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Helping Children Make Good Food Choices
My guest today is Katherine Pryor, a good food advocate based in Seattle. While advocating for Farm to School funding in the state capitol one year, Katherine was impressed by the array of stories told by parents, teachers, and school administrators about how having farm to school programs and school gardens had changed kids’ eating practices. She wanted to write these stories from the kids’ perspectives, hoping to inspire schools and government agencies to support good food education. Her first children’s book, Sylvia’s Spinach, is being used to complement school garden curriculum and encourage young readers to try new foods. Her next book, Zora’s Zucchini, will be published in 2015. We’ll be talking about how you can help your kids make better food choices at home and when they are out in the world at school and with friends. Among other projects, Katherine has worked 
on a successful campaign to get Starbucks to commit to dBGH-free milk nationwide and worked with Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Health Care initiative, helping hospitals use their purchasing power to support local and sustainable food producers. In addition to writing, Katherine manages a statewide program to bring local and sustainable foods to Washington hospitals. www.katherinepryor.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Helping Children Make Good Food Choices
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Katherine Pryor
Date of Broadcast: July 08, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. It’s Tuesday, July 8, 2014, on a beautiful summer day here in Clearwater, Florida. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
I can’t talk today. It’s the day after the long 4th of July weekend, and I took yesterday off also. So let me just start again.
Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and how to live toxic-free. It’s Tuesday, July 8, 2014.
After a vacation, it just takes a minute to get back into this. Today, we’re going to be talking about helping children make good food choices, and my guest is Katherine Pryor. She’s a good food advocate based in Seattle.
She’s written a book called Sylvia’s Spinach, which is a delightful book for children. I’ll tell you more about it, how I felt about it when she comes on.
While advocating for a Farm to School funding in the state capital of Washington, Katherine was impressed by the array of stories told by parents, teachers and school administrators about how having farm to school programs and school gardens had changed kids’ eating practices.
She wanted to write these stories from the kids’ perspectives, helping to inspire schools and government agencies to support good food education.
Sylvia’s Spinach is her first children’s book. It’s been used to complement school garden curriculum and encourage young readers to try new food. Her next book, Zora’s Zucchini will be published in 2015.
Welcome to the show, Kathy.
KATHERINE PRYOR: Thank you so much. It’s nice to be here.
DEBRA: Good. So I loved your book. I just loved your book. And one of the reasons that I loved it is because it takes the child from not liking a vegetable, and not even be willing to try it, to going through school programs, where they plant seeds, and she happens to plant spinach, this vegetable she didn’t like. And because of the school program and watching the seeds sprout and the vegetables grow that she then liked spinach, and she was willing to eat it.
And I know, myself even as an adult, I’ve been through that same process of growing something in my backyard and just loving the way that it tastes, and just so wanting to eat it because of how delicious it is.
Recently, I’ve been trying to make myself eat kale. I’ve been trying to make myself eat kale for a long time, and trying it in different ways, and just really knowing how delicious it is, how nutritious it is, but just really not liking the way it tastes.
KATHERINE PRYOR: I think you’re on the same boat with a lot of people on that one.
DEBRA: I think so too. And this is why I want to tell you this because I’ve also been making a lot of changes in my diet over a long period of time, but recently this year, I really cut out wheat and all grains, and dairy, and all sugar, even natural sweeteners. The only thing sweet I eat is fruit.
This has been a very difficult transition for me, but the more I do these things, and just basically eat the freshest vegetables that I can, and basic proteins as the basic thing that I eat in my diet, and I eat nuts and seeds and stuff. But the vegetables are the most important to me. My body really needs to have vegetables, and the more fresh they are, and the more right out of the ground they are, the better my body likes them.
And an amazing thing happened to me was that after trying kale, and after trying it in different ways and not liking it, and then making all these changes in my diet, a friend of mine brought over a kale salad the other day that he had purchased. And it had a wonderful Asian dressing on it. And I sat there and I ate it, and I said, “Can I have some more?”
I realized that I wanted kale. Immediately, as soon as I left, I went down to the store, and I bought a whole bunch of kale, and I chopped it all up, and I put coconut aminos, and toasted sesame oil, ginger, and anything Asian I could think of. I’ve been [sorted] on. And I had enough, and I just ate that. And cashews.
And I ate that for three days. Every day for lunch, I ate this kale salad, and then I went and bought more kale. I’m totally in love with kale. And I just bought more and more, and I’m so happy, it’s so good for me, and my body feels good.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that everybody should be as adventurous as your character […] to try something new.
KATHERINE PRYOR: I think your story is really perfect. It’s illustrating why it is so important that we get kids eating these new foods, green foods, at the youngest possible age.
We know that a child’s palate is developing literally every day. They’re growing new taste buds. And we know that their palate and their food preferences are very much being shaped at a young age.
And so here, you had to literally re-train your palate to like kale. And it sounds like you’ve kept at it until you did which is fantastic. But think about how many people wouldn’t go through the effort that you just went through to re-train your brain and your tongue to like something that maybe you hadn’t been raised eating.
DEBRA: I was not raised eating kale. I was in a situation where my mother never learned how to cook. My grandmother was basically a housewife and she did all the cooking. My mother never learned how to cook.
So when I was born, when she got married, my father cooked. And he just cooked whatever it was that he felt like eating like bacon, mashed potatoes and cake, anything he knew how to eat, but it was not a very good idea.
And I had this strange situation where my mother decided when she didn’t want to learn how to cook, she wanted to learn how to be healthy. So she was making green smoothies back in 1957, except that she was making them in a little blender like they had in those days. And so they were horrible, stringy and gritty.
I decided I was never going to eat. She called it a green drink. I said, “I’m never going to eat this again.
When I grow up, I am not drinking this green stuff.”
KATHERINE PRYOR: And if you’re like most kids, I had those healthy parents too, we had green drinks also.
And I remember saying, “Why do we have to get the brown bread? Why can’t we get wonder bread? It was so much more delicious.”
And I would never have guessed that here I am, all of these years later, telling people to drink green drink, and if they’re going to eat wheat, to eat whole wheat.
DEBRA: I never would have guessed […]
KATHERINE PRYOR: They were really onto something, but I think that at the time, we maybe didn’t have the culinary knowledge of what to do with these things to make them taste good.
And I feel so lucky to live in an age where if there’s something you’re curious about, how to make a delicious green smoothie, there are a million recipes out there. And they’re really […] figuring out how to make that good for kids.
DEBRA: Tell us how you got interested. We only have a minute until we need to go to break, but start telling us how you got interested in your subject.
KATHERINE PRYOR: Well, you’re absolutely right that I was lobbying—I found a good food advocate in my day job. I was lobbying in my state capital for farm to school funding. And a dad told a story of how his daughter wouldn’t eat spinach until she grew it in her school garden. And then she ended up falling in love with spinach. She wanted to put it in everything that summer.
And everybody was […] professional advocates, they’re saying, “We need to write a white paper about that.
We need to do a press release about that.”
And all I kept thinking was, “Well, what about this little girl who went through this incredible, personal transformation to do a complete 180 and changed her mind about food? I want to tell it from her perspective.
And I think other little kids might respond to that.”
So I started learning more about how you write kids’ books. I took a class on it. And then I just started having fun with the format. Maybe after the break, we can talk a little bit more, but I’ve done a lot of really […] with kids.
DEBRA: And I want to hear all about it, but we do need to go to break right now. [inaudible 00:09:53] is going to come in and start talking on top of you.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Katherine Pryor. She’s a good food advocate and author of Sylvia Spinach, and we’ll hear more from her right after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katherine Pryor, author of Sylvia’s Spinach.
So Katherine, tell us more about writing the book.
KATHERINE PRYOR: Basically, as I was working on Sylvia’s Spinach, around the same time, my husband and I had started a program with a food bank in South Seattle. This food bank literally had a greenhouse attached to it, and the greenhouse had been abandoned by the community gardening program that was using it.
And we had the idea to start growing organic vegetables […] for food bank clients. What a lot of people don’t realize is that with emergency foods, produce and protein are generally the hardest things for food banks to store because they don’t have the freezer space. They don’t have the refrigerator space.
A lot of times, if produce is donated, it’s coming in near the end of its shelf life. So it’s going to be something that people are going to have to […] right away.
And he’s got a background in plant biology. And here, I’m a food advocate. I said, “This is what happens when those two specialists do get married […]” We started growing food together.
So we started this program with a food bank in South Seattle. We were giving out these organic vegetables […] that the clients could take home and grow themselves. They could either grow them at home, they could grow them on apartment balconies, or they could grow them in community gardens.
And the thing that we were shocked by was the way that the kids just lit up on the days that we were there.
So we would be near the end of the line, people would come in, and they would get their dried goods, those beans and pastas and things like that, and canned goods. And then they would get some fresh produce, then maybe some bread. Then they would come to our table.
We noticed that the kids were not even bothering to go through the rest of the line. They were just b-lining to our table and taking out the plants that they wanted to grow. They had a million questions. What will this plant be? What will this plant be?
And the kids were very much the ones who were deciding the plants that their parents would take home and grow.
And at the end of our first season, we wanted to do a survey to see how it had gone, to see if the program had actually worked for people. Were they, in fact, able to harvest fresh food at home? And we found that—I think it must have been like two-thirds of the participants had been able to eat from their garden two or more times a week. And almost single one of those participants said they had kids who could help in the garden and would then eat the produce.
And to us, that was the biggest success that we possibly could have asked for. And it really got me thinking about the relationship that a child has with food as they see it growing. They nurture it, they get to see every stage of its development, and then the big pay-off, you get to taste it.
DEBRA: I think for children, they still have that wonder about nature that I think that we tend to lose as adults, as we go through life and start putting our attention on other things like earning money and all the problems of the world, all those kinds of things. But children, my viewpoint personally is that we’re all born of nature, that you could take the whole industrial world away, and we would still be human beings living in nature as we did prior to the industrial age.
And the children still retain somehow. And so they can look at something living, like a plant, and get very excited about it, and want to take care of it, and participate in the growth of it. And for them to see that connection between the food growing and then it nourishing their bodies is a really wonderful experience that I think every child should have, and every adult should have.
That should restored in everyone.
I had a garden when I was a child, and we grew tomatoes. My grandparents had a garden, a very large garden, and trees. I’ve said this many times on the show, but I’ll say it again, because I love it so much. My first food memory was at age two or three, my grandfather lifting me up into the peach tree, so that I could pick my own peach. And the way that it smelled in the sun, I can remember everything about that. And bringing it in the house, and having my grandmother take the skin off, and slice it up, and put it in a bowl with cream and sugar.
Yes, she puts sugar on it.
But I had that experience of being up in the tree where the peaches are. That’s my earliest memory of food, and I think everyone should have that.
More recently, I had the experience of having chickens in my backyard until the police took them away because they’re illegal where I live. But I had them long enough that I could feed them my kitchen scraps and have an egg come out the other end. And then eat those eggs and see how amazing that very, very fresh chicken egg tastes when you know exactly what went into that egg, that there is no question about what happened at the farm. It was right there in my backyard, and I made that egg happen. And it was fabulous.
KATHERINE PRYOR: It’s miraculous.
DEBRA: It is! No, it is. It’s the right word.
KATHERINE PRYOR: I know that’s a funny word to use about something that literally happens every day, but there is something miraculous about food especially for kids who are growing up in an increasingly urban and suburban areas where they probably don’t see food growing. Really, their biggest interaction with food is maybe in a grocery store and a food […] or something like that.
They often times have never actually seen a tomato growing on the vine. They’ve never seen pea plants.
They might not know that a peach comes from a tree. They really are disconnected from this.
I think the first time that a child sees a tomato growing, a pea growing, and they’re able to reach out, take it, pop it in their mouths, they have this understanding of where food comes from that, unfortunately, we’re pretty disconnected from in the modern world.
DEBRA: We are. We need to take another break, but we’ll talk more when we come back. My guest today is Katherine Pryor, good food advocate based in Seattle, and author of Sylvia’s Spinach. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katherine Pryor, author of Sylvia’s Spinach.
Katherine, I know that I’ve made a lot of changes in my life, in my diet, as I’ve said earlier today on the show, but one of the reasons why I really wanted to have you on the show is because if I had made the kind of changes that you’re talking about as a child, and other advocates were talking about, who are helping children with school vegetable-growing programs, if I had had that, I think my health would have been very different.
And as an adult, as a consumer advocate, as a researcher about health, it’s so clear to me that great nutrition is necessary to good health. Just really eating those fresh fruits and vegetables, having enough nutrition that comes from real whole food, that is such the foundation of health. And because we don’t have that, we end up having skyrocketing healthcare costs, people wonder what drug they should be taking, but what we really need is nutrition, nutrition, nutrition.
Do you want to say anything about that?
KATHERINE PRYOR: It’s so, so important. There is absolutely no doubt that healthy kids stand a much better chance of becoming healthy adults.
And that’s one of the things that makes things—like this skyrocketing childhood obesity rate is so terrifying.
We know that, unfortunately, unhealthy kids stand at a much a higher risk of becoming unhealthy adults.
We see rates of obesity and diabetes going through the roof just in the last […] from the early 1990’s. And they were nowhere near what they are today.
So we know that unfortunately, the way we have been eating is really putting our health at risk, and future generation’s health at risk. We know we need to do something to stop it.
And that’s why my goal is really to get young kids thinking about eating good food, but not necessarily telling them that it’s because it’s healthy. I want them to love it because it tastes good and it’s fun.
DEBRA: Exactly. I totally agree with you on that. I started doing what I’m doing when I was only 24, I’ve been doing this for so many years. I was only 24 when I started, and I thought, I can’t just tell people that toxic chemicals are toxic and expect them to not use them. I need to tell them that there’s this other more wonderful life that they could have. That it really is more wonderful to wear cotton than polyester, and organic food is so much more delicious than toxic food.
That’s what I did. I somehow knew when I was 24 years old that I needed to take that approach. And I think it was because I needed to take that approach with myself. I was so sick from toxic chemical exposure, and I needed to essentially give up everything I already knew about the world and find everything that wasn’t toxic.
And it’s pretty much like the same process now with nutrition is that I need to come up with for myself a diet that is just so delicious and so wonderful, and so much what I want to eat because I love it, that I don’t even want to eat any of those other things.
Yesterday, a friend of mine and I went down to Sarasota, and we went to Whole Foods. We went to have organic lunch. You walk in, and there are whole racks of all the gluten breads, and the huge pastry department, organic sugar, of course.
But you can’t just walk into a place like that and eat anything, and expect that it’s all going to be healthy because there are all these businesses who say, “Well, we have to produce all these unhealthy foods because that’s what people buy. That’s what they want. And if we don’t give it to them in an organic form, they’re going to go someplace else and buy it from somebody else.”
KATHERINE PRYOR: Honestly, I think one of the big problems is that we’ve taken food like that that were historically a treat food. That’s just something you ate on special occasions. That’s just something you ate at special times of the year, on your birthday, other people’s birthday.
We’ve taken this treat food, and we’ve made it everyday food. And it is available everywhere.
Honestly, I certainly enjoy a cake. My family knows I sucker for the occasional ice cream cone.
DEBRA: But there’s a difference about eating that occasionally.
KATHERINE PRYOR: I love it. You just have to treat it like it’s a special occasion food, and not an everyday food.
I think once you start looking at food that way, it really gives you an awareness of how surrounded we are by things we probably shouldn’t be eating as much as we do.
DEBRA: Well, it’s so easy to buy all these foods or be around them. The point I wanted to make about yesterday was that I am so committed to staying on the diet that makes me feel healthier, and have more strength and energy, and be able to function better that when I walked into Whole Foods and saw all those pastries and desserts full of wheat and sugar, I just said, “I’m not going to do this. As tempting as that may be, I’m not going to do this.”
And I think that that’s part of educating children. It’s educating children by what they love to eat at home. But also, what happens when they go out into the world? Talk about school lunches. Talk about going out with their friends. What would you like children to know about that?
KATHERINE PRYOR: That’s where it gets tricky because there are a lot of parents that I know who absolutely have the best of intentions, and then you send your child out into a world of nugget-shaped chicken and French fries with every meal.
I hate to say it, but I routinely ride my bike through a big kitchen that does a lot of the prep work for the Seattle School. It’s a big industrial kitchen. And my bike path happens to go right by that. And oh, my goodness, when you ride your bike pass that building, it smells like grilled cheese and tater tots because a lot of times, that’s what they’re making for the kids in school.
There is a huge amount of work to be done on the school food front. And I have to say, I absolutely applaud the changes that USDA has been making in changing the requirements for fruits and vegetables and whole grains. This is a massive, massive system that they are trying to turn around, and it is going to take a while.
But I think we’ve got some really good people working on this.
DEBRA: Before you tell us that, we do need to go to break. It goes by so fast, doesn’t it?
But we’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Katherine Pryor. She’s the author of Sylvia’s Spinach, and you can go to her website, KatherinePryor.com, and find out more about her and her book and everything she’s doing. And we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katherine Pryor, author of Sylvia’s Spinach. You can go to her website, KatherinePryor.com, to learn more about her.
So we were talking about the school lunch program.
KATHERINE PRYOR: Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that I have been loving seeing here in Washington is there’s been a real push to […] getting those Washington farm fresh food into schools. And so we’re starting to see kids who are having more of a relationship with the farms where those foods are grown, which makes them way more excited to see it when it shows up in their cafeteria.
And one of the things that I have also loved seeing is they started doing fresh snacks programs for kids. A lot of schools, particularly, elementary schools, will qualify for funding that allows the school to provide the kids with a fresh snack either in the morning or afternoon. That could be anything from a carrot to a […] to an apple, pretty much whatever happens to be in season right then.
One of the things that I’ve been hearing these schools reporting that I think is really exciting is the school front has been able to implement this program where you’re literally giving the kids a fresh snack either in the morning or in the afternoon, they’ve seen reduced rates of visits to the principal’s office for kids acting out in class.
And it’s just something that I’ve been hearing anecdotally from teachers, from school nutritionists. But my goodness, is that what it would take to reduce rates of kids getting antsy in class, taking up all the teacher’s time when they have to get everyone else on track, and then taking up the principal’s time when they have to figure out what’s going on with this kid.
If we could just give every kid an apple at 10, at 1, at whatever time it would work for the school, we know that kids are much better able to focus.
And if you think about it, whole foods tend to stay with us way longer and sustain our energy way longer than something highly-processed like a white bread, or something like that.
And so what I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of is this effort to get young kids the healthiest food that we can in an effort to help them be better learners. I think we’re starting to see evidence that this is going to work.
DEBRA: Are the kids actually eating those fresh foods? Are they turning up their noses like Sylvia in your book and saying, “No, I don’t want to eat a carrot. I want chocolate chips.”
KATHERINE PRYOR: There will often times be some suspicion of them, and so the teachers who seem to have the most success with it—well, we do a couple of things. One is you try to make it fun. If it’s a carrot, let the kid play with the carrot before they actually eat them. A carrot can be a lot of things in the kid’s imagination.
The other thing—and this is more of what I do when I do school visits for Sylvia’s Spinach. I hate to spoil the ending, but she does end up eating spinach in the book. And so as I’m reading that part of the story to the kids, I will literally eat a piece of spinach as I’m reading it—and the kids gasp.
But then, at the end, I do something called the test of bravery where I ask the kids. We’re talking five and six-year-olds here. We’re not talking big kids […] I will do something called a test of bravery where I will invite all of the kids to try a piece of spinach.
We hand around the biggest plate of washed organic spinach that the kids can try. And we do something called the Sylvia Taste Test where they sniff it, they lick it, and then they crunch it.
And the thing that I tell them is they don’t have to like it, they just have to try it. Remarkably, that seems to do the trick.
DEBRA: That’s what we used to say in girl scouts. Just try it. And so what’s the result when they do that? Do a lot of kids like spinach?
KATHERINE PRYOR: A lot of them do. It’s usually a good percentage.
But here’s the other thing about kids. They’re so susceptible to peer pressure. What I’ll then do is I’ll call on some kids, and ask for their feedback. I’ll have them use some describing words to tell me what they thought the spinach tasted like.
And if that first kid that I call on says it was yummy or it was good, then the vast majority of kids in the classroom are going to say the same thing. Peer pressure is a huge driving force to them.
Think about it. When you were a little kid, you like what your friends like, and you want to like what your friends like. You don’t necessarily want to be different. And I actually think that little kids who are adventurous either is going to inspire a whole classroom to be willing to try new foods.
DEBRA: I think so too.
KATHERINE PRYOR: I think sometimes kids can be our best ambassadors to things like that.
DEBRA: I was just getting this picture in my mind of kids going home and saying, “Mom, can we have spinach for dinner?”
KATHERINE PRYOR: That’s so funny because I had kids ask for more. “Can I have some more?” And I’ll have these teachers and librarians just giving me this strangest look. “What have you done to these kids?”
And I swear, I don’t know if there is a spinach lobby. I do not work for them. I really just take it because it’s a food that kids have a hard time with, and I had heard a story about it. And it seemed like the right vegetable for the book.
It is remarkable how open kids are to it once you presented the food in a really fun way.
And I think that’s one of the things that the […] food movement, we’re not quite there yet in terms of the fun levels that we’re having. I think that one of the things we need to keep in mind—and I think there is no question. We need to change the way that we’re eating. It is literally making us sicker, both the types of food that we’re eating and the way it’s […] There’s no question we need to turn this around.
But the thing that we need to realize is that in any good social movement, we need to win hearts and minds.
There is no shortage in studies out there showing this type of fat is better than this type of fat. You need this many calories per day, and they should come from these foods.
If you’re into food, there are a lot of really incredible logical things you can study to get into it.
But most people are not going to be that. And so I think what we really need to start doing is making good food fun. And that’s for kids and adults. We really need to start getting them emotionally connected with good food.
DEBRA: Here’s one thing that I did. When I first started eating organic food many years ago, I was astonished the first time I ate an organic orange because supermarket oranges have this funny taste to them, which I found out was a fungicide. And it’s on the skins of every orange. And I grew up thinking that that fungicide taste was the taste of an orange.
And the first time I ate an orange without fungicide, it was a revelation. I totally loved it so much so that what I gave everybody for Christmas that year was organic oranges. And nobody else that I knew had ever eaten an organic orange at that time. And it was amazing to them to too.
And so I think there’s no number of studies, or doctors saying things, or scientists saying things, can compare to the actual experience of eating a food that you love. It speaks to you as being healthy and delicious when you put it in your mouth.
KATHERINE PRYOR: Food is a memory.
DEBRA: It is!
KATHERINE PRYOR: You have those foods that you bite into, and it can transport you to all the other times in your life that you’ve eaten that food. And if you have really positive emotional experience with good food at a young age, you’re going to carry that with you.
Unfortunately, I will say, the marketers of said food have also discovered this, which is why marketing to kids of unhealthy products is so prevalent and so frightening.
But I think that once we create positive associations with good food—and in fact, we can probably use the same marketing techniques […] We could probably learn from them.
I think that we have a much better chance of training kids’ palate from a really young age to like foods that are going to make them be stronger, healthier adults.
DEBRA: I totally agree. We only have, literally, a minute left before the end of the show. I wanted to say that one of my favorite places in the world is the San Francisco Farmers Market at the Ferry Building. Whenever
I go to San Francisco, I always go there first.
One day, I was at that farmers market, and there were parents strolling around a little a baby in a stroller.
Not a little baby, maybe one or two. And she had a box of blueberries, these pure, just fresh, organic blueberries, and she was just putting it in her mouth as fast as she could. And she had blueberry juice all over her face.
But the expression on her face, of this little child eating these organic blueberries was, I will never forget it, just the joy of that.
That’s about all we have time to say. Thank you so much, Katherine, for being here. Her book is Sylvia’s Spinach. Her website is KatherinePryor.com. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well.
Binders in Cork Floors
Question from CZ
Do you have any information about the kind of binder used in manufacturing cork floor tiles? ?
I just learned that cork floor tiles are not solid cork but they’re made from cork granules and a binder pressed together. I’ve been reading about cork flooring for months and never heard this. It’s disconcerting that makers and retailers never mention the binder (much less identify it by name). Today I came upon one manufacturer’s website where they did mention a binder. I’d buy from them except they’re above my budget.
Every cork product description says “hypoallergenic” but I never see testing information mentioned. Even if cork is traditionally low tox, it’s important to know exactly that ingredients any company is using to make their tiles, the binder and the surface finish. And I’d like to know the maker has a clear commitment to safe ingredients.
I was hoping to use cork to cover a very bad floor in my family room because I must sell my house soon. (Low tox plywood was going to be the subfloor). Cork seemed something I could afford and safely live with until my house sells. Lumber Liquidators has had good prices on plain cork floor tile. I’ve just left them a message asking what binders and surface finishes are used in manufacturing the tiles they sell. Thanks for this opportunity to vent but also I’d appreciate any further info and feedback.
This leads me to ask you and your readers if you have any recommendations about flooring that is clearly low tox and that is low cost. Thanks much.
Debra’s Answer
Experience anyone?
Let me know what Lumber Liquidators says and I can tell you if it’s toxic or not.
Mobile Homes and MCS
Question from LL Goeckel
I am looking at options for senior living without assisted care…what about mobile homes? What is the best overview and then what specifics would be important to evaluate ?
Debra’s Answer
I’m going to leave this question to others to answer, who have more experience.
In general, motor homes are filled with particleboard and other toxic materials.
I haven’t ever compiled guidelines for choosing mobile homes.
Readers, any experience with this? Let’s create some guidelines right here.
I can say one thing. If you live in Florida, don’t live in a mobile home. It will be gone if there is a hurricane.
Are There Flame Retardants in Dehumidifier Filters?
Question from Erin
Hi Debra,
I have a question about washable filters for portable dehumidifiers. What are the chances that the filters are treated with flame retardants or other chemicals? The companies I’ve contacted could not find a MSDS for the washable filters I inquired about. Does that mean there are no chemicals present?
Also, do you know where I could buy replacement filter mesh that is chemical-free/natural so I have the option of replacing the filter with something else?
Thanks
Debra’s Answer
I would say that the chances are slim a dehumidifier filter would be treated with flame retardants, since flame retardants are only used where a fabric might come in contact with a source of fire.
Can you find out from them what materials are used to make these filters?
An MSDS sheet is required by law for all products that contain toxic chemicals that appear on certain lists. Generally, if there is no MSDS, then the product does not contain those chemicals.
Plastic in Toothpaste
From Debra Lynn Dadd
I always love it when readers send me articles about toxic exposures I might not have seen.
This one is about plastic in toothpaste. She thought it was leaching from the tube, but no…Crest and other brands of toothpaste actually put bits of plastic in the toothpaste, which then embed themselves in the gums of those who use it. I kid you not.
Take a look at this article written by a dental hygenist and see her explanation and pictures.
The plastic is polyethylene, which is not toxic, but it isn’t biodegradable and will just stay stuck in your gums, I’m thinking, unless you remove it.
For some reason, maybe a long-ago tv commercial, I thought those flecks were crystals of mouthwash or something useful. But there is NO FUNCTION for these bits of plastic. Incredible!
If you are already using a natural toothpaste, you probably won’t find bits of plastic in it. But if you are using any brand with speckles in it, you might want to reconsider.
Source: Healthy Holistic Living: Crest Toothpaste Embeds Plasitic in Our Gums
Growing Organic in the City—Yes It’s Possible!
Today my guest is Dan Susman, director of Director Growing Cities. Growing Cities is the first documentary about urban farming across America.From rooftop farmers to backyard beekeepers, Americans are growing food like never before. Growing Cities tells the inspiring stories of these intrepid urban farmers, innovators, and everyday city-dwellers who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Growing Cities been accepted by American Public Television to reach a guaranteed 80% of PBS markets, but the filmmakers are responsible to secure all funding for the broadcast, including all the editing and conforming the film to PBS standards. So they are reaching out through a Kickstarter program to raise $30,000 by July 9th.
Dan has lived, breathed, and eaten urban agriculture over the past three years making Growing Cities. He has visited countless urban farms and food projects across the country and worked with many leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement. He is also the co-founder of Truck Farm Omaha, an edible education project which teaches local youth about sustainable farming and healthy foods. www.growingcitiesmovie.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Growing Organic in the City—Yes! It’s Possible!
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dan Susman
Date of Broadcast: July 01, 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 a gorgeous summer day here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s the first of July, 2014. And this morning, I just posted, actually announced. I was going to tell you to just go to my website at ToxicFreeQA.com, and read my Declaration of Independence from Toxic Chemicals.
But I just realized that it isn’t at the top of the list. I posted it a couple of years ago. But if you just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and go to the search box, and type in “independence” and it will come up, I think, as the first item.
It’s Independence from Toxic Chemicals. And in there, I talked about the whole idea of independence and freedom, and why we have the right to be toxic-free. There are some interesting things about the Declaration of Independence, which is one of my favorite documents of all time. And you’ll just learn a little bit more about me by reading that.
So I invite you to do that this Week of Independence in America.
I’m very excited today. Actually, I should say I’m very inspired because I just spent the last hour watching a film about growing food in cities. It’s a documentary film, and I invited my guest to be on the show today because he’s the director of the film, and they have been accepted to be on the American Public Broadcasting, PBS stations all over America.
Except here’s the catch, they have to come up with all the production costs themselves, and it’s $30,000. And they have to come up with it by July 9th.
So we’re going to be talking about the issue of growing food in cities, or the opportunity of growing, the wonderfulness of growing food in cities, and in your own backyard. And as people, all of us, taking responsibility for feeding ourselves in our community.
We’re going to talk about that during the show today, but I also invite you to go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and scroll down until you see, there’s a video. The Kickstarter video is right there on my website. There’s also a link to their Kickstarter page.
And if you’d like to make a contribution towards the $30,000, that would help them get this out there.
It’s a fabulous, fabulous film. I was inspired by every second of it. And we’re going to talk about that on the show today.
So hello, Dan. Thanks for being with me.
DAN SUSMAN: Hey, no problem. Thanks for having me and all of the really nice and kind words you said about the film already.
DEBRA: Well, I’m going to say more because it really is. What an accomplishment, and what an inspiration.
I saw it in the film, so I know the story, but tell our listeners how you became interested. What inspired you to make a film about urban farming?
DAN SUSMAN: I was really interested in sustainable agriculture just all throughout growing up. I grew pumpkins in the backyard with my mom and my dad. So from at a young age, I was very interested. And in college, I worked on farms.
Basically, I just decided, “Hey, this is what my passion is. This is what I want to learn more about.”
My partner, Andrew Monbouquette, he was really interested in filmmaking. He has dedicated his life really trying to do that.
We grew up together in Omaha, Nebraska. After college, we just came back together, and he really wanted to make films. I really wanted to learn more about urban farming in whatever cultures. So, we just combined our passion.
Four years later, this is where we’re at.
DEBRA: What a great accomplishment, just a great accomplishment. I have some experience myself with growing food. I used to live in California, so I was very interested that the first city that you want to as having a lot of urban agriculture was San Francisco.
I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, and lived there until 13 years. That’s when I moved to Florida.
And you’re right when you say it in the film that there are a lot of people doing a lot of creative things about how they garden, and how they farm even. I don’t know if it’s still there, but I remember on 4th Street in Berkeley, there used to be—I don’t remember the name of it. But one of the lots, instead of having a store there—maybe this was just when they were still building it up. One of the lots that was empty had a farm right there where they had plots on the lot.
They were growing lettuce, herbs and things like that. And you could just go there and buy just right out of the plot.
And it wasn’t seedlings. You could actually buy a full head of lettuce out of these boxes.
And I thought that that was one of the coolest things that you could actually buy, a fully grown live plant instead of going to a supermarket or even a natural food store and buying a harvested head of lettuce. You could just buy it right out of the ground or right out of the box.
And one of the things that I thought was so wonderful about that is that you can grow things in a box anywhere. You can grow things in a bag. I have a lot of permaculture friends, and one of the permaculture things is you just buy a bag of compost and split it open, and plant things in it.
Anybody could do that anywhere. And that’s one of the messages, I think, that I was so impressed with in your film, was that you go all around the country, and you show all these great examples of people in different walks of life, and economic situations.
I was taking notes while I was watching the film because I wanted to bring up different things. I think the thing that most impressed me was the scene when you were talking about, people had just put compost over the cement.
You don’t even have to have a park or something. You just put down compost on the cement and start growing things.
DAN SUSMAN: There are so many different ways to do it. It’s incredible how creative people get. When you’re presented with challenges, like you are typically in the urban environment whether you have space or they’re not great soil/medium to grow in, whatever it might be, people are figuring out really creative ways whether that’s putting soil down on old basketball courts, like you’re saying, or rooftop farms. There are vertical gardens on walls.
There are so many different solutions for growing in small amounts of space. And whether you’re in an urban environment or not, I think people even grow in window sills inside. They don’t have a yard at all.
I think there are a lot of opportunities. It’s pretty easy to focus on the challenges. There are so many opportunities that we have.
And that’s the […] the film takes. It’s really solutions-oriented, and it really shows what people can do in their own community, to grow, and to really make those communities better by growing food.
I think you saw that in the film, but it’s something where we—kind of getting back to your first question—have seen so many problems. And so many films and media that really show the problems in the food system, and what was wrong with what we were doing. We really just felt like it was time to put a spotlight on the people who are doing things right, the farmers, the activists.
There are so many people, community gardeners, every day people really, who are really making their communities better by the simple act of growing food.
DEBRA: Well, we need to go to our break, but we’ll come back and we’ll talk more about this.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dan Susman. He’s the director of the documentary film, Growing Cities. And he’s trying to get funds together to be on PBS across the country. They need $30,000 by July 9th. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and see their Kickstarter video, and get the link, and make a contribution if you’d like.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dan Susman. He’s the directory of a documentary film called Growing Cities. It’s all about urban farming, and they have a Kickstarter campaign. They need to raise $30,000 by July 9th in order to get their film on PBS across the country.
But if you go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, scroll down, and you’ll see a link to their Kickstarter. It’s hard to remember, or I would give it out over the air. But just go and click, and see what their offers are, see their trailer. They’ve got a list of all the things that those $30,000 need to go to.
You’ll see their big block of awards for the film. There’s more information about Growing Cities, urban agriculture, all of it. It’s a good supplement to this show to go and take a look at that page.
And you can make a donation, as small as $1. Every little bit helps.
So Dan, I wanted to ask you, could you just tell us, I was trying to figure out the difference, the definition. When you talk about urban farming, the first thing that comes to my mind is people having farms in a city, where they’re feeding other people in the community.
But in watching the film, I saw that you had some examples of backyard gardening, where I didn’t think he was feeding other people. It looked like you were referring to people growing food in their own backyards, or digging up their front lawns, just all opportunities, I guess, for growing food in the community.
What is your definition of urban farming?
DAN SUSMAN: That’s a good question. That’s one I get quite a lot. People define it in different ways. For us, we’re really inclusive about it. I think you could tell by the film probably. There are so many different examples of people growing food at a shed in their backyard, they’re on vacant lots, community gardens. There are so many different ways.
So we try to be as inclusive as possible with that definition. But basically, we say anybody who’s growing food in the urban environment. Even suburban areas, they’re […]
That’s not to discredit farmers. That’s their job, and that’s what they do every day. I think that’s something we really value what they’re doing.
Almost by that definition, I guess, we just try to be as inclusive as possible because this is a movement. People are growing food for so many different reasons and so many different ways that, to us, whether they’re growing it for themselves, their families, their neighbors, the broader community or for sale, everybody’s growing food, and I think that’s the important part.
And they’re making their communities better.
I would say, yes, we tend to be most inclusive about it, and not worry too much about definitions, I guess […]
DEBRA: I guess I’m just thinking about, it sounds like this is a new thing, but as one person said in the film, it’s just what people have been doing all along. It has a new name. And so I think about my grandmother, I’ve said this before on the show, but it bears repeating a lot.
My grandmother had a huge garden which she and my grandfather tended for many, many years. Just their own backyard, and they had trees, fruit trees. One of my earliest memories was my grandfather picking me up, so that I could pick my own peach off the tree, and how delicious that one peach was, just heated by the sun, really the ripest one that he found for me, and then picking me up to pick it.
And that’s part of my food memories. And I think that a lot of people don’t have those kinds of memories.
But it used to be commonplace for people to be growing food in their backyards.
I live in Florida, in a neighborhood that is—my house was built in 1940. But all the backyards have old fruit trees on them.
Everybody has citrus trees around here.
If a house was built in a certain time period, it’s got citrus trees in the backyard. The brand new houses don’t.
There was a time when everybody grew food and victory gardens. It was just part of what you did. And then we lost all that and we stopped growing food. I’m not saying everybody stopped, but it stopped being part of what everybody did.
I remember when I lived in California, I lived in a small rural community. And one of the things that I loved was a neighbor gave me raspberry canes for my garden. I grew a lot of food in that garden. And my neighbor gave me raspberry canes.
And they multiplied and multiplied and multiplied.
But everywhere you went, all my neighbors had my neighbor’s raspberry canes. And it was just wonderful to know that I was eating one neighbor’s tomatoes, and another neighbor’s raspberries. And it was just a lovely thing that really tied our community together, to be sharing these plants.
And that’s not so common as it used to be. And that’s the kind of things that I thought when I was watching your film.
It’s been difficult for me to make the transition in Florida because I’m accustomed to growing in California. And so I have some herbs, but I haven’t been as successful with some things as I was in California. But the other day, I had bought a box of mint tea bags from the store. And as I was walking up, my back stops where I have my little herb garden, and I went, “Wait a minute. Why did I buy mint tea bags when I could grow it?”
And I immediately went down and bought mint plants, and put them in pots.
I think a lot of it is just changing the way we think as individuals, and realizing that we can grow food.
DAN SUSMAN: Yeah! No, totally. Everything you said is really spot on. I think that especially when you were talking about […], that’s really been happening for a long time. Just like you said, this has been happening since World War I, World War II.
As you see in the film, we go over it pretty quickly, but it isn’t new.
DEBRA: It isn’t. We need to go to break. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but we need to go to break, and we’ll come right back.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dan Susman. We’re talking about his documentary film, Growing Cities.
You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dan Susman. He’s the director of Growing Cities, a documentary film. And they are doing a Kickstarter campaign because they’ve been invited to be on PBS, but they have to pay $30,000 in production fees in order to do that.
So you can help them out by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and clicking on their Kickstarter page, and finding out all about how you can make a donation, if you’d like to do that.
Dan, I have a question for you. So I have a fairly large backyard, and I can rip out all my lawn. After seeing your film, I wanted to do exactly that. But I had chickens. I had, past tense, chickens, which is one of the most wonderful experiences that I’ve ever had. And it was so great to be able to go out in the backyard and feed my chickens, and they would lay eggs, and then I would eat the eggs.
And I just knew the whole life cycle of that egg. I knew exactly what that chicken had eaten. And there were no pesticides.
There was no whatever else they put on eggs. They were delicious. They were wonderful.
And then the police came and took them away.
I was wondering if you have any comments about different cities having different regulations, how people get around that.
Any thoughts on what the regulations should be? Anything on that subject?
DAN SUSMAN: I’m sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, it’s the story that’s too common, I think. I think, in general, the laws in cities and towns and everything are, generally, moving in the right direction, I think. There’s a lot of places that are legalizing backyard chickens, goats, rabbits, and all of these things that you wouldn’t think you can have in a backyard.
But actually, when you think about it, if you’re describing that—a chicken is a lot less dangerous than a Rottweiler or a Pitbull. It’s a lot nicer too because instead of just picking up the poop, you can just […] in the morning.
In terms of why it makes sense that these laws are there, I don’t think it really makes any sense except that there’s a lot of places that are—in my hometown, I think, is one of them, here in Nebraska, where really a farm state. And I think there’s this fear in a lot of cities and towns that are in the Midwest that are also just more generally, in suburbs and areas like that where they’re really afraid that people are going to think, “Oh, they’re still back in the dark ages. They’re still farming.”
The city leaders, “Well, I think we need to make laws to make sure that nobody has chickens or does that.” These big metropolises, places like San Francisco and […], these types of places, the biggest cities and most urban places we have are actually saying, “Oh, yes. Sure, you can have chickens. Sure, you can have those if you get the right permit.”
So I think it’s really this sort of reaction, this sort of backlash to, “Oh, we don’t want people […] backwards or something,” when, in fact, it’s so much more. It’s more about how do we take control of our food, and what’s inside of that.
So I think, in general, we’ve seen a lot of cities, a lot of people coming together, neighbors going to their city council and saying, “Hey, this law doesn’t make sense. We should be able to have chickens in our backyard.”
In particular, there’s one place, this woman up in Seattle, Jennie Grant, she formed something called The Goat Justice League. They advocated to make goats legal in backyards in Seattle. She had a […] protest. They’d walk goats around.
They worked with city leaders in the end and got a bill passed. So they could actually have goats in the city.
So I think there are numerous examples of that. But I think a lot of people with the same story as you, it’s unfortunately because so many people feel like they’re alone and are like, “Well, what do I do? How can I fight this? It doesn’t make sense.”
But there’s a lot of inspiration that could be drawn from other places I think.
DEBRA: I think so too, and I think that one of the things that’s inspiring about your film is that you really show—Independence Day is coming up on Friday—you really show our right to grow our own food, that we should all have the freedom to grow our own food and why.
It’s something that we’re designed to do as human beings, that we’ve been growing our own food for millennia. And yet, today, most people have other people growing their food, and are dependent upon the availability of food for the few distribution system.
One of the reasons why I started learning how to grow food when I was living in California was that I had this idea that if, and I’m not saying this is going to happen, but if our food system were to collapse—that has happened in places in the world, if our food system were to collapse, I wanted to know how to grow food. I just wanted to know.
And when you look at the quality of food that we get in the world today, I just had an epiphany—I’ve had lots of epiphanies in my life, but recently, I had an epiphany. I asked what would be my ideal food to eat. And what I got was fresh, whole, organic vegetables right out of the ground. That would be the ideal thing.
And I’ve eaten that kind of food, and I always love it. And I always go, “Yes, this is great.”
And yet, I’m not even growing those. I’m not even growing it in my own backyard, in part, because I don’t know how to grow here. And yet, I could learn how to do that. Everybody could learn how to do that. There are people who know how to grow here. Just because I spent most of my life in California doesn’t mean that I can’t learn this.
And then my other excuse is I don’t have time. But what am I doing with my time. Not that I’m flittering my time away doing useless things, but I’m one person living by myself, and to do all the things that one needs to do to maintain a home, or money to pay the bills and all those things, to also maintain a garden, oh, my God.
But you know, I do know that there are people who don’t have land that want to come and work on a garden. And I think that if I were to really think this out, I could grow so much more food than I could possibly eat, and share it with the people who come and help me to grow it.
Here we are at another break.
DAN SUSMAN: That’s so quick.
DEBRA: I know. It is so quick. And I’m doing all the talking. I need to let you talk more.
DAN SUSMAN: It’s okay. I’ll try to jump in more.
DEBRA: But I love this subject, and I love your film. We are going to go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dan Susman. And I promise I’ll let him talk more in the next segment. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dan Susman, director of Growing Cities, the movie.
I just discovered that you actually have a website, GrowingCitiesMovie.com, and you can go there. I was looking for that. But you know, it wasn’t on the press release that I could find.
You can go to GrowingCitiesMovie.com. You can find out more about the film. There’s also a list of screenings, and it also gives you information on how you can host the screening, how to find the screening, how to host the screening. You can just find out all about this. There’s also a link there to their Kickstarter campaign.
That’s GrowingCitiesMovie.com.
Dan, would you tell us about food justice and food security?
DAN SUSMAN: I was going to mention it eventually. But food justice, food security, I think are some of the biggest issues here, especially in urban agriculture and farming cities, this idea that everyone should have the opportunity to access fresh and healthy food regardless of their income level or background or where they live.
So food security, people have often heard of food desert, these places where there’s very little access to fresh, healthy food.
That often happens in the inner city, although there are plenty of food deserts that are in the rural environment as well.
So many of the projects we visited occurred in these places where it’s miles and miles to reach a grocery store, and then maybe even that store doesn’t even have really high quality produce or any of the types of things you’d want to really live a healthy lifestyle.
In a lot of those places, you have people who get their groceries from a gas station. When you think about what’s in gas stations, candy, chips, soda, and that’s about it. Literally, people are living off of that.
So I think that’s where urban agriculture and community gardening can really—especially in people’s lives who don’t have access or don’t have the monetary funds in order to access that food, then this can bring them straight to that. It’s in the community. It’s something that were there often growing. People can grow the food themselves. It’s affordable.
It certainly takes some time. But in terms of the benefits, even in terms of just improving the community itself, things like housing values go up next to a garden and all sorts of auxillary benefits besides health. I think that’s pretty cool.
But I think in a lot of the cities we visited, there are people who are working with folks who were just out from prison for instance. In Chicago, you saw on the film folks, convicts who don’t necessarily have violent crimes or anything. They just made a mistake when they were young. Maybe they had problems with substance abuse or something like that. It’s really hard for those types of people to get a job when they out of prison.
There’s an organization in Chicago called […] that works with those people, gives them jobs, teaches them skills through gardening as their tool to teach them.
So, that’s part of food justice. Things like working with kids, there’s a place called […] in the film. They work with kids and teaches them about growing food, both how to market it, and sell it, and all of these skills—math, public speaking, so on and so forth—that go along with running a business.
You’ll find in the film, food is the tool to really achieve a goal […] they’re working with people who can’t afford fresh, healthy food, or whatever it might be. I think what we show in the film is there’s just this wonderful possibility to use food as a tool to make your community a better place to live.
DEBRA: I really see that and that has been my experience too here. Several years ago, someone started a gardening group where what we wanted to do was help people learn how to grow food in our community, and what were the skills, and my best friends I made in that group, being somebody who had just moved here.
And we don’t have that group anymore for a variety of reasons, but I learned a lot, and I met people, and I still feel like a community with them. There’s something about growing the food, and eating it, and having pot lucks, and having people say, “Here’s my salad with my flowers that I grew.”
And we all go, “Hmm.”
And it gives you something, wholesome is the word, that comes to mind. It gives you all something wholesome to do together, and something that helps everybody, and something that improves your health and the community.
And I wanted to say earlier when you were talking about people not being able to afford food, a packet of seeds costs practically nothing, a dollar or two. And anyone can take a packet of seeds and a pot of soil and grow something.
It’s so much more economical. You can eat the best organic food for pennies because it doesn’t cost a lot of money to grow your food. You just buy the seeds, you plant it, you water it, you take care of it, and then you have food.
And so this whole idea that you have to have lots of money in order to buy food at the supermarket is not really true. And I think people don’t see the economic benefits of that. They have victory gardens. In our economic times, everybody should be growing food just for the economic reasons.
DAN SUSMAN: You’re so right. The economics of it is you need to have time which I think that’s the […] thing. You need to have that time. You can’t be working three jobs, and you have to get your kids at school, and do all those other things.
But you’re still right in terms of just all the people who are unemployed and who can’t find work, and they’re tough on their luck, and all these things, why don’t we look at farming as a viable career option? Why don’t we look at that because, one, we’d be employing people, two, we’d be providing fresh food in places that need it the most.
There is an incredible, incredible opportunity there especially in the urban environment where you have waste coming straight from the city. You could go and build a farm, using people who are usually thought of as useless to society.
You have this wonderful cycle that could take place and is starting to take hold in some places, but needs so much more support. I think you hit it right on the head.
DEBRA: I was just thinking. You were talking about back in the depression, there was something called the CCC, the Citizens Conversation Corp I think it was. And the government hired people to do conservation projects, environmental conservation projects.
There could be all kinds of programs hiring people to grow food in any kind of urban, suburban, even rural environment.
And just put people to work growing food, I think, would be a great idea.
So we only have a couple of minutes left. But what was the most inspirational to you, what was the thing that really tugged your heart, the one thing that you visited that was most memorable to you?
DAN SUSMAN: I think I mentioned them earlier just really briefly, but the group down in New Orleans […]—I think you saw it at the end of the film—what they do is they work with […] It’s just the place that was hit the hardest by Katrina.
And you say, “Katrina, when was that?” Well, it was a long time ago. But even when we were filming in 2011, for seven years after it hit, it looks like it had been hit last week. So it’s just a place which has almost been left behind. But there are still families there. There are still kids there.
So those kids, I […] in this place where it’s very dangerous for them to grow up. They’re carrying guns around as young as 8, or 9, or 10 years old.
We heard some of those stories. And I think that really touched me because I can’t even begin to relate to where these kids are at. But at the same time, to see, using food as this way to give them something to do, and give them a safe space, and give them the attention they need as kids, to really flourish and grow, I think was really special and powerful to me.
So I think that was probably one of the most touching. It really hit it home for me in terms of wow, farming and growing could really make an impact on people’s lives—and not only change these kids’ lives, but really change and empower the entire neighborhood.
DEBRA: Tears are coming to my eyes as you’re talking about that. Food can just be transformational in a lot of ways especially empowering people to do that basically for themselves.
Well, we’ve only got just a few seconds left now. So I’ll just say thank you so much for being on the show. And again, you should go to his website, GrowingCitiesMovie.com, and not only will you find out about the movie and the Kickstarter campaign, but there’s also a lot of information to learn lots of resources.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
A Truly All-Natural Carpet
My guest today is James Stinnett, founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills. They are the premier North American manufacturer of all natural, non-toxic carpet, area rugs and padding—made using undyed, untreated wool on the face, along with hemp, cotton, jute and natural rubber for the backing materials. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals in carpets as well as how Earth Weave makes their carpets and padding. James grew up in Dalton GA, the carpet capital of the world, then moved out west to Montana after receiving an Operations Management degree from Auburn University. There he started and ran a successful flooring company, Rocky Mountain Flooring. Inspired by his love of nature to make non-toxic carpet and rugs James returned to Dalton, GA with a passion for providing high quality, healthy, non-toxic products. His company, Earth Weave Carpet Mills, founded in 1996, is the first and only North American producer of truly healthy broadloom carpets. James oversees every aspect of the business ensuring the products he manufactures speak for themselves in quality and purity. After being in business for over 18 years Earth Weave has maintained a notable reputation for being North America’s premier manufacturer of non-toxic, natural carpeting products. www.earthweave.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Truly All-Natural Carpet
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: James Stinette
Date of Broadcast: June 30, 2014
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s so important to do this because there are so many toxic chemicals in the world in consumer products we use every day, in the environment once we walk out our door. Even our bodies are carrying around toxic chemicals from past exposures that we didn’t even know about. But there are things that we can do to make our lives better, to be healthier, to be free from the harmful effects of these toxic chemicals. And that’s what we talk about on this show.
Today is Monday, June 30th, 2014. It’s a beautiful summer day here in Clearwater, Florida. Actually, when I’m sitting here during the show, I’m looking out into my garden. There’s 17 ft. of windows. I just am seeing this butterfly flying past my window. It’s just so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. It’s a beautiful day.
Anyway, today we’re talking about carpeting. We’re talking about what’s bad about carpet and we’re talking about the best possible carpet that I know of that you can buy. If you want to have carpet in your home, you don’t have to give up carpet, but you do need to watch out for the toxic chemicals. And that’s what we’re talking about today.
My guest is James Stinette. He’s the founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills. They’re the premiere North American manufacturer of all-natural, non-toxic carpet, area rugs and padding made using un-dyed and untreated wool on the face along with hemp cotton, jute and natural rubber for the backing materials. We’re going to learn all about this today.
Hi, James. Thanks for being on the show.
JAMES STINETTE: Thank you, Debra. Thanks for having me on. I’m glad you have sunny weather there. We have a little bit of rain here, but you have some nice view to look out there.
DEBRA: Well, we’re going to have rain this afternoon, I’m sure. We have rains every afternoon, thunderstorms. We’re in the south. We’re both in the south.
Anyway, tell me how you got interested in making an all-natural carpet.
JAMES STINETTE: I grew up in Dalton, Georgia, which is the carpet capital of the world and was exposed, I guess, just at every turn because that’s the industry here. It’s kind of like Detroit was to the auto industry. Wherever you go, everyone here is involved in the carpet industry whether it’s manufacturing of yarn, manufacturing of backing systems, manufacturing of the full carpet system or the distribution of it. So I grew up in Dalton and worked in various stages of that.
I guess I’ve more so always been environmentally conscious and outdoors. I just wanted to be outside and enjoy the mountains and things like that. So after I graduated from Auburn University– like I said, growing up here in Dalton, I worked in those various things, but I graduated from Auburn University, I moved out to Montana and I started a business out there selling carpet. I was just selling the mainstream Hoover Covering, Shaw, Mohawk and what-have-you because I was young and had connections from back here. So I had a business doing that. I thought there’s got to be a better way.
I’ve seen landfills here when I grew up in Dalton, we’d take things to the landfill and you’d see all the carpet waste that was there, and just always…
DEBRA: Yeah.
JAMES STINETTE: And at the back of my mind—sorry, go ahead.
DEBRA: No, I was just agreeing with you about the carpet waste. I think that that’s something that most people don’t realize. They put down this synthetic wall-to-wall carpet and it doesn’t biodegrade. Isn’t carpet like a big waste problem?
JAMES STINETTE: It’s huge. And I saw a number the other day, I don’t even want to quote it because I thought it was so enormously high. I need to clarify that. But the amount of volume in pounds that they were saying that carpet attributes to the actual overall pounds of landfill waste was just enormous. You’re right.
So that was where I was coming from. I have that desire to be outdoors and to protect the environment. And selling these things — not huge business, just a small business, but it was growing, I just had this idea, “I need to figure out a better way to do this. There has to be a better way.”
I just started doing some research. Back to the way carpet was made years and years ago before the synthetics took off, before it became cost-effective to do things in a synthetic manner, they were all natural materials. So I went out and just redeveloped a backing system. I say “redeveloped,” I tweaked the old style and developed the primary backing because that was the key thing, getting the primary backing as adhesive because we used wool and wool for yarn was currently being used. So that wasn’t the revolution. It was more just bringing it all together.
The carpet that we make is no different as far as the way it’s made, the process of being put on a tufting machine, yarns and they’re placed in their primary backing and then adhesive is applied to that. So it’s no different than what everyone else does, but it’s just the fact that the constituent materials we use are natural. So that’s where I got into this and just said, “Hey, there’s got to be a better way” and just thought it through and spent – it was probably 18 months of research and development to try to come up with the products we currently have or at least the ones we had then. We expanded the line since then. But the product is essentially the same as it was 18 years ago now.
DEBRA: I just want to congratulate you for having an idea and following through with it in order to make such an outstanding product because a lot of people have ideas and they don’t do anything with it. So this is great that you did something and you made a product and you have marketed it and you have – I’m going to assume a successful business or you wouldn’t still be in business.
JAMES STINETTE: Yes, we’re not the biggest, but it’s going good. Yes.
DEBRA: Good, good. At least you’re covering your costs and all those things and you can stay in business, and feed your family, and all those kinds of things. So…
JAMES STINETTE: In regards to that – I mean, I’ve considered myself more of an eco-entrepreneur. I don’t feel like being an entrepreneur. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Well, maybe there’s this thought process that, “Hey, you can’t be healthy and environmental and actually be an entrepreneur and good for the economy as well.” I don’t agree with that. I’m an eco-¬entrepreneur and I think that’s where the future is.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you because I think that sometimes people get confused between the idea of being entrepreneurial and having a business or even having a factory and misusing that by some toxic corporations.
Everything in nature, everything in life is producing things. I mean, even an animal will build a nest. A bird will build a nest and we need to build our homes and put things in it. I think that you’re absolutely right that the future is people like you figuring out how to do it in an ecological way, so that the materials that we’re using for these items that we need in our homes, it comes from the earth in a sustainable way. We use it and then it can go back into the ecosystem in a sustainable way.
So I am assuming from the description that I’m reading of your carpet, that you could just put it out in your garden, and it would just biodegrade.
JAMES STINETTE: Yes, over a number of years. That’s one thing that people think, “Well, this carpet is going to fall apart because it biodegrades.” It’s probably a better term to call it is “compostable” because “biodegrade” simply means it’s going to do it on its own, “compostable” means it requires other organisms to do that. But that’s what’s out there in the environment. Once it’s exposed to dirt and the soil and the other organisms, yes, it will be composted actually.
DEBRA: Yeah. And so, your carpet is never going to sit in a landfill. Those landfill carpets, do you think that they’ll ever break down and go back into the environment?
JAMES STINETTE: Well, they say 10,000 years, but how would you know? I mean, you can’t…
DEBRA: Ten thousand years? Yes…
JAMES STINETTE: You can’t really accelerate that in a lab.
DEBRA: I don’t consider 10,000 years to be biodegradable. It’s there and it’s part of the environment and it piles up because it doesn’t have a time period in which it goes back, a reasonable time period in which it goes back into the environment.
That is what happens. Nutrients from the environment go into making these raw materials and then we use them and then they need to go back. Like leaves on a tree, a tree produces leaves, the leaves fall, they do their job for the tree, they fall, they go back in the ground and the ground breaks them down and then the tree utilizes the nutrients again. And that’s the cycle we all should be having.
We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about carpets with my guest, James Stinette, founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills. We’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is James Stinette, founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills. You can go to his website at EarthWeave.com and see his carpets and buy one if you need a carpet for your home.
James, I want to tell you and our listeners some stories that I have about—I would just call them “carpet horror stories.”
Many, many years ago when I first started writing, nobody was talking about toxic chemicals in carpets. And yet I knew that there were toxic chemicals there because I had a number of clients where I would go to their homes and help them identify what was toxic. I knew that for me, I had to remove the carpet from my home because I knew that it was making me sick.
And then I had clients and I would tell them to get your carpet and their symptoms would go away, but there were no studies about this.
I don’t remember the exact year, but I think it was in the ‘90s sometime, the EPA had a big problem, because – I’m trying to remember all the details of this story because they have installed a new carpet and the workers on the EPA building started having symptoms. They documented all these symptoms. They tested the carpet and they found that there was a toxic chemical.
Since there have been a lot of tests on carpets and they are finding just long lists of – I’m not even going to go into what the toxic chemicals are because they’re just a bunch of names that we probably wouldn’t recognize. But it’s not just one or two toxic chemicals, it’s lists, hundreds of toxic chemicals that are found in just standard synthetic carpets.
And I haven’t had a carpet in my home in more than 30 years since I ripped the carpet out of my bedroom one day. I just got on the floor and ripped it out because I couldn’t sleep and I was trying to figure out what I needed to do to make my bedroom a place where I could sleep and carpet was one of those things. I haven’t had carpet in my house since.
So I am very happy that you’re doing what you’re doing because I know some people who really do want to have carpet and there’s no reason not to have carpet if it’s made out of safe materials.
JAMES STINETTE: That is true. And you’re right, a lot of colder environments really need it – the bedrooms (it’s a popular item for the bedrooms) and stairwells and our stairways and basements where there are kids.
And that’s our biggest clients, I guess, new families, young mothers that have kids that want something soft for the kids to play on.
The industry, as a whole, the flooring industry really promotes hard surface for health. There are Scandinavian studies actually that have looked at indoor health and indoor air quality associated with hard surface versus carpeting. And they’ve actually found out that if you have a healthy carpet, that it actually can act as a temporary sink and collect any airborne dust particles until they’re clean. I guess the issue is that if people don’t do the cleaning, then that’s where they run into another risk in addition to the chemicals that could be in a standard carpet.
DEBRA: Well, there’s another whole source of chemicals, the rug shampoo that people then need to clean those synthetic carpets and the contaminants. That makes sense to me, that it would be a sink for dust particles and things because I know that carpets often can collect things.
And I’m thinking, this just occurred to me, I’ve never seen this written that I can recall. You know how when you wear synthetic clothing, that there’s static electricity. And so you have to use antistatic in the laundry. But I’m wondering if synthetic carpets have static electricity kind of thing that would cause more particles to be attracted to it. Your carpet doesn’t have that kind of static attraction being a natural fiber. I just thought of that. I don’t know if you know anything about that.
JAMES STINETTE: I’m not really sure on that as far as whether there would be a difference between a synthetic nylon and a wool.
DEBRA: Yeah. So I do know that the toxicity of carpets has been recognized by the carpet industry. Toxicity in synthetic carpets has been recognized by the carpet industry because now there is a program. I don’t have the name of it at the top of my head, but there’s a program where…
JAMES STINETTE: The Carpet Rug Institute.
DEBRA: That’s right. There’s a program that rates carpets for different levels of emissions. And so if there wasn’t a problem, they wouldn’t have that. And yet I would say that my evaluation would be that your carpet would be just like off-the-charts better in comparison.
JAMES STINETTE:Well, here’s the thing. There is actually just one level. It’s the Green -Label Plus. And I think that a lot of the misinformation that’s out there – we make a wool face fiber. There are other wool manufacturers out there, and they tell their carpets as being green, eco-healthy, sustainable, natural.
Actually, go to their website and you will see the words of wool. It’s green, healthy, eco, natural, sustainable, non-toxic, biodegradable and all these things. And if you look closely, they’re right. Wool is, but their backing system is identical to a nylon carpet because they still have the styrene-butadiene rubber adhesive in there.
And you were saying, they test for these and rate them on levels. They actually do not have different rating levels. There is just one level and it’s really the Green Label Plus. Ay nylon carpet, their nylon carpets can get the exact same rating as a wool carpet, because it’s really the adhesive that has the 300 different chemicals in it – the toluene, the benzene, the styrene, the 4-PC.
A lot of the consumers out there are duped by the industry because they see maybe a designer or someone that’s supposedly in the know that says, “You want a wool carpet because wool is healthy. Wool is green. Wool is eco. Wool is all these things.” They don’t tell you, “Well, it still has the same styrene-butadiene adhesive on the back and moth proofing,” which is a pesticide on there as well.
DEBRA: I want to talk about moth proofing when we come back. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is James Stinette, founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills, and his website is EarthWeave.com. You can go there and see his carpets. You can see the little lambs running along the hillside that give the wool for his carpets. I’m not saying those are the sheep, but that’s the idea.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is James Stinette. He’s the founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills and his website is EarthWeave.com.
James, before the break, we were almost starting to talk about moth proofing and pesticides. I know there are also stain repellants and things. Can you just talk a little bit about those things before we get into talking about your carpets?
JAMES STINETTE: In what regard? I’m sorry.
DEBRA: Tell us about – I think when I was researching this many years ago, there were different types of pesticides that were used on carpets for moth proofing, but there was also a moth proofing process. I’m trying to remember where they change the wool in some way that wasn’t the pesticide. I was wondering if you could just tell us, if something says “moth proofing,” what does that mean?
JAMES STINETTE: They put a synthetic chemical permethrin on there, which is somewhat a derivative of the chrysanthemum plant. I guess they take something from that plant and change it around to get this chemical make-up. And it’s a known neurotoxin. So it’s something that my clients and our customers do not want on their product in their home. We don’t feel that it’s needed on the carpet and that it’s just something that’s not healthy.
DEBRA: Yeah. What about stain-resistant products? Are there things like Scotchgard and things like that? Do you know anything about this…?
JAMES STINETTE: I’m not sure if the industry – they’ve kind of gotten away a little bit from Scotchgard. Well, actually, Scotchgard changed one of their chemicals that was in there because it was actually known to be a carcinogen. They found out to be that. So they’ve reformulated a little bit, but it’s still out there in the whole synthetic industry.
The big thing now with carpet is they’re soft as wool or soft as silk, soft, soft, soft and they’re doing that through chemical processing. They’re taking synthetic yarns and treating them in a different manner to get the softness. I don’t think they’re going to perform as well as they had in the past, but they’re trying to give this hand and this luster and this appearance of wool. Everything is trying to approach the perfect fiber, which is wool.
Really, the scale structure on the fiber, everything about it, you cannot mimic through a synthetic because if you’ve ever looked at a wool in the microscope or there are pictures of it, it has a scale structure and that scale structure lends itself to its durability and its longevity and its resilience and also its clean ability.
So the synthetics, they’re trying to get there, but they can’t do it. They try to mimic it the best they can, and they do it through chemical processing.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. Tell us about your carpets now. Tell us about the materials and how you put them together and everything.
JAMES STINETTE: Sure. As I said at the beginning, we don’t really do anything different as far as the construction technique. It’s still made on the tufting machine, which is essentially a very large sewing machine. It’s 12 ft. wide. It has a lot of needles through it and yarn is fed through it. So it’s the same process as what everyone else does. We just choose to replace the synthetic materials that everyone else uses with a wool faced fiber. So if you look at the top of the card, it has wools. It’s British wool. It’s the longest lasting, most resilient fiber available.
It’s naturally colored. So just like your hair color, maybe your family, they all have same hair color, let’s say. We choose sheep that has similar hair color from similar family range and breeds. We combine those to get our coloration. So there are no dyes or chemicals put on there, no moth proofing. The sheep are just free ranging out on the hills as they have been for thousands of years literally in the UK.
DEBRA: Literally, they have. Sheep are a big thing in the UK.
JAMES STINETTE: Definitely, and this is…
DEBRA: Yeah, here in America, we don’t see sheep on the hillsides like you see it in the UK.
JAMES STINETTE: Exactly! And like I say, they’ve been doing it for years and years and years. This is not a new thing.
So we take those yarns and then we put them into custom-manufactured hemp and cotton primary backing. Whereas everyone else in the industry uses polypropylene, we use a hemp and cotton primary backing. This is something I custom developed. There is nothing else like it out there. And it took a long time to develop it.
It’s not perfect. There are inconsistencies in natural materials, but that’s what gives us the texture and everything that we need, whereas you’ve got a synthetic polypropylene primary and it’s repeatable and everything is identical each and every time.
And the other thing about it is it’s not as inexpensive as a synthetic. Our backing system, just that primary, it’s four times the cost of a polypropylene primary, but it’s what we need to do to get the¬¬ natural biodegradable system that we have.
All these that I am talking about can be seen on our website under ‘Carpet Construction Diagram’. Once we placed the yarn…
DEBRA: I’m looking at that page and it’s a very good diagram.
JAMES STINETTE: Thank you, yes. As you go through that, you can see we’re going from the top down. So we’ve got the wool on the face, we’ve got the hemp and cotton primary backing and then, we’ve got the natural rubber adhesive that we use (that’s from a rubber tree and that’s what we use to replace the styrene-butadiene rubber adhesive that all other manufacturers use). And then, you have a jute secondary backing.
And here’s one thing in the industry that rubbed me in the industry. For years and years, we were the only one even pushing this, being healthy and natural and green and all these things. We don’t even use the word ‘green’ anymore. I’ve stopped using that word because it was…
DEBRA: Me too.
JAMES STINETTE: I just use ‘healthy’ because as I told you earlier, there are all these wool manufacturers, they’re telling their products as being green and eco and everything, but they don’t tell you about that styrene backing. So that’s where the crux of the matter is. That’s what makes ours different.
You can actually find wool carpets out there that don’t have dyes on them. And some don’t even have moth proofing. You flip them over, they may have a jute secondary. It’s the sandwich. It’s what in the middle of the sandwich that they don’t tell you about, that spread that’s in there that has the chemicals.
So the materials that we use, the properties of them are completely natural. They’re truly renewable, truly sustainable.
The buzz words that just drive me crazy now are ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’, those two things. And then they will have them attached to synthetic products. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand that, how they can use those words.
DEBRA: I’ve heard that a lot too. Here’s what I see. I see that there are people like you who are doing the right thing and they are doing it completely and thoroughly. They’re understanding, “This is a sustainable product and so everything about it needs to be sustainable. It needs to fit in the ecosystem of the earth.” That’s your guiding star.
But other people are coming from having done something really synthetic and then they say, “Well, let’s move in the right direction.” And they’re moving in the right direction, but they are not producing a sustainable product. They shouldn’t say that if they aren’t.
We need to go break again. We need to go to break. We will talk more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is James Stinette. He’s the founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills and we’re talking about this truly natural carpeting. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is James Stinette, founder of Earth Weave Carpet Mills. And his website is EarthWeave.com.
James, so tell us about your padding. First tell us why we need to have carpet padding. And then, tell us about – I know you have two different carpet pads.
I always thought I don’t really need padding. And actually, I’ve never put down a carpet. I’m usually taking them up, but I do have one area rug in my house which happens to be covering an old – well, I live in Florida and the way my house was constructed, if you were to cut a hole on the floor, you would just look down on the dirt. There’s no basement or anything.
And so, central air conditioning/heating system had been installed and then they took it out, so there was a grate. You just look down in the grate (because there was a hole on the floor), you look down on the grate and you see the dirt underneath and the lizards and everything.
So I had to put something over that or replace the floor right there. And just temporarily, I just went and got a little wool area rug that I put over there. It’s still there 13 years later. But I’m thinking about getting an area rug for my living room and I thought, “Well, I don’t need a carpet pad under that.”
Tell us why we need a carpet pad.
JAMES STINETTE: We have two different paddings. One would be for installation, wall to wall and that is the wool padding that we have. In that application, it promotes resilience and longevity of the carpet.
The commercial applications, a lot of times, they do not use padding underneath. That’s more just because in commercial, there are a lot of rolling items, perhaps chairs and carts and things like that they need to pull. The padding would maybe make it a little bit softer, a little bit too cushiony.
For residential applications, a padding is actually an integral part. It’s a system. You put that under there, it gives it a great base. Ours is 40 ounces of wool. It’s firm, it’s dense, it’s not hard, but it’s resilient enough that it gives it that springiness that you need and kind of cushions the steps that you take.
DEBRA: As I’m looking at this piece of padding on your website, and I’ve been looking – oh! When you mouse over it, it gives you enlargement. That’s very nice.
As I’m looking at this and I’m looking at your carpeting, I can just imagine how good that would feel under my feet, to have that double-padding, the padding and the carpet, and walking on that and how soft that would be. I could see why people would want that.
I think I had this idea from so long ago even before you existed as a company that I don’t want to have carpet because carpet is toxic, toxic, toxic. And I’m looking at your carpet, and I am thinking, “What a wonderful, natural thing to have under my feet.”
Okay. So then, the other one is the rubber rug gripper.
JAMES STINETTE: The gripper, yes. And that’s more to be used under an area rug if someone has an area rug that may not have furniture like a coffee table or something that’s sitting on it. And it just keeps it to non-slip. It keeps it from sliding. It will not harm a wood floor. And there are some out, synthetic versions that actually do some damage to hardwood floors, but this is fine for that.
It offers a little bit of additional cushioning as well, but predominantly, it’s more of a gripper. That’s why we call it a rug gripper. It just keeps it from sliding around.
DEBRA: So here’s the next question. So then, how do people clean these carpets?
JAMES STINETTE: How do they clean it? We suggest hosed carpet cleaning. We have a link to that on our website. They have a completely natural non-toxic cleaning process. And just like our system of the padding in the carpet, we want to suggest natural things with Total Care. So that is a system that they use.
And the great thing about them is they have a home system that someone like yourself could buy for your occasional spills or stains, and then they also have professional cleaners that will come in, people with their own machineries that will come in and use the same materials.
I don’t want to use the word ‘chemical’, but there are natural materials that they have for the cleaning. They will come into your home and do a thorough cleaning if you have a wall-to-wall carpeting. Those guys are nationwide. So that’s why we like to recommend them. Not only are they completely natural and non-toxic, but they have a nationwide system to do this.
DEBRA: Excellent! I didn’t know about them and I am very happy to hear about them because I know that some people still do have carpet and at least, they could clean their carpet in a more natural way and eliminate that toxic exposure from the normal carpet cleaning.
So it looks like you’ve got everything figured out here. That’s so great.
JAMES STINETTE: Not everything. We’re trying, but not everything.
DEBRA: So what about people who are chemically sensitive?
JAMES STINETTE: Well, that’s a huge part of our market. People buy our rugs and we have tons and tons of repeat customers. It’s odd.
In the last week, we had three or four inquiries. Actually, someone said they bought our carpet four years ago in remodel. They’re putting it in again. They love it. And someone else is like eight years ago and they bought another house.
Those people that don’t want to be exposed to these chemicals are those who buy our products. And there are people that either knows they’re chemically sensitive and can’t be around. There are other people that don’t want to expose their kids to the chemicals that are out there.
So that’s our main clientele; those who seek this out. They do the research and they find out that there is a difference in our products and everything else that’s out there.
DEBRA: Your product really is different than everything out there. I can really see that. There was another question I wanted to ask you and now I’ve forgotten.
Oh, I know what I want to talk about. So I know that your products are qualified for the LEAD certification. You have a comment here on your website about LEAD certification. I’m trying to find it again, so I can ask you about it. I’ll just paraphrase what I remembered.
JAMES STINETTE: That’s a sore issue with me because like I say, it’s kind of back to we don’t use the term ‘green’ and LEAD is kind of just pushing this word, this ‘green’.
When USGBC, the United States Green Building Council first started, there were companies such as myself and other truly healthy companies in there and now, it’s just overrun by the big chemical companies, the MonSantos and the insulation companies. They’re no different in the company’s products now than they were before. That’s where the money is at. So that’s the biggest thing I have, I see in the industries the term called “green-washing.”
Fortunately, you don’t really see a lot of this because I think you’re focused on the health side, but a lot of people in my industry, in the building industry, they focus on green. And that doesn’t mean anything like I say, because everything is green out there. I mean, Clorox is green. I see advertisements on TV for Clorox, and it’s green. In Exxon, your gasoline is green.
DEBRA: Yeah, I know, it doesn’t mean anything.
JAMES STINETTE: It doesn’t mean anything.
DEBRA: I think that what you had said, I’m trying to find it as I’m listening to you, is that you said something about that there’s not a difference between the ones that are – like you were talking about the Carpet Institute, that there’s not a difference between something that is unique…
JAMES STINETTE: They don’t reward people or companies like our product. They don’t actually reward someone for putting in a truly natural, truly sustainable healthy product…
DEBRA: That was the point.
JAMES STINETTE: You get the same number of points as if you were to put in a synthetic that just meets the Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) Green Label Plus Program. It doesn’t mean they don’t have chemicals on it. It doesn’t mean it’s healthy. It’s just means that it meets their criteria.
DEBRA: And I’m wanting to particularly make the point about this because this isn’t the only certification program that does this. I’ve been saying this about other certification programs like GREENGUARD and other ones we were talking about the other day where you can’t just look at the certification and say, “Oh, this certification means this,” because there are no gradations that then can point out what’s at the top and what really is green. It just all falls into one category and so, you can’t tell the difference. And that’s the problem for me with all those certifications. You can’t just really find out what is the best one. So I sympathize with you.
JAMES STINETTE: Unfortunately, it’s big business. It’s big business and that’s where the money is going. We know that.
DEBRA: Yeah. And so, it kind of becomes meaningless. That’s too bad because I think that people really need it.
JAMES STINETTE: And the big thing we fight against is green-washing, the levels of green and shades of green. Maybe we’re too far to the purist side, but I don’t feel like there are any levels…
DEBRA: Never.
JAMES STINETTE: There is either green and healthy, which is natural, or there’s not. How can you have something that’s synthetic in all these chemicals? Take the BPA. They’re now finding out in the plastic drinking bottles and all these things. For a long time it was there, it was safe – I shouldn’t say ‘safe’, it was allowed. And now, they’re finding out that it shouldn’t have been allowed. So why would you trust these people?
DEBRA: I understand what you’re saying, that either it should be allowed or it shouldn’t be allowed. We are always finding out some things, more things about toxic chemicals. And so if something shouldn’t be allowed, it still shouldn’t be allowed. I get what you’re saying.
Anyway, we’re coming to the end of our hour. Thank you so much for being with me. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you again. My guest has been James Stinette from Earth Weave Carpet Mills. His website is EarthWeave.com.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
JAMES STINETTE: Thank you.
Cleaning Mitsubishi Splits air units
Question from CZ
The Mitsubishi Split air conditioner unit in my bedroom has a terrible odor that the heating-cooling company has diagnosed as sweaty gym socks syndrome and says it needs spraying with a fungicide/mildew remover to coat the coils–and this solution will not work for me.
Vinegar and water, my first thought, would cause too much oxidation I’ve been told.
What alternative cleaning and clearing would work for the chemically sensitive?
I would appreciate suggestions!
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any suggestions?
Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- The Basic Principles of Toxicology
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxicants
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: June 26, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic-free.
Today, we’re going to be talking with toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert, who’s been on the show so many times. I appreciate it every time he comes because he’s a real, live toxicologist, and this is what he does all day long, is study what chemicals are toxic, how they’re toxic, where they are, what to do about them, and he’s written a wonderful called A Small Dose of Toxicology.
I had mentioned this book before, and I always say everybody listening should just go to his website and get a free copy of this book because it not only talks about some of the major chemicals that you should be concerned about, but it also talks about some basic things about toxicology, and it’s all written in a way that’s very easy to understand.
And so you will want to go to his website, which is Toxipedia.org, T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A, and get that sometime during a commercial or something, or after the show. But it’s certainly a book that should be, I don’t want to say on your shelf because it’s an e-book. It’s probably not going to sit on your shelf, but it should be in your home, and you should have that information as part of just general background for living in the toxic world that we live in.
Hi, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: Hi, Debra. It’s good to hear from you again.
DEBRA: Thank you. It’s nice to have you. Today, we’re going to be talking about persistent bioaccumulative toxicants. And this isn’t something really different than what we usually talk about because it’s not something that we generally find in consumer products on the label, although they definitely are in consumer products, but it’s something that governments are concerned about accumulating in the environment.
So tell us exactly what is persistent bioaccumulative toxicants. And I know it also goes by other names too. So tell us about those.
STEVEN GILBERT: It goes by other names. For example, PBT is persistent bioaccumulative toxicants […] from the USEPA.
And most of the states have chosen categories like that. The United Nations call them persistent organic pollutants or POPs.
And both agencies, they have developed a list of these chemicals.
And the primary reason is because they’re persistent in the environment, they do not break down. So they’re persistent in the environment. And they’re bioaccumulative in the sense that they move up the food chain, they accumulate in the animals or plants, or in human bodies. That’s where it becomes more serious.
And we’ve really learned to know from studying toxicology that very small amounts of some of these chemicals can produce the adverse effects.
So we’re concerned about chemicals that persist in the environment and do not break down. And a classic example of this is DDT.
It’s a well-known insecticide, widely-used after World War II. And it was really the foundation for Rachel Carson writing Silent Spring where she really laid out the key study, DDT, although it might not seem toxic to humans (at least when we were thinking about it then), it was very toxic to birds and to the wildlife.
So high predatory birds like eagles and hawks, it damages their ability to—their chicks could survive because of the eggs.
[They’ve got crusts]. And this was very serious. It caused a lot of damage to the bird population in the United States.
It really showed the importance of understanding ecological effects of the persistent chemicals, and how they survive in the environment, what the consequences to wildlife is.
DEBRA: I know most people have a lot of attention. I know I started out this way. I wasn’t thinking about the environment at all. I was thinking about these consumer products that are making me sick when I use them. And I know that a lot of people come into having interest in toxics by what the health effects are on themselves, or concern about their children, or women who are pregnant, who are concerned about their growing child in their womb.
But the environment is extremely important. It’s absolutely vital. We couldn’t be alive without the environment. Everything that keeps our own bodies alive all comes from the environment, all the natural resources that are used to make the products that we use every day, our food, the air we breathe, the water we drink, all of those things come from the environment.
And if we don’t have an environment, then we don’t have our own lives.
And I think that that’s one of the most important things for people to know, and yet, it’s so widely not known in our culture today. People just don’t have that awareness.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, it’s really true because we have contaminated the environment, which ultimately leads to the contamination of humans.
A really good example is lead and mercury. I’ll just focus on mercury for a moment.
Mercury moves up the food chain when it gets out into the environment. And mercury is in coals when you burn in these coal-fired utility plants. And the ETA has passed a recent regulation trying to control the mercury […] But the mercury comes out of the coal, off the smoke stacks, gets in the environment, and then it’s converted to methylmercury.
So the inorganic mercury that’s in coal is converted to organic mercury. That organic mercury gradually moves up the food chain and accumulates in fish. So the big fish eats the small fish, the small fish have eaten the bacteria, and the snails have accumulated the mercury, and it moves up the food chain.
So fish that are on the top of the food chain, there’s tuna, swordfish, shark, accumulate this mercury. And we now know that mercury has very serious consequences for neurological development in children or infants.
So we have contaminated a very important source of protein around the world. But we continue to do that with burning of coal.
So, it’s really a global issue. It comes down to thinking globally on these issues. And the coal that we ship to India and China come back to haunt us in some interesting ways because of the bioaccumulative nature of methylmercury.
So, we’re on one big closed-loop system here. We’ve got [continuity directly back to us].
DEBRA: You just talked about how inorganic mercury in the environment, they get changed to, what was it? Mercury or lead?
STEVEN GILBERT: Mercury, it changes from inorganic to organic mercury.
DEBRA: Could you just explain that in a little more detail? It’s the changing of the form by us using it that makes it more toxic.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, that’s true. And many people have probably placed little […] of mercury because it’s widely used in thermometers and thermostats. My old house used to have a thermostat with mercury in it. When you go and pull the cover off that, you can see little mercury sloshing around in there.
And they use that because it conducts electricity. So mercury is a really interesting metal. It has a wide number of uses. It’s a catalyst and it’s used all over the place in many industries. And only in the last 20 years, we really tried to control the mercury effluence and the mercury use.
It’s used, for example, in gold mining because mercury attracts the gold. If you take your ring and put a little bit of mercury around it, it will turn silver because the mercury adheres to the gold. But when you evaporate the mercury—and that’s another important property. It evaporates in room temperate. If you heat it, the mercury is boiled away and you’re left with gold and the gold mining.
But just like with burning coal, when you heat that coal or burn the coal, the inorganic mercury goes up the smoke stack, and then into the environment.
And in the environment, in fact, it’s been used as a [fungicide]. For example, mercury was used in […] A form of mercury was used in vaccines. So it’s very bacteria- and fungicidal. It killed those unwanted organisms.
But these organisms also fought back, and they tried to convert it. To detoxify the mercury, they convert it into methylmercury. So they attach a methyl group to this mercury. And that’s where it starts bioaccumulating up the food chain.
Mercury interacts with protein, so it accumulates in the muscle of the fish. In a high predatory fish, it gradually accumulates more and more mercury. So the long, big, old tuna would likely have quite a bit of mercury in it.
Because we contaminate, we spread mercury throughout the environment from burning of coal and other uses. And also mercury is somewhat naturally occurring in the environment although at much lower levels.
So as mercury moves up the food chain, it contaminates the fish we want to eat. And that’s a serious problem for kids, fetuses, and women of child-bearing age. So you really want to limit the amount of mercury intake.
So the FDA just came out with an advisory on mercury where they advise women of child-bearing age and pregnant women to consume fish of low concentration of mercury. So fish that have little mercury, they’re recommending increased consumption of. They’re trying to avoid fish with high levels of mercury.
So, this is why I mentioned it’s really a global problem in a sense that we burn mercury and lead off into the environment.
The burning of coals, for example, will contaminate our waterways. We’ve got fish advisories all over the United States, and really, around the world, about trying to control the mercury in fish. And we continue to burn coal.
And we know how to sequester the mercury from these coal-fired plants, but we don’t do it because they’re expensive to do. Owners would rather generate electricity and make money than use pollutant control devices. So we’re all culpable in this mess.
DEBRA: We need to go to break now, but we’ll talk more about this when we come back because I have a question for you about tuna. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m talking with Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. And he’s also the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology, which you can get for free at Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. And we’ve been talking about persistent environmental bioaccumulative toxicants. It’s got so many names, just a couple of names, but it’s all the same thing.
So my question that I had about tuna is, of course, every child is fed tuna sandwiches. I didn’t eat a lot of tune because I didn’t like it. But so many people eat tuna. It’s a standard lunchtime thing. And a lot of people eat tuna as sushi.
Is there any tuna that is not contaminated?
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, there are some fish that have lower mercury levels in them—like salmon, for example, or shorter-lived fish. So they live for a couple of years. They’re not as high on the food chain as, for example, tuna. So salmon generally has less mercury in it.
Mercury is important because we eat the meat, the muscle of the fish where the mercury is. But for example, in salmon, they might accumulate some DDT, or PCBs, but they’re in the fat of the salmon, not in the muscle. So you have to know where the chemical is accumulating to be wise about what to eat.
So we try to choose fish that are low in mercury.
DEBRA: And the EPA has a list. I think there are several lists, but the EPA, as you said, just came out with one.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, there are several lists. The FDA just published a recent one. Most of the states have fish advisories. The Washington state does. It stirs you to the fish to consume that are lower in mercury.
DEBRA: So should somebody be looking for their local state list because it would have local fish on it?
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes. Most of us have local fish. There will be local fish advisories, and then you have to consult them and know what fish are for sports-fishing.
And I think the other thing, remember, is that this is also an environmental justice issue because people that are high fish consumers can be lower on the socioeconomic scale, and they’re using fish for subsistence living, in a sense.
And they eat more fish […] that they are exposed to other PCBs, DDTs, as well as mercury.
DEBRA: Every time you turn around, there’s another aspect of this. But I know for myself, I as a child, I just didn’t like fish from the first bite. There was something about it I didn’t like. I always refused to eat fish and seafood. And it’s still that way for me. I just put it in my mouth and I don’t want it at all.
Every once in a while, I try and bite a fish, but I think it might be just from the toxic chemicals that are in fish.
So I’m looking in your book, A Small Dose of Toxicology, and there’s a whole chapter on this. If you’re listening to this, and it seems like this is a lot of new information, you can just go to Toxipedia.org, and download A Small Dose of Toxicology. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, there’s a picture of the book there with the description of this show. And if you click on it, it will take you right to the page where you can get this book for free.
STEVEN GILBERT: In the chapter (and also in the PowerPoint presentation that goes with that chapter), I list out a table that has different chemicals that had been declared persistent bioaccumulative or POPs. I think I listed the Washington state list too.
So there’s a range of chemicals and metals. Lead for example, is persistent in the environment. It bioaccumulates in the bones, for example.
But you can get a list of these chemicals. A lot of them are pesticides, you’ll notice in that. And that came out of post-World War II when we thought we had a handle all things chemical and knew how to manage the environment.
I just want to say, Rachel Carson had a great quote from Silent Springs. “As crude a weapon as a caveman’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.”
And I really think that’s what we’ve done in a lot of ways. And these lists really demonstrate that, how we’ve taken the chemicals and really hurled them at the fabric of life to create a lot of hazard in our own lives now.
DEBRA: I was just going to mention these lists. And that’s why I […] But yes, these are good lists. And I think that the thing that strikes me when I look at them is that it contains not only the things bioaccumulate in the environment, but they also bioaccumulate the same chemicals and metals would bioaccumulate in our own bodies in the same way.
STEVEN GILBERT: I was going to say lead is a great example of that. If you’re exposed to lead while you’re growing up, the lead accumulates in the bone.
And then for example, there are certain periods of life—it might even be during pregnancy where the child […] zinc or calcium. Their bones are de-mineralized in the mom. And that led, along with the calcium that’s de-mineralized, goes into the child, the developing fetus.
So, persistent bioaccumulative toxicants are very serious. And you’ve got to remember that the child, the fetus, is very small, so a small amount of exposure represents a big dose to that developing fetus or developing child.
So there are many ways. And we have to be really careful with these compounds.
DEBRA: We’re about to go to break again. But I just want to finish saying what I was going to say, and then we’ll go to break, and then we’ll have a new question here. The things that really jump out of me that I didn’t understand before that were persistent are lead, as you said, mercury, and here’s another one, it’s tin.
I know that I did some research some years ago about tin because I bought a set of cookware that was lined with tin. So I was trying to find out if that was safe. And of course, there are tin cans, but they aren’t lined with tin anymore.
But at the time when I was doing that research, it didn’t come up that it was a persistent metal. And so I’m no longer using that cookware for other reasons, but that’s something that you do see in consumer products.
Let’s see what else is on the list. There are a lot of pesticides, PCBs, PBDEs. Tell us a little bit, really quick, about PBDEs.
STEVEN GILBERT: PDBE is a part of a category of flame retardants. They’re very persistent in the environment as it turns out. They are in the cushions and mattresses.
They’ve started becoming banned—California has moved to do that—because these chemicals would get out into the environment, they would be distributed all over the world, and show up […]
And it’s because they tend to accumulate in fat. So when a woman lactates, the fat is mobilized and the flame retardants come out into the milk.
And they’re actually shown not to be effective in mattresses and cushions. And the reason why these chemicals are used as a money-making product for the chemical industry because they are used to quench fires that might start from cigarettes.
And the cigarettes were manufactured to burn down, so they didn’t go out. Cigarettes will naturally go out if you’ve not puffed on them, if you just roll your own.
But initially, the tobacco industry made them, so it did not go out. And they added flame retardants in these mattresses and cushions because they thought that was the way to keep the cigarettes from burning.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. And we’ll be right back with more about these persistent chemicals.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. And we’re talking about persistent chemicals in the environment. Of course, if a chemical is persistent, then it’s also going to be persistent in our bodies.
Dr. Gilbert, I understand that some of these chemicals, governments are tracking these chemicals because they’re considering phasing them out, some of them. Tell us where we are in the world, in different countries, about eliminating these chemicals because it’s not really a consumer question. This is more a regulatory question, isn’t it?
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, that’s true. A lot of these chemicals have been phased out, particularly the pesticides. And we’ve also tried to control, for example, mercury used in gold mining, and mercury products like thermometers and other things in schools and homes. They try to collect these back up. But pesticides are still widely out there, some of the old, banned pesticides. I’ll give you an example of that.
My wife’s father died in November. He was in his 90’s, mid-90’s. And in cleaning out the house, we found old containers of DDT and Aldrin, two banned pesticides.
So we took these to the hazardous waste disposal. This is an example of how these pesticides are still findable in home environments.
And agriculture communities use a lot of these too. And they still show up in hazardous waste collection sites and agricultural communities.
So despite the efforts to try to ban these things—in a sense, ban the sale of them—because they’re so much manufactured, they’re still accessible in everybody’s environment.
I think, in a sense, we’ve done a good job of trying to understand the consequences of these, and move towards pesticides, for example, that break down in the environment. So ultraviolet lights break down the modern pesticides, but you have to be careful with tracking these pesticides indoors because indoors, you don’t have the ultraviolet lights, so they’re more persistent inside.
So you really have to be taught about chemicals that you use, and where you’re using them, and how do they break down.
DEBRA: That’s a really good point. This comes back to one of the things that I mentioned in my book, Toxic Free, was about leaving your shoes at the door, and not wearing your shoes into the house. This is exactly a reason why you should do that because if your neighbor has DDT, and they’re spraying it on their lawn, and you walk by the sidewalk, or you’re walking your dog, and the dog runs on the law, or whatever, what would you do about that?
What if you were walking a dog, the dog goes running on the lawn, and the lawn service has just come. You could take off your shoes at the door, but what about pets? They can’t take off their shoes.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a good thing to raise. I think taking off your shoes is absolutely essential. The three most important things to do are eat well, have good nutrition, take off your shoes, and wash your hands.
The first thing I do with my granddaughters, as they come in the house, is wash their hands. It’s a chronic joke. Wash hands, wash hands, wash hands.
But trying to reduce exposure is really important.
So with pets coming indoors, it’s really important to keep the house well-vacuumed, and to mop the floors, if it’s a hardwood floor. And also, encourage your neighbors about […] pest management.
Some provinces, specifically in Canada, have moved toward banning the cosmetic use of pesticides and herbicides.
So, we really are getting a little bit smarter in trying to control and reduce the use of these products because […] doing a little weeding is good exercise. And we need to do a little bit more of that and a lot less application of pesticides.
DEBRA: I totally agree.
STEVEN GILBERT: […] more about integrated pest management.
DEBRA: What else can I ask you about these chemicals?
STEVEN GILBERT: One thing is PCBs, polychlorinated byphenyl ethers, they’re usually compounds that were used in transformers. It’s still widely-distributed in the environment. For example, the orca whales in Washington state that travel in our waters out here, they’re the most contaminated creatures in the world.
So these PCBs would spread all over when they’re used. And they show up in women’s breast milk. That’s a serious product.
Washington State is just doing a chemical action plan for PCBs to know where they are. They show up in […] and also in some paint still.
So I think we still have a lot of work to do to try to corral these compounds. And PCBs are examples of compounds that go to fat.
So the big reservoirs for persistent bioaccumulative toxicants, are they in the muscle? So if they’re consumed, are they in the fat? So, you have to concern about lactation if they’re excreting the phthalate PCBs, DDTs, chlorinated compounds, and brominated compounds like TBDEs. And you also have to worry about bone compounds (those that are stored to the bone).
And the other thing I want to mention is persistent compounds, the radionucleotides and radioactive particles, they are very persistent in the environment. They have half-life hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of years.
Fukushima, the nuclear plants that just had all the problems in Japan, is still putting nuclear isotopes out into the environment. And these are taken up by plants, as well as fish.
So there are lots of persistent compounds out there that we need to be concerned about. And we, in general, need to control the use of these persistent compounds.
DEBRA: So I’m looking at this list, and I don’t see the radionuclides on here. Am I just missing it?
Here’s the question. I know that this list is you’re summarizing these different lists, and you have columns that show which chemicals are in which list that have been produced by governments. And so are there other ones that the governments haven’t identified?
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I think so. It’s probably true. I think these are lists of some of the classic, older ones. And I think as we understand how these compounds work in the environment, we have a better appreciation for them.
But a lot of compounds do break down. A good example is caffeine, which many of us widely consume caffeine. But it’s widely metabolized in the body and excreted in the urine. So that’s a compound that is not persistent or bioaccumulative, thank goodness. But it does excrete into the environment, and it shows up in the waterways.
But the compounds I’ve listed in these lists are really the bad actors of the bad actors that we know have toxic, adverse effects, we know they’re persistent, and we know they bioaccumulate.
So there other compounds out there, they’re persistent, but don’t bioaccumulate as well, or they are not quite as toxic, so they don’t make this list.
And I think you make a really good point about not having radiological compounds in these lists. And when I revise this chapter, which is coming up soon, I’m definitely going to add that into this list.
DEBRA: Yes, because I’m looking at things here that I know we’re being exposed to, the radioactive ones, the tin, the mercury and the lead, and they’re in consumer products. This is what we’re going to talk about after the break, which is coming up. Actually, let’s go to the break, and then I’ll ask you the question.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, see the description of the show today, and click on the book cover of A Small Dose of Toxicology.
It will take you right to the page where you can get this book for free.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. His website is Toxipedia.org, but you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and click on the cover of his book, A Small Dose of Toxicology, and you can get that book for free. And it also has a link to Toxipedia.org. Is it dot com or dot org? I don’t have it right in front of me, dot org, I think.
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s supposed to be .org, but .com works too.
DEBRA: Good. If you can’t figure out how to spell Toxipedia, then just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and there’s a link right there.
So the question that I wanted to ask you is we talk a lot about reading labels, but these chemicals are in the environment, and they’re showing up in consumer products through the raw materials that are used to make the consumer products, and waters, and things that it just says water. It doesn’t say what is contaminating the water.
And so because these chemicals are so widespread, then they show up in many, if not all of our products, as contaminants.
And this isn’t on the label.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s really true because these things are technically contaminants, they’re not part of the product. For example, calcium supplements have lead in them because the animals that were used to get the calcium from were contaminated with lead.
So this is a problem. It’s on toys, for example. Lead is used in paint, so it shows on toys. And lead is a little bit sweet, so kids, they consume the lead chips off that product or it gets on to their hands. You see the lead.
So that’s the real issue. We don’t know sometimes which fish have the mercury in them, so we can’t really buy smart in that sense. And the Food and Drug Administration […] need to be more consistent about enforcing the mercury contamination in fish levels.
I also want to mention tin. You really have to know what form are in these products. Tin as a metal is not that toxic. But when tin becomes organic tin (these methyl groups attach to these tins), that’s when they become toxic. And these toxic materials are used as pate balance on boats.
So it’s used on boat holes to keep off barnacles and things like that because organotins are very toxic compounds. They tend to accumulate in ports and harbors.
And again, we’re just cavalier with very toxic compounds because we try to do things on the cheap. It’s cheaper to put these organotins on the holes of boats, so you don’t have to scrape the barnacles off. But we don’t account for the consequences of putting this material out into the environment.
So we need to be much wiser about, and really account for the costs of these materials. We’re not externalizing the costs onto the wildlife, and onto humans, which ultimately happens in many of these situations.
DEBRA: That’s such a good point. Another thing that I talk about a lot, but I think I need to keep saying it until it actually makes the change in the world, is that I know that for myself, as part of my own personal process, I started out just having the same ideas and viewpoint about things as most people in our current society.
But I went through a change where I realized that if I didn’t have some concern for, first, my own life and my own health, and then concern for all of life, if I didn’t make the first question that I asked, “Is this toxic,” or, “How does this support or harm life? How does this support or harm my body? How does it support or harm the ecosystems,” if I didn’t ask that as my first question, then I wouldn’t end up with the right answer.
And that to me is the missing question, is that people don’t ask themselves that question. For myself, I refuse to use toxics. I just refuse. If the only way to do something is a toxic way, I just don’t do it. I don’t wear fingernail polish.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really important choice to be made with consumer products, in using personal care products and what toxins are in those things. It doesn’t have to be persistent bioaccumulative toxicant to be a hazard.
For example, Bisphenol A, BPA, is fairly, quickly metabolized, but we’re constantly exposed to it. So we have this background level of these materials. And in that sense, it is a toxic compound that we need to be paying attention to. Just because it’s not “persistent in the environment,” it doesn’t mean we’re not chronically exposed to it.
So, I think those are really important questions to ask. My neighbor, I refuse to use pesticides on our lawn and our driveway.
It gets weeds in it. So I got out there and weed the thing. Our neighbor tends to use pesticides, herbicides, to kill these materials. And I just think that’s the wrong way to go. We should not be doing that.
DEBRA: Well, do you have any suggestions? I get this question a lot what I’m about to ask you. How can I control what my neighbors do?
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a tough one. I think they just need more education about integrated pest management, and talk to them about if they really need to be using these fairly noxious chemicals that are potent […] herbicides.
My attitude is I just need to keep talking to people and try to educate people barring more regulatory approaches.
And the real approach, in my view, is regulation, where we just have to say to people, “These chemicals are no longer going to be for sale. You can’t use chemicals to beautify your lawn. You need to get out there and use other means to do that that are not as toxic, and not putting these materials on the environment because they get into the soil, and it eventually gets washed into the waterways.”
In our situation, it’s […] which is really unfortunate.
DEBRA: When I was in San Francisco, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then moved to Florida.
But I went back to visit about seven or eight years ago. They have a very good Office of Environmental Affairs in the City of San Francisco. They do a lot of education of the people there.
And I have to say this. I have to say that they do allow backyard chickens in the City of San Francisco. And I have to say that because they’re not allowed in my little suburban town of Clearwater, Florida. And I keep saying this, but it’s just outrageous to me that the police came and took my chickens.
That is an example of bad regulation.
But what I wanted to say is that when I was there, they were doing big campaigns to educate people about mercury, and the disposal of mercury in thermometers and in fluorescent lights because there was so much mercury in San Francisco Bay.
STEVEN GILBERT: Mercury is a very serious pollutant. Some of the old gold mines are contaminated with mercury because mercury was widely used in gold mining operations.
In Washington State (and I think San Francisco too), we’ve had mercury take-back programs for schools, high schools and businesses. They’ve really tried to get mercury out of pressure measurement equipment, and out of thermometers used in almost all situations that have mercury in them.
So if anybody has a mercury thermometer, they should really take it to hazardous waste, and dispose of it properly because we do not want that mercury get out into the environment. It ends up in our fish that we consume.
So we really have to look at the loop that this is where the mercury goes. So I’m really glad to hear that San Francisco is trying to control its mercury. That’s great news.
DEBRA: Yes, me too, because San Francisco is known for its seafood. People go there and go to Fisherman’s Wharf, and the fresh catch comes in. And it’s really important not only to the health and the environment of San Francisco, but to the economical-being because you don’t want people to go to San Francisco and be poisoned by the mercury in the seafood they had, the tourists.
I don’t think that that’s ever happened, that somebody ate a crab or something, and then had to be rushed to the hospital. I don’t know. It may have, but I’ve never heard of it. And I haven’t heard of everything.
But it’s part of the overall load of chemicals, the body burden, that eventually makes people sick.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really good point you bring out. We’re not exposed to just one of these chemicals. We’re exposed to all kinds of chemicals from PCBs, a little bit of DDTs, a little bit of mercury, a little bit of lead. So it’s an accumulative effect of all these chemicals we’re exposed to.
And mercury can be consumed. High consumers of mercury-laden fish, as adults, can have […] health consequences.
There have been several incidents of adult exposure. I just co-authored a paper about a year and a half ago documenting some of these cases. I’m trying to come up with better messaging for adults that are consuming mercury-laden fish.
So, we really got to be thinking about this. And the point that you raised about multiple chemical exposures, that’s a really good one. Small amounts of a whole bunch of chemicals equal a large dose of toxic properties.
DEBRA: That’s why I’m not so concerned anymore about how much am I being exposed to one chemical. People are often asking me, “Well, what’s the safe level for this? What’s the safe level for that chemical?” To me, my conclusion is we just need to be aware of as many chemical exposures as we can be, learn as much as we can, and we just lessen exposure as much as we can.
The reality is that we really don’t know what’s in the products. Even if we read labels, I think the best we can do is use that label reading to eliminate as many chemicals that are known. But we’re still not going to end up with having zero toxic exposure because of the environmental contamination.
We’ve only got about 30 seconds, so any final words?
STEVEN GILBERT: My final word would be on this chemical exposure. People need to work towards better chemical policy.
We need to reform TSCA and have a better chemical policy in the environmental chemicals and better knowledge about what the health effect potential of these chemicals are.
So, chemical policy reform is absolutely critical for our environment, for human health.
DEBRA: Thank you so much, Dr. Gilbert, for being with us. And I’m sure we’ll talk to you again.
STEVEN GILBERT: You’re very welcome, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more about the show, and what’s coming up, and listen to past shows, and even listen to this show again. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Kangen Water
Question from Genie Dillard
I plan to get the water filter you recommend.
But I wanted to ask you…
There is a great deal of promotion on the Kangen water, in terms of preventing oxidation, lowering PH and creating “microclusters” that allow water and other nutrients to enter the cells.
I’m hoping someone has knowledge of this water system, its pluses and possibly minuses. Does it really do something beyond what an excellent filter system does? Many have reported medical benefits. I’d like any information you or your reader can offer.
Debra’s Answer
I’m familiar with Kangen water and the whole concept of alkaline water.
I’ll just say first that I used to drink alkaline water, in fact, I drank it for about ten years, until I got my PureEffect filter, which I like better. The difference is that the alkaline water I was drinking before was made by a machine that “split” the water into alkaline water and acid water using an electrical charge from a metal rod immersed in the water. The machine I had did nothing to remove anything from the water, it only performed the function of splitting the water into acid and alkaline, and placing each into it’s own container.
The premise behind drinking alkaline water was—and still is—that it is healthier for your body to be more alkaline, and modern life makes your body more acid. Toxic chemicals, refined foods, and even tap water and water from some water filters make the body more acid. To make the body more alkaline, people go on diets and eat alkaline foods. A number of years ago there was a book called Reverse Aging by Sang Whang. He said that alkaline diets don’t work, but drinking alkaline water does make the body more alkaline. I read the book and it made sense to me, so I bought an alkalizer and started drinking alkaline water.
Then Kangen water came along. This machine basically splits water into acid and alkaline like my little alkalizer, by the same method, but has more settings so you can specify how acid or alkaline to a specific degree. I know people who have these machines and I have heard stories of people getting sick from heavy metals leaching into the water. One woman I know removed it from her natural food store because so many of her customers were getting sick after drinking the water.
Alkaline water also has a detox effect, so you have to start with very little and work up.
The PureEffect filter is different. In nature, water is naturally balanced between 6.5- 9.0 pH (pH stands for the Power of Hydrogen, which is a measure of how acidic or alkaline something is). Using nature as his guide, the founder of PureEffect saw that rain water makes it’s way down to the ground, then is filtered through the earth and over riverbeds, where it picks up it’s mineral/electrolyte ions and becomes naturally balanced. Taking this process into consideration, he developed their filter systems to pattern this effect naturally. As tap water flows through a PureEffect filter, the pH is raised naturally by the release of trace amounts of natural minerals, rather than using metals and electricity to make water artificially alkaline beyond what is found in nature.
Since drinking the first glass of water from the PureEffect filter, I never again drank water from my alkalizer machine. It’s sitting on a top shelf. I’ll sell it cheap to anyone who wants it.
I’m interested in clean water without pollutants. That’s not what Kangen Water is about. Read this statement from the manufacturer’s website at www.enagic.com/blog/what-is-kangen-water-from-enagic
Kangen Water machines work by applying an electrical charge to your tap water, and then sending that charged water through an ion exchange membrane. This will mix positive and negative ions within the water, which can help break molecular bonds on dirt, which is why it is ideal for cleaning and personal hygiene.
The Kangen Water will break the molecular bonds on dirt and oil on your face, keeping it clean, smooth, and moist. Rather than using harsh astringents that dry out your skin, or leaving a soapy film on your skin because your water can’t clean it all off, Kangen Water can help clean your face better than regular tap water.
It can also help you clean your home by loosening the molecular bonds between dirt and the surfaces you’re washing, attracting it like a magnet. This way, Kangen Water can actually lift grime and dirt off surfaces, which makes it easy to wipe away. No need for dangerous, toxic cleaners, no need for abrasive sponges and frantic scrubbing.
That’s fine that it has all these benefits, but what does it remove from the water?
The above statement goes on to say:
“A Kangen Water system, with appropriate filters [italics mine], can clean up contaminated and polluted water, removing the chemicals, bacteria, and other unpleasant little nasties that can cause ill health.”
With appropriate filters. The Kangen unit that splits the water into acid and alkaline does NOT remove pollutants. You need to have the appropriate filters to filter the water first before it goes through electrolysis.
I can’t comment on the health claims of Kangen water.
My rule of thumb is to stay as close to Nature as possible. Until I can get water straight from a spring, I’ll stick with water from my PureEffect filter.
