Art | Resources
A List of Scented Stores I Won’t Be Going To
Question from Dave
Hi Debra:
I know you’ll love this one:
Los Angeles Times: For branding, many places adopt signature scents
“Marketing using scent is catching on among retailers, sports stadiums, banks and others that seek to distinguish themselves via the influential sense of smell.” a list of stores I won’t be going to.
best wishes
Dave
Debra’s Answer
Thanks for the warning!
HEALTH ADVOCATES AFFIX WARNING LABELS TO PHONES IN SAN FRANCISCO VERIZON STORE
Direct Action in Response to Heavy Handed Wireless Industry Crackdown on Democracy- Attacking City Ordinances and Cell Phone Labeling Efforts in Maine, Hawaii, and California
SAN FRANCISCO – Health advocates from the California Brain Tumor Association and Stop Smart Meters! have affixed health warning labels on cell phones for sale in Verizon’s Market St. store in San Francisco in defiance of the wireless industry’s legal bullying of cell phone safety ordinances across the nation. Store management removed the labels but did not summon police, possibly out of concern that potential arrests may highlight a health risk the industry would rather keep quiet. Further embarrassing the company, one of its employees stuck one of the labels to his own phone in an apparent act of defiance against his employer’s suppression of health information regarding its products.
In 2011, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a “right to know” law requiring cell phone retailers in the city to issue at the point of sale a fact sheet to each consumer including the World Health Organization classification and the manufacturer’s own language hidden in the phone or manual instructing phone users to keep phones 5/8 inch away from the body at all times when turned on. The Wireless Association (CTIA) sued the city (saying such “forced speech” represented a breach of the company’s First Amendment rights) and withdrew its annual conferences from San Francisco like whiney cry-babies. According to then Mayor Newsom, “their behavior makes me even more concerned as to what they are hiding.” The City did not lose the lawsuit but under the leadership of tech friendly Mayor Lee the Board of Supervisors was coerced into repealing the law, leaving customers in the dark about the health effects of routine cell phone radiation exposure.
Last month the state of Maine passed a cell phone labeling law. The next day the CTIA swarmed the halls of the Augusta Capitol. When the bill went back for the typical rubber stamping, many legislators changed their votes and the bill that had passed was killed. In Hawaii recently State Senator and Dr. Josh Green got a cell phone labeling bill passed through the state Health Committee. It then went to Sen. Roz Baker of Maui who refused hearing the bill and killed it. She also refused hearing the GMO labeling bill the same week. California State Senator Mark Leno has also tried to enact a cell phone labeling bill in California and has been shut down by industry contributions to state Senators. Many cities and states have attempted legislation and all received threatening letters of litigation from the CTIA.
This radiation has been correlated not only with brain tumors but with breast cancer, leukemia, salivary gland tumors, damage to fetuses, damage to sperm, an increase in autism and electro-hypersensitivity. In 2013 the American Academy of Pediatrics stated “Current FCC standards do not account for the unique vulnerability and use patterns specific to pregnant women and children. It is essential that any new standards for cell phones and other wireless devices be based on protecting the youngest and most vulnerable population to ensure they are safeguarded throughout their lifetimes.” The WHO classification included all wireless radiation including that emitted by smart meters. At least 15 other nations have taken action concerning the negative health implications of wireless radiation while the U.S. does nothing to protect Americans.
In February the U.S. Department of Interior in a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, cited studies showing detrimental effects from cell tower radiation on protected migratory birds and stated“ the electromagnetic radiation standards used by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continue to be based on thermal heating, a criterion now nearly 30 years out of date and inapplicable today”. Those same guidelines have been correlated with deleterious health effects in humans.
Ellen Marks, whose husband was diagnosed with a cell phone related brain tumor in 2008 said,
“Cell phones were never pre-market tested for safety. My husband and thousands of others have developed cancer because of industry greed. FCC Chair Wheeler buried the truth about the risks of cell phones and now families are burying the dead. I am outraged that honest legislators throughout the U.S. are being shut down by the majority who put campaign contributions ahead of the health and safety of their constituents concerning a radiation emitting device used daily, even by children. Getting the hidden warnings, which tell people to limit their use and carry them away from their body, to the consumer at the point of sale should not be this difficult! This madness must stop.” Marks has testified to Congress and worked on a federal cell phone Right to Know law and laws in many cities and states which, even when successful, were never enacted.
According to Josh Hart, Director of the grassroots group Stop Smart Meters!:
“Our labeling action is on behalf of the people of the City of San Francisco and those everywhere being harmed by wireless radiation. We will not sit idly by while the wireless industry takes advantage of a population that remains largely unaware of these deadly serious health risks. Placing warning labels on wireless devices is a reasonable and long overdue public health measure delayed by the collusion between government and industry. The cell phone and ‘smart’ grid industries are covering up the health risks from their products and people lack the information necessary to determine safe exposure levels for themselves and their families. Families are not only being evicted by tech-related gentrification, they are increasingly being subjected to serious health risks, even toxically evicted by the tech industry’s microwave radiation. The situation is unacceptable and intolerable, and these actions will continue until the industry ceases fighting reasonable, fact-based health warnings on their products.”
Media outlets are free to use footage of this demonstration with credit to StopSmartMeters.Org and the CA Brain Tumor Association. Do-it-yourself cell phone labels available at StopSmartMeters.Org
Joshua Hart MSc
Director, Stop Smart Meters!
http://stopsmartmeters.org
Stop Smart Meters! is grassroots-funded.
http://stopsmartmeters.org/donate
Sent from my wired computer
Honoring Rachel Carson–The First Author to Write About Toxics–For Earth Day
Silent Spring is a classsic environmental book, but it was also the first popular book to write about the toxic effects of pesticides to human health. Today I have two guests who have studied Carson’s life, to tell us more about her life and works, and how she contributed to our modern awareness of toxics.
Rachel Carson is one of my inspirations and heros, because she stood up for our rights to live in a toxic-free world when nobody else was talking about it. So today I want to honor her.
Linda Lear PhD is the author of the acclaimed biography of Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, and numerous articles on Carson. Lear’s biography of Carson was awarded the prize for the best book on women in science by the History of Science Society and has been translated into eight languages. www.rachelcarson.org
Patricia DeMarco PhD has been a Rachel Carson scholar since 2005, with service as the Executive Director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association and as the Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University. She writes and speaks extensively on the environmental ethic of Rachel Carson and her relevance to modern times. She is currently writing a book titled “Pathways to Our Sustainable Future.”
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Honoring Rachel Carson—the First Author to Write About Toxics—for Earth Day
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest:Linda Lear PhD & Patricia DeMarco PhD
Date of Broadcast: April 22, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.
Today is Earth Day, April 22, 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re going to celebrate Earth Day today by celebrating Rachel Carson.
Now, some of you may know her as the author of Silent Spring. You may recognize the name of that book and not know who wrote it. But Silent Spring is one of the most important environmental books ever written, and it also was the first book to talk about toxics, and how they affected the environment, and how they affect human health.
I want to just read you a little paragraph. This is from the Earth Day website at EarthDay.org. This is about the history of Earth Day.
It says, “At that time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans.”
This is April 22, 1970.
“Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.”
“Although mainstream America remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller, Silent Spring, in 1962.”
So the first Earth Day was eight years after Silent Spring was published in 1962.
“The book represented a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries. And up until that moment, more than any other person, Ms. Carson raised public awareness of concern for living organism, the environment and public health.”
Now, we’re going to celebrate her today and learn about her. I have two guests. The first is her biographer, Linda Lear, who wrote Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. And my second guest, which will be on the second half of the show is Patricia DeMarco who is the former head of the Rachel Carson Institute. And she, herself, is writing a book about toxic chemicals and the environment.
So let’s first talk to Rachel Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear.
Hi, Linda.
LINDA LEAR: Hi. Nice to be on your show. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you for being here.
Before we talk, I just would like to read the opening paragraph from Silent Spring.
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals.”
Remember, this is 1962.
“…from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their youth, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere.”
They already knew that. She knew this in 1962. And everyone in the world who read this book knew this.
“They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth.”
“Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles and domestic and wild animals, so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination.”
“They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds and in man himself for these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings regardless of age.”
“They occur in mother’s milk and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.”
And we now have had studies done which show that that actually is true. They are in the tissues of the unborn child.
So Linda, tell us about this woman who wrote this book.
LINDA LEAR: Well, Rachel Carson, I always want to say, knew that she had some special mission in her life. She was a quiet, retiring person. She never intended to be an alarmist or a revolutionary (although I think she became something of a revolutionary in her lifetime).
But Silent Spring was not a book she started out wanting to write. She was almost dragged into writing it because she was so alarmed by what she was discovering, and nobody else would take up battle.
We have to remember that in 1962, chemistry was god, and chemists in their white coats in laboratories were god-like. We just come from a time of war. Science was king. And science was mostly male.
Rachel Carson did not have a Ph.D. She was a writer. She had made herself famous through writing The Biography of the Sea, three books on the ocean.
And so she came to Silent Spring not as a scientific expert, but as someone who had observed, and read, and studied, and was alarmed by what she found out.
DEBRA: And also what was going on at that time was that, every night, people were watching television and seeing commercials about better living through chemistry. I remember that. I was seven years old when this book was published.
And that’s what we were watching on TV—that and the Jetsons. I remember the Jetsons cartoons about what it would be like in the future to have video phones like we have nowadays. I never thought that would ever happen, but here we are.
LINDA LEAR: Here we are.
DEBRA: Yes. Tell us something about her background.
LINDA LEAR: She came from Springdale, Pennsylvania, which is a little town on the Allegheny River.
When she was a young girl, it was a pristine town.
She and her family were not very well-to-do. They scrabbled. Her mother taught piano lessons. Her father worked in several jobs, mostly unrewarded. And thus, Rachel was always interested in writing and in nature. Her mother was her best teacher. She loved her birds and identified animals.
She graduated from high school in Parnassus. And at just about that point, in 1924/25, Springdale was beginning to be as polluted upstream as Pittsburgh was downstream. Springdale is about 10-miles from downtown Pittsburgh. And so Rachel witnessed the sullying, if you will, of her beautiful, little pristine village on the Allegheny River.
The water turned musty and began to smell. There were big chemical companies […] right in her neighborhood. There was foot and cement dust all over the little homes. And she witnessed this. She witnessed this deterioration of the environment.
So when she went to, what is now Chatham University, she went there with an already built-in sensitivity to the environment and to what was happening to the natural world around her. And she had already published stories in various children’s magazines. She wanted to be a writer.
She started out majoring in English. And at that time, there weren’t very many women scientists, and it was the beginning of the Great Depression. She graduated in 1929, and there were no jobs for women in science.
But Rachel discovered that what she saw through the microscope in her biology class meant more to her than what she was trying to do by writing fiction or even non-fiction.
So, she changed her major in college to Biology thanks to a wonderful mentor. And then she went onto Woods Hole and did graduate work at Johns Hopkins in Biology, and got an M.A. in Zoology, all the while interested in the natural
world.
DEBRA: Tell us about that moment. What led to the story behind why it was called Silent Spring?
LINDA LEAR: That’s a good question. The title of the book was under a lot of debate between her editor, her agent and herself. At one point, the title was Man Against Nature. But what Carson was finding out was that humans were actually the biggest culprit of environmental toxicity and environmental damage. It’s not a popular idea then, and it’s not a popular idea in some corners now.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we need to go to break, but we’ll continue just as soon as we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re celebrating Rachel Carson with her biographer, Linda Lear. And then we’ll have another guest talking about Rachel when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. It’s Earth Day, and we’re celebrating Rachel Carson. And we’re talking with her biographer, Linda Lear, who wrote Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.
So you were telling us how the title came to be.
LINDA LEAR: Well, the title came about because, finally, in her research, she had heard about so many towns and villages across the country where pesticides were being used, and suddenly, birds were dying, bees were dying, cattle were dying, domestic pets were sick and even children were sick.
And so they were talking about the fact that there was a possibility that spring might become silent. And that’s really the metaphor for how she got Silent Spring. But it’s not the fact that there was a specific town where all those things that happened. But in her research, all those towns had something that happened.
And can I just say that in 1962, the American public really did not understand that pesticides were poison. They really thought that pesticides and toxic chemicals couldn’t get through the barrier of the skin.
In the Uses of Pesticide report that the Congress, the President’s Special Committee on Pesticides, wrote just before Rachel’s book came out, the last line of that report says, “The American public does not understand that pesticides are poison.” That just really threw me when I first read that.
DEBRA: I think still people don’t understand that pesticides are poison or that toxic chemicals can get to your skin.
LINDA LEAR: I think that’s right. So Rachel went about trying to make people understand that the skin was not a barrier, that breathing was not a barrier, that putting your mask over your face is not sufficient, that chemicals are in your food, in your drinking water—what scientists and Rachel would call “persistent” in the water, in the soil.
Once DDT is in the soil, in the water, in your tissues, it doesn’t go away.
DEBRA: That’s right. It stays.
I know that you’re only available for the first half of the show. And I just want to mention before we get there in a couple of minutes—it goes by so fast, I know—how wonderful you are as a biographer. I actually haven’t read Rachel Carson, but the way that I found Linda Lear was by reading her book about Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.
This is a very thick book. It’s about two-inches thick. I started reading it, and I couldn’t put it down. And you sometimes think that biographies are going to be dry and difficult to get through, but this was not at all. I was fascinated. I couldn’t stop reading this book.
I do want to mention, Beatrix Potter, she has nothing to do with toxics. It wasn’t a problem at that time. Do you mind if I tell the story, Linda?
LINDA LEAR: No. Please, go ahead.
DEBRA: You told it so well. You inspired this.
LINDA LEAR: I appreciate the enthusiasm.
DEBRA: If I were doing a show in Beatrix Potter, I would call it, How Peter Rabbit Saved the Lake Country, because she so loved nature. She so loved nature. Linda and I talked earlier before the show about what a scientist she was.
And not only did she write Peter Rabbit and draw all those beautify pictures, but she also used her artistic talents to preserve information about local flora there in the English countryside.
But what a lot of people don’t know (and it’s in Linda’s book) is that in her later years, she took all this money that she made from writing Peter Rabbit books, and how they were so loved by so many children. And the money that she made writing those books, she used to buy the Lake Country of the English countryside, the whole thing.
She just bought farm after farm after farm because at that time, it was all being threatened. She said, “No.” And she bought it. And that’s why we have the Lake Country.
And every time I think about that, I want to cry because I’m so moved that one person like Rachel Carson, one woman, wrote a book and alerted the world about toxic chemicals. One woman just bought up the whole countryside because she had the money to do it, and she knew it needed to be preserved.
LINDA LEAR: And she cared.
DEBRA: And she cared. You’ve picked two incredible women to write about.
LINDA LEAR: Well, I think there are a lot of Beatrix and Rachel that are actually quite similar even though they lived almost half-a-century apart. Carson was born in 1907, and Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 and very Victorian.
But in their attitude towards nature, they were very, very similar. They both approached nature scientifically. Potter had animal pets as a child. And when they died, she and her little brother would boil their bones, and articulate their skeletons, so to be able to better draw them even more lifelike and to understand how the bodies work.
Carson went out and wrote about birds’ nests as a child and won prizes in literary magazines.
So they were both women whose great talent was in observation and imagination. Potter’s imagination is clearly more visible in her little book stories, but Carson’s imagination enabled her to write her first book about what it must be like to live under the sea. The book was called Under the Sea Wind. It’s a very special book. And it follows three animals who dwell over and under the sea, what their lives, she imagined, are like. And it’s not as she imagined it, but as she studied and observed.
So both of them have imagination. Both of them have this incredible ability to observe, and then to write about it.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve noticed that with both of them as well. They’re exceptional women, both of them.
Well, we just have less than a minute. That’s all the time we have. So I’ll just let you take that time, and make any final statement you’d like.
LINDA LEAR: I do want to tell your wonderful listeners that Rachel Carson should be a household name. I always have a problem because people want to call her Carlson or something, but it’s Carson. And she did not start the environmental movement, but she did indeed trigger it.
Her writing in Silent Spring woke people up. It made the American public understand that they had to ask questions to their government. They had to ask, “What are you putting in my food? What are you putting in my water? What is industry doing in the name of science that we don’t know about?” We have a right to know.
So all our right to know laws, our environmental protection, really comes from the broad consciousness that Rachel Carson started.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. We have so much to be grateful to her for. I’m sorry I started coughing right there while you were talking.
But thank you so much for being with us today. And thank you so much for everything that you’ve done to make the world know more about Rachel Carson.
LINDA LEAR: Thank you for having me. And Happy Earth Day, everybody.
DEBRA: Happy Earth Day. That’s Linda Lear, and you can learn more about her and her work at RachelCarson.org.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. It’s Earth Day today, and we’re celebrating the life and work of Rachel Carson who, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, laid the groundwork for environmental awareness that led to the first Earth Day. Her book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962, and then there was so much more awareness of the environment that we had Earth Day in 1970. And after that, then the Environmental Protection Agency was created.
All of this, even everything that happened today, started—I mean, she wasn’t the founder of Earth Day or the Environmental Movement. But she did what was in her observation and her heart, which was to speak out about something that she knew was wrong and that people needed to know about. And I admire her so much for that.
So our next guest is Patricia DeMarco, and she’s been a Rachel Carson scholar since 2005. She’s the former director of the Rachel Carson Institute at the Chatham University. And she writes and speaks extensively on the environmental ethic of Rachel Carson and her relevance to modern times.
Hi, Patricia.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Hello. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m very good. How are you?
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Thank you for having me with you today on this Earth Day.
DEBRA: It’s my pleasure.
So, tell us about what is Rachel Carson’s environmental ethic.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, she really is credited with a constellation of concepts collected as the “precautionary principle.” If you look at her work in detail, it really has four parts. One is that to live in harmony with nature rather than trying to subjugate nature to man’s will, we find ways to live in harmony with the natural world.
And second, that you preserve and learn from the natural systems of the world. She was a systems thinker, and her studies allowed her to really understand that interconnectedness and the real importance of the ecosystem services to our own survival. that we should minimize the effects of man-made chemicals on the natural systems of the world.
She really was concerned about not only the burden of all the synthetic materials that were in the biosphere, but she recognized the value of concentration of materials as they go up the food chain. Again, not well-recognized at the time that she began writing, but now, evident everywhere around us, the concentration of chemicals means you have to prevent, rather than try to remove.
And finally, she considered the implications of human actions on the global web of life. She understood that we are interconnected to all of the other living creatures, and dependent upon them, and all of us dependent upon the living earth as the provider of our life support—fresh air, clean water, fertile ground, and the biodiversity of species.
So her environmental ethic was one of precaution and one of living in harmony with nature.
DEBRA: It’s so interesting to me. I agree with everything that you just said. I hadn’t read Silent Spring when I came to those same conclusions myself.
It wasn’t anything I was ever taught in school. Nobody ever said it to me. It was just that I got to a point in the late 1970s, so I guess it was maybe 15 years after Silent Spring. I became very sick from exposure to toxic chemicals, and I said, “Wait a minute.”
No, very, very sick, like disabled sick.
And I said, “Wait a minute. There’s something wrong here.”
And I was just living my standard American lifestyle that everybody lives, but I got sick. And as I started investigating where were the toxic chemicals, and how could I live without them, if you keep asking that question deeper and deeper and deeper, you fall out the bottom of the industrial world and say, “Wait a minute. There’s nature here.”
You’re not looking at the industrial consumer system anymore. You see that there are ecosystems, and that if you just step outside of the industrial toxic world, that there there’s actually life living in harmony with itself, and we actually belong to it. And that we’re as part of nature as a tree is.
And yet, because we live in this industrial world, and we’ve been defined by our culture to be separate from that, we have lost our connection.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: That’s very true. Our connectivity to the natural world is the key feature of our modern technological time. And in fact, we’re more and more separate from the natural world as we develop allergies, and aversions to being outside as a hostile place.
And people think of the built environment as their natural habitat when, in fact, we are really creatures of the earth ourselves.
DEBRA: Yes, we are.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: And are subject to the same laws of nature as all other living creatures.
And I think that has been one of the biggest challenges. Since Earth Day in 1970, we have become increasingly dependent on technology to fix things. And we’ve got to the point now where we’ve gone far beyond the capability to actually stick anything, most of the environmental laws that were passed in the early part of the Environment Movement in the 1976 period, 1972 to 1976, we’re attempting to control the most egregious symptom of environmental contamination.
We’ve put corks in the smoke stacks. We’ve put stoppers in the emission pipes. We’ve put liners in the landfill and thought that we are doing environmental improvement.
But with all of those laws, we have, by law, legally, under permit, 3.6-billion pounds per year of toxic materials released into the environment, and 2.1-billion pounds of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticides drenching our farm wind each year.
Rachel Carson described it as a barrage of poison, and we could not withstand this as living creatures.
You alluded earlier to the quote about our exposure to toxic chemicals from the moment of birth until death, and if you look at the Center for Disease Control’s national report on human exposures to environmental chemicals that’s done every two years, they found that there are 441 synthetic chemicals in the average U.S. adult, and 337 in newborn babies, and 79 of those are known to cause cancer and mutations in humans.
And yet, the burden is on the consumer to try to avoid these materials. We have had so many attempts to try to reform the laws that allow all of these emissions and we can’t even get them out of committee for action in the public interest.
DEBRA: I’m going to interrupt you because we need to go to break. And when we come back, we’ll continue to talk.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest on this half of the show is Patricia DeMarco, who is the former head of the Rachel Carson Institute, and she’s writing a book on how toxic chemicals affect the environment.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and one of my guests today is Patricia DeMarco, who has been a Rachel scholar since 2005, and she’s the former director of the Rachel Carson Institute of Chatham University.
We’re celebrating Rachel Carson for Earth Day. She was so instrumental in changing the awareness of the public prior to the founding of Earth Day, and we’re learning more about her today.
Patricia, so how are some ways that we can be applying, those of us who are listening, individuals, how can we apply Rachel Carson’s environmental ethic in our own lives?
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, the first thing is to be aware of all the things that you can control yourself that have toxic chemicals associated. The most obvious one being, if you have a garden or property of your own, absolutely stop putting herbicides, pesticides and toxic materials on the ground. It gets in the sewers, it gets into the water table, it is impossible to keep it isolated from our biosphere, and it’s totally unnecessary for domestic uses.
You will have an absolutely beautiful garden without any toxic materials. And if you want directions about how to do that, the National Wildlife Federation has a Gardener’s Guide for Global Warming, which is available very easily, that gives a lot of explicit details.
A second thing you can do is read the label on everything. And if you find toxic materials, and you can identify which they are by going to the Environmental Working Group, EWG.org, and identify the 12 that you absolutely must avoid in order to be healthy and safe.
You can do an inventory of your personal care products to identify non-toxic and non-endocrine-disrupting alternatives to things that are commercially made.
And one of my most important things that Rachel Carson did was she asked a lot of uncomfortable questions—things like, who has the right side for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it will also be a sterile world ungrazed by the curving wind of the […] She questioned the benefits of technology applied without wisdom.
DEBRA: We absolutely should be questioning that. I don’t understand why the guiding purpose of the powers that be in the world today aren’t saying the number one most important thing we need to do is preserve life.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: We have had nine attempts to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, most notably under the leadership of Senator Lautenberg, and it can’t even get out of Committee because the money, the interests, have a different perspective on their freedom to do whatever they want commercially.
Limitation of the freedom of commerce has prevailed. But freedom without responsibility, without accountability to the public interest will just yield chaos. And we’re very far down the road of having chaos prevail in this area because the public interest in being protected has not been honored in our laws.
Rachel Carson’s testimony to Congress in June of 1963 laid out some very reasonable and relevant concerns, even in 1963. She was concerned about exposure of workers to toxic materials in their workplace.
This is still a large concern, especially for migrant workers. She was concerned that we have biologically-based alternatives, and this has been a very controversial area because people are claiming that genetically-modified organisms are biological control systems.
But no one asked us if we wanted pesticides to be incorporated into our food products.
DEBRA: They didn’t ask me.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: They didn’t ask me either, so you can’t even always tell what has been modified to include pesticide in the product. Labeling has become a controversial subject, even labeling, to know whether something is organic or not took a large bite.
I think we have to have a broader public debate about the ethical determinations that are being made on our behalf without public discussion. And this applies not only to toxic materials in our environment, but also to our energy choices, many of which have toxic byproducts.
I think we have to be more engaged in the public debate about the laws and the policies that are being adopted or not adopted on behalf of public interest.
DEBRA: Wow. That’s a lot to say. I totally agree with all of it. I’m sitting here thinking how much—a lot of what you’re saying are things, I wouldn’t say they’re commonly known even now, but they’re known to me, and they’re ideas that I’ve come across in other places, or figured out for myself.
But they aren’t widely known, and yet, she was writing about them when nobody else was writing about them, or talking about them, or even thinking about these things.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Right! I think she understood systems. She was thinking in systems. And much of what she predicted we have now seen in evidence as a result of things that she studied and knew about.
And I think one of the things that we have to really focus on here is going forward, not to continue trying to put Band-Aids on the symptoms, but to actually look at the root causes of our most egregious problems, and try to develop solutions which are based on curing the source of the problem instead of just continuing to patch up the air and the water emissions from things that really need to be replaced.
This is what I’m writing about in my own book. It’s Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, and to look at how do we address the root causes, not because we don’t have the technology to fix things, but because we need to apply the wisdom of natural systems in the choices that we’re making. And we need to choose things that solve the root problems.
So moving to renewable energy system instead of combustion of fossil fuels that were laid down in the last great extinction, doing things like making organic and sustainable agricultural practices, the mainstream component of our commercial agriculture, and looking at designing chemicals to be non-toxic on purpose rather than trying to clean up the risk from how much exposure you have.
Because many of them accumulate, and having the exposure controlled isn’t possible because they accumulate in the biosphere, so to design non-toxic products and byproducts.
And then to actually move to an economy that operates more like an ecosystem in circles, instead of going from raw material to trash, to find ways, to research a way, by design, design things for re-use, design things for being re-purposed, so you’d have an economy that goes in a cycle the way an ecosystem does.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree with all of those things. We’re absolutely on the same page.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Thank you.
DEBRA: I’m writing about things all the time. I know if you’ve been to my website. I didn’t quite introduce myself thoroughly. You just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and at the top in the menu, there’s a button called “shop” and you just click on shop, and there are about 700 websites where you can buy all kinds of non-toxic things for your home.
And if you click on “Q&A,” I’ve been talking with people for years. There are actually years of worth of dialogue about what people are looking for, and what kind of non-toxic solutions exist. So there’s a lot, lot, lot of answers here on my website that are just for free. People can just come and read them.
And you were talking about different examples of how we could move to something that is more sustainable and more oriented with nature, and I just want to emphasize just one because just out of all of those, I think the simplest one that we can do is if everybody would just switch to organic food, that is an example.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: […]
DEBRA: But that’s an example of how our food is produced by industrialization. It’s industrial food. When we eat refined sugar or refined salt or processed foods, all those things happened in factories. And even, there are factory farms. It’s agribusiness. It’s not agriculture.
And if everybody would just recognize this, we already have this technology of organic, and it’s being done, and it’s growing, and if everybody would just say, “We’re going to eat organic food now,” that would make such a difference in the world.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: It would be ideal, but one of the problems we have is that there are lots of places in this country that people don’t have access to any kinds of fresh produce. And there are places where people in those kinds of areas are taking land of their own volition, and growing their own food.
And I think the return to things like the victory gardens of the olden days makes so much sense because people can establish community composting, community gardens. And this is happening all of the country in many, many places that people begin to look at taking control of their own food chain, and being more familiar with it.
I think the more we know about how we develop our own food supply and our own energy supply, and taking responsibility for the quality of the food that we have—
DEBRA: I’m sorry to interrupt you in the middle of the sentence, but the music is going to come on in about four seconds. So I just need to say thank you so much. Happy Earth Day to everyone. Everybody, go out and find out something about Rachel Carson.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thank you.
Earth Paste Natural Toothpaste
Question from Diane
Just purchased (on line) 3 tubes of Redmond Earth Paste Natural Toothpaste (peppermint, wintergreen and cinnamon flavors). Package states “no glycerin, no fluoride, from the Earth, no artificial coloring, no foaming agents”. Ingredients: purified water, food grade Redmond clay, xylitol, (peppermint essential oil/wintergreen essential oil, menthol/cinnamon essential oil – depending on the flavor), Redmond real salt, tea tree oil. In fine print it states “California residents proposition 65 – WARNING: this product contains trace amounts of lead, a substance known to the state of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. This product may not be appropriate for consumption by children or pregnant women.” As I understand this proposition 65 warning label appears on a lot of items. The fact that it contains lead even though it is trace amounts concerns me; would you consider this toothpaste to be safe for adults who are not pregnant and since I highly value your opinion, would you yourself use it?
Debra’s Answer
I myself do use this toothpaste. As a whole, it has the simplest, most natural ingredients.
Warning labels aren’t always accurate indicators of toxicity. There are some products that really don’t need a warning label and others that really should have a warning label and don’t. We really need to evaluate each product for ourselves.
Now first, there is no safe level for lead so we should do whatever we can to minimize exposure. But the reality is you probably eat more lead in organic food because it’s a natural element of the Earth’s crust. And humans have been living and thriving with that trace amount for millennia.
The problem isn’t trace amounts of lead in natural materials. The problem is industrialized lead in paint chips that kids put in their mouths, and lead in car exhaust, etc. These industrial uses of lead are more than our bodies are designed to be exposed to.
I sent your question to Darryl Bosshardt at Real Salt (who makes Earthpaste). And as I expected, he sent back a long and detailed response, full of good information.
The ingredient that contains the lead is bentonite clay. Here’s what he says about it…
Hi Debra
Bentonite Clay has been used by natural folks for 1,000s of years with great results, but recently clay has been under a bit of attack because there are some natural trace amounts of lead and other metals.
Most clay experts agree that the trace amounts of these metals are bound to the clay and cannot be absorb by the body, which is why healing clays are used both internally and externally for numerous things for 1,000’s of years, even though there are trace amounts of these metals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_clay.
Below is a little longer explanation that you can also draw from if you are interested.
We realize that some will choose not to use clay or clay based products because of the natural state of clay and its trace amounts of metals, and we totally respect that, but after looking into clay the science and history of clay use many agree with the clay authors and naturopaths who say that these metals are not bioavailable.
Bentonite/Montmorillonite clay is the base product of Earthpaste and is about 25% of the formula. All natural Bentonite/Montmorillonite clays have natural trace amounts of many elements (http://www.earthpaste.com/elemental-analysis/ one of which is lead and other metals and minerals.
Any clay actually will have trace amounts of lead (as will collard greens, kale, mixed nuts and almost anything from the ground or grown in the ground) which is why we added the lead statement to our package. Other companies are doing the same thing and here are some examples. In the Garden of Life, Sunwarrior and Ridge Crest Herbals explanations they talk specifically about things like green beans and Echinacea which some find helpful.
- www.naturalgrocers.com/store-info/blog/garden-life-responds-bloggers-concerns-about-heavy-metals
- www.sunwarrior.com/notices/
- www.rcherbals.com/prop65/
- www.mountainroseherbs.com/prop65/
For those that don’t know, according the to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lead occurs naturally in uncontaminated soils at a level of between 50 ppm and 400 ppm (www.epa.gov/superfund/lead/health.htm) because lead is one of the elements that the Earth is made of. As long as we live on Earth there will be trace amounts of lead that we are exposed to because it is one of the many elements that make up the Earth we live on. This doesn’t mean we should not try to limit our exposure to processed/refined lead and lead contaminated soils. Contaminated soils such as those around power plants, gas stations, or other industrial waste areas are much higher than those natural levels found everywhere on Earth at the 50-400 ppm level. For comparison, Redmond Clay naturally has around 12 ppm on the recent analysis which you can see is a fraction of the typical amount in “uncontaminated soils” and is just part of the natural earth the way it was created.
For a true comparison we also need to convert ppm or ppb to micrograms in the foods and water we are consuming. In reference to the naturally occurring in lead in foods grown in uncontaminated soils, according to the FDA 2007 study of lead in foods it found that an 8 oz serving of fresh collard greens has up to 30 micrograms of lead (50 times the prop 65 limit) – for comparison an average use of Earthpaste would have about 6 micrograms assuming you consumed the entire amount. An 8 oz serving of dry roasted mix nuts had up to 20 mcg and similar servings of brussel sprouts was 16 mcg, spinach and sweet potatoes were about 15 mcg for the same 8 oz servings size. www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodSafety/FoodContaminants
Adulteration/TotalDietStudy/UCM243059.pdf
It is also important to note that all elements are not bio-available in all forms and that the FDA’s statement of the GRAS status of clay says this, “Apparently, very little, if any, bentonite is absorbed after oral administration and as much as 3 percent in the diet has no observable adverse effects on experimental animals.” The statement also says, “No adverse effects have been observed at dietary levels as high as 12 percent in experimental animals.” And says, “The human therapeutic dose for diarrhea is about 250 to 1,000 mg per kg.”
www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/fcn/fcnDetailNavigation.cfm?rpt=scogslisting
&id=35
That would mean that 3 – 12 pounds of clay could theoretically be consumed for every 100 lbs of food. That would be a serious amount of clay and an amount that no one would ever recommend, but it does show that the metals in clay are not absorbable. This is why the right type of clay has such a following, is used throughout the world, and has even been studied by NASA for astronaut use – although still not widely accepted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_clay
Many of the books on clay and most naturopaths agree that these other minerals in clay are in a form that the body can’t absorb and are not bioavailable – this is what the FDA statement also says in the section I included above.
Another favorite quote on this topic comes from Dr. Richard Anderson who is (was) a naturopathic practitioner. Being a natural doctor he probably understands the medical/chemistry aspects of clay better than some. Here is a short section from his cleansing site.
“Today, Bentonite clay is increasingly used both internally and externally by those interested in natural remedies, and it is included on the FDA’s famous “GRAS” list, which stands for “Generally Recognized as Safe.” With increasing public knowledge about minerals, some have expressed concern over the presence of small amounts of aluminum in bentonite clay.
However, Rich Anderson himself, and numerous others who have used Bentonite clay extensively with his cleanse program, have had hair analyses done which indicated that the body does not absorb aluminum from Bentonite. [ . . . ] Some people are concerned about the aluminum in bentonite. Yes, it does have aluminum. For aluminum is one of the most abundant minerals on the earth. However, if you recall the above paragraph where it states that bentonite has a negative electrical charge, you will realize that bentonite cannot be absorbed by the body. The epithelium cells of the gut are also negatively charged. Like the polar opposites of two magnets repelling one another, the cells of our bowels absolutely repel the bentonite from entering the inner sanctum of our bodies. This means that you never need to be concerned about taking psyllium shakes. Rich Anderson has probably set the world’s record in the consuming of bentonite. Not only has he no signs of aluminum poisoning, but also hair analysis has never indicated any abnormal levels of aluminum in his body. And does he still use bentonite? Absolutely. [ . . . ] Why are the toxic metals in the minerals in bentonite not a problem (like chlorine, arsenic, aluminum, and lead.) A: These minerals are in small, trace amounts and organic in nature. They are not toxic in this medium. They are derived from ancient vegetation and are naturally chelated to plant proteins. Organic aluminum actually transmutes into silica and then into calcium according to Professor Louis Kervran. This is explained in his book “Biological Transmutations and Modern Physics” on page 157. (Magalia, California: Happiness Press, 1988.)” www.cleanse.net/hydratedbentoniteclay.html
An elemental compound that occurs naturally in nature is not necessarily the same thing as the highly processed, refined, purified element – and the body deals with these types or forms of elements differently. Pure metallic Sodium or pure Chlorine gas are good examples of this. The apparent difference in bioavailability is why most clay users agree with the clay authors, naturopaths and the FDA as mentioned above. Leaded gasoline and lead-based paint are very different than the naturally occurring trace amount of lead in organic kale, peach, pears or clay. That said, some decide not to use clay or clay based products because of its natural state and its natural levels of so many elements including metals – and we respect that as well.
Sorry for the long answer and hopefully this helps add to the discussion. We are working to improve our website to better explain clay and why some choose to incorporate clay into their lifestyle and others choose not to.
Listen to Darryl talk with me about Earthpaste at Amazingly Natural Toothpaste (It Really Is!)
Building Homes That are Healthy…and More
Today my guest is Jan Flanzer, CoFounder and Managing Director of Healthy Home Builders in Scarsdale NY. We’ll be talking about the the toxic-free materials used to build healthy homes. Jan grew up in a real estate oriented family, but took another direction for her career. When she became sick from toxic chemical exposure, she re-evaluated her life and decided to build homes that are not only safe, but a joy to live in. HHB creates properties that are distinguished by understated elegance, thoughtful floor plans, and meticulous detail. The guiding principles for the firm’s projects are to be mindful of how their buildings will become part of the fabric of their community. No two projects will necessarily be alike, as the aesthetic of each home is attuned to the history and architecture of each neighborhood. They believe that indoor air and water quality are overlooked aspects of sustainable development. The firm’s core principle is to pioneer the use of materials, systems, and design to protect the health and wellness of its occupants through improvements in indoor air and water quality. They carefully test and select construction materials in order to incorporate non-toxic or minimally-toxic products. Their buildings combine architecturally-contextual exteriors with clean building technologies. By minimizing energy usage and harmful chemicals, they strive to provide homeowners with a better and healthier interior home environment.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Building Homes that are Healthy and More
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Jan Flanzer
Date of Broadcast: April 21, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and how to live toxic-free. And I do this every day, every weekday at 12 noon Eastern. But you can also listen to these shows in our archives.
I do this every day because there are so many toxic chemicals out there and there are also so many things that we can do to not be exposed to them. So that’s what we talk about here on the show is toxic chemicals, how we can reduce our exposure, how we can heal our bodies and how we can live in a way that is toxic-free.
Today is Monday, April 21st, 2014. We’re going to be talking about building houses today. This is a very, very, very important subject because one of the most difficult things to find that are toxic-free is just a place to live, a home, a building that is not made from very, very toxic building materials.
My guest today, after becoming ill from the toxic chemical exposures, decided that she was going to start building beautiful, healthy places to live. So my guest is Jan Flanzer. She’s the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Healthy Home Builders in Scarsdale, New York.
Hi, Jen.
JAN FLANZER: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: How are you today?
JAN FLANZER: I’m doing well. Thank you.
DEBRA: Good. Tell us how you got to start building healthy homes.
JAN FLANZER: One of the things as you mentioned in your introduction is I did get sick. I’ve been exposed to toxic chemicals beginning with toxic molds. This happened over a period of time, more than a couple of years.
I went through a battery of tests at major New York City hospitals. No one knew what was going on. There’s very little awareness about environmental illness even today. And the only doctors I found to really did recognize it and think that that might be a possibility after ruling out just about everything else were doctors who themselves have been exposed to some really toxic event or more than one.
That itself is a challenge just to get diagnosed. I really didn’t know what was making me sick for a couple of years. It pretty much took me out of the game. I wasn’t able to work. I wasn’t able to do much of anything. I had really severe symptoms that moved from system to system in my body, and I was really desperate.
So I knew that I had to do something to find out what was wrong with me to get better or I wouldn’t make it.
One day, my daughter suggested that I check the air inside our house. I did that and sure enough, that was how I learned what was wrong.
After that, it was a series of moves and other exposures. It was a series of consecutive exposures to different toxic elements that made me worse and worse and worse until at one point, I ended up in an environmental health center, which unfortunately didn’t help at all, but I learned a lot.
After I started recovering little by little, I got back to a safe place. The way that that occurred was that I met a wonderful contractor who believed me. A lot of people don’t believe others who say they have become sick from the environment, from the air that they breathe, which is exactly what it was that did me in. You don’t really think of that if it’s not something you can see or feel or smell even. That was not visible to the naked eye.
So here was someone who believed my story because at the same time, he was coming in contact with people who had hired him to find out what was wrong or problems they had in their homes from water intrusion. And those things came together and we both connected on a level in which we recognize that this was a problem not just for me, but for many people – water, one way or another, coming into a home.
This wasn’t anything you could see. There weren’t any leaks or puddles or roof lesions where water was just coming down visibly. In my particular case, it was a slow, steady drift from a horizontal pipe in the basement that I never even saw.
But we started putting our minds together, realizing that other people needed to find a way to solve this problem. And the toxic exposures where dramatically changing people’s lives. Nobody really understood that it was all about the indoor air.
So we needed to deal with that in a way that people could recognize it and appreciate the changes. I have, in particular, developed something called multiple chemical sensitivity, which is MCS, which still stays with me today. That is a sensitivity to all toxic chemicals pretty much (or most of them). I’m sure you’re familiar with that.
DEBRA: Yes.
JAN FLANZER: And those of us who have this have been called the canaries in the coal mine because even though these chemicals are all around us and the society at large, most people don’t recognize them. But we do. We have no choice. Our bodies react to them in a negative way.
DEBRA: I would just like to comment on that because having been somebody who has gone through the same thing a way long time ago and recovered greatly by eliminating toxic chemicals from my home (which is why I started doing all of the work that I do because it was the same thing, you had this happen to you), you go, “Well, everybody ought to know this. Nobody’s recognizing this. Why are these products being used? How come there are still toxic chemicals?” You just want to get out and do something about it.
What I figured out for myself is that there are people who end up having a collection of symptoms of indifferent body systems, which makes it look like, “What is this?” It’s not this or that. It’s a bunch of things.
But there are people who are having symptoms as a result of their exposure to toxic chemicals that just look like a headache or the flu or other things like that, things that you would take an over-the-counter drug for. But if people would stop being exposed to the toxic chemicals, they wouldn’t have the symptoms and they wouldn’t have to take those drugs.
A really good example of that is that formaldehyde causes insomnia. And formaldehyde is on practically everybody’s bed sheets (unless they buy bed sheets that specifically don’t have formaldehyde on them). The standard bed sheet has formaldehyde, lots of formaldehyde on it. People sleep in that or attempt to sleep in that and they end up taking sleeping pills.
Just because they don’t recognize that they’re having a toxic exposure doesn’t mean that they aren’t. I think that the bigger thing is that many, many, many millions of people are having symptoms from toxic exposure and not making the connection.
JAN FLANZER: Yeah. I agree with you completely. I agree with everything you said. One of the things that I learned is that we do have a toxic load that we accumulate over a lifetime.
For most people, they’re individual incidents just like the one you cited. And for me, the exposure to mold at that time and pesticides just put me over the top, and my body wasn’t able to detox anymore. Generally, when you have one incidence that’s isolated, you can detox it, but I wasn’t able to anymore and my body just crashed.
But you’re right. The symptoms taken by themselves appear to the medical community as insignificant, whether they’re muscle problems or eye problems. They move from the central nervous system maybe with tremors to the muscular skeletal system to the digestive system. And they move all around just like you said, exactly the way you described.
Nobody really puts it together, but you’re right about the sheets, which is why I only use organic cotton sheets now. You’re absolutely right. The mattresses as well are at fault because of the flame retardants.
DEBRA: Yes, and all the synthetic materials and everything. I mean it really is…
JAN FLANZER: It is everywhere.
DEBRA: It’s mind-boggling at first to consider the toxic chemicals in everything.
JAN FLANZER: Yeah, it is. And it’s all about everything we breathe.
DEBRA: It is. And how much…
JAN FLANZER: And that’s the common denominator.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. We need to take a break, but we’ll be right back. And we’re talking today with my guest Jan Flanzer. She’s the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Healthy Home Builders in Scarsdale, New York. And her website is HealthyHomeBuilders.com.
When we come back, we’ll talk about some of those toxic chemicals that are in almost every home in America and in the world, and then what we can do about it. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Jan Flanzer. She’s the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Healthy Home Builders in Scarsdale, New York. Her website is HealthyHomeBuilders.com.
And Jan, tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that are in these products, these building products and which building products that they’re in.
JAN FLANZER: Sure, I’ll be happy to do that. We actually spent years researching and testing products before we selected the ones that we would use for construction. We wanted to make sure that they would be safe to breathe because after all, there are really four elements that determine your health.
After genetics, which of course is the first one, there’s the air, the water and the food. And nowadays, everybody can buy organic food if they want to. And what we wanted to do was take care of the other two elements, which are the air and the water.
So feeling that, to some extent, people are managing to somehow detox municipal water supplies at some point, we took that to the next level and installed a whole house carbon water filtration system, backed up by a point-of-use reverse osmosis system in individual locations. So the water we have is absolutely pure and nobody really would ever need to buy bottled water again.
As you know, those plastic bottles are sources of toxic exposure as well because of the petroleum…
DEBRA: Right, they are. They are, the plasticizers and things. Yes, I actually think that everybody needs to buy a water filter for their home. I think it’s more important than a refrigerator or a stove. I know that’s not as funny, but I really think…
JAN FLANZER: No, you’re right.
DEBRA: I really think that just as every home has a refrigerator and a stove and a washing machine and a dryer, every home needs to have a water filter as standard equipment.
JAN FLANZER: Absolutely right, especially with the municipal water supplies now. Some of them, they’re not just bringing in all the toxic chemicals that we’ve tried to avoid because they’re being they’re carried in the supplies, but even jet fuel is in some of the water supply.
I agree with you. I think that’s a good way of thinking about it that it should be another appliance in anyway.
DEBRA: It is. It should be another appliance that should be – I agree with you about having a whole house filter and a point-of-use filter because what happens is that –
I used to wonder. Why did they put all these chlorine and chloramines and everything in the water? It’s because the water can be absolutely perfectly clean when it leaves the water treatment plant, whatever it’s called. And it isn’t, but let’s just say that it is.
By the time it goes through miles and miles of pipes, which has, who knows what, in them, all that stuff is going to get to your house if it doesn’t have these disinfectants in it. And so that’s therefore are safety to put in the chlorine and the chloramines.
But once it gets to our house, we don’t need those chlorine and chloramines in our bodies. And so you need to filter coming into the house so that when you take a shower, those chlorine and chloramines go right into your skin and into your body immediately. Even if you have fluoride in the water, it goes right through your skin immediately, and any other toxic chemicals.
I mean if you don’t have a water filter or whole house water filter, when you get up and take a shower in the morning, you’re just taking a bath in toxic chemicals.
JAN FLANZER: You’re absolutely right.
DEBRA: It’s absolutely true.
JAN FLANZER: And many people don’t realize that the skin absorbs water just as surely as if you were drinking it.
DEBRA: Even faster because when you drink water, it goes into your stomach and those pollutants get slowed down by that and proteins and fiber and all those things.
When you put something in your skin, it goes straight in, right into your blood. And when you breathe, it goes straight in, right through all these little cells in your lungs. So I would say that one of the easiest ways to get exposed to toxic chemicals is through water and through air.
We think of it as – for so many years, it was like a poison with something that you ingested, but that’s the slowest way to get a poison in your body. If you wanted to give somebody a poison and kill them, it would be better to have them breathe it or put it on their skin.
JAN FLANZER: That’s absolutely right. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, which is why we focus on this.
We started out thinking that we would be the Whole Foods of residential construction, which is one way to look at it because we’re giving people choices. Most construction is full of toxic chemicals. All building materials contain so many of those.
The list could go on and on and on, but what we decided to do was focus on what was not toxic. And we wanted to build differently and better. And so we decided to change the game. Changing the way we build is what Healthy Home Builders is all about. So we’re not building in the way anybody else is building.
And we’re not even aware of any other company who’s doing what we do. A lot of people are building sustainably, and they call that green. And that’s generally the reference to green. People think of green as being sustainable and conservation. We’ve done that too. We’ve re-cleaned old floors that have no toxic stain or finish on them.
We’ve done all of that, but what we’re doing that’s totally different is focusing on the health of the people who are living there. That’s currently being done by any other builder that we’re aware of, except one or two people on the West Coast who pretty much are building houses that don’t look traditional, the way ours do. The house that they’re talking about are usually extremely contemporary, sometimes even looking something that Jacksons might have lived in.
What we’re doing is building a house that looks like something people really want to live in, that looks like home. But at the same time, we look forward to health benefits that we are offering with all these non-toxic material.
So for us, it starts with the building envelop, which is everything that gets exposed to the outside. That would include the roofing, the siding, the windows, the doors, the drainage, the insulation. All of these things are primary importance to us because we want to make sure that there is no opportunity for any water to enter the house at anytime.
So the installation at all of this building envelop, pieces that come together really determine how we’re going to be able to protect the people inside the house.
DEBRA: Jan, I need to interrupt you for a second. We need to go to break, but I need to really emphasize what you said about not letting any water come into the house. I want to talk about that more when we come back.
JAN FLANZER: Okay.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Jan Flanzer of Healthy Home Builders. That’s HealthyHomeBuilders.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Jan Flanzer. She’s from Healthy Home Builders in Scarsdale, New York. And her website is HealthyHomeBuilders.com.
Jan, before the break, I said that I wanted to talk about water getting into the house. And the reason, I wanted to talk about that is because I actually had a problem with that in my home that I’m living in now.
I didn’t build the house to begin with, but I bought an older house that was built in 1940. And after living in it for a few years, both my husband and I started having symptoms that we haven’t had before. I knew that it wasn’t any toxic chemicals because there were no toxic chemicals in this particular house and none that I had put there. And we had remediated a few things to eliminate things from the house.
So we knew that we were living in a non-toxic house. And what it turned out to be was that the bathroom hadn’t been built correctly. And so there had been a water leak going on in a pipe, in a wall.
This was one of the things about bathrooms. They build the pipes in behind walls. You can never look at them, and they start dripping. You can’t get to them without ripping the tile out. You just don’t know what’s going on.
What we found when we finally – we had somebody come in and do a mold test. They found that the mold was very high. And so we said, “Okay, rip out the bathroom.” And we had to rip out our entire bathroom, all the walls, the ceiling, the floors, everything. We were down to the set, and there was mold all over. There was just mold all over behind the walls. It was getting into our indoor air, and it was making us sick.
One thing that I want to say about pipes is that – I went to a house. I think it was the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. And it was an old Victorian house.
They had built it in such a way that there was a little door on the other side of the pipes in the bathroom. So on the bathroom side, it was tile. But then, the pipes were in the wall. And then on the other side of the wall, there was a little door. You could open it, and you could see the pipes.
I thought that was the most clever thing that I had ever seen. When I was building a bathroom in California, we put that in our bathroom. We put the shower towards on the outside wall. And then we put a little door on the outside that we could just go and access our pipes without ripping out our bathroom. But we had to rip out…
JAN FLANZER: That’s pretty cool. You’re talking about an access panel or more than that?
DEBRA: Like an access panel.
JAN FLANZER: Yeah.
DEBRA: So when we were rebuilding the bathroom because my husband builds, he built our whole bathroom with his own two hands. And the thing that he really, really emphasized was that he wanted to build our shower so that no water could possibly ever escape from the shower.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly. He’s right.
DEBRA: And they are not built that way today. They are not built that way today. They haven’t been built that way for a long time. This is something that can really cause a problem if it’s not built correctly.
JAN FLANZER: Absolutely right. We do build in that way. I’m sorry you went through that, but you’re absolutely right about everything you said. It is extremely important.
That’s why water is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem in homes and in terms of causing problems with indoor air. Absolutely right.
DEBRA: Yeah. And it’s something that we don’t often talk about. I was thinking about – I have this big focus on toxic chemicals that we bring in or that are in building materials. But water, it can come into your home in so many ways. It can cause many problems, and you don’t know it.
JAN FLANZER: It’s very insidious, and you don’t know it. Just like what you said, you can’t see behind the wall.
DEBRA: Yeah.
JAN FLANZER: And you ended up opening up your walls. I ended up having to open up my walls one room at a time because you don’t know what’s behind there. It’s not just the bathroom. It’s one wall, and then you think it might be another wall. You’re right. You have to look behind there as well.
DEBRA: And mold is just…
JAN FLANZER: The whole idea is prevention like you said, like your husband did.
DEBRA: Yeah.
JAN FLANZER: And if you can do that, which is how we build a home at Healthy Home Builders now, then the inhabitants never have to worry about water coming in.
It’s about the drainage system. It’s about how our shower is built and put together. There are just so many things like that that we took the time to research, study and make sure would be safe for the people living there.
There are many other elements that I would love to talk to you about including something that we don’t hear about much called garage ventilation. Because if people…
DEBRA: I know that garage ventilation.
JAN FLANZER: You do know?
DEBRA: Let’s talk about that.
JAN FLANZER: Okay, great. So I don’t know if your listeners would be interested in hearing about it or if they already have.
DEBRA: Oh, please go ahead. I’m totally interested.
JAN FLANZER: So now we know that researchers have determined that an attached garage poses a threat with the exhaust fumes coming out of a car when it’s parked in the garage certainly for the rooms above it, unless it’s properly ventilated.
In fact, I understand there’s a law that’s pending in Canada now to require ventilation systems that automatically come on fans that vent the fumes from the car exhaust, whether that’s carbon monoxide or benzene or anything else that comes out of car exhausts. So that it doesn’t go through drywall or porous cement walls from the garage inside the house and get into the air because people aren’t aware of that. It’s certainly dangerous.
So what we’ve done is installed that so that automatically – anytime the garage door closes, for the next 15 or 20 minutes, this fan is venting all the toxic chemicals that come into the garage through the car exhaust. That’s really important too in terms of how you breathe and what you breathe.
DEBRA: It really is so important. One of the things that a lot of people do is they store a lot of their toxic chemicals on the garage, their pesticides and their paint and all those things. All those fumes can just come right in the house.
The house I’m living in now has an attached garage, and you can walk right from the garage into the house. There’s just a door. And it has a little space down at the bottom. Most garage doors do that, unless you put a piece of leather stripping down there. I don’t have anything toxic in my garage, and I don’t park my car in my garage. People think it’s convenient to have that attached garage, but what it’s really doing is polluting your house.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly right. And one way to mitigate that is what we said that’s an alternative. There are so many things that we’re learning that we didn’t know before.
For example, all the other systems, all the other elements and products used in the house, from sealants, to stains, to paints, to crocking – all of these things are toxic as they are right now, unless you do a lot of research.
Hopefully, we’re hoping someday to even come up with a product line of our own. That would be the non-toxic version of these products. So there would be Healthy Home Builders’ sealant, Healthy Home Builders’ crocking, Healthy Home Builders’ stain.
And you can buy zero VOC paints today. In fact, that’s what we’ve used throughout this project, that 8 Kent Road at Healthy Home Builders.
DEBRA: We need to take another break. And then, I want to hear about your project. You can tell us about some of the safe kinds of materials that you’ve used.
JAN FLANZER: Okay, absolutely.
DEBRA: Okay. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Jan Flanzer from Healthy Home Builders. Their website is HealthyHomeBuilders.com.
When we come back, you’ll hear about her project and the materials that she used. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Jan Flanzer of Healthy Home Builders. That’s at HealthyHomeBuilders.com. She’s going to tell us now about the first house that they built. Hello?
JAN FLANZER: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: Hi. Okay, you’re there.
JAN FLANZER: That’s actually not the first house that we built, but it’s the first house here in Scarsdale.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Tell us about the first house in Scarsdale.
JAN FLANZER: We’ve actually used these systems before in terms of the air and the water and purifying them. I didn’t get to tell you about the air system, the air filtration system and ventilation system…
DEBRA: Okay, tell us about that.
JAN FLANZER: …which is so important when you build a house. You have to ventilate it properly. That’s what we’ve done here. We have some really cool system called an ERV. I imagine you’re familiar with that.
DEBRA: I am, but most of the readers or the listeners won’t be. Let’s talk about it.
JAN FLANZER: That basically is a fresh air exchange system which is called an ERV, Energy Recovery Ventilation System. And that constantly brings fresh air and purifies it, filters it, brings it to the temperature at which you’ve set the thermostat and then carries the stale air out of the house.
So it’s really quite a remarkable system that you can regulate yourself at different locations in the house to determine how much fresh air you want in at any given time and how much air you want removed. And it guarantees that you’re always going to have fresh air coming in and stale air exiting the house, which is what healthy indoor air is all about.
DEBRA: Yes. I’ll tell you that my preference has always been for clean outdoor air. I always try to live someplace where the air is as clean as I can have it.
Where I’m living right now is – I don’t even know how many miles, maybe three miles from the Gulf of Mexico. And so air is coming in off the gulf all the time. It’s pretty good outdoor air. I live with my windows open much of the year, as much as I can, although in the summertime, I have to turn on the air conditioner. And then, it all filled up. So I would always say, “I’d rather have clean air than have air that goes through a machine.” But then, I went.
There’s a friend of mine in LA who has probably one of the most state of the art air systems that there is. The difference between the outdoor air quality and the quality of air inside her house is remarkable, remarkable, remarkable, remarkable.
I mean it was just stunning. I mean you would never go out…
JAN FLANZER: I’m so glad you noticed it. That’s probably the carbon and HEPA filtration also.
DEBRA: Yeah. So I did notice that the filtration really made a difference. So if you’re living someplace where there’s a lot of outdoor air pollution, this is something you really need to have.
JAN FLANZER: Yeah, and also for things like dust and pollen and all kinds of things.
DEBRA: Yes. It makes difference.
JAN FLANZER: I totally agree with that.
DEBRA: Okay. So tell us about…
JAN FLANZER: That’s the primary system. The things that we’re specializing in are indoor air and water quality cleanliness and safety and filtration.
And then, we also use cost-saving energy systems like solar panels and geothermal heating in air conditioning and rating in the floors and the bathrooms upstairs. All of these systems dramatically reduce cost. So people would pay between 70% and 80% less than their traditional energy bill every month, which is really pretty huge.
They’re clean, which is really cool. There are no compressors outside the house like you see around most houses. There are machines all around them, but we have none. So that’s a really good thing.
DEBRA: Wow.
JAN FLANZER: Yeah.
DEBRA: Wow. Wow.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly. It’s a clean way to live in so many ways. There’s nothing off-gassing.
You walk outside sometimes – even in my house, the exhaust from the air conditioning when it’s on is blowing right in your face. So all the air that’s being sucked out of your house, you’re breathing anyway if you’re outdoors nearby.
But with this system, it’s not like that at all. The solar panels provide all the hot water in the house. There are just so many cost-saving benefits, not counting the fact that it’s still nice and clean. That’s the best of all.
DEBRA: Yes. You’re not adding toxic pollutants to the outside air that you will turn around and breathe.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly, that’s right. So I think the other thing that’s really important to know is that there really is a seat change going on. And we really are firm believers that this is just the beginning and that it’s going strong.
I don’t know if you heard or read a couple of weeks ago that even Walmart is going organic now. They bought Wild Oats Company, which was a major competitor of theirs. And Wild Oats will be supplying the organic products on the shelves for them.
That really means that mainstream America is starting to think about health. It’s going healthy. Walmart I think is pretty much the definition of that. It’s not just the…
DEBRA: Walmart is very mainstream.
JAN FLANZER: …people that we thought were going organic now. It’s everyone.
DEBRA: It’s not a fringe thing at all anymore. I mean Walmart, I didn’t know that they had bought Wild Oats, but they have been moving in a more sustainable, organic direction for a number of years.
So it’s starting to come out that they have – I did another show where we talked about this – that they have a whole program within their company to be moving in the direction of removing toxic chemicals from their products. They’re notifying their vendors that by a certain date, if they still have toxic chemicals in their products, they have to be on the label or they won’t put them on the shelves…
JAN FLANZER: Yeah, I read that.
DEBRA: So I think that all of this is moving in the right direction. I think that you are way running out way out in front in terms of what you’re doing.
JAN FLANZER: We know that. We are way beyond green. What we actually hope to do is raise awareness so that other builders will do the same thing we’re doing as well.
DEBRA: Yes. Traditionally so far, the whole thing about green building hasn’t been about toxics, but I’m starting to see some interest in that. The green building has been all about saving energy, conserving resources and all those things, which is great. But toxics need to be addressed.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly. What I said before, they’re focusing on sustainability to the exclusion of health. And what they’re doing is…
DEBRA: Let me say it in another way. Let me say this because this is going to sound even more incredible.
JAN FLANZER: Okay.
DEBRA: What they’re doing is that they’re trying to sustain life without addressing the very thing that is destroying it.
JAN FLANZER: Exactly right. Yes. Also though, it’s been presented as the fact that it’s about the planet, but we’re talking about the people on the planet.
DEBRA: Right. But all these toxic chemicals that are harming us are also harming every other living thing on earth.
JAN FLANZER: Of course.
DEBRA: So if we want to have – tomorrow is Earth Day. If we want to have a planet to live on, if we want to have all the things to sustain our lives, we need to pay attention to what we’re putting into the environment.
If we put toxic chemicals in the environment, we’re going to be living in a toxic environment. There’s an old saying. I wish I could remember it. It’s something about a frog living in a pond. If what you’re doing is living in a place and what you do is just fill it up with garbage, then you’re going to be living in a garbage place. If what we do is we create toxic chemicals and we put them in our environment, we’re going to live in a toxic world.
And we do. We’re at that point where there is no place on earth that doesn’t have toxic chemicals in it. You can go to Antarctica and the penguins are dying from toxic chemicals. It’s everywhere. And what we need to be doing is we need to be making these choices one by one, like I’m doing and like Jan is doing, and saying, “We’re not going to be toxic anymore.”
And I think that you’ve done a great job, Jan, of saying, “This can be done. We know how to do it. We’ve done the research. We’re actually building houses. And everybody can build a house like this.” The information is there now. It’s just a choice. We need to keep building the toxic-free world by all the choices that we make.
So Jan, we’ve just got a couple of minutes left. So I’m going to let you to say whatever you’d like to say as your final statement.
JAN FLANZER: I really just like to thank you for having me on, being able to talk about this really important change in how we’re building so that people can leave healthier lives and not have to deal with illness that’s environmentally related.
It’s really good to know that you’re out there talking about these things. As I mentioned too, I think in my e-mail, you were one of the first people who had inspired me and guided me when I got sick in terms of telling us what we needed to do and what were the safe routes.
So I’m very grateful to you. I know many others are as well. I hope you keep doing the important work you’re doing.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you. I intend to do that.
JAN FLANZER: Good.
DEBRA: I am enjoying very much of doing this radio show and talking to people like you who are, in addition to me, out there doing things to make the world less toxic. It impresses me everyday what people are doing that they’ve come to from their own decisions and their own hearts and their own conscience of knowing what’s right.
What do you say on your homepage? I think you say, “We’re doing something different not because we can, but because we should.”
JAN FLANZER: Exactly right. That’s what we say, “Because we should.” And we hope everyone else will.
DEBRA: Well, I’m sure they will. You’re giving us a great example.
JAN FLANZER: Yup. And these things…
DEBRA: Again, her website is HealthyHomeBuilders.com. We have to go.
JAN FLANZER: HealthyHomeBuilders.com. Thank you so much.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Waffle Iron
Question from Debra
Hi Debra: Long time follower. I use your website all the time to find things I need. Is there a waffle iron that you know of with a suitable non-toxic non-stick surface? My daughter is at college and she is asking for one so want to do my best to get her something healthy. Thanks so much.
Debra’s Answer
Some years ago we had this question and could find only one cast iron waffle maker that didn’t have a Teflon finish.
Now, there are a number of choices for wafflemakers.
I’ll list them here to make it easy for you to compare, because I know waffles are a favorite.
There are two types to choose from. If you want an electric waffle-maker, you can now buy them with a ceramic-based nonstick finish. Much less toxic than Telfon, but as I’ve noted elsewhere, these finishes tend to wear down and get more sticky with time.
There are also old-fashioned cast-iron waffle makers that you put on a stovetop gas burner. I bought one of these and it just arrived today.
The reason I bought a waffle iron is because there are now recipes for gluten-free waffles! Yay! I’ve been missing waffles!
I haven’t tried any of these yet, but here are some to experiment with:
- www.fitbodsoul.com/2013/04/11/miracle-waffles-the-fluffiest-tastiest-almond-maple-waffles-gluten-free-paleo-heart-healthy/
- www.paleomg.com/almond-flour-coconut-waffles/
- www.2cookinmamas.com/2013/07/30/go-paleo-with-almond-flour-waffles/
- www.comfybelly.com/2009/01/waffles/#.U1WkICjaPZc
- www.thedigin.com/2013/11/almond-flour-waffles-gluten-free/
- www.allrecipes.com/recipe/almond-flour-waffles/
There’s more online, but I think that’s enough for now. You can always search for “almond flour waffle.”
Best Floor Choice & Underlayments for Condos
Question from Mira
Hi Debra,
I’m considering asking my condo HOA Board for permission to install wood floors in my 2nd story unit. They would require acoustic insulation so the neighbor living below me doesn’t hear footsteps/noise. There are cork and polyurethane underlayment options, which can be used separately or in combination. Or, I could get wall-to-wall wool carpet with felt pad. (Neither option is ideal I know, but I want to do the best I can).
The wood floor would need one or both of these types of underlayment:
WE Cork Soundless and Soundless+ underlayment MSDS:
http://www.wecork.com/wp-content/forms/Soundless_Soundless+MSDS.pdf
Healthier Choice Sound Solution Acoustic Underlayment (contains antimicrobial) MSDS:
http://www.menards.com/msds/104543_001.pdf
(I wonder if the polyurethane underlayment would be safe with the wood flooring over it. It has a very slight odor).
VERSUS:
http://www.hiberniawoolcarpet.com/display-color.asp?s=Habitat&clr=Seashell
I’ve home tested dozens of natural, green, wool carpets samples and the only ones I didn’t react to were two styles made by Hibernia Woolen Mills: Elements and Habitat. These are triple washed and contain no dyes. I detect no smell from them. They are low pile berber carpets which collect dust less than pile carpet and are easier to vacuum and keep clean.
with
http://www.rugpadcorner.com/shop/superior/
I love this carpet pad — my friend has it under her area rug. It has no smell whatsoever and feels wonderful underfoot. It can be used for wall-to-wall also.
What do you think of each option and which would you choose?
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
I looked at the MSDS sheets for the floor underlayment and they both were fine.
They both contain polyurethane, however, polyurethane itself is not toxic, it’s the chemicals they add to it to make polyurethane foam and polyurethane floor finish that make these products toxic.
The antimicrobial the Healthier Choice underlayment is Hydrated Alumina, which is well known for it’s antibacterial properties. This is a particle suspended in and surrounded by a polymer–like a seed in honey–so there is no exposure to it.
So either choice would be fine with me.
I think you’d have less problem with the HOA if you chose the carpet. [And that’s what she did.]
fumes from shower repair
Question from Leslie
Hi Debra – am loving your new site! We are having a small crack in our fiberglass shower module repaired. The tech said they do not use acid etching but rather, their own method (miraclemethod.com). He said the only ‘danger’ is when they use a very small hand-held fan to spray the small crack; an isotope is released into the room but dissipates in 15 min. and is only harmful to people with severe respiratory problems. My question is: we do have an exhaust fan (but wonder if that’ll spread the toxins into the rest of the house) and a window we’ll leave open. But we have a clothes closet in the bathroom, next to the shower (closet has own door). Do you think a piece of plastic taped over the closet door will prevent the fumes from getting into my clothes? Or do I need to empty out the entire closet? Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
Tape doesn’t always block fumes.
Think of a material as a space with a lot of molecules in it. Depending on the material, the molecules are different sizes and there are different amount of spaces between them. Then you have a chemical molecule that comes along and it’s a size. If there is enough space between the molecules it can get through. If there’s not enough space, it won’t.
The only barrier I know of that blocks EVERYTHING is foil. So the best advice I can give is to put foil over the space around the closet door. Now you’ll need to use a tape that is easily removable, like blue painter’s tape. I would normally recommend using foil tape, but you can’t remove it.
Preparing Your Own Food? Learn How to Have Food Ready When and Where You Are
Today my guest is Tammy Creditcott, author of Make Ahead Paleo. Even if you don’t eat Paleo, Tammy will help you with the logistics of preparing food every day as part of a busy life. The key to staying on an out-of-the-ordinary diet is having food on hand when you’re hungry and when you’re out, and that’s what this book is about. Tammy Credicott is a recipe developer, food photographer, public speaker, allergy-friendly cooking instructor, and the national bestselling author of Paleo Indulgences, Make Ahead Paleo and The Healthy Gluten Free Life. Tammy has a passion for understanding health and wellness as it relates to nutrition and has used this knowledge to help her family overcome health issues such as celiac disease, multiple food intolerances, eczema and ADD. She lives in Bend, Oregon with her husband and two daughters. www.thehealthygflife.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Preparing Your Own Food? Learn How to Have Food Ready When and Where You Are
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Tammy Credicott
Date of Broadcast: November 26, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free because there are toxic chemicals all over the place in all kinds of consumer products, in the food we eat, in the water we drink. They’re in our homes.
They’re in our bodies. They’re in our workplaces.
But they’re not everywhere. And so what we talk about here is how to identify those toxic chemicals and how to choose all kinds of things without them. And I’m talking to a lot of people every day. All my guests are doing something to make the world less toxic and more healthy place to live.
Today, we’re going to talk about food. It is Thursday, April 17th, two days after tax day. I got my taxes done. I hope you did too. We’re going to be talking about the Paleo diet. But more importantly if you’ve been reading my website and reading my food blog at ToxicFreeKitchen.com, you know that I’ve been on the Paleo diet and it’s made a huge amount of difference in my body even though I was eating pretty well, pretty healthy, pretty organic before I started this diet.
Just the exact specifications of both foods that I was eating and more importantly probably the foods I stopped eating made a difference in my weight, my blood sugar, my energy level, everything. So I’m very interesting in keeping going with those and making it really work for me and to have it available for other people.
My guest today is a recipe developer, food photographer, public speaker. She’s got three cookbooks about the Paleo diet and the reason I had her on today is not just about the Paleo diet, but she has written a book called Make Ahead Paleo, which is all about how you manage to get all this food preparation done in your busy life. I think that that’s one of the most important things that people need to understand how to do. I know I’ve had to figure out how to make things ahead, how to have food be ready when I want to eat and she’s got lots of tips, lots of recipes that you can make ahead, thoughts and ideas about how you can arrange your kitchen in your life so that you can take charge of preparing healthy food.
Her name is Tammy Credicott. She’s the author of Make Ahead Paleo, Paleo Indulgences: The Healthy Gluten Free Life. And her website is TheHealthyGFLife.com. Hi Tammy.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Hi Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m really good. How are you?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Now first, I want you to tell us, me included, how did you become interested in the Paleo diet?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: It was by force from my husband. Let’s see. I never know how far back to start. We’ve been married for 15 years and 10 plus years ago, we were working out at the gym and eating our low fat chicken breast and oatmeal and all that good weightlifting type food that we thought was healthy.
And I continually gained weight over the years. Nothing really seemed to work. I was getting more and more exhausted, granted I had two kids in there two. So that always helps a little bit with the tiredness.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: So we thought we were doing really well. We kept going down this path of trying to make better choices and I take one thing at a time like trans-fats and then looking at organic. We just do it step by step. We felt like we were doing pretty good.
And then both the kids were really young and my husband was not feeling well. And over the course of about six months, he lost a lot of weight very quickly, 30 to 35 lbs, which he didn’t have to lose. He’s a very tall muscular lean guy and he didn’t really have much to lose. He lost of weight very quickly. He was very pale. And one of the big things for me was he got sick constantly. And the whole time we’ve been married, he never even had so much of a cold.
So I knew something was going on and he was complaining about his stomach hurting every time he ate oatmeal for breakfast. And I told him, “You’re crazy. Oatmeal is so benign. That’s what they give babies. It’s one of the most benign things you can eat.” We just didn’t know and he kept saying and kept saying it.
So he was doing research and he said, “I think there might be something going on.” So he was lucky from start to finish. It was probably six months.
He was diagnosed with celiac disease. Some people go decades before the doctors figure out what’s going on with them.
DEBRA: Let me just ask you. I want to hear the rest of your story, but I want to interrupt for a second because I think a lot of people don’t know what celiac disease is or how they might be recognizing it or what’s going on with them.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: The recognition part is very hard, which is why some people can go 20 years before anyone to go, “Oh hey, maybe we should test for that.” The symptoms vary so widely depending on the person. But in a nutshell, it’s an autoimmune disease and in this instance, your body is attacking your small intestines every time you eat gluten.
It’s abrasive to their stomachs, to their intestines and it rubs down the villi, the little hair-like follicles down there that absorb all the nutrients. And so you end up having nutrient deficiencies, which can lead to all kinds of symptoms and it can lead to leaky gut where the food that you’re eating, the larger particles are not being digested properly and it actually sticks to the lining and into the blood stream. And in that case, again you can have lots of symptoms, more importantly neurological issues. It can actually cross that blood brain barrier, which causes huge problems for a lot of people.
So it’s an autoimmune disease. Your body is attacking itself. It thinks that gluten is the enemy and so when you eat it, it’s causing inflammation in the lower intestines.
DEBRA: Good. Thank you.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: And it can be anything. Some people have more stereotypical symptoms like diarrhea, stomach cramps. If they ingest gluten, they end up in the bathroom. Those are the stereotypical symptoms, but over the years, I found that they’re actually not that typical. It’s just really widespread. For example, my two daughters also had celiac disease, 9 and 12 year old. And all three of them are completely different.
If my husband gets gluten accidentally, he starts having stomach problems within 24 hours. He ends up in the bathroom. Then his mood just tanks into this severe depression. He’s completely not himself for a couple of days. So it’s an interesting process.
My oldest, she gets more hyperactive. She doesn’t seem to have stomach issues, but she can get more hyperactive in her verbal communication declines. That’s been something that affects brain more. And then my youngest, it affects her sleep and her skin and her mood. She gets very whiny and crying and just not like herself.
So it’s interesting. They’re definitely all different. But for my husband, he’s having stomach issues and not feeling well that way with the stomach every day. And he went in for a blood test and he was so off the charts, testing positive for antibodies and all the stuff. We saw no need to go in and do a biopsy, which is right now the gold standard in determining a positive for celiac disease.
DEBRA: So you got the diagnosis and then what happened?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: We got the diagnosis and I cried for about a month because I was a baker. I loved to bake. My whole life, I had dreams of having a bakery and things like that. So I was really upset.
And part of it was because I saw him not feeling well. I saw that he was sick and I knew that we needed to heal his gut and get some meat back on his bones and all my tricks of comfort foods that I would have normally made wouldn’t work. So I felt a little helpless.
It took me about a month to get over that and trying separate meals for the kids and I and him. And I just realized it wasn’t working. He was getting cross contamination because of bread crumbs or pasta stuck to strainers and that sort of thing.
So we made the leap and all of us decided to go gluten-free. And about the same time, my oldest was going through some issues as well. My kids have gone through severe dark circles under the eyes, eczema, ADD diagnosis, night terrors and all these different symptoms that at the time we had no idea why they were happening. But once we started researching the food for my husband, all the light bulbs went off and it was very obvious that we had a lot of food related issues going on in the family.
Yes. So we decided it will help the kids. Well, I wasn’t having any symptoms of any sort. It certainly can help because gluten free is healthy. Well, it is if you choose healthier. But we did the norm and went into “Let’s replace everything.”
DEBRA: We’ll talk about that when we come back from the break. We need to take a break now. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Tammy Credicott. She’s the author of Make Ahead Paleo and other Paleo cookbooks. We’re going to be talking about the Paleo diet and how you can possibly prepare all this food yourself at home. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My name is Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, my guest is Tammy Credicott. Am I saying that right, Tammy?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes, you got it perfect.
DEBRA: Good. And she’s the author of Make Ahead Paleo, which is a great cookbook. It’s so beautiful, the cookbook, just to look at. Did you take all these photos?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Oh, thank you. I did. Yes. I’m learning as I go.
DEBRA: Not only are the recipes luscious, but the photos were beautiful. And this particular cookbook, instead of just having a list of recipes at the beginning, it has in this table of contents little thumbnail pictures of all the dishes so that you can look and see.
One of the things that I like about the recipes in this book is that they really are Paleo versions of things that you would like to eat anyway. They’re not strange.
This actually has been a problem for me in the past when I go and I read this diet or that diet and then the recipes are just inedible to me. I just can’t envision myself eating them. But I envision myself eating every one of these recipes. I haven’t tried any yet only from lack of time and sometimes lack of ingredients.
I have gone through your entire book and put post-it notes on half the pages. It’s not about I can’t find a recipe I want to try. It’s that I want to try so many of them. I can’t decide which one to try first.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I love that. That’s great.
DEBRA: Yeah. And let me tell you listeners that she’s got things in here like waffles that I thought I was never going to eat again. And I love waffles. I used to have waffles, wheat waffles every morning for breakfast, smothered with butter and drenched in maple syrup, which is probably not the best thing for me.
But I love waffles and I would have made them the day I got this book except I don’t have a waffle iron. I need to get a waffle iron. And then I’m going to make these waffles. I mean she knows how to make everything. And I can’t wait to try this. Anyway, I’ll talk about more of those later.
First, I want you to describe. I’ve been doing so much research about Paleo in the last couple of months and I know that everybody has a slightly different version of Paleo. So, explain what your version of Paleo is and why.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: That’s a really good question actually. It’s hard to put into words. Our philosophy is real food and with my husband and daughters having celiac disease, we walked this very interesting line sometimes.
Our lives started in the gluten free community, which is actually my first book. It’s not Paleo. It’s The Healthy Gluten Free Life. It’s gluten free, dairy free, egg free. It was made for multiple allergies because that’s what we were going through at the time.
And then overtime, my husband still wasn’t feeling great. Gluten free wasn’t good enough. We were still eating 80% gluten free grains and sugar.
And that’s when he found Paleo diet and started feeling better and we all jumped onboard and started feeling better immediately. So gluten free made us feel better, but Paleo made the big difference. And for us, we think that that was…
DEBRA: For me too.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I’m sorry?
DEBRA: For me too.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. I think primarily it was because of getting rid of the grains and the sugar. But I think you had mentioned earlier that it’s not so much what you do eat. It’s what you get rid of that can show some of the most improvement.
DEBRA: Yes.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: And so for us, we’ve been doing it for a few years now and it morphs and changes depending on where we’re at. My husband is still healing his gut. So he can’t eat all the Paleo foods. Coconut does not agree with him and nuts, some things that a lot of people really rely heavily on in the Paleo world. And he still can’t do eggs.
So we work around those parameters. And when we travel and stuff, we have to keep them safe from cross contamination in restaurants. So we might not be quite strict Paleo at those times because you can’t just get a bunless burger and we’re looking at safety first. It’s an interesting line that we walk between the Paleo world and the gluten free world because they’re not the same.
Gluten free community tends to want to replicate the sweets and treats that they’ve had before and focus on that. The Paleo community is more interested in health and eating whole real foods and not replacing everything although you can find many recipes that duplicate, but it’s not the priority.
DEBRA: I think that I’ve seen that too. I had Sally Fallon Morell on last week from the Weston Price Foundation. And I actually started more with that kind of orientation before I ever got to Paleo.
But the problem that I was having doing the Weston Price diet was number one, I did have some sensitivities. And so to try to do the Weston Price diet as written, I felt like you can eat wheat, you can eat eggs. Do you know what I mean? All foods are included on that diet.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Right, sprouted grains.
DEBRA: Yeah, all those kinds of things, sweeteners. And I thought, “I’ll just eat this diet, but in fact, my body can’t eat all those foods.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah.
DEBRA: And it wasn’t until I actually talked to her person-to-person last week that I really understood. And she even said this. She said that all these foods are allowed on the diet, but that doesn’t mean you have to eat them all.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Exactly.
DEBRA: And I think that there’s some Paleo that is a cross. I think probably my diet is a cross between the real foods of the Weston Price diet and the Paleo eliminations. It’s a cross.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes, I think that’s very common. There’s a lot of crossover there. A lot of the Paleo community still does some sprouted grains if they can tolerate.
We have done some sprouted buckwheat occasionally and everyone seems to be just fine with that. I myself felt fine afterwards, but I’m still working on my overall health and I have still weight loss to work on and that sort of thing. So that tells me I’m not completely healed of whatever I have going on. It’s just one big experiment really. So we just felt…
DEBRA: I think it is for everybody. I think that if people just focus on the real food, what I’m getting down to is just start with the Weston A. Price Foundation diet, the real food of it. And then if you need to eliminate something, if you decide that your body needs to eliminate grains or if you need to eliminate eggs or whatever it is.
Then you just keep eliminating until your body goes off. That’s it. This is it. This is what makes me feel good. This is what makes my blood sugar down. This makes me lose weight when I could never lose it before.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Exactly.
DEBRA: And I think then you have this list of foods. And the question is “What are you going to do with it?” Let’s talk about it when we come back from the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Tammy Credicott, author of Make Ahead Paleo. And her website is TheHealthyGFLife.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Tammy Credicott. She’s the author of Make Ahead Paleo and we’re talking about how you can prepare all this food whether you’re on the Paleo diet or some other diet where you are preparing all your food instead of eating packaged processed foods or takeout or restaurant food, but really fixing real food at home.
Now, we’re going to talk about how you can actually get that done. But first, I want to say I keep browsing through her cookbook, Make Ahead Paleo, during the breaks. And I know the first thing I’m going to make is I’m trying to decide between the English muffins and the pizza crust.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Those are two popular ones. Yes.
DEBRA: When you’ve been gluten-free for a while – I’ve been totally gluten-free since last June and what happened for me was my doctor said, “Why don’t you go on gluten-free? Let’s just try gluten free diet.” And I had been on gluten free diets before and I said, “All right.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Fine.
DEBRA: I like to be simple and so I say, “Well, I’m not going to do all those replacement things. I’m not going to make everything out of tapioca starch. I want to eat real foods.”
And so I would just eat salad and I eat meat and I’d go, “But I want an English muffin. I want a pizza.” So it’s really good to be able to see that there are ways to do these things and that you’ve worked these things all out for us. I’m very grateful and I’m sure a lot of people are too. I can’t wait to try this.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Thank you. I’m very happy with what the English muffin has turned out. Let me tell you.
I had that one in my head for a while and I was just like, “I don’t know if I can do that one grain-free.” But I was really pleased with the results of that one because English muffin is just so versatile. You can use that for sandwiches, you can use it for little pizzas, you can use it for breakfast and you can have breakfast sandwiches on the go. They’re just so versatile.
DEBRA: And you can just eat them with butter because they’re so good.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah, just loads of grass-fed butter.
DEBRA: Yes. And put honey on them. There are all kinds of things. Okay.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: That sounds great.
DEBRA: I ran out of almond flour, but I just ordered some. I always wait until it goes on sale and then I order almond flour. And I ordered some this morning. So we’re going to have more baked goods.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Honeyville is one of the brands that I like. And they have 15% off right now.
DEBRA: Right now?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes.
DEBRA: I think it [inaudible 00:29:13]. I just got an e-mail from them. I was waiting for that 15% off. So tell us. Just start at the beginning with this information that you have in your book about how to organize so that you can always have some good food on the table.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I think the biggest complaint that I’ve heard from people living a Paleo lifestyle, especially those starting is it takes a long time to prepare food because you’re not grabbing any of the convenience boxed items. You’re making everything from scratch and it’s expensive.
I would debate on the expensive part. Good quality meats are more expensive, but when you’re not buying sodas and chips and donuts and all of those extra little things, that adds up too. I don’t find that I spend any more. The only place that I spend a little extra is on the organic local grass-fed meat.
But the big thing is the preparation. I live a life. I’ve got two kids in school and activities and I work fulltime. I have some works fulltime. And we both are self-employed. So we have crazy hours and not just 8:00 to 5:00 thing. So I totally get that it can be hard.
But you have to want it. You can’t just assume that I’m going to be lazy and come home from work and then somebody is just going to magically make my dinner for me although that would be really awesome.
DEBRA: Before you go on, I just want to say something about that because last night, I went out to dinner and since I started the Paleo diet, at the end of January I think it was, I think this is only the second time I’ve eaten out in a restaurant.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: And [inaudible 00:30:57]?
DEBRA: I noticed that I somewhat didn’t feel as well this morning. But here’s the thing that was interesting to me. My awareness level has shifted because before I would say, “Here, what’s on my plate is a salad and there’s some chicken.” And I went to a restaurant that I hadn’t checked out their ingredients. But in the past, I would look at it and I would say, “This is [inaudible 00:31:22], here’s fresh lettuces, here are fresh tomatoes, here’s fresh guacamole, here’s chicken fajitas on top and I’m not eating corn chips and I’m not eating tamales with corn on them and stuff like that.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Which is a great step for most people.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: But?
DEBRA: That is a step that I did for a long time, but I’m sitting there eating and I’m going, “Oh, this is delicious.” And I suddenly went, “Gee, I wonder if there’s any sugar in this.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Right.
DEBRA: “Gee, I wonder if there’s this.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. What oils do they use?
DEBRA: Which oils do they use? Yes, exactly. It was like I didn’t use to ask myself those questions. I used to think I’m cooking well for myself at home and I’m eating organic food and I know which oils and what kind of salt I’m using and stuff. And then last night, it was just suddenly like I ate them and I went, “Wait, I don’t want to eat this. I’m not going to eat this.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: When you finally put your body and your health as a number one priority and you know what it’s like to finally feel good, that’s a big one. I don’t think that the majority of people remember what it’s like to feel good because I think we’ve been bombarded our whole lives.
So, most people have never felt great.
DEBRA: Well, that was what happened as I went on this Paleo diet and I went, “Oh my god, I haven’t felt this good.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes, it’s amazing. And you just want to shout from the rooftop and annoy everybody with all of it, but it’s true.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: It is true definitely.
DEBRA: And then I walk around out in the world and I see people eating all this stuff and they’re a million pounds overweight and they’re shooting their insulin at the restaurant table and all this stuff. And I’m going, “Just eat differently. Please eat differently.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah, it’s really not hard and you’ll feel amazing and it will be great. And it’s funny once you get your body off that heightened – I think everybody is at this high level of inflammation and your body is constantly filling with everything that was thrown at it environmentally, food. And then when you finally get a lot of that stuff out and your body calms down a little bit, then it’s the little things like eating out that you go, “Oh, that didn’t use to bother me, but now I don’t feel my best. I don’t feel horrible, but I don’t feel my best.”
DEBRA: Yes.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: And that’s what I’ve noticed over the years. I’m able to identify and be more body aware because things have come down and I can actually identify those things now. Before, it was just part of the whole mess.
DEBRA: I can actually feel like I had so much inflammation go down for almost 30 days on just the really restricted Paleo diet that when I ate something, I think I eat honey or something, it was just like, “Oh, there is inflammation.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: And honey, especially if you buy it local or where you are, has some great health benefits. However, it is high in fructose. So a lot of people who have issues metabolizing and using glucose for energy and that sort of thing and switching to the fat burning side of the Paleo diet, honey doesn’t work for them. We don’t use a lot of honey in our house just for that reason. It tends to spike our blood sugar and restarts some of those cravings and cycles.
DEBRA: Yeah. And when you really take out the sweeteners, then your body can go into that fat burning. We’re going to live on fat instead of sugar. And then when you start putting sugar back and you get out of that mode, I can see difference now.
We need to go to another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My name is Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Tammy Credicott.
She’s the author of Make Ahead Paleo. Her website is TheHealthyGFLife.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Tammy Credicott, author of Make Ahead Paleo. Her website is TheHealthyGFLife.com.
And Tammy, I think the number three thing I’m going to make is lemon coconut mousse. This looks so luscious.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: It’s so good. I [inaudible 00:39:06] anything.
DEBRA: Yeah, I do too. And it’s made with coconut flour and almond flour and it’s only got a little bit of maple syrup in it.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes.
DEBRA: It just looks on the page like a luscious piece of cake.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Awesome. It was and it freezes really well. Everything, all the baked foods and things in the book freeze really well. So that’s why they were included. So I’m big on the freezer.
DEBRA: Well, tell us more about some of the things that you do to make your food preparation easier.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: The first thing I try to teach people, I call it my three Ps. Like I said, you have to want to commit to making your meals at home. And once you’re there, you actually have to plan a little bit. It doesn’t take very long especially once you get used to it and you start cycling through some of your favorite recipes.
But the first one is planning and it depends on your schedule. We used to do a monthly menu because I didn’t want to mess with it. We were busy and I never wanted to come home at 5:00 at night and ask, “Okay, what are we going to do for dinner?” because that’s the time that everything falls apart.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: If you already know what you’re going to have and you have it planned out even if you don’t really want it, once you’ve made it and you’ve sat down and you’re eating it, you’re not going to think, “Oh well, I didn’t really want that very much.” But at the end, you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m glad I did that because I didn’t eat out and I didn’t grab a bag of chips.” So planning for sure.
And for most people, I suggest starting off with a weekly menu. It’s a little less intimidating. If your case changes, each week, you can plan some different recipes. And from that menu, you can do everything from just planning your dinners. We tend to cycle through the same breakfast and lunches. So I don’t usually…
DEBRA: What do you have for breakfast? Tell us about breakfast.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I rotate through various proteins anywhere from pork tenderloins that I cut up into small pieces that cook quickly, that’s another trick, small pieces of meat cooked very quickly. If you don’t want to cook a whole chicken breast, cut it up into bite-size pieces. I cycle through that.
We have bacon, good quality local bacon once a week. I do some organic local sausages as well. Sometimes, depending on the day, I will also put a large roast in the Crockpot at night when I go to bed. And then after eight hours, it’s ready in the morning and it’s really good with eggs. That’s good.
We try not to do eggs every day because we do have some food intolerances and we have to cycle through and not eat the same thing every day while everybody is getting better.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. So if you want to plan the breakfast, we tend to cycle through the same. So I usually just list my dinners and side dishes. And from that, you make your shopping list and you go to any pantry items, any fresh stuff and then any proteins and things that you need.
From there, you got to go get it.
But if you spent the time to do your weekly plan and make your grocery list, then the shopping goes really easy. I mean shopping in a Paleo lifestyle has been the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I’m in and out. There’s no reading labels because you are not really getting much with labels.
DEBRA: I find that too. I have my list now of foods and these are the foods that I know that I can eat. And I just go into the Natural Foods Store and I buy them.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. And you go around through the edge of the store there and very quickly.
DEBRA: And I don’t get pulled into cookies or whatever. I just go in and I buy my real foods and I leave and then I come home and do things with them.
I cook things ahead like I cook chicken. There are things I always want to make sure are in the refrigerator and one of them is chicken.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Which is the final P. That’s my final P, preparation, preparing. That’s exactly. I’m a big proponent of taking a few extra minute here and there.
If I’m making something for dinner, say we’re going to have spaghetti squash with a tomato sauce, I will double my tomato sauce so that I can have dinner that night and the rest goes in the freezer so that at another time, I can just pull it out.
It’s the same thing with chopping an onion as I need that to cook with the chicken that night. I chop two onions. I throw the other into a freezer container. I stick it in the freezer and then I have it. Frozen onions are great to add to scrambled eggs or other dishes that you’re sautéing and you don’t have to pick the time later on. If you do that all the time and take a few seconds here and there to double up on things, pretty soon your freezer is stocked. It doesn’t take long and then you always have things to pull from including chicken or anything like that.
With grill, instead of grilling one or two for dinner, grill the whole package that you have and let it cool, freeze it and then you can chop it up for salads or stir fries or anything that you want to throw together. That’s a huge one and it just takes a little different mindset. Instead of racing through getting some done, just add a little bit of little extra time here and there.
DEBRA: And I’ve also found that instead of thinking about how I am going to make a big new recipe each day or every couple of days, I do have those basic things. I always have cooked chickens. It’s always there. And the game becomes “How am I going to make this chicken taste different tonight?”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Right. And another thing I talk about a little bit is having your favorite spice blends on hand so that you can transform meals into different flavors. I have the taco seasoning and Italian seasoning and then a basic dry rub that I can use on any meat. And those are my basics that I always go back to. I can mix and match other spices with it to change it or I can use it to alter a meal that I’m making.
So find those blends that you really like. And if you’re looking for more than even what I have in the book, there are tons of them out there if you like, more of a Greek style than you can combine or more of an Asian flare and get some Chinese spice in there. So it’s a good idea to have some spice blends and then you can just sprinkle it on and then your meals transform and you didn’t really have to do anything.
I’m lazy in the kitchen.
DEBRA: I am too. It’s like I love to cook and there are times if I really have the time or if it’s a special occasion, I really make something special. But I’m really looking for “How can I do a five-minute meal?” Thirty minute meals are too long for me.
I need to get in the kitchen and put something on the plate and eat it, but I want it to be really good. So making sure that I have things there in order to choose from and knowing what I’m doing, I think a lot of it is education too, figuring out what are the foods that you really like to eat.
I love Chinese food and the more I think about it – my brother was just talking to me the other day. He said, “Oh, just put some oyster sauce in it.”
“Well, do you know what’s in oyster sauce?”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yes, gluten usually.
DEBRA: Besides, gluten there’s refined sugar, refined salt and sodium benzoate. It’s just a horrible, horrible list. And if you go into any Chinese restaurant, they’re putting oyster sauce in things. It just made me not want to go to a Chinese restaurant. But yet, I grew up in San Francisco on Chinese food. I want to eat Chinese food. And so I’m making my own Chinese recipes.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. Just changing some of the spices, you can get some amazing flavors.
If one person that just wanted to change one thing about their home-cooking to make it better and more accessible and more entertaining for their body, it would be to learn spices. Go online and get some books, whatever you need to do to learn some spice blends and things that work well together because you can change anything at that point.
DEBRA: Yeah. Out here where I live, we have a couple of different spices shops that have so many spices and you can go on there and you can smell them and taste them. I spent an hour in a spice shop once and I came out with about 25 different little bags. And I could just really play with them and see what I like and then go back and get them.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah.
DEBRA: So we only have a few minutes left. Would you just tell us something about takeaway foods? What do you send with your children to school for lunch?
TAMMY CREDICOTT: My kids, gosh, they eat just about anything. And in the book, I have it On-the-go Section and we pull from that one a lot.
They are things that are quick and easy and travel well. That’s the key.
School years are typically over the winter months. So we use the thermos a lot. Today, they took steak bites. We cut up some steak and sautéed it in coconut oil. And then I have the tomato based sauce that I add some spices to and they are able to dip it in the sauce. They love it.
DEBRA: That sounds great.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah, we’re big on that. And they like coleslaws with added protein and a pasta salad, it’s a big one, deviled eggs, just anything we can throw together. And we were doing little ham rollups a lot, ham with some avocado and veggies in there and we rolled it up.
After about a year, they were like, “Please don’t give us the rollup, mom.” So we’ve been varying it a little bit.
DEBRA: It is really important to not get bored. It really is, to be able to…
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah. My husband could eat the same thing every single day and be fine. I need something different all the time. So it’s interesting how every person is a little bit different.
DEBRA: Yeah. What I do is I find something that I want to eat and I go, “Oh, this is delicious. I want to eat it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” And then all of a sudden, I go, “It’s time for something else.”
TAMMY CREDICOTT: I’m done now.
DEBRA: Last week, I was eating this, oh my god, gorgeous tahini dressing I was making. And then I thought, “You know what? I think there’s probably something in this that isn’t ideal for me as much as I love it.” So now, I’m finding the next thing. But that tahini dressing is going to come out again, but maybe I won’t eat it every week.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Tahini makes a great added ingredient in baked goods keeping them moist without adding or changing the flavor.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Yeah, I have tahini blondies in the book. They’re definitely a family favorite. I have to make them all the time to keep the freezer stocked.
DEBRA: Oh, good. I’m going to try those too. Well, I have to say goodbye now because the show is going to be over in about 15 seconds. But thank you so much, Tammy.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Thank you so much. That went by so fast.
DEBRA: It does go by really fast. I mean an hour sounds like a long time, but it goes by really fast. Thank you so much.
TAMMY CREDICOTT: Thank you.
DEBRA: Her book is Make Ahead Paleo. Her website is TheHealthyGFLife.com. And everybody, try it.
Berkeley Ergonomics
Question from Dani
I’m looking for a safe mattress. Where I live, it’s difficult to get to a showroom where I can test organic mattresses. The one store I found carries a line of mattresses made by Berkeley Ergonomics. Is anyone familiar with this brand and is it non-toxic? I’ve heard that there is some synthetic latex out there. I’ve also heard that all latex in the U.S. is made in a facility in Connecticut, where they make both synthetic and all-natural latex. This is all very confusing!!
Debra’s Answer
I looked at their Berkeley Ergonomics website and it looks pretty good to me.
They use
- prewashed organic cotton
- organic wool
- 100% natural filler-free latex (not organic, but Oeko-Tex certified)
They list a lot of certifications but don’t show them on their website (“certificates are available”) so I can’t verify without asking them for certificates (my opinion is if someone says it’s certified, the certificate should be on the website.
All of their materials are from Europe, even though, being in California they could get Pure Wool from California.
On paper, it looks good, but I haven’t see their certifications. It would be better if they used organic latex, which is available.
Understand their Oeko-Tex 100 certifications doesn’t mean a material is organic. It means it doesn’t contain a list of 100 priority chemicals.
And no, all latex in the US is NOT made in one facility in Connecticut.
