Art | Resources
Lead Free Dishes
Question from R SWANSON
Can you tell me if Mikasa Bone China is lead-free or safe to us, our daughter has cancer and wants to stay away from dishes containing lead?
Thank you for any help you can give.
Lisa’s Answer (updated September, 2020)
I will be updating Debra’s List with safe brands. As a guide you can read “Is Ceramic Dishware Safe?”
Living Toxic Free With Nine Children
You might have read a post on my Toxic Free Q&A about immersion blenders, which had a comment with a link to a post on another blog about toxic chemicals being released by immersion blenders. Well, I went to check out that post and found a whole website created by a woman who is very much in agreement with me. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She blogs at It Takes Time and is the owner of Just So Natural Products. We’ll be talking about how and why she lives and works toxic free. Andrea is a former journalist and the mother of nine children ranging in age from 29 to 13. Following a health crisis in 2008, Andrea and her family discovered the wonders of natural living. Andrea is also the founder and president of momsAWARE, an educational organization designed to empower others to live healthy in a toxic world. www.it-takes-time.com | www.justso.co
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO Living Toxic Free with Nine Children
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd Guest: Andrea Fabry
Date of Broadcast: November 20, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, November 20th. It’s getting to be winter. I just heard on the news while I was waiting for the show to start (and maybe you did too) that more, more snow in Buffalo, New York area.
And it’s cold here in Florida, but I got my heater. I was talking the other day about my old heater broke and I had ordered a new one. I’ll just say it again because I know that a lot of people are buying the space heaters nowadays or you have one because it’s getting cold, you want to make sure that you don’t use a plastic space heater because the heat will cause the plastic to up gas.
What you want to get is something called a ‘utility heater’ and they have metal housings, metal with a powder coat, baked-on finish sometimes. If it smells, if the powder coat finish smells, just put it somewhere where you can just run it and it’ll bake off. That’s just some residual thing.
But I just took mine out of the box and there was no odor at all. It’s heating my feet up nicely under the desk. I got it at Home Depot for $19. You might have to order one because they’re just lying off the shelves. But just go into Home Depot or Lowe’s or whatever your local hardware store is and ask them for a ‘utility heater’, which just went on. I don’t know if you can hear it.
Anyway, that’s how you can get a heater, a small heater that will heat you personally, not your whole, entire house. It will heat you personally sitting at a desk or lying in bed inexpensively and non-toxically. It’s the most important thing, that it’s toxic-free.
Actually, it sits toxic-free in your home. The electricity, of course, is putting toxic pollutants out into the environment, but that’s another thing.
Alright! It’s Thursday, November 20th 2014. And today, my guest is Andrea Fabry. She has a very interesting blog at It-Takes-Time.com. She also has a business selling hand-made natural personal care products. She’s got an organization called Mom’s Aware to educate moms to live healthy in a toxic world.
And it’s just every interesting for me to read her blog because she has things on it that I didn’t know. In fact, that’s how I found her. One of my readers sent a comment to one of my posts with a link to Andrea’s website about immersion blenders. Maybe we’ll talk about that a little bit.
But as I looked around her blog, her viewpoint is very much in common with mine. She does things slightly differently in an interesting way and I learned a lot by looking at her website (and I’m still looking at her website) because she’s very creative and has her own way of doing things.
Hi, Andrea!
ANDREA FABRY: Hi, Debra. So great to be here. I’m so excited.
DEBRA: Thank you. Oh, so the thing that I forgot to say is you have nine children.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, yes.
DEBRA: So nobody can tell me, nobody can say to me now that they’re too busy to be toxic-free.
ANDREA FABRY: Ah! Well, that’s a story and I’m sure we’ll get into it.
DEBRA: So I gave a little summary about what you do, but why don’t you in your own words just give us an overview of what you do.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, I just have a passion like you do, Debra just to return to nature, really explore what it means to live as naturally as possible. I haven’t always been that way unlike you who’s been on this journey – you’re way ahead of your time.
DEBRA: Thank you.
ANDREA FABRY: I was not on this journey until the year 2008. So it’s very recent for me, in the last six years. But I know that if I can make some of these changes, anyone can.
DEBRA: Exactly, I totally agree with you. So first, tell us how you got interested in this in 2008. What happened in your life? What was your life like before you changed?
ANDREA FABRY: Right! Well, before, we were a drivethrough family. I was raising nine children, busy, activities, living the good life, buying the cheapest products I could find. Even my next door neighbor, I remember, got pregnant with her first child and she wanted to go to natural products and I said, “Don’t throw your old ones away. I’ll take them all.” I just had no concept.
We were managing okay. My oldest at the time in 2007 was in her twenties and then our youngest was six years old. Up until that point, I didn’t cook. I bought as cheaply as I could and thought nothing about the world in which we lived.
So in the year 2000, we had moved into a home that we didn’t make any connection with. For the first time in our parenting, we found ourselves in emergency rooms. We began to get medical diagnosis. This was in the year 2000. And again, I still thought nothing of it except that we made a move from Illinois to Colorado, maybe the elevation, I don’t know. We had a lot of mysterious illnesses that lasted up until the year 2007.
Well, in that year, we found some mold in the house and uncovered some carpets – and not just a little, but a lot. We called someone to come fix this and unfortunately, we called the cheapest company possible, which was our mindset at the time. Very unfortunately, they remediated it improperly and blew fans all over to it and into the heating system, the ventilation in the home.
So shortly after, about six weeks later, we began to see serious illnesses come up – autoimmune disease, vertigo, migraines, digestive problems, vision problems, respiratory problems, fatigue problems to the point where we had surgeries. My 11-year old was in a wheelchair. And these were kids that were active and thriving. Before I knew it, our youngest, four couldn’t even read because the [inaudible 00:07:49] was so intense.
So something severe was happening, but to be honest, Debra, I was just hoping a doctor would figure it out for us. And so we want to 60 of them that year. It was only thanks to the internet and a friend who suggested that there’s such a thing as big building syndrome, environment matters, that kind of thing who just mentioned it to me. I didn’t want to think about environment or even taking ownership of our house in any way. That was a new concept.
But desperation will take you a lot of places and I became desperate to find an answer. And when I connected the dots, that this mold exposure was so intense and the remediation was so improperly done, that we were living in a very toxic situation.
That led me to speak with one of the leading toxicologists in the field who helped me understand what had happened to our family and encouraged to leave everything, treat the home as if it were on fire. And October 4th 2008, we did that.
At the time, we had seven children living with us. The others were out. We left everything and started completely over. I had a great hope that some of these health issues would be behind us. And unfortunately, what I didn’t understand about our immune system and rebuilding it is we couldn’t keep the lifestyle we had.
And as one who was completely clueless – and now, I’m 51 years old. I was an older parent, I’ve lived a certain way. My house had declined so severely that not only did I have nine sick children, but I was having a hard time functioning, a lot of memory loss and fatigue and joint problems, liver problems and so on. So it was a very steep learning curve suddenly.
And out of desperation, I made a lot of changes including just we moved to Arizona to kind of figure out how we were going to survive and thrive again or if that was even possible. We were just kind of limping along. And I’ve discovered that it’s more than – there’s clean air, there’s clean water, there’s clean food.
Well, our diet was pretty typical American. So to change and alter – and our products was full of chemicals, something I’ve never thought about. I had to make all of those changes. This is why I know that if I can do this, limping along, I know that anyone can. They key is understanding the process and it took time. That’s why I had such a passion to call my blog that.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. But I do want to say that I just can’t even imagine what you went through having gone through that whole process myself (I know a lot of people listening have gone through that same process), but I only had to do it with one person. I just can’t even imagine multiplying that by nine especially children who you have to help as well.
We need to go to break now. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Daddy and my guest today is Andrea Fabry. When we come back, we’ll hear more about her adventure and how she became toxic-free and nature-oriented.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She’s got nine children and she went through a whole ordeal of having to change their whole lifestyle – hers and her whole family when they all got sick of toxic mold.
So Andrea, when you got to the point where you decided that you needed to change everything, reading your blog, you have picked up on some things. I’ve been looking at toxic chemicals for 30 years, more than 30 years. I’ve been writing about them for 30 years.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, you have.
DEBRA: And I actually started, I went through my own ordeal in 1978. That was a long, long time ago. And so I looked at a lot of products. But you write about things I’ve never heard of. Let’s talk about toxic chemicals and immersion blenders. That came up on my blog because somebody sent it in, but it sparked a lot of interest. So how did it ever occur to you to look at toxic chemical in immersion blenders?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, here’s the thing. I went from complete disinterest in the whole subject and thought people like myself and probably at the time, I would’ve thought you were kind of – you know, nuts!
DEBRA: Thank you.
ANDREA FABRY: I mean, I really just was not interesting and I just couldn’t understand asking questions about our lifestyle honestly. So to go from that to reading the science journals – that’s what I do. I’m sure, just like you, I’m on notifications on a lot of keywords.
And so this study came up and it’s very recent, it was in Sweden I believe of finding chlorinated paraffin in immersion blenders. We live by our big blenders because when you fix food from scratch, there’s a lot to do and this really helps speed the whole process up.
DEBRA: Right, it does, it does.
ANDREA FABRY: I make mayonnaise with my immersion blenders. So it really caught my eye. I just wrote about it. The next day, I wrote the author of the study because I knew it had really just come out and what’s so interesting – and it was just interesting more than, “Oh, I’ve got to quickly take action” because Debra, you and I both know, you do the best you can. You do the best you can and then you make choices and you learn and you grow. And next time I need an immersion blender, I’m going to get this brand.
But I thought a little more urgent about that. But more than that, it was such a new – I use it all the time and I never thought to look. And of course, I buy stainless steel. I never thought to look under that hood where there is this plastic. And that what type of plastic? To find that chlorinated paraffin – and I know enough to know. I don’t want that in my food. I don’t know want it. And we’re heating it up? It’s electrically applied. There are heating bulbs.
And the author of the study, he just came on it by accident where this cat food had been contaminated. And so they tried to figure out why and how. So all that to say, I know you and I are just very like-minded and like-hearted, I just couldn’t wait to share that information.
DEBRA: Yeah, whenever I see things like that, I always want to tell people. When I finally figured out in my own life that I could feel better by not being exposed to toxic chemicals, it was like, “Oh, my God! I have to tell everybody.”
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, yes.
DEBRA: …because nobody had told me. If somebody had told me early in life or if my parents had known early in life that they could’ve raised a healthy child by not exposing them to toxic chemicals and they have done that, how different my life would’ve been and how different my life would’ve been if I had felt better and not gone through the illnesses that I went through.
I just said, “I have to talk about this because I don’t want anybody to be exposed to toxic chemicals because they don’t know.”
ANDREA FABRY: Right, exactly!
DEBRA: …if you don’t know.
ANDREA FABRY: You don’t.
DEBRA: Yeah, if you don’t know, you can’t make a choice.
ANDREA FABRY: I feel that way so much about a house, an indoor environment of any sort – a school, an office, a house. To understand that our air matters, that’s a new way of thinking.
DEBRA: It is a new way of thinking. When I started 30 years ago, there was no such field as indoor air pollution. I was writing about people getting sick from carpets and stuff, but there were no studies then. I was just saying, “You know, well, I know this person who got sick… we took out the carpet and they were fine.”
And then the studies started coming out. And so now, we think of things, toxic chemical exposures very differently than we did.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, you’ve seen it all. Boy! You’ve really seen it.
DEBRA: Yeah, yup. I really have been here through the whole history.
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah.
DEBRA: But I want to back up for a minute. What should somebody be looking for in an immersion blender to try to figure out if they’re being exposed?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, I’ll be honest. If you have a stainless steel one, look under the hood, the part that contacts the food and see if you don’t see a rim of plastic there. That’s the problem. And convenience is a problem, isn’t it? I like it because it saves me some steps and it works. Otherwise, I’d get my big blender out with the stainless steel whisk and use that or do it by hand and so forth.
But you know, it looked to me from the study like it’s enough to cause an issue. And if we’re going to invest our time in this high-quality nutritional food, I want it from the farm to the table. I want to keep it as non-toxic as I can.
It’s up to every individual as to where that lies on your priority list. For me, I’m on the hunt for one that doesn’t have. And there are a couple. There were four brands in this study that came out clean. I don’t think – well, most of them were not made in China. And in fact, eight of them that had this chlorinated paraffin were from China (or maybe it’s not eight, I can’t recall the exact number).
But that’s the clue sometimes even if you buy it in America where it’s been made. So I have bought two now since I’m really on this and I really want to write about it. I do want to replace mine because I use it so often. I bought two and they’re from Europe.
And so I’m currently waiting on the voltage adaptor/transformer before I can use either one.
DEBRA: I understand. It’s an adventure. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She has a blog called It-Takes-Time.com It Takes Time. She’s also the owner of Just So Natural Products. We’ll talk about these when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry and we’re talking about how to live toxic-free with nine children.
Now, I have to say I was looking at your blog again (I keep looking at your blog), I was looking at your blog again during the break and I have to say that you can go to my website and you can find all kinds of – probably anything you want or know how to buy, any toxic-free products in and I have recipes and things. But Andrea has this unique viewpoint because she’s a mom and because she has a family. There are things that I would never even think to write about.
For example, there’s a whole section about food cold By Kids, For Kids were her kids are coming up with the recipes and pictures. They’ve written a blog post and there’s pictures of them making them. One of them is cacao stripes cookies, gluten-free cacao stripes cookies. She says, “Looking for a healthier alternative to the ever popular Keebler Fudge Stripes?”
Well, see, I don’t even know what a Keebler Fudge Stripe is because I gave up eating packaged cookies 30 years ago. So it would never occur to me to make an alternative to a Keebler Fudge Stripes?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it turned out that way when I looked at the pictures. It’s exactly what it looked like. And Debra, I’m sorry, but eight years ago, that’s all what we’re eating. It’s pretty fresh in my mind.
DEBRA: I understand! No, I understand because I will admit that prior to – it was hard for me to change my food.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes.
DEBRA: I removed the toxic chemicals a lot sooner. The food took years. And even after I was living in a totally toxic-free home and eating additive-free food, that additive-free food still could be a bag of cookies. I used to have this European cookies that I really loved and they didn’t have any preservatives or artificial colors or flavors in them. And so that was fine. I could eat wheat and sugar and all the other garbage. The only thing I was not eating was preservatives and artificial colors and flavors. That was as far as I had gotten at that point.
And so I would just take a bag of these cookies and a carton of pasteurized milk (non-organic because there was no organic milk then), and I’d sit and that’s what I’d have for dinner. Very well balanced.
So that’s what I’m coming from. I mean, I grew up on TV dinners.
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah, me too.
DEBRA: And Jack in a Box and A&W root beer.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes!
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what I – shake and pizza.
ANDREA FABRY: We are kindred spirits.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what I grew up on. I mean, I didn’t know any different. And so the whole thing to stop eating those cookies and make my own cookies or make my own ice cream instead of – there used to be this flavor of ice cream. I don’t know if it’s still available. It’s called Cherry Cherie, which is full of these candied maraschino cherries and chocolate chips. I could eat half a gallon of that. I’d just sit there and watch TV and eat half a gallon.
So I want people to know, I am totally normal. This is where I’m coming from. I haven’t always been this way, but I learned…
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah, over the years.
DEBRA: Over the years, you learn, you learn.
ANDREA FABRY: You do. And you know what propelled us in our family [inaudible 00:30:10] one of them right after we blew fans on the toxic mold, my son, six weeks later, developed type I diabetes. Well, that obviously is a life-changing diagnosis. And as a mom, well, I choke up thinking about this. He already lost so much and now, he’s got to change his diet.
Fortunately, at the time, I knew nothing about diet and we were told just to cover his carb. He could eat whatever he wanted. And this is why. It’s mainly because Collin is now 14, watching him take ownership and learn to love real food and learn to cook real food and find things that he just loves about the sugar has been so encouraging. If he can do it, then all of us can. All the other kids kind of followed his lead. It’s like you don’t need sugar the way you think you do.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right.
ANDREA FABRY: Food tastes wonderful in its natural state. So that’s really why we started By Kids, For Kids. They were just whizzes in the kitchen and I thought that’s going to help somebody. We’ll inspire another child with type I or their mom.
DEBRA: Yeah, it really is. I see that after all these years of research, I see that there’s basic information that we need to have like what’s toxic and what’s not toxic. But how you apply it is very individual. It’s so encouraging and gratifying for me to see a blog like yours where you’re applying the same concerns that I have and the same information that I have in your own unique way with your family.
On the one hand, we could say that this is a big, horrible, tragic thing, that everything is so toxic, but on the other hand, seeing now that there’s a whole alternate universe of things that are not toxic and things that are good for you.
But they aren’t so commonly available or commonly known. And so it’s about finding out about them and then using your own creativity. It’s just amazing opportunity to create your life the way you want it to be out of your own creativity.
ANDREA FABRY: Exactly! I think of it now as like a treasure hunt as opposed to when this first happened. You know, a part of our story, Debra, a big part of it is that after we left the house and after we started to recover, we developed multiple chemical sensitivity where one whiff of the laundry aisle in the store, I would have to go lay down for three hours or my children, one little, tiny ant trap that’s so innocent would create this huge nosebleed.
That hasn’t been the case. So to become chemically sensitive on top of everything else, my initial reaction was I resented it. Why can’t we just go back to our old life? Because we simply had to alter our life.
Some people make these decisions for a healthier lifestyle simply because they’re smart, they’re wise, they get it, they want to avoid things. I applaud that so much. That wasn’t me. That’s not my story. I had to. If my kids were going to survive and thrive again, we couldn’t have the chemicals in the house. We couldn’t have the chemicals in the food. We had to do it all so fast.
DEBRA: I understand, so did I.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes! And there was a sort of resentment about it initially. Well, that, thankfully, the journey, I’m six years out. I really do see it as a treasure hunt now. It’s the best part of what came out, it’s discovering this whole world of natural and realizing how much better we’re going to do over the long run despite our crises that we know what we know and then to enjoy it.
That’s what I love to help people. Get people over that hurdle of, “I don’t want it! I just resent the whole thing. Why can’t we just make the way it was or why do we have to think about immersion blenders or heaters?” like you opened the program, I wrote that down because I didn’t know and I’m in Arizona and my feet are cold. So I’m like, “Oh! Utility heaters. Thank you, Debra” and I just wrote that down.
You know, I like thinking about that now, whereas before, it was a burden.
DEBRA: I totally understand what you’re saying. It is a treasure hunt for me too. It’s just so much delight when I find things.
We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry and we’re talking about the delights of living toxic-free. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She is the mother of nine children who all went through toxic mold exposure and multiple chemical sensitivity and came out the other end smiling and creating a new life with much better products in their homes.
So Andrea, I wanted to ask you a question that I know a lot of people have on their mind. And that is at the beginning of the show, you were talking about how you used to buy everything because it was cheap. And so it sounds like budget was a consideration for you.
So does it not matter to you anymore? How are you? Tell us, is it more expensive to live this way and how do you do that?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it depends. I’m an economics major. I graduated 1978 with economics. I didn’t go into that field. However, something stuck with me over the years. And that is short run and long run. When it comes to health and the world in which we live, there’s a short run and there’s a long run. I now understand that I’m going for the long run. When I spend more on food –
And honestly, when you start making your own cleaning products and beauty care products, that part, I think that expense can go down. I don’t know any way around spending more for grass-fed pastured meats. It’s more expensive. But I see it as an investment. And I know in the long run, I know what I know what I know is that it pays off.
DEBRA: It does.
ANDREA FABRY: It may cost more now, but you will be spending less. And if you look at a hundred years ago, what we spent on food, it was a substantial part of our income, but what we spent on medical care was much smaller with that split. Now, we’re spending a great deal of income on medical care and less on field.
And that’s a mindset. Really changing that mindset to, “Yes, I may be spending more now, but…” – and we’ve seen it, the medical bill. Because we had that horrific – especially 2007, 2008, our medical bills, it took us a long time to dig out of that hole, plus we lost our house and started over. So financially, it was quite devastating, to say the least. We really did start from ground zero again. But we knew we had no choice, that if we were going to help our kids recover and thrive again, we had to get away from that mentality of, “Well, that’s the cheapest?”
And I didn’t even realize that I said that in the beginning, Debra, but that truly was a big part of my mindset, how buying in bulk, buying the cheapest. Now, I belong to an organic buying club. We do group buys. It’s just like that treasure hunt. There’s nothing like finding other like-minded people and getting together and sharing some of these costs. We ended up buying a quarter of cow. That’s a lot cheaper than the special cut of grass-fed beef.
And that’s the other part. I do understand. I understand the financial concerns and you can’t do it all right away, but in the end, you will be saving in terms of quality of life.
DEBRA: I found that too and that there are certain things that are more expensive and there’s other things – like when you start cleaning your house with baking soda and vinegar instead of expensive cleaning products, you start saving money.
And I found that my medical expenses did go down. I mean, there had been studies, which show – I don’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it’s on my website – about how many billions of dollars are being spent on illnesses related to toxic chemical exposure.
And so when you remove the toxic chemicals from your life, you’re cutting all of that out, so that your body actually has a chance to thrive and have its own natural health and that things like the extra expense of food is much, much less than the cost of medical bills. I mean, the cost of having cancer, for example, is astronomical.
ANDREA FABRY: Right. You know, we were on so many prescriptions. We had seizure disorder on one of our children and that was huge amounts of drugs and visits and tests and so forth. These are free now. Thanks to clean air, clean food, clean water, her body has just really appreciated the change and so we’re saving.
But honestly, you have to remember that. You’re giving up that lifestyle of walking in and seeing – food is incredibly cheap this way when it’s industrialized. It’s almost like just a giving up and a letting go of that.
DEBRA: Well, it’s a letting go, but also, I think you’ll agree that this other world that we found is actually much more enjoyable like I’d much prefer the taste of food organic to cheap, processed food.
ANDREA FABRY: Everything is better, everything is better.
DEBRA: Yeah!
ANDREA FABRY: And that is the long run view, the risks. And again, I did it kicking and screaming. And now, I’m beyond grateful. So my heart and my passion is for the kickers and screamers, but if they’re probably listening to your program, they’re probably not kicking and screaming, but maybe part of them. They’re obviously smart, they’re listening to this.
But my heart is for someone who is having a hard time believing, “Is it really going to pay off?” and I just want to say that the quality of life – well, you can hear it both in you and me.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANDREA FABRY: It gets pretty obvious.
DEBRA: We’re almost to the end of the show, but I want to make sure I ask you this question because I see in your writing that you have a close to nature viewpoint. This is something that’s really important to me. I wish we had a whole hour to talk about that. But maybe we’ll have you back and we can talk more about that because there’s so much we haven’t covered that we could talk about.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it’s like driving, Debra (and I’m teaching one of our younger ones to drive again, it never gets easy). If you focus on ahead, way what your goal is rather than get caught – when you look too close to the road, you can veer off. Nature really offers just a beautiful picture of thriving health-wise. And so you keep your eyes and your focus on, “Well, what is the closest to nature?”
And I’m very active in the field of building biology and that’s basically it. What kind of shelter does nature provide? What are the materials rather than getting caught up in this and that. You can get tripped I think very easily.
DEBRA: Well, that, in 1978, it had been about 10 years, I was actually starting to feel better (because I had no guidance or anything then), in 1987 – or 1985 actually, I moved out into a forest instead of living in the city. In 1987, I just kind of looked around and I said, “Well, wait a minute! There’s the industrial world and there’s this.” Nature is thriving. Why aren’t we, humans thriving? And I had just a big aha moment about if I wanted to know how to live in a way that was thriving, I should look at nature because nature is doing it.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes! Yes. And you know, I just want to thank you honestly really for pioneering this. That took a lot of courage. And for you to just write about it so quickly and have this passion, I really appreciate it.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Well, I think it takes all of us. It takes all of us doing this. My goal is now to have the whole world be toxic-free. I just started out just trying to make my home, my home and then quickly, we have other people’s homes.
Then I’ve learned so much about how everything that we do has these long tails and they go out into the environment and they affect other people and what other people do affects us and that we really need to do – like in the beginning, I was talking about my heater. Well, it’s an electric heater, so it’s producing pollution. But where I am right now, unless I put solar panels on my house (which I’m considering, but not affording yet), that’s the only choice I have.
ANDREA FABRY: Right, exactly. Yes.
DEBRA: So we need to be looking at what is the electric company doing and what are the government regulations and what are they selling at the big buck stores and you know you know.
ANDREA FABRY: I do! That’s right.
DEBRA: And so everything that I do and everything that you do is all contributing to this—and everything that all our readers are doing. I think that all together, we are changing the world.
ANDREA FABRY: I do too.
DEBRA: And even though it looks weak sometimes, but we are changing the world and we’re changing the way people think and we’re changing what’s happening. So Andrea, I’m so happy that you are on the show. Let’s have you on again.
ANDREA FABRY: I’d love it! I’d love to come back, Debra.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So again, her website is It-Takes-Time.com. Make sure you look at her recipes. I know that I am going to make these little cacao stripe cookies.
ANDREA FABRY: You’ll love them. You’ll love them.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah… and so many other things. She’s got a pizza recipe. Her son makes pizza. Her son makes pizza for the family.
ANDREA FABRY: He’s 13, I know. It’s really amazing.
DEBRA: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? She’s got a great recipe for coconut ice cream, coconut coffee ice cream. And one thing I like about your instructions – I obviously read a lot of raw food blogs and experiment with things myself and write myself, but yours are very simple. Your recipes are very simple and it’s a good place to start. I just go, “Oh, yeah! That would work, that would work.”
ANDREA FABRY: Good! Oh, I love hearing that. Thank you for that feedback.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. And we have to go because the music is going to come on in about five seconds. So thank you so much, Andrea. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can listen to this show again, you can listen to past shows. You can read the transcripts. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
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. Today we’ll be talking about back pain and how you can help alleviate it using natural things you can do at home. There are more than 200,000 back surgeries in the USA every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain. We’re going to talk about chronic pain, some of the causes beyond the injury itself and how to control pain instead of surgery. Doctors offer only surgery and drugs, but there are other natural solutions, some surprisingly simple. 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
- How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
- Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
- 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
Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph
Date of Broadcast: November 19, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, November 19th 2014 and it’s still cold here in Florida. I’m still cold. I’m still waiting for my heater that I ordered to arrive that I have finally turned out the central heat for the house. So it’s warming up slowly, but boy! It’s cold here.
Anyway, my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday. She was on two Wednesdays ago and she’ll be on two Wednesdays from now again and every other Wednesday thereafter because she’s got so much to tell us about how we can not take prescription drugs, but instead handle things that are going on with our bodies by using natural means.
She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And today, we’ll be talking about back pain and what you can do to alleviate it using natural things that you can do at home.
There’s more than 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S.A. every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain, so she’s going to tell us what to do, some of the things that cause pain beyond the entry itself and how you can control pain instead of surgery.
Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. You know, I have to tell you that yesterday, I got an email that said, “Debra, I love your show and especially Pamela.”
PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s wonderful. Thanks for the great feedback.
DEBRA: You’re welcome! So anyway, let’s talk about backs.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So what happens is, like you said, there’s 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S. every year and that’s probably even a low estimate. What we find is if we go to an allopathic doctor and we have a chronic back problem – and a lot of people do have chronic back problems either because of an injury or dehydration (and we’ll go to that in a minute), what does the doctor offer you? They offer you surgery, they offer you opiates (pain relievers) and they offer you muscle relaxants.
So a lot of times, I tell people that especially surgery, the outcome sometimes is not so good. I’ve seen quite a few of my clients that things just did not turn out the way they perceived they would be. So it’s really a dicey situation.
And what we want to look at is that back pains (especially lower back pain, which is probably the most common type of back pain), there’s two components to back pain. So when you look at natural substances and what we want to do in place of surgery, in place of being addicted to narcotics (because that’s typically what they offer), lower back pain, the component you look at are muscle spasm. That’s 80% of the cause of back pain. So the muscle around the area are contracting in a way that’s very, very painful.
And secondly, there’s disc degeneration. So it puts strain on the tendons and the ligaments that are on the spinal column.
These two processes are really what’s causing the pain. Both of these are caused by chronic dehydration. I mean, I have met people that treat back problems pushing fluids. Water will take these areas. And if you think about the vertebrae, they have these cushiony areas between the vertebrae and what happens is chronic dehydration sets in and sets in motion all of these types of back problems.
DEBRA: So let’s talk about dehydration for a minute because I think that most people don’t understand what dehydration really is. I think that people understand that it’s not enough water, but what is the definition of how you would be dehydrated besides having back pain? How would you know that you’re starting to be dehydrated and how much water to drink?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Well, that’s a very good question. It’s going to vary for different people. I use the sauna a lot, I do 30 miles on a stationary bike every day. I need to drink a lot more water than somebody perhaps isn’t doing all the exercise because I sweat a lot. So these things are components that need to be looked at – the daily exercise and how much you sweat.
But most definitely, you can tell a person is dehydrated, I always tell people to look at your skin. Your skin gives away a lot of what your dehydration says. And of course, when you use the restroom, if your urine is really dark and concentrated – outside of taking vitamins because when people take B vitamins, riboflavin gives you that kind of fluorescent, yellow urine color. That’s a metabolite. It doesn’t mean that you have expensive urine.
I always hear people say, “Well, you know, you’re peeing out all these vitamins.” That’s not what it is. It’s the metabolite, the riboflavin. So people can correct them that that’s what it is. It shows that it’s actually being metabolized and utilized by your body, so actually, it’s a good thing.
So you need to look at those things, people’s skin. But really, it depends on activity level more than anything especially here in Florida, we’re going to be needing more fluids when it’s hot out than a person perhaps maybe up in Canada where it’s cold and they’re not sweating so much.
So I always say that it’s a broad question, but it would be inter-individual on the person. You’ll know when you’re dehydrated.
A lot of times, people with dehydration, the symptoms that show up most frequently are headaches. That’s what I find for most people. A lot of headaches are from chronic dehydration because a lot of people drink a lot of coffee and they drink a lot of alcohol. Those tend to be dehydrating by themselves.
DEBRA: People who are drinking coffee all day long (like sitting at work, drinking coffee all day long), they’re not actually hydrating their body. They’re dehydrating their body.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s a big culprit.
DEBRA: What we really need to be doing is drinking water. I actually drink water all day long. I’m drinking – let’s see, how much water am I drinking now. I’m drinking at least a half a gallon of water a day. It’s got all of these things that I got from Pamela. So I’m like sipping all these nice nutrients all day long in homeopathic.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great!
DEBRA: But I read a book many years ago – it’s an excellent book and I highly recommend it – called Your Body’s Many Cries for Water…
PAMELA SEEFELD: My favorite!
DEBRA: Good! Yeah, I really love that book. When I read that book, I went, “Oh, my God! Everything that could be wrong with your body could be dehydration” and I think that that’s really true. I just started drinking more water and it explains in the book about how your body needs water and that people are drinking soda or they’re drinking juice or iced tea or whatever and what you really need is water – water, water, water.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. I’m telling you, water is the no. 1 healing property that you can bring into your body. We look at the things that cause epigenetics, what turns on genes, what helps the body heals – water, sleep, plants, consuming plants. All these things matter, but water is one of the most important things because our bodies are mostly made of water.
And we know that the joint surfaces, the cartilage, it’s the padding that separate the bone structures and the joints. The cartilage contains a lot of water.
So when we get the stability that we’re having all these dehydration, the cartilage starts to dry out and the sliding surfaces between the cartilage and the joints, all of a sudden, there’s friction there because there’s not enough lubricant. And as a result of it, you start getting knee problems, hip problems, back problems. They’re all interrelated.
DEBRA: And it’s all dehydration.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right. I’m saying, it’s so simple. Water is free!
DEBRA: Yeah, it is. It’s something that everybody can take and I would just say that you want to make sure that you drink filtered water, so that you’re not getting all those chemicals that are in tap water.
But aside from that, you’re not going to drown by drinking too much water. Your body needs more water than you probably think that it needs. I feel just a lot better. When you drink a lot of water, your skin looks really good too.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Almost definitely. I’m telling you, people are always coming to me, “I want anti-aging skin secrets. I use medical skin care and vitamins here,” I’m like, “Look, you need to start pushing fluids.” When people are dehydrated – especially here in Florida, a lot of people have boats. They’re out in the sun. They’re doing house work outside, yard work, you get dehydration set in very easily even for active people.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. So how much water do you drink? How much water do you drink?
PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean, I drink probably a gallon or a gallon and a half.
DEBRA: Yeah, but you’re execising so much and you’re sweating.
PAMELA SEEFELD: The exercise, yeah, exactly. You know what? I’ll tell you. If you drink alcohol in a daily basis and you’re drinking coffee, you need to probably double up what you’re normally drinking now. That’s what I tell most people. Those things are naturally going to dehydrate the individual quite severely.
And also, too, don’t forget, you need to have salt. A lot of people are on these low salt diets. Salt needs to be with water.
DEBRA: That’s a very important point.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Personally, I like rock salt. That’s one of my favorite. People have their personal favorite, but rock salt on the Himalayan especially has all the minerals and it has iron in it.
DEBRA: I only have two kinds of salt. I use real salt and Himalayan salt.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Me too!
DEBRA: Me too!
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly all I have in my house.
DEBRA: Yup, that’s all I have in my house too.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Real salt and Himalayan, yes, those two things. But it’s really interesting because we know that especially the Himalayan, when it’s pink, it has a lot of iron and it’s really great for the body especially for heme and for oxygen-carrying capacity. You’re getting quite a lot of it. It’s very bioavailable when it’s located in the salt itself.
DEBRA: That’s great. We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about back pain and dehydration and other things that we can do to handle these pain in our bodies when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. 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.
Pamela, before we go on about back pain, tell people what you do and give your phone number so that they can reach you.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh! Okay, great. Yes, so my background is clinical pharmacy, but I’m also a pharmacognosy consultant (and that is an expert in plant medicine). I have a homeopathic and natural pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida called Botanical Resource. It’s been in business for 15 years, but I’ve been a pharmacist for almost 25.
I would be most glad to help or your family with any condition, not just back problem, but any sort of condition that you might be interested as far as natural remedies and alternatives to prescription.
My consultations are free and the number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very honored and pleased to help you or any other individuals in your family with any need you may have.
DEBRA: And please call her if you have any need. Really, she does want to talk to you and she’s happy to talk to you for free. I know she has a very good reputation here in Clearwater, which is how I found out about her in the first place. It’s because of so many people who are saying so many good things about her including medical doctor, including my own medical doctor.
She is just every day taking people off of prescription drugs and putting them on plant-based natural kinds of remedies and their conditions improve. So she knows what she’s talking about in terms of viewing it from a pharmacist’s viewpoint and dose and how the body works and all these kinds of things. She’s really made a difference in my health, really helping me with the things that I’ve been trying to work on for years and not getting through. I’m now such a difference. She can tell you. Pamela, tell them how much better I am.
PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re doing great. You’re doing wonderful. Really, it’s a tremendous turnout for you and I think I’m just really pleased that I could help you so much. I really have done this a long time. I’d be the first to say that if someone needs a prescription, they need to stay on what they’re doing, but I do have alternatives, homeopathic medical alternatives that are not available at the health food store that I can sell with counseling that will take the place of prescription. I can even order things out of Europe as well.
So it’s truly all-encompassing. I teach this. Your health is just paramount. You’re doing phenomenal and you’re off a lot of your stuff. And really, we were going over that, for eight years, you were going to all these doctors and nothing really was changing. But in a short period of time, we got you on the right track and everything is great. I’m very, very happy I could help you.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Okay, tell us more about back pain.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, great. So this is interesting. During the break, I pulled out The Body’s Many Cries for Water, the book that we both love so much. It’s talking about the importance of the 5th lumbar disc and this is the part in the book that they were talking about why people end up with so much lower back pain with dehydration setting in.
What he’s saying (and this is something I tell my clients a lot of times), 75% of the weight of the upper body is supported by the water volume that is stored in the disc core on the 5th lumbar disc.
So that dehydration in that 5th lumbar disc – and if you look, a lot of times, people, L5 and L4 is where they’re having a lot of problems as their lower back. And sure enough, it’s because of the dehydration.
If you think about it, your upper body, the core, it has to be held, the weight of this upper body has to be held by these small disc in this very concentrated area. So dehydration setting in is really a big problem.
Also, I want to bring up about alkalinity. When you have dehydration, you become more acidic. And so as a result of that, that changes the pH of the fluid around the cartilage. And as a result of it, it ends up in more denegeration. And of course, then it leads to more pain.
I’m a big fan of using alkaline boosters. That’s really an easy way to get the alkalinity of your water up. You can do it by becoming a vegan too, but a lot of people do not want to do an extreme diet change and I don’t necessarily recommend that. But pH boosters are great because they’re drops you put in the water.
I like AlkaLife. Personally, I’ve tried several of them. That’s the one I consistently have stayed with. I test the water.
And typically, most water, from a filtered water or from bottled water, it’s going to be probably between let’s say pH 2 or 3 to 7.5, something like that. I’ll tell you, the worst bottled water as far as pH is Dasani. That tested out to be like a 1.
DEBRA: Because I think that’s tap water.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s the same pH of Coke.
DEBRA: Isn’t Dasani tap water?
PAMELA SEEFELD: It is, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s very acidic. So when I see people, they go to Costco or someplace and buy bottled water, I say, “Don’t get the Dasani if you’re going to do anything. That’s really extremely acidic.” I mean, you can change the pH of that water with it. But basically it’s just water from the tap that they put in a bottle. It’s really a poor choice.
So I use my regular filtered water. But when you do Ph drops, a lot of times, it’ll boost it up to 13. That’s a great, easy way, inexpensive. You can use baking soda. But sometimes, that has too much sodium. For some people, if they have blood pressure problems, I’m not going to recommend doing that. But just in a pinch, you can take baking soda and put that into just sodium bicarbonate and put that into your water and it will change the pH pretty effectively.
DEBRA: Yeah, alkaline booster is something that Pamela gave me. And so I take it as part of my – what she does frequently is she gave me some tablets and capsules and things, but not very many. Mostly, what she gave me is in liquid form. And then she tells her clients to just have a bottle of water and put all the things in the water and sip it over the course of the day, which is exactly what I do. It works beautifully, it just works beautifully.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. Because you know what it is? It’s like getting an IV. When you take sips of the medication all through the day, every time you take a sip, you’re getting a little hit of the medicine into the tissue. So that’s going to be more reparative and more restorative than taking single relief pill. When you take a pill or a capsule, depending if there’s food in your stomach, but most of the time, it’s going to take about 20 minutes to dissolve. You’re going to get a peak in the bloodstream and then about five minutes later, it’s gone. So it’s inconsistent dosing. Putting it in the water, you’re going to get a much better outcome.
DEBRA: Well, I really see that for myself. I mean, the change has been remarkable. It was fast. This week too, I just felt like something kicked in. You start feeling better. But then there’s a point where you just go, “Wow! Things are different. I’m in a whole new level.”
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m so excited.
DEBRA: That happened for me this week. Really, it’s like I’ve been sleeping better so much, but it was just like my energy level and the way my body is shrinking in terms of losing weight, but also just in terms of losing puffiness. I’m just more trimmed and energetic and all those things that I always wanted to be.
Anyway, we need to go to break again. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Pamela about back pain. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses natural things instead of prescription drugs. She has a business, Botanical Resource. She has a lovely spa here in Clearwater, Florida. You can call her, she’ll talk to you on the phone. 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. We’re talking about back pain. So tell us more about some of the natural remedies that you can use for back pain.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect! So we’re going to do this little comparison like what will the doctor give you, what am I going to give you.
DEBRA: Good, I love that.
PAMELA SEEFELD: We’re going to play that little game here because most of these people, let’s face it, a lot of people that are listening maybe have had back pain or have back pain and they know it, what normally are being prescribed.
So when you have muscle spasms, you go to the doctor and he’s going to give you a muscle relaxant like Flexeril or Zanaflex. There’s a bunch of different ones. These muscle relaxants, they relax the muscles, but they also make you loopy and tired and these are highly sedating. There’s a lot of cognitive impairment with these. You’re very sleepy.
So what can we use in the natural realm that I think personally is just as effective as these. And this is what I normally use when someone comes to me and say, “I really don’t want to take these. I’m scared driving. I have to go to work.” There’s a product called Spascupreel, which is made from Heel. It’s a homeopathic product and it’s very strongly effective. It was Rx for a long time, a while ago. The FDA has made it OTC now.
Spascupreel is excellent! And it works for any muscle spasm anywhere in the body and it’s non-sedating and it’s non-addicting and it’s very well-tolerated. So I would say figuratively, 90% of the time, someone comes to me and says ‘chronic back problem’, is on this prescription anti-spasmodics and really wants to try something different, Spascupreel does the job.
And it also can work for leg cramps like Charley horses in the middle of the night. It can work if your eyelid is twitching. It can work for any kind of cramps any place in the body. Basically, it’s kind of all-encompassing.
And these products tend to have a long shelf life. So it’s one of those things that you could use periodically or if you could use it every day if you need it to.
DEBRA: And that’s a homeophatic remedy, right?
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a homeopathic product and it’s developed by MDs. It’s inexpensive. It works really well. They’re little sublingual pills. And like I said, you get away from the sedating properties that are very common with the prescription that a lot of people, if they have to go back to work and they have to go along with their day, these things really knock you out and make you extremely tired. So Spascupreel is an easy choice for that.
Remember we talked about the two components of the back pain. We have the fact that we have the disc degeneration and then we have the muscle spasm. This can take care of the muscle spasm.
Now, the disc degeneration, when you have stenosis or the spine is narrowing and it’s pressing on the nerve, we want to look to what’s happening in the area of the body. I usually recommend instead of going right away to surgery and doing all these very invasive procedures, costly procedures, but also high chance of disability, maybe more so than the person already is experiencing, there’s a product from DesBio called SpinalMax.
Now, there used to be a product I use from Heel that was very, very good, but they’re only making it in Germany now, so that one’s not available here so much. But SpinalMax has had excellent results. SpinalMax actually repairs the nerves coming off of the spine. I cannot explain how homeopathically this works because I was trained as a pharmacist…
DEBRA: Please do, please do.
PAMELA SEEFELD: …because it moves the spine back into place.
DEBRA: Wow! Wow!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.
DEBRA: The thing that’s very interesting to me about homeophatic – I mean, I’ve known about homeopathy for many, many years. When I used to live in California, I went to a homeopath, but there’s homeopathy and there’s homeopathy. It didn’t do much for me at the time. But what you’re giving me – like I was on insulin and Pamela gave me a homeopathic remedy. The difference is that insulin is just making your blood sugar go down and is not healing your body and the homeopathic remedy is actually healing my pancreas.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!
DEBRA: And so the long-term effects of these two things, the outcome is very, very different. And so now, it’s been what? A couple of months I think…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.
DEBRA: …since I haven’t been taking the insuling and my blood sugar is still the same today as it was the day I stopped taking insulin. So, my blood sugar has not increased over time. I feel like more sugar is getting into my cells and I have more energy and everything. And so I’m just getting stronger and stronger. That was not happening on the insulin.
So it’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty amazing, these homeopathic remedies, these particular ones that I’m taking in and some that Pamela is talking about. They are developed by doctors to be healing. And there are things that you can’t just get it without – I mean, Pamela can give it to you because she’s a pharmacist. You can’t just go to the natural food store and buy these.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important to know, right because they want these products. In fact, I was looking at the disclaimers in a lot of the things that I sell, they can basically go ask you legally if you’re putting it on the Internet and people do click and ship. We don’t want that. We want these to be sold with directions and counseling and I personally select for you.
And I think what’s interesting with SpinalMax and any of these kind of products, when you go to a traditional homeopath, they do the constitutional make-up, they do all that kind of stuff. Personally, I use homeopathy in a pharmacological realm. I look at the ingredients that are in there and I decide how I’m going to use it for the individual based on how I know the dynamics of these properties of these different plants are in there.
That’s why sometimes I’ll even give somebody a product for a particular ailment and it doesn’t say that’s what it’s for. I say, “Look, I know what I’m doing. Just use it for this.” It’s really important to kind of sometimes think outside of the box. Well, this SpinalMax was actually designed in place of surgery, this particular product is.
But it’s important to use your God-given talents and your intellect, all these reading and all these learning. If, for some reason, you view a particular product that has ingredients and a make-up that might be particularly good for another ailment, it’s important to realize that. You’re able to challenge that and say, “Yeah, I think I’m going to use it for that” and it does work. That’s why we go to school, right?
DEBRA: Right, right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: …to learn all these things.
DEBRA: Healing, you know, it’s not a static thing. It’s not something that you can just write a book on and say that applies to everybody, everywhere at every time. And so your experience and your intelligence and ability to put all these pieces together for an individual really comes into play here. I just think that you’re doing an excellent job. I can’t say that enough because I’ve known a lot of people over the year who do various kinds of healing things and I just see you helping people over and over and over. It’s really pretty wonderful.
We only have a few seconds left until we need to go to break, so why don’t you give your phone number again?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. If you’d like to call me at my pharmacy, it’s Botanical Resource, it’s 727-442-4955.
DEBRA: Okay, good. We’re going to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld.
She’s a registered pharmacist. And as you know from listening, she prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she gets a lot of people off prescription drugs. She just does remarkable work.
So we’ll be right back and hear more about what you can do about back pain.
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. She prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And Pamela, give your phone number again.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. And like I said, I would be really, really happy to help you or your family member with any issue you might have regarding prescriptions or avoiding them. We handle all cases.
DEBRA: Yes, she does. And she can even tell you what is going on in your body now that will lead you to need to take a prescription drug in the future and how you can handle that, so that you don’t have to get sick in the first place. She does so much, it’s amazing!
Anyway, let’s go back to backs.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.
DEBRA: So where were we? What would you like to talk about next?
PAMELA SEEFELD: We were talking about alternatives, the basis of what you would normally get from the doctor. You would get narcotics and you would get muscle relaxants. So we could treat all those things. So let’s talk about the pain.
For the pain itself, remember we’re talking about using hydrating, water to increase the fluidity of the joint.
[dial tone]
DEBRA: Uh-oh, did we lose you, Pamela? Uh-oh… I’m sure that – I have a message here. Okay! So my producer is calling Pamela back. So she’ll be back just right in a minute. Let’s see, what can I tell you about backs. I know a lot about back pain because my ex-husband had a lot of back pain, a lot of injuries.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m back.
DEBRA: Oh, good!
PAMELA SEEFELD: I lost our connection. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.
DEBRA: It’s okay.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So, we’re regrouped. We were talking about water, lessening the friction and lubricating the joint. Now, let’s talk about the pain.
So if you go to the doctor, what he’s going to give you when you’re complaining of chronic back pain is he’s going to give you some anti-inflammatories, okay? He’s going to give you Mobic or Celebrex. They’re very common drugs – especially Celebrex.
Celebrex is a COX-2 inhibitor. It works on that particular pathway, that cascade of eicosanoids in the body. Those are pain signals. It blocks it. But of course, by blocking it, life is not like all or nothing. So when you block that, it has other problems. That’s why Vioxx had to be taken off the market because there’s people with heart problems and heart attacks. So it’s not a good idea to just completely block out a particular pathway.
I’m a big fan of using curcumin, which is turmeric. It works as a COX-2 inhibitor. It’s a natural COX-2 inhibitor. And that’s pretty easy to use and it’s pretty inexpensive. I also am a big fan of Traumeel. Traumeel is an excellent anti-inflammatory. And what Traumeel does – and it’s from Heel. It’s homeopathic. They come in drops, they come in tablets, sublingual tablets. It also comes in injections and cream. But I use the liquid quite a bit for people because you can put it in water like we were describing. When you drink it through the day, very specific.
But why Traumeel is different than using an anti-inflammatory, if you take an anti-inflammatory, that’s all you’re getting. Like a prescription anti-inflammatory, it blocks a certain cell signal, a pathway and there’s no solving.
So if we want to start solving the problem, if you’re doing this Spascupreel for the muscle spasm, you’re drinking more water, you’re doing maybe some exercises, some physical therapy to try and help the area with mobility and the SpinalMax to try and realign the spine, the Traumeel actually goes to where the injury is taking present and repairs small tears and damage in tendons, ligaments and the areas surrounding the tissue itself that’s injured.
So I like it because I think of it more as a reparative than just blocking out a cell signal. It’s more of a solving of an injury. And that’s what they really developed it originally for, for athletes. It solves where the injury takes place.
DEBRA: Yeah. Traumeel was one of the first things that Pamela gave me because I was having a problem with my foot at the time. When I went into her office, I was in so much pain I could hardly walk. She gave me Traumeel.
Later on, I had to go do other things and I was in pain. I was taking it, I was drinking it throughout the afternoon while I was sitting down. And then I had to drive myself home and I thought, “How am I going to drive home with all those pain in my foot?” But when I stood up, there was no pain in my foot after I had been drinking this bottle of water with Traumeel in it for several hours. That really shocked me. It works so well.
Pamela, are you there?
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I don’t know why I keep cutting out. I apologize. No, that’s what it is. When you’re drinking it in the water, specifically, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start releasing it gradually over a time period. And what you’re going to do is you’re saying to yourself is, “Okay, I’m actually looking for a complete solving of the issue instead of just blocking out a signal.”
All of these different prescrpitoin things that we use only block out a certain pathway and we really want to try and heal the area. So we say to ourselves, “Okay, in place of surgery, push fluids, SpinalMax, using some Spascupreel for the spasm, using some anti-inflammatory be it Traumeel or turmeric.”
And also, too, probably to some degree, eliminating nightshades in your diet because tomatoes, eggplants, some of the different vegetables that are nightshades, they do cause inflammation in some people. And sometimes, people have to try and eliminate those foods to see if the inflammation goes down a little bit.
But the hallmark of this whole talk today is to say all these people having all these back surgeries, if they did a few, inexpensive supplements (we’re not talking a lot of stuff here really) and water – like I said, the water costs nothing. It’s right there, it’s your filtered tap. If you start doing those simple things there, I’m sure that most of these people could avoid surgeries.
And I can tell you from experience and also just from listening to a lot of different lecturers, I’ve heard people, different doctors even profess that dehydration is causing a lot of the back problems. This is not new science. I can’t understand why when someone shows up with the initial, the beginning of some back problems, that water is not suggested first and foremost. I just really cannot understand that.
DEBRA: Because they don’t make money selling water. You know what? I think that back doctors, all the back doctors should all sell water filters in their offices and that way, they would make money.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I concur.
DEBRA: Yeah. I think all doctors should sell water filters. I just think that the first thing that anybody should do if they have anything going on with their body is drink more water, drink good water that is healing water and that will just hydrate your body. And then you should call Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, that’s true because we were talking about dehydration. When dehydration sets in in these discs in the spine, that’s the first place it’s going to show up because like I said, we have L5 holding a huge amount of our upper body weight. So if the dehydration alter the rest of the body, then it’s also going to start especially affecting that joint.
I’m telling you that most people could’ve reversed a lot of their back problems specifically with that SpinalMax bringing the spine back into alignment and repairing those nerves. And don’t forget to mention too that really, folic acid and omega 3 fish oil form the actual nerve themselves. Those can be excellent adjuncts to therapy to these things. I usually use those with it too because if you give the building blocks of the nerve, you’re going to have much better nerve repair off of the spine.
DEBRA: You know, Pamela, with my ex-husband, we went through years and years and years of disc problems. They wanted to give him surgery and he didn’t want to have surgery and all these stuff. And then there were chiropractor’s massage, we did something called VAX-D. There were exercises. Not one single person ever said to him these things that you’re saying now. Just having been through all that years of pain with him, I wish we knew you then.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s just really sad. These are like very elementary concepts too. Anybody that has any kind of – even a minor understanding of the human physiology would realize that the fluid and the water and how it is allowed to take waste products away from the area, how it’s needed in the subluxation station or the area where the cartilage is moving back and forth to protect the joint and lubricate the joint, these are rational concepts. They’re not like out there kind of concepts.
We know what the body is made of. We need to start remembering that we’re kind of like a chemical soup and the water is where all these ions and everything is moving around in. And if we don’t have that basis where things can be eliminated and the body can basically lubricate all these different joints and different areas, it’s going to be an uphill body for a lot of individuals – especially elderly people because their sense of thirst is altered as they age. And that’s why you see a lot of these older people with so many back problems. A lot of it is dehydration.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Alright! So we’ve only got about a minute left. We’ll just say drink your water…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Drink your water…
DEBRA: Call Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Call me for homeopathic anti-spasmodics. And also, the SpinalMax, I cannot say enough how many wonderful things I’ve seen. I’ve had people that were on Fentanyl patches and oxycodone and they’re completely off of it doing the homeopathy for the spinal repair. I told them, “Look, pain medicines aren’t going to solve the spine. We need to solve the problem so that you don’t need the narcotics.”
They’re very liberated and very, very happy that we were able to accomplish that. It can be done. I want to tell people that there’s lots of encouragement. If you’re on all of these medicines, I can help you, give you some kind of path away from these things. I think you’ll be very satisfied.
DEBRA: Yeah, I think that you will be too. So it will not be an intrusion for Pamela for you to call her.
PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I do this all day long.
DEBRA: She does, she does. And she loves to hear from you. And so just if you’ve got something going on with your health or somebody in your family, even with your pets – she can help pets too.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes!
DEBRA: …and so just give her a call. Give the number again.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can reach me at 727-442-4955. As I’ve said previously, I would really be most honored to help you or your family member or your dogs or cats with any issues they may have. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve very successful at it and I really want to help people. So really, please call me if there’s anything I can help you with.
DEBRA: Thank you! And that’s it, we’re at the end of the show. Thank you so much, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.
DEBRA: Pamela will be back in another two weeks. You can listen to this show again or her back shows at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
The Best Water Filter Now Disinfects & Breaks Down Even Hard-to-Remove Pollutants
Today my guest is Igor Milevskiy, founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters, a small, family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters which remove fluoride, radiation, and pharmaceuticals as well as chlorine, chloramine, lead, and other common pollutants…at an affordable price. Well, I have to say that Igor has really outdone himself now. He’s taken the model I’ve been using for almost two years now and make some additions that really amp up the removal of chemicals and disinfects the water completely. I just replaced my filter with the upgrade and love it. We’ll be talking about the new upgrades and why his filters are just head and shoulders above others. Also find out how you can pay for your filter by selling these exceptional filters to others (and there’s no fee to join). www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/pureeffect-filters
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH IGOR MILEVSKIY
- The Best Water Filter Just Got Even Better
- Are You Drinking Enough Water for the Sweaty Days of Summer?
- Why You Need a Water Filter and the Water Filter I Use in My Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Best Water Filter Now Disinfects & Breaks Down Even Hard-to-Remove Pollutants
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Igor Milevskiy
Date of Broadcast: November 18, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. Today, I’m sitting here very cold. I think if I’m cold here in Florida, probably everybody listening is cold. We just got a cold front came down and we had this huge storm yesterday. We had thunder and lightning and tornadoes – not tornadoes here, but in Florida, we do get tornadoes with big storms.
Anyway, I want to give you a winter tip because this is what I’m going through right now. I do have heat in my house although in Florida, we usually have the air-conditioning on. I can heat my house with my central air-conditioning, but I don’t like to spend all that energy to heat the whole house when I’m really only in one room. So I usually have a little heater, just a small heater under my desk so that I’m warm sitting at my desk. And my heater broke.
But this is the perfect time of year. If you need to buy a heater, if you get those little heaters – I can’t give you a whole discussion about heaters today because we’re going to talk about something else, but what I want to tell you is that if you want to get the least toxic little heater, what you want to do is buy what’s called a ‘utility heater’ because it’s made out of metal.
Everybody is sold out of them now, but I do have my order in at Home Depot. I just went to the Home Depot website, I typed in ‘utility heater’, I ordered mine in advance and I hope I’m going to go pick it up soon because it’s cold! It’s cold, it’s cold. But I’m all bundled up and we’re going to have a nice, warm show.
So today is Tuesday, November 18th 2014. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. He is the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters, my favorite water filter company. He’s been on before, but he’s on today because he’s introducing a brand new water filter that I just had installed in my house last week.
Now, remember I’ve been looking at water filters and evaluating them for more than 30 years. I have said before that his filter, the one that I’ve had for the past two years is the best that I’ve seen in 30 years. Well, this one is even better. He just continues to make his filters better and better and better. We are going to talk today about this new filter and the amazing and wonderful things it does.
Hi, Igor.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Debra, it’s so nice to be back with you.
DEBRA: Thank you. Well, well, well, what can I say? You just are a brilliant water filter designer.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I appreciate that.
DEBRA: I know that you’ve been working on this for five years. Tell us a little bit about your new filter.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Well, it’s everything our bestselling units have, the ones you’ve been using for three years already and it’s more. We’ve added on a disinfection power to that system. So now, your water is protected from a very wide range of microorganisms, viruses, bacteria, allergies and so on. With the water treatment centers degrading, aging and a lot of negligence and sometimes, human error, it’s always good to have disinfection protection right at your tap and not rely on others for you for water treatment.
DEBRA: Well, let’s talk about disinfection for a minute because when you first told this to me, I have been very focused on toxic chemicals for so many years. So when I look at a water filter in the past, I would look and see how does it remove the toxic chemicals that are in water because all tap water has toxic chemicals for disinfection.
So when you brought up that this one had disinfection as a new thing, my first question was, Whoa! When chlorine and chloramines or whatever is put in the water, doesn’t that take care of killing everything?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s what most people assume, that it does. But a lot of scientists have done research and there’s an article I sent you recently as well, which shows that ten to a hundred million different organisms can survive in one quart of tap water and a lot of them are becoming chlorine-resistant kind of like if you’ve heard of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotic. That’s a similar thing happening in tap water.
The microbes are becoming resistant, they’re evolving because chlorine for such a long time. So now, what the treatment centers have to do is they have to use a stronger disinfectant, which are worse for drinking water for us as humans.
DEBRA: Right. And chloramines is a lot – if you have chloramines instead of chlorine, it’s a lot stronger and more toxic. We’re going to talk about that in a minute, but I just want to say I have this article that Igor sent me from the New York Times. It says in there that to call the process of putting in chlorine-based disinfectants, purification is a misnomer. To call the process ‘purification’ is a misnomer because really, what it does is it destroys organisms that cause illness, infection diseases like typhoid, cholera and dysentery, but it’s not really designed to do much else. And so there’s all these other things that are in the water that we don’t even know are there.
This article was talking about one called mycobacteria that are very common. They cause 20,000 infections a year. Whether you ingest it or inhale as bacteria, it affects the lungs of the elderly or immune-compromised individuals. It’s called ‘lifeguard lung disease’ because it’s such an occupational hazard in indoor pools.
We just never know what is going to be in the water because our water treatment plants are not really designed to give us the quality of water that we would like to have, plus once it leaves the plant, we can’t even estimate how many miles of pipe before it comes out of your tap and all those types could have bacteria and viruses and all kinds of things, living microorganisms that could be getting in your water.
So this new ability of the filter to disinfect I think is a really, really important thing.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Absolutely! And it’s a safe way to disinfect because we’re not using any chemicals, we’re not using any additive, it’s just the power of the sun. We’re using a UV light that the water passes through and it then gets disinfected very safely and effectively.
DEBRA: Tell us about the different sizes of microorganisms. Now, I know the unit that I’ve been using (and a lot of my listeners and readers have been using) – by the way, if you don’t have one of Igor’s filters yet, I have never had a complaint. I’ve been recommending it for the last two years and all I get is, I love my filter, I love my filter. Not one person has said to me, This is a horrible filter. Not one, not one.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Beautiful.
DEBRA: Yeah, they are really just high quality filters in every way. So the difference I know, I know that if you have one of the previous filters (which are still available and still an excellent filter), it also removes some microorganisms. But explain the difference about the size of the different microorganisms.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Sure. Well, our previous Ultra model, it had a half a micron sediment carbon block. We call it a super block. It removes some bacteria because a lot of bacteria are larger than 0.5 micron. And it removes over 99% of microbial cysts like giardia and cryptosporidium, which have a hard shell. They survive disinfection. So it removes a whole host of those.
But there’s microorganisms out there that are smaller in size. Bacteria can be as small as 0.1 micron. Viruses can be as small as 0.001 micron.
DEBRA: Igor, I have to interrupt you because we have to go to break. I want to make sure that we get through our little minute here until the commercial starts that I tell our listeners that they can win a free filter, this filter that we’re talking about, this free filter. Igor is giving one away. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comduring the break, you can send me an email and enter into the contest to get a free filter.
You’re listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. He’s the founder of Pure Effect Advance Water Filters. Today, we’re talking about his new model, the Ultra UC Disinfect, which removes – well, it disinfects water and also, we’re going to be talking soon about ways that it also removes more toxic pollutants than other filters as well.
But I wanted to just say again that he’s giving one away free to my readers and listeners. One of you lucky people are going to get to have your own free filter. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comfor the instructions. Scroll down the page and you’ll see the instructions for how you can enter the giveaway contest.
So before the break – and I interrupted you, Igor – you were explaining about the different sizes of microorganisms.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes. They vary from 10, 20, 30 microns. Some cysts are as large as 50 microns down to 0.01 microns and a little smaller even for some virus. So sometimes, you can’t physically capture all of those on a membrane without removing minerals that are beneficial. So the ultraviolet light is what shines here – no pun intended. The light burns through them all, viruses being more susceptible because they don’t have such a protective shell like cysts, but they’re smaller. So the UV light takes care of those and a very wide range of all these different microorganisms.
And in the new system, we also have a backup. We have the ultra filtration membrane, which is 0.05 microns, several times smaller than the smallest bacteria.
And in case the power goes out, let’s say there’s an emergency, there’s no power, but you still have water pressure, the system will still work. And the membrane doesn’t require – the membrane is going to be the back-up that helps take out those bad guys. It’s small enough to take out most of these microorganisms and large enough to allow the mineral ion to pass through so you’re still going to have minerals in.
DEBRA: So I just want to summarize the difference between the unit that I’ve been recommending for the past couple of years and this new one in terms of disinfecting and removing microorganisms. The old ones, it removed those by having them be filtered down to 0.5 microns.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: 0.5 microns, that’s correct.
DEBRA: Now, in the old one, wasn’t I 0.5?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, the old one was half a micron, yup.
DEBRA: So the old one was down to 0.5. Now, in the new system, it goes down to 0.05, which is much, much smaller, plus you have the UV light, which just will kill all of them no matter what size they are.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, it zaps them. So it’s not a physical membrane. It’s the light using the power of the ultraviolet wavelength, which is 254 nanometers. It’s the specific wavelength that destroy the DNA and the replication mechanism of these microorganisms and it zaps right through them.
DEBRA: You know, I don’t know if I ever told you this, Igor. I actually have a long history with UV because my father was very interested in UV.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes, you mentioned that, yeah.
DEBRA: And so I had a lot of years of having lots of UV lamps around the house while he did all these testing and tinkering and developing UV systems for swimming pools to purify the water in swimming pools. And also, he developed a unit for purifying water – just not tap water, but just like what’s being sold in third world countries. I don’t even know what the company is, but I know that at some point along the way, it got sold to somebody and that’s where it is right now.
But it’s just UV. It’s just the very best thing if you are concerned about water needing to be disinfected the way they do it with UV. Nothing comes close to it.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, and UV has other advantages too, not just disinfect. It also helps spray down chemicals as well via photocatalysis. It speeds up the decomposition of the chemical. It burns it out.
DEBRA: Yeah, so what happens is that it breaks down the chemicals. Usually, chemicals are removed using water filters by absorbing the chemical molecule in some kind of filtration media. But what UV does is it actually breaks down the molecules, the compounds into just their original elements like hydrogen and oxygen and things like that, which are completely harmless.
I think that’s a pretty amazing thing for it to do. We’re coming up on the break. We just got about – no, let’s keep talking about it because this is such an important thing. I actually did some research on this. Tell us more about how this works.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: As far as the ultraviolet disinfection or…?
DEBRA: About ultraviolet. Actually, tell us about NDMA and about how you came to address this.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Okay. Well, here’s the thing. Because the water treatment centers are so careful – not careful, but they’re very curious about protecting us, they’re adding a lot of chemicals like chlorine. That causes, as I’ve mentioned earlier the microorganisms to evolve and become resistant. So now, they’re adding chloramines, which is a more potent disinfectant to kill these guys.
But the problem is chloramines creates a byproduct, a chemical byproduct called NDMA. That’s a very persistent chemical and it’s highly toxic in very small doses.
And so one of the best methods to remove that is to decompose it with ultraviolet light. So this light often serves to break down the byproduct of chloramine disinfection.
DEBRA: I think that that’s so interesting because I looked up NDMA. The first thing it says is talking about, Well, does it persist in the environment? It says yes, but it just breaks down almost instantly by sunlight and so it doesn’t end up being a problem in the environment. But if it’s not being exposed to sunlight, then it is very persistent. And UV is just like having a sunbeam on your water, which is really good.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yup.
DEBRA: We need to go to break now, but we’ll come back and we’ll talk more about all the wonderful things about this new filter. Remember, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand enter to win this very filter in the contest. ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand then scroll down the page.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand there’s a link there to his website and you can find out more.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. He’s the founder of Pure Effect Advance Water Filters. We’re talking about his new – what’s it called? Let’s see, the Ultra-UC Disinfect.
Now, I want to tell you before we go any further that people are writing in, entering the contest and I want to give you some messages, Igor.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Okay, sure! Great.
DEBRA: Here’s one from Monica. She says, Great show, Debra! Igor, keep cleaning up our waters.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I will!
DEBRA: And here, get this. Now, listen to this carefully. This woman wrote in and she says, Oh, dear. I live in San Francisco and they recycle sewer water here. She’s 65 years old and she’s from a ranch in Oklahoma where they had artesian well water and she says that she has sewer drinking water and that it makes her ill all the time.
And she’s sending me a number of articles here. Here’s one from the Texas Tribute that says ‘No Joke: Most Drinking Supplies Flush with Potty Water’ and from ‘Toilet to Taps’, city officials say, Get used to drinking recycled toilet water.
Now, do we really think that if that’s what the water is that it doesn’t have some microorganisms in it?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Oh, I highly doubt that it doesn’t. Disinfection isn’t enough. We need to do more. In New York, they installed the ultraviolet system for the main water treatment because of this concern, huge high powered UV reactors. I guess a lot of places in New York also use the recycle ‘potty water’ as you call it. It’s pretty disgusting, but imagine how many chemicals have to go in there to disinfect the water and make it clear again.
DEBRA: Yeah. Argh! Argh! Anyway, when I think about drinking pristine water from – I’m originally from California. You may have heard of Mount Shasta, California, which is one of the highest mountain. The residents of the town of Mount Shasta can go to a public park and collect water from a spring, a natural spring where the water comes down off the mountain and [inaudible 00:29:14] comes up from the spring. I’ve drunk that water and it’s so incredibly delicious and invigorating and clean. To compare that with water that’s been recycled through the sewer system, it’s not quite the same thing, not quite.
So this is one of the reasons. I mean, this is really what’s going on in the world today. And so this is one of the reasons why we need to have filters like this. We need to be taking care things right out of our own taps at home.
So let’s talk more about how UV helps break down toxic chemicals. After you told me about NDMA, I went and looked up about what other chemicals the UV lamp can break down. I have a link – let’s see. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand scroll down to the box where I’m talking about the contest, there’s a link there that says ‘read more about the new filter here’. If you click on that, it’ll take you to another whole page about things that we’re talking about and that there’s a link to an article about what UV lamps do in terms of breaking down toxic chemicals.
And so here’s a list of some other things that might be in your water that UV will break down – pharmaceuticals (those don’t get removed at the water treatment plant), chemicals that are in personal care products (which also don’t get removed at the water treatment plant), pesticides, herbicides, 1-4 dioxane, fuels and fuel additives, VOCs of all kinds and endocrine disruptor chemicals like BPA. These are chemicals that UV will break down into their safe elemental components.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, and a lot of those chemicals are already removed by our system’s media even without the UV like with the advanced catalytic carbons and the zeolite, activated zeolite. But there’s over 80,000 man-made chemicals in the environment, so it never hurts to have yet another layer of protection. The UV light serves that purpose very well.
DEBRA: I think that that’s a good way to put it because I have felt for the last two years extremely confident using the original Ultra-UC system. It’s certainly is one that I continue to recommend. And if somebody is on a budget particularly, this is one of the most effective, most affordable units that I’ve ever seen.
If you want more protection, then this new unit is – I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to describe this because I don’t want to make it sound like that the old filter isn’t worth having because it totally is.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Absolutely.
DEBRA: So how would you recommend people decide between these two?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Well, it really depends. If you are on a water that has chloramines, certainly, it would be a good idea to get the UV light because chloramine because creates that toxic byproduct that UV light destroys. Carbon can’t remove it, reverse osmosis can’t remove it. Ultraviolet light is the way to go on that one.
Debra; Now, let me just jump in and say that this NMDA, it damages the liver and it’s suspected to be a human carcinogen. And so if you’ve got chloramines in your water, then you’re drinking this if it’s not being destroyed.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yes, there’s a possibility that there is NDMA in the water if it has chloramines. Chlorine creates byproduct, but our other system remove that very well. So the regular Ultra system will address the byproducts to chlorine very well.
DEBRA: Yes, I would agree.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: For chloramines, you need to consider the UV light if you’d like to break down that byproduct, NDMA.
Also, if you are well water and you’ve tested the water and you found high levels of bacteria or you’re just concerned, maybe the water is cleaned now. But water is dynamic so it can change. A month from now, there can be a change in the environment or in the soil and then you can have some issue. So for peace of mind, for well water, you can have that as well. The UV light will serve you well.
DEBRA: Good. I think that that’s a good description. So now, I also want to mention that you also have a whole house filter. So why would somebody want to get a whole house filter?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Well, I mean, if you want for your bath water, your clothes’ washing water clean – your clothes will come out cleaner because there’s less chemicals in the water. Your dishes, when you wash your dishes, you’re not breathing the fume from rising into your face or coming out of your dishwasher.
Debra; I have to interrupt you. I was so interested in talking to you that I forgot to look at the time. The music is telling me we have to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And after the break, we’ll be back with my guest, Igor Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. So during the break, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand sign up for the free filter. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Igor Milevskiy. He’s the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. That’s a small family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters that remove fluoride, radiation, pharmaceuticals as well as chlorine, chloramines, lead and other common pollutants. And now, with the addition of the UV light, we have additional disinfectant qualities and also, additional ability to remove toxic chemical that wouldn’t otherwise be removed prior.
During the break, I got another email from the woman who’s drinking recycled toilet water. She said the point here for her is not that it’s sewage water, but that so many chemicals are added to the water in order to process the sewage water.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Of course, yes.4
DEBRA: And that’s her concerned. So she would be very happy to win the free filter to say the least.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Well, I would be happy to give one away. It’s a great product. I’d like to introduce that to your audience and hear some great feedback hopefully.
DEBRA: I’m sure you will get some great feedback. I will give you great feedback. I love mine, I love mine. And one of the things that I can say from experience now is that when I had somebody come in to – I had a handyman come to install the new filter. When he came in, he commented about how well-built the filter was – not only the new one, but the old one that he was taking out. He said that it was so easy to install and that he was just really pleased with it.
I could tell that he’s somebody who does very careful work himself. And so he really appreciated the quality.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: That’s great. Yeah, we designed them to be easy to install (or at least as easy as possible) with less hassle, better connection, higher quality connection. We don’t cut corners on quality. We put our heart and soul into this. I’m glad that it showed.
DEBRA: It does show. And none of the parts come from China.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Correct.
DEBRA: Tell us more about how you manufacture them, the things that are unique to yours.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: It’s a painstaking process, let me tell you because we don’t manufacture it all in one place. We have different components at different factories. This is because we try to source the best suppliers of the different parts even down to the little connection elbows that connect the water to the filter – the bulb, the stainless steel reactor for the UV. A lot of this is a calibration of different factories across the country that produces this. So it’s not easy, but the end result is worth it.
DEBRA: It really is. And so, even though some of the parts are plastic, they’re BPA-free, they’re folate-free, the metal components are lead-free. Just everything, I can really tell, you’ve really paid attention to everything.
And also, tell the listeners about the UV lamp and how many [inaudible 00:42:24].
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Well, yeah. We even went into giving it that extra power, that extra potency because it takes a little more power to decompose NDMA. Our system has a flow rate of half a gallon a minute. It takes about 8 seconds for a cup, which is designed that way so it’s filtered better, more thoroughly, so it doesn’t pass through too quickly.
And the light, it’s rated for a flow rate of two gallons a minute. So it’s rated several times more than what the water is actually flowing at for the system. It gets to treat the water three or four times longer. It exposes it to the UV light longer for more potency.
DEBRA: Yes. So see, Igor has thought of everything. Now, in addition to all of these, your filters also have other benefits. All of your filters have all of these benefits. So tell us about the pH of the water.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: For the drinking water filter, the pH is gently, naturally increased. But please keep in mind, this mainly is a water filter and disinfection system. The alkalizing effect is a natural effect of the calcium that we use in the system. So it’s gentle. It’s not like the artificial ionizers that use the metal plates and artificially shoots the plates up, which may not be very healthy according to some research.
This system has the calcium the water passes over and it picks up those calcium ion, which is what causes the pH to rise. Now, if you have a really low pH to begin with in your tap water, it may not rise as much as somebody let’s say like with a seven. You may see about an eight or eight and a half. Somebody with a five may see a seven. You see what I’m saying? So it depends on what the starting pH is of the tap water, but it is gently alkalizing, which makes the water more pleasant to drink and almost with a sweeter taste to it and it hydrates better. there’s a lot of research that shows water with a higher pH and more minerals give cells more hydration and the penetration to the cell is better.
DEBRA: And it makes your body a little more alkaline, which makes you healthier. Some illnesses cannot happen within an alkaline body and most people’s body’s are too acidic from toxic chemical exposure, things that you eat and things like that. And so having a little alkalinity in your water is I think a good thing and more like it is in nature.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Everything in moderation.
DEBRA: Everything in moderation.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Too high a pH is also not good.
DEBRA: Yes. No, no, you don’t want it to be too high.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: So properly balance.
DEBRA: Balance, that’s good. That’s a good way to put it.
And so, Igor, we’re coming to the end of the show. It goes by so fast, doesn’t it? We only just have about three or four minutes left. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t covered?
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I also wanted to mention if there’s anybody who is listening now that has one of our previous model systems, you can email us or Debra, provide your order number from the previous order along with your email and phone number and I will contact you with a special discount if you want to upgrade your older version to this new disinfection system. I will give you a reasonable discount to help you upgrade your unit. So we don’t want to leave anybody out.
DEBRA: And also, when you’re looking at the cost of upgrading, I had no problem selling my old filter. I mean, I had it sold before mine even arrived, my new one even arrived. The woman was going out of town and she’s going to pick it up tomorrow. I just announced it on a little, local email list I’m on that I had this filter available and it snapped right out. I mean, it is like an hour after I posted it.
Some people on this list also already have one and they started chiming in about, Oh! This is a great filter.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Beautiful! I appreciate all those comments and all of your listeners who bought water filtration from our company. I really appreciate that. So thank you to everybody and of course, to you, Debra as well.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I also want to mention that you could actually conceivably get your water filter for free by joining Igor’s affiliate program, which is absolutely free. It doesn’t cost anything to do this. You could just sell one filter or five filters and you could just earn – just sell enough, you don’t have to make a business out of it. Just sell enough to your friends that will cover the cost of your filter.
So he’s really got everything all set up so that anybody can get one of these, that it can be affordable, but you can also earn the money that you need by selling the filters.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Yeah, if you have a list of people or if you’re active in the community and you’re passionate about water filtration, then I think it’s a great potential.
DEBRA: I think it’s a great potential too. And I’ll tell you that I always give people who come to my house a glass of water and they always say, What is this?! They’re always interested. Are you filtering this? Is this bottled water? It’s because it tastes so good. It just tastes so much better than what they’re drinking. And when I tell them – I’ve sold a number of filters to my friends just because they tasted the water. Yeah, these are not hard to sell.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: And that’s the best, when you actually taste it and you can see the difference. When you compare the way the water out of the tap or even out of the battle, that plastic case and out of the filter, freshly filtered, it’s night and day difference.
DEBRA: It is a night and day difference, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being with us today.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: My pleasure.
DEBRA: Thank you so much.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Thank you.
DEBRA: And thank you for your filters and your excellent work. I want to tell our listeners again to go ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. If you scroll down the page, you can enter the contest to win a free Pure Effect Ultra-UC Disinfectant Water Filter Revitalizer. You can also get more information about the filter. All the links are there on the page. You can just be drinking pure water instead of whatever unknown things are coming out of your tap.
I can’t say enough about how wonderful those filters are and how pleased I am that you’re making them, Igor. It’s just – thank you.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Oh, it’s so worth it, hearing this type of feedback and seeing the results and how many people are drinking clean water and enjoying it. It’s really a pleasure to do. That’s what keeps me going and evolving this product further and further.
Wendy: Thank you.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I appreciate everybody’s interest and you having me on the show again, Debra. So thank you very much.
Wendy: You’re welcome, you’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
I think it’s:
IGOR MILEVSKIY: Oh, it’s so worth it, hearing this type of feedback and seeing the results and how many people are drinking clean water and enjoying it. It’s really a pleasure to do. That’s what keeps me going and evolving this product further and further.
DEBRA: Thank you.
IGOR MILEVSKIY: I appreciate everybody’s interest and you having me on the show again, Debra. So thank you very much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome, you’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Spain incorporates Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) in its International Classification of Diseases
From Debra Lynn Dadd
Spain has recognized Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
AC / MADRID
Day 09/26/2014 – 3:56 a.m.
Incorporating the health system has been made in accordance with guidelines approved by WHO and other countries had already adopted
Spain has officially recognized multiple chemical sensitivity ( MCS ) to incorporate its International Classification of Diseases or ICD (the system that classifies the Health and encodes their diagnoses). With this decision, Spain joins the list of countries that recognize MCS as a disease: Germany (2000), Austria (2001), Japan (2009), Switzerland (2010) and Denmark (2012).
The process was carried out through a non-legislative proposal (PNL) presented by Deputy María del Carmen Quintanilla’s Party;following a request made to it by the Fund for the Protection of Environmental Health ( Fodesam ), in collaboration with theInformation Service Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and Environmental Health ( SISS ).
The SQM radically changes the lives of those who suffer. The recognition was a longstanding demand of those affected by a disease that turns many common chemicals in everyday life a torment for those affected by MCS. Detergents, soaps, colognes, or air fresheners become aggressive to them products they produce palpitations, vomiting, skin irritation or recurrent headaches. “MCS changes the lives of those who suffer and forces, in many cases, to live with many preventive measures to not contact or in the air, with these products,” says Carmen Quintanilla. Go outside or into a store can be, for these people, impossible to perform tasks.
This condition was further added the inappropriate treatment that many of these patients receive from the health system. Because it does not appear in the ICD as a disease is in an administrative “limbo” that involves “a state of complete helplessness. Something that should end with the recognition of MCS as a disease.
“The situation of these people is very difficult,” says Carlos Prada,Chairman of Fodesam. His intolerance synthetic substances frequently used in society often forces them to live homebound, almost like “bubble people”; wear a mask and the few times they go out.
MCS affects the central nervous system, but may also cause malfunctions in other systems such as respiratory, gastrointestinal or heart. This is an “emerging disease” of chronic nature and “environmental toxic ‘causing a’ physiological response to many agents and chemical compounds” that can be found in air fresheners, colognes, personal care products, cleaning supplies, food, water Griffin, clothing, cosmetics, snuff … Therefore, although as in other diseases MCS have degrees and symptoms vary according to the parameters of health and “chemical” environment of the patient, it is a problem difficult to handle, further “limited remarkable quality of life “form, noting the non-legislative proposal.
See article at BBC: Mundo: La difícil vida de las “personas burbuja”
Dry-cleaned clothes and Evaporation Rates of Solvents
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I have some dry-cleaned clothes still in the plastic that have been in my closet for about 6 years. Would these be safe by now to wear, or would you dispose of them?
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
The dry cleaning solvent perchorethylene is very volatile and will evaporate completely. I can’t tell you exactly the evaporation rate because it depends on the conditions. (Just so you get how complex this is, take a look at this paper on how to calculate evaporation rate).
So if you brought you dry-cleaned clothes home from the cleaners 6 years ago and had removed the plastic and hung them outdoors so the perc could freely evaporate, I would say in a day or so. Certainly 3 days or 7 days there would be nothing left. The plastic, however, slows evaporation. At 6 years I don’t know what it would be. But you could simply take the clothing out of the closet, remove the plastic, put them outdoors, and within several days the perc would evaporate completely.
As long as we are talking about evaporation, there is a toxicological factor of solvents called the “evaporation rate.” Each solvent has it’s own evaporation rate. These rates are established by supposing the evaporation rate of ether (or some other substance) = 1 and by indicating other slower drying solvents as multiples of the evaporation rate of substance it is being related to.
As an example, here is a chart of the evaporation rates of solvents used in printing inks, using ether=1.
But this still doesn’t tell us how long it would take for your perc to evaporate.
The MSDS definition of evaporation rate is “the rate at which a material will vaporize (evaporate, change from liquid to vapor) compared to the rate of vaporization of a specific known material. This quantity is a ratio, therefore it is unitless.” (MSDS HyperGlossary: Evaporation Rate)
In general usage we think of it as the amount of material that evaporates from a surface per unit of time. So there are three variables
* amount of evaporated material
* per space
* per time
Here is a chart where butyl acetate=1.
The problem is that you need to start with the evaporation rate of butyl acetate, which is unknown because the number would depend on a number of variables, such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, air flow, viscosity, and, as in the case of your dry cleaning, whether or not it was covered.
But here’s something you can glean from this chart. The evaporation rate of water is classified at 0.3. Heat the water and it will evaporate faster as we can observe as steam. Freeze it and it won’t evaporate at all. That’s true for solvents too—heat speeds evaporation. But if you know water is classified as 0.3 on the butyl alcohol scale, and you know that is slow evaporation, then you can tell that acetone (nail polish) at 5.6 is five times faster.
There is a line on the MSDS for “volatility” in Section 9: Physical and Chemical Properties, but there is no data on the MSDS for perc.
Well, there’s the science lesson for today. I wish it were simpler. I just try to think in terms of is it going to evaporate fast or slower. Formaldehyde, for example, evaportates pretty quickly from an open bottle, and very slowly when bound up in a resin in particleboard.
Why Organic Fish is a Terrible Idea
From Debra Lynn Dadd
I’m forwarding this to you from Max Goldberg…
The USDA is very close to finalizing standards for organic
fish and what it has come up with is absolutely horrible.
If organic is important to you (even if you don’t eat fish), I
strongly urge you to read what is going on and take action.
Why Organic Fish is a Bad, Bad Idea
As always, thank you so much for supporting organic food!
Max
—-
Max Goldberg
livingmaxwell.com/
www.facebook.com/livingmaxwell
Electric Tea Kettle
Question from Mira
Does anyone know of a chemically safe electric tea kettle? I drink tea all day long and would like something that heats up quickly and turns off automatically. Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
Readers?
Need To Choose An Insulation
Question from Gayle
Hi,
I’m needing to add more insulation to my home which was built in the 1960’s. There are SO many choices. Since it’s an established home, it seems easiest to have insulation “blown in”. Foam types scare me. Has anyone used “Green Fiber” from Lowe’s? They say it’s formaldehyde free and made of 85% recycled materials . . . I’m open to suggestions!
Thanks,
Gayle
Debra’s Answer
Readers, can you offer your experience?
Neem Oil May Be Toxic
Question from SARA
Hello Debra,
My name is Ines and the story I am about to tell you is truly horrible.
I am a victim of the false advertising of piggy paint, which was what lead me to your article. My 4 year old daughter almost died because she accidentally ingested piggy paint. But it wasn’t the chemicals that affected her…it was the NEEM OIL!!!!!
I originally bought the product because the founder advertised that her kids put their hands in their mouths all the time and that’s why she created the product.
I desperately need more help because the research in this is so limited. I am worried that something can happen to another child.
The symptoms include drowsiness, lethargy, seizures, respiratory arrest which can lead to death and coma. I do not understand why neem oil would be in a product advertised for children since it is known to be hazardous even for pregnant women. If you can help me in any way I would be very grateful. Thank you for you article as well.
Debra’s Answer
I agree with you that neem oil should not be in a product where it is expected that children would put it in their mouths.
Here is the neem oil side effects list from WebMD:
What kind of help do you need? Is your daughter OK now?
