Art | Resources
Protect Your Health From EMFs with Clothing That Shields Your Body
My guests Suzanne and James McConnell are the Co-Founders of Off the Matrix, a clothing design and manufacturing company specializing in EMF-sheilding Apparel and Canopy Shields. Through their meditation practices they came to understand the need for EMF shielding. EMF fields are very distracting energy forces, both for the spiritual self and the physical body. The EMF clothing and canopy shield products fill the need for those who are rightly concerned about the abundant amounts of EMF radiation we are exposed to on a daily basis. “The EMF Canopy Shield gives our bodies a much needed eight hour break from this toxic EMF world and allows our bombarded bodies time to heal.” James and Suzanne currently live and work in Preston, Connecticut.
On the show today we mentioned a website where there is a lot of information on EMFs and toxic chemicals. It’s www.oscillatorium.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/emfandtox032114.pdf.
It’s a pdf, so if it’s too big, use the magnifying function to make it smaller.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Protect Your Health From EMF’s with Clothing That Shields Your Body
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Suzanne & James McConnell
Date of Broadcast: April 30, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to 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 about something I’ve never seen before actually, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m having it on because it’s something that we actually need in our world. And it’s a solution to a toxic exposure, definitely toxic exposure.
We’re going to be talking about EMF’s and clothing that can shield these electromagnetic fields, also, things that you can put in your home, like a canopy over your bed, a cover on your mattress, even a wall-hanging that also shields EMF’s.
We really have EMF’s all around us. We’ve talked about EMF’s on Monday too when we were talking about cell phones. I know in my house, I don’t have Wi-Fi. I don’t have a cordless phone. I use my cell phone as little as possible
But when I turn on my computer, this little thing comes up and asks me if I want to accept the Wi-Fi. Some neighbor has Wi-Fi, and it still gets into my house.
I don’t think that there’s a place on earth that you can go today where you’re not going to be exposed to electromagnetic fields. And electromagnetic fields cause a lot of harm to your body. We’re going to talk a little bit about that today. And they also can make your exposure to toxic chemicals worse.
It makes your body less able to tolerate toxic chemicals. We’re going to talk about that too.
So I want to introduce my guests. I have two guests today—Suzanne and James McConnell. They’re the co-founders of Off the Matrix, a clothing design and manufacturing company specializing in EMF-shielding apparel and canopy shields.
Now, this is so new and so unusual that they actually make all of their products by hand because they’re not even in manufacturing yet.
Anything we talk about today, you can go to their website, OffTheMatrix.com, and you can place an order, and they will make it for you. They’re planning on manufacturing these items, but they’re still looking for the right manufacturer to do so.
So this is something that is new, unique, and necessary. And I’ll bet you anything, 10 years from now, it’s going to be widespread, or even sooner.
This is just going to be something that the time has come for.
So hi, Suzanne and James.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Hi, Debra.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Hello.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Well, thanks for having us on your cutting-edge program.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you for being cutting edge.
JAMES MCCONNELL: We’re still homeschooling our child. I want you to know that this would be a mandatory course.
DEBRA: Good. Thank you.
So first of all, tell us how did you become interested, and each of you can tell your own story if you want or you can interrupt each other. I know a couple sometimes just gives one story, however you want. But tell us how you got to be interested in this subject and why you thought it was so important to create these products.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Well, as I say, necessity is the mother of all invention, but I have a unique theory on that. It’s inventions and discoveries are open. And the people that are paying attention or are in need are the ones that are getting the opportunity to discover that […]
So it seems when a new idea comes to the market, 20 other people have the same exact idea. And my way of thinking is just that it’s something that’s opening. It’s ready to come out. And those who are paying attention get the opportunity to play with it.
So I don’t take any credit for having done this. When we first started, I hadn’t seen anything like it. But now, just prior to coming on the show, I did another search, and it’s starting to explode already.
So, there are people that are manufacturing hats and gloves and different things and a band that goes around pregnant women’s stomachs to protect their […] But I like our product because we started with the idea of the coat because it offers so much protection to the entire body.
And then also, if you want a lining in the coat, you can get the full lining, but you can also use it as a means to keep your privacy because the pockets are shielded on the inside and out on one side of the coat. Then the other coat is just shielded on the inside of the lining, so it’s exposed to the other signals.
So […], “Oh, I’m going to put it in the left-hand pocket.” And if you want your cellphone incognito, you pop it into the right pocket. It works amazingly well.
I know there are other products on the market like plastic shields and stuff. They’re definitely serving another function and purpose. People want to use those as well. But the coat is another form of protection.
I think now, they have the technology to be able to scan how much cash you have in your pocket. They can tell what your credit card numbers are and they can see what your passport strip—it’s in all the passports now. It has huge amounts of information about yourself.
So, it affords you a higher level of privacy. But then you can get the full lining in your coat, which is optional, that gives you the protection from the EMF signals which, as you know, are just—
A lot of independent studies have been done on it that absolutely can prove, without a doubt, that it’s causing much damage to our systems.
DEBRA: In preparation for this show, I actually did a little search because I had remembered hearing before—we’ll wait until after the break to talk about this because I want to make sure that I get your stories.
Suzanne, do you want to say anything, about how you became interested in this subject?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Well, mostly for myself, my need for such an item would have more to do with my meditation practices because I am very, very sensitive, spiritually-speaking. And so during meditation, I find that the covering or the shielding is pretty useful.
JAMES MCCONNELL: […] canopies.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: It’s blocking out so many things, even thoughts. You get so many thoughts when you try to meditate that just seem to come out of nowhere. It helps. So for me, […]
I’m interested in what you said earlier about how the EMF signals can make you more susceptible to your own chemical sensitivities. I am chemically sensitive on latex toxic. We’ve had a lot of health problems that came about because of that.
So it will be interesting to see if that doesn’t help. But […] regularly don’t help that chemical sensitivity.
DEBRA: Well, I think it might be because I do so that there’s a lot of correspondence between people being chemically sensitive and electrically sensitive.
I, personally, am not electrically sensitive. I’m very happy that I’m not.
Actually, one of the things is I was reading something completely unrelated the other day about sugar actually, and that there have been studies that show that healthy people can just assimilate sugar in their bodies if they’re healthy.
And the people who have difficulty with sugar metabolism are people who are otherwise, their bodies are not functioning in some way.
And I’ve been saying this for years. I’ve been saying to people. They say, “Why don’t you do this or that because it’s supposed to make things better?”
And what happens is that I do it, and then it’s like my body is operating backwards from the chemical exposures that I’ve had in the past. And it doesn’t. Whatever that healing thing is doesn’t work because my body isn’t functioning correctly, that there is damage to it.
And I think that a lot of people have chemical damage to their bodies, or electromagnetic damage to their body. And then whatever it is that the treatment is just doesn’t work because that’s not what needs to be done.
And so I think that to eliminate the EMF’s, I think James, you were talking about—I think you wrote something—just to give yourself a relief for eight hours.
Oh, I have it. I put it in right in the description. I said, “The EMF canopy shield gives our bodies a much needed eight-hour break from this toxic EMF world and allows our bombarded bodies time to heal.”
Unless we have something like that, we never get a break. We just never get a break.
JAMES MCCONNELL: I’d like to say, the canopy shield is ideal because it gives you complete 360° protection. There are so many products out there, the wall hangings, the different items—you want me to wait until we come back from the break?
DEBRA: When we come back from the break, we’ll hear about your items. But the first thing I want to talk about when we come back from break is what I learned about the connection between EMF’s and toxic chemicals.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Suzanne and James McConnell, from Off the Matrix. We’re talking about EMF’s and what to do to protect your body.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Suzanne and James McConnell from Off the Matrix, and they make shielding canopies and clothing. We’re going to talk about this in a minute because you can go to their website, and I’m looking at the canopy shield.
It looks like mosquito netting. It just looks like mosquito netting. And so it completely encases your bed.
But before we talk about that, I want to tell you some things that I found here. So what I’ve looked at was I’ve looked up EMF’s and toxic chemicals, and there was very little. I could find very little, but there’s one page that is just amazing. It’s got lots of links to lots of articles.
The URL is too long for me to give to you, but I’ll put it on the website, along with the description of this show. I’ll include the URL, so you can all take a look at it.
It’s extremely difficult to read. It’s a great, big poster, and you have to keep scrolling around to see a little piece and a little piece. It’s not really laid out to be a page.
I’m just going to read you part of it. It says, “What happens when you’re exposed to EMF’s is (these are some of the things) detoxification methods may be overwhelmed.”
And so, what happens if the detoxification mechanisms are overwhelmed by EMF’s, then what are they going to do when the toxic chemicals come along?
It’s too much. The toxic chemicals alone are too much for your body. The immune systems become overwhelmed. Membranes are disrupted by EMF’s which allow toxic chemicals to penetrate tissues more easily.
Some toxic molecules become charged stickier, more difficult to remove. The body is forced to ration nutrients, and toxic-heavy metals may be released because of EMF’s. Repair from toxic chemical injury is slowed by having the EMF’s because your body is dealing with the EMF’s.
It just goes on and on, and it’s probably got about 50 links to articles on this subject.
It’s an excellent page. I just started exploring it, but damage to the blood-brain barrier by EMF’s allows toxins into the brain.
When I first started studying toxins, one of the things that I noticed was that for things like asbestos, for example, asbestos is more toxic if you also smoke. And that there are all these combinations of things where it’s bad enough by itself, and then you put them together, and it makes it worse.
And it’s very apparent to me that EMF’s and toxic chemicals together make both of them worse.
So let’s talk about your canopy shield.
JAMES MCCONNELL: I was mentioning that the canopy shield offers you that 360° environment except when you take your cell phone into the canopy shield area. All of the Wi-Fi signals drop off to zero. So everybody can test it without getting the expensive equipment to actually read RF signals.
But there are other products on the market like the hanging wall thing that you can put on the backside of where your SMART meter is, or there are big curtains that you can put a wiring in the back of the curtains and curtain an entire wall.
Now, recently, there’s a company called Wise Shield that is making a paint. They use a cheaper graphite metal that they put into the paint. And if you paint the walls, it knocks down all the RF signals coming into your house, which I think would be, of course, the better solution.
There are window pane linings now that you could put on your windows that are transparent, so you can try to enclose the entire environment.
The reason why I’m bringing that up is because I’m so excited. But since we scheduled being on your program, I came up with something else in investigating this paint. They sell you one kind of paint, and it’s five gallons, and it’s ready-made, and then you have to pay the shipping cost. It’s $400 just for five-gallons of paint, and then $75 for probably the shipping that goes along with it.
DEBRA: $400 for five-gallons?
JAMES MCCONNELL: It’s insane! So I started contemplating and meditating on this. And I came up with an incredible solution. I said, “Why can’t we just take the silver powder then mix it in with your paint?”
Then you have the benefit of the primer, and you can put it in the primer, and then you get a double coating which, of course, increases the shielding. And then you can put it in any color pain that you want and the quality of paint that you want.
So we’re working on that right now, and we haven’t yet tested it. It’s up on the internet. I just put it up there last night. But people need to understand that if you go and order today, we have to complete the testing before we actually send it out to you. We wouldn’t want to sell you anything that doesn’t work. I’m so confident that it’s going to work.
So now, you just get one-ounce powder container, and you can drop it into the primer, and the finish coat paint, then you get essentially the same protection for a fraction of the money. And I really believe that’s one of the best solutions.
Even with that paint, you’re going to have cracks and crevices in your wall that would allow some signals to come in, and that canopy bed still provides ultimate optimal protection. So I still would recommend that as well.
DEBRA: What is special about the fabric that you’re using that makes it repel the frequencies?
JAMES MCCONNELL: Well, the industry is racing to come up with the solutions for people because the demand is, of course, increasing. What we do is we order big bulks of the fabric, so it’s much cheaper, then we can pass the savings along to everybody else.
The typical price of some similar products we’ve seen are $24.95 for a square-foot which is outrageous. The jumping in the market to try to make a killing, that’s not why we’re in business. We’re in business to help people. So we’re trying to keep the cost down as much as possible.
We’ve researched different fabrics. There’s a copper fabric. There’s nickel. You probably know more than I do about the nickel being an agitator in the skin and stuff. In proximity to your skin, you’re going to get a rash. A lot of people do. So I don’t think that’s the best solution.
The copper has its positives and negatives as well. But the silver is the way to go for the canopy shield for anything that you’re going to come in contact with.
So the back of a wall-hanging, you could use the copper nickel fabric, which is much cheaper. But for something like the canopy or the clothing, you should go with the silver and cotton fabric. And the silver offers antibacterial properties as well.
DEBRA: We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Suzanne and James McConnell from Off the Matrix. And we’re talking about how to shield your body from EMF’s.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Suzanne and James McConnell from Off the Matrix where they make clothing and shielding canopies to shield EMF’s, so that you’re not exposed to them.
Do you have to be careful with this fabric? Does the shielding quality disappear if you wash it?
JAMES MCCONNELL: As with any fabric, with some degradation. That’s why we favor the silver because if there’s some sort of particle fallout, of course, […] You don’t want something toxic showering down on you.
With all clothing, when you put something in the drier or the washer, there’s a length when it comes off of everything. It’s the degradation of the fabric, which is causing the [inaudible 00:19:05].
In a similar fashion, it’s going to degrade over time like anything else. But we haven’t done any studies on that right now to find out what the life of the product is. We’re heading in that direction, but we haven’t done any of those studies yet.
But the silver is probably the least toxic, and perhaps you could even say it’s beneficial to you. Even if something fell down on you because of the coil of silver that people […] and what-not, I think it’s probably a pretty safe product.
DEBRA: So is this like threads of silver? I haven’t seen the fabric. For the canopy, for example, are these threads or particles?
JAMES MCCONNELL: You mentioned that one looked like a mosquito netting. And that particular fabric is silver and polyester. The cotton doesn’t come in the mesh fabric, but it comes in something more opaque, so you can still see through it.
We would recommend the cotton material.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: It’s more like the muslin, the light-weight muslin material. It looks more like that. So it’s a little bit heavier than a net. But it’s very comfortable […] like a bag.
DEBRA: So air still moves through it, but you can’t see through it so well?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: The air will move through the cotton and silver better than it will move through the polyester netting.
DEBRA: I wonder why that is.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: I don’t know if you’ve ever been under a polyester mosquito net. But the air, it looks like there’s movement, but it doesn’t move, the air doesn’t move well.
DEBRA: That’s very interesting because I have had mosquito netting in the past. I had cotton, and the air moved very well.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Yes. I would love to find a cotton netting that has silver. But so far, it’s only available in a heavier fabric.
JAMES MCCONNELL: The trick is we constantly beat the bushes and try to find the best solution and the best prices.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: If we can get that manufactured, we’ll be doing that. So we are looking to try to manufacture that material actually and the netting that has […]
JAMES MCCONNELL: And I contacted some manufacturers to try to do stuff according to my specifications. We’ll see how that goes.
But we’re a young business. We don’t have a lot of help with any capital. So we can’t afford the big purchases upfront right now. But hopefully, we’ll get to the size where we’re able to do our own research, and do our own development on different products as well.
DEBRA: So here’s a question I thought of a couple of days ago. We were talking about cell phones on Monday, and I was wondering, can you make something that would be a pocket for a cell phone? I have a shield. I have a Pong shield on my cell phone. Could you make something that would shield the cell phones as much as your canopy shields?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: You mean just to put around your cell phone itself?
DEBRA: Yes.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: We have that in the coats. We have the pocket that’s completely enclosed. And then we have the pocket that’s open on the outside.
But obviously, it would be very simple to make a pouch that you could just drop it in and then drop that in your purse or the pouch in your pocket.
That’s obviously very simple—and actually cheap, because that’s not something that is going to be against your skin, so you could use the nickel copper.
JAMES MCCONNELL: it’s just like a […] bag or something or even something with a zipper.
DEBRA: With a little zipper or a little fold-over with a little snap or whatever. I don’t know what’s the easiest to get to when your cell phone rings.
But I’m just thinking about people putting them in their pockets, or in my purse. I put it in my purse.
JAMES MCCONNELL: We’re going to do that. We’ll have to give you royalties for the idea.
DEBRA: Yes, I want those royalties. I was just thinking about all these different ways that you might be able to use this because people are needing to shield themselves—coming from a toxics background, the rule is always to eliminate the poison from the source.
JAMES MCCONNELL: But given the choice between having to open the bag, grab your cell phone, and then stick it back in the bag, and put it back in your pockets, wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to pull it directly out of your pocket?
DEBRA: Yes.
JAMES MCCONNELL: It’s basically the same thing done.
DEBRA: Oh, no, no. Here’s what I was actually thinking. It was not just a little bag. What I was thinking was something like a little fanny pack or something that you could strap around your waist, and then just pull it out.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: We’ve designed a fanny pack that has shielding, and it will have an outer pocket that’s actually open to the frequency, so that your cell phone can ring, but you can have other things get in the fanny pack or you can dump the cell phone into your fanny pack if you want it to be hidden.
JAMES MCCONNELL: So it’s like two compartments.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: It’s like a fanny pack with a little outer compartment, so you can put your phone inside or outside.
JAMES MCCONNELL: And sometimes you want to […]
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: […] The hope is that in the future, the clothes, the large clothing makers will just put those kinds of pockets available in your pants, so that everybody who wears a pair of jeans is protecting their important bits at least.
And it has that availability of a fully-shielded pocket or just a pocket that’s open to the outside that your body is shielded.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Does she need to elaborate on what the important bits are?
DEBRA: No. I think we all know what the important bits are.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: We’d love to see the large clothing manufacturers start to incorporate that into—that’s the design that’s written up on the website. This was designed. And the patent’s pending. We’re working on that.
JAMES MCCONNELL: And even a tote bag or something, there are so many variations of this.
DEBRA: Purses. I was just thinking that you could line the pocket. I have a pocket on the front of my purse where I slip my cell phone in, and if that were just lined, that would protect it too.
JAMES MCCONNELL: There are a couple of solutions. You can order eventually—we don’t offer it right now, but you’re going to be able to order the fabric because we want to work with local drapery and curtain manufacturers or companies, small mom and pop places that can go in your house and actually consult, and find out what kind of draping you want. You’re not limited to the mosquito net-looking one. You can have a full wood canopy bed with this covering all over it, which would look really beautiful.
DEBRA: That would look beautiful.
JAMES MCCONNELL: And we work with local contractors. We only work with people that have good […] ratings or Better Business Bureau ratings. And then we’ll send in the fabric and consult with them on how best to do it.
So we’re really looking to partner with a lot of people. We’re dying to find people with sewing machines […]
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: […]
JAMES MCCONNELL: I think we can do this mass production and we’re looking into that as well overseas, maybe China or […] I tried to get a local company and he said, “Yes, yes.” You can now say it’s by America. […]
DEBRA: We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Suzanne and James McConnell from Off the Matrix.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m here with James and Suzanne McConnell from Off the Matrix.
I can usually remember people’s first names and their last names.
Before we go on, I just want to tell everybody, you probably hear that commercial that just played for water filters every day on my show. Well, this week through Friday, there’s a discount going on, on those filters, both on the under sink filters, the countertop filters, and on the whole house filters.
So if you’ve been thinking, you might want to get that filter, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, type into the search box, and the search box is at the top. It looks like a little magnifying glass icon. So click on that magnifying glass icon, and then type in “discount water filter.” And the page will come up, a link to the page, will come up, where it has all the details on the discount and about the water filter too.
It’s a really fabulous water filter which I have in my own home. So if you’re thinking about water, this is a thing to think about.
So Suzanne and James, during the break, you got a question, and it was e-mailed to me, so I’ll ask you the question.
Can you put colloidal silver on fabric? Will that make it block EMF’s? Also, would mylar protect you from EMF’s?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: I’m not sure how you put colloidal silver. You mean, like washing with it?
DEBRA: I don’t know. That’s all he said, but I would assume washing it.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: I don’t think it would impregnate the fabric well enough, but that would be just my assumption.
DEBRA: What do you think, James?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: The silver is actually woven into the fabric.
DEBRA: Yes, so it’s silver threads, right?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: It’s actually cotton-wrapped silver fibers. It’s what the fabric is. I don’t think that colloidal silver is going to impregnate the cloth just by putting it in there, and then taking it out and drying it.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Well, there will be a little bit. The question is would it be enough?
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: It wouldn’t last very long.
DEBRA: Well, it wouldn’t last for a washing. What about mylar?
JAMES MCCONNELL: No idea.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: I don’t know.
JAMES MCCONNELL: I think the environment, what it would be contained would get a little […]
DEBRA: I think so too because, yes, you wouldn’t want to wrap your bed in a mylar blanket. If you’re going to have something like a canopy, then you’d want to be able to breathe. But a mylar blanket, if it does block—oh, this is just making me think of something.
JAMES MCCONNELL: The real easy way to tell is just go out to your local store and get a mylar blanket and wrap your cell phone in it and give it a call. If it rings, you’re in trouble.
DEBRA: That’s good. That’s a good way to do it.
What I was about to say is that I know that foil, aluminum foil will block toxic chemical out-gassing. The gasses from toxic chemicals can’t go through aluminum foil.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Tin foil hat people.
DEBRA: So, I don’t know if EMF’s go through foil. That’s something I should take a look at.
JAMES MCCONNELL: Again, the easy experiment.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Check your cell phone […]
And actually, I think there are different qualities of tin foil. I’m not sure how our tin foils actually can foil anymore. Have you noticed that sometimes you put tin foil, supposedly tin foil, on a food product in your oven and it doesn’t really get hot? I’m not sure it’s actually made out of foil anymore.
DEBRA: I don’t know because I rarely use it. I only use it for very few things.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Yes, me too. I don’t use it because of that particular property I noticed long ago that it didn’t get hot anymore. And I thought, “Well, if it’s really metal, it should be getting hot.”
DEBRA: Yes, it should. It’s supposed to be aluminum. But I will look into that. I will look into that.
I just want to reiterate that the conclusion here is that that these special fabrics have threads of these metals. They’re wrapped in cotton. And so people shouldn’t be attempting to just take silver something, and impregnate their fabrics and expect it to work.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Yes. You can’t get it to work that way.
DEBRA: So what else do you want to tell us about your clothing or any of your products?
JAMES MCCONNELL: We have a whole list of things […]
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: Just look at the list.
JAMES MCCONNELL: I’m so thrilled about this silver powder thing, this shield. I think this is going to be so great a solution. There are so many applications.
SUZANNE MCCONNELL: But like you said, we need to test it.
JAMES MCCONNELL: But we need to test that. We’re going to test that as quickly as possible. So if anybody were to order it, we would not send it to them until we’ve tested it. We’re probably going to complete that within the week.
And again, just do that simple testing, putting your cellphone in a […] Styrofoam box or something and see if it rings. And if it rings, you’re in trouble.
We want to notify everybody and return everybody’s money. But I’m almost certain it’s going to work. We’re just really excited to try that out.
And then we have the wall-hanging things which you have a SMART meter in the back of your house. It takes […] to get that thing off. So a simple, quick, inexpensive solution if you’re not going to go the trouble of painting and putting up a big curtain that covers your entire wall is just to put a wall-hanging up there.
Of course, the bigger the wall-hanging will be the spot where the SMART meter is, the better protection you’ll have.
DEBRA: Let me ask you a question about that. How far out from the source of EMF’s do you have to protect yourself?
JAMES MCCONNELL: So I’ve been looking into that. I don’t know if the EMF signals are in line of sight, or if they’re like AM signals, they kind of wrap themselves around something. The AM signals can go over mountains and stuff. The FM signals cannot.
So I don’t know what frequency range the EMF’s operates in as well as I probably should. But we’re finding out new things every day. That’s something we’re researching now.
I tend to believe that if you had something that was five-by-four hanging on your wall like a SMART meter, it’s going to protect your entire room environment pretty well because the studies that I have seen, the EMF goes out […] around the SMART meter. Diameter, it’s about three or four feet around the SMART meter.
So having seen that, it tells me that that would be enough, but it’s not ideal. But knocking down as much as you possibly can, it’s going to be a constant battle throughout the rest of our lives, unfortunately, to try to get these things out of our environment.
It’s something I want to touch on without sounding like a conspiracy, is that all these things are coming into our existence with little or no testing. I mean, the correct term is it’s epidemic right now. And whether they’re doing it intentionally or whether it’s just greed driving the industry and getting these products to market without testing them properly.
I do tend to be one of the people that believes that they’re actually dumbing us down intentionally and calling the population in preparation for the robotics phase of our existence where they don’t need laborers anymore.
The best example is I’m trying to buy American products, and they tell me that robots are doing all the sewing. What’s the difference between the Chinese robots and the American robots? I don’t really care about robots.
But they don’t need us anymore. So they’re wanting to kill us off. There are too many chickens in the roost.
DEBRA: If there are no humans, if there are no people, then they can have robots making all of the products that they want, but who’s going to buy them, the robots?
There’s a lot that I appreciate about technology, and technology to me is a very broad word, which some years ago, I actually read an encyclopedia of technology, which started out by talking about the technology of birds in nature, what technology they use.
So technology is a big word.
But our modern industrial technology, and the ideas that go with it, is extremely destructive because it’s only just designed to take nature and turn it into products, and then make garbage. That’s what it is.
There’s a whole other way to think about life which starts out by saying, “We need to sustain the planet. We need to be looking at our health and how do we act from that?”
And people could make products and sell them all day long, and if they thought about that, we’d have a lot better world.
I’m not against people making products and selling them. it’s just the way that we do it. And we do need to be putting life first. We need to say, “How are we going to sustain this planet? How are we going to be healthy?”
And manufacturers need to be asking those questions, and have their products reflect that.
JAMES MCCONNELL: The white papers are out there […] talks about these vaccines and how we wants to reduce the world population. I’m not saying it’s correct, and I agree with you. What are you doing? You’re destroying the very people that you might be able to sell cell phone to in the future. But they have a different mindset.
DEBRA: Exactly.
JAMES MCCONNELL: And I do believe that the EMF signals, everybody talks about the physical harm it’s causing, but I think it causes more spiritual harm because it affects the faculty of the brain where spirituality exists. And I think taking away the very thing that we can defend ourselves against what […] in this evil empire.
So again, I don’t want to go off on crazy, conspiracy theory. I don’t think it is conspiracy theory, but it’s a huge subject and it’s one that […] conspiracy. But I believe it’s intentional, and I think it’s a battle between us trying to protect ourselves against the things that we’re using against us.
[…]
DEBRA: I have to interrupt you because we’re going to end in about five seconds. So thank you very much for being with me. And go to OffTheMatrix.com, and take a look at these products.-
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
A Doctor Speaks on Nutrition and Detox for Good Health
My guest today is Dr Darrel Hestdalen. He’s been a Doctor of Chiropractic for more than 35 years, with extensive use of Clinical Nutrition, Acupuncture and Applied Kinesiology as functional neurology. We’ll be talking about what he’s learned about nutrition and detox over the years, and why it’s important to good health. Dr Hestdalen is now retired, but still promotes good health through his website and his work as Team Chiropractor for the FM Redhawks professional baseball team. www.enjoyhealthnow.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Doctor Speaks on Nutrition and Detox for Good Health
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr.Darrel Hestdalen
Date of Broadcast: April 29, 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.
We do that because there are a lot of toxic things out in the world, but that doesn’t mean that we have to get sick or not be able to think clearly or not be able to do our jobs or suffer in any way from having toxic chemical exposure. We can still be healthy. We can choose less toxic products. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. We can get good nutrition.
There are all kinds of things that we can do to support our bodies, to be healthy and thrive even though we live in a toxic world. And on this show, I interview a lot of people who are doing things to make this a less toxic world and make your life less toxic.
Today before we get to the subject at hand, I just want to tell you a little thing that’s going on in my personal life here. And that is today, in Florida—yesterday actually was what I would call the first day of summer because we have a summer pattern of weather here, which is over 80 degrees all day long and not quite 80 degrees all night long.
And there’s a lot of humidity. It’s not quite humid yet, but the heat is such that you just sweat all day long and all night long. It’s just you’re constantly sweating.
And when I moved here, I thought, “There’s no way I can live here without air conditioning.” And yesterday, when I went to turn on my air conditioner, which I do as soon as it gets hot like this, I found out that my air conditioner was so broken that I had to get a new air conditioner. So I have no air conditioning right now. I’m drinking tons of water to stay hydrated.
But how this relates to toxic exposures is that when we run electrical appliances like air conditioners even though we can’t see this happening, somewhere down the line, something is being burned to create the energy, whether it’s nuclear power or coal or whatever is the source of your energy. And it would be a good idea to find out what is the source of your energy. Every time you run some electric appliance, it’s creating pollution in the environment. It’s creating air pollution and that might be nearby where you live, it might be far away.
But what I found out—I started thinking about this because after I guessed how much money I’m going to have to go into debt to buy this air conditioner, the key thing was that not only would I have air conditioning, but the amount of energy that I would be using with using this new system is so much less than what I was using before.
It would be a big savings on my energy bill, but it would also pay for itself. There would be savings once it’s paid for. But also it’s reducing the amount of pollution that I’m putting to the environment just immensely. And so that’s cleaner air for everybody.
So if you’re thinking about things like refrigerators and air conditioners that are using lots of energy, consider, if you purchase a more energy-efficient model instead of continuing to run your old one, that you will reduce air pollution and I invite you to do that because all of us would like to breathe and I am feeling good today that I’m putting less pollution in the environment.
So today, we’re going to be talking about nutrition and detox. And my guest today is Dr. Darrel Hestdalen and I’ll just give you this disclaimer because the FTC likes us to do this. I’ll give you the disclaimer right upfront and say that both Dr. Hestdalen and I are distributors for Touchstone Essentials products, which we’re going to be talking about and how they relate to detox and how they relate to nutrition.
And so I just want you to know that you can go to his website, you can go to my website. You can order from either of us. So if you decide that you want to, both of us are making these products available because we both think that they’re vital to having good health, that we need to get really, really clean nutrition and we’re going to be talking about that. And we need to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies.
So I’m going to let Dr. Hestdalen. I talk about this a lot. But I’m going to let Dr. Hestdalen talk to you today about why these products are important to him as a doctor. And you hear me advertising them on every single show, so now you get to have more information about them.
So hi, Dr. Hestdalen.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Good morning. It’s still morning here. I’m in North Dakota and we don’t have the heat issues as you do.
DEBRA: Well, it’s afternoon here.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: We’re about 50 degrees. Yes.
DEBRA: You have a cool morning and I have a hot afternoon.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yes. It’s 50 degrees and breezy today.
DEBRA: Oh, send some of those over the radio waves [inaudible 00:04:58].
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yes.
DEBRA: If anybody hears any banging going on in the background here, it’s just my air conditioning being installed.
So Dr. Hestdalen, you’ve been a doctor, a chiropractor for more than 35 years. How did you get into being interested in something like chiropractic rather than being a medical doctor and MD?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Before I entered college, I actually initially signed up to be an engineer. And prior to my first day in class, I switched my major to pre-medicine and was going along that process. But just the more I thought about having to get up in the middle of the night and make life and death decisions about drugs and those types of things that medical doctors did, I just lost some of my zest to do that.
And so then I went on to biology and I taught biology and coached for six years. And during that time, I have a friend of mine going to Chiropractic College and we got together and we’re chatting and I haven’t seen him for a few years. We were talking about. And then it really started to intrigue me. I didn’t have a lot of experience with that, but I followed up.
My wife happened to serendipitously meet the doctor of chiropractic’s wife at a State [inaudible 00:06:17] conference. I followed up and the next thing I knew I was [inaudible 00:06:23] decision and enrolled and got accepted in a chiropractic college.
So we sold our home and moved to Minneapolis and started my four years of training. And then for the rest of the time, after I graduated, I moved out to Western North Dakota and practiced there for 18 years.
And just a combination of things was going on with increased insurance and all the things, the regulation. So we sold my practice to a [inaudible 00:06:54] come in and work with me. And then we moved to Fargo, North Dakota. And after a couple of years there, I had opened up a practice again and just my wife and I ran that.
We did that for five years and now the only official goodies I work is on the sports medicine team for the Fargo-Moorhead Red Hawks professional baseball team and that season got started Sunday. So we’ll be back in working with the team and doing that.
That’s how I got involved from the coaching and working with the natural approach to health through chiropractic. The nutritional component appealed to me.
I remember my wife was doing some sub-teaching while I was training in my clinic work at the Chirorpactic College. And our little daughter was about three. So I put her in the grocery cart and we were going up and down in the grocery aisles reading labels and doing [inaudible 00:07:49]. My wife was teaching and [inaudible 00:07:51] worked out well. But we spent a lot of hours checking out labels and educating ourselves and reading books and getting more in tuned to what we could be doing for ourselves.
DEBRA: Yes. I’ve met you in person and I’m looking at your picture right now and you seem like a very healthy person, healthy and happy. That’s really good.
So then, now tell us. How did you find out about Touchstone and why did you decide that that was something that would be useful for you?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Several years, about 20 years ago now, I had met Eddie Stone who’s the owner of Touchstone in another business that we were involved with, but we had no real direct connection. I just met him at a national meeting.
So I developed a relationship with Eddie over the years and a friend of mine that had been involved with this had joined Touchstone prior to their launch actually and got a hold of me and we talked. I started looking at this. It really fit into some of the things that bothered me over the years.
I remember 30 years ago hearing the story of prisoners of war in the Korean War. And the medical officer that was with them had diagnosed that the prisoners had beriberi, which is B1 deficiency.
So he got B1 from Red Cross and it was synthetic B1, thiamine hydrochloride and gave it to the prisoners and nothing happened, no response. The Korean guard told him to use rice polish. That’s what’s left over after they polished the rice to make it white.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: So he was feeding them a teaspoon of this powder every day and within a week all the symptoms disappeared.
DEBRA: That’s very interesting. I understand why that occurred. But when we come back from the break, I’m going to have you talk about why that is that the synthetic version didn’t work, but the rice polish did work.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Darrel Hestdalen. And we’re talking about nutrition and detox for good health.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Dr—why do I keep wanting to say Harrell? Darrel. It’s because you have an H in your last name. It’s okay. I trip over everybody’s name. Dr. Darrel Hestdalen. I actually practiced before.
Anyway, Dr. Darrel Hestdalen is with me. He’s been a doctor of chiropractic for more than 35 years. And we’re talking together about Touchstone Essentials Supplements and Zeolite Detox product because we both use them and we both recommend them and I wanted to give you his viewpoint as a doctor.
So go ahead with your story about why the rice polish worked and that the B1 didn’t.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: In the rice polish would be the complete complex of the B vitamin. So when they took that, they have access to all aspects, which are necessary for [inaudible 00:11:01] and utilization by the body.
The synthetic B1 is only part of a whole complex of things. And it lacks the protein [inaudible 00:11:11] normally in the food that is necessary to communicate with the cells to get across cell membrane and to be directed to the proper spot in the cell.
So the synthetic, basically in some of the readings I’ve been doing, may be more of a toxin than a help. And in fact, even the American Diabetic Association had quoted in this book that we got to be really careful in using synthetic vitamins for deficiencies because it may create a worse disease than what they’re trying to treat.
DEBRA: The American Diabetic Association? Wow.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yeah.
DEBRA: Wow, that’s a big statement for them.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: And another doctor too suggested that the aspect of it is it may be more of a toxic stress on the body than the deficiency because the synthetic can’t be utilized. It’s like giving a car without wheels. What do you do with it?
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: It just can’t be utilized properly.
DEBRA: One of the things that I’d like to point out is that there’s a difference. We’re living in a world now that has really two ways, two assumptions. And one is the industrial way of looking at things and the other is the nature way of looking at things.
And I really see the nature viewpoint starting to emerge more and more. But the industrial viewpoint says that nature is full of these resources and you should take them and then split them apart into individual isolated elements. So if they want to make a vitamin, what they do is they make an industrial chemical out of it. They take everything away.
I’ll just give an example. This is not a vitamin, but salt for example. So salt and nature has all these nutrients in it, 89 minerals and metals and all these different things.
But industry said, “What we want is sodium chloride.” So they strip everything out and they just give you sodium chloride and they use it in all kinds of industrial processes. But then they take this very same industrial sodium chloride and they put it in food and we put it in our bodies. And our bodies go, “Ah!” and they get high blood pressure and all these kinds of things because it’s stripped away. It doesn’t have all its other co-factors.
And it’s the same thing with vitamins that a synthetic vitamin has that viewpoint that you just have to have this pure industrial substance. And so it’s pure vitamin C, it’s pure B1 and it doesn’t have anything else. The nature viewpoint says that everything should be as it is in nature because our bodies are designed to utilize whole foods, not to utilize isolated nutrients.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Also along with that is that there’s no way that I can tell what I need now or two hours from now, tomorrow. You’re all going to have different things necessary for our proper cellular function.
DEBRA: Right.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: So we need to give the cells all the natural nutrients so the cell can take and pick and choose what it needs. And you can’t do that with a synthetic. You can’t load that up.
First of all, the cell doesn’t have access to it in an adequate manner. And the body may be able to utilize some of the synthetic, but it’s very limited. And then the toxic byproduct of that is just another stress on the body and [inaudible 00:14:42] these people that are just [inaudible 00:14:44] may actually be worse than the deficiency we’re trying to treat.
So giving the body the whole food. We just really give ourselves the [inaudible 00:14:53] so they can choose what it needs. The doctor within us is much smarter than any pharmaceutical manufactured vitamins or whatever it’d be.
DEBRA: I agree. I agree. Somebody asked me the other day and it’s on my website today, the answer. But I’m going to bring it up with you. Somebody asked me why some vitamins don’t have the supplement facts labeled that gives you so many micrograms of each nutrient.
Actually her question was with whole food vitamins, how can you tell how much of the nutrients are in the vitamins since one strawberry has a different amount than another strawberry?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yeah. When you use a whole food, it would be difficult to label just because there are some variations and growing factors, the soil, the light, the water and all those types of things that affect how the plant matures and develops.
But they’re going to be in a very compact range and to be able to measure that, it could be proven that the number you would put on there isn’t exactly true. It could be very [inaudible 00:16:11]. It’s just not labeled.
We know that when you take the whole food, for how many thousands of years has man existed and tried just eating food.
DEBRA: Yes.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Our foods today, I’ve seen reports that from 50% to 30% of the nutrients today that we used to have 50 to 80 years ago.
When you were talking about the industrial aspect, I remember when I was growing up that DuPont Chemistry had that Better Living through Chemistry.
DEBRA: Yeah, I have that too.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Wow. I really question that. I just saw an ad this morning, an old ad that said, “More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarettes.”
DEBRA: Oh my god.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: And another one about how early can you start [inaudible 00:16:59] Coke. And they have an infant, maybe a one year old. They were promoting starting to feed them Coca Cola.
Those are the types of things in history that were just totally proven not good for our bodies. And we have to go back to what’s in nature, what we can do by getting the strongest nutritional food factors that we can.
And we’ve increased our eating to organic much more than we’re used to and still not everything is available that way. That’s why we supplement with supplements of whole foods and they are not from whole foods because that can get your isolates where it now has lost the protein complex that is naturally found in the food. So the isolated amount of food, you don’t have the whole complex that you need.
DEBRA: We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m talking with Dr. Darrel Hestdalen about nutrition and detox. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Dr. Harold—every time I say your name, I want to say Harold Hestdalen. Dr. Darrel Hestdalen. And he has been a doctor of chiropractic for more than 35 years and now he is helping people be healthier with Touchstone Essentials supplements and detox products.
So tell us why not all whole food vitamins are created equal. Can you tell us about that?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Certainly. There’s a group of supplements, they take on to the whole food component, but what they actually do is extract the vitamins from the whole foods. They may be low dose vitamins, but in the extraction process, they destroy the protein [inaudible 00:19:00]. It’s not concentrated [inaudible 00:19:03] extracted. And so they [inaudible 00:19:07] just picking out, but in doing that, a couple of things. They usually have used high heat. Using above 106 degrees starts to denature the protein and that’s the enzyme.
And some of the products too. A lot of fruits and vegetables in the products [inaudible 00:19:30], they actually pasteurize the liquid before they dry and form it into capsule. Pasteurization occurs at 185 degrees. The minimum standard is being 185 degrees for 15 seconds.
So they are heating from 106 to 185 and then holding it there for 15 seconds and then back down again until the bacteria make it safe to eat and that’s understandable for using [that package?] in that form. But why they would do that to a product that they dry and put it into the capsule anyway is just a process that happens.
You have to understand the process of the product. That’s where Touchstone [inaudible 00:20:09], in a way, they’re very adamant about keeping things at low temperatures so that we don’t denature any of the natural complexes that are in the food, in the nutrients so we’re getting the whole package.
DEBRA: One thing that I think is really important and I totally agree with you on that—one thing that I think is important for consumers to understand when they are making a choice about buying a vitamin product, a supplement is that a whole food, something that is properly done as a whole food, all that’s being removed is the moisture. And it’s just extremely dehydrated, extremely concentrated actual food.
I asked Eddie about why it didn’t have the numbers about how much of each nutrient. And he said because the law doesn’t recognize whole food supplements as vitamins that need to be labeled like supplements. They recognize whole food supplements as food. And so what you need to put on the label is the food that’s in it.
And I thought that that was interesting because it actually is food. You shouldn’t even think of them as vitamins in my opinion. You should just think of them as being, “Here’s a little capsule with food in it.”
And I’m smiling as I’m saying that because when I was a kid and we first had the space program, do you remember they talked about the astronauts just taking food capsules?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yes.
DEBRA: And I thought, “Gee, I’d like to eat whole food. I don’t want to take capsules.” But this is exactly—it’s food in a capsule.
And I think the Touchstone Essentials, the Essentials supplement has 33 servings of broccoli in three capsules. I’m not going to ever eat 33 servings of broccoli in one day. And so I know that I can just take this capsule and I get as much nutrition as 33 servings of organic broccoli grown in wonderful soil, harvested at the right time and processed at a low temperature.
And it’s very difficult. I’ve been looking for the past two years. It’s very difficult to find other supplements that compare to that.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yes. And the synthetic, they [inaudible 00:22:42] huge building that they have several assembly lines and each assembly line has a different [inaudible 00:22:48] to that company. And they’re placing the raw ingredients out of the same [inaudible 00:22:52] and same barrels and just formulating it slightly different. So everything’s coming up to the other end of the line and just being a different combination of synthetic vitamins and they’re still synthetic.
Here, like you said, it’s processed and it’s grown under the ideal organic sustainable agricultural practices. It’s harvested and processed [inaudible 00:23:14] and at low temperatures so you don’t lose any of the nutrients or you minimize any loss of nutrient value. And it’s extremely small.
And about the labeling aspect too, I remember with another company that products that use—they were wanting to go to Canada and Japan. Both countries have a different level. Like for folic acid, [inaudible 00:23:38] 800 milligrams. They want to accept the micrograms, the other 400. And in the process, you even have to have the lowest one because you couldn’t sell the highest ones in other countries.
Here, because of the whole food, other companies have had various strict requirements it’s difficult to get a new product in. Some of those are getting in, in four days. Touchstone is already available in at least 40 countries because it’s so easy [inaudible 00:24:06] because they’re whole foods.
DEBRA: That’s all they are. They’re whole foods. I wrote a blog post once called The Food, the Whole Food and Nothing But the Food and that’s what they are. If you’re looking for a nutrient supplement, what you should be looking for is something that is whole food. Whole food.
And you can tell that it’s whole food because you won’t see any numbers on it. You won’t see so many micrograms of a particular nutrient. You’ll just see that it contains broccoli and mushrooms and whatever is in it. And that’s how you tell it’s a whole food.
So what kind of benefits do you see when you start giving people these nutrients?
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: I’ve taken vitamins, the synthetic, which what we believed—years ago, that’s what we believed was the best [inaudible 00:24:57]. We were doing what we thought was best.
I had some colds and flus and I was basically healthy, healthier than most. And working at a busy practice, I was face to face with people every day that were sick. And my health was pretty good, but I still would get [inaudible 00:25:13] colds.
And when I started this, it was 180 degree because all of a sudden, I’m not going to take anything. I have not had vitamins for over two years. I have not had a sniffle in two years.
And our grandchildren get the Pure Body, the Zeolite Clay and drops. They’ve had those before they were born because their mothers were taking it. And they continued to do that and had very little illness. A couple of colds in a six year old and the brother is just a little over two years old and he hadn’t had anything other than [inaudible 00:25:51] he gets runny nose and that sort of thing.
DEBRA: Yeah.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: They’ve been very healthy and they continue to get the Zeolite and I mix the whole food. I make a roasted red pepper hummus and I [inaudible 00:26:04] capsules of the essentials and the super greens in the mix that you can’t even that’s in there, but then they get [inaudible 00:26:10] spoonfuls, but I know they’re getting a reasonable amount of that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: So it makes it a super food for them to eat. The benefit is that for the last two years, without any vitamins at all…
DEBRA: Wait. I want to interrupt you because the commercial is going to come on any second. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking with Dr. Darrel Hestdalen 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 Dr. Darrel Hestdalen. See, I’m getting it by the end of the show. Dr. Darrel Hestdalen. He’s been a doctor of chiropractic for more than 35 years.
And we’re talking about Touchstone Essentials whole food supplements and also their Pure Body Zeolite drops and spray.
Let’s talk about Pure Body now. You tell us about Pure Body.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Pure Body is a zeolite mineral. Zeolite is unique. There are several different categories of zeolite and this one is a sheet-like zeolite and it has tunnels and channels in the molecule.
It’s negatively charged, so it has a strong affinity for the heavy metals, lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic and so on. And because of their heavy weight, they have a very small dense nucleus, that actually will fit into channels and tunnels of the zeolite molecule.
So then it just goes into the body. Pure Body has two forms. One is liquid drops. Average is 0.3 microns inside, which is the size that’s necessary to be absorbed across the intestinal membrane. And then the rest of it that doesn’t get absorbed [inaudible 00:28:03] in the intestinal tract.
The spray is in nanometer sizes, 100% absorption. It actually is dipped inside the water molecule. And it’s been taken wherever water goes in your body. So your body spray will go with that. And therefore it can get into the cell membranes and across the blood-brain barrier. And so it can be detoxifying throughout your body.
It only lasts in the body about three to five hours and then it’s excreted when it picks up the loads of heavy metals. And it will a sandwich attachment to many of the chemicals and also organic compounds that are positively charged. The two zeolite molecules can stick together and stand rigid. And then once the zeolite loses its negative charge because it’s [inaudible 00:28:53], then the kidneys flush it and there’s no stress.
We’ve seen people [inaudible 00:28:59] transplant who have actually improved their chemistry scores because they were using the zeolite. So it’s not a stressful thing to the kidney.
And in my practice, we did a few patients where we actually did the testing. They have been on the zeolite. And using a process, we could measure the excretion of the heavy metals and the increase was up to 300% over here.
DEBRA: Wow.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: We tested nine different minerals. And all of them except one person only had seven of the nine increases. All the rest of them had all nine heavy metals. We increased in the excretion in the procedures that we worked.
And so it works. And a number of other doctors around the country are doing the same thing around the country. So we have a large number of patients that were showing the same type of results.
DEBRA: I know that when I started taking it, I saw a result within 10 days or so. I think it was. It’s been a while now since I first started taking it. But I hear this from people all the time because a lot of my readers are taking it. They write to me and they say, “Wow, I started taking this and all of a sudden, I felt euphoric.”
That’s the word that everybody uses. They say, “I felt euphoric.” And I know what that’s like. I now call it “zeolite euphoria” because I’ve heard it so much and I have experienced it myself and people around me who are taking it have this experience.
And I think it’s just because your body gets to this point where the zeolite has removed enough heavy metals that your body is not being suppressed by them so much and that you just suddenly feel really good. To me, that’s the indicator that it’s actually doing something.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yeah, there’s a good science behind that too because the heavy metals will block the enzymes that are part of the reactions to create the energy ourselves that we need to provide. It’s actually our life energy.
The molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate is three phosphate molecules linked in. The bottom [inaudible 00:31:14] and the second and third is a very high energy bond. And the enzymes required to break that bond require an activation mineral called magnesium.
Now what happens is that the heavy metals, lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic will sit and block that binding site, the activation or the [inaudible 00:31:32] center, if you will, of the enzyme.
Now what happens is that the magnesium can’t get in. The heavy metals do not trigger the reaction. So we’re diminishing our abilities to release this energy.
DEBRA: I didn’t know this. Wow.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: The zeolite actually traps and removes the heavy metal. Now the magnesium has access to that activation center. It’s like sticking a key in the slop and now it works. So it causes the reaction.
It’s very common to hear people, “Oh, I have just more energy. I talk to people just almost overnight with the clearness of thought.”
DEBRA: It really clears up the thinking.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yeah.
DEBRA: I’ve really noticed that. I’ve noticed that in a lot of people.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: ADD. I have one grandson that—they couldn’t really go to the shopping mall because there’s too much visual stimulation. He was just all over the place. Within three days of taking zeolite, he could walk through and he just held on to his grandmother’s hands the whole time and just walked down. He just behaved very normally. So it really makes that huge difference.
The three systems impacted by heavy metals are the nervous system, the immune system and the hormone balance. If you think about health problems, if you can have a positive influence on those three, you’re going to do a lot to help people function at a more normal level.
DEBRA: That’s right. You mentioned, you talked about the two different, but I just want to reiterate this. The Pure Body comes in two different strengths. This is the regular Pure Body. This is the one that primarily works in the intestines. And then there’s Pure Body Extra Strength, which is a very small particle that can go all throughout your body, including through the blood-brain barrier.
I take both of them. People can take one or the other or both. It’s okay because they complement each other.
And I just think that it’s so important because unless you’ve done something specific to remove toxic chemicals from your body and heavy metals, unless you’ve done something specific, your body is overloaded with them. And so anything else that you want to do to improve your health, you still got this toxic situation going on in your body.
I have been researching this for 30 years and I can just tell you that this product is the simplest, safest, most effective, most affordable thing that I have ever found.
You just put the drops in water or you just spray the spray in your mouth and you don’t have to make any shakes. You don’t have to be allergic to anything. It’s just a natural mineral and yet, it does this amazing thing.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: In practice, we know that toxicity was an issue and these herbal detoxes and force-dumping and people will get sick and couldn’t handle it. It was just really tough for a patient’s compliance.
And to get the results they wanted, it was just reading out and to hold their hand and talk them through it. Here, we can do it. We don’t have the side effects. People can get the results. A neurologist friend of mine in Minneapolis said this is the biggest breakthrough in 50 years in healthcare. It’s just a great, great change.
Personally, about 20 years ago and actually about 25 years ago, it was North Dakota’s centennial year in 1989. So we rode bikes across the state. We put a bicycle on the Montana border and rode across and put it [inaudible 00:35:12] and the Minnesota border.
DEBRA: Wow.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Sometime after that, I noticed we had a new regular heart beat and I know if that’s triggered. I used to have a mouth full of mercury fillings. I had them all removed, but I still had this irregular heartbeat.
And a doctor looked at it and checked it over. He said, “I witnessed it and I affirm it. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” But it was just about every three to five beats, it would just flutter. And it’s called PVC, premature ventricular contraction. And what happens is the fibers in the heart start losing their protective sheet and [inaudible 00:35:47] response to mercury is one of the causes. For me, that’s what was happening.
And so I had this and it just was not really getting better. When I started the Touchstone Pure Body product and about six months ago, I noticed my heart is not skipping anymore.
What happened is I was giving my body total nutrition, plus I had taken enough mercury out of my system now that I was no longer destroying the sheets and the [inaudible 00:36:15] fibers in my heart. And they were healing and I have no skipping at all right now. None. That’s just a wonderful feeling.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally understand what you’re saying. One of the things that that so attracted me to Touchstone Essentials was because I had written my book Toxic Free and this was the book that was the culmination of 30 years of research.
And I figured out in that book that what we need in order to recover from toxic exposures is we need to remove the toxic exposures. We need to remove the toxic chemicals out of our bodies and we need to get enough nutrition for our bodies to heal. And so I had this detox nutrition connection in that book.
And then I found Touchstone and it was exactly the same thing. Here are the products in order to be healthy. You need to detox and you need to have good nutrition. And the products are really the best quality of these types of products that I’ve found.
And I just think that everybody is exposed to toxic chemicals and has been all their entire lives. If you’re alive today, you’ve been exposed since even before you were born.
And it’s just something that I think everybody should take. Across the board, I just think everybody should take it just as a first step towards health. That’s my opinion.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Yes, today with our food supply, because of the commercial fertilization and all of this…
DEBRA: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you. I’m just not paying attention to time, but it’s the end of the show. Thank you so much, Dr. Hestdalen.
DR. DARREL HESTDALEN: Okay. Yes.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
Swiss Apartment Building for People Who are Chemically Hypersensitive
A new building has been in the news recently. It was built by Swiss Healthy Life and Living Foundation for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) patients in a remote part of Leimbach, on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland
They don’t allow products that contain toxic chemicals, or cell phones.
15 apartments.
I’m happy this has been built, but I would like to see ALL buildings built this way. Because nobody should have to live with toxic chemicals.
I would like to see toxic-free homes built and have them be available to anyone and everyone. It should just be the norm.
The Telegraph: The Swiss flats where smoking, painting and mobile phones are banned
New York Daily News: Switzerland apartment bans perfume, cell phones and smoking
Cell Phones, Brain Tumors, Labeling and Your Right to Know
Today I have two guests speaking on the health effects of cell phones and the problem of insufficient product labeling.
I invited Ellen Marks to be a guest today after posting a press release last week about how she and others protested cell phones at a San Francisco store by placing warning labels on the phones. Ellen is founder and director of the California Brain Tumor Association which focuses on prevention and on the wireless radiation issue being a possible cause of deadly brain tumors. Ellen entered into the cell phone/brain tumor world when her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008. Her husband and Senator Kennedy had their seizures and same diagnosis 10 days apart. Ironically, her son had worked for the Senator. Her suspicions concerning both her husband’s and the Senator’s long term cell phone use to the same side of the head where the tumors developed led her to worldwide experts. Upon sending them her husband’s cell phone records and medical records they confirmed that her husband’s glioma is “more likely than not” attributable to his long term ipsilateral cell phone use. Ellen has testified before Congress on the health effects of cell phone radiation, attends International Expert Conferences on this issue and has appeared on the Dr. Oz Show, Larry King Live, The View and many national newscasts. Not only is she educating others but by “going public” many other victims have reached out to her and she has brought the victims together to have their collective voices heard. www.cabta.org
Ellen then invited Representative Andrea Boland to join us as well. Rep. Boland serves in the Maine House of Representatives and is considered a national expert on electromagnetic radiation health and safety hazards of cell phones, smart meters, and other wireless devices. She introduced the first legislation in the world to ask for warning labels on cell phones to alert users to keep them away from the head and body, especially those of children and pregnant women. She has spoken on the subject in Washington, Vermont, Portland, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She received the 2011 National Health Freedom Hero Award for her work supporting nutritional supplementation, advancing wireless health and safety, and promoting the public’s right to know.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Cellphones, Brain Tumors, Labeling & Your Right to Know
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest:Ellen Marks & Andrea Boland
Date of Broadcast: April 28, 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 to live toxic-free.
It’s Monday, April 28th 2014. And I have two wonderful guests today. We’re going to be talking about cellphones and brain tumors and your right to know what’s toxic and EMF’s.
The reason that we’re doing this is that I was so inspired by my first guest—actually, we’re going to have both of them on at once. But I originally contacted my first guest because she and others sent out a press release about how they did a demonstration at a cellphone store in San Francisco. They just walked in and put warning labels on their cellphones, little stickers with warning labels on the cellphones. And I actually don’t have the sticker right here in front of me, so I can’t tell you what it says (but she can probably tell you).
But I was so impressed by this because I have often had the thought that labeling is just so inadequate that I just want to walk into a supermarket with a roll of stickers that have skull and crossbones on them and stick them on everything that’s toxic, walk into Walmart and all these big stores that still have toxic things on the shelves and just put stickers on them, shelf-talkers that just would say, “Caution: This is a toxic product. Use it at your own risk.”
Ellen actually walked into a store and did that. So she caught my attention.
Anyway, we’re going to be talking about what she did, but we’re also going to be talking about why she did it and what we can do to improve our right to know and the labeling.
So, my first guest is Ellen Marks. She is the director of the California Brain Tumor Association. And I also have with us today representative Andrea Boland. She’s a representative in the Main House of Representatives. And she’s considered a national expert on electromagnetic radiation and safety hazards in cellphones and other things.
She introduced the first legislation in the world to ask for warning labels on cellphones to alert users to keep them away from their head and body, especially those of children and pregnant women.
So, hello, Ellen and Rep. Boland. Thanks for being here today.
ELLEN MARKS: Hi, Debra. Thank you so much for having us.
ANDREA BOLAND: Yes, thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So I want to ask both of you how you got interested in this subject. Ellen, why don’t we start with you?
ELLEN MARKS: Okay. Well, if somebody would’ve asked me ten years ago, I never would’ve thought I’d be doing this. But unfortunately, about almost six years ago, my husband had a seizure in the middle of the night.
He was diagnosed immediately at the local hospital with a large tumor glioma in his right frontal lobe.
At the same time, my son had been interning for Senator Kennedy and the same thing happened to him about a week later.
My son was the one that brought it to me. They’re both on their cellphones all the time. And it was true. My husband was a heavy cellphone user for nearly 20 years. He’s what we call an “early adapter.”
So, started researching it and I was shocked to find things. At first, I thought, “Oh, if this was true, our government would’ve told us.” I was kind of naïve, wasn’t I?
DEBRA: Well, I thought that too. When I first discovered about toxic chemicals, I thought, “Well, how come there are toxic chemicals. Isn’t the government watching out for us?” They aren’t.
ELLEN MARKS: No, they’re not unfortunately. I mean, there are some good legislative such as Rep. Boland and Sen. Leno […] There are some good legislators. But unfortunately, we can’t get enough done. The status quo is not good enough anymore. We need to change this.
So anyhow, I did find out. I sent my husband’s medical record, cellphone record to experts around the world. And they did get back to me and said that, more likely than not, his glioma which was on the same side of the head to which he held the phone was attributable to his cellphone use.
So, I have since testified at Congress and involved in trying to get legislation passed from Maine to Hawaii. I’m very active in the San Francisco Right to Know legislation because I want people to know—and many others.
Trust me, I have a list a mile long of people who are dead or dying that are much younger than him. Had he known, he never would’ve risked his life by holding this to his head.
And that’s what we want people to know. And unfortunately, even though we’ve tried giving labeling laws across the nation—and Rep. Boland had been fabulous with this, I can’t thank her enough—this industry is beating us up.
They’re not telling people the truth.
And unfortunately, our government, from the very top, from President Obama down, is involved in this collusion between the FTC and and the CTIA, the wireless industry.
So, that’s how I got involved. I’ve dedicated my life to this because I see the devastation of the brain tumor, and they are on the rise.
DEBRA: Yes, I understand. I have a very dear friend who—let’s see, I think he’s in his early 40’s. Very brilliant, a very kind and caring person. He spent so many years just with the cellphone glued to his head. I sat there and watched him do that.
And he called me about a year ago and said he had a brain tumor.
ELLEN MARKS: Oh, I’m sorry.
DEBRA: He had an operation. I’m thinking that he’s fine. I haven’t heard from him since. But I heard that he’s survived the operation. He was 40 or 42, something like that, when this happened.
ELLEN MARKS: Yeah!
DEBRA: I can’t walk around saying, “Well, my friend…”—I know for a fact that my friend used his cellphone for hours on end every day, and he got a brain tumor.
But you had put together evidence. And so I’m so glad that you’re doing what you’re doing. I understand how you feel because when I found out about toxic chemicals and consumer products, and I was made so sick from them, I said, “Wait a minute! If somebody had told me that there were toxic chemicals in all these products that have no labels on them, then I wouldn’t have used them.”
I think that everybody has that sense that if we know there’s a danger, we’re not going to put ourselves in harm’s way. The biggest problem is that we don’t know where the harm is. People are making controversy out of it and—anyway, you understand.
ELLEN MARKS: You’re right. And the controversy with this issue (and Senator Boland will tell you in a minute also), there is a lot of good science. When they separate the independent science from the industry science, there’s excellent science showing that there is an increased risk of brain tumors from cellphone use and from cordless home phones.
People need to be aware of that. They need to get rid of their cordless home phones and go back to the wired landline—if the cellphone industry is going to keep the wired landline. That’s another issue.
DEBRA: That’s a whole other issue.
ELLEN MARKS: Exactly!
DEBRA: Well, Rep. Boland, tell us how you got involved in this issue.
ANDREA BOLAND: Well, actually, it was brought to me by someone in California—Ellie actually, I didn’t know, but someone, a retired college teacher, who had been looking at that issue. He saw a story about me in a magazine and thought that I might be one who might take it up.
And when I heard about it, I just sort of groaned, “Oh, my goodness. I have enough things on my plate.” But he sent a lot of good information, even information from Europe and he translated it (in this case, from French to English). So you couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t have any personal connection to the effects of cellphones that I knew of. But anyway, the evidence, to me, was overwhelming, that certainly a warning label is called for to let people know we may have some serious problems here.
So, I went ahead with the legislation. We designed the label. And it had a graphic on it as well because we knew at that time that cigarettes in other countries had graphics with them showing […] and that sort of thing. So we put a graphic on, showing the brain of a 5-year old receiving the—70% of the brain was receiving the emissions from the cellphone.
DEBRA: Yeah. We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more about cellphones and their health effects with my guest, Ellen Marks who’s the founder and director of the California Brain Tumor Association and Rep. Andrea Boland from Main. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ellen Marks. She’s the founder and director of the California Brain Tumor Association and Rep. Andrea Boland from the House of Representatives in Maine.
Wow! So, tell us something more about the health effects.
ELLEN MARKS: Well, I could start a little bit. First of all, in 2011, the World Health Organization did classify radiofrequency electromagnetic fields—that includes cellphones, cell towers, anything that emits non-ionizing radiation—a possible human carcinogen based on an increased risk of glioma associated with wireless phone use. So, they did this after they studied the findings, the science for […] France.
And the health effects are not just brain tumors. That’s something that people need to be aware of. Just recently, they’re finding out (there was a study done) that women who keeps cellphones in their bras are getting unusual breast cancers at young ages.
And there are salivary gland tumors. There was a study out of China which showed a huge increased in salivary gland tumors […] And those can be length.
And we’re talking about prostate cancer and all sorts of things. Now, they’re saying—I think it was Martha Herbert from Harvard who was a neuroscientist. She came out with a report that she believes that Wi-Fi is causing an increase in autism.
So, there’s a lot of different health effects. And the problem is that it’s from the non-thermal emissions. And the FCC, when they’re putting out their guidelines through these cellphone safety standards are only taking into considerations the thermal effects. And this needs to be changed. This is a terrible, terrible mistake. It’s going to affect just about every man, woman and child in America using a cellphone. How many future cancers and deleterious health effects are we looking at?
And one thing I want to say also is something that got Andrea and I and others involved in this is the language in the manual. Andrea, you can talk a little bit more about this too.
The cellphone industry is required by the FCC to put in what’s called a safe distance precaution. And they’re hiding them in tiny, tiny font on page 250 of the manual or they’re not even giving the manuals out anymore. I don’t know.
Many people use the iPhone. Do you mind if I take a minute to go through what you have to do to find out the warning?
DEBRA: Please. Please do that, yes. Go ahead.
ELLEN MARKS: It’s quite amazing! Who would know this other than us? You have to hit ‘Settings’, and then you have to hit ‘General’, then you have to hit ‘About’, then you have to go all the way down and hit ‘Legal’, then you have to hit ‘RF Exposure’. And in print that you cannot make bigger—like you can on most iPhones—it tells you (if I can read it with my glasses on, which is not easy), “to reduce exposure to RF energy, use a hands-free option such as the built-in speaker phone, the supplied headphones or other similar accessories. Carry the iPhone at least 10 mm. away from your body to ensure exposure levels remain at or below the tested levels.”
So they’re hiding information like this. The Blackberry says to keep it almost an inch from the abdomen of a pregnant woman and the lower abdomen of a teenager. Every cellphone has a warning like this somewhere, but Americans aren’t seeing it. Other countries are warning their citizens, but we’re not doing that here.
So Andrea, do you want to talk a little bit more about the manual?
ANDREA BOLAND: Well, the thing about the manual, of course, is that people don’t see it. They can’t even find it sometimes if they want to. You might have to go online or dig deep into the phone—as Ellie said, to dig deep into a manual, it’s very tiny print.
My daughter recently got an iPhone 4 I guess it was. And there was a very thin, little piece of paper that floated out of it that she wasn’t even going to pay any attention to. She looked at it and there was some information there about finding the warnings or the safety advisories, whatever they want to call. The print was so tiny that when I copied it to show the legislators, it was absolutely unreadable. So, that’s the kind of trick that they pulled.
But when you talk about the health effects—there are others too. There are effects to soft tissue—for instance, the eyes, the testicles, the reproductive organs. So, in the Blackberry, it was saying to keep away from the abdomen of pregnant women and the lower abdomen of teenagers, they’re talking about birth effects.
All I can think of is parents who are anticipating the birth of a child not knowing this information and then finding out too late that they, themselves, cause birth defects or traumas to their newborn baby or their developing child. I just really think it’s criminal.
And in fact, it probably is. Looking at Risk Management Magazine, which is a magazine that corporations go to, it talks about how there is actually requirements that—for instance, manufacturers have often been held liable with their warnings who are deemed not conspicuous enough or placed in the wrong location or fell off of the product by accident. Well, my daughter’s would probably be called “falling off” or “falling away.” There are requirements for these.
And so, not only are the health effects and not only are the warnings hidden, they are actually flirting with the law to not have them obvious.
So, there’s really so much there. And yet, what happens is children may develop and not have good brain function. They’re not able to learn easily. People could have difficulties with vision. I believe I do because of a problem with glaucoma where one eye has huge, huge high pressure and the other one didn’t (a little bit, but really essentially didn’t). The doctors was so shocked. They couldn’t understand where it came from. It was suggested to me that it came from my cellphone use. So, I lost 90% of my vision in that eye.
DEBRA: So many things we don’t know about this.
We need to go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guests today are Ellen Marks, founder and director of the California Brain Tumor Association and Rep. Andrea Boland from the Main House of Representatives. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about cellphones, brain tumors, labeling, your right to know. We’ve got Ellen Marks who’s the founder and director of the California Brain Tumor Association (they are at CABTA.org) and also, Rep. Andrea Boland. She’s got a long URL for a website. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can look at the description of the show and find out how to reach each of these guests (and any other guest) and find out that we have all over a hundred past shows that you can listen to also in the archives.
Let’s talk about right to know and labeling. Rep. Boland, why don’t you go first? Okay, go ahead.
Ellen: I think at about the same time—and Andrea, correct me if I’m wrong—Maine was starting to look at this, the City of San Francisco was starting to look at this issue. Originally, it was then Mayor Gavin Newsom. The San Francisco Department of Environment was fabulous on this.
What I heard was that Gavin Newsom became concerned when his wife was pregnant and she was holding the cellphone to her abdomen.
And by the way, I want to say something about that, what Andrea was just talking about. There are studies showing damage to sperm. There’s a wonderful couple here in Marine whose young child, at four, died from a GPM, the worst type of brain tumor imaginable which is very unusual in a child. And she does blame herself. She was a realtor and kept cellphones in two pockets while she was pregnant.
So, it’s really important that pregnant women keep this thing away from their bodies—well, that everybody keep it away from their bodies, but especially pregnant women.
So, anyhow, what happened in San Francisco was that we came up with the Right to Know law. It passed unanimously in 2010. But it was to post the SAR, which is the specific absorption rate at the point of sale. Each has a different one. And the limit is 1.6 watts per kilogram.
So, anyhow, the CTIA did come in and sue. The deputy city attorney who was in charge of this case wanted to repeal it soon thereafter because he said he could not defend the […] in court.
Cindy Franklin and I—she is the fellow advocate up in Washington. She has a non-profit called Consumer for Safer Cellphones were very upset by this. We had worked hard to get this done. We knew that it was something that needed to be done. And we got hold of then Lt. Gov. Newsom and he got in touch with the interim Mayor Lee, and said, “No, this is not going to be repealed. This is needed.”
So, what we did was we had Supervisor John Avalo introduce new Right to Know legislation which passed unanimously in 2011. Basically, it was to hand out a fact sheet at the point of sale, talking about the World Health Organization classification and some precautions that people could take.
The CTIA continued to sue. This is what they do. They threaten everybody with litigation across the nation who has wanted to do something. They did continue to sue.
The bottomline is that California, San Francisco did not lose in court. But it wasn’t looking good in federal court, but they did put out a non-binding ruling that this did violate the industry’s—Andrea, what was it—the industry’s first amendment rights. It was compelling speech.
DEBRA: Well, now, wait a minute. Don’t we have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
ELLEN MARKS: Oh, that’s exactly the words that I use all the time, that my family and others have been robbed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, yes.
ANDREA BOLAND: And those public servants who swear to uphold the constitution swear to uphold those rights. And they too are not doing it.
DEBRA: So to me, life—that’s the very first word that’s used—we have the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So anything that violates life, to me, is unconstitutional. And not only is it unconstitutional, but it’s unethical.
There are such things in the world as ethics, which means that you do the thing that promotes well-being. You don’t do the thing that is harmful.
I’m going to make a really strong statement here. People are found guilty of murdering people, and yet, at the same time, consumer products that actually kill people are allowed to continue to sold.
ELLEN MARKS: And I cannot agree with you more. I’m angry. That’s why I continue to do this. This is why we fought back in San Francisco. We had this changed. It’s pathetic, what is going on. It goes as high as President Obama (and I’ll explain that to you in a minute).
What happened was that in 2013, while the lawsuit was still going on (but the city was doing pretty good with it actually), the new mayor wanted no part of it. He’s a text-friendly guy, and he wanted no part of it.
So the deputy city attorney was right behind us, lobbying that it should be repealed if we were lobbying that it should not be repealed.
And I’m going to tell you something now. I don’t think—and many of us do not think—that it was a coincidence that one month later, the deputy city attorney in charge of this case for three or four years was appointed to become a federal judge by President Obama.
We had about 20 other cities and states who wanted to do this Right to Know law. This collusion and corruption is coming from the top. And it is sickening.
You are so right when you say this about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My family has been robbed it, and I can’t tell you how many families has been robbed of this. And Obama recently appointed the ex-FTC head, Tom Wheeler, to head the CTIA.
The revolving door continues. Last week, an ex-FCC commissioner was appointed to head the FCC. I think maybe I said that backwards before. Tom Wheeler, head of the CTIA, now he heads the FCC. And now we have the ex-commissioner of the FCC heading the CTIA.
This revolving door is going around and around. The corruption is starting at the top. Our hands are tied because whenever we try to do something, this industry who is fueling our global economy and has so much money and is buying politicians, buying science, trying to [… ] their product—it’s tobacco all over again. But this is worse because everybody is using them and it’s a valuable technology.
So, as much as wonderful people like Rep. Boland and Lt. Gov. Newsom, Dennis Kucinich, even representatives […] who wrote to the FCC, the American Academy of Pediatrics—even the Department of Interior last week wrote a letter to the Department of Commerce saying that these FCC guidelines are inapplicable—it’s pathetic what’s going on out there.
And this is why I took the action that I did. I think that we need a National Labeling Day. I hope Andrea is with me on it.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk about that when we come back from the break. We need to go to a break. We’ll talk about that when we get back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my two impassioned guests today are Ellen Marks from the California Brain Tumor Association and Rep. Andrea Boland from the Maine House of Representatives. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ellen Marks from the California Brain Tumor Association and Rep. Andrea Boland from the Maine House of Representatives.
So, Ellen, tell us what happened in San Francisco. Why did you take labeling into your own hands at the Verizon store?
ELLEN MARKS: Well, after the law was repealed—and it was the saddest day at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Meeting […] They had their heads down. They were just embarrassed by what they had to do.
And then, we had—Andrew will tell you what’s happened in Maine. We had this happen in Hawaii just the last couple of weeks where Senator Josh Green of Kona got a cellphone labeling bill passed through the Senate Health Committee, and then the representative, Sen. Roz Baker of Maui refused to hear the bill. It was the same week that she refused to hear the GMO-labeling bill. So there are some industry manipulation going on there.
And then, Andrea will tell you what happened in Main, which was just awful and sad.
We decided we were going to take the law into our own hands. I don’t call it “civil disobedience.” I call it “civil obedience.” We’re trying to save lives.
My colleagues and I went into a Verizon store and we started labeling the phones. We made sure that they were going to come off easy. I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before. It said something to the effect of “This device emits radiation which the Whole Health Organization says can cause cancer. Do not hold to the head or body, especially pregnant women and children.”
We were in there for about an hour, putting the labels on. They followed us around, taking them off. They were on the phone, waiting for the police to come. And they did not come. And we made some…
DEBRA: But they didn’t stop you from doing it? They just took them off.
ELLEN MARKS: No, they couldn’t stop us. I think they were probably informed not to touch us or anything like that. We kept doing it. We wanted to make a statement that this is what is needed, and we’re going to take it into our own hands if we have to. And like I said before, I hope that we can do a National Labeling Day.
And I think there’s enough outrage, people across the United States right now that feel the same way that we do, that this does not violate their civil rights or their first right amendment, but it violates our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is affecting children. And we’re horrified about the effects. And it’s not just cellphones, like I said before. It’s cordless phones. It’s baby monitors. It’s toys that are being made for 6-month old where you can put your eyes on them for them to play with.
I would love for Andrea to tell you also about what happened in Maine.
DEBRA: Okay.
ANDREA BOLAND: Well, what happened in Maine was the legislation I brought was announced with a press release in December 2009. It went to the Associated Press and it just went viral. It was really incredible.
It was all over the country and other countries.
I was sitting on the phone for about three days with all different media outlets—the first one being CNN, which was startling to me. But anyway, people couldn’t believe that there was a problem with cellphones. They were angry at me and they were shocked. Some people did know and weren’t surprised. But for the most part, it really caused a huge uproar.
And from there, I think there’s a lot more that came out in the press and news magazines and everything. And that was just kicking the door open. I had a lot of these folks from California who had been giving me some advice on it and all too. So we just kept bringing it forth.
Anyway, the first label that I asked for actually said “Warning: This device emits electromagnetic radiation, exposure to which may cause brain cancer. Users, especially children and pregnant women, should keep it away from their head and body.” And it had that graphic of the penetration (which has been modeled by a professor at the University of Utah) showing the effects of the emission penetrating the brain of a 5-year old.
All of that caused a lot of uproar.
From that, I’ve had two more iterations of it to tame it down because it couldn’t have graphics and everybody was all nervous about the wording. This year was the third time it’s been voted on in the Maine legislature and all it said was, “If you have advisories in your manual for the user, put them on the packaging so the purchaser can see it or some kind of a label that tells them where to find it.” And the wording would just be “Information on RF exposures can be found at page such-and-such” or “on our website, such-and-such,” so that people have a fighting chance of finding it if they want to. But at this point, people know there may be some kind of an issue.
It was so tame we didn’t use warning, we didn’t use “safety.” We were careful to use no words that could be called “compelled speech.” We only wanted to use the word of the industry itself. Very, very tame, “For information, go to…” That’s all it was.
Well, it passed decisively in the house. It passed decisively in the senate. And then, there’s a final vote. It’s called a “vote of enactment.” And usually, nobody even pays attention to it. It just goes under the hammer and they’ll roll call, no discussion. But the cellphone industry put a whole bunch more lobbyists on the job in that last day and scared the devil out of some of the legislators just enough to turn it so that it didn’t pass on what we call “enactment” that final vote, which was, of course, very disappointing. But they had the help of the leadership of the House of Representatives.
People who, before, had voted in favor of it (it did pass the house the year before), this time, they all voted against it. What was that about? And they let people know they were voting against it. And it was a much tamer label.
Also, the attorney general was lobbying against having that bill passed. She was saying it was unconstitutional even though we had a great constitutional scholar and a Harvard Law professor saying he would just send it all the way up to the Supreme Court if the state of Maine didn’t want to. He contested there was no way it was unconstitutional.
But to see the leadership –and that’s my own party, I’m a Democrat—turn against it after they’ve voted far in a prior year and to have the attorney general working against it really shows you (as Ellen was saying) how deeply the problem goes—how high it goes, how low it goes, how deeply it goes for people who are anxious about the power of this industries.
And in fact, the first year I brought it, I’ve been working with the AG’s office all the way through with it. The assistant AG who’s a constitutional scholar, we had to work with it, it had to be as careful as we could make it, he had told me that the industry had come to him the very first time around. They said it subtly, but he said it was very clear, that they would sue the state of Maine.
Well, we’re a small state economically, and that’s a very threatening kind of thing to say. But like in San Francisco…
DEBRA: I’d hate to interrupt you, but we’re getting near the end of the show. We only have a few minutes left. I want to make sure that you tell us what people can do to be safer with this technology.
ANDREA BOLAND: Well, as Ellen was starting to say, basically, keep it away from your head and body. Use it on speaker phone or a wired headset. Children, really, shouldn’t be using them at all because they’re so much more vulnerable.
And really, that’s it in a nutshell I would say. Texting is better than having it up to your head, but your hand is still exposed.
DEBRA: And also, you’re still exposed to it even when you’re not using it, just having it in your pocket or, as you said earlier, in your bra or in your purse.
ELLEN MARKS: Yeah, you’re right. If you have to have it on your body, keep it in airplane mode, turn it off. Something people have to realize, I do not advocate against this technology. However, we do have to—and some of the manuals even say this—limit our use. User a corded landline when you can’t. Don’t stream videos. I mean, we’re also talking about cell tower radiation which is harming people and the environment.
We need to be responsible starting with ourselves, with our families at home and in school. Wi-Fi’s in schools is starting to be a huge problem.
So turn them off when you can.
ANDREA BOLAND: And you need to hold your representatives responsible. You’ll need to call them. You tell them.
ELLEN MARKS: Absolutely!
DEBRA: Yes. I’m sure both of you remember when we were all children. There was no such thing as Wi-Fi or cellphones or anything like that, and we all got along just fine.
ELLEN MARKS: You’re right. I hate to say it though, this technology is not going to go away.
DEBRA: Well, I know it’s not going to go away. You really can’t escape it because…
ELLEN MARKS: We need to make it […]
DEBRA: …all the cellphone towers and all those things, even if you’re not carrying a cellphone—I mean, I can pick up my neighbor’s Wi-Fi on my computer and I don’t even have Wi-Fi in my house.
ELLEN MARKS: Right, right, right. It’s a very sad state of affairs that we let this get out of control. But right now…
ANDREA BOLAND: But we can push back on it. I mean, it’s still early on in the industry. It probably can be a whole lot safer than it is.
ELLEN MARKS: Well, I’ve heard that they do have patents on safer equipment.
DEBRA: Okay. I have to interrupt you now as much as I don’t want to. I have to interrupt you now because the music is going to come on and it’s going to cut you off.
ELLEN MARKS: We can talk for hours.
DEBRA: I need to say “thank you so much.”
ELLEN MARKS: Oh, my gosh! Thank you. And Andrea, thank you. And by the way, Andrea is running for state senate.
DEBRA: Yehey! Good. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well!
Carbon Blankets
Question from Chris
Do carbon blankets work to protect against off-gassing? We need to protect against a 3 yr old latex mattress with a memory foam topper? My wife is chemically sensitive and is afraid to try it. Does anyone have any experience with the use of carbon blankets? Any other remedies for off-gassing of mattresses? Thank you!
Sincerely,
Chris
Debra’s Answer
Carbon blankets will absorbs offgassing chemicals from something like a mattress or a car seat.
I don’t have any experience with using one for that purpose, but I’ve been told they work.
My best recommendation to you is to get a toxic free mattress as soon as possible. The rule of thumb for best results is to eliminate toxics at the source whenever possible, rather than try to block them.
You can get carbon blankets at Nirvana Safe Haven
Toxic-free Eybrow Color
Question from Susaninnyc
Thank you Debra, and hello everyone!
My question is this: My very dark eyebrows are starting to go gray. I use light mountain color the gray henna to color my hair, but was wondering if anyone else has a better idea for eyebrows. I have pretty severe MCS.
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
I have no experience with this. Readers?
Grand Legacy Mattresses
Question from Anne Castile
I have been a follower for the last 10 years.
I have a question regarding the Grand Legacy Mattresses. They are advertising a “green ” component. I’m curious if these are really green. They say they are formaldehyde free.. They use soybean and natural latex as part of the matttress.
Made in Cleveland Ohio and carried at the Levin stores.
I’m in the market for a new mattress and suffer from MCS.
Thanks for any info you can send me.
Debra’s Answer
I took a look at the product description at www.levinmattress.com/index.php/grand-legacy/
There are plenty of toxic chemicals in this mattress.
In addition to the gel memory foam and high density foam, the “BioFlex™ foam…
They says “BioFlex™ eliminates the use of harmful chemicals and is extracted from soybeans grown in Ohio.”
I’m sorry, but this just isn’t true. The soybeans may be grown in Ohio, but there is no soy foam in the world that “eliminates the use of harmful chemicals.” Soy foam is, at best, 30 percent soy, the remaining 70 percent is the same polyurethane foam used to make toxic mattresses.
There are many online sources of natural beds at Debra’s List: Textiles: Beds
Rediscovering the Natural World
Today my guest is Marcie Cuff, author of This Book Was a Tree: Ideas, Adventures, and Inspirations for Rediscovering the Natural World. Because this show is about toxics and alternatives to toxics, part of my mission is to encourage everyone to become more aware of the natural world, which supports all life. For decades I have looked to nature for life-enhancing ways to live, as a toxic-free alternative to industrialism. Marcie doesn’t wear a bonnet, carry a hatchet, eat hard tack or forage for wild herbs, fruits and nuts each morning. She prefers, instead, to wear spandex and a superhero cape and drink tea while planning clandestine small-scale seedbomb planting attacks in neglected neighborhood vacant lots. Between seedbombing excursions, she and her family live atop 0.013 acres of paradise just north of Manhattan. When she isn’t writing, digging in the dirt, or shop vac-ing the basement after a heavy rain, she is raising two small wild girls and a menagerie of pets with her clever and mesmeric husband. On any given day, Marcie’s small house is teeming with a maelstrom of rowdy kids, powerful ukulele ballads, disorganized experiments in various stages, and a potpourri of fort-building, dress-up bins and early-risers. 
Before earning her M.A. in Secondary Science teaching and writing THIS BOOK WAS A TREE, Marcie had plunged into a whirlpool of prerequisite employment—everything from organic lettuce farmer, to tropical rainforest field technician, to stuffed animal designer, to Alaskan tent-dwelling goose researcher. Her award-winning blog MOSSY is devoted to families who share a love of slowing down, simplifying, getting dirty, and finding hands-on connections to art and nature. www.marciecuff.com | www.mossymossy.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Rediscovering the Natural World
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Marcie Cuff
Date of Broadcast:April 23, 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. And usually we talk about things like less toxic products that you can buy, how to make things yourself, what toxic chemicals, where you find them and what they do to your health.
But today, we’re going to take a little different spin on it. Yesterday was Earth Day. Yesterday, we did a fabulous show about Rachel Carson who is the author of Silent Spring, which was I think the first environmental book that was really written for the general public. And it was also the first book to talk about toxic chemicals and how they affect the environment and how they affect our health.
And during the interview, one of the things that one of my guests said because I had two guests yesterday, one of the things one of the guests said was that Rachel Carson’s view was that we really needed to get back to living in harmony with nature and that that was the solution to the problem of toxics.
I was very happy to hear that because I figured that out a long time ago when I’ve been writing about that a lot over on the side because most people would like to know how to clean our house without toxic chemicals or something like that. But for me, the real solution is to regain our awareness that we do live in the natural world though natural world is out there, providing all the resources that flow through our industrial system and that to us as consumer products.
But we’re so busy looking at consumer products that we don’t trace it back through the industrial system all the way back to the earth. If we don’t take care of our environment, we don’t have natural resources to make those consumer products. And the first step to taking care of the environment as far as I can tell is just to be aware that it’s there. And this is what we’re talking about today.
My guest is Marcie Cuff. She’s the author of a wonderful book called This Book Was a Tree: Ideas, Adventures and Inspirations for Rediscovering the Natural World. Hi, Marcie.
MARCIE CUFF: Hi. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
MARCIE CUFF: Good.
DEBRA: I’m so happy to have you on today because this is one of my favorite subjects. It was the way that—I think that everybody, as you say, is just connected from nature. And that those of us who are now reconnected had an aha moment.
And for me, it was that I just kept looking for something that was less toxic and less toxic and less toxic. And I finally looked around and said, “Wait a minute. Nature is not toxic.” And I started and I moved from the city. I was living in San Francisco in the city. I moved out into a forest and actually lived in a forest in a very rural area for two years. And that really changed my viewpoint about everything.
So tell us. I know you’re a science teacher. How did you become interested in the natural world?
MARCIE CUFF: I spent a lot of time when I was a kid in the woods. And when I got a little older, I worked as a field assistant for many years for professors when I was in college.
Actually before I got to college, I took a course called School for Field Studies and that got me some background. And then when I got into college, I was hired as a field assistant during the summers to collect data for professors.
So I spent a lot of time with different jobs in the woods and in Jamaica, studying fish and in Virginia, studying birds. And I spent a lot of time on trails.
And then I went into a graduate school in Alaska. So I spent a couple of years there. In graduate school, I lived in a cabin for a few years. It’s very isolated and I did my field work in a very isolated area, Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. And then I came back to the East Coast and I taught high school and middle school biology and environmental science.
And then when I had my two girls, then I stopped teaching and I got a grant in running their grade school garden. So I [inaudible 00:04:45] program. I coordinated with the teachers and developed a curriculum based on the New York State standards.
So I did that for several years and then I started to blog along the way. I started a blog called Mossy. The blog was originally just documenting projects that I worked on with my kids. So I would document different hands on nature projects like [inaudible 00:05:14] and things we were doing outside.
And so I got a little bit of a following, mostly homeschool parents and Montessori schools. And then I was approached to write a book. So I started writing a book proposal and that’s where the book came along.
DEBRA: It’s a wonderful book. And one of the things that attracted me to it and why I wanted to invite you to be on the show is I love the title, This Book Was a Tree.
I remember a time and this was way back in 1987 when I first became aware of nature, but I remember a day where I suddenly went, “Oh, my desk came from a tree.” I was looking at the [inaudible 00:05:57]. “Wait a minute, this was a tree.”
And then I looked and I had a coffee mug on my desk and I said, “Wait a minute, that’s clay out of the earth.” And I just was looking all over my desk. This pencil is wood. It just came from a tree. And I just started looking at everything and instead of seeing it as a consumer product, I saw it as a natural resource.
And I saw that there were all these living things that had been turned into consumer products and I think it was a revelation for me to see that because I, like most consumers prior to this, would just see something—I mean I thought soup came out of cans and things like that.
My ex-husband, now he’s a very intelligent man and does a lot of things. And when I met him, he didn’t know where spaghetti came from. And so to talk about disconnect, we really don’t even know where the things that we’re using every day actually come from.
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah, I think that we have become progressively isolated from what’s outside. And so a lot of the time, we spend so much time in front of a screen and we forget where things come from.
It is amazing. I worked with kids at the grade school garden and before the kids in the city. A lot of times, I’ll have kids in the garden and they have never ever held a worm before.
I used to live in the city, but now I live outside the city, New York City. We don’t live—I mean easily we could be outside. It’s not like we have a city around us all the time. We could be outside [inaudible 00:07:43] in the dirt. And a lot of these kids have actually never really gotten their hands dirty.
I work with kids a lot, but I think the book that I wrote is actually—I mean kids can read it, but it’s more of a grownup book. It’s a book on how to get yourself and your family outside and set a good example and become aware of change that’s happening around us.
There are things that are going on that we might not even realize. We drive around and honestly there are a lot of things that I see. I guess my eyes may be trained a little differently because of my background in the sciences and environmental science. I see invasive plants and invasive species that people might not recognize if they’re not tuned into it.
So I think it’s important for us to spend time out there and get become aware of things that are around us.
DEBRA: I completely agree. We need to go to break soon, but I want to just mention that I actually have two copies of your book and so we’re going to give one away today. And so I just like to invite my listeners. If you are interested in getting your free copy of Marcie’s book, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page and there is a contact form.
If you just send me an email and just say that you’re interested in getting the book, I will choose one person at random at the end of the show and you’ll get to have a free book.
We actually do need to go to break in about 10 seconds. Nine, eight, seven. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Marcie Cuff. She’s the author of This Book Was a Tree. And when we come back, we’re going to learn a lot more about how you and your family can go out into nature and learn something about the natural world. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Marcie Cuff. She’s the author of This Book Was a Tree: Ideas, Adventures and Inspirations for Rediscovering the Natural World.
She has a website at MarcieCuff.com. You can learn more about the book. But she also has a blog. It’s called Mossy, but the URL is MossyMossy.com. I went to Mossy.com. It was a car dealer. So you go to MossyMossy.com.
So I wanted to tell you that you were talking about seeing the world with different eyes. And I had that experience too many years ago. I had this big breakthrough about discovering the natural world and immediately after that, I met my husband to be who was very, very nature-oriented.
And I remember one day, we were walking down the street in San Francisco, in downtown San Francisco, in the financial district, which is like New York. It’s skyscrapers. And you can’t even see the sky and it’s just all concrete.
And he said, “Oh, look at that bird nest.” This is when I was just getting to know him. He says, “Look at that bird nest.” And I couldn’t see a bird nest. And he pointed to it and it was way up on the third or fourth floor on a skyscraper on a ledge. There was a bird nest and there was a bird in it.
And what I realized out of that was that I was walking down the street and all of my attention was I’m looking in the store windows. And all of his attention was he was looking at nature. I was looking at industrial consumerism.
And when he said that, when he showed me the bird nest, I suddenly realized that the wind was blowing on my face and I could actually [inaudible 00:11:46] that it was blowing on my face. I could perceive the temperature that was going on. I noticed that there were flowers and flower boxes and trees planted in boxes.
And suddenly, I could see nature, but a minute before, I couldn’t see it. But my awareness shifted and I think that that’s a big thing that needs to happen in our culture.
There’s nature all around us. We’re part of nature. I mean me, I consider myself as a human species to be as much part of nature as a tree. It’s not something separate from me. But we are separated from the natural world in our culture today and that’s the point of this book. It’s such a great book.
I’d like to just start at the beginning. You have chapter one. It’s about creating. So can you tell us about that?
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah. I guess the importance of chapter one I think is to realize that all of us have a creative side, even grownups. So if you’ve forgotten how to be creative, it’s totally important to slow yourself down and get in touch with that part of yourself.
DEBRA: Yes.
MARCIE CUFF: Each chapter introduces a main project and so chapter one, the main project in chapter one is to take a hard cover, old book that really is unloved and will not be ever used and then to remove the pages and then put your own journal pages in and make it into a nature [inaudible 00:13:29].
So it’s a neat project because you’re taking that part of you and you’re putting it inside a book and you can add different things if you step outside. So it’s a nice creative project to work on.
DEBRA: I love that you’re encouraging people to be creative because that’s another thing. I mean I consider creativity to be part of our natural ability as human beings. And yet, what we do is turn our creativity over to multinational corporations and have them create everything for us and then we go buy it.
And so I think creativity is a really, really important thing to be bringing back. So once they make their journal, then what kind of things do you suggest? What kind of projects do you have them do so that they put something in the journal about their experience?
MARCIE CUFF: Okay. So there are different things that you can do in a journal. You can collect things. You can go outside and make collections. You can treat it as if you’re [inaudible 00:14:36] in a journal. You can make a list of different uses for objects or keep track of things that you see outside. Or you can treat it like a regular journal, but you can also add.
What I’ve done with a lot of my journals is I’ve added envelops and different collection areas for different things. So you can treat more like a collection journal. I have two girls and they’re very active outside kids. So we have a lot of different types of journals. So they all have different types of uses.
DEBRA: One of the things that I’ve enjoyed doing is that I walk around in my neighborhood a lot. And to me, at first I thought this is boring. I don’t want to just walk the same path every day. And so I started taking different tracks.
But then I started noticing that as I would walk past the same spot day after day that it was different that a plant suddenly would burst into bloom or the color of the leaves would change or things like that. I was doing it for exercise, but it turned into a nature walk. And I would carry my cellphone with me and I would just take photos of different things that I thought were particularly distinct at that time.
And that brought me a lot more aware, particularly the plants or the birds or if I would see an insect or something like that. It just made me more aware while I was getting my exercise. And that’s something that could go in a journal too.
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah. There’s another project that has to do with that actually that I have in the book, which is if you collect a stack of paper board and cut them to all uniform sizes, then you can make what we call a [contextual?] calendar and you can put it in an old wooden box. And so you can keep track.
You put a date stamp on each little cardboard piece. And so you stack them one behind the other in a cardboard. Mine is in a wooden box, but you could use any kind boxes. Stack them up, one behind the other.
And then each piece has a different date stamp on it. And so you can reuse this every year. So every day, if something happens outside or around you, you can keep track of when the raspberries start to ripen or when you see the first robin here or when does the big snow storm happen. Every year, things are different and it’s really important to keep track of all these things that are happening.
DEBRA: I have done that and it’s a very interesting thing to do. Here, where I live, in the spring, one of the indicators of spring is the jacaranda trees. And they are just definitely purple and you can’t miss them. And so I was keeping track of what day the jacaranda trees burst into bloom.
We have to have another break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m talking with Marcie Cuff, author of This Book Was a Tree. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Marcie Cuff, author of This Book Was a Tree.
As I mentioned before, I have an extra copy here and I’m going to give it away to one of my listeners. So if you’d like to get a copy of the book for free, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page to the contact form and send me an email and tell me you’d like your book. And at the end of the hour, after the show is over, I’ll pick somebody at random.
Marcie, one of the chapters I was really interested in, in your book, is “Spend time wisely.” And you have some projects here about time. That was one of the first things that when I started looking at nature, I started realizing that nature operates on a different time.
And you have a project here about building a sundial. I happened to live in a house that is oriented exactly north, south, east, west. And where I’m sitting right now is exactly east. And so I see the sun coming up in the morning and it comes up at different places across my window. And I have a shade and I have to move the shade over as the sun comes up at different times of year in different places.
So I was very happy to see that you had a chapter on time. So tell us about that.
MARCIE CUFF: Most of the sundials that you see for purchasing at nature centers and online, most of them aren’t really set to your longitude. So this project in the chapter, I make it easy.
So it’s a pretty simple sundial. So you use a template that I put on there and you determine your latitude coordinates and then you plug in your latitude and then you can make a sundial from that. And you make the sundial from a base that’s fairly simple. It’s just a sliced tree stump.
You just need a couple of things, the tree stump and a protractor and a ruler and pencil. And it’s a fairly easy project. Based on your latitude, it’s pretty easy to set up. Yes, so it’s pretty simple and you can just keep it in your garden or outside, wherever you want to put it.
DEBRA: Yeah. I watched my sundial. I got a sundial and I watch it and I recognize that we think of hours as being 60 minutes, but if you actually watch them on a sundial, then some hours are 60 and some are 45 and some are 62 and that 60 minutes in an hour is just an average of the length of time of an hour.
But it’s interesting to actually see the difference and the variations in the natural world rather than have your time perception be the way it’s been all standardized. There’s a reason for standardized time. Go ahead.
MARCIE CUFF: That’s right. There’s something called the equation of time. You can correct your sundial in minutes. To be honest, the sundial is probably more accurate than any clock that we have if we look at nature.
There’s a reason, you’re right, that we have those really fancy, cutting-edge clocks. But a sundial is very accurate. You can set it to read what you want to if you use the equation of time. There’s a graph that I put in the book that you can reset your sundial so that it reads what your clocks read.
But you’re right, it’s really interesting to look at it and see that there are differences.
DEBRA: I’m laughing, I’m sorry. I have to laugh at what you just said that you can reset your sundial to read what your clock says.
MARCIE CUFF: I know it’s funny.
DEBRA: I mean to say this, but I have to tell you something even funnier. The whole point is to reorient ourselves to the natural world. And so for me, I just noted the difference between my sundial and my clock and I noticed that my clock was standardized and my sundial is different.
But the thing I really was laughing about was that the first thing that I became aware of about the natural time was the moon cycle, from the dark moon to the full moon back to the dark moon and when was that. And I thought, “Oh, how am I going to find out? Let’s see. I’ll go buy a book.”
MARCIE CUFF: That’s so funny.
DEBRA: And I did. I went and bought an almanac and I bought a tide guide so that I could find out when is the…
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah, instead of just going outside.
DEBRA: Instead of just going outside and looking in the sky.
MARCIE CUFF: Right.
DEBRA: So I’ve come a long way. I’ve come a long way. But the moon is not that easy because sometimes in the phase, it’s there in the night and other times, it’s there in the day. And you have to understand what that phase is. So there are things to learn about nature. It’s so fascinating.
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah. It’s actually really neat. If you use your sundial, if you make a sundial and then you sit there for 10 minutes every day and record observations about what’s going on around you, it’s nice to train yourself to just sit in one place and just record, just watch time pass.
People so rarely do that these days. We’re moving so fast and we’re trained to have tons of things on our plates. And just sitting there outside for 10 minutes and without interpreting things or comparing things or just looking at things, [inaudible 00:24:03] at the world, it’s important to do that, just to take the time and actually see what’s going on around you.
DEBRA: And you can watch time pass on the sundial because when you’re looking at a clock, what you’re looking at is the hands moving and when you look at the sundial, what you’re looking at is the earth moving.
MARCIE CUFF: I mean if you don’t want to make a sundial, you can actually do it in different ways too.
DEBRA: Yeah. Tell us another one.
MARCIE CUFF: You can watch shadows moving. You can make your own. Sundials have been made of different things for just over centuries. I mean the earliest ones were just tall, tall statues that would set a shadow on the ground. So that is considered a sundial. You can watch time pass in different ways. You don’t have to be as accurate as a sundial.
DEBRA: Right. But it’s a fun thing to do. It is a fun thing to do. I love sundials. So what is your favorite project?
MARCIE CUFF: Oh, it depends on who I’m with. I just last week worked with some nursery school teachers and we did a project as a workshop for them that is really easy for smaller kids. That is in my book and it’s called seed bombs and that’s a fun project.
DEBRA: I love sea bombs. Yeah, tell about sea bombs.
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah, it’s very fun. It’s super easy and really fun with smaller kids or grownups. It’s just a mixture of soil and clay and water and local wild flower seeds.
Honestly, it’s not a really specific mixture. You just wing it. But it’s very simple. And you basically make little small [meatballs?] and then you dry them and eventually toss them into places where they’ll grow.
DEBRA: Isn’t that fun? I love that. So we need to take another break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Marcie Cuff, author of This Book Was a Tree.
If you’d like a free copy, please go to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And not everybody is going to get a free copy. I’ll choose somebody at the end of the hour. So just go send me an email with the contact form and you might be the winner. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Marcie Cuff, author of This Book Was a Tree: Ideas, Adventures and Inspirations for Rediscovering the Natural World . And there certainly are ideas, adventures and inspirations.
This book looks like so much fun that I feel like that I would just like, as an adult—and I don’t even have any kids to take on this adventure with me. But it is just something that you could just start at the beginning and go outside and you could gather some kids, you could gather some friends. You could invite people to a workshop and everyone can have a book and you can do it together.
It really is a very good outline of ways to get your attention back on the natural world and see that it’s there. And I think that there are so many people who don’t even see it. And how can we take care of something that we don’t know?
Marcie, how do you think we got so far off track? Even 100 years ago, people were very oriented to nature and very oriented to growing their own food and things like that. It was a very hands-on experience of making the stuff of life out of nature that was right around you. And now, we don’t do that at all.
MARCIE CUFF: Honestly, I feel like maybe it started with supermarkets. We used to raise all of the things that we ate in our backyard.
DEBRA: Right, we did.
MARCIE CUFF: Or we traded with our neighbors. And then supermarkets were more prevalent.
So I think the people started to forget where their food came from first. I mean it’s certainly more simple. And then we started working more, away from the land. So I think that’s probably, in my opinion, where it all started.
DEBRA: I think about it. As I mentioned before, the people think that if you’re going to have soup that you just opened a can.
But I’m really encouraging people. I have a food blog on my site and I’m really encouraging people to learn how to cook because even if you didn’t eat organic or didn’t eat local, just the act of moving away from processed foods and just to fresh foods is a huge step.
When I moved here to Florida, I come from California, from the San Francisco Bay area. When I moved here to Florida, I was astonished at how many women I was meeting did not know how to cook. Their food was coming from takeout and packages and they really didn’t know how to slice a tomato. They really didn’t.
And people started asking me to give cooking lessons. And I thought this is just a skill we need to bring back because it’s a very different experience to go out in your backyard and pick warm tomatoes off the vine and make them into something delicious.
And even if you don’t have that tomato plant in your backyard, to go to a farmers’ market or even buy fresh tomatoes at a natural food store that are organic, it’s a completely different experience than eating a packaged food. And I know that I feel a lot more connected to nature just having my hands on the food than appreciating those plants and animals for giving the nutrition.
MARCIE CUFF: Having a connection with what you eat is really important. I think that most of us eat just out of habit without really thinking about what we’re putting into our bodies. So I think that considering what you eat and you drink or the origins of the food [inaudible 00:30:28] with package or keeping track what you put into your body is really important.
Yeah. I think that it’s also interesting if you just keep track just for one day the ingredients of products that you eat, just thinking about every single thing that you put into your body and just keeping track of what exactly is going into you.
DEBRA: And where is it coming from?
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah. Where is it coming from? Yeah. And eating seasonally is really important. I think that once we have supermarkets, we forget that.
DEBRA: We do forget that.
MARCIE CUFF: A lot of the products that we find in our supermarket don’t come locally. They come from really far away.
And so produce has a season. Things that we buy, they really do have seasons. You have to be paying attention to the season of the products.
DEBRA: I, as a child—my birthday is in June. And so I always had Strawberry Shortcake for my birthday cake because certainly there were strawberries. And we would go looking for the first strawberries as a family. We live in the San Francisco Bay area, so down the coast in Monterey, they would grow strawberries and we would go down to Monterey so we could get the first strawberries because we love strawberries so much and that was a family trip.
So I had a real sense of the seasons growing up with food because at that time, it was before they started shipping things in from all over like they do now. And you couldn’t get the watermelon or a strawberry or any of those red peppers or anything, unless it was summertime.
And I remember when we lived in California, my ex-husband loved bananas and I would say, “No, no, you can’t eat them because they don’t grow here.” I was really trying to really eat only what grew in my bioregion.
And so then we moved to Florida and there are bananas trees in everybody’s backyard, including mine. And I said, “Okay, eat all the bananas you want.”
MARCIE CUFF: We have a very small backyard, but we do have a community garden that we are really actively involved in. And even if you don’t have that, you can grow sprouts in your kitchen very easily.
It’s basically like harvesting. It’s like a little garden and that’s something that you can grow all year-round. That doesn’t have a season.
You can grow sprouts that are really healthy for you and they are super easy, just in a regular mason jar. That’s a simple project that I have in the book too. That’s very easy to do and you don’t need to have a green thumb.
DEBRA: I love growing sprouts. It’s so fascinating to me to watch something grow from a seed. And in a sprout jar, you can see that happening. It’s not like the seed is underground where you can’t see it.
And also for a while, we had chickens that were laying eggs in our backyard until the police came and took them away because they are illegal where I live. But when I got that first egg from the chicken, I just went into the chicken house and there it was, just sitting there. I went, “Oh my god, an egg.” And I knew that I had fed the chicken and they had eaten grass, just right my organic grass in my backyard and things like that.
I knew what had gone into that egg and it was the product of my local backyard and my kitchen scraps and stuff. And then I ate that egg and there was this real sense of knowing where my food was from and that I have participated in that. Connecting with nature just changes your perspective a lot.
MARCIE CUFF: Yeah. I feel like just reconnecting with the natural world and slowing down and looking at our relationship with what’s outside, what we contributed to it is really important.
DEBRA: We only have just a few minutes left. So is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?
MARCIE CUFF: Oh, the only thing I can think of is advice for people just to get outside and move away from your comfort zone and get away from a screen and just go outside and pay attention to what’s going on around you.
DEBRA: Excellent advice. Excellent, excellent. And you will see a change. You will notice the world in a different way.
Thank you so much, Marcie for being on the show. Thank you for writing this book. I certainly am going to have fun with it and I help a lot of my listeners do it as well. Thanks for being with me today.
MARCIE CUFF: Thank you so much.
DEBRA : You’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. The first thing that you should do is to scroll down the page and send me an email that you’d like to be one of the people in the drawing for a free copy of Marcie’s book.
But also there are other things on the page. You can go to the top of the page and there are other parts of my website. If you click on Shop, it will take you to Debra’s List where you’ll find over 500 different websites that sell toxic-free products.
Many of them are very connected to nature and how they’re made with organic things and just right close to nature. Many of the products are that way. Many are hand-made. Many are things that you can find in local stores.
And then if you click on Q&A, you can ask a question. You can ask a question and I will answer it and my readers will answer it and they’re very, very knowledgeable. There are probably 10 years worth of questions on there. There are thousands of questions and thousands of answers.
And then if you click on Body Detox, that’s my blog where all we talk about on that blog is how to remove toxic chemicals from your body because everybody does have toxic chemicals in their body. And everybody needs to remove them in order to have good health. There have been many studies where they test the blood of people, of newborn babies that have toxic chemicals in their bodies. So this is a very important subject.
If you click on Food, you’ll get to my food blog where we talk about how to cook healthy things. And the last one is Nature. And that’s where I talk about how we can reconnect with nature.
You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Natural Remedy for Morning Sickness
Question from Kathleen
Hi Debra. I read your first book when it came out. That means I am probably older than you. However, my oldest daughter is pregnant. I wondered if you were aware of any non-toxic natural remedies for morning sickness that actually work.
Nothing worked very well for me back in 1980. I took the Bendictin and it helped a little. I know it was safe.
When I was about 4 months pregnant, we had our house weatherized. Urea formaldehyde foam blown in, and storm windows and doors, and a heat pump. Because the house was already so tight, not much foam came into the house.
However, enough got in that within 18 months, I had health issues that have never gone away. My daughter shares the chemical sensitivities and has some allergies as well.
Sincerely,
Kathleen
Debra’s Answer
I’ve never had morning sickness (no children) but I know that ginger calms nausea. An old doctor told me that a long time ago.
People drink ginger ale for nausea, but it’s not the fizz that calms the stomach, it’s the ginger. So you could make ginger tea and drink it hot or cold, or even mix it with fizzy water to make ginger ale.
Readers, what worked for you?
New Chair Outgassing
Question from Cindy
I have MCS and have been trying to create a better home environment. I also have pain issues and fibromyalgia, so I replaced my worn out comfy chair with a new one. Of course, it bothers me, even after letting it air out on porch for 3 weeks. I have zeolite rocks in bags but not sure how they could help with this. Any input? Love your website and have enjoyed a couple of your earlier books.
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
I’m afraid it’s going to continue to outgas for quite a while. In addition to polyurethane foam, synthetic fabrics, and formaldehyde fabric protectors, there are also toxic chemical fire retardants required by law.
If you need to keep this chair, you might try covering it with a carbon blanket.
