine hanging in my shower. And I just seal it off with a sheet to increase the heat. I think they’re a solution for most people because most people can’t afford $2000 or $4000 for the infrared sauna. And with the near-infrared sauna, you can set one up for as little as $100.
I have ones in my store. You can get at store.Liveto110.com that are more professional grade and will have a little canvass tents around them, or even have wooden near-infrared saunas. There’s a whole range of saunas that you can get. I believe in near-infrared saunas have a lot more benefits and are less expensive.
DEBRA: So you’re basically using these red lightbulbs. So if you just want to go into a hardware store, what would you ask for?
WENDY MYERS: Well, you’re going to get 250 watts red heat lamp. And Phillips carries them, other brands carry them. But they just say heat lamps on them. They don’t say infrared lamps because that’s not what people are looking for at the hardware store. But that’s what you get. You can get them off Amazon as well.
I have many clients that just create their own sauna at home. You can even buy a single bulb, just one bulb. While it doesn’t produce the sweat that you need to have a full detox effect, the one single, red heat bulb (I have those in the store as well), they just come with a fixture and you can shine those on any area of your body that needs healing like a sinus infection or a throat infection, a gut infection, a pulled muscle, toe fungus. You can kill toe fungus quite nicely with a red infrared bulb. And there are just lots of different uses for a single bulb as well.
DEBRA: How many do you need to make a sauna?
WENDY MYERS: Ideally, you want four. I’ve used saunas with just three bulbs and it wasn’t quite enough heat. So I really like ones with four. More is always better. But four is enough and you can add a little space heater to it to increase the temperature a little bit too. That’s what I do.
DEBRA: And so you need to have an enclosed area, right? So could you just have it in the bathroom?
WENDY MYERS: You can, but you need to have a little bit of a smaller space, just enough space to contain your body because if it’s any larger, you need about a foot or so from the bulb, but if it’s any larger than that, I find that it just doesn’t get hot enough. It’s hard to heat up a larger space. So ideally, you want to build an enclosure or get like what I have in my store, the tented enclosure.
DEBRA: The little tent. I’ve seen that, yes. We need to go to break again. So we’ll go to break and we’ll come back and talk more about saunas. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers, and she’s from Liveto110.com. We’re talking about saunas, and you can go to her website and she sells all these things that we’re talking about to make your own near-infrared sauna. Actually, you don’t make it, but you set it up in your own home and get all the benefits of sauna. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She’s the founder and head writer at Liveto110.com. We’re talking about saunas today.
Wendy, there’s a new study that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Finnish middle-aged men where the mortality rates and incidents of heart disease was drastically reduced in the group that was doing frequent saunas. Can you tell us more about that?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, well, this is a really interesting study because it basically showed that regular use of an infrared sauna can reduce the incidents of heart disease. And the Finnish study, it emphasizes the healing life extension benefits of frequent hyperthermic therapy.
DEBRA: I like that, hyperthermic therapy.
WENDY MYERS: I don’t think they were using a far-infrared sauna. I don’t know. I think they were just using regular, traditional saunas. But it still shows that the hyperthermia can kill off parasites and get bugs and increase your circulation and increase the health of your blood vessels, et cetera. There are additional benefits for the near-infrared sauna therapy that really aren’t addressed with traditional saunas.
DEBRA: Well, I’m very happy to hear that I can actually make one and then I don’t have to spend a thousand dollars to get one. I have people around me who can make those kinds of things. So as soon as we get off this show, I’m going to find out about getting a sauna.
So how long and often do you need to use a sauna? If you have one in your home, what’s the protocol?
WENDY MYERS: Well, when you’re starting out, you just want to do maybe 15, 20 minutes to start out because it can stir up a lot of stuff and have detox symptoms. That’s normal. Many people don’t feel great after using a sauna. Some people do feel good. It feels very good. But because you do stir up a bunch of stuff and it can take a couple of days for it to be removed from your system, some people do feel tired or can feel headache-y after a sauna, et cetera.
So you want to start slow. I do it for 50 minutes, 5-0 minutes. I recommend people do it about 30 to 60 minutes, five days a week because you do have to do it pretty frequently for about two to three years to detox the bulk of the heavy metals and chemicals and kill off chronic infections that everyone has in their body.
DEBRA: The first question that comes to mind after hearing you say that is, is that the amount that you need if you’re doing nothing else, but sauna? What if you’re doing sauna and you’d doing other kinds of detoxing or should you not be doing other detoxing? I mean, you know so much about detox, what about doing more than one detox at a time?
WENDY MYERS: Oh, you can do all kinds of things at the same time. The near-infrared sauna is definitely an adjunct to your current detox program. I think it’s the most effective detox thing that you can do. But I think zeolites, I use a detox foot pad that I have in my store as well. I do all kinds of stuff. I’m doing a parasite cleanse right now that’s on my site. I really like Global Healing Center products. They have an amazing line of products. It kills gut bugs and parasites, et cetera. I do coffee enemas. I mean, I do all of the above to help detox and clean out my body. So you can do all kinds of things at the same time.
DEBRA: I do a lot of things at the same time too. I take zeolite every day and I also take a homeopathic remedy. I definitely think that I need to add more sauna and more sweat to what I’m doing.
So now, let’s talk again about you were saying that exercise, the sweat from exercise doesn’t detox you. Can you explain more about that?
WENDY MYERS: Well, a lot of my clients ask me, “Does sweating from exercise count?” And of course, exercise is healthy. But the thing is, to detox, you have to be in your parasympathetic nervous system. And when are you in your parasympathetic nervous system? That’s when you’re…
DEBRA: I don’t know. When you’re asleep?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. That’s when you’re resting, digesting, and detoxing. So you have to be in that mode to detox. When you’re exercising, you’re activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight mode. And this actually draws blood away from your skin. It actually inhibits toxin elimination. You have to be in that calm, parasympathetic state to detox and release toxin.
So people do get benefit from sweating, but it’s just not the same thing as sweating in a near-infrared sauna.
DEBRA: What about sweating outdoors? I live in Florida as you know and the entire, from about April to October, you just walk outside and you sweat. When I first moved here, I used to change my clothes three times a day because I couldn’t go outside without sweating.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, I know! I’m from Texas so I experience that same heat. I know what you’re talking about.
DEBRA: Yes, are we getting detox benefit from that kind of sweat?
WENDY MYERS: Well, you definitely get a little bit. You do have a few toxins coming out of your sweat no matter what type of sweating that you’re doing. But it’s not going to be the same as these near or far-infrared rays penetrating deep inside your body because we need to get the toxins that are deep inside your body, not just from the surface of the skin. And so you need those rays to penetrate inside you to activate that detoxification that everyone so desperately needs today.
DEBRA: So I’m trying to understand technically how this works. So when we’re just walking around at the beach in the sun, the rays, whatever rays are coming from the sun, are just not penetrating very deeply into our skin, but the near-infrared goes much deeper than even the far-infrared. And so that’s why it’s so powerful.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly. The sun does emit some infrared rays, but it’s just not strong enough to have the therapeutic effect.
DEBRA: So should you do something like – oh, we’re going to come up to the break in just a few seconds anyway. Well, let me ask you the question and we’ll talk about it when we come back. Should people do something like exercise prior to get things moving in their bodies? That’s the next question to talk about. So we’re going to be coming out to the break.
WENDY MYERS: I wasn’t answering the question. I’m sorry. I thought you were waiting for the break. But it’s a good idea. You can exercise right before the sauna at some point. It’s really not necessary because the sauna gets that circulation going real nicely.
DEBRA: Good. That was a nice, short answer. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And we’re talking today about sauna. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is the chief writer and everything actually at Liveto110.com.
Wendy, are there any warnings that you want to give people about the use of near-infrared sauna at home?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, there are some people who are not good candidates for saunas. Children that are under seven years of age, they don’t have their mechanisms in their body developed to reduce body temperature. So we don’t want to heat them up. We don’t need to. They’re not super toxic just yet.
Some children I test are quite toxic because we inherit our toxicities from our mothers. So whatever toxins they have, you get into the child. Typically, copper and aluminum and other toxins are passed onto the child.
Additionally, other people that should avoid the sauna are people that are really, really infirm, maybe the very elderly. They may not be doing so hot with the sauna. Also, people with rosacea don’t do too well with heat. Also, people with metal fixtures like hip replacements, titanium fixtures. Those metal plates or pins. Those could heat up in a traditional sauna. But you can probably use just a single bulb lamp where you need to. And at least get some benefits that way.
There are some doctors that say, “You shouldn’t go on an infrared sauna if you have breast implants.” I don’t find that to be the case at all. I find that you absolutely can do use a sauna if you have breast implants.
DEBRA: Good. So after you do the sauna, is there anything that people should do like drink a lot of water or rest or anything?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. Well, I’m a big fan of using minerals, taking mineral supplements anytime you’re doing a lot of sauna use because when you sweat, you sweat out minerals. So number one, people definitely have to take magnesium and other minerals as well.
Magnesium is the number one mineral that’s lost when you have any kind of stress or excessive sweating, et cetera. So people need about five times their body weight in magnesium in milligrams. So that’s quite a lot. If you’re 150 pounds, that means you need about 650 milligrams a day. I’m sorry, it’s 750 milligrams a day of magnesium.
I take different forms. I take glycinate magnesium citrate and magnesium malate to cover my bases at a lot of different forms.
People also need to take a multi-mineral supplement. I like Designs for Health’s Multi-Min. That’s a nice. I also like Seeking Health’s Trace Complex II with no iron and copper. That’s a really nice one. I also take a trace mineral supplement. I like Anderson’s Mineral Drops. I have that in my store, but I graduated to Dr. Drucker’s IntraMin. That’s a fantastic product, carbon-based, carbon-bound mineral.
So I always encourage people to take minerals if they’re doing sauna use. But they can also drink coconut water. That has lots of really nice electrolytes in it. Eat lots of sea salt. Add sea salt to your water and what-not when you’re in the sauna and after the sauna.
DEBRA: And should you rest at all after you do the sauna or just continue your daily activities? And what time of day is a good time to do sauna? Like would you want to do it and then go to bed?
WENDY MYERS: Some people can be stimulated by the sauna. I can do it before I go to bed and I’m okay. But I’ve had a lot of clients find they have a little trouble sleeping if they do it at night. So everyone is a little bit different. But the morning and the evening time are probably the best times to do it. But everyone is a little different.
Really, any time you do a sauna is good as long as you’re getting into one. Just get in one. It doesn’t matter when, just whenever you can fit it into your schedule. And when people get out of the sauna, definitely you want to shower off right away because you’ve done all this work, to sweat out these chemicals and metals and toxins, shower them off right away.
Sometimes, I’ll run to the shower because I find that my sweat dries really quickly, and then I’m terrified that the toxins are going to get absorbed back into my skin. So run to the shower.
DEBRA: Well, they do! Yeah. No, I can see that. I think about when I take my shower (I don’t sit here and think long hours about when I take my shower), I consider when I take my shower during the day in relation to other things that I do. So if I’m going to do some exercise or go work out in the garden or something that’s going to make me sweat, I’ll wait and take my shower after I do that instead of taking a shower and then sweating, and then taking another shower.
And so it just seems to me that a good time to do it is before you’re going to take a shower anyway or just take a shower afterwards. But I think the shower component is really important to consider that you need to do that as well.
WENDY MYERS: Absolutely. And there are lots of places you can go to that have saunas. They all have the far-infrared saunas. I’ve never seen a near-infrared sauna facility. Those are usually only for home use. But there are places, there’s a franchise chain called The Sweat Shop. There’s another one called Planet Skin or Planet Fit, something like that. I have it on my website. If you search for infrared saunas, there’s an article called Infrared Sauna, and it has all the sauna places that you could go to.
You can go on SpaFinder.com and search for a place near you with your zip code that has an infrared sauna. And when you go to these places , they all have a shower in the stall with the sauna. Like the Sweat Shop, it’s got 10 saunas and each little unit has a shower in there as well for that very purpose.
DEBRA: Well, we only have a few minutes left, four minutes to be exact. Is there anything else that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
WENDY MYERS: Yeah. Well, something I like to do right when I get into the sauna, I like to take a dry brush. It’s kind of those back scrubber or what-have-you. I take a natural dry brush and do a dry brush with my skin before I start sweating. This helps loosen up any dead skin cells and really more importantly, gets that lymph flowing. It helps your body to get rid of the toxins. Getting that lymph flowing, that’s where you’re going to be transporting a lot of these toxins, et cetera.
So I do that over my entire body, and it’s a really pleasant feeling and help to really stimulate your skin and your lymph system.
DEBRA: I do that too before I shower. It really does feel really good. I do feel stimulated. It makes the skin wake up.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, I love it so much and there’s really so many other benefits to saunas we didn’t talk about. People can improve their wound-healing. Human cell growth increases by 150% to 170% and wound size can decrease by 36%.
There’s a study done by NASA that found that wound-healing was increased. You can get pain relief. The penetrating heat from the saunas have been proven to reduce pain in joints and muscles and reduce inflammation and increase circulation to the area of discomfort. It reduces blood pressure. German medical researchers concluded that one session in an infrared sauna for an hour can significantly reduce blood pressure because it’s due to persistent peripheral vessel dilation. So this helps to reduce blood pressure. It causes a release of nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels.
There are just so many benefits. I can’t even go into it in this one hour that we have to talk about. It reduces radiated cells. So a lot of people are exposed to radiation. They get radiation poisoning from bomb testing and Fukushima Fallout and just living in urban areas. And one of the best ways to destroy cells that contain radiation is with an infrared sauna. These are weaker cells that can safely and easily be destroyed and prevent any cancers that they may eventually cause when they begin to mutate.
DEBRA: Wow! And everything I like about sauna is that it has a very long history and natural origin. And just during the break, I’ve been looking at different pages about saunas and here’s one that says that Indian Sweat Lodge has been in use continuously for 40,000 years. I mean, there’s such a history to sauna.
And here’s something that says that the near-infrared lamp sauna was actually invented by Dr. Kellogg a hundred years ago.
WENDY MYERS:Wow! I didn’t know that.
DEBRA: And it says that electric lightbulb had just been invented by Thomas Edison and he made the first infrared lamp, sauna, and it used 40 small, just regular lightbulbs. That was the first thing I knew. Nobody knew what to do with it or why you should have a sauna made with lightbulbs, but here we are.
Well, thanks so much, Wendy.
How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
My guest today is toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, He’s a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Today we’re going to talking about pesticides, which is a large class of chemicals with many different degrees of danger. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of 
Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- The Basic Principles of Toxicology
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: April 14, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Tuesday, April 14, 2015 and today we’re going to be talking about pesticides. Pesticides is a very big subject, we’re not going to be able to cover every detail about every pesticide on this show. It’s an enormous subject. But we were going to talk about pesticides in general. How they can affect your health, different things about pesticides that you should be aware of and what you can do instead of using toxic pesticides. We’ll throw a few tips in there too.
My guest today is toxicologist Dr. Steven Gilbert. He, I think is the most regular guest on this show. I think he’s done more shows than anybody else He has so much information to share with us as a toxicologist who is dealing with toxic chemicals and their health effects every single day. He knows so much and I’m so grateful that he spends so much time doing shows on Toxic Free Talk Radio, so that we can have all that information.
Hello, Dr. Gilbert.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Hi good morning. How are you doing?
DEBRA: I’m doing well. How are you doing?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Very good, it’s a beautiful day here in Seattle.
DEBRA: It’s a beautiful day here in Florida too in Clearwater, Florida.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: [inaudible 00:02:26]
DEBRA: Okay, good, good. Let me ask you an off-the-subject question here because you have solar panels. Somebody wrote to my Toxic Free Q&A blog the other day asking me if there were EMF dangers associated with solar panels?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: No, the solar panels turn the sunlight into DC power. So DC power is converted to AC, which we use in our homes. At the size of the panels or down could be a box or a house column inverter. And then that energy is then moved over to your electrical box and passed back to the house as AC current. So there’s no EMF other than what you would normally have if you’re connected to the grid.
DEBRA: Yeah that’s what I thought the answer was too. She was really concerned about solar panels having more EMF dangers, but I can’t imagine that they would be worse than high intensity power lines.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: No, not anywhere near as bad as high intensity power lines. I think solar panels are very passive by and large. They’re great investment. I wish Florida to had better rules and regulations, better incentives. We have some of the most restrictive laws in the country about using solar panels, the most difficult ones.
DEBRA: Well, I wish we had better laws too because we have so much sunshine, it just seems natural. I was reading a book about the history of solar energy. At one time in the past, there was more solar energy used in Florida than anywhere else in United States like back in the 20s and 30s. The people had solar water heaters and all kinds of things like that. It was a very big thing in Florida. And now, I practically never see a solar panel.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: It’s really unfortunate that the government is not providing more incentive. The Washington state is very fortunate. They have very good incentives for using solar panels. So it’s a really excellent investment both financially and for the environment. It’s really unfortunate Florida hasn’t followed suite with providing incentives for [inaudible 00:04:30].
DEBRA: I agree and hopefully that will change.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Hey Deb, talk to me a little about that. Find out what politicians are thinking about solar power.
DEBRA: I will, I will. Okay let’s talk about pesticides. This is such a huge subject. And one of things that I want to say just right off is that I think that people who are not educated as much as they could be on toxic chemicals think that if they hear a word like pesticides or plastics or some of those VOCs, terms like that, they really represent a whole class of chemicals and not just one. There’s not just one pesticide. When you say pesticides, we’re talking about thousand, thousands of chemicals.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Thousands, tens of thousands.
DEBRA: Yeah, and so each one of those affect our bodies in different ways, infecting environment in different ways. And the thing that’s most interesting and I think important to me as a human being is that they have different degrees of toxicity, but they also stick around with different periods of time.
There’s something called the half-life. If you want to know, listeners, if you want to know how long it takes for a pesticide to no longer be there, what you want to look up is something called the half-life. It doesn’t even tell you like it’s going to last for 30 years. It will say, “It will just degrade half way in so many years.”
And so you really need to know, “Is this a short quick, biodegradable pesticide or is it going to last for 30 or a hundred years?” I think that’s one of the most important questions.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really important question and a really important comment. And I want to point out, I just want to make a note that today, 1964, Rachel Carlson died. So really, it’s the anniversary Rachel Carson’s death and she’s the author of Silent Spring in 1962. She was born in 1907 and was a marine biologist. She was a brilliant writer and she received the Presidential Award medal of honor in 1980.
I just want to read a couple of quotes from Rachel Carson’s book. So one of them is, “We are rightly appalled by genetic effects of radiation. How then can we be indifferent to the same effects of the chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?”
Another one is, “As crude a weapon as the caveman’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.” And this goes not just for pesticides, but for a wide variety of chemicals that we’re exposed to.
Another one is, “The control of nature is a phrase conceiving arrogance, more a Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”
And lastly, “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals, eating and drinking them, taking the into the very marrow of our bones, then we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
And I think this last quote is most important because if we’re using pesticides (and pesticides do have a good function and purpose), we really need to know a lot about your nature and power and you define one of the most important ones is how much they bioaccumulate and biomagnify.
Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring was really about DDT, which bioaccumulates. In fact, it can be excreted in the breast milk and can be long lived. They live very long with the environment. It’s destroyed a lot of the birds and now it’s showing up in our whales, and other mammals that are in the oceans.
So bioaccumulation in pesticides, really important to be thinking about.
DEBRA: One other thing that I notice in looking at your pesticides chapter this morning, I should say – oh, I didn’t introduce you. I just said hello to you. Dr. Gilbert is the author of a book that I highly recommend called, A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And you can go to his website, Toxipedia.org, and get a free copy of this book, a free pdf copy of this book.
And I was looking at the pesticides chapter this morning before the show and I notice that you have a little picture of an old ad for DDT and I had to smile because I did a two hour long seminar a few years ago and I started with a similar ad for DDT. The point being, that DDT used to be, before it was banned (and this is the pesticide that Rachel Carson wrote about in Silent Spring), it was advertised by the government to housewives, encouraging them to use it and spray it all over everything.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: It’s in our wallpaper. You buy impregnated wallpaper with DDT.
DEBRA: Wow, I didn’t know that. But yeah, it was I think, called the ‘housewive’s friend’ or something like that. It was an extremely toxic pesticide that does not break down quickly and so then it bioaccumulates. And when you have something accumulating in your body, it accumulates and accumulates, and then you get sick at a certain point. If your body accumulates enough and you get sick – except that DDT is extremely, extremely toxic, so it doesn’t take much.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, DDT is a classic example of bioaccumulative organochlorine pesticides. And the reason it got so widely used is it’s highly effectively. It’s highly effective against mosquitos (although they’re adapting to it a bit). But it didn’t appear to be toxic to humans and the animals because if you [inaudible 00:10:27] there are some classic pictures of people following a spray truck down and playing in the mist and they had DDT in it.
But then we found out that – and this is back to the in points, what in point you’re looking for. It was a disastrous for high predator birds and their bird shell eggs and destroyed huge populations of eagles. Now the birds are just coming back now. We were not paying attention to the other toxic effects including [inaudible 00:10:51] low level effects to humans.
DEBRA: We need to go to break but when we come back, we’ll talk more about pesticides with Dr. Steven Gilbert, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. And you can actually just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for today’s show and you can click right on the title and it’ll take you exactly to the page where you can get this free book, which is very valuable. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert from Toxipedia. His website is Toxipedia.org.
Dr. Gilbert, you mentioned earlier that this was the anniversary of Rachel Carson’s death and during the break I just ran and got my copy of Silent Spring. I think it’s wonderful that we serendipitously chose this date because I didn’t know that this was her death anniversary. But I’d like to read some of my favorite quotes from Rachel Carson too in between.
So here’s one, “Storage of chemicals in human beings has been well investigated and we know that the average person is storing potentially harmful amounts. This situation also means that today…” and this is 1962, “…today, this means that the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry, henceforth.”
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: That’s absolutely correct that you’re exposed to a wide range of chemicals, including other industrial chemicals as well as pesticides starting at conception and moving forward. We also know that kids are not little adults. They eat more, breathe more, drink more than the adults do and they’re smaller, so they’re exposed and they have a bigger dose, their exposure to chemical.
DEBRA: Yes they do, they do. One of the things that I was horrified to realize when I read Silent Spring – and you would think I would read Silent Spring many years ago because I’ve been doing this work for 30 years, but it was only about five years ago that I read Silent Spring. When I read in that book that they already knew in 1944 that pesticides were ubiquitous on the planet, that there was no place that you could go where there were no pesticides, they already knew that in 1944, that meant that I was born already polluted.
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that when I was born in 1955, there were already pesticides everywhere. I’m sure you’re familiar with that study that the Environmental Working Group did a few years ago where they tested the blood of newborns and they found all those chemicals. I thought, “Oh, this is something recent that’s happening.” But no, when I was born in 1955, and everybody, all of us, we were all born already polluted because our parents already had toxic chemicals in their bodies.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: It’s really true. We really need to be more aware of that and paying attention to that issue because we’re exposed a lot of chemicals. And you can see the rate of disease, childhood diseases has also increased.
You made another really good point. Pesticides are just one thing. There are also other different classes of them. There are herbicides that kill plants, there are insecticides that focus on the insects, there are rodenticides that focus on rodent and fungicides that focus on other microbes and fungal material.
So there’s a wide range of chemicals. We’re not exposed to just one pesticide, we’re exposed to a range of different pesticides. They have different functions and different mechanism of action.
DEBRA: Well, like in a typical day, how many pesticides do you think we’re exposed to?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Oh, God! I don’t know. That’s a good question because if you think about what we eat – and there’s some really good study that show that eating organically grown food does reduce your exposure to pesticides. It is hard to get a hand on what pesticides are being used because there’s no reporting system for that, but they do look in metabolites.
So there are different classes of organophosphates, organochlorine and some of these pesticides have similar metabolites. And usually, you’re tracking metabolites of the pesticides, not the actual pesticides. When we’re exposed to a variety of them, they can cause reproduction effects a lot of times, intellectual deficits in brain development, cancers, there’s immunological diseases. So pesticides are something to be really careful of.
And I also want to mention that a part of my websites, I have a website called IPMopedia for integrated pest management, which really talks about trying to reduce the use of pesticides. Chemical pesticides should be the last resort in the management of any kind of pest, whether it’s a plant bug or a rodent.
DEBRA: I totally agree. So I would just like to think for a second and see how many pesticides I can identify that someone might be exposed to during a day.
So there could be pesticides that you’re breathing like household pesticides that you’ve sprayed for ants or flies or any kind of bugs. There might be mothballs, which is a pesticide. There might be in your food. Unless you’re eating organic food, there most certainly will be pesticides.
Let’s see, where else? Outside, you probably have some pesticides in your garden. And if you haven’t applied them, maybe your neighbors have or the city has applied them and that you’re getting pesticide drift. If you’re using natural personal care products, but not organic, there’s going to be pesticides in them. If you’re using not natural personal care products, that’s going to have other petrochemicals in them, but not pesticides because they’re not made from plants.
Let’s see, what else? Can you think of any others off the top of your head?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. Well, if you are a worker, if you’re a farm worker, you’re exposed to a wide range of pesticides in much higher concentrations, if you’re a child out working in these fields, if we’re tracking pesticides indoors.
I think that’s another reason why we need to take our shoes off when we come inside. Modern pesticides break down the sunlight to track them indoors and into your carpets. And so they’re hand to mouth. They have their hands on the carpets, remember? These pesticides last longer indoors than they do outdoors. So it’s really important for you take out your shoes and wash your hands when you come indoors just to protect against pesticides.
Another curious modern type pesticide is a nanoparticle, nanosilvers impregnated a variety of products. They’re designed to control bacteria and funguses. These nanomaterials, including nanosilver, are in more products. They also should be considered as pesticides for that purpose.
And you have to think about the school environment for kids. We tried to get integrated pest management policies used at schools. We worked hard at that in Seattle here. Oregon’s got some good laws in there. I’m not familiar with what’s there in Florida. This is another very important area because children, remember, are small, they are exposed, but they have a bigger dose for their small size and their systems are developing and they’re more vulnerable. So the school and playgrounds are really important areas of exposure to pesticides.
And you mentioned diet, nutritional issues. Water supplies can be contaminated. So it’s just a wide range.
DEBRA: When we come back from the break, which we have to go to now, I want to talk about pesticide regulation. I know that’s something we don’t usually talk about except that pesticides have a lot of regulations and I want our listeners to find out something about this because that indicates to me how toxic they are.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s at Toxicpedia.org. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert who’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals and his website is Toxipedia.org.
It’s a very interesting website because he really looks at toxic issues not just from the health effects, but social, environmental, historical, all kinds of different viewpoints. He knew some things like today is the anniversary of Rachel Carson’s death and she wrote, I think, the first popular book on pesticides, Silent Spring. And here we are talking about Silent Spring today, pesticides today.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, I agree. Sheesh, I would nominate her being on the dollar bill.
DEBRA: What?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: I would nominate her for being on the dollar bill when we change those one dollar bills.
DEBRA: Good idea! Yeah, yeah, I really think that Rachel Carson was so pivotal and what she wrote was so important just as a foundation of what we need to know today. She really needs to be highly, highly honored and more. The new generations need to be introduced to her and she needs to be not be forgotten because she just was in the world of toxics, which I think is the number one most important issue in the world today. She has definitely laid the groundwork for where we are today.
So I want to talk about the regulations of pesticides.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Before we come to regulation, can I add more comment? You asked a really important question about our exposure. I want to mention that the nature has made a lot of pesticides. And when we drink a cup of coffee, the caffeine in it is actually a pesticide. We find it as a stimulant, but a very small bug would find it toxic because of their small size. A very small exposure’s a big dose.
The thing with nicotine, the nicotine is a actually a widely used pesticide extracted from tobacco plants. But nature’s been developing pesticides. In response, humans don’t have the liver to metabolize these unwanted chemicals that are really from plants. From [inaudible 00:29:02], from trees, there’s pyrethroid from chrysanthemums.
So there are all kinds of pesticides that are “natural“, they are grown up by nature because it is war out there, trying to keep the bugs from eating the plants and the plants dominating other plants.
The pesticides are both natural and we’ve develop a very nasty way of manufactured chemicals that go all the way up to producing inert gases, [inaudible 00:29:31] gases and others that are highly toxic. We sort of dumbed those things down to protect our plants.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree. I totally agree with everything you said. The reason I thought about regulations, I was thinking about it earlier before the show, but you mentioned silver, putting in nanoparticles of silver as a pesticide. And the two things that I want to say here are, “When is that?” I think that silver is a good example of a less toxic pesticide. You could have a pesticide that is airborne that’s very toxic and you’re breathing it in or you could have something like silver that is mixed into paint and then acts to control mold on a wall and you’re never really exposed to that silver because it’s just a particle that’s encapsulated in the paint, but it kills the mold.
But regardless – let me finish my sentence and then I’ll let you talk – regardless of the toxicity or what are exposure is, every pesticide, anything that’s considered to be a pesticide has to be registered with the EPA. I think that that, to me, indicates how toxic these things are.
I just had somebody write to me in my Toxic Free Q&A about a product that somebody had asked about a couple of years ago saying that the EPA had ordered them to stop distributing it because it was intended to kill mold, therefore, it contained a pesticide and it had to be registered by the EPA and it wasn’t.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: That’s right, yes. So the pesticide regulations are really interesting. The FIFRA, the Fungicide, Insecticide, Rodenticide Act, the Federal Insecticide Act goes back to 1947. I think it was 1972 that it was moved to EPA. So the EPA took over FIFRA, which regulates fungicides, rodenticides, insecticides, and herbicides.
This is really great. There are good regulation, pretty good regulations around the active ingredients of pesticides. They had testing done to them to try to understand their consequences to the organism as well as other ecological hazards, for example, to nematodes or frogs, some things like that. For example atrocy is an herbicide that appears to affect the development of frogs.
So the EPAs are required and the companies are required to do a lot of studies to assess the potential hazardous effect.
Now the problem is there’s also inert ingredient. So the pesticides, the active ingredient on the label is a very small amount. So what are these inert ingredients? Inert ingredients could be surfactants. It helps the herbicide, for example, to penetrate leaves, which can increase their toxicity to other plants and animals.
So understanding inert ingredients in that package of pesticides is also really important. That’s not as well managed as it could be. It’s hard to find out what these inert ingredients are.
DEBRA: Yes. It’s very hard to find that.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, it’s very hard to find out in some cases. So I think you have to be really careful with the regulation.
There is also the Food Quality Protection act. It gives a little bit more authority and try to move it more toward the precautionary approach especially when it came to child health-related issues and child exposure because children are the most affected class of people because of their detrimental effects in developing nervous systems.
And pesticides, many of the pesticides act on the nervous system. They act to affect neurotransmitters through these organophosphates and acetylcholinesterase. They inhibit metabolism of acetylcholine. Excessive acetylcholine cause death and other side effects.
So pesticides are hazardous and it’s really about how much you’re exposed to and the dose response of the pesticides.
DEBRA: One of the things that has been in the new the last week – I don’t know if you saw this about the family that went on vacation in the Caribbean and a nearby room was being sprayed with regulated chemical, regulated pesticide that should not be used indoor. A company, Terminix, the company that should know how to use a toxic registered pesticide applied this incorrectly and it turned out that they’ve been applying it for the past year and this family got so sick from it that they have to take them to the hospital and then airlift them to America. When I see stories like this, I just say, “These kinds of pesticides should not be on the market at all.”
We need to go to break, but I’ll let you respond to that when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. When we come back, we’ll talk more about pesticides.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert from Toxipedia.org and he’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals, which you can get for free. Every household should have one.
Okay, Dr. Gilbert, so what do you think about what had just happened with the family getting sick from pesticides in that hotel room?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, there’ s just no excuse for that kind of exposure to pesticides indoors. That comes back to just being a lot more cautious in the pesticides we use and know exactly what chemicals are being used. Chlorpyrifos is a very toxic, very useful pesticide in agriculture, but very toxic. It was banned from home-use in 2001.
You mentioned paint. Paints can also have pesticides in them. One of the use is mercury. They actually put mercury in paint because mercury is a very good fungicide. You paint mercury in woodwork. If a family painted the walls of a child’s bedroom with a mercury-based paint (mercury added to the paint), the child can be really affected by the mercury exposure because the mercury evaporate out of the paint.
So it’s very important to understand how these products work within paint. Do they evaporate out? What problems can it cause?
And remembering that, in the example you mentioned, pesticides sprayed in home, it’s in the air, it’s on the floor, on the woodwork. The child can easily get contaminated with pesticides and eat them or ingest them as well as breathe them in.
So we need to be a lot more careful and that goes back to integrated pest management where you really want to program that looks for the reason you have pest. One of the most important reasons is you’ve got food for the pest. You’ve got to take the time to understand the biology of the pest and how best to interrupt that and get rid of the pest that you’re trying to control the pest.
And there’s many ways to do it besides using strong chemicals. Having an integrated pest management particularly around school is really important because kids spend a lot time there and there are good ways to control the pest whether it’s a rodent or it’s an insect without resorting to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: That’s totally right. I know that I grew up in a world which [inaudible 00:41:09] this. I’ve said this before, but especially people who were born around the time that I was born, we were born into this new age of – all these chemicals have been developed during the World War II, in the 50s, then we’ve got DuPont’s talking about better living through chemicals and suddenly, they’ve got all these chemicals and they’re saying, “Oh, let’s take all these war time chemicals and use them in our culture.”
And so everybody just like spraying pesticides and toxic chemicals all over everything, thinking that they’re fine and so we have that mentality of, “There’s a pest, spray a chemical on it, you’re sick, take a pill.”
And in fact, there are all these other things that you can do. We have to remember that our houses and our schools and our businesses, everything is built in these ecosystems where these things that we call ‘pests’ live. If we have some awareness that we’re living in an ecosystem, then we can get to know these other creatures who have a right to be living here and see how we can be sharing the space in a way that they get to have some space and we get to have our space in a way that they don’t.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Actually, one great example of that right now is the colony collapse of bees where bees are being infected. The latest study is showing that one of the pesticides may be a nicotinic-based pesticide that’s affecting the bees. Bees are clearly important pollination for the plants that we depend on for food supply.
So you’re absolutely right. We need to be thinking not just of ourselves, but also the whole equalizing of system. That’s what Rachel Carson really tried to bring out in Silent Spring. We do not live in isolation. I live in Seattle, Washington here. And at my desk this morning, I get to look at the window and I saw three bald eagles circling around [inaudible 00:43:01]. And that’s the result of our being more cautious with pesticides. Birds were able to recover [inaudible 00:43:09] DDT and got less exposed to DDT and other organochlorine compounds.
So it’s really, really important just to mention there’s been a great increase in disabilities in kids from 1997 to 2008, 17% increase in hyperactivity disorders, 78% increase in autism, child with cancers an increase 25% from 1975 to 2004, diabetes increase by 53%, now obesity has gone up a 131%. All these are due to not just pesticides, but pesticides are a big factor now. We really need to be cautious about all the hazardous chemicals that we expose ourselves to early in development.
DEBRA: Well, we have about six minutes left. Well, five minutes left. So let’s just talk about real quickly what are some alternatives. First of all, you could eat organic food instead of eating conventional food with pesticides. So what’s another thing people could do that’s quick?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Well, real quickly is don’t use pesticides around your house. If in doubt, do a little weeding and get some exercise if you’re trying to get rid of weeds. That’s what I do, I get out there. I enjoy being outside and do a little weeding. Do not use pesticides around your house. Some of the provinces in Canada, Ontario, I think British Columbia have banned the domestic use of pesticides. Forty percent of the pesticides we use are by home use, which contaminates our streams, contaminates our water supply. It gets into the lakes and rivers around our home.
Do not using pesticides at home. Look and take an approach where if you’ve got some kind of pest, ask where it’s coming from, ask whether you can tolerate little bit of it and then move on to and try to control it by removing food source. If you have ants, you have rodents, ask why the pest is there. You can do that with some landscaping too, even plant crops. There are plants that help control unwanted other plants.
DEBRA: I just want to tell a quick story about a success I had with pest control that was not toxic. I used to live in an apartment building in San Francisco, a small apartment building that had like 12 units or something and there was an ant problem. This was when I was still first learning about things and so they notified all of us that we were going to have an exterminator come and I said, “No, I’m not having my unit sprayed. That’s it, period,” but I knew that everybody else was going to be sprayed.
And so what I did was I just used my common sense and I took some Elmer’s glue and a sponge. I watched where the ants were coming in and I just wiped them up. And then I found like a little crack where they were coming and I filled it with Elmer’s glue. The next day, they came in again and I did the same thing. After three or four days, I had filled all the cracks with Elmer’s glue.
Now I want to tell you, honestly, this story I’m telling you is true, I never saw another ant. I never saw another ant. Everybody else who were having their apartments exterminated all still had ants. I was the only one that didn’t have ants.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, that’s a great, great story. You should write that little story up. In fact, that’s a great example of integrated pest management where you ask, “Well, how did the ants get in there?” and then you block the road. They’re going to go where they can get food and water and other nourishment for them. If they can’t get it, they’re blocked, they’ll go someplace else. So, that’s a great example of using integrated pest management.
DEBRA: Yeah, and you can use that for any pest because the pests need to stay outside in their environment and we need to, say, “This is our boundary” and we say that this is our boundary by filing in cracks, by putting out screens on the windows and things like that. And so it’s just a matter of claiming our territory and saying that’s your territory and this is our territory. We don’t have these very toxic chemicals all over the place, we don’t need to kill the pests. The only reason we think they’re pests is because they’re in the wrong place. So we just need to put them in their place and claim our place. It’s very simple.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, absolutely. And rodents are the same thing. Find out what the food source is. Don’t use rodenticides on rodents because other creatures will eat those rats or mice and they will get sick from eating that toxic material.
It’s really important thinking not just of the pest, but also the consequences of using chemicals on the pest. I love your example about those ants. That’s a great story.
DEBRA: Thank you, I love that story too. Anyway, we now just have about 2 minutes left, so is there any final thing you want to say?
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: I think the most important thing is not to use pesticide. They should be the absolute last resort whether it’s herbicide or insecticide or rodenticide or fungicide. Do that only as a last resort. Learn about the biology of the pest, get out there and do some weeding in your garden, hand weeding. I get my grandchildren out there and we go weeding. It’s very fun to do. It’s a good family thing to do and do not use pesticides.
Think about where those pesticides are going when they flow off your property and into the streams, what the consequences of those might be. Think about the other birds and the other wildlife that you might be harming by using pesticides.
So the important thing is take an integrated approach to management of the pesticides. Remember that we live together with lot of other creatures.
DEBRA: Yes, we do. We’re all interconnected as Rachel Carson said. I highly recommend that everybody read Silent Spring. It’s an excellent, excellent book. We just need to keep her memory alive and keep her message alive.
So my guest today has been Dr. Steven Gilbert. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Gilbert. You can go to his website. Oh, you want to say, “You’re welcome,” but I keep talking. Thank you for being here today.
DR. STEVEN GILBERT: Alright! Bye bye.
DEBRA: Bye. He’s at Toxipedia.org. You can go there get A Small Dose of Toxicology. That’s his book, A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can just look for today’s show and click on the title and it’ll take you exactly to the page where you can get this book. It’s a basic book about toxicology that should be in every household. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Toxic Products in Dollar Stores
February 2015, HealthyStuff.org released the results of testing done on 164 products purchased at four major discount retailers—Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and 99 Cents Only—in six U.S. states.
Eighty-one percent of the products contains at least one hazardous chemical above levels of concern, and 49% contains two or more such chemicals.
Some of the products with the highest level of chemicals included mini lights, rubber ducks, USB cables, adhesive gem strips, artificial nails. Click on product names to find out the brand, country of manufacture, and level of tested chemicals found in the products. Products were tested for arsenic, bromine, cadmium, chlorine, chromium, mercury, lead, antimony and tin.
Here is an article from a UK newspaper about this study that gives a more visual perspective of the toxic products:
Our Chemical Lives
Question from Emily
Hi Debra,
My Australian sister-in-law sent me a transcript of a wonderful TV program that aired a few weeks ago on Australia’s ABC, similar to our PBS.
The program is called Catalyst and the segment is “Our Chemical Lives”.
As an American I was surprised that a topic like this was allowed on mainstream media. I applaud their efforts of course and thought you would like to see this.
Debra’s Answer
Thanks Emily. This is a very good and simple presentation of the problem of toxic chemicals in our world.
Also see the links to other shows about toxic chemicals.
Beyond Organic Skin Care
Today my guest is Ken McGowan, founder of Sinfully Wholesome. He creates amazing luxurious skin care products, “handmade from wild fruits and their precious oils.” Soaps, oils, and even laundry products that will leave clothing and bedding soft against your skin. We’ll be talking about the importance of eliminating toxics from your skincare regime, why they chose their luxurious wildcrafted ingredients and special packaging material, and what it means to be social and environmentally responsible. Ken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur and the former Leader of the Green Party of Nova Scotia. www.sinfullywholesome.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Beyond Organic Skin Care
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ken McGowan
Date of Broadcast: April 09, 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 Thursday, April 9th, 2015. And today, we’re going to talk about a very interesting topic. I say that, but every time I say that, I say, “All the shows are interesting and they all are interesting.”
Today, it’s interesting in a different way. We’re going to be talking about soap, which we’ve talked about before. But this soap is so different. When I first heard about it from one of my readers, he wrote to me and he said, “I think this soap is in a class by itself.” And I got some and I tried it and I totally agree.
So we’re going to learn about soap, we’re going to learn about skin care, we’re going to learn about interesting ingredients and we’re going to have a great show today.
My guest is Ken McGowan. He’s the founder of Sinfully Wholesome. And that’s what these products are. They really are sinfully wholesome. He creates these amazing, luxurious skin care products that are handmade from wild fruits and their precious oils. Doesn’t that sound good? They even make laundry products so that your clothing and bedding will be soft against your skin and not irritate your skin. So this is going to be very interesting.
Hi, Ken! How are you?
KEN MCGOWAN: Hi, Debra. I’m doing well, thanks. And thank you for having me on your show. I admire all of the pioneering work you’ve done.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. I appreciate you being here. You have one of the most pure products that I’ve ever seen. And I’m always looking for the purest everything with the least amount of toxic chemicals.
So first, start off and tell us how you got interested in doing this.
KEN MCGOWAN: That’s a long story, but we’re going to try and keep it as short as possible. It revolves around in epiphany I had shortly after a heart attack in 2003. And the heart attack, by the way, almost killed me. I don’t really blame the heart attack, I blame my lifestyle before the heart attack.
DEBRA: Ah! Yes, that’s very good.
KEN MCGOWAN: Like most people in North America, I live the life that we all live and bought the products that we were all told to buy by the various advertising companies and chemical companies that are promoting a better life via this chemical or that chemical and “just add this to your detergent and you’ll have whiter whites… eat this food and you’ll be better.”
Well, none of that stuff really is true. It got me on an operating table. And afterwards, the epiphany I had was that I had to change my personal lifestyle and start integrating more healthy products that I both ate and washed myself in. I also started thinking about what sort of legacy I would be leaving behind prior to the heart attack to put a finer point on it.
One of my friend’s jokes, I was a running dog capitalist pig. I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life and I’ve owned a number of difference businesses from the ’80s on. My primary goal was chasing after the economic dream almost to the exclusion of all else. That certainly wasn’t the healthy thing that I needed. That got me, as I mentioned, on the operating table. And it wasn’t the kind of legacy that I wanted to leave behind.
So after the heart attack, I became involved in politics out of a desire to change the world, and ultimately became the leader of the Green Party of Nova Scotia and was involved in trying to convince people to change their behaviors both personal and how they interacted in the financial method on a worldwide scale. I quickly realized that politics isn’t necessarily the best way to go about doing that. Sometimes, you have to walk the talk and lead by example.
So shortly after resigning from the Green Party, I created a natural skin care product company. And it came about from a rather convoluted way insofar as a friend of mine who is originally from Syria (and owned a few small businesses in Nova Scotia) approached me with a bar of Aleppo soap. Aleppo, of course, being one of the major cities in Syria and perhaps one of the longest-sustained occupied cities in civilization.
DEBRA: Hmmm… I didn’t know that.
KEN MCGOWAN: He came to me and he said, “Try this soap out” because he knew I was interested in natural products, both food and personal care. I did and I went, “Wow! This stuff is pretty amazing. What is it?” And he said, “Well, it’s Aleppo soap, and it comes from my home country of Syria. And I’m thinking about bringing it into Canada. But I don’t know anything about imports and exports. Can you help me with this?” And I said, “Yes, I probably can.” So we started investigating the possibilities of importing Aleppo soap.
And this was just prior to the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. In fact, we got caught in the outbreak insofar as we had arranged to import some Aleppo soap from Syria at about the same time that both the Canadian and US governments imposed sanctions on Syria and shut down the whole trade between the two countries.
We lost a shipment of soap as a result. But not to be deterred, I decided that if I wasn’t going to be able to import this great soap, I would import the knowledge and reached out to the families that make the soap. It’s primarily a family or was primarily a family-run business in Syria where you had certain families that were making soap for up to a thousand years. One family was making the soap for more than a thousand years.
Aleppo soap is famous for a number of really compelling reasons. It’s the first hard bar soap ever made by humankind. Its recipe goes back unchanged almost 2500 years. It’s renowned in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, although it’s very little known in North America. It is so highly sought of in Europe that dermatologists frequently prescribe it to their patients who have skin conditions of a variety of kinds.
And so being stymied by the prohibition on importing goods from Syria drove us into the area where we were going to start actually manufacturing the products here in North America. Now, I have a degree in molecular biology so it wasn’t a big leap for me to figure out how to make soap and use the various ingredients to their optimum benefits.
And in fact, I invented a proprietary system of making soap. And let me explain. There are two primary methods of making soap. One is called the hot process. Very simply put, it involves a lot of heat. For example, when making Aleppo soap the traditional way, you would boil the oils and the two oils that are used in Aleppo soap. This has not changed for, as I said, more than two-and-a-half thousand years. The two oils are olive oil and laurel oil.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a moment because we need to go to the commercial break. But when we come back, I want to hear all about this.
KEN MCGOWAN: Okay, we’ll come back and do laurel and olive oil then.
DEBRA: Good! That sounds great. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ken McGowan. He’s the founder of Sinfully Wholesome. They make these great soaps as he has been telling us about. We’re going to hear all about this. His website is SinfullyWholesome.com and we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ken McGowan, founder of Sinfully Wholesome. And he makes these – he used the word, amazing soaps. And it is amazing soap.
Ken, before you go on, I just wanted to tell about my experience using this soap because I haven’t even told you this. But what happened was that I got the soap from you and it took me a few days to get it from my desk into the shower. But then I started using it all over my body, my face, and the rest of my body. And a few days later, I looked in the mirror at my face and my skin looked completely different. I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t trying to see what it was going to do. I was just using it.
I was surprised to find how different my skin looked within just a few days. And the way it looks different is that it seems to be – well, I don’t quite know how to describe this. It looks softer. My skin definitely looks softer. And it has a bit of glow to it that it didn’t have before. It seems to have a smoothness that it didn’t have before.
You know how when you do something and it’s so different in terms of your experience that you weren’t ever even trying to achieve that effect because you didn’t even know that it existed and then it happens? I’ve had experiences like that in my life where I was just so astonished when they happened because they had never happened before.
And this is one of those things. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my skin. And then I used your soap and I saw, “Oh, my God! My skin could be so much better.” But you don’t ever see it. You don’t ever it. And so it’s not like I’m walking down the street going, “Oh, look at her skin. I’d like to have skin like that.” My skin is different than anything I’ve ever seen.
KEN MCGOWAN: Well, thank you. The reason that has occurred for you is because of the two oils that are in the Aleppo soap that you used. As I was mentioning to your listeners just before the station break, we were talking about different methods of making soap and then I touched on the ingredients in Aleppo soap.
The basic ingredients that you put in a soap is very, very critical to the outcome that you’re going to get for your skin. As you know, Debra, today, modern soap-making has been industrialized and we’re putting all sorts of things into our soap and we’re taking things out of it that we shouldn’t. And this has really at a profound level that it’s happened without them even noticing.
For example, it’s hard to take on specific brand names, and I’m reluctant to do so.
DEBRA: And you don’t need to mention any specific brand names. Just say whatever you’d like to say in general.
KEN MCGOWAN: Well, I’m going to mention one specifically. And it’s targeted at men. It’s a product line called Axe. It’s made by Unilever. The reason I mention this on air without any qualms is because the information I’m about to share with you is in the public domain anyway.
The State of California has sued Unilever for air pollution in their products.
DEBRA: Oh, my God!
KEN MCGOWAN: Yes.
DEBRA: I love hearing that.
KEN MCGOWAN: It sounds like a really bad joke and you’re going to wait for the punch line. The punch line is really very simple. There are so many toxins in the Axe product that the State of California sued them for polluting the air.
DEBRA: But are there more than normal?
KEN MCGOWAN: Maybe they picked on Unilever out of one of thousands of different companies they could have, I don’t know. It might have been a test case. I really don’t know the answer to that. But it’s in the public domain. All you need to do is, Unilever Fined for Polluting California Air with Axe Deodorant Spray. It’s out there.
DEBRA: And it’s so ironic that they’re suing about a deodorant spray that’s supposed to be reducing odors.
KEN MCGOWAN: It’s designed so that you don’t stink. And yet, California sued them for polluting their air. That’s how bad the personal care industry has become. We can do a whole show on personal care industry.
But the personal care industry, things like soaps and cosmetics, it is part of – and this is almost a joke too – a self-regulated industry, which essentially means there are no regulations at all. So these cosmetic companies and the companies that make all of these products that we put on our body every day, and the average person puts on nine different personal care products, with a total of about 126 different chemicals, every day, you put this on your body.
Now, each one of these products that you put on your body, all of the manufacturers claim that they fall below the areas where these particular chemicals become dangerous. Well, that maybe true for one product, but you’re putting nine of them on. And you get this chemical soup that you’re bathing yourself in on a daily basis.
And the skin is your body’s largest organ. It’s voraciously hungry. Sixty to seventy percent of the things we put on our skin are absorbed directly into our bodies.
And so for putting things on our skin that pollute the air in California, it’s no wonder that people’s skin doesn’t look as healthy as it should.
So when you eliminate these toxins that are in the personal care products and you start bathing in things that are actually good for you, there’s a profound change that takes place and you’ve noticed that.
DEBRA: And I should say that I already was using natural products for a good 30 or more years.
KEN MCGOWAN: I know you would have been. There’s no question about that. But not all natural handmade soaps are created equal.
DEBRA: No, I agree.
KEN MCGOWAN: And it comes down to the selection of the oils that you use.
DEBRA: Before you go on, I’m hearing the music so we need to go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Ken McGowan, founder of Sinfully Wholesome. He’s at SinfullyWholesome.com. And when we come back, he’ll tell us more about soap and the ingredients. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ken McGowan, founder of Sinfully Wholesome at SinfullyWholesome.com. We’re talking about his skin care products hand made from wild fruits and their precious oils.
Okay, Ken, go on with your story.
KEN MCGOWAN: Okay, we were talking about the different kinds of oils that you can put into handmade soaps or natural soaps. And not all oils are created equal. I should mention right now, Debra, that before we actually went in to production and started making soap or even sold a bar of soap, we did two years of research into the various oils and their skin care properties.
We have two basic principles that we established our skin care line on. Number one, if you can’t eat it, don’t put it on your skin. Number two is that we wanted it to be as close to nature as possible. And that’s why we selected to go wild-crafted as opposed to organic.
DEBRA: Well, now tell me why those two are different.
KEN MCGOWAN: Wild-crafted is the art of harvesting, in our case, the fruits from nature and then hand-making the oils from them. And because we started with Aleppo soap, I’m going to continue on that one. We’ll talk about other oils. But for example, the laurel oil that we use in our soap is gathered from the laurel forests that still grow around the Mediterranean. And laurel, by the way, is something everybody is familiar with. And you all eat it whether you know it or not. Every time you make spaghetti and you put a bay leaf in your spaghetti sauce, bay leaf is a laurel leaf. So you eat it all the time.
You can make a sauce out of laurel berries. We make our soap out of laurel berry. You can get oils from various parts of the laurel tree, but the best oil for making soap is laurel berry oil as opposed to laurel leaf oil.
DEBRA: Now, let me ask you a question here. I know that some people are listening and saying, “That stuff sounds great.”
KEN MCGOWAN: I’m sorry, I’m not hearing you clearly.
DEBRA: Oh, can you hear me now?
KEN MCGOWAN: Yes.
DEBRA: So I know that some people are listening and thinking, “This soap has a fragrance.” And I’ll just say, there’s no added fragrance to this soap. But it does have a smell. I don’t want to say, I don’t know what word to use here, because I don’t want it to sound it’s an unpleasant smell because it isn’t at all. But the ingredients, the oils themselves have their own fragrance.
KEN MCGOWAN: That’s correct! And there are a lot of people that really enjoy the natural aroma from the laurel berries.
DEBRA: Aroma, that’s a good word. I like that. And so I just wanted to ask you, is what I’m smelling the laurel berry?
KEN MCGOWAN: Yes, that’s correct. With the Aleppo soap, you’re smelling laurel.
DEBRA: Good. I enjoy it very much. I have no problem with it at all. But it was very different when I first smelled it. I thought, “What is this?” Not in a negative way, but it was just a pleasant smell. And so it’s just the same thing that you would smell when you’re putting a bay leaf into your spaghetti.
KEN MCGOWAN: We don’t put anything in our soaps at all in the way of fragrances. If it’s not good for your skin, it simply doesn’t get into our soap. We add no colors, no fragrances, natural or otherwise, and we always use the minimum number of oils in order to achieve a desired outcome. And we’ll stick with Aleppo soap for the moment.
Those two oils are olive and laurel. And when we get our research into determining which oils that we would select to make our product line, we came up with what we believe are the three best skin care oils in the world. I’ll itemize them for you – olive oil, laurel oil and oregano oil. All of our products in soaps are made from those three oils and none other.
And when you mentioned earlier that you’ve been using natural products before, but you still noticed the difference when you used ours, it’s because of the oils that we’ve selected. For example, I’m going to mention palm oil. Palm oil is the most heavily used oil in handmade products of all. It’s used for two primary reasons by most people who make handmade soaps. Number one, it lends hardness to the bar of soap, and that’s a desirable outcome for a lot of people. And number two, it’s very inexpensive. But it has absolutely no skin care properties that are of any value. And that makes up the vast majority of a bar of soap that’s handmade today.
Unfortunately, the use of palm oil in handmade soaps is devastating the rainforests in Indonesia and destroying Orangutan habitat. And even though many people claim that they are using sustainable palm oil, only 1% of all the palm oil generated in the world today is sustainable. If everybody claims that they are using sustainable palm oil, so where’s the other 99% of the palm oil going, it makes you wonder.
But anyway, having said that, our philosophy is very simple. If it’s not good for your skin, it doesn’t get into our products. And so everything that you bathed in when you were using our product is good for your skin.
DEBRA: Well, I think that’s a key thing because I think that most people, when they’re buying soap, they’re thinking of cleanliness. Is it going to get the dirt off my hands or is it going to get the oiliness off my face or is it going to remove my makeup or something like that. I think that most people in the world today are not thinking about nourishing their skin any more than they’re thinking about nourishing their bodies.
KEN MCGOWAN: Soap is the single, best thing, if you use a good one, that you can use for your skin care regime. And if you think about it, it’s obvious. We use it every day. We shower from head to toe in it. We’re constantly washing our hands with it. And if you’re using a toxic product, the end result is that you’re going to be prematurely aging your skin or creating skin problems.
We have an epidemic in the western world of childhood eczema. Child eczema is at 22% in the west. When we were doing our research into Aleppo soap – and it was because of my background in science that allowed me to do what I referred to as a little bit of armchair ethnobotany insofar as I went and I read all the available published information.
DEBRA: Before you go on with your next thought, I need to interrupt you again because we have to go to our last break here. And we’ll be right back and you can finish your sentence.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ken McGowan. He’s the founder of Sinfully Wholesome. His website is SinfullyWholesome.com. And we’ll go to break and we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ken McGowan. He’s the founder of Sinfully Wholesome at SinfullyWholesome.com. And Ken, go ahead.
KEN MCGOWAN: Okay, I just want to pick up where we left off on the epidemic of childhood eczema in the west. And while researching the oils for soaps, and specifically, Aleppo soap, I did a quick PubMed research. And Syria, bear in mind, is the home of Aleppo soap. The study that I came across was July of 2010 where the incidents of childhood eczema in Syria are 3.3% to 4.2% versus 22% in the west.
DEBRA: Whoa!
KEN MCGOWAN: And it’s because most of the people, prior to the civil war (the civil war effectively ended soap production in Syria, which is a bit of a sad story, we won’t go there today), the 3.3% to 4.2% incidents of childhood eczema in Syria is directly attributable to the types of soaps that they use.
The 22% incidents of eczema in the west among children are also directly attributable to the kinds of soap that we bathe in and the chemicals that are in these soaps, these industrial, commercial soaps.
So it’s very small wonder that you notice the significant change when you use Aleppo soap. And the reason being is that olive oil is one of the greatest skin care oils ever. We look back over the centuries and if we look at Ancient Athens or Ancient Greek civilizations, they were using olive oil as a skin care product for the longest time. In fact, Democrates is famous for saying, “Let us bathe our insides in honey and our exteriors in olive oil.”
DEBRA: Oh, I love that.
KEN MCGOWAN: And the very first hand cream or cold cream ever invented was by Galen, a Roman physician of Greek origin who created the very first home cream, cold cream and he used olive oil, beeswax, and rose water. And that’s been going on since the 2nd Century AD.
Today, there’s this rush to put all sorts of other things into products, even homemade products or handmade products. We’re adding colors, we’re adding fragrances, we’re adding this oil and that oil for reasons that have nothing to do with skin care.
We made a conscious effort when we started creating our product line, “If it’s not good for your skin, it doesn’t go into our products. And if you can’t eat it, you don’t put it on your skin.” So those things drove us in the selection of oils and why we narrowed down that selection to the three oils that I mentioned to you earlier, olive oil, laurel oil and oregano oil.
Laurel oil is especially important in the Aleppo soap insofar as, and you mentioned cleanliness. Laurel oil is a deep cleaning agent. It also has antibacterial properties, antifungal properties and antiviral properties. It’s a very, very wonderful oil. Modern science now has a huge body of evidence to support the use of laurel oil with a number of different things and it’s great for a huge variety of skin care problems that include eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, all the tinea infections, which are fungal infections. It promotes wound healing and it reduces wrinkles.
DEBRA: Oh, is that why my wrinkles disappeared? No, I actually don’t have very many wrinkles for my age. But I’m sure that I’m very happy that this soap is going to even prevent wrinkles from appearing.
KEN MCGOWAN: Well, what we found is that our best customers are the people who have the worst skin conditions in the world. And when we meet a customer for the first time via the internet or wherever we do a show, the very first thing that I tell them is that if you want to improve your skin – and this is in keeping with your philosophy too – you have to do a lifestyle change. And that means you have to eliminate toxins from your personal care products.
But that also means that you must eliminate toxins from your laundry products. And people have scratched their heads and they wonder why we sell soap nuts on a skin care site. The reason is very, very simple, and it’s obvious, and everybody, they have dents in their foreheads from smacking themselves in the foreheads when I tell them it’s really simple. You wear your clothes all day. And you sleep on your bed linens all night. And if you are wearing clothing that’s impregnated with chemicals and you’re sleeping on it, especially your pillow, you are exposing your skin to these harsh chemicals that actually prematurely age your skin.
So simply stopping using those things automatically is going to improve your appearance, the elasticity of your skin, how your skin feels and it’s going to also reduce the flare-ups and many of the conditions and symptoms that people experience with eczema, psoriasis, et cetera.
So if you just simply stop using the industrial chemicals that are in commercial soaps and commercial detergents, your skin is going to improve. But if you then go the extra step and identify a product that is designed, and the oils are selected specifically for their skin care properties, then you get that little extra boost that you noticed when you used the Aleppo soap for the first time.
DEBRA: And that is a principle that I apply to everything because if you want to improve any part of your body, first, you eliminate the toxic chemicals that are causing damage. So then, right there, if that’s all you do, you’re going to have an improvement because you’re not being constantly bombarded with the toxic chemicals.
But then if you can go beyond that and then find something that nourishes and heals that part of your body, in this case, the skin, it has an opportunity to work because the toxic chemicals are not working against it.
I think that most people can’t quite see this yet. A lot of my listeners, I know must see this because I say it a lot. But you’re really doing all of those steps in your products and really, not to say again, I’ve been doing what I do for more than 30 years and this is not only the most pure soap, but the most nourishing soap I’ve ever seen.
KEN MCGOWAN: And it’s famous worldwide with the exception of North America for some reason. That’s slowly changing. I think we have a small perk in that insofar as we’re increasing the profile of Aleppo soap and specifically, laurel oil in the marketplace.
I hate touching on this civil war in Syria, but it effectively ended soap production in that country. Many of the people and the families that were making it are refugees now. Some of them have set up smaller soap-making productions in Lebanon and some in Turkey, for example, some of the outlying countries where they’ve gone. But for a very brief period of time, perhaps for a year or so, I think I was the only person in the world making Aleppo soap.
DEBRA: Well, I’m so glad you are. I’m going to cut you off here. I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re coming very close to the end of the show and I don’t want to have to say, “Oh, stop,” mid-sentence. So we have about a minute left and I want to make sure that you have that time to say any final thing that you haven’t said that you want to make sure you get in.
KEN MCGOWAN: Well, the thing that I would like to reiterate for your listeners is if you’re experiencing skin care issues of any kind, if it’s eczema, psoriasis or simply premature aging of your skin, do a lifestyle change. Get rid of the toxins in your personal care products, get rid of the toxins in your laundry products, and you’re going to notice a difference. It will make a difference in how you feel the health of your skin and how you look. You can take years off your appearance simply by eliminating the toxins in your personal care products.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. And I’d just like to thank you so much for being on the show today.
KEN MCGOWAN: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. And I really appreciate your work. I really appreciate people who start with doing the right thing rather than starting with how we’re going to make millions of dollars. It’s not that I have anything against money, but I think that we need to always start with doing the best thing.
And again, you can go to his website, SinfullyWholesome.com. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to other shows. And thank you for listening. Be well.
Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary 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—as Pamela puts it—”the good, the bad, and the ugly” of supplements: adulteration, missing ingredients, manufacturing practices, contamination, quality, and more. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and sellling 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 to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
- 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
- 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
Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld
Date of Broadcast: April 08, 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 Wednesday, April 8, 2015. If I sound different than usual, it’s because I’m having technical problems with my computer and my microphone today, and I’m speaking to you via the old fashion telephone recorded from, not a cell phone, a corded phone, not even a cordless phone, but landline corded telephone. So there is no EMFs here on this phone at least.
So today, we’re going to be talking, it’s every other Wednesday for my guest, Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who talks about natural ways to handle health problems without prescription drugs. Even though she is a pharmacist, she prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural things. I have her on every other Wednesday. So it’s this Wednesday, two Wednesdays ago, two Wednesdays coming up, and we always have something interesting to hear from Pamela.
Today, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements. And did I say this is Pamela Seefeld? I’m a little bit distracted at the moment because of all these technical difficulties.
Anyway, my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. Hi, Pamela!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Sorry about your computer issue.
DEBRA: Me too, me too. It’s just technical things. This is now the second computer that I’ve had problems with in terms of plugging the audio in, so I just need to solve this. But we’ll do fine on the phone today.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: Okay, hidden dangers in common dietary supplements. There are so many things we could talk about with this. Where would you like to start?
PAMELA SEEFELD: I would like to start, and this is actually very timely…
DEBRA: Oh, wait, wait, wait. Before you talk about that, there is something else we were going to talk about.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s showing up everywhere for sure.
DEBRA: The thing that I wanted to talk about was that Pamela, a few weeks ago, told me about a recipe that she had tried and that she really loved, which was to make flax chips. Now, some of you may have heard of making flax chips, which is you just take flaxseeds and you soak them and then you put them in a dehydrator or a low oven. And when you soak flaxseeds, they turn into a little gelatinous mess. And so they stick together. Then when you dehydrate them, they make these great, crunchy chips.
But they don’t taste like much. I had made them before. And I thought this was a great way to eat flaxseeds. They’re so nutritious for you.
But Pamela makes them in a different way. She adds tomatoes, onions and all kinds of things. I made them her way this week and they were so good that I couldn’t stop eating them. So I have them. I put it up on my food blog. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and up at the top, just click on food and you’ll see Pamela’s Premium Flax Chips.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That is so cute. That’s hilarious. That’s funny. That’s really very funny.
DEBRA: Do you want to say anything else about your flax chips?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I think everyone really enjoyed them. And what’s good about them is that they don’t have calories. They’re going to be negligible calories because really, flaxseeds when you have them whole, they pretty much go through you untouched to some degree. You do observe some omega-3’s somewhat. But what’s good about is that it’s a low-calorie, very filling snack.
I snack on those a lot when I’m working late at night because you don’t want to eat something really heavy, but you want to have something that satisfies. It really fills you up. And since there’s no calorie, this is a very good tool for weight loss.
And it’s just super healthy and super cheap to make and easy that I think your listeners will just really find that this is super, super easy. It takes me a matter of a minute. And then you put them in a dehydrator, the oven or whatever you want to do. It’s very quick. Anyone can do it, even kids can do it. It’s very, very simple.
DEBRA: I told a friend of mine about this recipe yesterday. I told him it was weightless. He said, “Weightless?” And I said yes because there’s no calorie, there’s no fat. There’s onions, there’s those fats, there’s those omega-3. It doesn’t affect your weight at all. And you can eat them and they’re so delicious with all the vegetables in it.
Again, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click at the top of the menu, it says ‘Food’, and today the recipe is right there on top for Pamela’s Premium Flax Chips.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I just love the name. I think it’s very cute. I really appreciate you doing that. I love to share that with everybody and I know that they’re going to really enjoy it.
DEBRA: Thank you, and I have a little picture. You can go there after this show and see my picture of the little flax chips on a little dish.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh. That is so funny. That’s hilarious.
DEBRA: But what I want to mention out of this first, before we talk about the hidden dangers in supplements, let’s talk about why you should take supplements at all. Why can’t you get your supplements, all your nutrients out of food?
PAMELA SEEFELD: And that’s a good question. So people, a lot of times, you’ll hear these people making excuses saying, “Oh, I don’t need to take any supplements because I’m getting everything from my food.” We do get a lot of things in our food. That is true. Eating a varied, balanced diet of lots of fruits and vegetables, especially the vegetables, you’re getting a lot of phytonutrients that have high activity in all areas of the body, especially the fat-soluble tissues depending on what you’re eating them with.
But in many cases, the amounts that you’re getting, it’s going to be sporadic because you’re not eating the same thing every day. And also too, if you’re making green juices and so forth, you’re probably getting a lot more of the enzymes of the plant. But in most cases, you’re taking the supplements, you’re getting these things, but you’re not going to have high amounts of.
A good case in point, vitamin D. People think, “Oh, you go out in the sun, you’re getting enough vitamin D.” Well, we know that the amount of D you make in your skin is inconsequential. It really doesn’t matter. So your sun tanning is never going to bring up your D level very much. So supplements need to be employed in those cases.
Also too, resveratrol is a good example. How many gallons of red wine you’re going to have to drink to get enough resveratrol to have a really therapeutic outcome? It’s not going to be possible.
I’m still even a big fan of taking a quality multivitamin because you’re really just getting a little bit of everything. The vitamins you have to be careful of of not taking too much are vitamins A, D, E and K, which are the fat-soluble vitamins. You do need to use those to some degree, but those, when you’re taking them in really high amounts, can damage the liver. So those are the ones that you really want to be careful of.
But all the other vitamins, you’re not really getting as much as you think out of some of your food. And a lot of it depends on what you’re eating the food with, are you taking it with a lot of fiber. Fiber binds up nutrients too. There are a lot of other variables. This way, you’re going to be very consistent in what you’re getting.
DEBRA: So when you say fiber binds up nutrients, that means that you’re not absorbing as many as nutrients because of the fiber?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So I’ll give you a good example. In pharmacology, we tell patients if they’re taking psyllium husk, if they’re eating All-Bran extra fiber, really, just basically, the meal is mostly fiber. It binds up everything in its path.
So a good case in point is these people use psyllium powder in the morning to try and make themselves more regular. It’s a bulk-forming laxative and what it does is it brings water into the gut and forms this bulky, gelatinous stuff in the GI tract and it moves through. It binds up cholesterol in its way through and it moves its way to the GI tract. But it also binds up medications and supplements.
So if you’re taking a lot of psyllium or if you’re making – I know I was using a vegan recipe that use psyllium for a pie crust if you’re making a torte or something, you have to realize that you’re not going to be absorbing most of the nutrients out of the food you’re eating in the proximity of two hours of consuming that. That’s important to realize.
It’s the same thing with all bread, extra fiber. I just give that as an example. The point is it’s all fiber. That’s all it is. Eating that for breakfast with a banana and milk, you’re not going to be absorbing your vitamins. So you need to separate that by at least two hours.
So those are just some examples. Fiber itself, I’m talking about where the meal is mostly fiber. I’m not talking about a salad, which contains fiber. I had a pear this morning. It has fiber. That’s different. But something that’s specifically a bulk-forming laxative and it’s all that is, fiber in that particular meal. You’re going to really have impairment of absorbing anything, especially medications. That’s very important for somebody that’s on medicine from the doctor. You’re not absorbing them if you take it with that type of a meal.
DEBRA: I think what you just said is so important and especially when people are in what one could probably call an ‘alternative diet’ where they’re trying to avoid some kind of food product and so they substitute other things. But psyllium husks is a substitute ingredient that I see frequently in recipes. And if it has that effect, then you aren’t getting your nutrients from that meal. It’s important to know about these foods.
We need to go to break. But we’ll be right back. 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 natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back to hear more from Pamela.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses – I’m so distracted today because of all these. I’m so distracted because of all the technical things going on here. And there’s my page. So anyway, you know she’s Pamela Seefeld
PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re so funny. Oh, my God! Hilarious.
DEBRA: Pamela, tell us about why people should call you or give your phone number.
PAMELA SEEFELD: People should call me, Pamela Seefeld, clinical pharmacist, because I’ve been doing this probably 25 years. I specialize in medical homeopathy, so all the products that you will get from me will not be available at the health food store. I actually teach this.
And the things I’m using, I see children, I see adults and I can treat anything from ADD. I specialize in mental health, but also if you have high cholesterol, if you have low energy and fatigue, chronic fatigue, viruses, anything that’s going on in your body that you would like to address.
My consultations are free. I’m here in my pharmacy pretty much every day. You can call me here at Botanical Research in Clearwater, Florida. It’s 727-442-4955. I would be greatly honored to help you and your family with any medical need you might have. And also, if you’re actually inquiring to transition off of prescription drugs, I can assist you with that as well.
DEBRA: Yes, and she’s very good and very well-regarded. I say that all the time, but it’s true.
So Pamela, tell us about hidden dangers in supplements. Where do you want to start with that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we can start with the article that the front page of the New York Times today. When I was reading this this morning, this is titled, Study Warns of Diet Supplement Dangers Kept Quiet by FDA. Basically, what they’re talking about is that there is a chemical that they want to assign. It’s available in this acacia plant. But not necessarily, it’s what’s actually in the products. And this particular chemical called MBPEA acts like a stimulant. And a lot of these diet products that have been available, they’re actually containing these stimulants and that could actually be dangerous for patients. And the FDA really wasn’t keeping track of that because what was happening on the labels of these products is that they’re actually putting that this particular plant was in there, but actually, instead of using the plant, they were actually spiking the product with this MBPEA, which actually is a stimulant. And so that’s how people were losing weight with it.
So if you have a heart condition or you have high blood pressure, you wouldn’t be taking these things. But if you don’t have it labeled properly, you wouldn’t know that you’re taking these chemicals that are stimulants and are potentially very dangerous.
So it’s front page in the New York Times today. If you want to see that, I was reading the paper this morning and it was pretty bad. And I’m not surprised. Of course, it wasn’t even a month ago, I had come out talking about how that they tested several different herbal products that were available at major manufacturers that were at regular drugstores, even at GNC and what they were finding is that it did not contain what they said they were containing.
So that’s a part of it. That’s more of an adulteration in the fact that they don’t contain things. But some of the dangers, we’ll move beyond that, but this is just…
DEBRA: Wait, wait, wait. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question first. What is the law about labeling these things? I know that on food labels, if it’s a food product like catsup or something, they have to tell you – well, I was going to say they have to tell you everything. Let me just explain about food labels.
If you were in your kitchen and you put in sour cream and ground beef and flour, you would have to list on the label sour cream, ground beef and flour. But you wouldn’t have to list the ingredients of the sour cream. If you see on the label something like ham, for example, it would have all kinds of nitrates and coloring and stuff like that that you might see on the ham label if you were buying a ham. But if you’re buying a ham sandwich, it just says ham on the label, it doesn’t have to say all the ingredients that are in the ham. That’s the rule for food products. What’s the rule for supplement products?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. The rule for supplement products is probably, most likely, you don’t have to be listing everything. The ingredients are in there, but what the problem is that it’s a voluntary process to follow good manufacturing practice and have the FDA inspect your facility.
Especially these wow-crafted products that people maybe do private labeling, you don’t necessarily know what it’s in there. But these things will be changing. That’s for sure. But now, the way the law stands, if you are a medication company, a pharmaceutical company, and you manufacture something, it has to follow good manufacturing practice, KGMPs. And this is a group of regulations, its rules, it’s a huge book and you pay the FDA to come in and inspect your facility.
If I’m manufacturing a pharmaceutical product, I don’t have a choice. I have to do it. I pay them to come in. They come in, they issue a certificate of authenticity, whatever you want to call it, of what’s going on in that particular facility, whether the machines are being cleaned, the product labeling, so forth and so on. That’s that process.
But with herbal products and supplements, that doesn’t take place unless you want it. So the whole idea is a cache of a company that manufacturers of herbal products to say, “Look, we have GMPs. We have the people inspect our facility.” And that’s what separates the poor products from the other products.
Like I said too, it’s very important to realize about private labeling. A lot of people that are practitioners might label like ‘Pamela’s Vitamins’.
DEBRA: I’ve seen that. Doctors have their own brand.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Doctors do that a lot. Chiropractors do that a lot. You don’t know necessarily what you got there because there’s some third party. Basically, how that works too is I’ll go to a company, say, it’s a private label. I go to them, they put my name on the label and I have to order $2000 worth of whatever. This is a minimum order. And I have all these products. The reason why most people do that is because you can use inferior-quality products, but it has this cache of like it’s a personal product. But it’s not really my vitamins. It’s somebody putting my name on whatever they’re manufacturing.
And that’s important for people to know. That’s why I’m not a big fan of private labeling because of that. The talk we have today is about hidden dangers, but you really need to know what you’re getting.
So the dangers that have been showing up in these articles that have been front page news should be really looked at seriously. They’re very dangerous. And just the fact that they’re now figuring this out, this thing has been going on for a long time.
And also you need to realize that good manufacturing practices, if they’re not being adhered to and the facility where the products are being made and privately labeled, you don’t know where that’s coming from. The machines might not be cleaned properly.
DEBRA: Okay, good. The thing that comes to mind is that maybe there is something you’re allergic to that might still be on the machine.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!
DEBRA: And somebody who is allergic to peanuts or something like that, soy, a lot of things, you don’t even know if they’re in that.
We need to go to break. So 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 medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And we’ll be right back.
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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. Today, we’re talking about hidden toxic dangers that may be in some of those natural supplements that you might buy in various different places.
So Pamela, go on with – let’s see…
PAMELA SEEFELD: We were talking about private label.
DEBRA: Private label, yes. We were talking about private label.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m not saying necessarily that they are going to be bad. It’s just that there are going to be inadequacies in analyzing the quality of it because this is really not that person’s vitamins. It’s obviously a company. And most of the time, when people private label, they shop these things around and they want to make the most profit off the bottle.
With my stuff here, I don’t even know what I paid for mine. I have a staff running these things. I don’t know.
But if you’re going to put your name on a product, a lot of times, people will do whatever they’re making the best profit on. So maybe the product is not going to be necessarily good.
And another thing for evaluating hidden dangers is when you see a product on the back of the label, it has all these little asterisks next to it with all the ingredients, I don’t like that. And the reason why I prefer not to use those types of products is because you cannot evaluate how many milligrams of each product is in there to make a dose.
So if someone brings me a product and they bought it at some place, at a health food store, and it’s got these little asterisks next to it, when you look at that, there’s no way to adequately evaluate what dose you’re getting of each product.
So typically, when they do this kind of things and they have these blends of all of this stuff and there are little stars next to each one so they don’t tell you how many milligrams, the majority of the time, the reason why is because they’re putting more of the less expensive ingredient and less of the more expensive ingredient if that makes sense to you. So that’s what’s really happening.
And so when you see those types of products, there are a lot of multilevel marketing products that fall into those categories. I have hesitancy in saying that they would be even safe because you really have no way of knowing. The real way to evaluate something is having faith that what you’re seeing on the label is something that you can determine if this dose is appropriate for the individual. And that’s where a pharmacy comes in.
But a regular individual could look at that and say, “I don’t really know what I’m getting.” That could be a problem, especially if there’s drug interaction or if the person has allergy. How would they know what they’re even getting in the product?
DEBRA: I agree with you. I think that a lot of times, people are taking these products because they want them to have a medicinal effect. And so if you don’t know what’s in it – I mean, part of getting the effect is knowing what you’re taking and what’s the dose.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And so if you can’t adequately evaluate it because of the fact that they’re really not revealing it on the label, I have some problems with that. So that’s another thing.
Now, the fact that there are heavy metals in some of these things – and I like to point to calcium supplements and lead. They’re cleaning that up a little bit better than it was in the past, but if you look in consumer labs, there are a lot of different products. Almost 20% of the products that they reviewed had some small amounts of lead in them. And of course, lead is a neurotoxin. And that’s something that we need to be cognizant of.
And you have to think about too where the plants are grown. I mean, I have nothing against China, but I really would not be using a lot of any of these oriental products that are actually made in China. And the reason why is that the environmental pollution is so rampant there that if you’re growing the plants there in the soil and the air, the environment is pretty much destroyed as far as heavy metal contamination. When these plants are eventually put to a product you’re consuming, you might not really be aware of what you’re getting. And that’s very important.
In not only that too, the American companies, at least when you have plant material, they do genetic testing on it to make sure that’s what’s really in it. And that’s actually how they found that the products that were being carried by these various pharmacies and GNC did not have that particular product because they actually tested the DNA. What they said in the label was not what’s in the bottle.
So there’s lots of room for air. I personally use a lot of products with companies that I really like and I know follow a good manufacturing practice. A good case in point is if you go to the health food store, Nature’s Way, Nature’s Plus, they follow GMP. It’s what they’re saying in the label.
I actually went out to the Nature’s Way plant in Utah a long time ago and toured the facility. It’s very clean. The plant material was being analyzed and checked for fungi and bacteria.
And that’s really important to know. If you go to the health food store and you’re buying herbal products in bulk, maybe they’ll have bulk whatever herb you’re particularly buying, and it is in a bulk container, bacteria, fungi and bugs contaminate a lot of bulk, raw herbs.
So you got to be very, very careful about that. That would be something that if you have any issues with your immune system, if you’re immune-compromised because maybe you had a transplant, you have no business doing anything bulk. Those products need to be medical grade from a store that is specifically using products that have been tested to be free of bacteria.
And that’s probably important to know. I’m not sure what percentage of the population has immune issues. But even if someone’s been having chronic herpes infection, chronic Eipstein-Barr, any of that kind of stuff, your immune system’s already low and taking in bulk herbs that you’re buying from a container where you’re measuring out so many grams of it or whatever you’re buying, I would really hesitancy and advising against that.
DEBRA: So that would be true for culinary herbs as well.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: I mean, it’s all just the same herbs. They’re in [cross-talking 00:32:51]
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, when it’s in bulk. So if you’re buying some of those in a container, that’s pretty much had been tested and is probably free of that. But mold too, if you just think about it, it’s plant material. And even if it’s been dehydrated, there still might be small amounts of water and that’s all it takes. These are the things that you can’t see with the naked eye.
DEBRA: Right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: But if you’re drinking or eating it, it could be a big problem, especially if you’re making an extract of it. Like I said, if the person is immune-compromised, you might not realize why you’re getting these infections and it might be because of the bulk products. And you’d want to have something in a capsule that’s been sealed, that the top of the label has been sealed. That would make a big difference as well.
Now, I’m going to switch over a little bit talking about mercury in fish oil products. The best way to have mercury removed from omega-3 is by molecular distillation, fractional distillation. You think about when they process oil in refineries, there’s columnar filtration and certain things come off at certain points. And that’s the same thing with fish oil. We want to make sure that when we have something, it has been filtered in that sense that the mercury has been removed.
I also have a problem too if we talk about hidden dangers that if you have a really big bottle of fish oil, you buy something in bulk, by the time you’re halfway through the bottle, there’s so much degradation of the product inside because of oxygen being affected. That’s another thing that you actually could end up with lipid peroxidation in coronary artery disease even as a result of taking omega-3’s just because of the fact that they become adulterated from the oxygen.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. So I’ll ask you this question when we come back. 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. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.
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DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who – I can’t talk. I’m just having one of those days. You know who she is. Okay, let’s go over to the question.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly, you know who I am. So we were talking about the large containers of fish oil.
DEBRA: And I had a question for you. Are you talking about large containers of liquid fish oil or fish oil in capsules?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Both.
DEBRA: Okay, so my question is, does the capsule keep the fish oil fresh?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Not necessarily. It’s just a more convenient dosing mechanism for some people. What we have to realize is that oils are sensitive to light, heat and oxygen in that order actually. We know that if something has oxygen coming into it in the bottle, what happens is each time that you open the bottle and take some pills out and then close the bottle, the oxygen is let in the bottle and it stays in there.
And so what happens is the oil itself can start having derogatory products as a result of it. It becomes rancid. You don’t really smell it because it’s not really to the point of – if you think about it, if you kept a bottle of fish oil and you kept the top off and you had it sitting out for weeks on end, eventually, it would start to smell.
But even though it’s just small amounts of oxygen that you keep letting when you keep opening the cap, there are some problems with that.
So a case in point, in Costo and Sam’s, they sell fish oil in these huge, big containers, that’s not good. People think they’re getting such a deal. It’s not a good deal because you really want to have a bottle of fish oil that has maybe 120 in it or 90 capsules or whatever the case may be. You use that up within a month and get a fresh bottle after that. Each time you’re opening it up and you’re letting the capsules out and you’re letting oxygen into the bottle, the derogatory products that are going to be present there in the liquid or in the capsules, either way, those are bad because they have free radicals. And so when you’re consuming those, those free radicals, depending on your anti-oxidants status at the time when you consume them can be probably detrimental to the blood vessels.
And I really wanted to talk a little bit, just briefly, about fish oil just really quickly. There is a study that came out maybe a few weeks ago. And it was talking about how fish oil is shown that the benefits were not really derived there for these patients that had heart disease and that it really didn’t protect the heart and everything. I want to point out something to your listeners. Those patients that were in that study (and it’s very important that we look at the study) had already had a heart attack and had heart disease.
So what I’m telling you is that if you’ve already had a major health problem, you’ve had heart attack or you have heart disease and I give you fish oil, are you going to be like you and me and you’re going to be completely fine? Probably not.
Look at the studies and look at the population of the people that they’re using in that. They didn’t use healthy people. They used people that have already been sick, were on a bunch of cardiac medicines. They gave them fish oil and we’re trying to see if it would protect against further cardiac damage. And the study showed that it probably didn’t.
What that means is that maybe it’s not just fish oil that’s needed when these people are very sick and have heart disease. Maybe they need to be on B vitamins, maybe they need to be on exercise, maybe they need to be on a different diet, all these other things. It’s not all or nothing.
I think that’s important for people to realize when they see this. I read the study and people come in and say, “Well, I guess fish oil really doesn’t do what it says it does.” All these negative studies that they think that they have, you need to look and see. If they were dealing with very, very sick people, you might not have the outcomes you’re expecting because the health of these individuals is very poor.
DEBRA: I think that’s a really important point to make. I think that people read just an article where a reporter who is not trained in these subjects write something and it’s his understanding of what the study is. And when you go and read the study, it’s sometimes completely different.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. Many times, it is. And I think, let’s face it, if you’re trying to make a name for yourself and you’re a reporter, the sensational titles really catch people’s attention.
And maybe they really should have looked at what they’re trying their outcome to be. Is a person’s heart disease going to completely go away? Probably not. But maybe if they’re using homeopathic cardiac glycosides, maybe if they’re incorporating diet and exercise and some other things that we know has shown to be helpful, maybe the outcomes would have been different.
But when you deal with a patient population that already has some baseline health issues that are pretty severe, you might not always see the results that you want. Should this mean that the person who has really bad heart disease shouldn’t take fish oil? No, they need to be taking it. But there might be other things, other variables along with it, some lifestyle factors, that probably are influencing it. That’s really important.
So I don’t want people to stop taking fish oil. I think this is just, since we’re talking about, important to bring that up because it doesn’t mean fish oil doesn’t work.
DEBRA: Fish oil has a lot of other benefits as well. And that said, I’m really understanding in my own life very much lately that it’s a combination of things. Everybody needs their own individual combination of things in order to build health. And we’re exposed to different things. Our bodies are different. And it’s not just one thing. It’s not even just one thing of avoiding toxic. I think that everybody needs to avoid toxic chemicals. Everybody needs to get toxic chemicals out of their bodies as I think like a baseline thing. But then after that, there are still other things that are needed.
PAMELA SEEFELD: What you’re saying is these are inter-individual. And that’s why I like what I’m doing here because I can select these things for you based on your family history and what you think you’re more prone to or at risk for or what situations you have cropping up. It’s really important. I can look at your blood work with you and say, “These are things that I see that are coming. They’re not being flagged yet, but I don’t like these numbers and we need to try and reverse those.”
And especially if you’re dealing with anybody that has some pre-kidney issues or some pre-liver issues, those two things in particular are very, very bad because you don’t want to end up on dialysis and you don’t want to end up with a liver transplant.
So when you start seeing some things, some changes physiologically in the person in their chemistry, their blood chemistry, those you need to act on. And those people in particular would really want to be cognizant of what supplements they’re taking because you don’t want to be taking anything that’s possibly adulterated.
And another thing too, when you see these supplements and it says, “Genko, two for a $1” That’s not Genko because there’s no way they’ll be able to sell that. That’s a lot of these products that were private-labeled by these different pharmacies that were just really junk. They were picking them up because they were cheap.
That’s what really it is. They didn’t go and explore, “Is this an adequate supply? Do these people actually test these things?” We’re looking at that because the bottom line, if you’re a retail business and you’re a chain nationwide, it’s, “What profit am I making off of each bottle?” And that’s what a lot of people need to realize, that the practitioner and the integrity of who’s dealing with the products, that’s very important.
DEBRA: Well, I want to say on your behalf, Pamela, I want to say to the listeners that it’s really a very different experience working with Pamela because not only does she have the products that she’s investigated and evaluated for herself and has been using for many years and she knows the people who are making them and things like that, but she also has the skill and experience to know exactly which products to give you, exactly which natural substance is going to do the thing that your body needs.
And it’s very different in terms of just walking into a natural food store or a drugstore or any place like that where you’re just choosing something off the shelf without having the knowledge that she brings to this. And her knowledge is so great in a large sense. She’s so experienced that she can just choose the right thing and give it to you and it just cuts right through to having the right solution.
It’s very different. I’ve never been to any kind of store like Pamela’s pharmacy. She just does something completely unique that is, I think, so needed in the world.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. I really pride myself that what we’re providing is a very valuable service here, that people, once they’ve realized that we’re really micro-managing their stuff and just looking at it and we’re doing it in a very economical way, that’s what it’s really all about. It’s making sure that people have quality choices and especially if they’re on prescriptions and they don’t want to be on them or they’re coming close to needing medicine.
I see a lot of people that are coming here and they may be are needing medicine in some time in the future. And I’ll tell them exactly what they’re going to eventually give them and say, “Do you want to just get rid of the problem now? We can address it today.”
But I respect people. If they want to triage something and say, “Okay, let’s check the blood work in another month and see where they’re at,” we can do that too. And if they’re still continuing to get worse, then you have to act on it.
I think people need to have choices. And especially, I keep bringing up the kidney thing because there’s some homeopath stuff that I’ve been using for people with kidney issues and starting to have pre-kidney failure and they’re reversing pretty significantly. I’m even astounded at the numbers. There’s a big, big difference in people’s [inaudible 00:48:48].
In fact, I’m doing some speaking next week, which is continuing education for the doctors. And I’m going to be providing some of the blood work (I only blocked out the names and everything). I’m showing the blood work of people that actually went on some inexpensive, simple, medical homeopathy and his pre-kidney failure was reversed in a month. And that, to me, is just unbelievable. I wouldn’t even expect the results to be that good. Huge differences!
So people need to know there are choices for that. And I’d be very grateful to help you in anything, especially if you have any question about a supplement you’re taking. We’re talking about these hidden dangers, but if you have questions about any kind of contamination or anything that’s going on with it, I’d be very grateful to look and see if we can find us some information, if there are some questions about some kind of adverse reaction that you’ve been having to a supplement you’ve been taking because there’s a lot of that much more prevalent than you would think.
DEBRA: Well, we only have about 20 seconds left. So why don’t you give your phone number again?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely. My pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I would be very grateful to help you in and your family if you have any questions you might have about your medications or your supplements.
DEBRA: And thank you very much, Pamela. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another show with Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
