Art | Resources
Why Toxic Chemicals Continue to Be in Consumer Products
From Debra Lynn Dadd
An interesting article was released in Newsweek magazine this past week, about endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), such as bisphenol A (BPA).
“For the first time anywhere in the world, the Europe Union (EU) is attempting to regulate endocrine disrupting chemicals, setting down criteria to define, identify and, where necessary, ban EDCs. Already, this is sending shockwaves through boardrooms across the world because companies selling their goods in Europe will be forced by law to comply. Everyday goods may be taken off the market; industry could lose billions. The emphasis is on the word “could” because the fightback has already begun. Already a year over deadline, the procedure has finally gone to public consultation, where it has met with uproar.”
It very clearly describes what we consumers are up against. Over and over we ask, if there is scientific evidence that a chemical is toxic, why is it still allowed to be on the market? Isn’t the government protecting us?
Well, it seems that even when a government tries to protect us, there are other forces at work.
So we need to have a consumer voice that is even stronger.
Read more at Newsweek: Calls to Ban Toxic Chemicals Fall on Deaf Ears Around the World
Toxic Tuna
From Debra Lynn Dadd
We’ve known for a long time that tuna contains mercury.
This video from a CNN report shows the government now advises that pregnant women eat no more than 6 ounces of albacore tuna per week. The video also explains how mercury gets into tuna.
Mercury is a heavy metal. It gets stored in the body. Because it is difficult for the body to process mercury, it’s likely that mercury you ate in a tuna sandwich as a kid is still in your body. And every day mercury is added to your body from other sources as well.
This is one of the reasons why I continue to recommend PureBody Liquid Zeolite. It’s an easy and affordable way to remove mercury from your body.
Plywood
Question from Allison
Hi Debra,
Could you tell me which of these plywoods would be the safest to use inside my home?
Thanks so much!
Here’s the MSDS for the second kind: www.araucoply.com/_file/file_3982_msds%20araucoply.pdf
Debra’s Answer
I explained the difference in plywoods some years ago in Plywood Resins.
Both are made with exterior glue, which is less toxic than interior glue.
The second one looks to be of better quality and is made with sustainably harvested wood.
I would choose the second one myself.
EMR protection
Question from SARA
Hi Debra,
Would you or your readers know of reputable companies that offer EMR protection products? Am specifically seeking EMR protection/mitigation while sleeping.
Thank you for your help!
Sara.
Debra’s Answer
Readers, what companies have you used and recommend?
Detox As A Daily Routine
My guest today is Meghan Root, a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan. I like her site because she has good solid information about food, fitness, and detox, presented in a way that shows how she incorporates these principles in her daily life. She helps people create unique and customized routines that fit into busy schedules. “I prioritize creating healthy routines in my life that keep me organized and on track with my long term health goals. Having a plan and sticking to it the best way to remain in control of your health and wellness,” says Meghan. Her free ebook DIY Wellness outlines five fitness routines that you can customize for your own needs. www.BeMightyLikeMeghan.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO Detox as a Daily Routine
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd Guest: Meghan Root
Date of Broadcast: November 6, 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 6th and it’s a nice autumn day here in Clearwater, Florida. Not too cold, not too hot.
And of course, winter time is the most beautiful time in Florida. That is why people come down here from the north. We even have blossoming flowers in the middle of winter. This is actually when we start planting our vegetable gardens so that we have homegrown food over the winter and into the spring because in the summer time, it’s too hot to grow most. It just have exactly the opposite kind of weather from other parts of the country.
Anyway, today we’re going to talk about detox, which is one of my favorite subjects and we talk a lot about it on the show. But we’re going to talk about it from a little different perspective. We’re going to talk about it as a daily routine.
I got this idea from a young woman named Meghan Root who is our guest today. She’s a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan. I like her site because she’s got good, solid information about food, fitness and detox. What she does is she helps her readers, her clients create routines, wellness routines.
She has an ebook. You can go to her website and download it for free. Her ebook is called DIY Wellness. Her whole philosophy is that there are so many things that we can do to help ourselves be healthy. Just in our daily lives, we can be healthy and maintain our health and restore our health and an easy way to incorporate this and make sure that we get them in is by creating routines.
Her DIY Wellness book shows some of her routines and it really inspired me to take a look at what are my routines. I think we kind of fall into routines without being aware of them like what do you do every morning when you get up out of bed, what’s your morning routine or your morning ritual and did you choose that or did it just kind of happened?
We have control over what we do in our lives. By setting up routines, we can make the most healthful choices. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
Hi, Meghan!
MEGHAN ROOT: Hi, how are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
MEGHAN ROOT: I’m good. I’m so jealous of your lovely weather. It’s raining and windy and stormy in North Carolina right now. But I think it should clear up this afternoon, so we’re definitely looking forward to that.
DEBRA: Yes. Well, you’re having a North Carolina autumn and we’re having a Florida autumn.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yes, we are. Yes, we are.
DEBRA: Yes. So tell us how did you become so interested in fitness?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, I say this often when I started talking about it. I feel very lucky because it’s always been a part of my life. When I was younger, I was competitive in a variety of sports – gymnastics, swimming, triathlon, pole walking.
And so, it’s second nature for me to be active and it’s something that I have always prioritized. That became challenging as I got older. Of course, the days tend to go by faster and there’s little time for many of the things that we need to do.
But I’ve always been passionate about it. I love helping people. I love helping them make lasting changes in their health and wellness. And at the end of the day, that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.
DEBRA: Well, I can really see that in your new website because everything that you’re talking about are things that people can actually do. They’re things that you do in your daily life. You show us how we can incorporate those things in our daily lives as well, which I think is a really important point.
I know that you mentioned that you’re fortunate that this was part of your life since you were a child. I know in my life that it wasn’t. I didn’t have a family that was fitness-oriented. I had P.E. class in school, but I was just really bored with it and didn’t like it. I think that as a child, nobody ever instilled that love of sports or playing games or running or walking or any of those things. It was never something that I was taught either by my family or in school. And so consequently, it’s really taken until late in my life recently that I’m understanding the importance of movement especially in relation to detox.
So how did you get interested then in the detox aspect of this?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, I had to stop and think about this because detox wasn’t something that – when I was in college, I could get away with murder when I was younger, a teenager with what I put in my body and how I treated it. I think that’s just part of being young. You can rebound that way.
And then when I got into college, I started to notice some things changing – how what I was eating and drinking were impacting my ability to perform as an athlete. And so I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my fitness level to the extent of what I was doing on a daily basis. I started focusing on my diet and the foods that I was eating and the quality of the foods that I was eating became very important.
But it wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I began to think about what does detox mean. There was a book that I read – and I don’t know why it resonated with me the way that it did. It was a book by Jillian Michaels called Master Your Metabolism. I wouldn’t classify her as a great resource on detox necessarily, but she has a 3-phase approach to getting a handle on your metabolism and really functioning in an efficient way. It’s the three R’s. It’s remove, restore and rebalance. It’s all about taking out the bad, so that you can put in the good and kind of rebalance your life with regards to the way you’re eating and your metabolismd on the importance of eliminating chemical exposure in terms of cleaners and detergents and beauty products.
DEBRA: Oh, good.
MEGHAN ROOT: She relates all of those things to the impact that toxic exposure can have specifically in your body’s metabolism. And at the time, it was so terrifying to me and then it just got even more terrifying when I realized how much an impact that those toxic products have on every single function of our bodies. And so that’s when I first started really learning about what it meant to remove these things and to detox as a part of my daily routine.
DEBRA: So have you done anything to remove your toxic chemical exposures in your daily life, the things you have done?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, yeah. So I do not use and traditional household cleaners. I’m a big fan of Ms. Myers products. But even before I grab a bottle of that, I’ll reach for lemon and vinegar and baking soda and things that you can find in your pantry. You don’t have to bleach everything and Lysol everything. You’re just exposing yourself to so much bad when you do that and it’s not necessary.
I’ve gone through and cleaned out my beauty products, my hair products. I’m really careful about what I use and put on my skin. I mean, your skin is the biggest organ in your body and to think that you’re smearing this toxic lotion on it every morning, it’s just absolutely terrifying that I’ve been doing that for years. And so I think you’ve got to look really carefully. It’s not just the food that you’re eating and the chemicals you’re using at home. It is your beauty products. You just have to look with an open mind everything that you’re doing.
DEBRA: It really is. I think that a lot of women your age – and I actually don’t know what your age is, but I think it’s younger than me.
MEGHAN ROOT: Just a couple of years.
DEBRA: How kind. But anyway, you’re at an age where I would call you a young woman. I think that you’re in your twenties or early thirties at the latest, but you’re not at a stage in life like I am and many other women and men too where you’re now getting to the age where your body is starting to have problems and you’re thinking about, “Well, how am I going to stay younger?” and things like that.
You’re doing things at an age where – I mean, you talked about the difference between your teen years and your college years, that you could already see that difference, but what I’m so impressed with is how well you’re thinking about these things at this point in your life, so that you could have an easier time of it and be more healthy when you get to be my age. And that’s such an important message for people. It’s such, such an important message.
We need to go to break, but we will be right back and talk more with Meghan Root. Her website is BeMightyLikeMeghan.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Meghan Root. She’s a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan. So Meghan, what is being mighty?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, I think it’s so many things. I think for me, it’s taking personal responsibility for your health and your wellness and your vitality because at the end of the day, nobody else is going to do it for you. It’s so easy to look away and to prioritize other parts of your life, but being mighty is owning your health and owning your wellness and doing it in a way that is positive and in a way that can impact others where other people look at you and they’re like, “Wow! You’re glowing. You look great. How do you do it?”
That, for me, is that. It’s owning my health and my wellness in a really positive way.
DEBRA: But that is such a different viewpoint than 99.999% of people in the world today have. I was just looking since I’ve been reading your website and talking to you and knowing you, I took a look the other day in my own life about how I do a lot of things to increase my health. In particularly, I have lived with toxic chemicals for more than 30 years. I got rid of them a long, long time ago and that impacts my health so much in a positive way.
But when it comes to other things, we have this idea (and I think we’re all kind of conditioned to this) of going to a doctor. And so I transitioned many years ago from going to a medical doctor to doing alternative kinds of health things that even now, even now, I have my own favorite alternative health doctor that I kind of give this health professional responsibility for my health.
You see what I’m saying? Even though I do individual things, I’m not saying – I mean, you really made a difference for me in terms of me having to look at myself and saying, “Where am I not taking responsibility for my health?”
And actually, just last week, I went through this whole thing where I said, “Wait a minute! I need to take more responsibility for my health even than I am” and I would say that I take so much more responsibility than people typically do. I just saw how little healthcare I would actually need and how little healthcare – we’re in a healthcare crisis in the world today.
But if one really took responsibility, all the things that we can do that if I really did them, then I would be even healthier than I am now. If I didn’t say, “Well, it’s okay if I don’t do this because then I can just go to my doctor and he can help fix it,” I just think that the full degree of responsibility that you take for your health is extraordinary and I highly admired it and you really inspired me with that.
MEGHAN ROOT: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I hope that you inspire a lot of other people in that regard. How did you come to have that viewpoint because it’s sort of visual?
MEGHAN ROOT: I think a lot of it as I have an aversion to – I think that there’s certainly a place in this world for doctors and there are times when you’ve got to go.
DEBRA: Like if you break your leg, you want to go to the doctor.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yes, yes. If I’ve broken something, yes, I would go. But I do think that the more reading that I’ve done over the years about the power of whole foods and the impact that they can have on your well-being, in your health, I mean it’s incredible to me!
I’ve made a lot of mistakes when I was in college with regards to what I was eating because I didn’t know any better.
DEBRA: Oh, yes.
MEGHAN ROOT: But I would go through a period where I didn’t feel so good and I would go to the doctor. It took me until about my junior year to really kind of stop and look very objectively at, “Okay, what am I doing differently because it wasn’t like this when I was little. I didn’t use to feel this way. I know that I have the power to fix this.”
And so I remove all processed foods. I used to eat lean cuisines like it was my job. I mean, those things are so bad for you. They are.
DEBRA: I know. I know. I know. I grew up on TV dinners. I grew up on TV dinners.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yeah. Oh, my gosh! And to think – I mean, not only is it processed, but it’s in plastic. It’s just all – it’s so bad.
DEBRA: And it’s promoted as being healthy.
MEGHAN ROOT: And it’s so bad. But when I removed processed foods and I would look at something if I were about to eat it, I would say, “Okay, where did this come from?” If I couldn’t tell myself where it came from, the ground or an animal, I wouldn’t eat it because the reality is your body has a hard time figuring out what to do with processed foods.
And so it was about six months after I made that change that I stopped and I said, “Wait a minute! Wait, I haven’t been to the doctor. I feel great. My energy levels are through the roof. This is the answer for me.”
And so that’s when I found out – and for me, that was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve done a lot of personal research on my own diet with my foods that I’m sensitive too. But I think there’s so much power in just eating real food. So that’s what has kind of set my course with regard to that.
DEBRA: That’s so good for you to have learned that, again, at an early age. I went through a similar thing where, as I’ve just said, I grew up on TV dinners and going to [inaudible 00:20:26] and fastfood, all that fastfood. It wasn’t until I got out on my own away from my family and started living on my own in San Francisco in the big city that I started finding out that people ate differently than that and that I could go to a natural food store or my friends were eating differently and I just started trying all those different foods and went through a very similar process to you where I found out that most of what I was eating was just making me sick. When I stopped eating it, I had a dramatic improvement. But also, by removing toxic chemicals too. It was a combination of those things.
Over Christmas once, I went on a fast. And after five days of not eating all that junk food, I was like a new person. I was like, “Well, I had to pay attention to this.” Anyway, we have to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Meghan Root. She’s a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan and that’s supposed to be at BeMightyLikeMeghan.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Meghan Root. She’s a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan at BeMightyLikeMeghan.com.
So Meghan, let’s talk about routines because that’s something that your whole website is kind of organized around routines. You’ve written this great ebook. It’s not very long, but very impactful in terms of showing us a picture of how you use the concept of routines to organize all your different wellness steps in your life. Tell us more about that.
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, when I first came up with the idea for this website, it had nothing to do with routines. I wanted it to be all about fitness. But what I found was it was hard for me to talk about fitness without incorporating all of these other steps that I take in order to keep me on track. So it organically evolved to a conversation about routine because that’s what keeps me on track and I think it’s what keeps most people in track and moving in a direction that is in line with my long-term vision and goals.
So when I sat down to write DIY Wellness, like I said, it wasn’t with routines in mind, but that’s how it happened because it’s second nature for me. They’re not extremely abstract ideas. They’re very simple. It was very easy for me to notice these patterns in my life and I think it will be easy to notice patterns and routine for most people, because they do exist.
Our lives, for the most part, are a series of patterns. So I got shoveled that I go through in this ebook – I have a morning routine that’s very basic. I think that most people do also. But I always try and wake up at the same time every day. I always make my morning detox tea (which are the recipes on my website), then I’ll make my coffee and then I always go for a walk or stretch. After about 30 minutes, I’ll have breakfast and check email.
I always do it in that order. That’s something that I didn’t even realize and so I stopped and looked at it. It sets the tone for the day and it just is a nice, productive, organized way to start my day.
DEBRA: You know, after I read your DIY Wellness ebook, I started looking at my own routines because I never have sat down and said, “Okay, I’m going to make a routine.” But it was kind of second nature for me to say, “If I want to get something done, if I want to make sure that it happens, then I’m going to make sure that I do it in a certain order.”
I think that doing things in order makes a really big difference. I really wasn’t even really aware. If you would’ve said, “Write down your morning routine,” I’d have to stop and think about it. But when I did write down my morning routine after doing DIY Wellness, what I saw was I got up in the morning and the first thing I do is read actually because I’m reading different kinds of inspirational books and I’ll just read a little inspiration to start my day.
And then I get up and I take my shower and I brush my teeth. And then I take my vitamins. It all kind of happens in that order.
I noticed in my life (not on a larger scale) that I have routines of things that I do every day. I do my newsletter every Monday, my main newsletter every Monday and I send out another newsletter on Thursday and another one on Friday. And if I don’t do these, if I don’t have a time set and a decision made to do these activities, they don’t happen. I think that that’s the value of having a routine.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yes, definitely, yes.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
MEGHAN ROOT: And I think another big one – and this is where I feel a lot of people struggle, having a routine that you can commit to with regard with your fitness because for a lot of folks especially when we get busy or when it’s the holidays and you have a lot on your plate, it gets bumped for something else whether it’s your kids, your work or your husband. It always gets put away for another day. The reality is that at the end of the day, you’ve only got one body. You’ve got to take care of it and you’ve got to prioritize that.
And it’s so easy. You just find a time of the day that you can commit to. And whether it’s going to the gym or working out at home, I think you’ve got to be diligent about making that one a habit because your body will start to crave it and it knows when it’s time.
I’m an afternoon person. I like to go to the gym in the afternoon, after lunch when my body is nice and awake. I’ll notice when it’s time for me to go, my body knows that and so I’m ready and I want to. That’s something that, again, I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this. It was like, “Wow! Yeah.”
And not to say I can’t work out in the mornings, but I always want to work out in the afternoon because that’s what I’m used to doing.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I noticed for myself, one of the things that I want to do at this stage in my life is to incorporate more exercise in my life because it’s not something that I’ve ever – it’s not that I’ve never exercised, but I’ve never had an exercise routine that would really stick.
I think that’s part of making a routine. Intentionally making a routine is saying, “Alright, this is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to accomplish. How do I get that goal in? What are the steps towards reaching that goal and that you just keep the routine in.
And so there had been times in my life when I decided, “Okay, I’m going to get up and walk every morning” and then something happened that made me stop like I hurt my foot or something and then I didn’t go back to it.
But I think that for me, as I’m learning about routines from you, it’s about that these are the basic, fundamental things that we need to have in our lives in order for our bodies to be healthy. These are just things that we need to incorporate every day of our lives.
And sure, if you hit your foot and you can’t walk for a week or two weeks, okay. But then when that time is up, then it’s back to walking because your body actually wants that exercise, it wants to be healthy and that once we know what these essential things are, these are things that we can do.
There was some place I was going with this and now I’ve forgotten what I was.
MEGHAN ROOT: But I do think that a lot of people struggle because they lack direction and accountability. And so for that, right now, I’m teaching group fitness classes. And what I love about group fitness is it has that layer of accountability and when someone is not there (because each class time, there are regulars that you’ll see), when John is not there, everyone wonders where John is, then everybody reaches out to John. They’re like, “Hey, John, are you okay?”
And so it just a layers. It’s community, it’s social, but it has a layer of accountability that a lot of people, they lack in. And then you’ll find that it’s fun and these are your friends.
DEBRA: It’s fun to go see your friends if you go to exercise class, yeah, yeah.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: I’ve had that experience. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Meghan Root. She’s a certified fitness instructor and she just launched a new website and that’s at BeMightyLikeMeghan.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Meghan Root. She’s a certified fitness instructor who just launched a new website called Be Mighty Like Meghan. She’s got a great ebook that you can get for free called DIY Wellness. You can get it at her website, BeMightyLikeMeghan.com. So Meghan, I know in DIY Wellness, you talked about a detox routine. So tell us what you do to detox. One thing I want to say is that I know that a lot of times if you look up ‘detox’ on the Internet, if you get past all the detox drugs and detox alcohol and you get to people who are talking about detox programs for your body, that they’re talking about things like “in the spring” or “one day a year, drink a week of green smoothies” like detox doesn’t exist the rest of the time.
One thing that my favorite alternative doctor keeps telling me is that – but he doesn’t have to tell me. I mean, he’s preaching to the choir when he says this. He keeps saying that people think you only have to detox once a year, but your body is detoxing 24 hours a day every day because you’re constantly producing wastes and they need to be taken out and there’s constantly things coming in even if you have a pristine, toxic-free house like I do.
You walk out the door and you’re being exposed to the toxic chemicals and they’re coming in your body and your body needs to do something with them.
So if you’re living on planet Earth and you’re not just staying in a building that have no toxic chemicals and purified air, you’re going to be exposed to toxic chemicals. Your body needs to do something with them.
So when you talk about detox, your detox routine, you’re talking about detoxing your body every single day. So tell us what you do.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yeah! That’s right. Well, because we can do our part with removing as many chemicals. And fortunately, we do have control over a lot of what we eat and drink and put on our body, but the reality is if you go outside or to a restaurant and have water, you’re exposed to pollutants in the air, the pharmaceuticals in the water and you can’t control these things. But you can combat it.
And so I have a daily detox routine because you’re right, your body is constantly detoxing. We are constantly exposed to chemicals and to toxics. And so we have to detox daily.
And I mentioned in my morning routine that I – and this is the first thing I do every day, have a detox tea. It’s easy and I’m certainly not a pioneer with this, but I do like to talk about it and mention it. I do it every day. My detox tea is warm water, lemon juice and cayenne pepper and that’s it.
DEBRA: And tell us what that does. Why is that important?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, it stimulates your liver. Your liver is your body’s primary organ, your main organ responsible for removing toxins from your body. So it just helps to jump start that process first thing in the morning. It’s like I wake up and then I go wake up my liver and we’re awake together. And so yeah, that’s how I take on the day.
But it also helps to increase the alkalinity in your body because we have a tendency as Americans to be very acidic and that can be detrimental in a number of ways also.
But honestly, it’s the easiest thing. And then during the day, I’ll drink lemon water, lemon juice and water. So that’s an easy, easy way to approach detoxing on a very surface level. But I love it! I can’t go a day without it.
When I travel and go to customs, I’ll take lemons with me and cayenne paper because I really can’t go without it.
DEBRA: That’s a very good routine to do. So what else do you do?
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, like I said earlier, I’m very conscious of the quality of the food that I eat. And so I eat everything organically. I source sustainably and responsibly farmed protein. And that’s just to prevent pesticides and chemicals and anything that’s been genetically modified from entering my body.
I also dry brush. I used to think that people who did this were nutty. I was like, “There’s no way that there’s anything…” And then I started reading about it and then reality is your skin is your largest organ, it’s extremely exposed to toxins and dry brushing is an easy way to remove dead skin cells and toxins and increase your circulation as well as stimulate your lymphatic system.
So you can take five minutes and do it. You can take 20 minutes and do it. I certainly do it at least three times a week. Sometimes, if I’ve got more time, I’ll do it every day. It’s nice and it’s relaxing. It’s a good way to kind of unwind and it’s you time. So that’s something that I’ve just recently incorporated in the past year. But the cornerstone of my detox routine, because in order to do it daily, you’ve got to keep it fairly simple. I know this is something that you use as well. It’s Touchstone Essentials Pure Body Extra Strength, their Zeolite product. It’s a naturally occurring mineral. It’s negatively charged. And so it binds to environmental toxins and heavy metal, which generally carry a positive charge and it flushes them out of your body. It’s the easiest way to remove toxins. It’s four sprays three times a day. It’s a piece of cake.
DEBRA: It is.
MEGHAN ROOT: It has had a huge impact on my life.
DEBRA: Well, tell us about the impact. I know that you have written about what happened when you first started taking it. I know I like to say that when I first started taking it (it’s been a few years now), within the first ten days, I had what I now call Zeolite euphoria because I felt so good. It’s like if you’re doing something (or you’re not doing something) and you don’t even know how bad you feel until you do something else and you feel good.
MEGHAN ROOT: Yes.
DEBRA: I thought I was doing pretty well until I took Zeolite. By day five or ten, I just woke up and I went, “Wow! I don’t remember ever feeling like that.” I realized that what it was was that was toxic chemicals were no longer in my body – not completely, but that enough had left my body from taking Zeolite that I can feel the difference.
Your body will remove heavy metals first. And with heavy metals, our body doesn’t remove them on its own. And so if you’re not doing something like taking Pure Body, your body is just accumulating and accumulating and accumulating heavy metals.
One of the things that I’ve learned when I started researching detox is that you have to do the right detox for the thing that you want to remove. You can drink green smoothies all day long and it’s not going to remove heavy metals. It will remove other things from your body, but not heavy metals.
And so heavy metals are some of the most toxic things that you can be having in your body and cause some of the worst health effects. You could go to all the doctors in the world, but if you still have heavy metals in your body, you’re not going to get well. That’s just a plain fact.
So this is why I’m constantly saying over and over and over, “Take Pure Body, take Pure Body, take Pure Body” because the first thing people should do is just get the heavy metals out.
So tell us what happened to you when you started taking it.
MEGHAN ROOT: Well, it’s similar to how you described your initial experience. I don’t want to say I was skeptical because I was already a proponent of detoxing, so I was not nervous to introduce this. I just didn’t know how much of an impact it was going to have on me because at the time, I would’ve considered myself as well as I could’ve been.
DEBRA: Me too.
MEGHAN ROOT: And I’ve been taking this for about two years now and I felt great. I mean, I did. I thought I felt great. I was occasionally tired and occasionally, I didn’t sleep well, but I just that was normal.
And then I started taking Pure Body and it worked. It was like a week after I started taking it. It was like this cloud had been lifted off of me. I mean, the first two things that I’ve noticed where my mental clarity. I just felt like – you know, you have days where you’re really on and then days where you’re maybe off. I just felt like I was on. I could think clearer, faster. I was making connections better. It was effortless. And I also was sleeping better at night. Those are the first two things that I notice.
But again, that’s one of those things that I cannot go without because it is. Once you realize what you’re capable of feeling like with a product like the Zeolite, like Pure Body, you don’t want to go back to where you were because it’s like being a whole other person. You’re in another gear. And so I’ve so enjoyed my experience with it. I recommend it to everybody. And it has such a profound impact on my life. It’s almost hard to talk about because I get so excited about…
DEBRA: I understand. I feel the same way, I feel the same way. It’s just in this world that we’re living in today, there’s so many toxic exposures and so many exposures to heavy metals. And radiation, it removes radiation. I just put something on my blog this week about how Pure Body helps our body with radiation exposures we’re having now and radiation exposures from the past and how those radiation exposures can affect our health and what your body does.
So with all these things that it removes, I think everybody should have it.
We’ve only got about 30 seconds left, so I want to tell people that I’m actually doing a giveaway. If you want to get a free bottle of Pure Body, then just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, scroll down the page and you’ll see Meghan and her beautiful face, smiling face. Right below that, you can center the contest to win a bottle of Pure Body. We’re going to have two winners.
I’ve got two seconds left, so thank you so much, Meghan.
MEGHAN ROOT: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
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 how toxic chemicals cause free radical damage that ages your body, and which specific antioxidants to take to heal free radical damage in various parts of your body. 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
- Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
- You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
- Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
- It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
- How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
- Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
- Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
- Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph
Date of Broadcast: November 5, 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. We have an autumn day today, Wednesday, November 5th 2014. Today, we’re going to talk about how toxic chemicals aid your body and what you can do to stay young.
I don’t know if you’ve seen my pictures, I don’t know how old you think I am, but everybody tells me that I look younger than I actually am. I’m not going to tell you how old I am today, but I could guarantee to you, I am much older than my picture looks. People are just guessing all the time how old I am and I’m actually pretty old. I mean, you can figure this out because last Saturday, November 1st, I celebrated 30 years of having my books continuously I print. If I’ve been writing books and having them published for 30 years, then – I didn’t start when I was six years old.
But I think that I look so young because I’ve been away from so many toxic chemicals so much. Obviously, it’s impossible to stay away from 100% of them in today’s world. There’s so many things that you can do to remove them from your home and your workplace and your body. And when you do that, then you’re not suffering from the damaging effects that we’re going to be talking about.
So my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday, so she was on two weeks ago and she’ll be on again two weeks from now. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs and uses medicinal plants and other natural substances in place of drugs in order to handle physical problems.
Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! It’s great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here too. So, we’re kind of in this pattern of starting off your shows with me telling how well I’m doing from working with you and having you give me various supplements to do various things.
So last week, I think we were talking about weight loss and I was talking about my weight loss of 14 lbs. since I’ve been working with you. But the thing that’s happened in the last two weeks that has been really astounding to me is that I actually have so much energy that I want to exercise. I want to exercise.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That is just so great!
DEBRA: It is because I’ve spent most of my life not exercising because it’ll just be, “Oh, I have to drag my body out of the chair?” or I get short of breath or something like that. And so I have this little rebounder. I’ve had it for a couple of years and I know that jumping on a rebounder is really good for you. But knowing that something is good for you and actually doing it are two different things.
When I started out, I could maybe ten bounces. I mean, that’s how out of shape I was. And so then, I got up to a hundred. And then a couple of weeks ago, I got up to 150. And this week, I’ve been doing sets of 200 bounces and I’ve been doing that two or three times a day.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That is great!
DEBRA: Yes, yes. This is huge progress.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m just so very, very happy for you. You deserve it. Your health is just of the utmost important.
DEBRA: It is because really, if you don’t have health, you’re not going to be able to do anything else in the world. So actually, we’re talking about aging. As my body is getting older, I am getting stronger and healthier and more able. And so aging doesn’t have to be deteriorating. It could be restoring.
Anyway, let’s start out just by talking about toxic chemicals and how they damage your body.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So there’s different categories of things that can be damaging to the body. We know heavy metals, lead, mercury and nickel, these things can accumulate in the body because they really don’t leave the body. It doesn’t have a really good process for eliminating it. What actually helps eliminate heavy metals pretty effectively are saunas.
DEBRA: Yes.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Because saunas, most of these heavy metals are stored under the skin and they can come out in the sweat. So we know that’s a very good way to remove that kind of body burden so to speak.
But we also know that the chemicals, the pesticides has to be fat soluble to stay in the body. So I’ll explain what that means. From a chemistry standpoint, something that’s water soluble, if you’re in contact with this chemical and it’s water soluble, it is going to go into the urine and leave the body. But they’re more your really aren’t water soluble chemical that accumulate in the body, so those aren’t the ones we really concern ourselves with.
When you think about a pesticide, the reason why it’s fat soluble is because think about it, when they spread a field, how do these bugs die? You don’t see bugs that are burst apart, right? That doesn’t happen. They find them dead. And how they die is in the central nervous system. So these bugs are neurological toxins to these different insects and they have affinity to do that. That’s why they’re also neurological toxins for us. So someone that maybe sprays pesticide for a living will be at a higher risk for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, any of these neurological disorders.
So people need to kind of phrase these things in their mind, going like, “What are we trying to get rid of?” Metals are easily removed from the Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox that I use. That’s going to work its way into the central nervous system in the brain too so that if someone ate a lot of fish at one time, that can remove mercury. But it’s important to say, “We want to remove fat soluble chemicals” and to do that, the body has to undergo moving the pesticides out of the fat, into the blood stream and changing them in the liver to make them more water soluble.
So it’s important to note that that’s how these things kill bugs and they also accumulate in us.
DEBRA: Yes! So then what do you do…?
PAMELA SEEFELD: I think it’s interesting. I don’t know if people really think of it that way.
DEBRA: Well actually, I think of it that way because I wrote several pages exactly on that process in my book, Toxic-Free. But I had to research that and I had to have a friend of mine who’s a doctor explain it to me. You explained it really, really well. But I only know this because I’ve been studying toxicology for 30 years.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You’re an expert in the field and so you would know that, but the person listening, they might not have had it presented to them in that matter to understand how it works. I hope that that clarifies the different levels and the things we’re trying to remove out of the body.
DEBRA: Yes, and you explained that very well because the heavy metals have to be removed in a different way than how the pesticides need to be removed. Even fluoride needs to be removed in a different way.
This is what I’m finding out as I’m researching the whole subject of detox. You have to know what it is that you’re wanting to remove from the body in order to remove it. To just drink a green smoothie doesn’t necessarily remove what you want to remove. That’s why we need to be so careful about this one when we’re actually doing it.
Tell us about free radicals and how the toxic chemicals, that damage that occurs with toxic chemicals.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Yes, absolutely. Great question. So free radicals, basically what is – and we’re going to talk a little bit about antioxidants coming up. Free radicals are basically an unpaired electron. It’s an unpaired electron and it’s allowing damage to take place.
So what can free radicals do in the body? If you don’t have anti-oxidants whether you’re getting them from food or from supplements (sometimes, I like to say you can get it from both), what they do is it can damage blood vessels and vasculature and allow for plaque and hardening of the arteries and atherosclerotic disease.
They can work specifically on the arteries, but also on the internal organs (the liver, the kidneys).
And a good example of free radicals that are damaging is macular degeneration. When these free radicals are damaging the eye and people start having issues where they start losing their sight as they get to be elderly.
DEBRA: Right! So I also wrote about free radicals in Toxic-Free. Actually, anybody who’s interested in how toxic chemicals affects your body and what the detox process is, there’s a real clear explanation in my book if you just get my book, Toxic-Free. But I’m going to explain something about free radicals because this is how I thought of it really easily.
What free radicals are is that they’re a natural byproduct of energy production. So our body is producing free radicals. What they are is they’re molecules, but they’re unpaired on their outer shells. And so it’s like if you were a single person, you would be like an unpaired electron and you’re looking to mate up with another electron.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right.
DEBRA: But what happens is instead of mating with another single electron, they go steal husbands and wives from other marriages and they destroy those marriages.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Aah, I like your analogy.
DEBRA: Isn’t that great?
PAMELA SEEFELD: I like that. No, I really like that. That’s simplistic because I mean, really, I’m sure most people in their mind don’t know how to picture an electron.
DEBRA: Right, right. But that’s exactly the function that’s happening. We need to go to break. When we come back, more about antioxidants and free radicals and unpaired electrons.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s funny.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about how toxic chemicals age your body and what you can do to stay young. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. There’s actually a word for it, it’s ‘pharmacognicist’.
I always like to mention this ‘pharmacognocy’ because it means the study of medicinal plants, but the word root itself is pharma-, which is drugs and -cogno, which is intelligence. So plants are drugs with intelligence and I really like that because nature has its own intelligence and it gets transferred to the plants into our bodies and then that intelligence helps heal us. Yes, is that correct? Hello?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That is correct.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So let’s go back to anti-oxidants and free radicals. Alright! So then the free radicals, when they mate up with husbands and wives instead of another single electron, then there’s damage. It just destroys that. And so then what happens with the antioxidants?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So the antioxidants go and they stop this process. They’re basically donating electrons. So what’s important is there’s different levels. We think of vitamin E and vitamin C, those are very strong antioxidants. Vitamin C is the water soluble antioxidant, so that goes into the blood and the tissues that have water affinity and vitamin E is the fat-soluble antioxidants. So that goes to the brain, to the cellular membranes, things like that.
The problem with free radicals is they are not taken care of and ‘neutralized’ so to speak, you end up with damage to tissues. So antioxidants are really an important way to circumvent that. The vitamin C and E are really good. I did some searches in the Library of Medicine because I have some particular favorite antioxidants that I like.
I like Resveratrol quite a bit. Resveratrol has anti-cancer activity. It decreases your lipid, your circulating lipid (so your cholesterol, your triglycerides) and its anti-aging effects are really great because it encompasses anti-aging properties in the inside of the body, but it also stops hyperpigmentation and aging in the skin, which I thought was really interesting.
So it works inside and outside. And really, that’s what we’re all kind of concerned about, right? We want to look young, but we also want to feel young too.
So this has high affinity for the plasma membrane.
DEBRA: What is Resveratrol? What plant does that come from? How does that get made?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Resveratrol, it was originally located in red wine. It’s kind of like the going joke you need to drink lots of red wine for getting your Resveratrol. But you’d have to be drinking quite a bit, which probably wouldn’t be good either intoxicated people walking around all day. And we do find these components in wine, but it’s to a very small extent.
So the capsule, they’re relatively inexpensive. They work really, really well and they’re well-tolerated. There’s also some data, I think this is quite interesting, that this has really high penetration to the brain. And they have some studies that they’ve shown with mice that they make them both alcoholic mice. That’s the particular mouse that they breed. And then they made sure that these mice had cognitive impairment as a result of it. They couldn’t find their way around the maze.
And then they gave the one group a placebo and the other group, they gave Resveratrol. And within a month, the Resveratrol group actually overcame their cognitive decline and could run the maze like mighty mouse. So we know that it really does help to change tissue in the brain too in a favorable sense.
So there’s tons of different antioxidants. I can go to a lot of the different ones, but Resveratrol might be the one you really want to try because it does prevent the aging of the skin, which that’s been shown to be statistically significant especially the hyperpigmentation and the sun spots that you get. And then also, the internal organs and the circulating lipids and the anti-cancer and anti heart attack capacity that it entails as well is really important.
DEBRA: That’s really good.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I would tell you too green tea.
DEBRA: Yeah?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good. Green tea is excellent as well. Green tea contains epigallocatechins, over 300 of them. I would tell people not just drinking the green tea because when you do a green tea teabag, you’re only doing the water soluble components of the plant, right?
DEBRA: Yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So drinking green tea is great for you, but I prefer to tell people to actually consume the capsules because when you consume the capsules, you’re getting all the tea. You’re not just getting the water soluble components, but you’re getting the fat soluble components.
So remember, fat soluble is where all the problems are. You want something that’s going to target into these membranes, into these tissues and the anti-cancer – like especially for breast cancer with green tea, it’s highly efficacious.
So I would tell people that green tea capsules. And not only that too, you get the added benefit that green tea capsules are great for weight – weight loss, I should be more specific.
So I know I do that. When I exercise in the morning, I take four small green tea capsules just before I start working out with my detox bottle. That way, it really helps to burn a lot more fun. There are studies that have shown that the increase in fat-burning is quite significant. So those two supplements are something that most people should really be taking.
DEBRA: That sounds good to me. I actually take a green tea extract. So would the fat soluble be in the extract or should I switch to capsules?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. So yeah, if it’s an extract that’s in glycerin or in alcohol, yes, it would because glycerin and alcohol (especially alcohol, maybe more so) extracts those components out. When you do a water soluble extract (with basically, the hot water over the tea bag), you are still getting components, but you’re not getting all the epigallocatechins that are in there because you really want the 300 different components that are in there.
An extract would have that. I like just taking the capsules, which is pretty easy because they’re tiny, little capsules. The good part about it is that I don’t do real well with caffeine and the capsules – and I think you should notice it for your extract, they don’t make you jittery.
DEBRA: Yeah. No, it doesn’t make me jittery at all.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! Whereas if you can get it from coffee, I don’t tolerate it very well.
DEBRA: I don’t tolerate coffee well either even just a cup of coffee in the morning. I only drink it like if I’m in a different timezone and I have to be awake.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the way I approach it. I don’t have coffee in my house.
DEBRA: I don’t either.
PAMELA SEEFELD: But if I’m working as a pharmacist and I’m filling prescriptions and it’s late in the afternoon, I take maybe a few sips. I’m probably getting 2 mg., just something just to make sure that I’m not getting tired.
This is really good too because we’re like parallel lives.
DEBRA: We are, we are.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, exactly. And green tea is a great way to get those components – so Resveratrol and green tea. I want to mention too just eating vegetables in your salad. If you have vegetables that have all these different colors, if you put olive oil on them, you’re going to absorb all of these flavinoids and polyphenols directly out of the vegetables. That’s why you’re eating food in the first place, to nourish the body.
DEBRA: Let’s talk more about that after the break.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.
DEBRA: Yes, we need to go break. So we’ll talk more about that when we come back.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about how to stay young even in a toxic world that cause the damage and aging to your body. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
And Pamela, we haven’t given your phone number yet. Pamela will talk to you on the phone for free about whatever your physical condition is that you’re concerned about and make some recommendations. So tell us more about what you do and what your phone number is.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, very good. So my background is clinical pharmacy, but also, of course, pharmacognocy, which we discussed. I have a pharmacy in Clearwater, Florida. I do natural products. I’m a natural product pharmacist technically. We do homeopathic medicine, full service of vitamins.
And basically, I can even look at your blood work. I can tell you what’s going on in your body, not necessarily what’s normal range and out of range. And we can customize a program for you if you want to get off of particular medications. I do specialize even in mental health. So it’s all encompassing.
I also veterinary homeopathy for dogs and cats. So if there’s a particular ailment that your favorite friend in the house is suffering from, I’d be happy to help you with that.
So my number for the pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I would be really honored to help any of you that might have some issues about the medications you’re on or avoiding medicine. Everything we do here is all-encompassing. We keep a chart for you and all services are complimentary. So that’s basically the gist of it.
DEBRA: Yes. And she’s extremely effective. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. I found out about here and started having her on the show and started working with her myself because I was hearing from so many people how well they were doing after visiting Pamela.
And even my medical doctor, when I told him that Pamela was giving me some things to help some of the things that had been long-term conditions for me, he said, “Just do what she tells you to do.” And so she’s very, very, very highly regarded.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s great.
DEBRA: Yeah, she’s very highly regarded here.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I teach this. I’ve done this a long time. I’ll be very glad to answer any questions that you might have about the supplements you’re taking, the medicines they’re taking. I know both very well. This is something that I can help you with tremendously.
DEBRA: Yeah, she really can. And another thing I just want to add about what she does is that she’s looking at supplements from the viewpoint of a pharmacist. The dose that you’re taking and what you’re taking it with. All are intertwined with how effective it is instead of just going and saying, looking at the shelf in the natural food store and saying, “Well, what should I take?” or reading an article.
Have someone who really knows what they’re doing help you choose what your supplements are. It really makes a difference, it really does because then you’ll be spending your money on something that’s really working.
When I first went to Pamela, one of the first things that she said was, she looked at my blood work and she said, “You know, whatever it is you’ve been doing, you haven’t been making progress for the past eight years.” And then she gave me some things and I made progress in two weeks.
So that’s the difference. And so if you have something that you’ve been struggling with, please, please, please call her because she’s helped so many people.
Anyway, give your phone number and we’ll go back to talking about antioxidants.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, thank you. So the number here at my pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I’d be very honored to help with any of you with any issues you might have.
DEBRA: Yes, call her. Anyway, so antioxidants. We were talking about food before the break and you were telling us that we should eat salad and put olive oil on it. Explain about why the olive oil.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So fat on these vegetables. And it doesn’t have to be a lot. It can be half a teaspoon even. When you have fat on the vegetables, what it does is it allows to carry these components, which are fat soluble and that’s what you want, these antioxidants because we were saying that the areas that are most susceptible in your body are the ones that have cellular membranes and that is made of fat, so the fatty acids.
So what we want to do is we want to have this peak in the blood stream be very high. So a lot of these people that are dieting and eating lots of salad, but they’re not having olive oil with it, they’re getting the peaks in the blood stream. That explains why people, when they go on extreme diets, so they’re switching up just eating lots of salads in trying to lose weight, if they’re just putting vinegar on their salad…
DEBRA: The lemon juice.
PAMELA SEEFELD: …they start losing hair. The reason why, it’s not just the idea with the little calories, they’re not absorbing anything. That’s the real problem. So by not absorbing things, it’s causing these particular types of problems.
So the vegetables are really important. But also too, the supplements. I was talking about the Resveratrol and the green tea.
I want to mention, kind of an honorable mention of curcumin, which is turmeric. Turmeric is really interesting. Before the show, I did a Medline search in the Library of Medicine to see some of the different studies and turmeric, actually, we know it protects heart disease and cancer, it reduces incidence of type II diabetes, but its antioxidant effects are extremely effective for protecting neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.
It has a high affinity for the brain. And as a result of that, if you’re really concerned about cognitive decline, this would probably be something that you would really want to take.
DEBRA: So how…
PAMELA SEEFELD: But studies also show that it really…
DEBRA: Go ahead.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Go ahead.
DEBRA: Well, I was going to ask…
PAMELA SEEFELD: …macular degeneration, which I thought was interesting.
DEBRA: That is interesting. I think I should take that. I’d been considering taking that just recently. And I want to ask you, so you just probably give it to people in capsules?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, correct. You can cook with it, but it just doesn’t quite give us the peak in the blood stream because you’re not getting the same amount.
And I would also tell you that this one is particularly sensitive to needing fat present at the meal to have it absorbed. So if you’re having an apple for breakfast, this is not going to be absorbed. I tell my clients when I put them in curcumin (which is also extremely effective for arthritis and for pain), you can use curcumin many times even in place of narcotics for people who have severe back pain or rheumatism because it works like a COX-2 inhibitor, which is like Celebrex. It works exactly the same. It blocks chemical signals. You’re also getting the effects to the brain.
DEBRA: So what you need if you’re going to take turmeric, you need to take it with fat. So if you were eating Indian food…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You have to have that. Otherwise, it won’t absorb.
DEBRA: Yeah, if you were eating Indian food, it has a lot of turmeric in it, you would also be having the fat from the food. But you need to make sure if you’re going to take a capsule that you’re taking it with some fat.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important because I see people that have tried turmeric for pain – usually, most people take it for rheumatism. And they’re like, “Well, that didn’t work.” And then I bring it to the fact that that’s why it’s important that people call me and I tell them, “If you eat this particular food with this particular supplement, you’re going to get the full 99% of the dose into the bloodstream.”
And we can target different supplement and different foods to deliver these things in a more effective manner. That’s what’s really important, understanding the physiology of your body and the chemistry of your food and making these things all work together in harmony, right?
DEBRA: Right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: …because a lot of people, they’re not thinking of it in that sense.
DEBRA: Well, not only are they not thinking of it…
PAMELA SEEFELD: That is very, very important. So why spend the money if it’s not going to work?
DEBRA: You’re the first person in 30 years of study on this subject that I’ve ever heard say this, but it makes so much sense. And you’re trained. You’re bringing a different viewpoint to it. I think that you have your whole pharmacy background and that you’re looking at all these interactions and it makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’m so interested in this.
We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about antioxidants and other things that you can do to help stay youthful in a toxic world that is constantly aging your body. 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 aging, antioxidants, toxic chemicals and what we can do to have more antioxidants in our body.
So what do you think about chocolate as an antioxidant?
PAMELA SEEFELD: I think chocolate is just showing very convincingly the data that chocolate has strong antioxidant activity. But what I would say is that unfortunately, the majority of the chocolate we see is combined with a lot of sugar and fat.
I personally like regular chocolate like everybody does, but you know what I’ve tried to do (and I can do this a great deal of the time) is have you ever tried Cocoa Nibs?
DEBRA: Yes, I have. And you know what?
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s raw chocolate pieces.
DEBRA: One of the thing that I found about it is it actually does taste like chocolate, but it has a real kick to it in terms of – it seems to have more of a caffeine kind of kick. It’s more like caffeine than eating regular chocolate. Somehow, eating a chocolate bar maybe doesn’t have as much chocolate in it because it’s got all the other stuff in it. But the Cocoa Nibs, they’re really good. I like Cocoa Nibs.
What I like to do is I like to take cocoa powder and then mix it with whatever I want to mix it with. And one of the things that I like to mix it with is I just mix it with grass-fed cream and put whatever natural sweetener I want to put in it…
PAMELA SEEFELD: Great ideas!
DEBRA: I’ll make a little fudge.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a great idea!
DEBRA: Yeah, one serving at a time like I’ll take a teaspoon, a heaping teaspoon of cocoa and then I’ll just put a little bit of, say, coconut sugar or honey or whatever and then put in the cream and just make a little paste and it’s delicious. It’s delicious and you can mix it with nuts or put mint extract or orange extract or whatever you want. That’s what I do when I want chocolate.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very smart. I mean, a lot of times if I want to make a little fudge, I’ll mix cocoa powder with a little bit of agave and almond butter.
DEBRA: Hmmm… that sounds good.
PAMELA SEEFELD: You can roll them into little balls and put them in the refrigerator.
DEBRA: Yeah!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. I mean, you can be creative. There’s lots of different ways you can do it. So I think that the antioxidant activity in cocoa is hard to deny. It’s there and it’s really – life’s but enjoyment. The cocoa is good for you. We’re not saying, “Sit there and eat the whole bag of fun-sized sneakers” even though I was handing out candy on Halloween. I’ve had to bring it to the hospital to get it all out of my house because I’m like, “I don’t want to have that stuff sitting around.”
DEBRA: I know.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s so funny. Antioxidants some place else thinking that other people will eat it. But yeah, the antioxidant activity in chocolate is definitely there. We know that has high affinity for fat and water soluble areas of the body. That’s very important.
I was going to mention too, we’re talking about anti-aging exercise. What does the data show about exercise?
DEBRA: Oh, good. Tell us.
PAMELA SEEFELD: We know that the study show – and this is very interesting. This just recently came out. They took people that never exercised. These people were an average of 65, they never worked out before and they took a punch biopsy of the skin on their derriere. So that’s an area that normally doesn’t see the sun and so will have the least aging effects underneath the microscope as the rest of the body.
And then they put these people on exercise routine and they had them exercising for 45 minutes for four times a week.
After three weeks of this particular study, they went and resampled their skin and their skin in that time period from the exercise (and they don’t know if it’s the sweating or the exercise) actually look like a younger person’s skin.
DEBRA: Wow!
PAMELA SEEFELD: So the anti-aging effects of exercise are really important especially on the skin. The sweating process and also the capillary dilation during exercise allows more – this is my theory – allows more of the nutrients and the antioxidants that are present in your body to go to the cellular membranes and be much more effective. So it’s kind of up-regulating the area.
DEBRA: My theory is… go ahead.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.
DEBRA: Well, I was going to say too…
PAMELA SEEFELD: I was going to say too white blood cell demargination. The white blood cells have a transient increase during exercise. So these cells were normally kind of hanging on to the side of the blood vessels. Because your heart rate goes up, they’re kicked off.
And so if you take someone’s sample of their CBC and looked at their white blood cells prior to exercise and then right after exercise, you get this transient increase. That’s why people that work out quite a bit don’t get sick.
DEBRA: Hmmm… well, I was going to say that my theory about why your skin looks better when you exercise is because when you sweat, you’re removing toxic chemicals from your body and so there’s less free radicals damage.
And I’ve also noticed that at times when I drink a lot more water (like if you go on vacation and you’re hot and sweating in some other climate where you aren’t usually), I notice that my skin just looks clearer and softer.
And so I really drink. I drink about three quarts of water a day, which I think is more than most people drink. I’m just sitting at my desk and I just drink and drink and drink pure water. I think that makes a huge difference.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it does. You have to realize your body is mostly water. So basically, when it comes down to it, your carbon and all these electrolytes (sodium, potassium and your hydrogen) – I mean, basically, your body is a chemistry stew and what’s holding it all together is water. So your skin, of course, when it’s hydrated, it’s going to make a huge difference as far as the way it looks.
And believe it or not, even from people going out in the sun and sun tanning, just being hydrated makes a huge difference in the texture of the skin regardless of whether the person had sunscreen or not because dehydrate steps in and it’s really common that this can happen.
So I would tell people that you’d want to really push fluids and also try and find room for exercise during the week, whatever you can do. Personally, I think that the best time to work out is in the morning because it kind of sets the tone for the day and gets your metabolism up. But some people do much better in the evening. It just depends if it affects your sleep or not.
I would also say too there’s another supplement that I’m interested in, collagen. If you take collagen or hyaluronic acid, that can work for the joints if you have arthritis.
Collagen also, of course, builds up the collagen under the skin. You can take oil collagen. It’s pretty inexpensive. I use a drink here at the pharmacy that I take myself and it kind of tastes like orange. You put it in the water and it brings you into a peak in the blood stream really fast (but you can take it in capsules too).
And collagen, what it’s going to do is it’s going to help the skin look much more youthful because collagen is kind of like the – I want to say the scaffolding under the skin that holds it up, makes you look useful. You can take it in a supplement.
And what you can find too is that collagen has high affinity for the joints. So a lot of people, as you get older, you start having mild arthritis in your joints, it reverses that. So that’s an easy, inexpensive way to get the anti-aging effects. But at the same time, also, be working on the joints because rheumatism tends to set in as people get older. So those are some really good things too.
I’m not sure, but what are you using on your skin right now?
DEBRA: What am I using on my skin. I don’t use a particular skin product. I’ve tried a number of different ones. I mean, people are always sending me skin products because that’s a big thing in the natural products industry, natural skin products. And so I’ve tried a lot of them, but I just basically wash my face with filtered water from my shower and just various kinds of soap, just soap. I know that I probably shouldn’t do that.
PAMELA SEEFELD: You probably shouldn’t say that because your skin looks really good. Your face looks great.
DEBRA: Thank you. Okay! So Pamela, wait, I want to ask you a question. How old do you think I am? I think you don’t know my age. I think you don’t know my age, right?
PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I have no idea how old you are.
DEBRA: How old do you think I look? How old do you think I look?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Late forties? I have no idea.
DEBRA: Okay, that’s what people think. I’m older than that, I’m older than that. But see…
PAMELA SEEFELD: No, you look really good. And you know what too? And all kidding aside because people can’t see you (we’re talking on the radio), the difference since you’ve been doing the Body Anew and the few things that I’ve put you on, your skin and your body has transformed quite a bit. I mean, you looked pretty before, but now, you really glow when I see your face.
DEBRA: Thank you. I agree.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I can tell that things are just starting to fall into place.
DEBRA: I agree. Yeah, yeah. And you guys, you should see Pamela. You could go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand see Pamela’s picture. I want to look like Pamela because she just radiates health more than anybody I’ve ever met. I mean, you cannot look at her and not say that she’s not the healthiest person in the room. She looks healthy in a way that I’ve never seen anybody look health and I’m going to look that way too. So there!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely! That’s the only way to be. I get stopped in the grocery store and they’re like, “You look really healthy” and I’m like, “I do because I am. Please call me. I’d love to help you too.” So it’s all-encompassing.
Let me tell you, your health is your wealth and you really want to take care of your body. You only have one body. Taking some of these simple supplements we were talking about – the Resveratrol, green tea, salad with olive oil, maybe some turmeric, some curcumin, vitamin C and E, of course, getting enough sleep (we’ve talked about this before, sleep and exercise are very important), all these things that you do, these body habits affect aging in subtle ways, but very significant as well.
And these are things that we can easily do. This isn’t really too difficult. Even if you have to take the stairs when you’re at work, little bits of exercise here and there make a huge difference in the heart disease, cancer and also the way the skin appears. Study is showing that with people exercising, it can change their skin to a younger person just from a few weeks. It’s really a testament that exercise is not just for the physical health, but the skin health and the mental health as well.
DEBRA: Well, I want to say that I have this rebounder I mentioned. It only cost me $40. I just have it in the corner of the room.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you!
DEBRA: And it takes me what? A minute or two to do 200 bounces. And so I can just take a little break from my desk and do the 200 bounces and come back. It’s not even time-consuming anybody can do this.
We’ve got only 20 seconds less, so give your phone number again.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you can call me here at my pharmacy, the number here is 727-442-4955, I would be very glad to help you and your family with any questions you might have.
DEBRA: Great! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!
PureBody Liquid Zeolite for X-ray and CT Scan Exposures
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I have had a good deal of radiation exposure from past medical examinations – many different x-rays, and the one that scares me most is the abdominal/pelvic CT scan I had 10 years ago. Of course back then I did not realize how dangerous/high the radiation exposure was (since I was following doctors’ recommendations), but now I really worry. Is there anything I can do now to remove/reverse harmful radiation exposure? Can the zeolite drops help now from exposure 10 years ago? My 4 year old daughter also had a chest x-ray at 18 months. Would you recommend giving her zeolite drops for a certain period?
Thanks so much!
Debra’s Answer
YES, taking PureBody Liquid Zeolite CAN help your body detox from X-ray and CT scan exposure.
I contacted Touchstone Essentials for confirmation, and here is their reply…
When a person is exposed to radiation, the source is important to understand the inherent risk to exposure. The three types of radiation are:
- Alpha Particles – An alpha particle can be considered as a helium nucleus. Helium has 2 protons and 2 neutrons in its nucleus. If both of its electrons were removed, the result would be an alpha particle. Since there are two protons and no electrons, alpha particles are positively charged. Alpha particles are not very penetrating. Paper, clothing or a few centimeters of air can effectively shield against alpha particles. However, if ingested or inhaled, alpha particles can be hazardous.
- Beta Particles – Beta particles are high-speed electrons emitted from the nuclei of decaying radioisotopes. Since these are electrons, they have a negative charge and a small mass, approximated as 0 amu. Beta particles may travel 2 or 3 meters through air. Heavy clothing, thick cardboard or one-inch thick wood will provide protection from beta radiation.
- Gamma Radiation – Gamma radiation is very much like x rays. It has no charge, a very short wavelength and high energy. Gamma radiation is the most penetrating form of radiation considered in this discussion. It travels great distances through air (500 meters). To be protected from a gamma emitter, thick sheets of lead or concrete are required.
Sunlight gives off the following types of radiation.
- electromagnetic radiation
- beta radiation – consisting of electrons
- charged atomic nucleii – of which alpha radiation (charged helium atoms) is an example (alpha particles)
- Neutrino radiation.
The electromagnetic radiation is also of four types which can all be considered Gamma radiation.
- X rays
- Ultra violet
- visible light
- infrared
Cells in the body are damaged through the process of ionization when exposed to radiation. Radiation-induced ionizations may act directly on the cellular component molecules or indirectly on water molecules, causing water-derived radicals. Radicals react with nearby molecules in a very short time, resulting in breakage of chemical bonds or oxidation (addition of oxygen atoms) of the affected molecules. The major effect in cells is DNA breaks.
What the Pure Body and Pure Body Extra Strength can do is help in the repair of the cells by removing the positively charged byproducts caused by the exposure to the radiation. While Pure Body and Pure Body Extra Strength will remove radioactive particles—think uranium ore dust or radioactive dust from White Sands Proving Grounds—that type of exposure is going to be much less likely than simple exposure to a radiation source like an x-ray or exposure to the sun. The exposure damage happens in milliseconds or thousandths of a second. The sooner you can start the repair/healing process the less likely there will be long term effects from the exposure, based on amount of course.
Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
Today my guest and I are switching seats—I am the guest and my long-time friend Annie B. Bond will be the host. I’m celebrating 30 years in print (it was November 1 to be exact) so we’re going to talk about where the current interest in toxics in consumer products started (with my first book) and the progress made over the last 30 years. We’ve come a long way identifying toxics in consumer products and their health effects, and many more toxic free products are available today than ever before.
Debra Lynn Dadd is the author of seven books on toxics in consumer products and safe alternatives, including Toxic Free (Tarcher/Penguin, 2011). She has compiled the largest website on toxic free living, which is the only website 100% devoted to toxic chemicals, their health effects, where they are found in consumer products, and how to live toxic free. She was named “The Queen of Green” by the New York Times (mid-1990s). Debra is the host of Toxic Free Talk Radio. www.debralynndadd.com
Annie B. Bond is the author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010). She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). www.anniebbond.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
Host: Annie Bond
Guest: Debra Lynn Dadd
Date of Broadcast: November 4, 2014
ANNIE BOND: Hi, I’m Annie Bond and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we discuss how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. And if you’re wondering whether you’re listening to the right show, Debra Lynn Dadd is the host, but today, she’s going to be the guest because we’re celebrating the fact that her books have now been continuously in print for 30 years.
Last Saturday, November 1st was the anniversary of the publication of Non-Toxic & Natural, the very first book about toxic chemicals and consumer products.
Hi, Debra!
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Hi, Annie. Thanks for being here today to be the host, so I can sit on the other seat.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh! Well, I’m so excited to be on this show and really honored to be the host today as you have been a huge mentor of mine as well as just a life-saving and incredibly valuable resource as the first person who actually came out with the first how-to book of non-toxic living. I just could never – I’m always forever grateful.
So please do tell us your story. How did you ever come with the idea of the first book?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, I didn’t set out to write a book. My story actually began in 1978. At the time, I was a classical musician. I played the piano. I lived in San Francisco and I accompanied a lot of classical musicians and opera singers.
And then what happened was my mother became ill with cancer. Later on, I found out that we actually were living – I grew up in an area where we were downwind from a factory. It turned out to be a cancer causer. My mother actually died of cancer when she was only 51.
And approximately the same time, I became very ill. I moved home from San Francisco. I lived in Concord, California, which is about an hour away from San Francisco. I moved home to take care of my mother because I knew she was dying.
At that particular time, my father was trying to give her some kind of alternative cancer treatment. It was very difficult to find anyone. He wanted to give her intravenous vitamin C. So he took her to a doctor who was willing to do that who was also treating people for what is now called ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’ (at the time, it was called ‘environmental illness’.
He found out that these people who this doctor was treating were being exposed to toxic chemicals and having reactions to the toxic chemicals. He kind of put two and two together and said, “This is what’s wrong with my daughter.”
He came home and he said, “Well, you know how you’re depressed all the time and you can’t think straight and all these things,” all these things that were going on with me at the time. He said, “I’m going to this doctor and there’s a whole office full of people who are experiencing exactly what you’re experiencing.
ANNIE BOND: Wow! Wow! That’s amazing.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: That’s how I found out about it in the first place. Of course, nobody was talking about toxics then. There were no books like mine. It wasn’t on the evening news like it is now.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, sure, absolutely.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: No organizations, nothing. It was just completely like this fluke that my father went to this doctor because my mother was dying of cancer.
ANNIE BOND: And he was such a thoughtful man, your father. I mean, that was very…
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Oh, yes.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t go to the doctor. This just sounded outrageous to me. It’s like these products would not be on the shelves if they were that toxic. I mean, isn’t the government doing something?
ANNIE BOND: The government protects us, right?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah. And so I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. And then there was a night where after my mother died, I was sitting, playing the piano and I was playing this very beautiful slow movement from Abram Sonata and I just started crying. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop crying.
Now, my mother had just died, so somebody could look at this and say, “This is grief,” but my father looked at it and said, “She’s having a reaction.” And one of the things that he learned going to this doctor’s office was that if you’re having a chemical reaction, you can take Alka-Seltzer in the gold package and it will stop it.
And so he had bought some Alka-Seltzer. He put an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water. He gave it to me, put it on my hand and said, “Here, drink this.” I screamed and I said, “I will not drink this” and I threw it across the room and…
ANNIE BOND: Wow!
DEBRA LYNN DADD: One of the things that I learned later that one of my reactions, one of my physical, chemical exposure was that I would not help myself.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah, really interesting.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah, yeah. It was like this big resistance, “No, I’m not going to do this.”
ANNIE BOND: It is completely largely temper too, yeah, right.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: And so my father, actually, he went and got another glass, put another Alka-Seltzer tablet in it, wrestled me to the floor, held my nose and poured this down on my throat.
ANNIE BOND: What? That’s unbelievable. What an incredible man! I did not this part of your story.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: He poured it down my throat. And within a minute, it was like I woke up and I said, “What just happened?”
The next day, I went down to the doctor. And of course, they tested me because at the time, they were testing (I think some doctors still do that), they tested me and found out that I was reacting to every chemical they possibly could test for.
And then they wanted to put me on the protocol of giving what are called antigens, which are small amounts of the chemicals, which are supposed to stop your symptoms. Now, it stops symptoms, but it doesn’t cure what’s going on in your body. It doesn’t reverse the poisoning.
It was that experience of trying to figure out how I could get well from this toxic chemical poisoning. That led me to start researching.
And nobody had done this research before. I had to drag myself out of bed, go down to the medical libraries, go down to the poison control centers and try to find out what are the toxic chemicals that make me sick. Where are they?
ANNIE BOND: Well, when we go back to that time, the pioneers like you almost invariably came in because of a family issue. In your case, the tragedy of your mother and your father learning. And then you had to completely start from scratch. And for those of us that came later, we didn’t have to start from scratch so much thanks to you because you really were a trailblazer in this.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Thank you.
ANNIE BOND: So tell me more about the library part.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, we go down to the library. Remember, there’s no Internet.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah. This was like 1982 or something like that?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: That was 1978.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, 1978. Oh, my gosh.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: So it was really even earlier than that. It was 1978 and I would go down to the library and there were two books that saved my life. One was – my father, again, my father thought because I had never taken chemistry in school, he thought I needed a chemistry book. So he bought the Condensed Chemical Dictionary.
And so I started with that. I would look up a chemical like formaldehyde (there were a few chemicals that I could identify). And of course, the patients in the office that are patients with me, they’re all taking about this. But we have no books, we had no guidance. All we know is these toxic chemicals are making us sick.
ANNIE BOND: Right, right.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: And so I’m starting to pick up names of chemicals like formaldehyde and phenol and I looked them up in the Condensed Chemical Dictionary and fortunately, it tells you, “This is how this chemicals are made” and it gives you a very brief, little description of health effects – very, very brief.
And so you could then go look up and say, “Well, this chemical is made from this… “and then you look up the other chemical. That’s really how I started.
And then I went to another book called The Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products, which was in the reference section.
ANNIE BOND: And it’s about 17” thick. I have that one too. And that was an incredible weight.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: But I think it’s probably in every – anybody can go down to any library and it’s in the reference section. I started looking and seeing that this particular product (any product I chose) had this chemical in it. And then I would start researching the health effects and I would say, “Well, my symptoms are headache, depression, fainting in the shower, not able to sleep, blah-blah-blah…”
The one I really remember, the one that is just like the pivotal moment for me was when in one book I found that formaldehyde causes insomnia. And in another book I found, that the chemical that makes permanent press sheets is formaldehyde.
Nobody had ever put that together. Nobody had ever put that together.
And so here I was looking at health effects in one book and matching them up with what chemicals are in the products in other books. I had to go to lots of different books because I had to go to textbooks and things like that to find out what the chemicals were that were used to make consumer products and various things.
ANNIE BOND: We’re going to have to go to break now, but it sounds like at that moment, the jigsaw puzzle was starting to get put together for you.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Right, right.
ANNIE BOND: I’m Annie Bond and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is the author, Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re celebrating her 30 years of being continuously in print. We’ll be back in a minute. I’m curious to know when you started writing your first book? When did you feel like you were beginning to get it together?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, I’ll talk about that when we come back from the break.
ANNIE BOND: Sounds good. Great! Wonderful!
ANNIE BOND: Hi, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Annie Bond. Debra and I have switched seats today. She’s the guest and I’m the host and I am just so delighted to be here to help her celebrate.
And right before the break, we were pushing towards how she started putting it all together enough where she felt she could actually help herself to the point where she got well enough to even write a book. I’d love to hear that piece, Debra.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, once I start finding out, when I found out that formaldehyde was in my bedsheets and it was making me not sleep, I immediately went and looked for any sheet I could find that didn’t have permanent press finish and there was only one brand of sheet available at the time.
And so as I started identifying things like that (the perfume I was wearing was giving me headaches and things like that), I would just eliminate that toxic exposure and very quickly, my symptoms would just go away. The first night I slept on the formaldehyde-free sheets, I actually slept. I went, “Wow! There’s something to this.”
ANNIE BOND: You know, that is such an important piece, which I want to talk a little bit if you don’t mind..
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Sure. Sure, please.
ANNIE BOND: …just about how radically and quickly someone’s body changes. I’ll tell my story later, but it took me six months. I was as toxic as you and so sick. It was unbelievable. Six months in a completely healthy home and I bounced back. My doctor said I was old enough to have a baby. I was like a plant that didn’t have water that suddenly was given water and I just bounced back. It’s awesome. I just wanted to interject the magic of this.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah, that is what happens. That is what happens. People don’t realize how much exposure to toxic chemicals is affecting our health and well-being that when you start removing the toxic chemicals from your home and you start removing it from your body (which is a whole different thing), it’s so important that you’ll just bounce back.
ANNIE BOND: And I love that step-by-step thing.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah!
ANNIE BOND: The headache goes and then this…
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah, it does. It just starts peeling away and you start feeling ecstatic. Really, your body can feel good even living in a toxic world if you just remove the toxic chemicals from your home and remove the toxic chemicals from your body. It makes a huge, huge difference. But anyway…
ANNIE BOND: And then you want to share it, that’s the thing.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: That’s exactly it.
ANNIE BOND: I guess that’s where the natural evolution there, right?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, that was the natural evolution because once I got well, I knew a lot of people who we were on the same situation. And so in 1982, I wrote and self-publish just a little book that was a pile of Xeroxes. It was called A Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive. It was just for my friends so that people would know what the toxic chemicals are.
ANNIE BOND: I have a copy of that somewhere.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Do you have that book? I still have a copy too!
ANNIE BOND: My gosh! That was way back. I remember that now, yeah.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: And one of my patients because I was now working for the doctor advising the patients – a different doctor actually – how to clean up their homes. One of my patients was a newspaper journalist and she had a connection with a publisher, Jeremy Tarcher. She introduced me to her publisher and we did the first book, Non-Toxic & Natural, which was published in 1984. No book had come out like that.
The thing that really got them to do it was that my boyfriend at the time had written a letter to Bon Ami. Bon Ami was doing this whole campaign about, “Tell us how you use Bon Ami.” He wrote to Bon Ami, “My girlfriend this little book” and they were so impressed that they sent me on two 10-city tours.”
I got so much media exposure that that’s why the publisher picked me up. It was just a little book that – it was Xerox. They were Xeroxes. It wasn’t even published. It had a little tape binding that was covering at the staples and that’s how it started.
ANNIE BOND: Unbelievable! It’s so exciting! And so how many books have you written since then?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: I think seven.
ANNIE BOND: It’s really quite a library. I would love to hear.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Seven.
ANNIE BOND: Seven! Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA LYNN DADD: I can’t even remember them all. Let’s see, Non-Toxic & Natural, The Non-Toxic Home, The Non-Toxic, Natural & Earthwise, The Non-Toxic Home & Office, two editions of Home, Safe Home and the most recent one is Toxic-Free.
ANNIE BOND: Unbelievable! That’s just incredible. And I just remember the joy I had – so just to quickly give you a little bit of an update about myself for everybody, I had two catastrophic chemical exposures, which is different than what you had. You had a creeping up experience, right?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Right, right.
ANNIE BOND: And so I became sort of a classic case of chemical sensitivity because I worked at a restaurant that had a gas leak and it sent 80 people to the hospital. And then I had a pesticide exposure that completely contaminated my house and sent me to the hospital for three months.
And so I was lucky enough to – also because of an unbelievable family member, I got to one of the first environmental medicine doctors in the world that happened to be in New Haven , Connecticut at the time.
And so I just can’t tell you what it meant to me when I found your work because I was just as desperate as I could possibly be. I could not lead a normal life.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: I understand.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, it was a great joy for me. I remember going to listen to as if the goddess herself was emerging in Vermont. There were a number of us just hanging on every single word of yours. So thank you. It’s been really great.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. And I remember when you first wrote your first book, Clean & Green and I was very happy to write the foreword to that because…
ANNIE BOND: Oh, I was so honored, yeah.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Such a breakthrough that you did that. I had a few non-toxic cleaning products listed in my book and a few recipes, but you really were the one who did the breakthrough research for coming up with all these do-it-yourself formulas that so many people are using now.
ANNIE BOND: Well, thank you. It’s just an interest of mine. I was sort of steep to northern New England practical lifestyle and I was a hippie. I had that hippie life. It was a wonderful jumping off point for me. I almost didn’t do it because you had done such a glorious job on your own…
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Thank you.
ANNIE BOND: It was just one of those great things, one of these great synergies really. We need to go to break again. My name is Annie Bond and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is author, Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re celebrating her 30 years of being continuously in print. And that’s just wonderful. You’ve got a great website too. Could you give that?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Oh, yes. It’s Toxic Free – I’m so accustomed to say ‘ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com’. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and enter to the whole rest of the website where I have Debra’s list where it has more than 500 – it links to more than 500 websites that sell toxic-free products. And I’ve got thousands of questions on my Q&A. There’s just so much information there. There’s really no reason to live a toxic life.
ANNIE BOND: Wonderful! We’ll be right back.
ANNIE BOND: Hi, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Annie Bond. I’m here with Debra Lynn Dadd. She and I have switched seats together today. She is the guest and I’m the host. I’m delighted to be here to help her celebrate her 30th anniversary of being in print as an expert in toxic-free living.
So Debra, I’m curious. As one of the trailblazers or thetrailblazer actually in the home particularly on non-toxic living, I wonder what do you think, do you think we’ve made any progress regarding toxic for the past 30 years?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, the answer to that is yes and no. I want to give two examples. One is that – I just looked up this morning some statistics about how the organic market, the market for organic products, organic food actually has grown. And so I’m looking at this little chart here that I got off the Internet this morning and it starts in 1990.
Now, remember, my first book was published in 1984. There are no statistics for the sales of organic food when I started. So then in 1990, they had the first. It’s zero. It’s just above zero, zero billions of dollars. Anyway, it’s grown 20% per year since 1990. So this graph goes straight up from 1990…
ANNIE BOND: Hockey stick, yeah.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah. But here’s another interesting thing. In 1990, it was just under $1 billion and it’s now $24.6 billion. Well, that as in 2008. So now, it’s 20% and 20% and 20%. But it’s only less than 3.5% of the food sales in 2008. So there’s a long way to go, but look how far it’s come. Not only do we have organic food, but we have organic cotton and we have organic personal care products. There’s just organic this and organic that. And so we have so many choices that are organic (without those toxic pesticides) that it’s really amazing!
But here’s the other side of it. There’s a website called – well, first, I should say that every chemical, every industrial chemical has a number called the – what’s it called? It’s the CAS number, but I’m trying to remember what it stands for. It’s the ‘chemical abstract service’, that’s what it is.
So if you go to their website, which is CAS.org, there’s a little counter on there. It says, “a global team of scientists is continually adding substance information to the world’s disclosed chemistry to the CAS registry.” So it has all these information. Okay! So then there’s a counter and it says ‘organic and inorganic substances’ to date.
Now, I’m reading my book, Toxic-Free, which I was writing in 2010 and I wrote, “As I’m sitting here watching this counter today, November 15, 2010, the number is 57,110,200 and counting…”
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA LYNN DADD: “And the time it took me to type 57,110,200, it switched to 57,110,201.” Now, what do you think the number is today, I’m looking at it right now?
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh! I’m terrified. My stomach is in a knot.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Ninety million!
ANNIE BOND: Oh, gosh!
DEBRA LYNN DADD: 90,304,587 and it’s about to turn to 88 right now, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 as we’re sitting here.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh! That’s unbelievable. And that’s really interesting what we’re discovering.
So tell me what you think. Is there any progress though in making the connection, people making the connection between the environment and health because that’s the thing I found was just like a blank wall back in the early eighties. Everyone thought I was just nuts because…
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah, there’s a huge, a huge difference. There’s a huge difference. In fact, you and I got interested because there was a connection between our immune systems and the toxic chemicals. At the time, that was the big breakthrough just to talk about the one thing.
There were poison control centers, there has always been poison control centers where – well, since they started. But those are for what are called ‘acute toxics’ like if you were to drink gasoline. It’s an immediate toxic effect where you get sick or die from ingesting a toxic chemical. That’s what a poison control center is for.
But at the time, when you and I started, there was no talk of what’s called ‘accumulative effect’ and that is this slow day in, day out, year in, year out exposure that builds up in your body. When I started, they didn’t even have the term ‘body burden’, which now is the word used to describe the amount of chemicals that are stored in our bodies, but it was going on. It was going on.
The first book that I could find, it was written on Toxics for the General Public was Rachel Carson’s Silence Spring, which was in 1964. I didn’t read it in 1864. I was only what? Seven, eight years old, nine years old. But I finally read it a couple of years ago. It says in there that even in 1944, they already knew that our bodies were accumulating DDT, another toxic poison. They already knew it in 1944.
And so if you’ve seen that study from Environmental Working Group where it talks about the chemicals in the babies’ umbilical cords, that isn’t recent. That didn’t just happen. That’s been going on since 1944. They could’ve done that testing in 1944 and found the same thing.
And that means that…
ANNIE BOND: Well, one of the things that’s interesting that’s happening now I think is that – I agree, that there has been a very big increase in awareness of toxic chemicals and health, but there’s also an increase in fear. And the press is picking up on things like BPA in babies’ bottles and that’s something to be concerned about because of the endocrine disrupters. This is a whole other story.
But I think that that’s one of the values that I have found so much in your work. People can be terrified of this. I know many pregnant woman has just got into complete terror their whole pregnancy, “What if I got…?” and all that kind of thing. The wonderful think about your work is then they’re solutions that you don’t have to go under overwhelm and terror…
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yes, that’s exactly right.
ANNIE BOND: …that instead, you’ve got ideas of things you can do. And you and I both did it. We both learned how to live completely normal lives without toxic chemicals.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: We did.
ANNIE BOND: And so the solution section is just key. And really, thanks to you, you also have your Debra’s List on your website. So tell us a little bit about that because that really speaks to the solution-focus here.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, I want to say that a number of years ago, I was on Geraldo. Remember that show, Geraldo?
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, yeah.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: He would get people on the show and then he’d kind of rip them apart. I thought, “Oh, no! What’s he going to do to me?” But he kept to me to the very end. He did a show on toxics and he had all these other guests and then he kept me up to the end. He presented me like I was the saving grace angel.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, wow! Very nice.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: He didn’t say a bad thing about me at all. He just said, “This woman is coming up with all the solutions.”
ANNIE BOND: You know, we’re going to need to go to break now. I’m Annie Bond and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is author, Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re celebrating her 30 years of being continuously in print. We’ll be right back.
ANNIE BOND: Hi, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Annie Bond. I’m here with Debra Lynn Dadd. She and I switched seats today. She’s the guest and I’m the host because today, November 1st was her 30th anniversary of writing her first book, Non-Toxic & Natural. She’s since gone on to write a total of seven books and has an incredible website full of all sorts of resources. It’s nice to be back again, Debra.
Where do you think we’re going with toxics in the future? I mean, I think you’ve got a bird’s eye view that very, very few people on the planet about this entire situation. It’ll be really fascinating to hear that from you.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Well, I think that – hmmm… where am I going? Where are we going?
ANNIE BOND: Do you think we’ll ever have a toxic-free world, for example. Is there a silver lining here? I’ve given talks and people just wanted to blow their brains out after. I mean, not literally of course.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: No, I understand, I understand.
ANNIE BOND: They’re like, “Oh, it’s so depressing.” And so what do you think about the situation?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: I think we’re moving in the direction of having a toxic-free world. I’m certainly pushing it and I’m a big believer in that if we have a goal and we can take step-by-step increments towards that goal, then we can achieve that goal.
And so I know in my home, I live in a toxic-free world in my home, you live in a toxic-free world in your home, Annie and I know many of our listeners do as well. And so then it’s a matter of saying, “Well, if we could achieve that, how can we achieve having a toxic-free community? How could we look around and say, ‘Where’s the toxic pollution here?’ How can we help our neighbors be toxic-free? How can we help businesses be toxic-free?” And then it just kind of moves on and moves on.
I see things that now, countries (governments, for example) have lists of toxic chemicals that they’re reviewing and banning in different parts of the world, different chemicals, different lists. There’s like a hundred different lists of governments that are banning certain toxic chemicals.
We didn’t have that in 1984 at all, nothing. Nothing, nothing like that. We had things like green chemistry nowadays where businesses are being encouraged to eliminate their toxic chemicals and replace them with chemicals that are less toxic. We have organizations that are helping businesses and consumers do these things.
And so there’s a lot more people that are in agreement now that their toxics are a problem and that we should do something about it.
I think that it’s not that widespread where people are looking for solutions. There’s a lot more people who are promoting the problem. And then there are people who are promoting solutions. And so I just continue to promote my solutions. I just keep saying, “There’s an answer. There’s a solution. Come over here.”
But the first thing we need to do is just acknowledge that there’s a problem at all. There are still many, many people who just think that toxics are not a problem, that products wouldn’t be on the shelf because the government wouldn’t allow that. That really I think is the fallacy. That’s the myth.
ANNIE BOND: So I have a question about that then. If the – sorry, I just lost my thought about that.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: It’s okay.
ANNIE BOND: So keep jumping and I’ll come back.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Okay, so there’s so much going on in the world right now in this direction that I can hardly keep up with it. I remember when I wrote my first book, my very, very first self-published book, The Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive, everything I knew on the subject fit on 3 x 5 cards and a shoebox. And now, I have a website that is so big.
I have almost 6000 posts on my website. And new things are coming in all the time, new guests for me to interview, new businesses, new products that it seems like the whole world is geared towards, “Let’s be not toxic,” but there still is so far, so much to do, so far to go, so much to understand. But at last, we’re moving in a direction. It’s not a fringe thing anymore.
ANNIE BOND: I did remember what I was saying. My question was, most of my readers, all through the nineties, I would say 90% of my readers were pregnant women actually or young mothers and so that’s a definite vertical – or people that are extremely chemically sensitive or something like that. What about the broader population? How do you feel this is filtering out to people that don’t have such an urgent need to be concerned about it in the sense that they’re worried about a baby or something like that?
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Yeah. Well, I think that more and more people are starting to make the connection as there’s more and more general mass market kind of information out there. Another thing is when I was researching toxic-free, for a long time, I was going out on my old research that I had done back in the early eighties about what was toxic. And before Toxic-Free, I just researched everything a new in terms of what are the toxic chemicals because there’s so many new ones like in 1984.
In 1984, when I wrote Non-Toxic & Natural, I picked 40 chemicals. My whole goal of that book was just to eliminate 40 chemicals – and we didn’t even know about things like bisphenol a and triclosan and there was no such thing as indoor air pollution. All these things that we talk about today did not exist in 1984.
And so when I did this research, what I found was – and I’m going to say this slowly because it’s so important – every single body condition, every illness and every symptom has now been associated with toxic chemical exposure. You can look up anything that’s wrong with your body (headaches, stomachaches, impotence, infertility, anything, diabetes, overweight), everything is associated with toxic chemical exposure.
So there’s no question. Anything that’s wrong with your body, just start eliminating toxic chemicals from your home and your body and you’re going to get better. I can say that with confidence.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, it’s really true. I first started giving talks about this kind of thing. I would talk about something called the ‘barrel analogy’, which was commonly used where if you spray your rose bushes, you’re going to feel the barrel a little bit. If you spray perfume and then go have cheese wrapped in plastic, put it in the microwave, you get a lot of plastic, you’re going to be continually adding to the barrel until you hit the overflow point. And that’s certainly what happened to you and I. We both hit the overflow point.
But I was giving a talk once and somebody said, “You know…” – and this is an expert in the field of endocrinology, of endocrine disruptors, these hormone disrupting chemicals and he said, “You know what, Annie though? It takes one hit. When someone’s pregnant, make it one hit of the plastic on the wrong day for that fetus, it could have incredible ramifications.”
And so, the seriousness of actually – you know what? Maybe one thing to talk about is the steps. You and I both put it together as a puzzle piece and everybody has to do things one step at a time. I mean, you can’t just overhaul your life overnight even though some people want to and try. But when it comes to certain kinds of chemicals, that’s where we’re getting into a bit of a tricky thing these days, with the plastics and endocrine disrupters. I think you have to be especially carefully.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: You do have to be especially careful. Part of that is simply information and understanding about what are the chemicals and what are their health effects and the different ways that chemicals can get in your body and all these things.
And so on the one hand, I feel like that I ought to be doing a lot of toxics education. And on the other hand, one could simply say, “If you just do all the non-toxic things, just do those and you’re going to eliminate.”
ANNIE BOND: I agree. And that’s a really nice way of doing it, absolutely.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: You don’t need to know all the lists of pesticides that are in food in order to buy organic because you’re just going to eliminate that list of pesticides.
ANNIE BOND: That’s right, that’s right. And people, to become a label reader. So that’s where you’ll start finding, “Oh, well, gosh! That is yellow dye no. 5. I think I won’t buy it,” that kind of thing.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Right, right, right. You can find out as much as you want to about toxics. You can also just say – you asked me about Debra’s List earlier at DebrasList.com or you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on ‘Shop’ at the top. You could just go to Debra’s List and just buy everything off the websites that I have listed there and you would just have a pretty toxic-free life and you wouldn’t have to know anything about these phenol or anything else.
ANNIE BOND: …which just really comes to this sort of how much you – I mean, we need to start wrapping this up. I think from my experience of seeing the body of your work over 30 years, you’ve pollinated our lives with wonderful alternatives. I think it’s just an incredible legacy of yours that you’ve been able to do that and an incredible gift to the world. I, for one, thank you so much. I know there are so many hundreds of thousands of people out there that feels the same way.
So I just want to ask you if you have any closing thoughts? I can’t thank you so much for this incredible legacy.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: You’re welcome. I want to say that it’s really been my pleasure to do it because I know that a lot of people are scared about toxic chemicals particularly if you’re just reading the newspaper or watching TV. But what this whole journey has been about for me is finding the things that aren’t toxic, finding the things…
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, that’s nice. And there’s rejuvenation there.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Right. And I see that happening. I see that life basically wants to be healthy, wants to regenerate and that all we need to do is just eliminate the toxic chemicals that are working against us and then our health will be restored. I see that happen over and over again.
So actually, if you look at me and you say, “How can she study about toxic chemicals all day long every day?” That’s not what I’m studying. What I’m doing is finding the good in the world and it’s my pleasure to bring it to everyone else.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that is just a lovely way to stop here. Really, that’s just a great sentiment.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Thank you.
ANNIE BOND: So this is Annie Bond and you’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio with Debra Lynn Dadd. She’ll be back hosting the show tomorrow. Remember, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to the archive shows. And Debra’s also starting transcripts now, so you can read those too. There will be a transcript of the show by tomorrow. So thank you so much for being with us. Please listen again tomorrow. Be well.
DEBRA LYNN DADD: Bye!
ANNIE BOND: Bye bye, Debra. Thank you so much.
Wool as fire retardant and other mattress concerns
Question from TA
Debra, do you know if wool alone is sufficient to pass the flame test required by law for mattresses? I see natural mattress companies that claim they use no fire retardant because wool is naturally flame resistant, and that’s how they pass the flame test. But then I see other natural mattress companies claiming that wool alone won’t pass the test and therefore some type of fire retardant must be used (and they sometimes directly state that companies who claim to use only wool aren’t telling the full story, because they must be using something else to pass the test). Shopping around for natural mattresses gets very confusing and frustrating.
On a similar note, how can one be sure of ANY of the claims made by mattress companies? They say their mattresses are incredibly pure, free from any toxic chemicals, and so forth. But then I find something on another site stating that the mattresses from the super-pure-and-natural company have been tested by a lab and found to contain toluene and formaldehyde. Is it possible those are false accusations, perhaps from a competitor who wants to hurt their business? Yes. Is it possible that those things are true and we’d be breathing in those chemicals if we bought said mattress? Yes.
When spending thousands of dollars on a natural mattress, how can one be sure that the product truly is as wonderful as it appears to be? If I were to spend the money on a Savvy Rest mattress, for instance, can I trust that wool really is the only fire retardant being used and that we won’t be breathing in toluene and formaldehyde and other harmful chemicals if we sleep on it for the next 20 years?
Debra’s Answer
Yes, wool alone is sufficient to pass the flame test required by law for mattresses.
As for your other question, it’s difficult. By law companies are supposed to tell the truth. But they don’t always. Over the years I have gotten to know some of the companies and trust them because of our long-standing relationship. Some companies aren’t interested in talking with me, and I also hear things. But you can also just look at their website and see what they are promoting. For example, if a company promotes that they are “certified” by a certification they created and they are the only product certified, well, what does that sound like to you?
Also, look at their certification certificates. Are they up-to-date? If you go to the website of the certifier, can you confirm the product is certified?
The companies I trust are the ones who have current third party certifications and are forthcoming about their materials, particularly describing them on their website. They welcome my phone calls. Some, I’ve even visited their manufacturing facilities. I even SLEPT in the workrooms where they make Shepherd’s Dream mattresses.
I don’t like companies mudslinging each other. For me, the best presentation a company can make is to clearly present their materials and let the customer decide.
Fireplace Soot and Ash in My Home
Question from Nina
I went to clean our fireplace with a wet/dry vac to try and rid the home from the smell of the fireplace since we use it very seldom. As I was vacuuming up the soot and ashes I didn’t realize the vac was blowing everything back into my home!! I opened all the doors and windows and vacuumed and dusted everything, however I have small children in the home (who weren’t home at the time) but I want to make sure the air in the home is safe. Any recommendations? Thanks
Debra’s Answer
My inclination is to say that if you dusted and vacuumed then it’s probably fine. I might run your HVAC to pick up particles. Hard to tell what might still be there, not picked up, if anything.
Readers, any suggestions?
