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Question from green-earth
Hi Debra,
I need a scanner for my office. I was thinking of getting a portable one because it was smaller, however I need to scan books and the smaller ones wouldn’t work for that purpose.
I am scanning a sketchbook, which has drawings in it (and I don’t want to rip out the pages of the sketchbook). If you move the scanner a little bit, the drawing might be distorted. I am importing my drawings to the computer which I will be drawing on top of, so there can’t be any distortion. So I need a flat bed scanner.
Have you or anyone else found a brand of scanner that doesn’t smell strongly of glue or plastic?
Thanks
Debra’s Answer
Readers?
Mold Remidiation
Question from Bonnie Johnson
After a peak up into the attic crawl space it was discovered that there is some mold up there on the wood panels. The roof was done in 06 and have not been up there since then. I will get it tested and removed. I was wondering if anyone has ever been in a house that had that done or what the process is. Do I have to move out to get it done and how soon can I return…etc.
Debra’s Answer
Readers?
decals
Question from jenny
Hi Debra,
Is this a safe alternative to the vinyl wall decals? We’ve heard about -water based adhesive backed fabric material for wall decals that is ‘CPSIA tested and it is compliant’. Thanks for your confirmation.
Jenny
Debra’s Answer
Well, one site I read said, “FABRIC WALL DECALS are made out of fabric … a polyester weave with a water based adhesive which means : NO PVC’S, ECO-FRIENDLY and NON TOXIC. The advanced water based adhesive allows them to be re-used so no need to throw them out when your kids pulls them off the wall… just re-apply them.”
Polyester isn’t toxic, only the finishes applied to them are toxic. But if they have no finishes, I don’t see a problem.
Anyone have any experience with these?
Lamp shades
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I found some glass lamps that I like but wonder how safe the lamp shades are…the website states that the lamp shades are made of “a natural linen” but can I trust this? Are lamp shades usually made with a plastic/synthetic base also? And, do I have to worry about any flame retardants on the shade?
Thanks so much!
Debra’s Answer
I have one lamp with a fabrics lamp shade in my house, all the others are task lamps with metal shades.
I looked at the shade. Mine is basicallly two pieces of fabric stretched over a wire frame.
If I remember correctly, I seem to recall some paper lining (here is a how to make a shade that shows attaching a styrene plastic “shade paper”).
So I would just check and see. If the shade is 100% fabric, it’s probably OK. If it has a paper liner, I wouldn’t use it because the heat of the lamp would make the plastic outgas.
The other possible toxic exposure would be a fabric finish that would still be on the fabric because it probably isn’t prewashed.
As for fire retardants, you should ask as some may have it and others not. It may say “fire retardant fabric” in the description, but absence of these words does not necessarily mean there is no fire retardant.
To be really safe, you can choose your own fabric and have a lampshade custom made. Be sure to provide prewashed fabric and give exact instructions about what you want and don’t want. There are many custom lampshade makers online and probably available in your local community as well. If you are handy, you might be able to do it yourself.
The one lamp shade I have I bought when I moved here to Florida 14 years ago. It’s a synthetic fabric, I’m sure, but it had no toxic outgassing and is very pretty. But this is very much an exception to my general rules.
You just have to evaluate each lamp shade individually.
The Safest Seafood
My guest today is Randy Hartnell, President of Vital Choice Wild Seafood & Organics, which he founded in 2001 with his wife Carla. He is responsible for guiding the company on its mission of providing consumers with high quality sustainable seafood, while educating them about the impact of their food choices on the environment, their health, and the commercial fishing community. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals found in seafood, the health benefits of seafood, how you can choose and purchase the safest seafood. Prior to founding Vital Choice, Randy spent 24 years as a commercial salmon and herring fisherman in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. He is a Washington state native and currently resides there with his wife in Bellingham. www.vitalchoice.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Safest Seafood
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Randy Hartnell
Date of Broadcast: January 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 Thursday, January 15th 2015, 01-15-15. We’re having a winter day in Florida. It’s 67°, but it’s all gray and overcast and it feels like winter.
Today, we’re going to talk about seafood, which is something we haven’t really talked about before. I’ll just admit right up front that I don’t eat seafood at all at any time, so it’s not something that I’ve researched a lot. But I know a little bit about it, enough to know what the toxic exposures are and where to find the safest seafoods.
I just never have been able to eat seafoods since I was born. The first time my parents gave it to me, I was gagged. There’s just something about it that my body doesn’t tolerate. But that said, seafood is very healthy if you get good seafood. It’s a source of many nutrients that we’ll talk about. We’ll talk about how to prepare it and all of those things. I’m just saying that I’m a novice at this subject because I had no personal experience with it.
My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics, which he founded in 2001 with his wife, Carla. This is one of the best websites that sell seafood that I found. So we’re going to find out all about his very high quality seafood.
Hi, Randy.
RANDY HARTNELL: Hi, Debra. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.
DEBRA: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to have you. And you’re in Washington?
RANDY HARTNELL: I’m in Washington State up here in the northwest.
DEBRA: And what’s the weather like there?
RANDY HARTNELL: It’s a little overcast, kind of gray and probably a lot chillier than there, than where you’re at.
DEBRA: Yeah, is it raining?
RANDY HARTNELL: No, it’s not actually. We’ve been having a very mild winter.
DEBRA: Good!
RANDY HARTNELL: I haven’t touched my windshield yet.
DEBRA: Yeah, we’ve been having a mild winter too. So tell us, you used to be a fisherman. How did you get from being a fisherman to selling seafood?
RANDY HARTNELL: That’s right! I was a commercial fisherman for over 20 years. I loved it. I started going up there when I was in college to work my way through school and just fell in love with working out in nature and on the water. I did that until the late 2000’s, right around 2001.
We had a disruptive event happen in our industry over a period of time. The industrialization of salmon came on to the world scene in a big way. Whereas wild salmon from Alaska had previously constituted most of the wild salmon in the world, farm salmon basically came along and displaced it.
It was a lot cheaper. It was available year round. And so from a retailer’s standpoint, that was just a lot more profitable, a lot less hassle. And in spite of the fact that wild salmon was superior nutritionally, superior from an environmental standpoint, it tasted a lot better, basically consumers, all they knew was that farmed salmon was cheaper.
So in a period of couple of years, our prices collapsed and we couldn’t really make a living. It was a pretty devastating time in our industry. And so it’s really similar to what a lot of ranchers and farmers have experienced with the industrialization of these industry and basically every produce.
So I had to find something else to do. That something else ended up being Vital Choice.
DEBRA: Well, can you tell us something about what the fishing experience is like? I know that I’ve seen movies where they have scenes where the big boats go out and then they put the fish on ice and things, but is there anything that you can tell us that would give us more of an idea of what that experience is like between the fish in the water and it ending up in the store someplace?
RANDY HARTNELL: Sure! It varies quite a bit with the type of fish, the type of fishing methods used. I was involved with several different kinds of fisheries, but my primary fishery was a wild salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Fish come in seasonally. We even go up there every summer, in June. The fish would come in, we’d spend about six weeks and catch the fish.
Some of the boats take better care of them than others. My boat is refrigerated, so the fish were chilled. The openings are usually six or eight hours. And so after you’re done fishing, you’d deliver those to another boat that basically tenders them to either a processing ship or a processing client.
The industry has changed quite a bit, but basically probably 24 hours before those particular fish are chilled and cleaned. At that time, most of it was being canned for sale around the world. This is really one of the best foods on the planet really. Nothing goes into that can except that fresh salmon and maybe a little salt.
Increasingly, the demand for frozen product has occurred. In Europe, Asia, the rising middle classes around the world, they all want our Alaska salmon because it’s some of the best seafood on the planet – cleanest, best quality.
Ironically, a lot of Americans, still, they’re prone to buy the cheapest thing they can find and so they’ll buy a lot of the farm fish. The ironic thing is the best seafood that we’re raising or we’re harvesting is going offshore and we’re importing farmed shrimp, farm catfish, farm tilapia and all these stuff. They can’t come close to fetching an Alaska wild seafood nutritionally.
But anyway, as far as the quality goes and time to market, it really depends. A lot of people get hung up on the fresh versus frozen and all ‘fresh’ means is it’s never been frozen even though it may take a week to get from the fishing rounds to the store in Florida or Orlando actually. We spent a lot of time trying to educate people about this. If you take a really good quality fish out of the water, you clean it and freeze it right away. It stays that way until we thaw it. When the customer thaw it out, it’s going to taste the way it tasted out of the water. In many cases, frozen fish is going to be a better culinary experience than so-called fresh.
If you catch it yourself, if you’re down there in Florida, you have a lot of seafood and you catch it yourself, that’s one thing. But I travel around a lot, I always check out seafood in various restaurants. And a lot of times, it’s not very good. And I heard your introduction about how you had a really bad experience at an early age. Unfortunately, that’s the case for a lot of people. They get bad quality product and they just assume that all seafood tastes bad.
DEBRA: I may have. I mean, this was back in the fifties and so I may have gotten a piece of fish that had been sitting in a Styrofoam container wrapped in plastic full of mercury…
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, I doubt that that was it, it’s more the fats. The thing that makes seafood so incredibly healthy are those polyunsaturated fats, those omega 3’s. The thing about them is they’re incredibly unstable. That’s why we take it out of our food supply because they’re the enemy to shelf life.
And in fish, what that means is if they’re exposed to air, if fish is exposed to air for even a day or two, they start to oxidize. That’s what we know as its rancidity or fishiness and it just always amazes me how many people out there think that seafood tastes fishy because when you get good quality seafood and you take care of it and package it well, it doesn’t taste fishy at all.
I’m here in Seattle and last night, I went with some friends out to a local restaurant. We had a couple of different types of seafood. It was the most delicious meal. I would challenge anybody that thinks they don’t like seafood to let me set them up with a seafood meal. You wouldn’t believe a number of people I’ve converted over the years. I’m always just amazed. What I commonly hear is, “That doesn’t taste like fish.”
DEBRA: Well, maybe I should try your fish.
RANDY HARTNELL: I’d be happy to give you an option to help you do that.
DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. Well, we need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more with Randy Hartnell about this safest seafood. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics. Their website is VitalChoice.com. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. 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 Randy Hartnell. He’s the president of Vital Choice Wild Seafoods and Organics. That’s VitalChoice.com. We’re talking about seafoods, the safest seafood and the most delicious seafood, I’m told.
Randy, tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that are found in seafood that people might want to watch out for and why is it important to have seafood from pristine waters?
RANDY HARTNELL: Well, that’s an interesting question. There’s been methyl mercury in the ocean for thousands of years. They looked at specimens of hair from Eskimos that lived thousands of years ago and they had methyl mercury in them. A lot of people realized that life evolved in the ocean with a background presence of methyl mercury.
So to a certain extent, it’s there and we can handle fishes that have lower amounts. And if you look at the science, you look at the study, generally, around the world, the people that eat the most seafood are the healthiest.
DEBRA: Yes.
RANDY HARTNELL: They are the longest lived, they had some of the best infant mortality. I’m talking about major scientific studies where they looked at thousands of people and really you only have to look at Japan. The population of Japan including pregnant and nursing women are eating fish every day and they’re some of the healthiest people on the planet, not the sickest.
What happens is a lot of people focus on these trace levels of methyl mercury and other contaminants. We’re talking parts per billion or less. They totally forget about the good nutrients from seafood that aren’t in most of the land-based foods. Seafood, it just has the whole micronutrient spectrum. It’s got these incredible long chain omega 3 fats. And when you just focus the methyl mercury and you forget about all the benefit, you’re really doing yourself a disservice.
Now, to your question, you do want to focus on fish that’s obviously from clean waters. We knew that a lot of people were concerned about this and rightfully. And so we started our fish from the very beginning. We would submit samples to labs.
What we saw over the years, what we learned is that toxicity or methyl mercury in seafood is really a function of the species, the life cycle of the fish. And so generally, what you want to do is avoid longer lived fish because it tends to bio-accumulate over time in a larger fish.
So for instance, we source albacore tuna from one fisherman. But when he comes in and unloads his boat, he’s got albacore tuna that ranged from 4 or 5 pounds up to 50 or 60 lbs. and he buy only the smallest, two or three years old. They had the lowest contaminant levels and also the highest levels of these healthy fats.
DEBRA: Well, let me ask you about that because if you’re just going to the store or the fish market and you want to buy some tuna, how would you know what sized fish that piece of tuna came from?
RANDY HARTNELL: You would not know. It’s impossible to know. In fact, you could be pretty sure that what you’re getting is just the opposite, you’re getting the largest. The commercial path is we don’t like the little fish because they’re relatively low yield, they’re more expensive to process. In contrary, they like the bigger fish, which tend to have the highest contaminant levels and the lowest methyl mercury levels.
So for instance, if you buy a can of the albacore tuna that we’re sourcing, it’s got maybe 1 ½ to 3 grams of omega 3 fatty acids per serving. If you go into a grocery store and you buy albacore tuna off the shelf, it’s almost negligible. We’ve tested this numerous times.
And so not only is it that higher contaminant level. It’s got much lower levels of the good fats. And that’s just a function of the type of fish that they source. They’re both albacore tuna, but the bigger fish that are down deep have a higher contaminant levels than the lower levels, compared to the smaller fish that are caught by hook and line.
A couple of studies that came out a few years ago upon which the FDA based their advice to pregnant and nursing women to restrict seafood consumption. This is in 2004. They were based on two studies. One was in the Faroe islands of Denmark and one was in New Zealand. And they saw the higher the fish consumption along these pregnant women, they really begin to see problems with their children over the course of the years.
But when we went back and looked at it, when the scientists went back, we realized that in the Faroe Islands, people were eating pilot whales, which is at the top of the food chain, highly contaminated marine mammal. In New Zealand, they were eating shark, which again is a top of the food chain fish that lives a long time, has a relatively high contaminant levels.
On the contrary, when you look at populations that are eating normal seafood that you would get in the grocery store, most grocery stores, the contaminant level is much lower. What we’ve done is we’re very selective. We don’t have to produce large volumes to go into grocery stores. We just sell over our website and so we can go to the fishermen and say, “We only want your smaller fish. We only want your halibut.” We only buy halibut 25 lbs. and under. Halibut can get up to hundreds of pounds.
And so to answer your question. When you go to the store, you don’t really know what you’re getting.
DEBRA: But if somebody buys from you, then they do know what they’re getting because you have very specific criteria.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes, because we buy what we want to eat. Our family eats far more fish than anybody and so we just kind of practice – we just buy what we know is healthiest for ourselves and then source the same thing for our customers.
But I have to say that while we do that – and I’ve been doing this for a dozen years now, I go to scientific conferences around the world and I’ve developed friendships with some of the leading scientists in this realm, just some really wonderful people not connected to industry. They appreciate meeting our company because we’re providing food that they recognize being the healthiest out there. But what they will tell you is that there is no evidence, really no evidence…
DEBRA: Hold on, Randy. We’ll come back after the break because the music is kind of taking over. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Randy Hartnell, president of Vital Choice Seafood and Organics. We’ll be right back after the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell from Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics. I’m at the website now and we’re going to talk about all these great products. I’m just looking and there’s so many things. There’s basically – well, I’ll let you explain. Go ahead. Tell us about your products.
RANDY HARTNELL: Well, when we started out a few years ago, we mainly had salmon and halibut. And over the years, people have requested other products and we do have access. Both my partner and I had spent many, many years in the industry. We had a lot of contacts with our suppliers and with fishermen. And so we had access to really great products over the years. We just keep adding, adding things.
In fact, this last year, we even branched out from seafood and added some organic, grass-fed beef.
DEBRA: I saw that.
RANDY HARTNELL: We had customers that were asking for that and we had a great supplier real close to us here in Washington and so we put some of that out.
DEBRA: But basically, it looks like that your choices are really centered around salmon, cod, tuna, halibut and particularly, there’s a lot of salmon, wild salmon, wild Alaskan salmon in a lot of different forms from canned to – you’ve got a whole section here that has salmon burgers and salmon sausage and salmon bacon and all these things that are made out of salmon.
RANDY HARTNELL: [Inaudible 00:28:18]
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. But there’s also different kinds of salmon here. So tell us what the difference is. You’ve got sockeye and king and silver and smoked salmon.
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, the salmon is just an amazing, amazing animal. There are five different species. The biggest one is the king salmon. It’s the fattiest, richest, the least common so it’s going to be the most expensive. There’s the silver salmon. There’s the sockeye salmon. Sockeye salmon is our signature product. It’s a really abundant fish from Alaska and British Columbian primarily. There’s some coho salmon or silver salmon or pink salmon.
The main difference between the different species is when they’re going through their life cycle, they occupy different niches in the river system. That translates into – and when the fish comes back from the ocean (I don’t know how much you know about the life cycle of salmon), basically…
DEBRA: Well, actually, let me tell you, I know a lot about it because I used to live in Northern California right near Point Reyes National Seashore. And so the salmon would come up our creek in the [inaudible 00:29:41] valley. And in our community, we would celebrate the return of the salmon. We would all go stand down at the bridge and watch the salmon jump.
Anso I actually have a big affinity for salmon from doing that. It’s an amazing thing to see the salmon coming up…
RANDY HARTNELL: It really is. It’s just an amazing animal. The more you know about it, the more fascinating it is. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that when the salmon – they’re boarding the river, some fresh water. They migrate out as a little tiny smolt into the ocean. There’s a lot more food out in the ocean, so they grow rapidly out there. And then, roughly, on average, three to four years later, they will migrate back to the very same river, the very same spawning beds that they were born.
I forget where we were going with this. Oh, I remember. So a lot of times, the salmon (especially the king salmon and the sockeye), their spawning beds maybe hundreds of miles up that river. And once they get back in that river and they’re heading to those spawning beds, there really isn’t any food in the river, very little. So they’re not eating. And so they have to be carrying all the calories, all the energy that they’re going to need to get to those spawning grounds.
And so the species like the sockeye and the king salmon, they’d have to migrate the farthest. They’ll have the highest fat level. That translates into rich, just a really wonderful eating experience. You can get Alaska sockeye salmon from one river, but maybe it has to only migrate for a day and that will have like maybe half the fat as a sockeye and some of the larger ones that might have to migrate for two weeks. So you can have a dramatically different culinary experience depending on where that fish is from.
And so what we do to make sure that our customers are only eating the best is we tend to target fish that are from river systems where they have these higher fat levels.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful. And I just want to comment because of my experience living in Northern California. Actually, I was born there. I spent 12 years living in the [Inaudible 00:31:58] valley in Marin County, which is right across the Columbia Bridge from San Francisco and I lived out in that rural area.
Because I was able to live so close to nature and we had organic farms and we had the salmon and all these things, I became really aware of the whole idea of local food. It’s much more difficult to eat local here in Florida than it was for me to eat local when I lived in California. I just loved the stories behind the food that is completely missing in supermarket food. I loved the story that you’re telling about how much fat is in the fish depends on how far their spawning grounds are from the ocean.
I just think that if people knew these stories about their food more, then we would have much more appreciation for the food, that we’d have much more connection of the food coming from nature and our connection with nature.
So many people think that food comes from the supermarket and they have no idea that this fish is like going up river against the current of the river. It’s just like this big, whole journey to get back to the spawning grounds. And it affects your culinary experience. I just think these stories are so wonderful.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes. And beyond that, the fisheries in Alaska, really, the management of those fishers is such that – well, you know, around the world, most wild salmon have disappeared and a lot of that has to do with the loss of their habitat. The east coast, they dammed most of there, so there really are no commercially available wild salmon from the north east. All the Atlantic salmon that’s out there, that’s pretty much 100% farmed salmon.
But in Alaska, the habitat is still pristine. We’re fighting to keep it that way. Consequently, we still have these magnificent salmon [inaudible 00:34:01]. Two years ago, over 200 million pink salmon returned to Alaska. That was the biggest on record. A lot of people are getting the impression that we’re wiping out all the wild salmon. We hear all the bad news about wild salmon. But really, it’s a different story in Alaska because we’ve protected the habitat.
This year, 15 million sockeye salmon are predicted to return to Crystal Bay alone. That’s just one region out of 34,000 miles of [inaudible 00:34:29] up here. The best part of that story is it only takes about 15% to 20% of those fish to replenish the spawning ground. So the rest is harvestable surplus.
DEBRA: Good! 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 Randy Hartnell. He’s the founder of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics and we’re learning about salmon and other seafood. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randy Hartnell. He’s the founder of Vital Choice Wild Seafoods and Organics where they sell wild seafood. A lot of it, all different kinds, I’m looking here. They’ve got wild shrimp and shell fish, calamari, prawns, crabs, oysters. And listen to this. I’m looking at this description and it says, “Our pure sweetly delicious Pacific spot prawns are hand-harvested off British Columbia, packed in seawater upon harvest and fresh frozen onboard.”
And so it’s just like that whe you thought out these prawns, it’s just like you were just right there on the boat, yes?
RANDY HARTNELL: That’s right. It wasn’t easy for us to find a fisherman that was willing to do that. But fortunately, we did find a couple of them. And what’s happening there again, this is some of the highest quality seafood you can find and we’re just increasing the man for it around the world.
Maybe you’re familiar with this. The Fukushima radiation disaster in Japan, it just has made Alaska seafood in that much more demand. So you can see from the prices there that it’s not cheap, but we never let price dictate what we source. We go out and we find the very best quality of all the different types of seafoods and we pay the fisherman – well, we need to pay them to get it and add a margin so that we can survive and that’s what it is.
We’ve become so accustomed to cheap food in this country and it’s reflected in our health. We’re one of the sickest populations on the planet because we’re eating all these industrial pollutants. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
DEBRA: No, but I would just like to interject that people complain about the cost of food, but they forget that medical bills cost so much more. I would rather spend the money on the food and be well than spend money on medical bills and be sick.
RANDY HARTNELL: You know, my dad used to say as far back as I can remember, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” I’m getting older and I’m watching just so many people around me, their poor lifestyle and their diet are catching up to them.
He also used to say, “Don’t be too soon old and too late smart.” What we find is a lot of people, until they get a wake-up call, they really don’t hear it.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s exactly right.
RANDY HARTNELL: We spend a lot of time trying to educate people about that and provide them with that. That’s why we’re called Vital Choice because there’s nothing more important than your health and nothing impacts your health more than what you choose to eat.
DEBRA: I do want to mention – because this is the last segment and we only have a few minutes left. I want to make sure that I mention that you have a lot of information on your website about how pure your products are. You do testing. It talks about it on your website. You’re testing and also, that your cans are not the type that have BPA in it. Some of your products come in cans, some in pouches. So you’ve looked at the packaging as well as the purity of the fish.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yeah. We basically run our business. We started out as a family-ran business. We’ve got non-family people now. We basically just run our business based on the golden rule. We source products and package it in maybe what we want to consume. We’re as aware of this as anybody. We have thousands of customers and they tend to be customers that are highly conscientious and they’re concerned about this. And so we do our best to source things that we all want to eat and pack it in ways that are known to the safest.
Life is a terminal disease. There’s no way we can get rid of all the potential contaminants. It’s all out there. But I think what people fail to recognize is if you’re eating good quality food, it supports your immune system, it supports your cell health, your cellular health and you’re better able to combat these threats from our environment.
One of the best examples if I could just take a second is seafood is one of the richest sources of selenium and selenium is a natural antidote to methyl mercury. We have a lot more on our website about that if you want to just type in ‘selenium’ and ‘methyl mercury’. You can read all kinds of things. That’s just one example.
You know, I’ve seen over the years, people that are so focused on the toxic aspect of it that they forget about just how important it is to invest more in good food and protect yourself from these threats.
DEBRA: Just to back up to what you just said about the selenium, one of the things that I learned was that in nature – I learned this from an herbalist on an herb blog – is that in nature, the antidote to the poison grows right next to it. And so if you have something like a toxic mushroom or something, the antidote, you just look around and the antidote is there. I thought that that was a fascinating thing.
But of course, nature would do that. Nature would have that kind of balance. If there’s methyl mercury there and it’s a naturally occurring thing, that there would also be in the fish the antidote. It would be right in it.
In the industrial world, things are not created that way. It’s just industrial chemicals are industrial chemicals and the antidote is not right there.
RANDY HARTNELL: Great point, great point. That’s a perfect example, seafood because what makes methyl mercury toxic is that it binds the selenium in our cells. And every cell in our body requires selenium to function properly. And so if you’re getting methyl mercury and no selenium, then you run a selenium deficit and you have problems.
Seafood is one of the richest sources of selenium, so you’re replenishing any that gets locked up by the methyl mercury. There’s quite a bit of science about this. We’ve known it since the sixties. It doesn’t get much exposure in the press.
DEBRA: That’s so good to hear. Well, I’ll make sure that people know about it because they will hear this interview.
And also, before we go, I want to make sure that people know about your ‘In the Kitchen’ section on your website. We’ve got all these videos telling people how to prepare – you want to tell us about some of the videos?
RANDY HARTNELL: Yes, a lot of people are sort of intimidated about seafood. A lot of people are worried about it smelling up their house. And again, that goes back to quality. If you get good quality seafood, it’s not fishy. We travel around the country and we set up our grill and our booth, I cooked our salmon in hotels and conference centers and I’ve never, ever had anybody ask me to leave. So first of all, if you have good seafood, it doesn’t smell up your house.
Second of all, it’s just so simple. You can take one of these frozen pieces of salmon out of your freezer, thaw out in 15 or 20 minutes, put it in the oven or a pan and in 10 minutes, you have a gourmet meal with some of the healthiest food on earth. We wanted to share that. So we created a series of just short 1-minute videos that are on our website.
If I could, Debra, I also want to mention that we have our fantastic science-based newsletter that we send out every week. It’s called Vital Choice newsletter that you can sign up for on our website.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m glad you mentioned that because I have been subscribing to your newsletter for years and you always have interesting things to read, always.
RANDY HARTNELL: Yeah. It’s been great, yes. We’ve got over a hundred thousand people read it. I feel more like we’re just as committed to education as we are to providing good food. It’s kind of our passion, to help people understand just how important this is.
DEBRA: That’s great, that’s great. So what’s your favorite seafood dish, your favorite way to eat seafood?
RANDY HARTNELL: You may be surprised to learn that I eat probably more canned salmon than just about anything because it’s so easy, it’s so portable, it’s nutritious. You could put it over and it’s ready to eat. So you can pour it over a salad or stir it into a pasta or rice. It’s just very easy.
As far as our frozen products, I probably eat more of our sockeye and king salmon. Last night, we were at dinner at this great restaurant, a seafood restaurant in Seattle and I was just so torn because the sablefish or black cod is just – I’m not sure if you’ve had. Well, I know you haven’t.
DEBRA: I haven’t had that, but some of my listeners might.
RANDY HARTNELL: It is one of the most incredibly, wonderful, delicious fish. But they also have some winter king salmon that were just coming fresh from Alaska. So we were all torn as to which one to have. Sablefish comes from – it’s caught at about 2000 ft. to 3000 ft. down in icy cold waters and it’s just the richest, the most delicious thing.
It’s kind of like asking the person which is their favorite [inaudible 00:49:01]. It’s apples and oranges. They’re all good. We encourage people to experiment and try them all.
DEBRA: Yes. I mean, you even have wild salmon caviar. I think you have salmon in every form there is, it looks like to me.
RANDY HARTNELL: I will admit that that’s what I had for breakfast. It’s like rocket fuel for the brain. It’s pure, healthy, omega 3 fats. We try to please as many people as we can. We get the demand or requests for all kinds of seafoods.
DEBRA: Good. Well, we’ve come to the end of our time. Thank you so much for being here with me. I’ve learned a lot. I think my listeners have learned a lot. Again, you can go to their website, VitalChoice.com and sign up for their newsletter and try their food. We’re at the end of our time. Thank you so much! You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Cali Bamboo Flooring
Question from 3kids
Cali Bamboo Flooring claims the following for their floors. Do you have any experience with this company? Floor would be floated as this product would be used in a basement. Home is located in the Northeast so tile is not optimal. Thanks for your help.
Low VOC Flooring
ASTM Laboratory Test Results Show Cali Bamboo Flooring
100% Formaldehyde Free
A recent extensive testing performed by the world’s preeminent emissions detection laboratory Benchmark International, shows several floors registering standardized concentration levels as “Not Detectable” with less than 0.000 PPM (parts per million). The floors with detectable levels were still 50 times lower than the strictest California Air Resources Board (CARB) Phase 2 standards 0.05 PPM. In fact, Cali Bamboo floors scored even lower than the typical air we breathe 0.02 PPM.
Due to Cali Bamboo’s proprietary quality control process, which includes the use of superior materials, adhesives and manufacturing techniques, we are able to manufacture a product that is beautiful, durable, eco-friendly and safe for even the most sensitive homeowners.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience with this flooring, but it looks pretty good on paper.
Anyone have any experience with this?
Nut milk bag made of nylon
Question from TA
Debra, do you think that nylon bags known as “nut milk bags” are safe to use? They are commonly used for making almond milk, but I would like to use it for making coconut milk from shredded dried coconut and boiling water, which sits for an hour or so before being strained through the bag. So the water wouldn’t be boiling at the time it contacts the nylon, but it would still be a bit warm. I know that there are cotton/hemp bags also, but I get the impression that those might be more likely to become gross (for lack of a better word!) after a while. It seems that most of the bags are nylon, and they get great reviews, and of course they are made for and used by health enthusiasts, but I’d like to be sure they aren’t going to leach anything into the milk.
Debra’s Answer
Nylon is one of the safest plastics. I doubt the nylon bags would leach.
That said, I used an nylon bag to make almond milk and immediate bought a cotton bag and a hemp bag. I liked both, but liked the hemp bag better.
I don’t see any reason they would get gross if you wash the bags after each use and dry them thoroughly.
How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
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. The week before Christmas, my brother died suddenly. The death certificate says the cause of death was pneumonia, but this was only the result of a lifetime of cigarettes, alcohol and prescription drugs (read more about my brother’s death at Life and Death: A Tale of Two Children.) We’ll talk about how prescription drugs can undermine your health in general, the side effects of the specific prescription drugs Bradley was taking at the time of his death, and what he could have done naturally instead of taking these prescription drugs. I can’t help but think my brother could be alive today if he had made better choices. 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
- Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
- See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
- Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
- Different Types of Detox
- Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
- Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
- Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
- How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
- You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
- Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
- It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
- How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
- Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
- Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
- Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved a Life
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph
Date of Broadcast: January 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.
But actually, we’re actually – I can’t talk this morning. Actually, this show is going to be about a sad subject, which is that the week before Christmas, my brother died, my little brother. He’s younger than me and the death certificate says that he died of pneumonia, but my opinion is that he died from a lifetime of taking prescription drugs.
I have on the show today as my guest, Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She’s been on the show many times. She’s on every other Wednesday. You can listen to the back shows if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
She dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs, but she knows all about prescription drugs and what they can do to your body. I just want to do this show today in honor of my brother and of other choices, so that if you have loved ones that are on prescription drugs, that you can know what the possible outcomes might be and offer them another solution.
I know that sometimes, that’s hard to do because obviously, I’ve known and my brother all his life and he knows all about my work and I have tried to help him many times to do things a more natural way. The last time I talked to him – he lived clear on the other side of the country, so we didn’t see each other all the time. The last time I talked to him before I got the phone call (the week before Christmas), that he was on maximum life support.
The last time I talked to him, he was telling me about all the drugs that he was taking and how despondent he was about being addicted to them, but that he couldn’t get off of them. I offered to help him get off of them and he said, “I can’t go through that.”
I want to do this show today because if you have loved ones that are in this situations, loved ones who are taking these kinds of drugs (and we’re going to be talking about them today), please, please, please do whatever you can to help them because this is the end result. And Pamela, registered pharmacist is going to talk to us about that today.
Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, Debra. I’m really sorry for your loss. This is really important that we do this show and that people know about some of the dangers of the medications that he was taking, which are commonly prescribed medicine.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m going to let you do a lot of talking because I find myself sitting here being quite emotional since it’s only been a month. It’s only been a month.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it’s not too long, but we need to just kind of look at some of the medicines. We’ve discussed this. I have a list in front of me, the things that he was on. He was taking dextroampethamine, which everyone knows as Ritalin. He was on oxycodone, which is a very strong narcotic. He was on Ketorolac, which is an anti-inflammatory; Methadone, which is another narcotic; Valium, which is an anxiolytic; and he was on Lasix, which is a diuretic. He was also on Synthroid and some stool softeners.
So this, I can tell you just working as a pharmacist that this is pretty typical. A lot of people are prescribed these medications. And some of the things that people maybe weren’t aware of, but I’m going to explain a little bit about the scheduling of medication because three of the medicines he’s taking are schedule II.
Schedule II is the most highly addicting besides schedule I. Schedule II is what’s recognize in the prescription realm as being the most addictive and the most problematic. So the FDA assigned this scheduling system quite a long time ago to try and categorize different medicines, so people knew what their – and the categories are one through five based on potential for addiction and dependence and abuse.
So schedule I (and I think this is important for people to know about these schedules because it shows you how dangerous the medicines are), schedule I, there are no schedule I drugs available in pharmacies here in the United States. Schedule I is heroine and LSD, marijuana – which of course, different states are legalizing it above and beyond what the federal government has mandated – ecstasy and [inaudible 00:06:05]. People, they’re smoking these kinds of things.
These medicines are not considered – schedule I’s, there are no schedule I’s available in regular pharmacy practice in the United States. In Europe and in England, there are some schedule I’s that are available through research. They do have heroine and so forth. That’s different over here. In the United States, schedule I is not available.
Schedule II – and I want to really focus on this, schedule II. This is from the FDA site itself describing schedule II, “…substances or chemicals are defined as drugs with high potential for abuse, less abuse potential than the schedule I drug, with use potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Some examples of schedule II drugs are…” – there’s the methadone, there’s the oxycodone and there is the Adderall and the Ritalin.
So the three of the drugs that he was taking are considered schedule II. I was reading right from the FDA website the definition of a schedule II drug.
So this should make people pause and concerned that schedule II drugs, the FDA is saying they’re potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. “These drugs are also considered dangerous.” That is a sentence, period.
We know that these three medicines that he was taking have high tolerance, high dependence and the fact that most of these people that are put on these – especially the narcotics, in particular, the oxycodone, maybe even more so than the methadone. But we know that taking schedule II narcotics, patients have a higher risk of what’s called morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance of dying at a younger age from complications from the narcotic usage.
DEBRA: Now, I want to ask you a question. So Ritalin, when I put together this list, a friend of mine who went to get my brother’s effects (because I wasn’t living close by in order to do that), he was reading to me over the phone what was written on the bottles. And so I didn’t realize that he was taking Ritalin and Valium because I was just looking at the medical names for these.
But Ritalin, I mean, school children are given Ritalin?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, this is the problem, yes. It’s highly addictive and has psychological dependence and problems. We know that kids have ADD, ADHD, these sort of diagnoses where they have inattentiveness. I have different theories about that. I mean, that’s probably a whole other show in itself. I really am against using medications for small children. I think it’s really dangerous. We have a high percentage of children – I think I was reading in New York City like one in four kids is on a psycho-stimulant. It’s a lot.
DEBRA: It’s a lot.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a lot of children. I don’t agree with it, but I understand why society is leaning towards using these medicines in small kids and in people because people are demanding it. Most parents are not going to take the time to spend a lot on parenting skills and get the kids to be attentive to school. Most people are just basically surviving, running around trying to get everything done. I think it’s just an easy solution to maybe a complex problem that requires lots of lifestyle changes that they’re not willing to do. I mean, that’s a personal opinion.
DEBRA: Well, I think my brother has been taking these drugs for a very long time because I remember like 40 years ago – that’s a long time – 40 years ago, when we were young adults, I sent him a Christmas present. He called me up and he just screamed at me over the phone about, “Why are you sending me a Christmas present? Don’t you know that I have to go down to the post office and pick it up and I just can’t do that? Why are you bothering me?”
PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, no!
DEBRA: He just totally flipped out because I sent him a Christmas present. I recognized that’s not him, that’s not my brother. It was the drugs. That was going on like 40 years ago.
We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about prescription drugs and safer alternatives with my guest, Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She actually practices – say the words of what you practice because I’ve got it right here. Pharmacognosy! That’s the word. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And there is a term for that. It’s actually a field in itself called ‘pharmacognosy’, which is the study of medicinal plants. And I’ve said before on other shows with her that I love this word because it’s pharma, which is drugs and cognosy is intelligence. And plants are healing substances with intelligence coming from a live thing instead of being synthesized in the lab.
Any time we’ve talked many times before about how taking plant-based substances for healing will actually heal your body, whereas drugs might alleviate your symptoms, but they don’t have healing factors. You just keep taking them and taking them and get addicted to some of them. That’s what we’re talking about today, addiction to some prescription drugs and how they can lead to not living as long as you might. As I’ve said at the top of the show that my brother died the week before Christmas and he was taking quite a number of drugs which we’re discussing today.
Okay, Pamela, let’s talk about the first drug on the list, Ritalin.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So the Ritalin, we know that most of the time, people are given Ritalin because of inattentiveness, ADD, ADHD, that type of thing. Ritalin is a psycho-stimulant. And of course, especially in younger people, when they start on this medicine, there is some data that shows that it’s a gateway to other drugs. It opens the potential for alcohol abuse, marijuana, cocaine, things that are illegal drugs.
So we have to look and think that when the body gets conditioned – and you have to understand that these receptors in the brain, that’s how these drugs work – there are receptors in the brain that are stimulated and when they get stimulated, the body likes this. That’s why they’re considered addictive. Using psycho-stimulants to get attentiveness instead of looking at behavioral issues themselves really needs to be addressed.
I know for a fact that I’ve used these with adolescents before and adults that people that have ADD, instead of using Ritalin, they can get away with using pro-DHA, which are the common focus in fish oil, the DHA, the EPA of 4.5 to 1. And a lot of people really respond to low dose zinc, 15-30 mg. a day because zinc is a co-factor for over 200 enzymatic reactions in the brain and a lot of people with inattentiveness, children and adults alike, they can benefit from having more of the zinc.
Actually, zinc is depleted when people eat lots of preservatives, refined food, high fructose corn syrup, a lot of things that are just hidden in our diet. If they’re not eating a really clean diet, which most people aren’t, the zinc depletion as far as these co-factors in the brain is pretty significant. Just doing those two things there, many times, people notice a big difference in their attentiveness and they can possibly avoid being on this drug.
DEBRA: Well, I think that we’ve talked about it so many times, but it bears repeating here. The two things that are probably the biggest things that are contributing to health problems today are number one, exposure to toxic chemicals and number two, lack of nutrition.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!
DEBRA: Most people are so malnourished that if they would just take the right vitamins before they ever consider taking a drug, a lot of their symptoms will go away.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s exactly right. So what I’m telling people is that these drugs, not even looking at them as gateway drug, but when you’re drug naïve, you haven’t been on these medicine and you’re kind of standing in front of opportunities (because life is full of opportunities and knowledge is power), instead of putting these things into your body, you can stand there and say, “Okay, I see that I have a problem. I need something for pain or I need something for attentiveness” and look for tools that can help you instead of doing to the medicines first because the medicines, it’s kind of like you open the door and you can’t close it. You’re on them forever. Very few people will take – especially pain medicines, we’ll take patients off of these things.
So it’s kind of like all-or-nothing. It’s like you’ve got the gambling table, all or nothing. I don’t really think that that’s the best way to approach people’s issues. The best way is to try some other things first. Natural products do work very well. Maybe they won’t work for 100% of people, but I see this from personal experience that because I actually transitioned people off medicines many times, I tell people, “Before you actually take that initial step, you really need to look at what we can use.” A homeopathic detox takes the chemical out of the body. Use a calming, focusing fish oil to try and focus the brain.
Also, Huperzine, which is an herb has very, very good data that it works as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. I’ll explain what that is. When the brain and the synapse, when people have Alzheimer’s or memory issues, they use a drug called Aricept. Aricept is very expensive and Aricept has very limited use especially in Europe because it’s so expensive and they find that it just really kind of staves of the memory problems for maybe six months. But it’s used quite widely in the United States.
What this does is it allows more acetylcholines to make memories in the brain and it kind of stops the enzyme that breaks it down in the synapse. So generally, what it does is acetylcholine is a memory and when you make a memory, acetylcholine goes and it puts it in a certain place in the brain and then that’s your memory. You can retrieve it or put it away.
So Rx-Brain or Huperzine (Huperzia serrata) is a plant that shows the exact same activity as Aricept with none of the side effects. I even use it for people that come and say, “I need more attentiveness. I’m going back to school, I’m reading.” Instead of reaching for the Ritalin, these supplements run like $10 to $15 for a month, very inexpensive and very, very effective.
There’s tons of data on the Library of Medicine. If somebody wanted to say, “I need memory improvement, I need attentiveness improvement,” for $10 or $12 or something like that, you are really looking at enhanced memory. And there are studies that show that this works just like the drug.
DEBRA: Wow! I think that it’s just – we talk about this show after show. I think we’ve done ten shows or something like that now, but we keep talking about this show after show, about how it seems like any drug that you would be taking that’s a prescription drug or even an over-the-counter drug, that there’s a natural substance that can be used instead, which doesn’t have side effects, which is less expensive. We just should be reaching for those first.
We should be reaching for those first because you could stop taking them whenever you don’t want to take them anymore and you’re not addicted to them for life and they cost so much less. So in this country, we just need to have a reorientation to know that there are safer things that we can choose.
We needto go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is registered pharmacist, Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking the week before Christmas when he died and what you can do instead that is far safer for yourself and for your loved ones. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
Pamela, we haven’t mentioned yet today that people can call you and how you can help them. So why don’t you tell everybody about that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I’ve been 20 years in business here in Clearwater, Florida. My store is Botanical Resource Pharmacy. It’s all homeopathic and natural products. Consultations are free. I also do consultations on adults, adolescents and children and pets as well. You can reach me here at the pharmacy at 717-442-4955. I would be very honored to help you or your family member with anything related to medication, avoiding medicines. If you want to know medical homeopathic products that we have here, they’re not typically available in health food stores, they’re medical grade that I can prescribe for you if you have any issues with blood pressure, cholesterol or whatever and of course, pain, which is what we’re focusing on today.
DEBRA: And the way I met Pamela was actually a friend of mine went to her. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. A friend of mine went to her because his mother was on a number of prescription drugs and Pamela not only got her off the prescription drugs, but his mother is doing much better now. Even his other’s doctor commented on how well she was doing.
So Pamela really knows her stuff. She’s very well-regarded here in Clearwater, Florida. So if you have any health problems that need some help, if you’re on any prescription drugs, if you have loved ones on prescription drugs, I highly recommend that you call Pamela and let her help you with this because she really has things that work.
Alright! So let’s talk now about Valium.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So Valium is a schedule IV. They consider it low-risk for dependence, but actually, I don’t really believe that’s the case because most people that start on Valium, there is a lot of tolerance and dependence and people do become addicted to it.
And so when you look at people taking anxiolytics especially this particular class called benzodiazepines, benzodiazepines work in the brain and they work on the benzodiazepine receptor. When a drug binds into the receptor, it has this calming effect on the person.
The problem with this is that there’s psychological and physical dependence when you take benzodiazepines. People typically need more medicine. They stay at it for a long period of time. And when you start taking benzodiazepines, Xanax, Ativan, Valium, these different drugs that are very, very, very commonly prescribed, it takes probably less than 10 days and after that period of time, you start to develop intolerance.
So these medicines, it’s one of those things that I was talking about that when you start them, you’re going to be on it for a long time. You’re going to have a hard time getting off of it. It’s really a bad road to go down.
If you’re looking at natural alternatives, Passion Flower, medical grade Passion Flower is a partial agonist or has activity in a partial manner towards the receptor. So what’s interesting about this is that if your brother had been taking Passion Flower instead of Valium, he would be in a much better situation because the Passion Flower binds to the receptor – and I use this sometimes when I’m trying to take people off these medicines because the body can’t tell if it’s the drug on there or the herb. Passion Flower has this affinity for it and Passion Flower, it has anti-depressant activity and it has some anti-pain activity as well.
So it’s maybe more all-encompassing than the Valium and it’s very safe and you can’t overdose on it. So I really would suggest that if people are contemplating going on a benzo or looking at getting off of benzo, Passion Flower is a very helpful tool.
DEBRA: And I’ve taken Passion Flower. Pamela gave it to me to help me sleep. It did help me sleep. And then after a couple of weeks of taking it, I just decided not to take it one night and I’ve just been sleeping just fine ever since. So it certainly is something that can be used safely. She told me I could just take as many of them as I needed to in order to sleep. I did and it worked just fine. It worked very well.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. These medicines, benzos are highly addicting and like I said, the problem with tolerance and dependence is that a lot of times, you have a physical dependence where you’re craving the drug, but you also have psychological dependence because you start thinking that you need the drugs and you can’t live without them.
That’s the problem. You really want to start embracing and looking at are there things we can do other than that because anxiety is a pretty universal problems and it affects people in different ways especially stress. So we need to embrace other things that can be used in a safer manner and more effective manner and also safer for the long-term.
The medicines that he had here, the narcotics, the Ritalin, the psycho-stimulants and then also the anxiolytics or the Valium, these things all have higher risk associated when the people are taking them versus the person that are taking natural products and using some other alternative therapies in place of these medicines.
DEBRA: One thing that I want to mention is that my brother wasn’t taking like recreational street drugs. He was just – I’m going to say “normal” person. I remember my brother when we were younger before he started taking these drugs, as a child even, he was interested in cooking. He used to watch the Galloping Gourmet on TV and he got my mom to buy all the cookbook. He couldn’t wait to make chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. He wanted to.
He had loved airplanes. He was always bugging my father to take him to the airport. He just wanted to watch the planes take off and land. I remember, his happiest moment was when – I think he was about 10 or 12. He so wanted to fly that my parents bought two plane tickets, one for me and one for him. I had never been on an airplane either. They put us on the airplane in San Francisco and we got to fly down to Monterey, which is a very short flight, 30 minutes or something. We flew and they drove…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Ah!
DEBRA: They met us down in Monterey.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really sweet.
DEBRA: It was so sweet. Bradley was just so jazzed. This was like the highlight of his life so far, to fly. And as soon as he became old enough and started working and started making money, the first thing he started doing was flying around the country. And then he flew to Europe. He just loved to travel and he was very sophisticated and he liked to eat in nice restaurants and go to nice places and do nice things. And he got on these drugs because he went to the doctor and he believed the doctor.
The same thing with my father. My father died at age 77, but as he was having greater health problems, I was going in and saying, “Here’s a natural remedy. Here, drink this juice. Do this natural thing, do this natural thing” and he wouldn’t do any of it. He just said, “I’m going to do what the doctor tells me to do.” I would like people to see that there are other choices. There are other choices.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She’s here helping us all understand about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking most of his life and at the time of his death at age 56, the week before Christmas. His death certificate says ‘pneumonia’, but I know that these prescription drugs and maybe others he was taking were taking a toll on his health.
Pamela, before we talk about another drug, you mentioned about how prescription drugs can reduce your life span.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. A lot of the data is really with elderly people because there’s a lot of controversy about giving elderly people these medicines. The whole idea is that your brother was on these medicines for a long period of time. And then eventually, if he wouldn’t have passed away, he would be an elderly person on these medicines.
DEBRA: Yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So we looked at these, especially the narcotics. The narcotics, to oxycodone and the methadone are statistically significantly correlated with higher morbidity and mortality in elderly people – and even in middle aged people. We know that when a person’s drug are narcotics, the actual problem, what they had, the pain problem, the initial reason why they were prescribed the medicine, it’s not solved.
And this is important for people to know. The pain medicines that we use, there’s really two ways to approach it. One is the narcotics, we call them ‘centrally-acting’, which means they act in the brain. And when they act in the brain, they block the signal down to where the pain took place.
I’ll just give you an example. Say your brother had a back injury. He picked up something wrong, a car accident or something like that. This is very typical. He has a back problem, he goes to the doctor, they hand him the narcotics. They don’t tell him, “You’re going to be on this forever. You’re going to become addicted to it.” Really questions aren’t really brought up in the initial conversations.
So what it does is it blocks the signal from the brain.
DEBRA: Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want to interrupt you for a second because…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Please…
DEBRA: …I think this is an important point. You said the doctor hands them the bottle or the prescription and they don’t say that they’re going to be addicted to this for the rest of their life.
PAMELA SEEFELD: No! It really does not enter the conversation, correct.
DEBRA: And then it’s going to cost you hundreds of dollars a month. I think that my brother told me that he was spending $500 a month on his prescriptions.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s insane!
DEBRA: $500 a month, it is insane. And I will tell you that – and I don’t like to say this about my brother, but at the time that he died, he was just staying at somebody’s house and all of his possessions where in his car. He wasn’t homeless because he was staying with somebody. Fortunately, he had people that he could stay with, but he couldn’t afford to have his own place to live.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, because he’s spending it all on drugs.
DEBRA: Because he’s spending it all on drugs, I know! He got to a point where he couldn’t work anymore. It wasn’t that he was a bum. He worked all of his life. But it got to the point where his physical condition was that he couldn’t work anymore.
And so he was staying with friends. He had his things in his car. He was eating in diners. I mean, this is not my brother. This is not what he would’ve chosen. But that was the end of his life. I’m just stunned by this whole thing.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we know that he made the choice of going to the physician. The physician is not the bad guy here. I don’t want people to think that.
DEBRA: No, I don’t want them to think that too.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m not against that. I’m a regular pharmacist too. What I’m saying is that I think it’s empowering and important to individuals to realize that at any one time in our life, we probably are going to have an injury that we’ll need to see the doctor and we’ll need some kind of pain control. That is an absolute fact. That’s an absolute fact. He had an initial injury of some sort and he went to the doctor.
What we see that the data shows that when we look at an injury and if we treat this injury with a steroid burst, which is like maybe a Medrol Dosepak or some amount of steroids, steroids bring the inflammation down quickly in the body and allow things to start getting back into normal. A steroid burst and taking a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent like Advil or Naprosyn, something like that (there’s tons of them in the market), Ibuprofen and taking it in a scheduled manner, not like when you think you have pain, these peripherally acting or the ones that don’t work in the brain are much safer. They don’t have the addiction and the tolerance. S
So when a person has an injury (especially for back injuries), the data shows give some steroids and give them some anti-inflammatory on a scheduled basis, maybe one pill with each meal for a weak so you get the inflammation down and start healing the body. In those cases, it locks pain signals in the periphery called eicosanoids. It will just let that area start healing, maybe some physical therapy and things like that.
Those are the real ways to have positive outcomes. It’s negatively correlated when people get narcotics on the first forefront, they give them narcotics because basically, they’re going to be on it forever. And then the bad part about it is when you are on a centrally-acting narcotics, you’re on the oxycodone and he’s on the methadone, when you’re on these medicines, it blocks your perception of the pain, but the injury is still there. So what this means to you and I and to your listeners is that your injury actually can continue to get worse because you start exerting yourself and you’re moving around and you’re not cognizant of the pain.
DEBRA: Right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s the problem.
DEBRA: The thing I wanted to say and failed to say just recently here is that when a doctor gives you – I don’t want it to sound like I’m against doctors because I’m not.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, I’m not either.
DEBRA: I think that a lot of doctors do a lot of good in the world. But the thing is, any one of us, when a doctor gives us a prescription can go online and look up the prescription and find out what it is. And instead of just taking it blindly, we can find out if it’s addictive, what schedule it’s on. All these things, all the information is there.
And then we can see for ourselves – like when I used to take Synthroid, I was having side effects and everything (a lot of people do). I went and I looked up Synthroid and I said, “Well, you know what? Let’s look for something else. I looked for something else. I went to a different doctor and I found a natural form of thyroid supplement. It opened the door for me to say, “Well, I don’t have to always take this prescription drug.”
And so I’m just encouraging people to find out what your choices are and then make a choice. We don’t have to just do what the doctor says. You can decide for yourself if that’s the road that you want to take. And if you want to do what the doctor says, okay, but just know that there’s other choices.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, that’s exactly right. And also too, I mean, I have thousands of clients, but I have a lot of clients right here locally. If they have a prescription, they’ll come bring it to me first before they’ll go fill and say, “Do I need this? Is there something I can take?” And there’s a lot of times, I’ll say, “No, this is what you really need. This is what you have. Go fill it. But these are the side effects and this is what you need to look out for. Don’t combine it with food/combine it with food” or whatever. I’ll give them all that information.
Or I’ll say, “Look, I have something here. You can try this first. I think this is going to work and it’s comparable to what they wrote for you” and most of these people will embrace the natural products first especially the medical homeopathy, which is designed and developed by physicians, not herbalist.
So it’s really important that people know that there are really high-functioning products that can take the place of medications. And you have to look, two-thirds of all medicines were found in plants. This isn’t new information.
DEBRA: Yeah! Right, right. Yeah.
Pamela; The medicines that you’re using were found in the dirt or in plants or some place in the natural realm.
DEBRA: It all started with that. And then now, they isolate the active ingredients and duplicate them. In many cases, they duplicate them in the laboratory synthetically made from coal tar and things like that. So what you’re offering is the plant version, the plant version.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: Anyway, we’re getting to the end of our time together. It’s gone by so fast, it always does. But I want you to give your phone number and tell people again how you can help because it’s so valuable, what you’re doing.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So I do homeopathic and alternative medicine in pharmacy. I would be very happy to help with any of your concerns. Today was just kind of a microcosm of what we’re doing as far as looking at narcotics and medications, but we do have natural alternatives, homeopathic and alternative medicines that are plants and supplements that I can write out for you free of charge and mail it to you.
I’d say two-thirds of my business is really mail-outs, so you can call me from any place in the country. It’s a 10-minute conversation. I can go over what you’re doing and help you, guide you as far as what choices you want to make if you want to get off of prescription. If you don’t want to be on certain medicines, if you’re having some life issues that you need to deal with stress –
And I do a lot of mental health. So if you have anxiety or depression issues, severe stress, I’m very, very good at that and I would be most honored and would be glad to help you and your family. You can reach me at my pharmacy at 727-442-4955, I would be so very glad to help you see what alternatives you might have as far as for you and the future. I think choices are very important and knowledge is power. So I want to empower you, to let you know that there are things you can do other than medicines if you chose.
DEBRA: That’s right. And you do such a good job. I know I keep saying that, but I mean, Pamela has helped me so much in terms of helping me with some physical conditions that I’ve had for years. Even though I’ve detoxed and changed my diet and get nutrition and stuff, there’s still things that you want to do. Sometimes, your body just needs a little help. She knew exactly what to give me and my body has been so much better since she’s been helping me.
And so anyway, we’ve only got a few seconds left, so I just want to thank you again and thank all of my listeners. Just having somebody so close as a brother not be here anymore, I appreciate you all. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
How Cell Phones Harm Your Health and How to Stay Safe
Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D, is recognized internationally for her work on environmental health and disease prevention. A Presidential appointee that received bi-partisan Senate confirmation, Dr. Davis was the Founding Director of the world’s first Center for Environmental Oncology and currently serves as President of Environmental Health Trust, a nonprofit devoted to researching and controlling avoidable environmental health threats. A national book award finalist, Dr. Davis lectures at universities in the U.S. and Europe and was the recent winner of the Carnegie Science Medal in 2010 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Green America in 2012. Her 2007 book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, details the ways that public relations strategies have undermined public health, and is being used at major schools of public health, including Harvard, Emory, and Tulane University. Her recent book, Disconnect: The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation and Your Health, what the Industry has Done to Hide it, and What You Can Do to Protect your Family was published in the U.S. and U.K. by Dutton, 2010, and has been released in Australia, India, Turkey, Taiwan, Finland, Estonia, China, and as a book on tape. Her research has appeared in major scientific journals. Her research has been featured on CNN, CSPAN, CBC, BBC, and public radio. ehtrust.org | http://showthefineprint.org/ | www.babysafeproject.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Cellphones Harm Your Health and How to Stay Safe
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D
Date of Broadcast: January 13, 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, January 13th 2015 and it’s a beautiful sunny day here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we’re going to be talking about cellphones. We’ve talked about cellphones, but we can’t talk about cellphones too much because there’s so much to know about them and they can be so dangerous. Most people don’t know what the dangers are or how we can protect ourselves from them.
So today, my guest is Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D and she is the author of a book called Disconnect: The Truth About Cellphone Radiation and Your Health, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It and What You Can Do to Protect Your Family. It was published in the United States and in the United Kingdom and has been released in Australia, India, Turkey, Taiwan, Finland, Estonia, China and there’s a book on tap.
She, in addition, serves as the president of the Environmental Health Trust, which is a non-profit devoted to researching and controlling avoidable environmental health threats through education and policy changes. She has been on CNN, CSPAN, CBC, the BBC Public Radio. She’s just been around doing a lot for a very long time. Her research has appeared in major scientific journals so she knows what she’s talking about on this subject and I’m very happy to have her on the show.
Hi, Dr. Davis.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Well, hi, Debra. Nice to talk to you.
DEBRA: Thank you. You know so much. I don’t even know where to begin to ask you questions on this subject. Why don’t you just go ahead and start telling us about what you think are the most important things that the public needs to know about cellphones.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Well, picking up on your own work, I would say that, as you know, you spent a career identifying toxic hazards in consumer products in the world in general and I think one of the most important things for people to realize who are concerned about toxics is this — cellphone radiation weakens cell membranes.
This means that any toxic material that is already in your body can be more deeply absorbed into your cell with exposure to cellphone regulation. Now, this fact is being used now in medicine to enhance the uptake of drugs for the treatment of cancer as well as for other syndrome. So to me, it is absolutely puzzling that there is this disconnect of our understanding of the basic science of what is going on and the way that we treat other toxic hazards.
I’ve been disappointed at the failure of this issue to take off, but I think I understand it now better. Five years ago, when I wrote the book Disconnect, the world was simply not ready to think about the fact that there might be a dark side to this technology. Nowadays, we all know families who sit at the dinner table without talking, everyone glued to their devices.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: We all know young people with whom you cannot have full conversation because they will interrupt themselves by looking at their screen for something that suddenly occurs to me as more important than finishing their own sentence.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: And there’s been a growing recognition that these devices while very valuable also need to be reigned in in the way that we use them and rely on them.
So the Environmental Health Trust, the non-profit that I started when I was at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is now my full-time gig. What we are doing is taking the latest scientific information and making it available to the public, so they can make some sense of this very confusing situation where we simply are lacking information about the basics of cellphones.
So let me take a second and tell you something. A cellphone is a two-way microwave radio. It sends and receives microwave radiation. Now, microwave ovens use a thousand watts power. A cellphone uses less than one watt of power. And when it was first approved by the FDA in the early 1990s, it was assumed that because cellphone radiation was so weak, it would have no biological effect.
Research today tells us that that’s not true. Cellphones are weak, but they use the same frequency as the microwave oven, about two billion cycles a second, between 900 million to 2 billion cycles per second. That frequency can have biological effects because it is not a steady frequency from a phone, but a pulsed one – kind of like this, tap, tap-tap-tap, tap, tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. That erratic, irregular, pulsed digital signal is what we believe causes biological consequences.
It weakens membranes as I’ve said, but it can also cause damage to DNA not by directly breaking the ionic bonds like x-rays, which is ionizing radiation. But as a non-ionizing form of radiation, it can disrupt cells and their ability to communicate, it can cause heat shock proteins and increase the formation of free radicals, which we know are damaging to living material.
DEBRA: There’s so much! Wow! There’s so much to know and so few people know things.
I was actually talking to somebody the other day, somebody that I just met, he was surprised that I wasn’t carrying my cellphone. Of so many people that I meet, they don’t even have a landline anymore. Their cellphone is the only phone that they have.
And so this was a fairly intelligent guy. He has a law degree in fact. He had no idea that there was any health consequences of using a cellphone. And before I started explaining to hi the health effects of this, he was kind of teasing me like, “You mean, you’re not somebody that things, they have to be reachable any minute of the day?” I reminded him that when I was a child, we didn’t have answering machines on our telephones.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
DEBRA: I can remember the day that if you wanted to get a phone call, you had to actually be there in the house and answer the phone and that was the only way that somebody could reach you. No message machines, no cellphones, nothing. People communicated just fine. I don’t see that it’s a good trade-off for us to risk our life and our health and our well-being so that we can be instantly available at every moment.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: I certainly agree. Let’s just talk about what we know about health right now. We know that the World Health Organization in 2011 released a report that at that time reviewed all the experimental and human studies on cellphones and other wireless radiation. They concluded in 2011 that cellphone radiation was a “possible human carcinogen”< the same category as DDT, lead and some forms of the engine exhaust.
Now, you do not let children play with DDT, lead or engine exhaust and yet, our schools now are moving ahead to install wireless throughout with no recognition of the fact that there are long-term consequences of this.
Now, the WHO made that determination with the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2011. This past year, a group of colleagues and I reviewed new evidence including new studies of humans using cellphones for 20 years or more. We have concluded (working with some of the world’s top epidemiologists who are advisors to the World Health Organization) that cellphone and other wireless radiation is a “probably human carcinogen” using the criteria of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
I think that’s really important for your listeners to understand.
DEBRA: I do too.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: The evidence on the biological effects of cellphone radiation has become stronger since my book was first written. And one of the things I would appreciate getting feedback from you on and from your listeners is whether I should provide a new edition of the book that provides the new evidence because at this time, what I wrote in 2010 was somewhat speculative. What I have written now is less so because we’ve got the bodies of evidence, we’ve got the proof, we’ve got unfortunately growing numbers of people with brain cancer as well as people with hearing loss and serious problems with sleep, which we can associate with their long-term of cellphones.
DEBRA: We need to go to break, but we’re going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D. She’s the president of Environmental Health Trust and their website is EHTrust.org. We’re talking about how cellphones can harm your health. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D., president of Environmental Health Trust. Their website is EHTrust.org where there is a lot of information about what we’re talking about here today.
Before we talk about anything else, I just want to repeat what you said right at the beginning of the show about how cellphones are damaging to cells in your body and therefore, it allows the toxic chemicals to – say what you said again.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Cellphones weaken membranes. They may interfere with something as essential as calcium. And of course, calcium governs the ways that membranes open and close, gated communication within and between cells and membranes.
That capacity of cellphone radiation to affect membranes is being used in medicine today to develop new treatments for cancer. It makes no sense to then assume that the only impact of such radiation is beneficial. It is beneficial in the treatment of Cancer. It is being used in approved medical devices that have been developed in a number of countries. So I find it amazing that we fail to take this into account in the ways that we have been testing, evaluating and using cellphones and tablets and other wireless devices.
A tablet today has many different antennas on it and it’s tested at 20 cm. away from the body at standard test protocol. You don’t hold a tablet right next to your head. But increasingly, tablets are being used as phones and communication devices. They are being held directly on the bodies of young children. They are called ‘tablets’ because they belong on tables. They do not belong on the lap and they certainly don’t belong on the body of a small child.
Now, the good news as you know very well (and you’ve written about this) is that if you eat your vegetables, you repair DNA damage. I don’t mean to oversimplify it, but studies have been done with cellphone radiation where you first expose cells to melatonin or polyphenol or other [00:16:27] from green tea and you can reduce the damage by these exposures. This suggests to us that there are ways that you can repair damage that may have happened, which is why no matter how you’ve been using your cellphone until this moment, take it out of your pocket, get it off your body and eat your vegetables and of course, sleep in the dark because when you sleep in the dark, your body produces melatonin and melatonin is what we need to repair damage. T
That is why, in your bedroom, you should unplug. There should be no blinking blue lights or any other lights at night. You need to sleep in total darkness. And if your environment doesn’t allow that, then get a sleep mask because when you are in darkness, the body naturally produces melatonin and melatonin is a natural antioxidant, it affects almost every cell of the body and it helps us to repair whatever damage may have taken place.
Now, if your listeners are surprised to hear my concern, I’d like to let you know that we have a website we’ve recently launched called http://showthefineprint.org/. That site combines all of the advise that manufacturers currently provide about how to use their devices.
Those of your listeners who have a cellphone right now, an iPhone, you’ll find that iPhone has made it easy for you. If you go to your iPhone settings and open that up…
DEBRA: Actually, I could go there right now.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: You can do it right now. Go to your iPhone settings, go to ‘Settings’ and then go to ‘General’, which is just about midway down the screen. Click on ‘General’ and then click on ‘About’, which is at the top of the screen.
DEBRA: ‘Settings’, I’m on ‘Settings’ now. So now, I’m going to ‘General’.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Then go to ‘General’ and then go to ‘About’, which is at the top.
DEBRA: Yeah.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Now, scroll all the way down to something you would not normally even notice called ‘Legal’.
DEBRA: I got it!
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: And then click on ‘Legal’ and then you will get ‘RF Exposure’ and there you have it in the paragraph above the hypertext link. It tells you to reduce exposure to RF. Perhaps you can read it.
DEBRA: No, actually, I can’t read it and I have my magnifying glasses on. You know how on cellphone devices, you can make the type bigger, you can just open the window and it makes it bigger? This page will not do that.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Right! That’s right. You cannot make it larger.
DEBRA: So I can’t make it bigger.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: You cannot make it larger and you cannot copy it. Here’s what it tells you. It says, “To reduce exposure to RF radiation, use a hands-free device or the headset that came with the device and keep the phone at least 10 mm. away from the body to avoid exceeding the as tested exposure guideline.”
DEBRA: Okay, so how far is 10 millimeters?
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Well, it means you can’t keep the phone in your pocket.
DEBRA: Right!
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Ten millimeters is perhaps smaller than your thumb joint, but the fact of the matter is you can’t keep phones in the pocket of your pants or your shirt without exceeding the as tested exposure guidelines.
And this advice is buried in the phone. That’s why our group, Environmental Health Trust is working with others to make this information more broadly known. I hope you’ll be able to provide links from your site as well to ours.
DEBRA: I certainly will. I will.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: We have http://showthefineprint.org/, which puts together one place all of the advice on many of the smart phones today. We’ve also got the BabySafeProject.org, which is started by over a hundred physicians, obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatric neurologists, all of them share the concern about protecting the young, developing brain.
We are well aware that in the first year of life, the brain more than doubles in a child. And throughout pregnancy, the brain of course grows rapidly. It starts with just a few cells concentrated at the top of a neural tube and ended up becoming this amazing thing, the brain of the baby.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we need to go to break and I want to hear everything that you want to say. I want to give you plenty of time and I don’t want to interrupt you. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D. She is the president of the Environmental Health Trust, which is EHTrust.org. And we’ve also been going to http://showthefineprint.org/, BabySafeProject.org. And when we come back, she’s going to tell us about babies and cell phones.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Devra Lee Davis. We’re talking about cellphones and all kinds of ways they are harmful to our health.
Just before the break, we were talking about how they affect the development of baby’s brain in pregnant women. So tell us more about that.
DEBRA: Yes. The head of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University is Hugh Taylor, an M.D., Ph.D. Two years ago, he produced a study where he had exposed prenatally to cell phone radiation. He used a silenced and muted phone that was simply at the cage of the animal, so the exposure was rather weak, but it was throughout the entire period of pregnancy of mice.
He found that when the mice were born, the mice that had been exposed prenatally had hyperactivity syndrome as measured by a standard test that they use for measuring behavior in mice. Other studies from Turkey have shown damage to the brain of rodents that are exposed prenatally to cellphone radiation.
Based on these different studies, Dr. Taylor and a group of over a hundred other experts in pregnancy and reproductive health formed the Baby Safe Project. That’s BabySafeProject.org. On that project, on that site, you can find materials that are being handed out clinicians around the world today.
I spent a month in India. The Indian Academy of Pediatrics and the Indian Obstetricians and Gynecologists are also handing out these materials because we want pregnant women to know they must protect the abdomen especially toward the end of pregnancy when the baby’s head is close to the surface. Cellphone radiation doesn’t get very far into the body, but it does get in at least an inch or more. And the more fluid, the more it can absorb, which is why children has to be especially protected. Their skulls are thinner, their brains contain more fluid, they will absorb more radiation.
The Baby Safe Project has information for clinicians as well as for patients. And every one of the 4500 women who goes into Yale University Center to have a baby gets this information now. It’s available at BabySafeProject.org as well as under our free download at Environmental Health Trust, EHTrust.org.
Our website is loaded with information that you can download and share with others under the section right on our home page called ‘Download’. Our doctor’s pamphlet is a two-sided thing that can be printed out and given away and we certainly want to encourage your listeners to go to our site, to sign up to our newsletter, to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
DEBRA: Yes, all those things.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: All those things, but more importantly, to share this information with young parents, with people who have young children, so that they will understand that the American Academy of Pediatrics is advising no screen time for children under the age of two, so that they will be aware that there’s simple things they can do now to practice safe technology and that we have the right to reclaim our lives back. There is nowhere written that you’ve all got to be on emergency standby 24/7.
DEBRA: No. No. I mean, no. We’re human beings, we’re not machines and we’re not electronic devices and there are other ways to communicate besides phones.
I remember many years ago when I used to live in California, I lived out in a rural community and I belonged to an environmental group. And so this was back in the days when I remember at the same time, I was trying to figure out how to send via modem a magazine article to a magazine publisher and he was trying to talk me through it on the phone. The point was that we could’ve communicated electronically. I think that we had email at that time, but one of the women said, “But there wouldn’t be any chocolate cake.” After that, we all refer to this as a chocolate cake factory, which was meeting face-to-face and having human connection.
And I think that that’s so important. I was thinking the other day about how many people I know because of my professional activities and people who have become my friends from the work that I do that I have never met face-to-face. I know them because I email them or talk to them on the phone or Skype them or whatever. That’s good in one sense that you have exposure to many more people, but it’s a different quality of relationship when you’re actually sitting down together.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: That’s certainly true. That’s certainly true.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. It’s not the same, it’s not the same.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: And I think in a way, the anonymity of the Internet friends that we all have can also contribute to an increase in violence because it’s not a real person that you’re acting out against. It’s just this abstract entity.
Imagine all of these kids sitting there playing video games for hours at a time who can easily make the transition to becoming jihadist. And it seems to me that there must be a relationship. This Internet is being used to recruit these poor, insulated and disaffected, young people. Whereas in the past, they might have gone out, gotten into trouble in the local neighborhood, now they can get themselves on a plane and end up participating in horrendous activities of violence. I think that in a way, the digital world has allowed for anonymity and a disconnect from basic human feelings and exchanges.
Now, that is why, by the way, in South Korea, there are psychiatrist that has come up with a new syndrome that they have confirmed in MRIs in middle school children. They call it ‘digital dementia’. What they refer to is a lack of development in the right hemisphere, a lack of the ability to develop empathy, to look one in the eye, to understand the consequences of another.
It’s so severe that they have actually come up with treatments for this, which involves a kind of digital detox. And as you may be aware, digital detox is not just a phrase you can find. There are actually programs around the world now to allow people to disconnect and reconnect. People become so accustom to the 24/7 world that they forget to take time to play music, listen to music, go outside, all the things in the world we know we need to do to stay healthy – exercise and things of that sort. People are chained to their screen.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I feel so unfortunate that I’m old enough that I knew what the world was like before we had all of these. We need to go to break, but we’ll be back and talk about this more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D. She is the president of the Environmental Health Trust. The website is EHTrust.org. And from there, I’m sure you can get to all the other activities that she’s doing. She’s really, really taking a stand on cellphones and digital devices that I think is very much needed. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Devra Lee Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D. of Environmental Health Trust. The website is EHTrust.org. Dr. Davis, we’re in our last ten minutes here of the show. I want to make sure that you tell us about some things that we can do to use these devices more safely or do you think that we should just eliminate the whole system entirely?
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Oh, no, no. We’ve got to be smarter than our phones and our tablets.
DEBRA: I like that, ‘smarter than our phones’, yeah.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Right! This means that we’ve got to control the technology and not let the technology control us. Our website has lots of information. On Facebook, we have an ongoing discussion about things that can be done. We’re specifically concerned about young women keeping cellphones in their bras because as we just saw in the earlier segment, manufacturers advise that you not keep a phone directly next to the body, but people are not aware of this. That’s why we set up http://showthefineprint.org/. That site puts together all of the advice now found buried inside phones.
We have YouTube materials that people can look at and we have a campaign underway right now to model exposures so that people understand that a laptop (they no longer call them ‘laptop’) doesn’t belong on the lap, but on a table. The reason they call them ‘tablets’ nowadays is because that’s where they belong. We want to encourage people to understand that if you must carry a phone on your body, put it on airplane mode or turn it off. That way, you will not be getting exposed to the microwave radiation.
Men should be aware that those who keep phones in their pockets are exceeding the as tested exposure guidelines and reducing their sperm count. This is not a good idea for lots of reasons. It’s not a good form or birth control, but it also has other adverse effects that we need to be aware of.
We have a good program for the schools now that you can find on our website. We’re working ceaselessly on this around the country to promote awareness that schools should be wired, not wireless. The reason for this have to do with expense, but also have to do with safety. The long-term effects of children growing up in a sea of radio frequency, radiation that did not even exist five years ago is not something anyone can tell us about. We simply are not flying blind when it comes to this technology.
And as I indicated in an earlier segment, we want the 21st century classroom to go beyond the digital divide, that all children have access to technology, but there’s no reason that this should be wireless. We want to encourage awareness that there are solutions, that there are low tech best practices that allow schools to use wired Internet connections.
We are developing materials on our website on schools, wireless and health where there’s preliminary information that you can share with your teachers and students and a longer document that also tells you best practices that can be implemented of what parents need to know about safe technology.
The American Academy of Pediatrics as I indicated earlier recommends no screen time at all for children under the age of two. We are seeking support now to expand this message nationally and internationally. And so I would certainly appreciate your listeners making a donation to Environmental Health Trust, so that we can expand our ability to provide this information to teachers and parents around the world.
In general, the tips for the schools are to hardwire all devices that are connected to the Internet, these computers and tablets. And if you must use a wireless device, download to it and then put it on airplane mode when children are using, so that this becomes a routine policy in school.
And of course, we can provide briefing materials. We have resources for families and staff on safe technology and tips for how to practice safe tech including a little card that can be handed out. They involve keeping it on airplane mode as much as possible with WiFi off. And of course, practice safe phone. That means using a speaker phone or a handset (preferably an air tube headset) and not letting children use mobile phones except in an emergency.
Of course, driving is a huge risk factor. Mobile devices distract drivers even if they’re hands-free. Please limit your calls to circumstances where you are not in a high traffic situation.
Remember that distance is your friend and that if you can keep these devices out of your bedroom and away from young children, you’ll be better off and so will they. And as we know, we need to sleep in the dark in order to make melatonin, in order to repair damage that may have occurred as a result of living.
Promoting awareness of these things is what the Environmental Health Trust is doing. I’m delighted to be able to talk with you after all these year. I’ve followed your work for quite some time. I think it’s wonderful to see you moving into this area as well. I look forward to working with you to see that we all do a better job of getting the information out.
These devices have revolutionized our world. Business and our abilities to respond to emergencies is totally transformed. And you’re right, there’s a whole generation growing up that will never know what it was like previously.
At the same time, we’ve got to claim back our private time. We’ve got to give our children more opportunities to get their feet wet and dirty with the grass and sand…
DEBRA: I totally agree!
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: …and not spend their lives in front of screens. And families have the right to demand no devices at the dinner table and parents should absolutely take devices away from children at night. It disrupts their sleep no matter what they’re telling you. It’s not a good idea to have any bright lights, any blue lights in the bedroom.
DEBRA: I so agree with you about this. I know that even without all of these devices, it’s difficult enough to get people out of the house out into nature so that people can experience the whole of life that we’re all interconnected with. With all these devices on top of it, people are so absorbed in all these electronics and it’s like the reality of life becomes what they see on the screen instead of the actual reality of life that’s right in front of you.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Yes.
DEBRA: And I have a big concern about that. It’s just that we have to know that we’re connected to the natural world. That’s part of our basic survival and so many people don’t know that.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: I was in one of those beautiful places in the world in South India in Carola, taking a boat ride. There were other tourists with me from Asia, a family with young children. They were holding their device up to themselves and the experience photographing it, videoing it rather than experiencing it.
DEBRA: Yes, I see this all the time
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: On Jenny Lake in Jackson Hole, you’ll see people videoing the boat ride, but not experiencing it. It’s a strange thing. I’m wondering when are people going to – they’re going to spend their time watching the video rather than being where they are at the moment?
DEBRA: Yeah.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: And it’s happening all over the world!
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, we only have just a couple of minutes left. I just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. And I, too, I’ve been following your work for many years too. I’m so happy that we’ve finally met even though we were meeting over a digital device. I very much look forward to working with you in the future to make this more known.
People have talked to me in the past about the connection between electromagnetic fields and toxic exposures and how the electromagnetic fields can increase the toxicity of the toxic chemicals that we’re being exposed to, but I never quite understood how it fit together, so I’m so glad that you explained that. I will probably have more questions for you about that because I think it’s an integral part of people protecting themselves from the toxics, to also protect themselves from the electromagnetic fields.
Well, I appreciate that very much. Hopefully, we’re thinking about doing another edition of Disconnect because it’s five years now and so much more science has come out. I will certainly be in touch with you when we reach that decision. I would welcome any of your listeners who have an opinion to let us know what they think we should do.
It’s a tough sell because we are all so attracted and have become so dependent on these devices. I’m not anti-technology, I’m just pro-health.
DEBRA: Yeah, exactly. Me too.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: We need to understand technology better so that we can be more responsible in the way we use it for ourselves and our children.
DEBRA: Just like we need to understand toxics better for exactly the same reason. I don’t think that we’re going to end up with a world that’s 100% no toxic chemicals, but we need to understand how to use them and understand how to use this technology. I love that you talked about doing it smartly, us being smart over our phones…
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Correct!
DEBRA: …because that’s the thing, to use these tools as a tool for life rather than letting them make us sick and not being able to think clearly, et cetera.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Right!
DEBRA: Anyway, we have to go because the music is going to come on in just a few seconds. But again, thank you so much.
DR. DEVRA LEE DAVIS: Thank you and please have your listeners look at our website, EHTrust.org and sign up for our newsletter and let us know what we can do to get the word out more with you.
DEBRA: Great! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Clear coat for craft projects
Question from TA
Hi Debra, I ‘ve seen a variety of ornament craft ideas, in which an ornament is made of clay, salt dough, etc, and then covered with a clear coat. I’d like to try something like this with my child, and the clay and salt dough seem quite safe, but I’m wondering if you can recommend a safe product for the clear coat. I think the ones most people are using are probably an aerosol, toxic product. I’m not sure where to find a safe one for this type of crafts. Even though it’s now past Christmas, this applies to other crafts throughout the year as well.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know of a spray clearcoat that’s not toxic.
Readers, any ideas for this?
