Art | Resources
An All Natural Soap That Leaves Your Skin Clean and Free of Irritating Residue
My guest today is Heidi Sanner, Founder of Prima Natural. She makes a premium, truly natural soap free of irritating residues. Raw ingredients are combined using a unique trade secret process. We’ll be talking about conventional soaps and cleansers, the soap industry, the misconceptions consumers are under and how Prima Natural is different. Heidi has a Bachelor of Science degree in Medical Technology with an internship at a Veteran’s Hospital where she cultured all types of skin ailments known to man…and a few unidentified ones. She left the medical field for a “more normal” type of work as a CPA. After seven years she left to start an Organic Farm business, Candle Bee Farm, an organic beekeeping and beeswax candle business. And 10 years later started, Prima Natural. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/prima-natural
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
An All Natural Soap that Leaves Your Skin Clean and Free of Irritating Residue
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Heidi Sanner
Date of Broadcast: February 17, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
I’m feeling great today because I have been spending the last two weeks—and even longer, it’s actually been kind of a two month process of redoing my website. And I finally, finally get it done enough that I could make it go live at the end of last week. And so I’ve been spending the weekend resting after working from six in the morning until eleven at night on this website. It’s really beautiful. Everybody loves it. I’m getting so many emails from people who really love the way it looks and how easy it is to use. And it’s much easier for me, so there can be a lot of new content and a lot of different ways to organize things and make it easier to find things. There’s just going to be a big change in my website. I mean, there already is, but coming up, there’s going to be a lot more information. And I’m so excited about it.
So today, we’re going to be talking about soap. And my guest knows a lot about what’s going on in soap products, the regular commercial soap products (she also makes her own). And so she’ll be telling us about that.
Her name is Heidi Sanner. She’s the founder of Prima Natural. And she makes a soap that is unlike any other soap. I’ve been using it, and it really is unlike any other soap. It does not leave a residue, an irritating residue, on your skin. And so you feel really clean.
This morning, I thought, “You know, I should try this on my hair.” I have washed my hair with a lot of shampoos in bottles that just strips your hair. And then, I tried washing my hair with various shampoo bars which I liked more or less. But this morning, I washed my hair with Heidi’s soap. And I don’t have any of that soap residue that always stay on my hair from those shampoo bars.
So, I’m pretty happy with this. And we’ll talk to Heidi. Hi Heidi!
HEIDI SANNER: Hi Debra. Good to be with you.
DEBRA: Thank you. How are you today?
HEIDI SANNER: I’m doing great!
DEBRA: Good! Well, Heidi has been on the show before, so we’ve heard something of her story. But why don’t you tell us the path to Prima Natural. You started out being a medical technologist and got from there to where you are today. How did that happen?
HEIDI SANNER: Well, today, I’m an organic farmer. As you know, I started a candle bee farm I guess in 2002. And working on the farm with extremely sensitive skin was just insane!
In the summer, I was fully of rashes and ticks from the heat and the dirt. And in the winter, my skin was just tapped and dry and actually bleeding.
I took clues from nature. It occurred to me that humans are the only ones with this problem. Maybe it’s how we care for our skin. So I used my medical technology and laboratory background, that experience, and also my European background. The Europeans are far ahead of us in skincare products and use some natural products honestly.
When I grew up over there, it was tremendous! Their skin is beautiful. We hold up the Swiss. A picture of a Swiss woman is the epitome of perfect, beautiful skin—or the Polynesians, for example—that we just don’t have back here.
So, I used what I had on hand, the natural products, and made my own soap. It was two years in the making. I came up finally with the perfect formulation. I can effectively clean the toughest farm dirt and grease, and yet leave the skin supple and soft without the need for lotion and masking, clogging products that don’t allow your skin to function as nature intended.
Today, I’m 53 years old. I haven’t put any lotion or products of any kind on my skin for four years, and I have beautiful skin. And that’s the topic of the emails that I receive. It’s been proven by many people that it’s working.
DEBRA: Well, that makes sense to me. I’m very much one who thinks that we can find our answers in nature because nature has provided for us to be healthy and to have our bodies function right. We’re beings of nature in that regard. And so when I look at all the different things that our industrial consumer society has come up with for us to put on or in our bodies, and then I look at what nature provides, there’s a huge difference.
And knowing something about all the toxic chemicals that are in personal care products and soap—
Are you still there?
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, I’m here.
DEBRA: Okay, I just heard some crackling and I just wanted to make sure. I wasn’t sure if the line went down.
So knowing all the toxic chemicals are in there and what toxic chemicals can do and other things in our modern lifestyle, it seems like the closer that we can get to nature and have nature nourish our skin and handle our skin in a natural way, that we’ll be better off.
And I see that you are proving that over and over with yourself and your customers.
So, you decided to be a soap maker because you needed soap for yourself. So, can you tell us something about the process that you went through? What’s it like to develop a product that you decide that you’re going to make something, and then going through those kinds of trials?
HEIDI SANNER: Well, it’s a lot of science, a little bit of naiveté and a little bit of luck. Actually, the process we use is unlike any other. It is trade secret. It’s the only soap that really is cold-processed.
Most conventional manufacturers [throw them] in a big pot, heat it up, boil all the beneficial qualities out of every ingredient in there, mash it together, and there you have a bar of soap. That can go from start to finish onto the shelf within two hours. And that’s the reason for it.
I use a very slow method, a very cold method. And all of the natural ingredients in raw goat milk are preserved—and raw honey as well.
It’s important to understand that most soaps—like goat milk soaps, for example—don’t even have any goat milk in them. They have goat milk powder combined/constituted with water. Even the goat milk farms are making it that way.
So, I set out to make this real goat milk which everyone said cannot be done because of the fat content. Again, I just kept at it, it took two years, and produced Prima Natural. And that is why it is so different; it is actually made different. And even the large soap manufacturers are interested at this point and can’t figure out how I’m making it.
DEBRA: Well, I’m so glad that you came up with that. I can understand how that process might work because I come up with recipes for making different food dishes that I like. And instead of making things like cake, for example, out of sugar and flour, I had to figure out how to make something that resembled the dessert out of other ingredients like almond flour and coconut sugar and things like that which have different properties and they require different methods.
But what I found was that there are different methods. You can decide to take ingredients and figure out a process that will end up making what you want. And it may be something very different than what’s being sold in a store.
But I always find that when I actually make something that ends up working, it’s much better! It’s much better. It often tastes better or functions better. In your case, I really enjoy using your soap. And it really does a much, much better job than other soaps.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, it’s a feeling. It’s a “clean” that’s impossible to describe.
DEBRA: I would agree with that.
HEIDI SANNER: I can’t describe to you a color you’ve never seen. I can’t describe to you a feeling you’ve never felt. And this is really that different. All the proteins and minerals and the enzymes remain. And their beneficial qualities remain.
DEBRA: And that’s something that I’ve never seen in another soap. Usually, they make soap and then they put additives in it.
But this has the nutrients coming from it from the actual soap through and through.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, yeah.
DEBRA: Well, we need to take a break, and then we’ll talk more after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Heidi Sanner. We’re talking about her wonderful Prima Natural soap. And when we come back from the break, we’re going to talk about some of the toxic things and things that you probably don’t know about soap and cleansers that are on the market. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Heidi Sanner, founder of Prima Natural. And that’s at PrimaNatural.com. And you can also find Prima Natural on my website on my list of websites that sell toxic-free products, Debra’s List. She’s listed. You can find her there and on her own website at PrimaNatural.com.
Heidi, I know you’ve done a lot of research about all the different kinds of soaps and cleansers and what’s going on in the marketplace. There are so many so-called natural soaps and cleansers on the market. Can we trust the labels? And what about the integrity of the ingredients? And are there any legal regulations about soaps specifically?
HEIDI SANNER: Oh, this was a real eye-opener when I went into this field. The cosmetics and the pharmaceutical industries are regulated. But there are no FDA regulation over skin cleansers and soap manufacturers—none! In fact, a product labeled as a soap does not have to list any ingredients at all on the label.
So, what happens is the soap makers pick and choose what they want to put on the label. And many of the so-called natural soaps might have one natural ingredient or one synthetically made essence of something that was once natural, and they can call themselves a natural soap […]
Prima Naturals has every ingredient on the label. And I often get questions about that, but I prefer to do that because then I have nothing to defend now or in the future when, hopefully, these regulations change.
But right now, yeah, it’s scary. People think they’re buying something, and they’re not.
Even unscented soaps, you got to think for yourself a little bit here. Everything has a scent. Everything has a smell. If you have let’s say an olive oil soap or a goat milk soap, would you like to smell like a goat? Everything has a scent. So to think of an unscented soap, there’s really no such thing. What they do is they put in a masking chemical agent that masks or hide the smell of the ingredients and calls it unscented.
So, people think they’re buying an unscented, purer natural soap. But actually, they’re buying a soap with a chemical masking agent in it. I get emails from sensitive people. And I have allergies and sensitivities mostly due from vaccinations of going back and forth to Europe probably as a child.
But Prima Natural is formulated with a natural scent, a natural smell. No one wants to smell like a goat, and I have real goat milk in that soap. If I didn’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about it.
Now, for me to make an unscented soap, I would need a masking agent because, think about it, everything smells like something. If I make olive oil soap, you would smell olive oil. And that would smell rancid after a while. So, that’s one of the fallacies.
We have stopped thinking for ourselves. We’re lulled into the romanticism of these labels and taking what marketers are saying and not thinking, “Hey, wait a minute! This has coconut oil in it. Why doesn’t it smell like coconut? What’s going on here?” It’s upsetting, very disturbing.
Most recently—and I’ll throw this in also—the Natural Resources Defense Council has sued against the FDA. This has been 20 years in the making about antibacterial soap. And what’s in there—the hexachlorophene, the triclosan—these antibacterial soap, again, we are told that we need to [sift] our skin, we need to be antibacterial; and actually, nothing can be further from the truth. What they’re producing is antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It’s been proven that these agents, these chemicals in these soaps affect hormones. They affect muscle function. It’s just really dangerous stuff.
So, just in December, they actually won that lawsuit. And the FDA has been rewriting regulations that antibacterial soap will either have to be taken off the market or reformulated by the year 2016. But we haven’t heard much about that, have we?
DEBRA: No, I haven’t heard about it.
HEIDI SANNER: Look it up! It’s on the web, but you really have to look for it. They just signed that I think in November or December of last year.
Progress is slow and hard. And the public has no idea this is going on. They have no idea what they’re seeing and not seeing on these labels.
DEBRA: Well, labeling really is a problem throughout the entire industry. Every type of product has different labeling laws.
They’re regulated by different agencies. And I actually thought soap fell under the cosmetic laws, but…
HEIDI SANNER: No, it does not.
DEBRA: Yeah! Well, that’s very good to know. A soap manufacturer doesn’t have to put anything on the label or be accurate about it or—wow! That is a really scary thing because…
HEIDI SANNER: It blows you away, doesn’t it?
DEBRA: Well, it does. This is true across all kinds of labeling. Cleaning products are extremely toxic. It seems like the more toxic it is, the less regulation there is about labeling. I personally have been saying for years and years and years that what we need to do is have full disclosure of everything on the label. And that way, we can then make decisions as consumers. And we can’t make decisions that are based on the truth unless the truth is on the label.
HEIDI SANNER: Right! The only thing I can encourage is when you read a label, stop and think. There are even so-called goat farmers out there making pure goat milk soap from their own farm. The whole story is very romantic. It’s very beautiful.
And then, I read down further and it says, “cotton candy scented,” “lemon scented.” Well, I have a hard time believing that they’re putting cotton candy into the soap and making it smell that way.
DEBRA: No, they’re not. I’m sure.
HEIDI SANNER: There’s got to be a synthetic chemical. And how the heck do you get lemon scent into the soap?
DEBRA: No, it’s a synthetic scent. It’s a synthetic scent.
HEIDI SANNER: We don’t stop and think because we’re lured into this beautiful marketing wording and the story.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. We need to go to break, but I just want to throw in here for a second that I was on a website yesterday that claimed to make this product they were making and they were all green and that all their products on their website were green.
I then found out that only like 5% of them were. They were totally misleading.
Anyway, we’re going to go to break. Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Heidi Sanner, founder of Prima Natural, PrimaNatural.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Heidi Sanner, founder of Prima Natural. She makes a premium, truly natural soap free of irritating residues. So we’ve been talking about her soap and some of the things that she’s learned about the soap industry.
Heidi, during the break, I just got this flashback to when I was a teenager and I had skin problems. I had really, really bad acne.
So, there were all these things. I went to the doctor, I took tetracycline and blah-blah-blah. But I’m sure it was all the toxic chemicals and the stuff I was eating.
But I remember, I got this picture of going to a fancy department store and going to the counter of a famous skincare brand, and all the things that they gave me—like five or six different products—to do this whole skincare regimen morning and night.
And the thing that really stood out for me is that I remember part of the program was this pink lotion that was some kind of cleanser. I put it on with a little brush. It was bright pink. And it actually made my skin burn. Every time I put it on, my skin burned.
And this is what passes for skincare. And this is what we think is normal in this culture. I mean, it’s not just one brand. This is how most of the skincare brands are.
So, tell us what you’ve learned about what modern marketing has us believe and think about our skin and what we need.
HEIDI SANNER: Been there, done that. I’m right with you. Same here! I tried everything, even prescription, and nothing! In fact, what I learned was the more I did for myself, the worst it got.
DEBRA: Me too!
HEIDI SANNER: What does that tell you? That’s when you back up and go, “Whoa! Wait a minute here. The more I’m putting on, the more I’m trying, the worse this is getting.”
We are being led to believe by modern marketing and even dermatology that healthy skin requires dripping clean, removing everything, and then cover it back up with lotions and oils and protectants… or you’re going to die.
DEBRA: Well, that really is it! That is what those skin care programs do.
HEIDI SANNER: You’re just going to melt right off your body if you don’t have all these oils and stuff to protect it.
Skin is perfect as it is. It has to be allowed to function. It has to be allowed to, what I call, breathe. It has to expel sweat; and through that, you’re expelling toxins. And that cooling moisture keeps you cool in the summer.
Now, if you go slathering oils on top of that, you might as well wrap yourself in saran wrap. You think about sweat and bacteria underneath a layer of lotion and oils—I mean, the thought of it still makes me ill to think about it.
DEBRA: My skin is falling as you’re talking about it.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, you’re holding all that next to yourself.
Well, they make it all smell good, so you think you’re doing good for yourself because it smells so good with the synthetic chemicals. But it’s just not right.
And then, in the winter time, that moisture that you expel actually keeps you hydrated and soft. And there again, you put all these stuff that’s irritating your skin, actually, what it’s doing is it’s drawing in the tapping. So, the more you do, the worse it becomes. It’s an unending circle.
I just thought, “Enough of this!” In the summer time, I don’t want to be so hot that I feel like I’m wearing saran wrap […] Your skin has to be able to absorb moisture, absorb vitamin D. That’s so important for our health. And then it has to be able to expel sweat and expel toxins to keep your body in balance.
That’s how we were designed to function. And Prima Natural respects that function.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I’ve learned about body function is that everything in our body is designed by nature to do a certain function of bringing in nutrients and expelling wastes. That’s the whole thing. And our skin is actually one of our largest organs that is bringing in nutrients, as you’ve said, from vitamin D from the sun and expelling wastes, all kinds of wastes, with our sweat and oils and all those things that we have to have that in-flow of air—even oxygen—and the expelling.
We need to have it in and then out.
HEIDI SANNER: Conventional cleansers will strip your skin, but then they put in all these fancy oils. Now they’re putting in argon oil. They’re getting fancier and fancier with the names and the oils that they’re finding and bringing from overseas in an attempt to lull us more and more into this thought. And it’s just not required.
DEBRA: It’s not. We need to keep those channels open. We need to keep those channels of exchange with the environment through our skin open. And so that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about your soap because it allows that. It allows our skin to function as skin.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, it’s an original thought, isn’t it, but it’s proving itself.
DEBRA: It is! But what it requires is being able think about how nature functions instead of thinking industrially. Our industrial products are based not on what we need in order to be healthy. They’re based on materials and sales and profits and “we’ll keep the factories going” and all those kinds of things just like any other industrial product.
HEIDI SANNER: Well, I think it was brought out of—I mean, I always have this Pollyanna view of the world. I think it would’ve started as “how do you get the most to the most people?” But this got out of hand.
DEBRA: I think so too. I do think that that was the beginning of industrialism, “how do we get more things to more people?” But we’ve lost sight of that.
HEIDI SANNER: Right! And we’ve lost sight of commonsense is what we lost sight of.
DEBRA: So, we don’t need to have all those oils and toners and moisturizers.
HEIDI SANNER: No! I mean, you tell me. You’ve tried this soap now for a while. As you use it and your skin balances out, you notice “I don’t need lotions anymore. My skin is okay as it is.”
DEBRA: It is, it really is. And I can say that I’m almost 59 years old and I don’t have wrinkles. I mean, I haven’t been using your soap for 59 years, but I think it’s because I’m not using all those commercial products. I actually put very little.
This will sound funny, but I even went through a phase where I wasn’t using even soap. I was just getting in the shower and putting water on my skin because I thought, “Let’s see how this works” because out in nature, I figured…
HEIDI SANNER: Well, let’s get into that when we come back, the pH and neutral and water and how that works. That’s also a fascinating topic.
DEBRA: Okay, good. We’ll talk about that when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Heidi Sanner from Prima Natural. We’re talking about soap and skin. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Heidi Sanner from Prima Natural. We’re talking about soap and skin.
Heidi, tell us about pH-neutral skin cleansers?
HEIDI SANNER: Okay. Yeah, you mentioned with just water. Water is pH neutral. And the latest trend in marketing and skin cleansing are these ph neutral products. But think about it, neutral is just that, neutral. Nothing! No cleansing occurs. No bacterial protection results on the skin. It’s just neutral. You’re just smearing it around. You have to get clean. I’m a clean freak.
I’m sorry. I want to be clean.
And the real reason for pH neutral products in my opinion and according to my research is not for the good of the skin, it’s to extend the shelf life of the product. You have acid-loving bacteria that thrives in acidic environment. You have basic-loving bacteria that thrives in alkaline environment. But bacteria doesn’t thrive in a neutral environment. So that’s why they did this.
DEBRA: Well, that makes sense t me.
HEIDI SANNER: And “hey, let’s tell people it’s good for them. It’s neutral. It won’t hurt you.” Yeah, it won’t hurt you. It won’t do anything. It won’t get you clean either. This is a major discovery I came to when I was developing the perfect soap formulation.
Human skin is actually slightly acidic. And it needs a slightly basic formulation to bring it to neutral. So, I formulated Prima Natural to be slightly basic. So when it comes in combination with your skin, it will bring it to a true neutral where bacteria will not thrive.
DEBRA: Is that the reason why we want it to be neutral, is that bacteria will not thrive in your skin?
HEIDI SANNER: Right, right. You want to bring it to neutral.
DEBRA: Okay. But a neutral skin cleanser won’t bring it to neutral is what you’re saying?
HEIDI SANNER: No! If you remember from high school chemistry classes, neutral plus an acid—your skin is slightly acidic, right? Neutral plus an acid, you’re still going to have an acid. You have to combine a base with an acid to bring it to neutral.
And it has to be in the perfect combination as well so that it comes to neutral. Otherwise, we’ll be too acidic or too basic.
And that’s why you have irritated skin. You’re either too acidic with what you’re using (i.e. pH neutral or acidic products so that bacteria you’re trying to get rid of is still there, just thriving even more) or you have a cleanser that goes overboard the other way and you’re too basic (you’re too alkaline). It’s the same thing. It’s very irritating to your skin. You need a product that works with your skin to bring it to a true neutral, so that you can be comfortable and clean and everything functions as it should. I hope that makes sense.
DEBRA: Well, I’m just sitting here wondering if everybody understands what pH is. Could you just explain that just briefly?
HEIDI SANNER: PH is a measurement of the acidity or alkalinity, how acidic or how basic something is.
DEBRA: And so what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to balance it. It’s a chemistry thing.
Are you still there? I think that we just lost Heidi. I think that the line just went out. And so we will just find out in just a second.
I’m trying to not have dead air time. I think my line is lost.
HEIDI SANNER: I’m here!
DEBRA: Oh, okay, good. Good, good, good. Okay. Alright, good! I hope everybody stayed through that little dead air time because I wasn’t sure if it was my line that was gone or your line.
Alright! So, let’s get back to how do you get enough natural ingredients to run a soap company?
HEIDI SANNER: Oh my! That was the hardest part. As you know, I use raw goat milk. And raw goat milk increasingly is becoming illegal across the United States—the sale of raw milk, it has to be pasteurized. It’s being highly regulated.
DEBRA: So, is that true also to use it as a soap ingredient or I thought it was just for consumption?
HEIDI SANNER: No. In many states, it just can’t be sold, period. It doesn’t matter. And you can’t take it across state lines either. Then it becomes a federal offense.
DEBRA: I just need to say something about this. What I’m seeing more and more is regulations that, instead of helping us be more healthy, the regulations prevent us from doing healthy things. You’re talking about the raw milk. I’ve known about these raw milk regulations for a long time. If I was going to drink milk—I don’t drink milk, but if I was going to—I would want to drink raw milk. And there are only certain places—
I mean, it’s so healthy. It’s just so healthy. It’s what people used to drink. And the milk that is available now is not anything like what real milk is like.
HEIDI SANNER: We are more ill and have more disease.
DEBRA: Yeah. It used to be that doctors would prescribe people to drink milk in order to heal their illnesses. But they weren’t talking about drinking the milk we have today. They were talking about drinking raw milk.
And in the state of California now, we have this law. This has nothing to do with milk, but there’s this new law that basically is making it so that people who are selling natural fibers for upholstered furnishings have to put fire retardants on them in order to comply with the law. And this is just ridiculous!
I don’t want that to sound like an alarming statement. I’m actually doing a lot of research to figure out how we can still have untreated cotton upholstery furniture without violating the law. And I think that there’s a way to do that.
I can’t have chickens in my backyard. The police came and took my chickens. This is ridiculous! We should have laws that support health.
HEIDI SANNER: Absolutely! It got almost comical. And the way I got around this was I went to the state capital first and lobbied for the use of raw goat milk in soap. And they were not going to listen. And then I pointed out the fact that the states had given grants to the goat farmers to keep them in business, and then took away their ability to sell the product. It didn’t make any sense.
DEBRA: No, it doesn’t.
HEIDI SANNER: So, the way I got this done was I pointed that out to them. “Do you really want this to be publicized that you gave millions of dollars to goat farmers to build dairies and build up their herds, and then told them it was illegal to sell the milk?”
So, I have a special dispensation for Prima Natural that I can buy raw goat milk for the use of making soap only.
It’s funny, but it’s very sad.
DEBRA: It is, it is. If you look back at pre-industrial cultures, when you look at cultures or societies where people were living close to nature and that they were getting say their food from nature and everything that they needed to make their clothing and those kinds of things, they were growing food or hunting and gathering, if you look at those cultures, they have rules in place that their traditions are all around maintaining the resources so that they can survive. And we’re so far separated from our resources and from knowing what’s going with the relation between what we do and the environment. We can’t even see it because we’ve got this whole retail, industrial, consumer system between us.
All the rules need to say first how are we going to maintain the environment, how are we going to maintain health. And they all need to be in place in order to facilitate those things happening instead of blocking them from happening.
Anyway, that’s me on my soapbox for today. I just feel very, very strongly about this. This is like one thing. It’s like we don’t even have…
HEIDI SANNER: You can’t regulate such things. I mean, commonsense has gone out the window. There’s always an exception to every rule.
DEBRA: But we should not have rules like that, that you can’t sell raw milk. Those kind of rules just shouldn’t be there.
HEIDI SANNER: Especially when you’ve given public funds to the farmers to produce the raw milk.
DEBRA: Especially…
HEIDI SANNER: And then tell them they can’t sell it.
And these are organic. I mean, these are great! These goats are phenomenal. I’ve gone and I’ve visited them often. They’re organic farmers—
DEBRA: I have to interrupt you though because we’ve only got five seconds left. So thank you so much for being on the show.
Heidi’s website is PrimaNatural.com. You can go visit. I’ll be back tomorrow.
HEIDI SANNER: I hope it was helpful.
DEBRA: It was!
Pure Effect
A small family water filteration business, focused on designing, testing and innovating reasonably priced, yet high-quality drinking water filtration/revitalization systems, both point-of-use and whole-house. “We create Filtration systems that are simple, elegant, and extremely effective at reducing the widest possible range of common contaminants like Fluoride, Heavy Metals & Chlorine, as well as newly emerging contaminants like: Radiation, Drug Residues (Legal and Illegal), Chloramines (Ammonia+Chlorine), Petrochemicals (oil industry byproducts) and other Volatile chemicals. Our PureEffect Water Filter Systems protect your drinking water and help restore it back to it’s “naturally pure” state, and by that we do not mean laboratory sterilized H2O stripped of everything but the water molecules, instead, our filters can make the water that enters your body “whole” and ‘nutritious’ again.” Their filters are specifically designed to remove toxic substances while leaving essential alkalinizing minerals, electrolytes and negative electrochemical “charges” that neutralize positively-charged free radicals found in toxic tap water. All of their media cartridges are made in the USA and none of the parts used in their filters are ever sourced from China. All filter components are custom manufactured from the purest quality materials
such as our Stainless Steel Spouts, Purified Lead-Free Brass Connectors and Diverter valves, as well as NSF Certified, BPA-Free, Food-Grade Housing and Tubing. “We truly love what we do, and build water filter systems which you and your loved ones can enjoy for many years to come.”
The New Ultra-UC-DISINFECT is the Best PureEffect Unit Yet
Do You Need A Whole House Water Filter?
Read why I chose the PureEffect Ultra-UC filter to install in my own home…
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Listen to my interviews with Pure Effect Founder Igor Milevskiy |
Prima Natural
A unique handmade, gentle, chemical-free soap, that leaves your skin “effectively cleansed yet still soft and resilient…without pore clogging residue, sticky lotion or heat retaining oils.” Whole, raw goat milk and raw honey are combined in a special way to retain the vital vitamins, minerals and enzymes that make the difference. The unique process incorporates each ingredient slowly and carefully to enhance and promote the cleansing and nourishing properties. This produces an incredibly dense, gentle yet effective soap. Your skin is the largest organ of your body. Keeping it effectively clean and free of residue allows it to absorb essential needs from the air (oxygen), the sun (vitamin D) and the world around you. Also, important is the ability to excrete toxins and produce cooling moisture. Prima Natural™ soap respects and preserves these vital functions. Skin should not be masked with residual oils, lotions, creams or chemicals. Really clean, nourished skin does not require any of these. For a true natural clean and the health of your skin and your body: eat well, drink plenty of water and cleanse with effective yet gentle Prima Natural™ soap.
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Listen to my interview with Prima Natural Founder Heidi Sanner. |
Toxic Free Valentines
Today we’re talking Valentine’s with my guest Annie B. Bond. We’ll explore how to give the traditional Valentine treats in a healthier manner, and ways to show our love from the heart, I met Annie many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Valentines
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: February 10, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
We do that because there are so many toxic chemicals around – in toxic consumer products, in the air we breathe, in the offices we work in, in our homes. Even in our bodies we’re carrying around toxic chemicals that we’ve been exposed to in the past. All these toxic chemicals can affect us physically, mentally, spiritually. If we eliminate them and take charge of them, decide that we don’t want them, I’ve seen in my own life and in others amazing improvements in health and well-being of all kinds.
So, all of these is here for you to choose if you want to. I’ll just provide all that information I can. Every weekday I have different guests on and talk about how they’re contributing to making a toxic free world.
Today we’re going to talk about Valentine’s Day coming up. Valentine’s Day is a wonderful day to celebrate love, but it also has a lot of toxic exposure, particularly, the toxic exposure of sugar. But we’re going to talk about different ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day that can be healthy and life affirming today.
My guest is Annie Bond and she’s the author of a number of books about toxic free living. Clean and Green was her first one and Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment, she has got a cookbook called True Food and she just has been doing this almost as long as I have. So we have lots of experiences. She’s done a lot of writing of articles and websites. Her website is – well, Annie, I forgot your website. You know what’s going on today. Hi, Annie. Say hi.
ANNIE BOND: Hi! It’s so nice to be here. Thank you. Just AnnieBBond.com is fine.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m sitting here without being able to see my usual screen on my website because I’m actually redoing my website and it’s taking us a couple of days longer than I expected. I had to shut down my old website, but the new one is not ready yet, so I can’t see anything.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, no! Right! No problem at all. That’s it, AnnieBBond.com.
DEBRA: So we’re talking about Valentine’s Day and for everybody who’s listening, Annie has been on four or five times. She’s one of my regular guests. So we’ve all heard her story, but I understand that some of you might be listening and you don’t know anything about Annie. So Annie, why don’t you tell us again something about you?
ANNIE BOND: Sure. Yes, Debra was in a way my mentor because I got into this and she was the only person that was writing in this field when I started. I just have a little slightly different angle, so I just said, “Well, I guess there might be room for me. I don’t know, but I’ll try because I have some things to say.”
Anyway, I was poisoned in 1980. I worked at a restaurant that had a gas leak. I was very healthy, I was 26. It was one of those things that I was breathing the gas so much because I was a waitress that I got really exposed.
Suddenly people started passing out and it was one of these catastrophic things where 80 people had to be taken to area hospitals. It was a big deal.
So at that point, they say I had permanent frontal nervous system damage. I don’t believe it because I’ve worked so hard and I feel like I lead a pretty normal life now. But it hasn’t been without a lot of work.
And then after that, I sort of had back-to-back poisoning. Our apartment building was exterminated with a pesticide that’s been taken off the market because it’s so incredibly neurotoxic. So I just couldn’t have been more vulnerable. That just did me in right then.
And so I got very sick. I was basically a bubble case for a long time until I learned how to live without chemicals. And then I was like a wilted plant that was given water. In six months I popped back and was well enough to have a baby, my doctor said.
So, it was sort of an incredible testament to having an unwavering need for clean air and I just didn’t stop until I got it. That’s what enabled me to lead a normal life ever since.
DEBRA: I think that that’s just a really important point. I had the same experience where – you know, you and I were dealing with this so long ago when nothing was written about this.
When I started, there was only one book that even talked about anything remotely about it. And so, I just took the idea in that book, which was that if you could identify where the toxic chemicals were (and of course it didn’t have very much information about that), if you could identify where the toxic chemicals were, then you could recover from this immune system problem that we were both having.
And so I just took that to heart and I just said, “I’m going to find the toxic chemicals in my house and I’m going to figure out how to get rid of them.” And in some cases that meant just getting rid of whatever it was that had the toxic chemical and having nothing to replace it. It’s not like today where you can go to my website and find anything you want that’s toxic free.
ANNIE BOND: I know! I mean, my work especially is almost obsolete because it’s formulas, it’s the old folk formulas. That’s what interested me, finding how did they use to do it, how did they come up with these, how did they polish the furniture and things like that before we got into the petroleum age. And now, I think you just about do anything. There’s a green product for just about anything.
DEBRA: There is, but you know Annie, I think that there is an important place for people making things themselves and having the power to be able to decide what goes into your products and not just leave it to manufacturers – not that that it’s not good to have things be manufactured.
ANNIE BOND: This is a beautiful simplicity of that lifestyle too. I have to say, I have once had an editor come and she couldn’t believe under my kitchen sink I have five things there – baking soda, washing soda, vinegar, things like that.
It’s not like I live only on homemade cleaning products. I mix and match with a really good green detergent for washing my dishes for example, things like that. But just some of them, you just can’t beat, so why would you ever want to spend a lot of money on something that’s not as good?
DEBRA: Well you know what? That’s what’s under my kitchen sink. That’s what it looks like too.
ANNIE BOND: I’m sure it does. I’m sure it does. And other people say, “How do you do that? How do you get there?” I always say it takes about half an hour in your life once to make the decision to change, find some resources. And then once you’ve made the decision to change and you know what to do, you’re set for the rest of your life. And so you just need to make that intention at some point and then you’ll be fine forever.
DEBRA: I totally agree. That’s all it took. I mean, in my particular case, your books didn’t exist yet and my books didn’t exist yet And so it took me more than half an hour to figure out what I can do, to use baking soda and what to do with it.
But Annie and I have done all the ground work now. And Annie, I just want to commend you for the tremendously helpful and thorough job you’ve done of documenting all of this.
ANNIE BOND:Oh, thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: You really did a lot. You did a lot. I focused more on the consumer products part of it. But I really appreciate all the work that you’ve done to come up with these old folk formulas and preserve them and put them together so that they be used off into the future. You’ve made a tremendous contribution.
ANNIE BOND: Awww… thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
ANNIE BOND: I have to just interject that somewhere down the line, I’ll have to make sure this is instilled my daughter. I probably have the biggest library of salt formulas of anybody, books with formulas in them than anybody in the planet. So they should go in to some special library somewhere.
DEBRA: They should go in to a special library. Yes, they should. And they should make sure that that happens because that kind of information should not be lost.
ANNIE BOND: Exactly, exactly.
DEBRA: Exactly, yeah. So, I just want to make the point to people who are listening that both Annie and I come from having had this toxic exposures to the point where we were disabled and not able to function in life and having to figure out how we were going to solve the problem. And in both of our cases the major thing that we did was to eliminate the toxic chemicals that were making us sick.
Of course there are other things I did and I’m sure there are other things that you did, Annie, but wouldn’t you say that the first bottom line thing is to eliminate the toxic chemicals.
ANNIE BOND: Absolutely, absolutely. The people that try to just build their immune system and stay in a toxic place just never thrive the way I did.
DEBRA: Yes. And we can see, you can look at both of us and see how we’re thriving and how much energy we have and how we’re pursuing life and that we’re out there talking and doing things and writing books. It’s like if somebody has a chemical situation where they’ve been poisoned, it can be recovered from. That’s the point.
We need to go to a break and then we’ll be back and we’ll talk about Valentine’s Day. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Annie Bond.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond, author of many books about toxic-free living. She’s at AnnieBBond.com. And today we’re talking about Valentine’s Day. Well Annie, I love Valentine’s Day.
ANNIE BOND: Very nice, lovely.
DEBRA: Yeah, but there’s a lot of things that probably we shouldn’t be putting in our bodies on Valentine’s Day and let’s start with chocolate. We could talk for five hours about chocolate.
ANNIE BOND: We could. I just would recommend that we can rephrase that to say that we shouldn’t put it in our bodies but also that there are many things that can’t put in our bodies. Chocolate is such a healer of the heart on a biochemical way too.
DEBRA: Well, let’s talk about chocolate because I think that chocolate is the iconic thing to do for Valentine’s Day, give chocolates. And I think that the issue is not chocolate or no chocolate because chocolate is actually a very nutritious food. The problem is what gets put and mixed with the chocolates.
And so, what you want to do is stay away from chocolates that have a lot of sugar, refined white sugar in them or high fructose corn syrup or things like that. And go to the natural food store and buy one that at least has a natural sweetener.
ANNIE BOND: Yes, and that’s very dark because it’s the really dark chocolate that’s incredibly good for your heart.
DEBRA: That’s right, like 70 or 80%.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, I eat 85% dark.
DEBRA: Yeah, I do too. Many, many years ago, when I first started not eating sugar, when I was very, very sensitive to chemicals, one of the first things that I did was to stop eating sugar. But I love chocolate and I still love chocolate and so I tried to eat cooking chocolate, baking chocolate which has no sugar in them at all.
ANNIE BOND: Hmmm… ooh, that’s bitter.
DEBRA: And that was so bitter, so bitter! Oh, my God. And I decided, “Nope, this is too bitter.” But having that experience of going all the way to totally sugarless chocolate, I could back up to like the 80%, the really bittersweet and it actually tasted good to me.
ANNIE BOND: Even 70% now is so sweet, I can’t stand it.
DEBRA: Really?
ANNIE BOND: Yeah. As you say, back up into it. Eighty-five tastes delicious to me now.
DEBRA: Yes, I like it very bitter too.
ANNIE BOND: But I keep thinking how wonderful it is for my heart. That’s the thing. It’s just staggeringly beautiful for your heart. I’ve read so many scientific studies about how good it is for your heart. I’m like really sold on it.
DEBRA: I’m really sold on it too. I just went on a temporary 30-day diet and I’m on day 19, I think it is of the diet. So there’s no chocolate, no sweetener of any kind for 30 days. But prior to that, I was eating chocolate every day. I just have this little chocolate treat and I make it myself with cocoa powder, organic cocoa powder and coconut sugar because coconut sugar is the lowest glycemic organic – coconut sugar. It comes from the nectar of the flowers on the coconut tree. And it has a flavor like brown sugar.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, totally with you on this 90%, Debra. That combination is just fantastic!
DEBRA: It is. And so I would just mix it up with a little bit of organic…
ANNIE BOND: Isn’t that funny. After all these years, we just keep on honing in on exactly the same things.
DEBRA: Yeah, I know!
ANNIE BOND: This isn’t about the toxic cleaning products, I mean, these are our foods. We’re doing this exactly the same things.
DEBRA: Right, right. So…
ANNIE BOND: That’s an educated eye for you, everybody. I think we have such an educated eye. We keep going until we find what is the right, what is best and what is the healthiest for the planet and for us. I think that’s really true.
DEBRA: We do. And I think that there’s probably some truth to it because each of us independently find it. I mean, we have the same standards and we go find the same solutions and we’re so much in agreement.
One year what I did was that I wanted to not have any sugar at all. Remember when I used to be making all this recipes with natural sweeteners? One year, I decided no sweetener and what I did was I took a nice, soft date, a fresh date. Well I guess it was dried, but you know they’re nice and soft. And I rolled it in cocoa powder. That tasted so good..
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that sounds delicious.
DEBRA: It was so sweet from the date and you had just enough chocolate, so that it tasted like chocolate. It didn’t need to be cooked, it didn’t need to be anything. It’s just cocoa powder.
And nowadays, there are these things called cocoa nibs. If you’re not familiar with them – you probably know them Annie.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, I know that. I love that brand. I buy my cacao powder from them, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, and so what it is it’s just the cocoa beans cracked up in to little pieces. And so, here’s no processing at all, it’s just the cocoa bean now They’re pretty bitter and I’ll tell you, they have a big kick of caffeine in them.
And so when I eat them, I’ll just take a little one because otherwise I’m wide awake. I mean, that’s as pure and unprocessed cocoa/chocolate as you can possibly get. And so that’s a possibility too, so just grind those up.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, or to use those ingredients for – I mean buying the cacao powder, the cocoa powder, buy the purest possible one at the health food store and then add I’ll add a little bit of the coconut sugar and then it’s just absolutely delicious cocoa. That won’t get my caffeine hit from sometimes – I mean, not my caffeine hit, my chocolate hits.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So there are all kinds of ways to be creative with it. I have in the past made all kinds of chocolate desserts for Valentine’s Day rather than going out and buying chocolates. And so that adds a little extra love to it too.
ANNIE BOND: I think that’s very nice. One could find a really, really good truffle recipe. I have one actually on GreenChiCafe.com. I put it up there many many years ago before I was deeper into the food issues. One could substitute the sugars, but it’s a fabulous recipe for truffles if one wants a recipe. It came down through a few grandmothers, from one via France and it’s just fabulous.
DEBRA: Oooh I’ll have to go look at it.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, just substitute the sugars.
DEBRA: Once you start thinking in terms of making things like if you could make somebody – say you have somebody.
Oh, we have to go to break again. But after the break we’ll talk more about chocolate and other things that have to go on Valentine’s Day. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Annie Bond and her website is AnnieBBond.com.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond. We’re talking about Valentine’s Day and how to be toxic-free on Valentine’s Day.
So Annie, just to finish up about talking about chocolate, I wanted to mention that there are so many chocolate recipes of things that people could make. For example, I have a friend who’s gluten intolerant. I mean, I don’t eat gluten myself, but he’s never been able to eat gluten. And so he can’t just like go down…
ANNIE BOND: He’s more like [inaudible 00:27:33], it sounds like.
DEBRA: Yeah, he can’t go down to a bakery and buy a chocolate cake. And so for me to make him a gluten free cake is a very, very big deal for him and make it with natural sweeteners and things like that.
And so to me, doing things like that is so much more important, to give things from your heart that are really things that the person will really appreciate rather than just giving a card or things that you buy, consumer gifts, to figure out how can you do something really special for this person. And that’s something that I’d been known to do.
I know when I was married, Larry, had a favorite dessert called Coeur A La Crème, which wasn’t chocolate at all, but like this kind of cheesecake-y kind of thing that you make in a heart shape (coeur being the French word for heart). And then you put it in a pool of raspberry sauce. That was his favorite dessert and he always wanted it on Valentine’s Day. And so I made what he wanted.
ANNIE BOND: Yes, of course. I mean, if there’s ever a time for a heart-based gift, Valentine’s Day is it for sure.
DEBRA: Yeah! But another thing that I like to do is to roast beets and then cut them in slices. I have a little heart-shaped cookie cutter. I cut out little hearts, little red beet hearts and put them in a salad.
ANNIE BOND: That’s a really nice idea. And then you could use all of your peels to simmer in water and get a lot of beautiful red dye. And then, if you made a frosting or something, you could mix the beet into it and you would end up having a great red confection of some sorts.
DEBRA: I think that would be a great idea. So Annie, tell me about your most memorable Valentine’s Day.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh. There hasn’t really been a high point in my life. It was actually one of the big challenges of my last marriage because I would say, “You know, it really would mean a lot to me if I have had something, a gift or…” and he said, “You know I love you.” I’m like “Well, but it would’ve been nice to have something.” So Valentine’s have usually been sort of sad days for me.
DEBRA: Awww… I’m sorry
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, I always loved being able to do things. I love that kind of time. So I love doing it for my daughter and boys would get her something special, but we’ll make something, that kind of thing. Anyway, so what about you? Why don’t we turn it around for you?
DEBRA: Well, I actually have three memorable Valentine’s Day. I was thinking about this prior to this show and I was thinking, “Which one was the most memorable?” I think well I’ll tell one of them now and maybe I’ll tell another one later.
But the one that came to mind first was that there was one Valentine’s Day when Larry was off in California after we moved to Florida, the first Valentine’s Day he was – we wanted to move here, but he still needed to be in California so he moved me to Florida and I was here alone and he was back in California by himself.
When it got to be Valentine’s Day, it just got closer and closer and closer and I thought that I don’t want to be here when he’s in California. The day before Valentine’s Day I decided that I was going to go to California and see him, which meant getting a flight the day before Valentine’s Day. I had no money, but I was determined that I was going to go see Larry for Valentine’s Day.
And so I borrowed some money, I got a flight. I took the red eye and on Valentine’s morning, I surprised him in California.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh! What a wonderful thing to do. That’s awesome!
DEBRA: Thank you! But when I got home, he had sent me a Valentine. What he had done is he had gone and got this huge piece of butcher paper. He put it down in the floor and laid down on it and he traced all around his body. He put his arms out open and so he sent me this big hug, a life-sized hug.
ANNIE BOND: Awww… that’s the cutest thing ever. That’s so sweet.
DEBRA: It was! It was so adorable. I put it up on the wall the whole time that he was gone. There was this big Valentine up on the wall.
See, there are so many ways that if you’re just creative about it, that you say…
ANNIE BOND: That story though, I was afraid that he was on the plane coming east. It reminds me of that love story about that woman who cut her hair to buy the watch for the man and the man sold his watch to buy her a comb.
DEBRA: But now that you brought that up, I’ll tell you another one of my three stories and that is that there was another Valentine’s Day when we were apart, when we were living in California.
We were living in the San Francisco Bay Area and I needed to go Sacramento to work and I was supposed to work for a few days before Valentine’s Day and I was supposed to come home the night before so I’d be home on Valentine’s Day. The job went overtime and I called him up and I said, “I have to stay here for Valentine’s Day.”
So he was at home thinking, “I need to go see Debra. It’s Valentine’s Day, we’re supposed to be together.” And this was before cell phones. And so he couldn’t call me, he didn’t know where I was and he didn’t know where I was staying, but he wanted to be where I was.
And so he got in his truck. He knew I was in Sacramento, that was it. He got on his truck and he drove from Marin County all the way to Sacramento and just kind of followed his nose. I finished my job and I was walking through the parking lot to the hotel from my car to go into the hotel and Larry practically ran right over me.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, you are kidding me!
DEBRA: No, this is a true story. This is a true story.
ANNIE BOND: That’s unbelievable.
DEBRA: I was shocked because he just purely used his intuition about where I was. It’s like he set his radar on me and he found me.
So anyway, Valentine’s Day can be romantic without toxic chemicals, without sugar and without consumer products.
So let’s see what else should we talk about? Oh, wait we have to go to break now in about five seconds. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Bond and we’re talking about Valentine’s Day and we’ll be right back after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie Berthold Bond. Ooops, sorry, Annie Bond. I met Annie so long ago that I still call her by her full name.
ANNIE BOND: It’s okay, it’s okay. That’s why I included the B though in my address because if people search for Annie Bond they don’t come up with my books, but if they search for Annie B. Bond, they still come up for books that were under the name of Annie Berthold Bond.
DEBRA: Oh good, good. So my guest is Annie Bond and her website is AnnieBBond.com and we’re talking about Valentine’s Day.
So other gifts we can give for Valentine’s Day commonly, a couple more are – well actually, I would say that any gift that you want to give for Valentine’s Day, physical or otherwise, well the physical gifts, you can get any of them organic now. You can get organic flowers, you can get organic wine, you can get organic chocolate, you can get anything that you would think of – clothing, anything is all available organic. It’s amazing how many organic products are available these days.
ANNIE BOND: Totally!
DEBRA: So, look for organic. Again, the natural food store is a good place to do that. We’ve had as a guest on our show, Organic Bouquet, which is a great place to get flowers, OrganicBouquet.com. You also might be able to get organic flowers from your local farmers market or local natural food store. Just look around and see what you can do.
But I’m still interested in things that we can give from the heart. And another thing that I thought of during the break was love letters. Isn’t this the perfect time for love letters?
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s a beautiful idea. That’s a lovely idea.
DEBRA: And poems, you could write a poem. You could have a poem written for you. I have a friend who writes poems for people. You can buy a poem for a birthday or Valentine’s Day or a wedding or whatever. I think people should love each other every day of the year, but this is a time to remember to do that. So what kind of things….
ANNIE BOND: Well, it’s a time to tell people things that you don’t normally do, how much you care about people. I think it really matters. I think that really matters a lot.
DEBRA: I agree with you, totally. So what kind of things did you do with Lily?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I was just thinking that I’m a huge heart-shaped rock person. I’m always picking up heart shaped rocks and I often take pictures of them. I’m just going out of my room while I talk on the radio to find this. I have a heart that is a metal heart and written on it is – it’s like a paperweight kind of thing. And it says “Always follow your heart.” One year, that was my gift to her for Valentine’s Day because that’s what I wanted her to be able to do. It’s a hard lesson to learn, to always follow your heart. So that was an example.
I’d always make something and I’d always be using beets to make something with a red frosting. Just like you had your special heart cookie cutter kind of thing, I would always do things with hearts. We have a heart shaped waffle iron and I would make waffles that were shaped like a heart. I think the shape of a heart is a beautiful shape. So I guess I always saw myself focusing around the shape a lot of times.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I think so too. I think so too. I really like that.
ANNIE BOND: They’re beautiful. There are a lot of really beautiful quilted kinds of things that have hearts on them. It is always just a reminder to keep your heart open, which is not always easy. We all are shattered and it’s nice to work to have an open heart.
DEBRA: I think so too. I just I think that love is one of the best things. I love love. It’s not just a romantic thing, it’s just the feeling of connection with other people.
I think that love as a general feeling and concept has to do with wanting to make things better or make things good or doing things that have to do with goodness. And so if you love a person, you want to do nice things for them, you want them to be happy, but that can extend out to, of course, your family and out into the environment, about loving nature, loving earth, loving everything. And when you have that feeling for it, then you don’t’ want to harm it. And so, loving your body, loving other people, how could you want to harm them? I just think that having love for something, that results in things being better all around.
ANNIE BOND: Totally! And a lot of the suggestions that you’ve given, it doesn’t require money. So one could spend one year finding the heart-shaped rocks and then give them out on Valentine’s Day, that kind of thing. One could write a love poem and do that kind of thing, it really is lovely.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes.
ANNIE BOND: For some reason my eye [inaudible 00:44:33] to a rose hydrosol that I have. And so there’s something about the rose scent that makes me think of Valentine’s Day a lot. That’s something nice to spritz around I think, the spritz around roses.
I wonder what’s the etiology? Debra, you tend to know a lot about roses and if the rose sent during Valentine’s Day has any kind of historical meaning to it?
DEBRA: I don’t know what the historical roots are of roses for Valentine’s Day. Actually, I was looking at what was the history of Valentine’s Day about right before the show and it goes back to – I’m just laughing before I say this because in the article I was reading, it was talking about
Pagan roots as if that were a negative thing, but to me that’s a very positive thing. There’s this whole culture of people who were relating to the seasonal changes of the earth.
And at this time of the year, it’s a time when things start coming back to life. And so, it’s a time of fertility, it’s a time of love and those kinds of things were celebrated because of the new fertileness of the Earth that at that time, people did ceremonies and rituals to connect themselves to what was going on with the natural changes in the environment.
And this is the time when they wanted the plants to be fertile, wanted the food to come back, wanted the animals to be fertile and it was that kind of a celebration.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s so interesting.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t until Shakespeare that – see, this is very ancient. When Shakespeare came along, he started glorifying love and they started exchanging Valentine cards, that they would give someone that they loved a Valentine. It was in a form of a card, a love letter or a poem or something like that. They didn’t go buy them, they would make them and then that put their love into that physical form. And that’s where it came from.
ANNIE BOND: Wow, isn’t that interesting?
DEBRA: Yeah!
ANNIE BOND: It really is.
DEBRA: Well, Shakespeare is very romantic.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, sure. Absolutely!
DEBRA: Yeah, and all those sonnets. So anyway, there’s so much that can be done for Valentine’s Day. It’s just inexhaustible.
ANNIE BOND: Well, one thing I was thinking about when you were asking me what I did for Lily – for those who may not know, this is my daughter who is now 25. But when she was growing up, one of the things that – I always enjoyed this when she was a child, to really include and inspire children to actually do a lot of creative projects around Valentine’s Day.
And so I remember always getting doilies and having red construction paper and making hearts and making Valentines. And certainly for kids, it’s a big deal. Everybody is giving away a lot of candy to kids and kids are giving it to each other in little hearts with writing on it this time of year.
The health food store just are so much better than when my daughter was young at having candies that’s made with natural dyes so that they can give out these little natural dye-covered M&M type of things instead of those little sugar hearts that have the words on them.
There are a lot of creative things I think that you could do for kids so that they don’t end up having a lot of toxic chemicals (food dyes) in their lives. I think that’s a really good bar to hold as to try to keep them from having food dyes for Valentine’s Day.
DEBRA: I think so too because there’s so much red dye that goes on in Valentine’s candy, it’s amazing. So if you can cut down on that, that is a really big source of toxic exposure for this particular holiday. Well Annie, it’s been a pleasure having you on.
ANNIE BOND: Thank you so much for having me. I always love being here.
DEBRA: I love having you too. We will do it again soon. This is going to be a great Valentine’s Day, I think, for a lot of people. And I think that there are certainly things that we can do that are toxic free.
Now you can go to Annie’s website. It’s AnnieBBond.com. You can also go to my website ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more about this show.
Right at the moment, it’s down today, but it will be up tomorrow and if not tomorrow, the next day. I’m in the middle between two different websites and I’m working hard to get it back up. But I know that a lot of you will be listening to this after the website is up anyway. You can go there and you can find out more about how to live toxic free. And that’s it! Toxic Free Talk Radio.
UV Lamps and Ozone
Question from Becky
Hi Debra, What do you know about UV lamps and their safety? Someone recommended installing this in our furnace to help with allergies – the website says it does not produce ozone but how can you be sure?
http://www.swordfishuv.com/FAQ/SwordfishWholeHome/tabid/162/Default.aspx
Debra’s Answer
I learned something by answering your question.
Years ago I learned about how ultraviolet lights produce ozone because my father was doing some research on using ozone to purify water. At that time, he was using a UV light to produce the ozone.
Today there is apparently a new generation of UV lamps that disinfect with the UV light itself, and not the ozone, as I previously thought. These are ozone-free.
These ozone-free lamps can be used safely to kill micro-organisms within an HVAC unit where you are not exposed to the light.
UV light in a certain range kills living cells by being absorbed by the DNA and breaking up it’s structure.
It also can transform harmful substances by breaking them up into not-harmful molecules.
How to Have Cleaner Indoor Air
My guest Mark Sneller, PhD is the author of Greener Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. Twenty years in the making, his book is considered to be “the most complete and readable guide on indoor air quality for the average consumer.” We’ll be talking about some of the many indoor air pollutants you might find in your home and how you can eliminate them. Dr. Sneller received his Bachelor’s Degree in Education from California State University at Los Angeles (1965); served in the Peace Corps (India) 1965-1967; Master’s Degree in Microbiology/Biochemistry from California State University at Long Beach and Doctorate from the University of Oklahoma in Microbiology/Biochemistry with a specialization in Medical Mycology (1976). He received two Post Doctoral appointments from the National Institutes of Health in combination drug therapy and cancer research; served as Asst. Professor of Microbiology at San Jose State University, San Jose, California 1977-1979. Dr. Sneller began his air quality company, Aero Allergen Research, in Tucson, Arizona in 1979. He was twice recipient of the Clean Air Government award from the Arizona Lung Association for contributing to better respiratory health of citizens of the state; former member of the State of Arizona Air Pollution Control Hearing Board appointed by the governor; featured on ABC, CBS, NBC national network news, National Public Radio, the New York Times, Newsweek magazine, Hippocrates magazine, and Allergic to the 20th Century (Peter Radetshy, author) for indoor and outdoor air quality work; helped institute and oversaw the nation’s first pollen control ordinance; terrorism consultant for the City of New York, Department of Human and Mental Services; former member of Literacy Volunteers of America; former contractor with the U.S. Department of Justice and Defense; fifteen-year weekly newspaper columnist on air quality; newspaper and TV consultant on bioclimatology; fifteen scientific publications in the fields of mycology, fungal toxins, palynology, and incidence of mold around the world; pollen and mold consultant and enumeration expert for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology; radio talk show host for The Breathing Easy Show (Tucson and Phoenix, AZ); Sensei with the Japan Karate Association; member of the Society of American Magicians and three-time president of the Society of Southwestern Authors. www.globalgreenair.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Have Clean Indoor Air
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Mark Sneller, PhD
Date of Broadcast: February 04, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
It’s a beautiful early spring day here in Clearwater, Florida on Tuesday, February 4th 2014. I’m feeling really good today. The reason I’m feeling really good today is last week, I had a guest Dr. Kellyann Petrucci and we talked about – I guess it’s been two weeks, almost two weeks now, ten days, about 10, 11 or 12 days. We had a show about doing her program, the 30-Day Reset and removing dietary toxins from your body.
I decided that I was going to do that program. I’ve been blogging about it on my website. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And at the top, there’s a button that says ‘food’ on the navigation bar, click on that and you can read about how I’ve been doing on this program since the beginning – what I’ve been eating, recipes, et cetera.
But the point here is that usually on the show, we talk about toxic chemicals, industrial chemicals, heavy metals, solvents, things like that. And what this program is about is about removing the toxic residues in your body from toxic foods. And these are every day foods that you think are okay, but they actually are causing problems in your body.
I always thought that I could eat any food that I wanted to eat as long as it didn’t have any toxic chemicals in them. Well, boy! Was I wrong? Because there are some foods that I think probably nobody should be eating. So I’m not eating those foods. I haven’t been eating them for almost two weeks. And this morning, I woke up and it’s like – you know, you grow through any program and there’s little things along the way. But this morning, I woke up and it was like, “Wow! I really get it.” She said, “If you can just go through the first two weeks, you’ll see a big change.” And I’m seeing a big change.
We’re going to have Dr. Petrucci on again, Dr. Kellyann in two weeks from Thursday. We’re going to be talking about the whole program and what happened. But I just wanted to just give you this little – I’m just feeling so good today and my fingers are typing fast, I have lots of energy and I’m very happy. I feel a relief of not having some toxic stuff in my body that was there before.
There are different ways that you can remove toxic things from your body, but there are specific ways for different things and I’m finally doing one that I haven’t done before. It’s great! Great, great, great! I encourage you go read this. I’m doing really well.
That said, we’re going to talk about something entirely different today. We’re going to talk about indoor air pollution, which we haven’t really talked about much as a general topic. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD. He’s the author of a book called Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. This book as 20 years in the making. His book is considered to be the most complete and readable guide on indoor air quality for the average consumer. I would agree with that because I read a lot about indoor air quality, but most of the books are written in a very technical way and this book is very easy to read.
Now, he’s had his own air quality company called Aero Allergen Research in Tucson, Arizona since 1979. So he’s been doing a lot of research, working with a lot of clients right there in people’s homes and buildings, whatever. He was the recipient of the Clean Air Government Award from the Arizona Lung Association twice and he’s got a whole list of credentials that is just like very long.
Anyway, he’s done a lot of stuff. He’s even had his own radio show. He had a weekly newspaper column on air quality for 15 years. So he knows a lot – a lot, a lot, a lot. We’re going to talk about indoor air quality.
Hi, Mark.
MARK SNELLER: Hi, Debra. It’s an honor and a pleasure. You have been somebody that I followed and admired for many years and to be interviewed by you is really a high point of my career.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you, thank you.
MARK SNELLER: Thank you. Thank you for this.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us, give the story about how you got interested in indoor air quality of all things?
MARK SNELLER: Oh, man! I regionally started out in cancer research and antibiotic research and combination drug therapy and mycology, the study of fungi and molds. So the end of the story is that I’m a mold expert. But in there is a whole bunch of other stuff. I morphed from that into university teaching at San Jose State College for a couple of years and found out that I was an academician, not a politician and resigned that after two years and moved out to Tucson at ’70.
While I was at San Jose though, I had hooked up with an allergist who wanted a professional to monitor the homes of his clients and find out what kind of mold they were allergic to or exposed to, so he could prepare agents suitable to the individual.
So I had that experience for a couple of years. That was quite intense along with the teaching. And when I came out, I decided to expand my own development of my business and expand it not just to cover mold, but to cover indoor air quality.
The more I researched it, the more I found that the less that we know, that there’s no real spokesperson for the homeowner. It’s just a sellers’ market. There’s no protection for the homeowner and the things that we’re exposed to on a daily basis that change our moods, our attitudes, our health. It’s pretty well recognized that we get ten times more cancer exposure indoors than outdoors. Even the federal government, if you can imagine actually recognizes that.
That’s because of a lot of different factors. It’s a combination of factors. It’s sort of like the cup runneth over. You have some allergies and then you have exposure to fragrances and perfumes, which the EPA and FDA say should be on the hazardous waste list along with heavy metals and pesticides. We’re exposed to those in terms of perfumes and fragrances.
And then we’ve got diesel exhaust, carbon inhalation. It’s quite a list. And then we’ve got allergies to pets. And then, of course, as you had mentioned, the things that we eat. And then we’ve got climate changes. So I address all of these things in the book.
And so things just developed through the years and the business grew. I was hired by the county health department in ’85 to start a pollen and mold monitoring program where every day, I would monitor several areas of the city to ascertain their level of pollen and mold. And then the press got a hold of that, so we had great exposure. Half a million to a million people a day were able to get the information. There would be forecasts and predictions.
And then I got hired by other cities to help them with a pollen control program – Las Vegas for one, Boulder, Colorado, El Paso, Fresno, like that. So then they dropped the program in 2000. I hit the ground running and then my business expanded and on and on. And in there somewhere, I was kind of teaching martial arts for the Japan Karate Association when I first moved out to Tucson to make ends meet while I work my way into the scientific community.
And then I wrote the column for the newspaper as you had mentioned and then put that together and updated everything and put it together into the book. And since the book…
DEBRA: Oh, that’s why it’s a whole bunch of little chapters.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, yeah. I think it was 116 chapters and 14 sections.
DEBRA: Yeah, but it’s great. It’s great. No, I understand that because I do that with books too like if I want to research something, if I want to figure out some new area of where there’s toxic chemicals, I start writing about it on my website and then I put it all together after I figured out in little pieces. So I do the same thing. It’s like making a quilt or something.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah. I mean, you have to stay organized too to see what you’ve covered and learned new things. There are always new discoveries coming out. I’m a microscopist and I have a…
DEBRA: What’s a microscopist?
MARK SNELLER: An expert at using the microscope. And so I have several of them and I’m always puzzled by new things. I can identify maybe 50 different types of particles in addition to pollen and mold identification, but there was one particle that took me 20 years to learn how to identify until I finally figured out what it was.
DEBRA: Wow!
MARK SNELLER: So not everything is cut and dry. You don’t really know what you’re looking at and there’s a lot of questions about what you’re seeing and they’re yelling at you saying, “Here I am! Don’t you know what I am?” and you’re saying, “No, I don’t” and you’re trying to figure that out too.
DEBRA: Well, we need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll talk about what some of these pollutants are and as we go through the show, I want to learn about what to do to reduce indoor air pollution. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. We’re going to be talking about indoor air quality now, how it affects you and what you can do to improve your indoor air quality.
Oh, I should give his website. It’s GlobalGreenAir.com. You can get his book there. You can also get it by just going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. There’s a description of his show, you can click right there and order it from Amazon.com, which gives a tiny commission to defray the expenses of running this radio show.
Anyway, there’s so much information in this book. Why don’t we just start by talking about like what is the scope of how indoor air pollution can affect your health. You cover a lot of different things. I focus mostly on toxic chemicals. We don’t often talk about mold or dust or those kinds of things, but in the definition of toxicology, something is toxic – even an allergy is considered a toxic exposure. So why don’t you just give us a quick overview of the range of illnesses that can come from indoor air exposures and the range of pollutants that are considered indoor air pollutants when you’re talking about indoor air quality.
MARK SNELLER: Wow! Okay, there are two basic ways to categorize our problems, our indoor problems. One of them is particles and the other one is gasses.
DEBRA: Gasses, yes.
MARK SNELLER: So by particles, that includes dust, carbon exhaust by vehicles and rubber tires. We’re talking microscopic respirable stuff that gets down into – we call it PM10’s, 10 microns and below by the federal government. It gets into your deeper lung spaces. And then you have the bacteria and then you have viruses, those are all particles.
And as a quick aside, the dirtiest area of the home in my estimation and in my experience is the refrigerator for a lot of reasons. I devote a whole chapter to the refrigerator and why it probably communicates more disease than other area of the home.
That being said, you have the particles that are – most of them are tracked in by shoes. So the dust get ground including pesticides by the way.
Most of the pesticides that we find in homes (or maybe a half a dozen to a dozen) have never been used in those homes before. They’re just tracked in from hither and dither, wherever they’re being used, whether they’re being used in the garden or out on the lawn or wherever. They’re tracked in the home. They mix with the particles and the dust. They get into the air and they’re circulated throughout the home like that.
But that’s basically your particle factor. That can be reduced by having a scrub mat outside the door, to hang off your shoes at the door. That will actually reduce and lower the dust level within the home.
Removal of the dust itself by vacuuming is okay by slow vacuuming, but at the same time, by instrumentation, I find that the dust level inside of a home a thousand-fold once you begin vacuuming. It’s an interesting factor.
DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that.
MARK SNELLER: Another instrument that is used is air filtration. And empirically, it would seem that air filtration works because it reduces the level of particles in a room and like that, but we’ve never been able to prove that it works because setting up experimentation is virtually impossible to get matched sets of people and that kind of thing. So that’s [inaudible 00:18:05].
The other category is – and I’ll get to the symptoms and problems in just a second. The other category is the gasses, the volatile organic compounds – the carpet glues in industrial settings, outgassing from paints and there’s acetones and [inaudible 00:18:28] and benzene and those kinds of factors that are in paint that outgas. That’s responsible for most of the smells inside of a newer home rather than the carpet. So therefore, the home needs to be aired out completely, so that that VOC level decreases.
But the biggest problem that we’re running into now is perfumes and fragrances. Your imagination can run riot thinking about the number of perfumes and fragrances that we’re exposed to on a daily basis even if we don’t want to.
I even have a chapter, We’re Covered with Chemicals section and then one of them is in the bathroom and getting up in the morning. I counted 200+ chemicals that we’re exposed to and perhaps a dozen different fragrance product. And this is just normal living.
Now, the thing is what we’re finding – and if I had to expand my book, I would put this in because now, what we’ve been able to do scientifically is to take a perfume, a fragrance. Let’s call it a perfume that has a combination of perhaps half a hundred or a hundred ingredients and run them through gas analyzer. It’s an instrument that tells us what is in there. The items that are in there, there may be a dozen of them that are carcinogenic that are on the list .
So the end result of all of these…
DEBRA: I just want to interject here for a second about the perfumes. None of these is on the label. All it says is ‘perfume’ or ‘fragrance’.
MARK SNELLER: Right! Because it’s proprietary.
DEBRA: There’s no ingredients. It’s all proprietary. I mean, perfume doesn’t sound like a carcinogen that it is going to cause cancer, but listen to what he just said. What was it? A dozen carcinogens, did you say?
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, up to a dozen, yeah. And you take the plug-in air fresheners. I analyzed a home just recently and a man collected antiquities. He trailed around the world. He had these antiquities within his home and his house maid suggested that he has plug-in air fresheners to make everything fine. I come in there. I run air analysis in his home and I find millions and millions of these little microscopic particles of organic solvents that are in the carpeting, that are in every room of the house, every closet of the house that originated from the air fresheners. I told him that he needed to cease and desist because they’re going to affect his antiquities. Some people like them fine.
The point is not to stop everything. That’s not my philosophy, but realize what you’re being exposed to and cut back and to save money. This is really my reason for being and reason for writing this book – save people money, save hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year on doctors visit and the time that you spend at the doctor’s office and traveling. You won’t need medical care if you just take care of yourself at home. I’m serious.
DEBRA: I agree. We need to take a break. Wait, wait. We need to take a break. We’ll be right back. We can continue to talk about this. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, very enthusiastic about his topic of indoor air. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living.
Well, before the break, we were talking about how many millions of dollars could be saved from people reducing indoor air quality. And that’s actually consistent with studies that I’ve seen that said that something like 70% of – I’m trying to remember the number, 70% of all illness that require medical attention is based one exposure to toxic chemicals actually as we go about our daily life and that it could be $5 billion of savings collectively per year in America if we were to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals and consumer products.
MARK SNELLER: I totally agree with that? And we never did get to the symptoms. I want to touch on, if I may, a couple of items in this segment in terms of symptoms, the obvious allergy symptoms of sneezing and coughing and itching and watering eyes. And this includes the pets too of course.
But what’s interesting is that our exposure to these volatile organic compounds (and let’s just stick with the gas part right now) results frequently in headaches, depression and mood swings. So if you wake up in a lousy mood, it may not be your fault. How is that? It might be what…
DEBRA: Exactly! I had that experience in my life. I’m a pretty cheerful person. But I just wanted to tell a story because this so relates directly to indoor air quality.
Many, many years ago when I was back in my early twenties, I used to be engage to a man who lived – I lived in Oakland, California at the time. He lived in Berkeley, California. And in Berkeley, California as in probably a lot of cities with old houses – big, old houses. There are a lot of big, old houses that had been split up into apartments. And so the apartments are not made quite like a regular apartment building would be because they’ve been remodeled by various different people. Some are up to code and some are not.
And so this apartment where he lived is in a beautiful, old house. Great architecture and it had a kerosene heater in it. It was just one kerosene heater in the living room and it had open flames in it like a fireplace. You could see the flames inside the kerosene heater.
We would get along just fine when we were someplace else, but when we were in his apartment, we were depressed, we would argue with each other. It was just like not a good situation at all.
We finally broke up. We were engaged to be married and we finally broke up. A couple of years later – this was before knew anything about toxic chemicals. A couple of years later, I had learned that a lot of what was going on with me was reactions to toxic chemicals and I was working for a doctor. This man came to my doctor’s office and he said to me, “I want to tell you that I realized that what was going on with me was exposure to toxic chemicals, that that was what was causing us to fight like that in my apartment.” He said, “It had nothing to do with you.”
MARK SNELLER: Perfect! Yeah, yeah. I mean, how many marriages are based on that disintegrate from that today?
Debra; Yeah! I mean, he was just so sorry and he wanted to talk to me about how he could get the toxic chemicals out of his body and all these things because he could see the damage that it had done to us.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah. It’s a story that repeats itself on a daily basis in many households. The mood swings happen in children. They’re very sensitive to these things too. So if you see your child or your spouse having a mood swing for some reason, figure out if they just used a lot of hair spray or there’s a lot of fragrance and possibly what their last meal consisted of or if there’s headaches. You might see if there’s an incoming storm and there’s a drop in barometric pressure. There are a lot of variables there too. I just wanted to mention that.
Now, I would could your listeners to the following, to highlight what I’m saying. Take all the products that are underneath your bathroom sink and your kitchen sink and your laundry room, take them all and put them all into one place and add up the cost on all of those products.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s really helpful.
MARK SNELLER: How many of them have volatile organic compounds in them and petroleum distillates? And now add up the cost of a jar or a bottle of concentrated lemon juice, a gallon of vinegar, baking soda and borax. The latter will cost you $10 and will probably last you half a year. The former will cost you $200 or $300 and would be gone overnight.
So now, you can replace everything with – in 90% of the cases, for your laundry detergent, you can use borax. Baking soda, you can use for your clothes, softener, anti-static. There’s a way to use vinegar for that. Fresh lemons, you can use in your showers to remove lime as well as vinegar.
And vinegar is a wonderful disinfectant. But it can’t be called a pesticide or bactericide because it’s basically a naturally occurring product. Same thing with borax, like 20 Mule Team Borax. It’s a naturally occurring product, so by definition, it can’t be called a pesticide. There are other regulations involved in the nomenclature.
But these four items, you can polish your furniture, sanitize and clean your toilet, the sinks, on and on and on, do your laundry and do your dishes and sanitize and sterilize your kitchen after you cut up chicken, you get the salmonella off of that. You need to use it for your refrigerator and clean up the ten areas in your refrigerator that are problematic especially on the doors and like that.
These four items replace the hundreds of dollars of organic solvents and volatile organic compound-producing substances that you have. As far as personal care products…
DEBRA: Wait! We have to go to break again. So let’s take the personal care products after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD. We’re talking about indoor air quality. I want to say those are exactly the four things I clean my house with, so you must’ve been reading my books. But they are, those are the things to use instead of all these toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, my guest is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living.
Before the break, you wanted to start talking about personal care products, so let’s go.
MARK SNELLER: Personal care products, be really careful about them especially the types that are aerosolized. And again, I’m not saying quit everything cold turkey, but I am saying that use it wisely. If you’re going to use a hair spray or some kind of aerosol, make sure it’s a pump spray or an aerosol can. The latter makes microglobules that travels through the air space and get circulated throughout the home. So use it sparingly. Keep the fan on if you have one in the bathroom to exhaust that air too.
Much of this is really insidious. We’re sold a lot of things. We get perfume in the mail, we’re sprayed with perfume in department stores. Indeed, we use perfume laundry detergent and dry our sheets. Why?
DEBRA: Yeah. Why? I would like to know why they think that we need to have all that perfume?
MARK SNELLER: Because it’s a sellers’ market. The perfume industry is like the sugar industry, it’s like the petroleum industry, it’s an industry. And so they’re out to sell their product. And so you’re going to wash your sheets and pillowcases with this fragrance and then you’re going to sleep in it. It makes no sense.
DEBRA: It makes no sense.
MARK SNELLER: But why? Because it smells good, you’re going to get a better sleep? It never worked for me. I mean, I’ve got other variables going on when I sleep and it has nothing to do with the fragrance.
So it’s all insidious. It’s permeating through our society and our age and the marketing skills and our ease of exposure through television and various marketing plans and ads and like that. So it behooves us as individuals to wise up and just say, “No, I’m not going to buy products out of petroleum distillates. I’m not going to do this and that. I’m just going to stick with some basic products and do a little bit of research as necessary.” Read your books, read my book. That’s going to change lives and it’s going to save a lot of money not only in terms of purchases and in terms of expenses – doctors visits, time…
DEBRA: Time lost from working when you’re sick.
MARK SNELLER: …argumentation, depression, headaches, better health, better lifestyle, the whole thing. And it’s simple to do.
DEBRA: It’s so simple. It really is very, very simple. I remember back more than 30 years when I was first faced with this question of, “Well, where are the chemicals and what do I do?”, there weren’t any books like mine, there weren’t any websites like mine, nobody has done the research that you’ve done. But I figured it out.
And now that I’ve figured it out, it’s so easy. It really is so easy. It’s just a matter of deciding that you’re going to get the toxic chemicals out of your indoor space and finding out what can you use instead of this that is less toxic and it really becomes second-nature, it really does. I really find that living this way is actually more pleasurable and enjoyable than living with toxic chemicals.
There was a point where I felt like in my mind, I just wanted to put a little skull and cross bones on everything that was toxic. I kind of imagine myself going to the grocery store, putting a skull and cross bones on all the toxic foods and all the toxic products. I think one day, that would be fun, to just go into a grocery store and start doing that.
MARK SNELLER: I would just do the same thing to what used to be underneath my sink and in my laundry room. You take them out and you’re amazed at the number of jars and bottles and cans. Some of them aren’t even properly sealed, some of them are leaking and so on and so forth.
I mean, the kitchen is the worst room for the home for particles. The laundry room is probably the worst room in the home for VOC’s – that and the master bathroom because the master bathroom has of course your fragrances and perfumes. Everything is perfumed in the bathroom and then in the laundry room, everything is perfumed.
And so the highest concentration – I’ve got different machines and devices that measure VOC levels, volatile organic compounds. The laundry room typically has the highest VOC level in the home. It’s a confined space. There’s no air ventilation usually other than, say, through the dryer, but that really doesn’t count for air escaping from the air proper.
So you have then the VOCs there. You’re standing there and you’re working there and you’re exposed, you’re there. Don’t buy perfume detergent. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to buy commercial detergent. What borax does, 20 Mule Team Borax, what that does is boric acid ties up the hard water in the washing machine. So it takes out the hardness of the water and allows the detergent (a small amount of detergent if you will, half as much as you usually use, even less than that) to actually penetrate. It will bind up with the calcium and the magnesium and the lime. It goes through directly to the clothes and cleans it thoroughly. And then in the rinse cycle, you throw in some baking soda, which is an odor remover, borax along and you’re set.
DEBRA: Yeah!
MARK SNELLER: You used a cheap product to tie up the hard water and then you use less soap to get to the detergent because you don’t need as much, you’ve got clean clothes and you’re good to go.
DEBRA: See, saving money all around. We only actually have just about five minutes left of the show. Didn’t that go by fast? Amazingly fast. You mentioned the refrigerator before. Tell us more about that.
MARK SNELLER: Well, we talked about the surfaces, the handles, the sides, those needs to be wiped on a regular basis. Cold and flu are transmitted, we’re believing now through contact more than through sneezing for a lot of reasons. And so contacting a surface, shopping carts, railing in the supermarkets, at home, the refrigerator handle, microwave handle and then sticking your fingers in your orifices, in your nose, in your mouth (as humans, we do this), we should cease and desist that habit. And so that’s how the bacteria and the viruses are transmitted – aside of course from salmonella. That’s a little different story.
Inside the refrigerator, check the seals, behind the seals. If it’s green, chances are it’s going to be a mold called cladosporium that eats seal and it can become airborne and it’s allergenic. It’s a naturally-occurring mold in those seals and in air ventilation system.
The vegetable tray needs to be cleaned out. As a matter of fact, take everything out of the refrigerator, open up your jars and cans and see what’s spoiled and rotten. Throw it out right then and there. When you move the refrigerator, you’ll find things that you lost before. You got to clean that out, make sure your fan is clean. On top of the refrigerator, it’s usually sitting there, the stove, so it’s going to be full of grease. That’s got to be cleaned off too. Just go through the unit and clean it up. Clean up the floor underneath it. Clean up the walls behind it and like that. And throw out the bad food. There are a number of things to look for that I talk about in the book.
That one, when I really started exploring the refrigerator, I said, “Nah, what could be wrong with the refrigerator?” I think the list was at ten and it’s still counting. I’m finding new discoveries as far as the refrigerator are concerned.
So its surfaces are really important. And cleaning surfaces, you can use vinegar. Dilute chlorine bleach, a 1:10 is fine. Vinegar works just as well to remove the salmonella out of the sinks, out of the surfaces. And again, it’s a very powerful bactericide and virucide, but it can’t be advertised as such. So it’s just word of mouth that helps the spread. And it’s white distilled vinegar that we would normally use to remove the stains.
DEBRA: That’s what I use.
MARK SNELLER: There we go!
DEBRA: And you can buy vinegar in gallon-sized jugs. You don’t have to buy a bunch of little bottles of vinegar. I have probably three or four gallons of it sitting under my kitchen sink right now. You can just go to some discount warehouse kind of store where they sell things in bulk. Even at the supermarket, I think you can buy a gallon.
MARK SNELLER: I think I just pay $2.5 or something like that for a gallon.
DEBRA: Yeah, it’s very inexpensive.
MARK SNELLER: The white distilled vinegar, you can’t buy enough of it for cleaning. The list is endless. As a matter of fact, I ran across a book in the store the other day. They had over a thousand uses for vinegar.
DEBRA: I think I have a book like that.
MARK SNELLER: And a hundred uses for baking soda. It’s endless!
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. It is. I mean, if you just have vinegar in baking soda, you can do anything with it. I remember, my very first book even before my first published book, my first self-published book, a friend of mine was just glancing through it and he said, “The name of this book should be ‘You Can Do Anything with Baking Soda’” because that was the first book that I wrote about.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, on clothe, drain, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, it’s just a simple, simple thing. If you have vinegar and baking soda in your house, you can do almost anything.
So, wow!
MARK SNELLER: Wow!
DEBRA: What a treat this has been to have you here today. We’ve got less than two minutes left.
MARK SNELLER: Oh, thank you. GlobalGreenAir.com, I have to promote that new website. Go find out about the book, GlobalGreenAir.com. Read your newsletter and listen to your radio show. This has really been an honor and a pleasure to be with you today.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I hope you’ll come back because there’s so much information we can talk about in your book. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more and I’ll be back tomorrow.
All Natural Area Rugs and Yoga Mats
My guest today is Kevin Aylward co-founder and Owner of Prairie Rugs and Yogasana. We’ll be talking about how they produce high quality natural fiber area rugs and yoga mats in a sustainable way, and the trend toward sustainable home furnishings. After graduation from the University of Minnesota, Kevin began a career in sales and marketing in home furnishings. In 1996 he co-founded Prairie Rugs a manufacturer of eco-friendly cotton area rugs hand-made in India. In 2005 he became sole owner of Prairie Rugs, Inc., which was focused on eco-sustainable manufacturing before the ‘green’ movement became fashionable. Prairie Rugs is the only rug company in the U.S. that is a Founding Member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council. Working with his partner in India they used their expertise in cotton weaving to make a mat that is dedicated to the practice of Yoga. This seemed like a natural progression because the region of India where the cotton rugs are made is also the area where yoga originated. A new company named Yogasana began production of cotton yoga mats in December 2010. They have sold their cotton yoga mats to yogi in 30 countries around the world. www.prairierugs.com | www.yogasanamats.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
All Natural Area Rugs and Yoga Mats
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kevin Aylward
Date of Broadcast: February 3, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world because there are toxic chemicals all around us in all kinds of consumer products in our homes, in our bodies, in the water we drink, in schools and workplaces and public spaces… everywhere! But we can create our own sanctuary, so to speak, of a toxic-free environment in our own homes. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies and we can surround the places we live and work and fill the places we live and work with lovely, toxic-free products.
Today is Monday, February 3rd 2014. And we’ve got a nice overcast late winter, early spring day going on here in Clearwater, Florida. We’re going to be talking about rugs and yoga mats today, area rugs and yoga mats. And these particular ones are made in a very sustainable and toxic-free way and an example of one of those kinds of products that I just—
There are, I would say, a gradient of what’s toxic-free. And at the very bottom—or I shouldn’t say at the bottom because nothing that’s toxic-free is at the bottom. But there are toxic-free in that you would just take a standard product that might be toxic, like paint for example, and just make it out of non-toxic chemicals, and it’s toxic-free. But way at the top of the scale would be a product that’s not only free from toxic chemicals, but it’s also good for nature, the environment, our health, our life, as well as being free from toxic chemicals. And that’s the level of product that we’re going to be talking about today.
My guest is Kevin Aylward. He’s the Co-founder and Owner of Prairie rugs and another separate business called Yogasana. Prairie Rugs makes area rugs. And Yogasana makes yoga mats in actually the ancient region where yoga had its origin.
And so we’re going to be talking about how they do this in a sustainable way.
Thanks for being on the show, Kevin.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Thank you, Debra. Greetings from snowy and cold Minnesota.
DEBRA: I was just thinking that. You must be freezing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the news right before we came on. They were talking about how there’s another blast. And I have a friend who’s going to Minnesota on Wednesday, and I was thinking,
“Oh, he’d better bring warm clothes.” What’s the temperature there?
KEVIN AYLWARD: Oh, it’s zero one above, I’m not sure, pumping around zero. But that seems relatively moderate compared to what it’s been, the sub-zero last that we’ve got. You’ve heard about the polar vortex. So we’re taking the brunt of that a couple, two or three, times.
So, this is one of the colder winters I can remember. But we’re hardy up here, and we don’t complain as you know [inaudible 03:18].
DEBRA: Good! That’s right, that’s right.
KEVIN AYLWARD: We’re very stoic. We’re very stoic.
DEBRA: We’re hovering around 70 here.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, if we could split the difference, Debra, we’d both be relatively comfortable.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m sitting here in a little tank top and Capri pants.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Good! Well, we’re waiting for spring. So there we go.
DEBRA: Good, good.
So, tell me. This is a very unusual thing that you’ve been doing. You didn’t start doing this just because the green movement came along. You’ve been doing your area rugs since 1996, right, before anybody was talking about this. Tell me about your background and how you came to do this unusual thing when you decided to do it.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, I guess the genesis of the story really, I guess, goes back to when I married a woman from India. My wife is from India. And I graduated from Delhi University. And we moved to the States when we met. And she introduced me to my partner, my original partner, with Prairie Rugs. He was also from India. And he had the manufacturer relationship there.
And we began Prairie Rugs back then.
But I guess the reason that we weren’t late to the green manufacturing game, why it began that way I think is because which are called rag rugs—or the trade name for them is chindi rugs (and chindi is a Hindi word for “rags”—my Indian wife who was Hindi speaker tells me the manufacturing process is inherently sustainable. The base product is recycled—recycled cotton rags.
And while it’s always been important to me, I don’t think there wasn’t much of a call for green home furnishings when we began. We always leaned in that direction and tried t keep the supply chain manufacturing as eco-responsible as possible.
And the trend then developed, and we just played to our strength in that point.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I also want to just commend you for—1996, so you’ve been married for quite a while.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Oh, much longer! We’ve been married for 26 years.
DEBRA: Congratulations!
KEVIN AYLWARD: Thank you, thank you.
DEBRA: And I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing a business that combines both your cultures, and it’s something that you’ve integrated. I just think that’s wonderful.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, thank you. Thank you.
DEBRA: So, let’s see. Tell us then what happened that you ended up—you were doing Prairie Rugs for quite a long time before you decided to also make yoga mats.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yeah! Well, maybe I’ll take you to the Prairie Rugs genesis a little bit first if that’s alright.
DEBRA: That’s fine, that’s fine.
KEVIN AYLWARD: I’ll tell you how the rugs are made. We visit the manufacturing facility in India at least once a year (sometimes more). And as I mentioned, the process is inherently sustainable because we’re using recycled materials. I’ve pushed and I’ve worked with my manufacturing partners there to try and increase the ways and means we’re doing to make it more eco-friendly.
That’s not something that’s necessarily that well-known or sought after in India. As I mentioned rag rug-making was using recycled materials. There is no power. There is no child labor. That’s the nature of the process.
But we wanted to take it even beyond there and find out if there are ways and means in the manufacturing process where we could improve things and make it more eco-sustainable.
So basically, the cotton scrap is material that’s bought from mills. And it’s pre-consumer. It’s residual cotton. It’s been destined for making bedding and things like that.
So, we buy it from the mills in large bales. And then it’s sorted. And there’s lots of things in the bales. Sometimes, not all of it is cotton. There could be other scraps of this and that. So it’s all sorted out. And the better grades are used. They’re graded I think one through eight or something like that. So we’d use grade six through one in our rugs.
And then, it’s washed and cleaned. And one of the processes that we changed is, initially, they were using bleach to clean the cotton, and we switched to a biodegradable detergent which is more eco-friendly. So we changed that process.
And then, the cotton is dyed all by hand. And then after it’s dyed, it is washed—and not only once, not only twice, but three times, triple-washed in separate basins of water (each clean). And then, within each basin, they’re moving the cotton strips around to try and get the residual dye off of them, and then to put it into the next basin and the third basin.
And then, finally, it’s put out to dry in the hot Indian sun.
After it’s dried, it’s issued to weavers. The weaving is all done by hand, manually.
And then, there’s kind of a final inspection. They’re sort of cutting off the tabs and the little imperfections on the mats and on the rugs too.
And then they’re packaged in India and sent to us here.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. But after the break, I want to ask you to elaborate on some of the points that you just described because you’re doing a lot of unusual things that I want to hear more about.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Great!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kevin Aylward. He is from Prairie Rugs and Yogasana Eco Yoga Mats that are made sustainably in India. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kevin Aylward, co-founder and owner of Prairie Rugs and Yogasana. They make these rugs in India by sustainable methods.
Kevin, I was really interested to read on your website, you were talking about that the fabrics are hand-dyed. Now, when you say hand-dyed, I think you’re talking about dyed by hand like a person putting a fabric in a pot and not in a factory. But are they actually putting their hands in that? I was thinking as you were talking, “Well, I wonder if they…?”
KEVIN AYLWARD: No. No, no. No, not at all. They’re dyed by hand meaning it’s hand labor. It’s a manual process, not a mechanical process. I’m looking at a picture of one of our dyers right now, and it is in a pot heated with wood. And he uses a long pole to mix the cotton strips around within the pot.
So, it is all by hand. It is not by the manipulation of the cotton. And the dye bath is by hand, not by machine. I guess that’s what I meant by hand-dyed.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, the reason that I thought of that is because it also says on your website that the water, after rinsing the dying process—what does it say exactly? “The residual dye water is used to irrigate vegetables and mango trees that surround the manufacturing plant.” So your dyes must be really non-toxic?
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yes, they are, they are. Now there’s an interesting story how I found this out. I didn’t know that originally.
Years ago, I was calling on a group of stores, natural food stores, out in Colorado that was eventually bought by Whole Foods. Whole Foods owns all the natural food stores as you know. But at any rate, this is a chain. And I was trying to sell my rugs to them.
And the buyer asked me, “What do you do with the residual dye water after it goes through the dying process?” I said, “No one has ever asked me that question. I really don’t know.” I told her, “I don’t know. I’ll find out for you.”
So, I contacted my partner in India, I said, “What do we do with the dye water? Don’t tell me we’re dumping it into the Ganges.”
He said, “No, no. It isn’t. It’s treated. And It is used to irrigate our vegetables” that surround his manufacturing facility and groves of mango trees.
I was so happy that I could get back to this buyer and tell her that because that is a true story. It’s absolutely true.
DEBRA: Well, it just reflects the care that goes into every step. I mean, I can just see this whole process of the cotton being grown. Your cotton is grown right there somewhere nearby, isn’t it? And then, it goes…
KEVIN AYLWARD: It’s nearby. We don’t know exactly because there’s no source of the cotton coming from the mills. But we know it’s coming from Northern India is where it is. And we’re very familiar with the mill and their reputation. We feel very confident about the source of the cotton.
DEBRA: So you have this cotton, and it’s being grown nearby. And then, it gets turned into this fabric that is used to make bedding. And then, that fabric has some scraps. And then the scraps come to you and you make another product. You make these wonderful area rugs and yoga mats. And then, whatever is left over, like your residual dye water, it just goes on to do something else—to water the vegetables. And probably the workers eat those vegetables and those mangoes.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yes!
DEBRA: Everything is just very integrated into your natural system.
KEVIN AYLWARD: That’s all true. That is all true. And we feel very good about the way the workers are being treated. Aside from the due diligence that I’ve done with my partner over there, we did something interesting a few years ago. As I mentioned, my wife is from India. So I engaged my partner in the office while she went out and talked to the workers in Hindi, especially the women. I could try and do the same thing, but may not get the same answer that she would—it’s actually a woman talking to a woman. And we feel very good about how they’re being treated and that healthcare is provided for their familiar. So the karma is good. The karma is good.
DEBRA: Good karma. You know, one of the things that I like about products like yours that have a story like this where everything that you’re doing is interwoven in nature is similar to the mattress that I sleep on which is made out of wool. It’s made by a company called Shepherd’s Dream.
And when I got this mattress, I lived in Northern California, maybe an hour away from where they actually made them. And all the wool the sheep that provided the wool was all in a very local area. In fact, I worked with them to write the first organic wool standards for their growers.
I still sleep on this mattress. And I don’t know, it’s been 15 years or something, but it’s just like new. And I can see a picture in my mind of the sheep. I know where the sheep were raised. I know the room where this mattress was sewn. I had slept on mattresses in this workspace. And it’s like all that interconnection is there as part of the experience of my having this mattress.
And now that I know the story about your rugs, if I had one of your rugs on my floor, that whole story will be there in the rug.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s really nice to hear. And maybe that segways a little bit into the genesis of this second company I have that you mentioned. In the west, it’s called Yogasana. In the east…
DEBRA: Well, before we go talk about that, we’re going to have to go to break in just a few seconds. So let’s take a break and start the story when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Let’s give Kevin’s website. It’s PrairieRugs.com. And the business we’re about to talk about is YogasanaMats.com. And you can go to my website, Toxic Free Talk Radio, and find out more about this radio show and listen to all the radio shows from the past. We’ll be right back!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kevin Aylward. He’s the founder and owner of Prairie Rugs and Yogasana.
Okay, Kevin, tell us about Yogasana. I know this is what you most want to talk about.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, it’s true, Debra. It is my passion, it is. Well, I co-founded Prairie Rugs with two other partners; now I’m the sole owner of the company. Yogasana—which by the way, in the East, it’s pronounced, Yogasana. In the west, it’s Yogasana. Either is correct. I guess I go with the Eastern pronunciation, but either is correct.
This is something that I founded along with my partner in India—I conceived of, and he helped execute. So, the story begins where I was approached by several companies here—one even quite large one—that makes yoga mats. And they asked us to weave a cotton mat for them. When it comes to weaving cotton in India, that is our specialty. We’re known pretty well for that within the industry, within the trade.
So, I looked in that. I could’ve done that. And this would’ve been for their brand. And I thought, “Rather than building up their brand, why don’t we do our own?”
DEBRA: I want to ask you a question. What is unique about a yoga mat that’s separate and distinct from an area rug? If I were practicing yoga, why wouldn’t I just get one of your Prairie rugs?
KEVIN AYLWARD: Very good question. And I began with that premise. So we looked at Prairie Rugs, and I even made some samples, which I have. They’re 2 x 6 which is the normal size of yoga mats. They’re 24’ wide by 72’ long. 68’ is actually the standard. We went to 72 inches.
And I quickly found amongst myself and others who were much more adept at yoga than I am that the product was not suited. Number one, it’s too heavy. A 2 x 6 Prairie rug weights almost 8 lbs. It’s quite heavy, too heavy. And second, the cotton strips are not a good texture, not a good surface for yoga practice. It’s too slippery. It’s too slippery, too heavy.
DEBRA: Hmmm… okay, good.
KEVIN AYLWARD: So, we knew that wouldn’t work. So we started out with a blank sheet. Rather than taking an existing product which is a flat weave—Prairie Rugs would be considered a flat weave or a duree (we know cotton durees are a flat weave)—rather than taking one of those and repurposing it as a yoga mat or call it a yoga mat essentially, I said to my partner, “Let’s try and design a cotton rug for yoga—blank sheet, the best materials, the best weave.”
So, the base material is different than our Prairie Rug for Yogasana. It’s more of a thread than it is the cotton strips.
So, he made some samples. I said, “Make us some samples, 2 x 6.” We brought them over, and I gave them to friends of mine who are serious yogis and those that practice different styles of yoga—hot yoga, hatha yoga, vinyasa, the flow types of yoga, restorative yoga, different types. And then, I had them review the mat and its performance.
I gave them a sheet of 15 different questions. How does it work for grip and color and washability and weight and size and all these kinds of things.
And interestingly enough, he did the same thing with some yogis in India. We wanted to get both perspectives on that.
And then, out of those reviews and reports, we refined the product and developed it to what it is today which is a 2 x 6, 24” x 72” yoga or a cotton composition which we believe is the most eco-sustainable yoga mat on the planet.
DEBRA: So, when you say cotton composition, the first thing I think is that there’s some synthetic material in it. But no, it’s 100% cotton. So how is that cotton different from the cotton that’s in the rug?
KEVIN AYLWARD: It’s different. The cotton in the rug are cotton strips. I mentioned we buy them from the mills. They’re about 18” long and about an inch to an inch and a quarter wide. They’re a strip of cotton.
The cotton in our mat is actually a thread. It’s a cotton thread. So the source is different.
DEBRA: Oh, I see.
KEVIN AYLWARD: So, it’s a different source. And the manufacturing process is slightly different. But it is all cotton. It’s 100% cotton—cotton warp, cotton weft. Cotton composition, it’s strictly composed of cotton.
DEBRA: Yes, I got it. I got it.
KEVIN AYLWARD: A hundred percent, yeah.
DEBRA: I want to hear more about that you don’t use any electricity. I’m looking at a picture on the Yogasana site of a man weaving. He’s in a very open air kind of place with no walls. And so, you mentioned using coal before, but this is very much not a factory.
KEVIN AYLWARD: It’s not. It’s more of a cottage industry because it is an organized space where we’re making the mats and the rugs. But there’s no electricity being used. Most of the processes are done by hand manually. The weaving is on a manual loom. The dying is with coal-fired vat of dye. The warp thread is stretched just by hand. They put up two posts and run the warp between that and stretch it out. And the cotton dries in the sun. The water comes from a well on the site.
I get asked often about the question of child labor. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of child labor in India; there’s a lot. Oftentimes, it’s cottage industry, people making things at home. But this product does not lend itself to work by children. It’s more heavy-lifting and more of a rigorous process, so there is no child labor involved at all.
And so, it is very much of a hand-made process, again, inherently in making these kinds of products.
DEBRA: Again, we need to go to break very soon. But I was just thinking about the tradition of all these handcraft work in India and the spiritual roots of that and Gandhi setting up these villages. Maybe you could tell us more about that after the break.
And I also want to hear about the Sustainable Furnishings Council.
So, we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Kevin Aylward. And his website PrairieRugs.com or YogasanaMats.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Kevin Aylward. And we’re talking about making rugs and yoga mats in India. He’s the owner of Prairie Rugs and Yogasana. And the websites are PrairieRugs.com and YogasanaMats.com.
So Kevin, tell us more about the tradition of handcrafts and how India got set up that way.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yeah, that’s a really important part of the story. Weaving has been a tradition in India for thousands of years. And I think really, on the rug side—and you mentioned Gandhi before the break—[Gandhi] talked to the Indian population about the importance of home-spun clothe to try and help liberate the Indian population from the reliance on cloth coming from England before their independence, to be self-sufficient, self-reliant that way. And that became a huge movement.
Now, with regards to my yoga mats, people say, “Well, how did the idea begin, the genesis of that idea?” And in a way, it really began with this 15th century saint from India. He was a mystic poet and saint called Kabir. He was a poet, a saint. But his profession was a weaver. He was a weaver by profession. That’s how he made his living to be self-sufficient.
And weaving cloth in this part of northern India has been a tradition for thousands of years. The city we’re situated there is a very old city. It’s one of the oldest cities in the world. The city’s history dates back up 10,000 years if you can imagine that. It’s a city, a place, where Hinduism was founded and is also sacred to Buddhism. So it’s steep in mysticism and spirituality.
So, if you think about the weaving tradition and the spiritual tradition, it’s the place where yoga really began. So it seems like a natural progression for us to make this mat there.
And so, we talked about how it’s made and the traditions on which it derives from. But the final piece is—and I didn’t mention this, this is really important—that each mat that is made, it takes 10 days to make each mat including three days of weaving, three days on the loom. After which, the master weaver who made the mat signs a signature card that stays with the mat. And this way, it forms a connection between the weaver and the yoga who is eventually going to use this mat—from his hands to her hands in most cases.
I thought that was really important. I wanted to get that in.
DEBRA: I think it’s really important too. There’s such a connection that occurs with products like yours between the earth and the artisan and the user that is totally gone in industrialized products. You have no idea where the material comes from. A machine is making it. There’s a whole tradition of handcrafted things, having heart to them. And you’ve just got it all the way down the line. I can really see that your yoga mats would be very special to somebody who does yoga practice and knowing that they’re made in that place where yoga was developed. It’s all part of the story.
Everything that you’re doing just down the line, I wish that every product was made like yours, with the care and the thoughtfulness into sustainability not only in materials but in terms of history and human connection and connecting the user with the entire process.
And having pictures on your site and all those kinds of things, it’s just… just, just… I’m sitting here smiling.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, thank you, Debra. It’s really important me.
And the other thing that we’re doing which is the key to the sustaining this new company, Yogasana, is we have to give back.
We’re giving back to support the education of the production workers’ children. My wife is involved with this foundation and my partner’s wife in India. We call it Yogasana Circle. A portion of every mat that we sell goes towards this cause. And when a yogi buys a mat online, they can make an additional donation if they chose.
And a hundred percent of what is given goes towards our foundation called Yogasana Circle. There’s nothing lost in transfer.
There’s no administration. Every dime, every penny goes towards this.
So, right now, we’re supporting school supplies for the children of the workers—their books and pencils and backpacks and uniforms and things like that. But as the company grows, we’d love to say, one day, that we’re going to be able to build a school over there for these kids.
Education is really important. It’s really important to me. And it’s especially important to my wife coming from India and recognizing how that empowers the youth.
So, that foundation empowers Yogasana. That’s our energy source. So it’s really, really important to us.
DEBRA: How wonderful! Tell us about the Sustainable Furnishings Council. You were one of the first founding members and the only rug company in the United States that’s a founding member.
KEVIN AYLWARD: That’s correct! And the reason is, when the Sustainable Furnishings Council began in 2006, as I’ve mentioned, I had an interest in sustainability, so it was natural for me to sign on. And before it was really popularized, I signed on before any other rug company signed on. So even though I’m a very small company—Prairie Rugs is small—I’m the only rug company in the US that’s a founding member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council.
DEBRA: And what does the Sustainable Furnishings Council do?
KEVIN AYLWARD: Well, what it is, it’s an organization that supports sustainable manufacturing and retailing methods in home furnishing. And while they’re not a third-party certifier like others are, they’re basically rallying around a membership that has the same vision in terms of purveying sustainable furnishings if you’re a retailer or making or using sustainable methods if you’re a manufacturer or a distributor.
And basically, what’s required of me—there’s a membership required, a yearly membership—I have to sign an affidavit each year stating that the methods that we’re suggesting that we use are indeed true. And that membership has to be maintained year after year.
So, I love the idea initially. I thought that they were heading the right direction. It was natural for us because, as I’ve mentioned, our rugs are inherently. And they’re doing very good work, so that’s why I support them.
DEBRA: Good! I’m happy to see that they’re there in the industry so that people can have a resource and belong to something that supports sustainability.
So, we only have a few minutes left on the show. Didn’t that go by fast?
KEVIN AYLWARD: It did for me. I could talk on and on about this. As I’ve said, it’s my passion.
DEBRA: Well, is there anything that you want to make sure that you say that you haven’t said in the next three minutes?
KEVIN AYLWARD: Basically, as I’ve mentioned, Prairie rugs are really important to me and we continue to do that. The yoga mats, we are just launching and trying to gain a foothold in it.
Yoga is growing tremendously. I’m happy to say that we have now sold our mats to yogis in about 30 countries around the world. I just got an order from South Africa this week, from Brazil. We’re selling to Australia, New Zealand and Europe. It’s really growing nicely.
And the feedback, the testimonials that I get are just heartwarming. I invite anyone to go on our website or our Facebook page (you can navigate that from our website), and read some of the testimonials that we are getting from yogis who own our mat.
And I’m just speechless. The kind words that they’re saying about what this mat has done for their practice. It just makes me cry. We feel really good about that.
DEBRA: It’s so incongruous to do yoga on a plastic yoga mat.
KEVIN AYLWARD: I think so.
DEBRA: Yeah! I mean, yoga is so spiritual. It’s about connecting with your body and nature that to then put that smelly artificial thing there and have that be the base of a spiritual practice, this doesn’t make sense to me. So that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s so incredible that you’re doing this, because it’s so natural to the practice.
KEVIN AYLWARD: It’s traditional. It’s classic. And you’re right, the origin of yoga predates the advent of plastic.
DEBRA: Yes! They must’ve used something before a plastic mat.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Yeah! They did yoga on the ground. They did yoga on cotton and wool rug.
So, this is not a new idea that we’re doing. It’s a very, very old idea. This is a traditional idea. We’re trying to respect those traditions.
DEBRA: And I think you’re doing a great job. Sorry to cut you off, but the show’s going to be over in a few seconds. I just wanted to thank you so much for being here on the show and telling us what you’re doing. I think it’s fabulous.
KEVIN AYLWARD: Thank you very much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’ll be back tomorrow!
Balloons
Question from Becky
Do balloons contain toxic or hazardous substances that are harmful to children?
Debra’s Answer
There are basically two types of balloons that are commonly purchased for parties or gifts.
The old-fashioned rubber balloons that stretch and come in bright colors are made of natural latex tapped from rubber trees
The more modern shiny balloons come from the NASA Space Mission. In the balloon industry they are called “foil balloons” because they are made of a nylon sheet, coated on one side with polyethylene and a thin layer of metal on the other side.
Neither of these types of balloons have materials that are particularly toxic.
My only concern is that many people are allergic to latex. And I don’t know what type of colorant or inks are use. These may contain heavy metals.
So as long as your children don’t chew on them, and they are not allergic to latex, I think balloons are fine.
How to Grow Organic Food in Small Spaces: Container & Vertical Gardening
My guest Jai McFall is the owner of Organic Living for All, my local organic nursery and garden center here in Florida. We’ll be talking about why you should grow your own food as well as how—even if you only have a small garden space or none at all. Jai grew up on an organic farm, where her family grew fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and other farm products. They baked all their own breads, pie’s cakes, and cookies. They canned fruits, vegetables, jams, jellies, and pickles. Jai is a Master Gardener in Michigan and Florida as well as an organic, edible landscape designer. She does everything from full service landscaping to providing healthy plants and soil amendments so customers become able to grow healthy, nutritious and nutrient-dense food in their own back yards. Under Jai’s direction, I have actually been able to grow tasty vegetables in soil that is basically beach sand. Weekends you’ll find her giving classes and tours at her garden center while serving the most delicious iced tea made with herbs from her garden, including naturally sweet stevia. www.organiclivingforall.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Grow Organic Food in Small Spaces: Container & Vertical Gardenin
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Jai McFall
Date of Broadcast: January 29, 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.
There are many, many toxic chemicals around out there. They’re in the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our bodies. But there are also many things that we can do to make our home safe, to make our schools and offices safe, to make our bodies not have toxic chemicals in them.
And that’s what this show’s about. Here, on the show, I interview people who are doing things to make the world a less toxic place and making alternatives available to you so that you can do that in your own life too.
Today is Wednesday, January 29th 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where it’s been raining and getting colder. But it’s a nice winter day here.
And today we’re going to talk about gardening even though it’s the middle of winter. Winter is the time to plan and learn about how to grow your own food. There’s a lot to know. And there are certainly things that we can do to be planning about what we’re going to start doing in the spring, whenever that spring comes wherever you are.
Here in Florida where I am, we’re starting to plant our gardens. In fact, we’ve been planting our gardens because winter is the best time to grow food here in Florida when it isn’t scorchingly hot. But I know that that’s not the same in other parts of the country, in other parts of the world.
So, today, we’re going to talk about growing your own food in your own backyard, especially if you have a very small space and need to grow in containers.
My guest today is Jai McFall. She’s the owner of Organic Living for All which happens to be my local nursery where I buy my organic plants and soil amendments. She gives a lot of workshops on different topics on Saturdays. And she takes tours of her gardens. She serves wonderful organic iced tea with herbs that she grows there in her nursery.
She’s just very, very knowledgeable and has put together all the information about why we should be growing our own food and is making it really practical for those of us here in this place because gardening is a very, very, very local thing.
Hi, Jai! Thanks for being with us today.
JAI MCFALL: Well, hi, Debra. Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: Now, you’ve been on before. You’ve been on before, so we’ve heard your story. But tell it again because it’s been months, and I’m sure that some people are hearing this for the first time. How did you get interested in gardening?
JAI MCFALL: Well, I actually grew up on an organic farm in Michigan where we grew all our own food—meats, fruits, vegetables. We can, we bake. And so we ate home-cooked, home-grown, delicious foods. And so I’ve been a gardener for a long, long time.
And one of the things that I noticed in the ‘70s and ‘70s, people were buying more processed foods, and they were not cooking as much. And so I really became concerned especially because I saw my aunt becoming obese and diabetic. And I saw family members getting sick.
And so, my passion was then, and still is, to help people live better, healthier, and happier lives.
DEBRA: So, what was it like? Tell us what it was like for you to be eating food harvested, and then you prepare. I think that most people don’t even have the idea of what that is. Maybe they saw it in a movie or something. But I’ve never had that experience of growing up on a farm. I was raised on fast food and cans and all those kinds of things.
So, just give us an idea of what that’s like because I think that that is the ideal for each of us. Even though we can’t al live on farms, the idea is to be able to have food that’s grown in our own backyards or a community garden, and then being able to prepare those things, know how to prepare them and enjoy that food.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah, it was wonderful. We had such a large garden. It was probably a full acre. And for dinner, I would just go out and pick whatever was available—green beans, tomatoes, peppers. We’d just go out, take it. And it was really cute because we had a dog whose name was Boo. He was a German Shepherd. He’d go out and eat tomatoes right off the vine.
So, all of us were just eating this fresh food. We’d bring it in, and we’d make our dinner. The potatoes were fresh, the beans—even the meat. We grew our own meat. We would just open the freezer, take out whatever meat we wanted. In the winter, we would we would go to the pantry and take out whatever canned we wanted.
We also had two freezers actually—one for meat, and one for fruits and vegetables. So in the winter, they would be frozen, but they would still be fairly fresh from the garden because we would can them and freeze them immediately.
DEBRA: Yeah. And when you say canned, you’re not talking about a metal tin. You’re talking about canning like in glass jars, right?
JAI MCFALL: Exactly!
DEBRA: Yeah, the old-fashioned way that people used to do them.
JAI MCFALL: The old-fashioned way. We made jams and jellies and pickles and tomato sauce. You name it, we did it. My dad even made some wines that were really potent.
DEBRA: But I just want to comment that this is actually the way people used to live prior to supermarkets. I mean, this was the standard. Everybody had their garden, everybody canned, everybody knew how to do this.
I remember, I grew up in California, and I was always really interested in food. And my father actually taught me how to cook when I was six years old. So I’ve been cooking for very many years. And it was just kind of a natural thing for me.
And my grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived in the Central Valley of California in Fresno where there was a lot of agriculture. And she had a big garden too. So when I would go to my grandmother’s, my grandfather would pick me up and let me pick peaches out of the tree. And my grandmother would send me out with a basket to pick tomatoes off the vine and things like that.
So, I had that experience as a child. And she was always cooking, and I was always sitting next to her. She had a big stool, and I would sit next to her, so I could be at countertop level while she was rolling grape leaves and washing lettuce and all these things that she was doing.
So, there was this constant connection in her life between the garden and the food preparation. And so I got to see a little bit of that at my grandmother’s, but that wasn’t the way my family was because my mother didn’t know how to coo, and my father just knew how to cook foods that were not very healthy. And that’s what I grew up with.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah, yeah. And so many people have grown up that way. We’re so far away from the farms that people don’t even realize that food comes from the ground.
DEBRA: I know! Well, I was going to say my ex-husband, Larry, who’s a very smart, intelligent man did not know where wheat came from. He didn’t know that spaghetti was made from wheat. And he didn’t know where wheat came from. And he’s an educated person.
JAI MCFALL: Exactly!
DEBRA: I had to show him what wheat looked like. And there’s just so many people who really don’t know. I know that there are a lot of programs now for schoolchildren where they’re growing things in gardens just so the children know where the food comes from. I used to think that food came from the supermarket. I really didn’t think that it came from a garden or a farm.
And another thing I want to mention is that about 20 or 25 years ago—or more than that now. Well, 28 years ago—I went and lived out in a forest in California. I had always lived in suburbia or in the city, and I went and lived out in a forest. And in my front yard, I had wild blackberry bushes. It was so wonderful! In the summertime, I would just take my bowl out into the front yard to my wild blackberry bushes and fill it with wild blackberries—ripe, juicy, wild blackberries. And then, I’d pour cream all over them.
That food, if you’ve never had food directly from the wild, or directly from the ground, in your backyard, or from an organic farm, it tastes entirely different.
JAI MCFALL: Absolutely, it does. You’re not only getting all those fresh vitamins and stuff, but you’re also getting minerals directly from the soil as well as the microorganisms. People don’t realize that.
DEBRA: Well, we’re going to talk more about that when we come back from the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is Jai McFall. She’s the owner of Organic Living for All. It’s my local organic nursery.
But you can visit her online at OrganicLivingforAll.com. We’ll be right back to talk more about growing your own food.
DEBRA: You’re listening To Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jai McFall, owner of Organic Living for All. And she’s at OrganicLivingforAll.com. And we’re talking about growing our own food in our own backyard, particularly if you only have a small space. We’re going to be talking about container and vertical gardening.
But first, Jai, I know that you have three specific reasons that you’d like to talk about why it’s important to grow your own food.
So let’s start with pesticides.
JAI MCFALL: Yes, it’s very, very important to know what’s not in the soil that you’re growing your food in, so that you’re not having the pesticides and the herbicides on your food. Most people that I find aren’t really aware that the food in the grocery stores are very toxic, just like the cleaning supplies and the body care products. There are toxins in them. And they can’t be washed off, peeled off, or soaked off.
So, the most ideal thing to do is to get some good, clean soil. And if you get some good organic soil, then you know that it’s not going to have herbicides and pesticides in it.
And then, when you’re feeding your plants properly—I think that’s number two that you were going to talk about…
DEBRA: Well, no. But we could talk about this as part of number one. We’re going to talk about the pesticides, minerals and GMO’s.
JAI MCFALL: Okay, good. Yeah. Debra, you have already posted some things that I’ve sent you. And you’ll tell them how to find those, right?
DEBRA: Right! Yes.
JAI MCFALL: Yes. So, I’ve already sent out the document from 1936 on what the government says about the soil lacking minerals. You could read that there. But because the minerals are not in the soil…
DEBRA: But let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about each one of these because, actually, those documents aren’t up yet. I did post the pictures, but these documents are not up yet. So let’s go ahead and talk about them.
JAI MCFALL: Oh, okay. In 1936, the government released a document that says the soil is badly depleted of minerals< and that the food that we’re eating coming from that soil is starving us no matter how much we eat. And it can’t be remedied until the soil is brought back into proper mineral balance.
Now, that enough is scary. But then they go on to say lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals; but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless.
So, if we’re eating food out of soil that has no minerals, the minerals are not going to be in the food. And because every function of our body depends on having minerals, then our bodies are not going to be functioning properly.
So, we really do need to be feeding our plants minerals with all the minerals that should be in the soil which is 90 or 91 or 92 minerals.
DEBRA: Yeah. Now, how much of supermarket produce is grown on mineralized soil?
JAI MCFALL: I think zero.
DEBRA: I think zero too. This is just so incredibly important. I think that this document, this statement that you’ve just made is so powerful. I just want to say something again. Lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals; lacking minerals, the vitamins are useless. So if we don’t have minerals, all the vitamins that are in our food, our body can’t use.
JAI MCFALL: Right! And if we’re buying vitamins, we’re wasting our money. We need to get those minerals into our bodies.
DEBRA: Right! So, what about if people take mineral supplements? What’s the difference between taking a mineral supplement versus having minerals from your food?
JAI MCFALL: Well, mineral supplements are going to be man-made. So we don’t know where those things come from now.
I’ve seen this on the internet two or three different times, that if you take cornflakes and you roll them out with a rolling pin in a plastic bag, and then you take a magnet and run it along, you will find iron attaching to the magnet. Well, that iron is not absorbable. That’s not what we’re supposed to be putting into our bodies.
DEBRA: So again, what happens when it goes through a plant?
JAI MCFALL: When it goes through a plant, the plant actually—let me back up just a little bit. When there’s minerals in the soil and microorganisms in the soil, then those microorganisms actually help the plant take up and utilize the minerals and taken it into their cells. But as the microorganisms help make it bioavailable to the plant, and then those minerals in the plant are bioavailable for us, we can take them up and use them.
If it’s a man-made product with different kinds of minerals in it, many of them aren’t even bioavailable. I have talked with people who have seen what comes out of the portapotties. And most of the time, it’s filled with all these different vitamin and mineral tablets that people take. They just go right through. They’re not even broken down and absorbed.
DEBRA: Well, I think that part of that has to do with our own internal microorganisms, that our guts are not breaking these things down or digesting our foods or things like that. But that’s a whole different question.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah, it certainly is. But when people are eating fresh foods right out of the garden, you should be getting those microorganisms from the food.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes, yes.
So, we’ve established that pesticides, you don’t want to have toxic pesticides in your food. And there’s a lot of pesticides in supermarket food, so much so that the Environmental Working Group puts out a list of…
JAI MCFALL: The Dirty Dozen.
DEBRA: They have the Dirty Dozen list. These are the ones that have the most pesticides. Tell us what those are.
JAI MCFALL: Number one is apples. It used to be that an apple a day would keep the doctor away. But now, apples are number one. They have between 47 and 67 toxins on them that can’t be washed off, peeled off, or soaked off.
And then, number two is celery, then peaches, strawberries, domestic blueberries, nectarines, bell peppers. And then, they scrunched spinach, kale and collard greens together, cherries, potatoes, imported grapes and lettuce. Those are things that we all eat regularly because we love them so much.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. And we’re getting a very good dose of pesticides each time we eat them if we’re not eating organic.
We need to go to break again. But we’ll be right back. We’ll talk more about how we can get good, mineralized, healthy, wholesome, pure foods in our own backyards.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Jai McFall. We’re talking about organic gardening.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Jai McFall from Organic Living for All. That’s OrganicLIvingforAll.com. She’s my local organic nursery where I buy things for my garden.
And Jai, we didn’t get to talk about GMO’s. So let’s just talk about that for a minute as another reason why we should be having control over what we grow and what kinds of foods we eat.
JAI MCFALL: Yes, that’s very important because so many things in the laboratory are changed into something different that our bodies cannot digest. It’s not native to the planet, and so our bodies will actually keep producing more and more acids to try to digest it which ends up causing candida and many other problems.
People who really want to look into that should look up animal studies on GMO animals and really understand how toxic and poisonous they are and dangerous for us. But the thing is when you grow your own food, you just want to make sure that the plants and the seeds that you’re growing are organic, non-GMO and/or heirloom if possible. An heirloom just means that these were seeds that are originally from like the 1800. And so they’re safe. They haven’t been changed by men.
And so, it’s really important to prepare your soil well and to get these safe plants so that you can eat healthy food and digest it.
DEBRA: I want to ask you a question about seeds and GMO seeds versus heirloom seeds. I’ve done some studying on this myself.
In California, one of the big heroes—because I grew up in California, in Northern California—one of the big heroes in Northern California is Luther Burbank. I’ve mentioned his name to a number of people, and they have no idea who he is, but I’m sure you know who he is.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah.
DEBRA: And what Luther Burbank was famous for was for coming up with new types, new varieties of foods that were more hardy and things like that. And the way he did it was that he did it in a way that I think has been going on for millennia which is that you look at the plants that are the strongest and are producing the best food, and then you save the seeds from those.
And the ones that are weak and producing deformed foods, you don’t save those seeds. And so, you just keep planting them, and you just keep concentrating the strengths.
And so, man can have his hand in guiding the evolution of plants. But what’s different about GMO is that it’s not just choosing amongst from one plant to the next in order to continue that line. It’s actually going in and changing the genetic structure, taking things like genes from fish and putting them into tomatoes. This is all highly technological and not something—
I mean, when Luther Burbank chose the seeds from one tomato instead of another, he then planted them and allowed nature to then do what nature would do with it. And that is very different from going into a laboratory and saying, “We’re going to swap out genes here.”
And then, if you’re taking that material that has been genetically modified, this mutant material, and you put it inside your own body, what do you think it’s going to do to the DNA in your body? It’s a bad, bad, bad idea.
But let’s talk about container gardening.
JAI MCFALL: Okay. Especially here in Florida, we use a lot of container gardening because we live on a giant sand dune.
DEBRA: That’s right.
JAI MCFALL: There really isn’t any soil. So to amend the soil enough to make it doable is a lot of work.
So, I do build a lot of raised beds and encourage people to grow in pots. But you can’t grow everything in pots. You can’t grow like a peach tree or an avocado tree. But you can grow all your vegetables and your herbs—and some trees. There are some trees that are very successful like a Meyer lemon tree or a moringa. Now, many people don’t know what moringa is.
DEBRA: Tell us about moringa.
JAI MCFALL: Moringa, if you go on the Internet and put “miracle three” in, that’s what will come up, the moringa tree. It’s native to Africa and Asia. Every part of the tree is edible. They claim it will cure everything because it has a deep tap root that goes down and digs up minerals. Every part of the tree is edible.
Its leaves have a peppery flavor, so they’re delicious in salads. You can use them just like you would spinach. You can put them in scrambled eggs, stir fries, any way you would use spinach. You can eat the flowers raw or stockades. And people claim it tastes like mushrooms. I don’t get that, but that’s fine. And then it make seed pods. You can eat the seed pods when they’re young just like you would ochre or green beans. If you let it get bigger, you can pop out the beans and cook them. And they do have that peppery kind of horseradishy flavor. And I’ve been told that when they get very big, you can actually dry them and grind them up for flour.
DEBRA: Wow!
JAI MCFALL: I know a woman who all she specializes in is moringa. And she makes all kinds of products out of it. And she tells us how people who are diabetic, if they start eating the beans from it, it will stabilize the blood sugar and keep it under a hundred.
So, it really does have some miraculous properties that help people take control of their health. And it’s a simple tree to grow. It can be grown in pots here in Florida. In the north, you just bring it in. You just keep chopping it back and eating it. And it tastes phenomenal! It’s a phenomenal plant.
DEBRA: See, this is something that anybody who has any outdoor space at all—I mean, you don’t have to have a big garden to do this. It’s just a plant that grows easily in a pot and can have incredible health benefits. And this is something that more people should know about and more people should be doing.
JAI MCFALL: Exactly! And I know, a lot of times, people say, “I can’t grow anything because all I have is a small little patio.” If you have 2 ft. x 2 ft., you can grow vertical gardens.
DEBRA: Tell us about vertical gardens. I love vertical gardens.
JAI MCFALL: Yes, they’re very cool! There are lots of different ways to grow vertically.
DEBRA: Well, we need to go to break, so you can tell us about it after the break. This is going by so fast.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking about gardening in small spaces organically with Jai McFall, owner of Organic Living for All. That’s at OrganicLivingforAll.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 Jai McFall. She’s the owner of Organic Living for All organic nursery. And that’s at OrganicLivingforAll.com.
Jai, we were about to start talking about vertical gardening. So tell us about that.
JAI MCFALL: Well, we sell a product that you just stack these levels on top of each other. Each level will grow four plants. And you can go as high as you want to. And you just put in good, clean organic soil, the minerals, the microorganisms. And it’s phenomenal! You can go 20 to 25 plants in one 2 ft. x 2 ft. area. It’s quite amazing.
DEBRA: So, to me, when you say stack, I think of boxes. And so I’m having trouble visualizing this. Can you describe it?
JAI MCFALL: Well, it’s like four circles attached to a middle section.
DEBRA: Oh, I see.
JAI MCFALL: And then, you stack them on top of each other so that they’re alternating on where they are. So, on one level, they’ll be north, south, east, and west. And then, the next level, they’ll be between those.
DEBRA: I see. I think I saw that at your nursery. I was just thinking of it.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah, yeah.
DEBRA: I just wasn’t thinking of it.
JAI MCFALL: And so, in this little, teeny bit of space, you can grow quite a few plants.
And the thing that I always tell people if they’re just starting out is to start small. Go a few herbs that you love, add some flowers for butterflies, add some vegetable plants. And there’s so many different kinds of materials you can use. You can go out and buy big, huge, expensive pots. I’ve seen people growing them in five gallon pales, 2-liter soda bottles.
DEBRA: I grow things in wash tubs.
JAI MCFALL: Well, our town just got a new recycle bin where we now have the great, big bins that you put out by the road.
They’re telling people that the old boxes, because they have holes in the bottom, just keep them. Don’t try to turn them back in.
And use them to plant in.
DEBRA: Yeah, you really can plant in anything. And I know, coming from California, I had a lot of soil. And so I could just go out in my backyard and plant anything, and it would grow.
And oh, I’d just have to say going back to where you were talking about how delicious food is, some of my best food memories are foods not that I ate in fancy restaurants, but food that I got out of the garden. And I was just thinking about, one year, I grew potatoes. I took these little potatoes about the size of golf balls out of the ground, and I was also growing leaks right next to them, I went inside and I boiled the potatoes. I steamed, and then I sautéed the leaks in butter. I ate those potatoes and leaks. And that was one of the best things I ever ate. It just came to mind when I was talking about planting.
But here, it’s just sand. And it’s very, very difficult. So I actually have a lot of beautiful pots that I’ve collected over the years that I plant in. I’ll have like a pot for parsley. I have a lot of herbs right outside my garden door. I have a pot for parsley. I plant tomatoes in pots and things like that. And you can move them around as you need to and find their ideal spot.
Another thing I just wanted to say about vertical gardening is that, in addition to things like you’ve described, you can also just plant—like put a trellis in a pot and be growing up rather than be growing sideways. And I’ve seen gorgeous pictures of walls of buildings where pots have been attached to the walls or or planter boxes just up and down the walls. You could grow a lot of food just on the side wall of your house if you have the right amount of sunlight and things like that.
And then, we have espalier trees, those all over the side of a house. And there’s just a lot of ways to grow in small spaces that people don’t even think of.
JAI MCFALL: Yes. And I really want to encourage people to start. It doesn’t matter how big you start or how small.
DEBRA: Just start something.
JAI MCFALL: Just start. Start growing food. Once you start eating fresh foods from your garden with the minerals in it, you’ll be shocked at how delicious they taste.
I go out my garden every day and eat out of it. I love it because you can’t get it fresher or you can’t get it more nutritious or more flavorful. So anybody who wants to get our products, we do ship them. And I recommend that you try them and see the difference in flavors.
Now, you’ve tried them, Debra. What do you think about them?
DEBRA: I think that the foods that are grown with your products taste amazingly different. Jai has some products that she’s put together. It’s all organic. And I want you to tell about them after I tell how great it tastes.
The thing is that I’ve put these in—I bought all her products and I put them in my raised beds. And it made a huge difference on how the plants grow and how the food tastes because it has to do with adding minerals which changes the flavor and improves the flavor of the food. You go ahead and talk about them.
JAI MCFALL: Okay. Well, minerals are actually elements essential for life. They’re essential. We can’t do without them. And it’s for all life. And minerals are also what gives food the flavor.
So, once you actually build up your soil, you want to add the minerals into the soil as well as all the families of all the microorganisms that should be in the soil. Then you create this living community where the worms and the insects and the plants and the microorganisms all work together in symbiosis. You don’t get bugs, you don’t get diseases. You get nutrient-dense food that tastes phenomenal!
DEBRA: It does. It’s phenomenal.
JAI MCFALL: Yeah. When people come over, and I let them taste food out of my garden, they go, “I never knew there were so many flavors. And they’re so unique and so wonderful,” because that’s what you get. And then, you combine all of these flavors into salad.
Remember those wraps I brought to your party last year?
DEBRA: Absolutely! You know what? I need to put those up on my food blog now that I have my food blog started. What she did was she took me around her garden, and we picked leaves off of different plants. And I have pictures of all of them. And then, they all got wrapped up into this wrap. What did you put? It’s been a while.
JAI MCFALL: It was the leaf from an edible hibiscus that tastes like lemon.
DEBRA: That was the biggest one, yeah. It’s just a beautiful, gorgeous, purple leaf.
And then, in the middle, there was pesto or something—I don’t remember exactly, parmesan cheese I think?
JAI MCFALL: Yeah, I think some pesto that I made fresh from the garden as well, as well as other fresh herbs.
DEBRA: And what we did was we just kind of wrapped up—she laid out all these leaves from the largest ones to smallest ones, and then just kind of wrapped it up. And it was so delicious. It was unlike anything that you’ve ever tasted because these are all plants that are not sold in the grocery store. And yet, they’re perfectly edible in our environment. They’re right here growing where we live.
There’s just so many things you can do—so, so many things that you can do.
I know, again, in Northern California, there was a very famous restaurant called Chez Panisse. And what Chez Panisse did before they became famous—and I think this is what made them famous—is that instead of going out and going wherever restaurant supply people get their food, they actually were sending out what they called foragers to go out in the community and get food that people were growing in their backyards. They were talking to farmers and saying, “Would you grow food in this particular way and these kinds of different varieties?”
And the food there was incredible. It’s like something that you’ve never eaten before because it’s not the same old, same old that you find in the supermarket. Eating at Chez Panisse really changed my whole idea of what food could be. It’s just a different experience when you start seeing that not all food needs to come from the grocery store.
JAI MCFALL: Exactly!
DEBRA: It’s that simple. Your whole food world changes.
JAI MCFALL: So, I invite people if they do have questions to contact me either through OrganicLivingforAll.com. Or my email address is jai@OrganicLivingforAll.com. Or they can call me. My phone number is on your website.
I would really like to just say, get started. Try our products. See how amazing it can be. Our business is growing. And we invite you to grow with us.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate all the work that you’re doing—all the work that you’re doing for us locally here and helping us know what are the local varieties we can grow here, but also what you’re doing globally in establishing easy ways for people to grow their own food.
My ideal vision would be for everybody to be growing food in their backyards or on their canopies or wherever it is. Wherever you live, there’s a way that you can grow food. It’s a matter of each of us learning what that is, just starting small.
So, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more about our guests that are coming up and all the guests that I’ve had in the past.
The point of this show really is that I’m interviewing people who are out there in the world, making the world less toxic and more toxic-free and are doing all these different things. And every day, Monday through Friday, at 12 noon Eastern, you can tune in and find out what’s going on in the world, all these wonderful things that people are doing from the viewpoint of wanting to be less toxic and wanting to be more healthy.
And that’s what this show is about. I have more than a hundred shows in the archives that you can listen to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And it’s ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Air Scrubber Plus
Question from Becky
Has anyone heard anything good or bad about that Air Scrubber Plus for your HVAC system that cleans the air of bacteria, viruses, gases, air particles, odors. Uses hydroxyation, ionization and UV. Has been tested by 2 universities. Cells need to be replaced every 3 years. Was developed by NASA initially. Can be had with or without ozone. Passes California emissions test. Has Stayseal certification., et
Debra’s Answer
It appears that the technology would result in all the claims they make.
Whether or not this is a good unit for you depends on what you are wanting to remove from the air.
They also say it sends out something into the air and it’s not very clear what that is. I would want to check that out before making a recommendation. So this would require a chat with the company for more information.
Anyone have any experience with this unit?
