Art | Resources
Organic Paints and Varnishes
My guest is Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paints, which is the US distributor of Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish. We’ll be talking about toxic paints, VOCs, and nontoxic natural paints. Established in the United Kingdom, this proprietary paint technology, is “free from all toxic chemicals, with absolutely zero VOCs and odorless – essentially 7,000 times purer than standard low VOC paints.” Ecos Paint has been used and accredited around the world for over 25 years and has been specified in many prestigious projects including: The Louvre, Googleplex andWestminster Abbey. Not only are their paints nontoxic, they even filter pollutants from the air. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/ecos-paints
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Organic Paints & Varnishes
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Julian Crawford
Date of Broadcast: : January 16, 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.
There are many, many toxic chemicals out there in various consumer products, in the air we breathe, the food we drink, in our workplaces, in children’s toys, and just every place. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be exposed to them because there are many, many products that do not contain them. There are many things that we can do to remove those toxic chemicals from our body. And these are the things that we talk about on this show.
Today is Thursday, January 16th 2014. And today, we’re going to be talking about paint, safe paint. And this is zero VOC paint. This is a paint that’s been around for a long time.
My guest today is Julian Crawford. He’s the CEO of Imperial Paints which is the US distributor of Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish. This was established in the United Kingdom. It’s been used at the Louvre.
They used it to paint the GooglePlex and Westminster Abbey.
Thank you for being with me today, Julian.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Thank you for having me, Debra.
DEBRA: Good! So first, tell me a little history about Ecos Paints, and then, what interested you in coming to work for this paint company.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes, certainly. I guess the start of Ecos Paint really begins when the paint was formulated. That was around 1982. A UK paint chemist, [Ian Ware], he suffered from chemical sensitivities himself and had always had issues being around the chemicals (the paints, in particular). He was getting headaches and such like.
He decided to formualte a different type of paint chemistry. He basically started with a clean sheet and added components that didn’t cause problems, that were non-toxic (all of which are non-toxic) until he made a formulation that worked the paint.
I think he spent maybe six years for that process, which ended up with Ecos Paint being available I think about 1988. And they’ve been selling Ecos Paint in the UK eversince along with other various types of products, coatings and varnishes. But that’s really where it started.
DEBRA: And Julian, I need to interrupt you for a minute. My producer is asking me to ask you to speak into the phone so that we have better audio from you.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Okay. Is that better?
DEBRA: A little bit. It’s a little louder and a little closer to the phone.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Okay. Is that better?
DEBRA: Oh, perfect. Perfect, good. Thank you.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: I apologize. I’ve been accused of being a mumbler by my mother for most of my life, so it’s amazing to be even out here. Would you like me to restate what I said or is that…?
DEBRA: Why don’t you restate what you said because it wasn’t every clear. I was sitting here listening very, very carefully.
So, let’s just start over.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Okay, I apologize.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: The product itself, Ecos Paint was developed in 1982. It started around 1982 in the UK by a paint chemist, Ian Ware, who had chemical sensitivities himself. He set about devising a paint formulation, but didn’t include any of the harmful ingredients that you typically find in a paint.
So, he started a formulation with a blank sheet of paper and simply added products there that were non-toxic until he made a formulation that served its purpose of being non-toxic, and also, worked, very well functioning as a paint.
That process took about six years resulting in Ecos Paint being available from about, I think, 1988. And then, obviously, it had been sold in the UK, and actually, around the world since then.
They came to the United States in 2009. They had been selling products over here a little bit. But obviously, clearly, it’s not a simple exercise selling paints across the ocean here. They had sufficient inquiries and interest that they decided to set a small factory here in North Carolina. They began that in 2009. And we’ve been producing and selling paints here ever since.
DEBRA: It was used to paint Westminster Abbey and the Louvre.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Not the entire place for those. These are places where it had just been used when specified. And typically, it’s been usually specified in places where there’s a particular interest.
So, the Louvre, for example, they did some testing. They were particularly focused on preservation of artifacts. Clearly, there’s a whole number of very expensive and unique artifacts. They did their own proprietary tests, I believe, on our products and a number of others. And they were looking for, not only is it offgassing the paint, but also, the paint’s ability to inhibit offgassing from other types of materials, particularly wood.
Wood will actually give off sometimes this acidic chemistry. So, they used a passivating product of ours which actually not only doesn’t introduce VOC’s and contaminants. It will be able to actually reduce those that are being generated by other [substrates].
DEBRA: Interesting! Interesting, interesting.
Okay! So then, what about you? How did you get interested in things non-toxic?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Well, my interest with Ecos Paint and then, subsequently, of the Imperial Paint started when they set up their factory here in 2009. Clearly, South Carolina doesn’t have too many English people in it. And when they located a factory here, it wasn’t difficult for us to catch up.
People said, “Oh, you’re English [inaudible 00:06:44].” I got to meet them. That’s when I met the original UK contingent. He came over here to set up the company. I have introduced them into local vendors and contacted [inaudible 00:07:01]. I’ve been here for about ten years by that date.
And then, really, for the next couple of years, we probably didn’t touch base at all. I don’t know exactly what the reason why, but we got back in contact and I learned a little bit more about what they were doing and how it was working. I then did some diligence on the product, and I fairly quickly established their product (or our product now) is superior to we think any other product on the market.
It performs better as a paint. It doesn’t have the typical issues that you have environmentally-friendly products. You often sacrifice some type of performance for that. And it had a clear history, 25 years, of very successful use.
What I felt that they were lacking was an ability to connect to a market. This is a great well-kept secret. And I think that we still are.
DEBRA: Well, I think you are too. I’ve been in this field for more than 30 years, and I only just heard about you this year. I’m constantly looking for the best toxic-free products that there both in terms of toxicity and also in terms of quality and performance.
And I agree with you about your paint. It’s just not known. People just don’t know that it exists.
I think that that’s true for a lot of non-toxic product because if people knew that they were there, they would use them!
DEBRA: Right! And that’s invariably a conversation we’ve had with new customers People, they read an article in the newspaper. They find it relatively easy to get [inaudible 00:08:51] when people noted, “Oh, look! We should really do something about that.” And there’s invariably the pride element, “Oh, gosh! If only I had known.”
But what we’ve spent the last couple of years is really trying to address that and make sure that our product articulate what it is we’re trying to do, what the value is, and what the benefits are, and then make sure that they are focused on an audience that target or interested in that type of product, like a lot of our paint product.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. And so, we’ll talk more after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, our guest is Julian Crawford. He’s the CEO of Imperial Paints. He’s the CEO of Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish.
When we come back, we’ll talk more about paints.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paints, the US distributor of Ecos Paints. We’ve been talking about how they’ve been used to paint Westminster Abbey and the Louvre. And we’re going to be talking more about why they’re uniquely special
But first, Julian, let’s talk about why somebody would want to seek out a paint like yours. What is toxic about regular paint?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Regular paint contains a catalog of harmful chemicals, all of which are there for a purpose. They’re there to keep a paint from drying too quickly or they enhance the color or they help the spread rate. They’re not there without purpose.
In traditional paint, they include things formaldehyde, toluene, other types of solvents, all of which are either carcinogenic or have got issues with brain function or liver function, these kinds of health issues.
The technology of paint has not changed overly dramatically outside of the major substitution of lead for the longest time. Environmentally-friendly paints which are traditional-based typically just contain fewer of those. It’s normally done by an extraction process or a substition process.
And so you find that if a particular can was considered to be highly toxic, you might try and substitute that for a less toxic product or you might limit the quantity of it. The consequence of which typically is that the performance of the product is less, so it doesn’t hide that well or it doesn’t covers that well or it takes forever to try.
If you read the reviews that most of the environmentally-friendly or allegedly environmentally-friendly traditional paint, they typically have got a poor review in terms of the application.
Our product is completely different. We didn’t start with a paint recipe and tried to modify it. The original recipe was put together with products that didn’t cause harm. They’re blended of resins and food-grade products, the type of things that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a paint.
The result of which is actually an extremely good quality paint. It’s one of the things that attracted me to this company. The performance of the product is actually superior to most traditional paints in terms of coverage and color and durability despite the fact that it’s got a tremendous environmentally problem.
DEBRA: Well, you sent me a can of it. I actually have some tubes of various samples of the different kinds of products that you have. I smelled all of them. I didn’t have the opportunity to paint them all on something. But the quality of the paint in the cans and the tubes is tremendous. I’ve done a lot of painting in my life. It’s very thick and stays on the brush kind of thing and actually puts a good coating on.
And so I do think that you have accomplished that balance of making a toxic-free product that also is just beautiful to use in terms of the result. Yeah, I would vouch for that.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: And to be perfectly honest, we get as many people buying our product because of that quality as the environmental property.
So, for example, in the UK, a customer of ours is British Rails, all the rail in the country, they use the yellow paint to paint the marketings on the railway platforms because they found it’s the most durable paint they could find. We had people who paint carpark decks, the white lines on carpet decks. And they’re not really focused on the environmental advantages of the product. They’re just purely looking for performance. So yeah, we definitely do get that kind of [inaudible 00:14:22].
And the other thing with our paint is it typically covers more. An eggshell paint that we have will cover around 560 sq. ft. a gallon. Well, the traditional paint, it’s maybe 350, maybe 400. So, you get a much better coverage. So when people look at the cost, the price of the product, if you look at it instead of a gallon for gallon comparison that we price our products that’s the same as a high quality premium paint, you actually get a better coverage.
So, if you look at cost per square foot for this product, you get a more advantageous price.
DEBRA: So just typical household use, if they’re using it to paint the yellow lines in the railway station, it would probably last longer on your walls and cabinets that normally you wouldn’t have to repaint so much.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: I mean, we do test with durability. The products, we have people who paint, what we call ‘problematic substrates’. They might be painting onto a plastic or a glass. Those are where you get to really see the adhesion of the product. And very often, they’ll come and do the test and they will use our product, paint it, let it dry and try and scratch it off. [Inaudible 00:15:43] with a traditional paint is far superior.
DEBRA: That’s excellent! I always love it when it’s a better choice.
Many years ago, I was working with a company where we were developing green products and what we found was that not only did it have to have the environmental attributes, but that if it didn’t work as well as the one that was toxic or environmentally harmful, people wouldn’t buy it. It has to have that performance.
And so, I’m always happy to see when you can actually get better perfomance by makign the toxic-free choice.
Some chemicals that are typically found in paint are things like solvents (which are very toxic), animal products, heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, formaldehyde, vinyl chloride (which is carcinogenic), and phthalates (which you may have heard about.
And what happens with paint, the way a paint is put together, it has the paint parts, the solids, and then it has all these toxic things to keep it liquid. And that’s what you’re breathing, all the toxic solvents and things as the paint is drying.
We’re going to take another break and then we’re going to hear about all the details about Ecos Paints and what the different types of paints they have and why they’re so good.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paints, the US distributor of Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paints, the US distributor for Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish.
So, let’s talk about your paints. I’m looking at a page on your website that talks about your company. And one of the first thing it says is that it’s 12,500 times purer than paints that are – it says 5 grams per liter, 0.5% of these VOCs. So, that would be a low VOC paint, 12,500 times purer than low VOC paint.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Actually, [inaudible 00:18:21] in the United States would be a zero VOC paint. In the United States, you can actually call your product, the base paint, a zero VOC so long as it contain less than 50 gram per liter.
DEBRA: So, zero VOC isn’t zero VOC?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: No, no. This is one of the issues in terms of the paint market here. If you buy a product with zero VOC, it can actually contain up to 50 grams. And if you think about that, if you paint a room with five gallons of paint, 50 grams is about 2 lbs. of VOCs. That’s in a product that’s specified as zero. So clearly, you can have a low VOC or mid or high VOC which is multiples of that.
DEBRA: So, people, if they’re choosing a paint, they need to not look at the label and see where it says “low” or “no”, they need to actually look at the amount of VOCs that are in the paint?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: That’s correct. The zero VOC or low VOC is misleading. Most people will read zero and consider that that really is none. And that’s not the case.
And the other thing with VOCs is, clearly, there’s a whole range of different products that can be VOCs, some of which are not really harmful and some of which are extremely harmful in small quantities. So, if you chew on a little bit of arsenic, it’ll kill you if you chew on whatever else that’s not going to harm you. So you have to really think about what those are as a person [inaudible 00:20:00] just the volume.
DEBRA: VOCs stands for ‘volatile organic chemicals’. But as you’ve said, there’s such a wide variety of them and they don’t necessarily have to tell you exactly what they are.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Absolutely! And most companies, they’ll consider some of these products proprietary. And if they are in certain small volumes, then you don’t have to mention them either.
Oftentimes, you’ll see a general statement which says, “This paint contains non-carcinogens and products that [inaudible 00:20:34] in animals.” That’s a fairly standard descriptoin that goes on a lot of traditional paints.
DEBRA: Okay. So you have no VOCs. You actually have no VOCs.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: That’s correct.
DEBRA: Yes. And no glycols (glycol is another big ingredient that’s used in toxic paints), no solvents and it’s odor-free.
Now, I smelled all the paint samples you sent me. I think some of them have no odor at all. I’m sniffing, sniffing, sniffing and smelling nothing. Some of them, I would say, have a little bit of an odor. But none of them particularly smelled like toxic chemicals that I’m familiar with. So that was really good for me to see.
But I’m not sure I would call it odor-free because some of them had a little bit of odor if not toxic.
And another thing that your company does is you declare all the ingredients.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes. And actually,w e’re giong through a process at the moment. There’s a new certification process for LEED where you self-declare all the different products. We’re just going go through a process now of identifying [inaudible 00:21:52] and whatever, so you could put those on. And those will be specifically focused on sending to architects and people specifying so that they get that degree of comparability to a different product.
DEBRA: Right! And also you say that they’re safe for people with allergies, asthma and chemical sensitivites. So, tell us what is actually on your paint?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: The paint is water and binders. We have resins. It’s a resin-based product. We’ve got pigments.
Clearly, people buy products [inaudible 00:22:33] pigmented.
That’s one of the big things in terms of the product. We buy pigments and tints from Europe, a special variety that contains no glycol.
Glycol has been shown to cause asthma and allergies. There’s a Harvard School of Public Health study that specifically links glycols from paints and other kind of household painters and the development of asthma and allergies in children.
And glycols are used extensively in paints and also in tints because they help the product stay liquid. Particularly in tint, you don’t want the pigment to dry when it’s in a tinting machine. It dries and it clogs up nozzles and therefore, you don’t get the right dosage of that particular colorant.
So, we buy a variety of tint and pigment from Europe. It caused us more problems in terms of actually application. We’ve spent more time on making sure that process works smoothly. We can do that because we tint our products only here in the factory. Other people are tinting in retail location. We’re talking about hundreds or thousands of tinting machines that need to be attended to. But our products, it’s a bit more tricky to deal with. But the benefit of which is you don’t have these glycols because the glycols are particularly problematic.
DEBRA: So, let’s talk about color for a minute. One thing I want to mention is that I know that there are some paints – as you mentioned before about the base payment, you were careful to say that base paint has a certain amount of VOCs in it.
But I also know that the tints themselvse can have VOCs. And so people have been selling paints that might have VOC in the paint, but they still have the standard tints with those glycols and VOCs in them.
So, I’m looking at your Find Your Color page. I was about to ask you, if you’re tinting at the factory, then does that mean they can’t go down to their local store and bring a piece of fabric and have a color match? But you say here on your page that you at the factory, you can color match to almost any shade, just to send the sample and you’ll do it.
I’m looking for a page that has a bunch of colors on it. I’m not seeing that, but you must have one somewhere I guess?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: I don’t have the screen in front of me. There’s a page, Choose Your Color or something at the top maybe.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s where I’m at, Find Your Color, but I don’t see any colors. Hmmm…
But you know what? We need to go to break. So I will look for this over the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paint.
We’re talking about Ecos Paints, the world’s number one selling organic paint and varnish. We’ll be right back!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with Julian Crawford, CEO of Imperial Paints which is the US distributor of Ecos Paints, the word’s number one selling organic paint and varnish. You can go to his website at EcosPaints.net (not .com, .net, EcosPaints.net). And I’ve also got a link on my website at DebrasList.com. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and type in Ecos Paint and you’ll get to my listing about them. You can go to the website from there, EcoPaint.net.
So Julian, I did find your colors. You just go to Shop. And when you click on Shop in the main menu, it’s got a big menu and it says “Choose by color.” And if you go to red or orange or yellow or green or blue, whichever one, you get to a whole page that has all different shades of that color.
And then they have you buy a color card for ¢75 and you get a real color (because computer screens are often not accurate in terms of color). So you can get the color card and make sure that that’s the color that you want before you order. I think that’s a really good system.
Also, if you click on Shop over on the right-hand side under All, it tells all the different types of paints.
You have so many different types of paints. Tell us what is your basic paint like. You have a lot of different ones.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes! We have what you might consider the standard product range for people painting houses, your normal wall paint, egg shell, matte finish. Those are the traditional wall paint products. And then we have glass products for painting onto doors and trims and furniture. So there are interior and exterior products. They’re just basically the types of products that the typical household would need.
DEBRA: So basically, anything that you would find at a paint store, you have that type of paint.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes. And then we have some specialist types of floor paints and some masonry paints, these kinds of products that maybe nobody else really has these environmentally-friendly products.
DEBRA: And your floor paints, what types of flooring can you paint that over? I would think that that is especially heavy duty for walking on it?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes! You can paint it onto concrete and wood. We painted the floor in our factory here and ran a bulldozer truck over on it. It stands up to that.
DEBRA: Wow! So you could paint it on your garage floor, for example.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes! We had a customer who bought floor paint. And when we talked to him a little bit more, it was a company that trained sniffer dogs. So these are the dogs that were sniffing for drugs or whatever. They wanted to paint the floor that wouldn’t be scratched up and marked so easily by all these dogs and also didn’t have any chemicals or chemistry that would be interfering with the process of identifying different types of smells. And that’s one of the tests they did to see how well this would wear when they got dogs running out about.
DEBRA: Wow! Again, another use that is very specific where they’re looking for perfomance, and you came through with that.
So, tell us about the air purifying products because I’ve never seen paints like these.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Right! So, the air purifying products, again, share the same initial characteristics as our zero VOC, no toxic chemicals. Particularly, the air purifying paint, it has Zeolite crystals in it, specifically ceramic crystals. It has been specially or particularly [inaudible 00:30:14] and it traps VOCs that are bouncing around in the room. It traps formaldehyde and acetone. And we have some test results from [inaudible 00:30:25] 98% of the VOCs that are bouncing around.
So what happens as these VOCs bounce around the room, they eventually come into contact with the walls or the ceiling where they get stuck or trapped by the [inaudible 00:30:43] itself, things like carbondioxide and water and whatever. [Inaudible 00:30:47] back out. So, these actually remove VOCs from the air.
DEBRA: I think that’s amazing. I’ve never heard of that.
And so, let’s see, you have the Atmosphere Purifying Paint and then MDF Passivating Primer. So, that absorbs the toxic things coming out of MDF and particleboard.
So, if you wanted to use particleboard, you could put this paint on it and then it wouldn’t be emitting formaldehyde.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: That’s correct. And actually, that’s the product or one of the products that the Louvre used. They were testing to see that they wanted to trap contaminants.
Imagine you put an artifact in a glass case with normally a wooden frame around the outside, if the wood itself is giving off chemicals, you’ll find that it’ll be degrading the artifact itself. So, that was one of the products that they specified for trapping those kinds of chemicals.
DEBRA: And then you have a Deodorizing White Satin Paint that says it removes odors and VOCs from painted surfaces.
So if somebody had painted – I get this question a lot. There had been people, different brands of paint here where they’ve been advertised to be not toxic and then people paint with them and they can’t go in those rooms. It lasts for months and they have no way of remedying that.
So if you were to paint this over that kind of situation, it will block those VOCs and odors?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yeah. Typically, these paint is used on door frames and doors where people maybe have used an oil-based finished, typically the strongest the products in terms of odors and chemicals going out. And normally, you can’t paint the water-based type of product directly over those. The adhesion of the product is sufficient that it would actually cover those. You would simply mask those with our paints.
DEBRA: This is incredible, so many uses for these things. Then you have a certain thing called Anti-Formaldehyde Radiator Paint. It says “formaldehyde-absorbing finish for hot water radiator.” How does a hot water radiator give off formaldehyde?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Actually, that’s more a European type of thing. It’s not really something we – it’s a product that we have really from our [inaudible 00:33:22]. Typically, it’s not a product that’s sold in the United States.
DEBRA: Okay. I just never heard of that.
And then, the last one in the series has the EMR-shielding paint. That shields radiation.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Yes, this is for people who maybe live next to a cell tower or they’re in an office environment, a doctor environment where you’ve got machines that are emitting these radiations. This is a product that contains a nickel, an inert nickel chemistry. And that blocks that type of radiation. There’s a specific range that it will block in a particular efficiency.
Very often, people use our products and then unsolicited, they’ll say, [inaudible 00:34:14]. We have people who maybe have been [00:47:04]. And they will come back and say it’s just a completely different environment that they’re living in.
DEBRA: I’m just continuing to look around your site. I looked around it before, but I’m just scrolling while we’re talking.
Under specialty paints, just so the listeners can get an idea of all the different kinds of paints that you have, here, there’s anti-slip floor paint, there’s chalkboard paint, concrete sealer, feng shui paint. Well, how does feng shui paint feng shui?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: Actually, you asked question I can’t – forgive me, I’m not a technical person. There’s a difference with it, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not the technical person for the product.
DEBRA: You’re not a feng shui expert, huh?
JULIAN CRAWFORD: No, unfortunately not. In fact, I’m not the expert at [most of this]. The chalkboard product is a very popular product. Google use that chalkboard thing. We sell that to Japan. And again, that’s the only non-toxic chalkboard paint you can find. Well, you can paint walls with it. They pay glass jars. They paint cabinets, so they can write things.
Children paint walls. They can use them to write homeworks perhaps or just notes.
DEBRA: And you can get it in any color, chalkboard in any color that you can write on. They also have flame and fire retardant paint and nursery paint. Well, tell us the baby paint because you have a particular line of your baby paints.
JULIAN CRAWFORD: The nursery paint, again, has the same characteristics with no toxic chemicals. We put a hardener in the product because, obviously, when babies become two years old or so, they start touching walls [inaudible 00:49:08].
The nursery paint is a particular product designed specifically for that environment where babies are going to be put in a room. You put them in a cart, they might sleep with the doors shut for hours and hours and hours. So, anything that’s in that room, they are much more susceptible to them than the typical adult who will be in and out (they’ll be outdoors).
The idea was that nurseries or children’s nurseries, you put your baby down, you try and be as quiet as you can. Nowadays, with modern technology, you could put a baby monitor and then shut the door. You don’t have to [inaudible 00:49:41]. So, everything in that room is basically circulating.
And babies, one, they’re predisposed to…
DEBRA: I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you. We’re getting to the end of our time here and we have about four seconds left.
So, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can find out how to get to Ecos Paints’ website. You can listen to the show again (lots of great information). You can tell your friends about it. They can listen to the archives.
We’ll be back tomorrow! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Organic Bodycare Products for the Whole Family
My guest today is Katie Lynch, an Independant Consultant with Poofy Organics. Well be talking about toxic chemicals in cosmetic and beauty products, and how women, children and men can choose safer alternatives. Poofy Organics offers a full line of cosmetics and skin care products for women, a growing line for children, and even products for men. Poofy Organics products are handmade in small batches in New Jersey. Most of the products are USDA Certified Organic while others are made using mostly organic ingredients. Katie graduated with Honors from Rutgers University in 1998 with degrees in both Environmental Science and Political Science, followed by a Masters degree in Public Health from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. During her graduate coursework, Katie learned how many commonly used products including home cleaning products, cosmetics, perfumes, and most lotions that she put on her body contained toxins that were ending up in her blood stream. She realized that she needed to make a change and stopped using these products, and started learning about safer alternatives. In 2011 she found Poofy Organics and in September of 2013 she became an Independent Consultant. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/poofy-organics
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Organic Body Care Products for the Whole Family
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Katie Lynch
Date of Broadcast: January 14, 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 lots of toxic chemicals out there—in the food we eat, in the air we breathe, in the water that we drink, in our clothing, in our homes, in our workplaces, in all kinds of consumer products. But we don’t have to get sick because we’re exposed to them because all we need to do is find out where they are, how they affect us, and make wise choices.
And that’s what we’re about here on the show—is to help you get the information that you need to make those good and healthy choices.
Today is Tuesday, January 14, 2014, so 14/14. And it’s a very quiet day here in Clearwater, Florida. There’s no wind. There’s no rain. There’s nothing. It’s just still, with a nice blanket of grey sky—very, very quiet and peaceful day here.
My guest today, we’re going to be talking about personal care products for the whole family. Some companies only make things for women, some make just for children. This company makes organic personal care products for women, men and children.
Her name is Katie Lynch, and she’s an independent consultant with Poofy Organics.
Hi, Katie.
KATIE LYNCH: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: How are you?
KATIE LYNCH: I’m very good. Thank you for asking.
DEBRA: Good.
KATIE LYNCH: I’m very happy to be on your show.
DEBRA: Thanks. And where are you? You’re in New Jersey, I think, right?
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, I’m in Somerset County, New Jersey.
DEBRA: Good. So first, tell us about Poofy Organics—how did they get started, and tell us about their story.
KATIE LYNCH: Well, Poofy Organics began with a specific goal in mind, and that was to provide a healthy and toxic-free bath and beauty products at reasonable prices. It started in 2006, then Kristina Gagliardi-Wilson, she began the company after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After the diagnosis, they were determined to stop using products with the most toxic chemicals.
And they looked and looked, and they didn’t have any suitable alternatives to turn to, so they decided to make their own. And they made it their mission to find the safest, the most effective ingredients for their products.
And finally, today, they’re small family-run business, and they are proud to offer these alternative products nationwide. The products are made fresh by hands, in small batches in their store in Rutherford, New Jersey, so that’s local to me.
And they promised to avoid toxic ingredients, such as synthetic fragrance, parabens, triclosan, [inaudible 02:54], oxybenzone, GMOs and other harmful chemicals. And they also use recyclable and biodegradable packaging. And they never ever test products on animals.
And their products, 80% of them are vegan. Most of them are USDA-certified organic products. And all of them are gluten-free and made with USDA-certified organic ingredients.
One of the things I like the best is that the scents are made with organic essential oils or food extracts. And then since they started in 2006, they keep formulating more and more products. So they have developed the “I am Goddess” line, which is a line for women, including body sprays, lotions, soaps, sugar scrubs, make-up and nail polish. They have come up with [inaudible 03:45] for men, which includes soap, aftershave, [inaudible 03:49] and shaving gels. Young, Wild and Free for kids, which includes body sprays, body wash, lotions, deodorants and lip balm. And then Baby Poof for babies, which include lotions, bath wash, shampoo, diaper rash cream and vapor rub for chest colds.
They also sell deodorants, home cleaning products, laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, and Poofy Organics products are safe for our world, children, pets, expecting mothers, and like I mentioned before, they made it their mission to find the safest and most effective ingredients for all the products.
DEBRA: We have a lot of time that we can talk about the products. But tell us about how you became interested.
KATIE LYNCH: Well, I have my undergraduate degree in environmental science and political science. And then after that, I went for my master in public health from the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey.
So while I was completing my master in public health, I took a toxicology class. And I specifically remember this one class when it hit me that most of what I put on my skin was actually being absorbed and entering my bloodstream.
I think I was 23 years old and really never fully understood what it meant to put something on my skin.
DEBRA: I think that a lot of people are not aware of that. I know that I was probably about 23 years old when I had that same idea. I didn’t even know anything about toxic chemicals when I was 23, until I got sick from them.
And then I started noticing that you can put something on your skin, and then you can even almost taste it sometimes if you’re paying attention. It goes right in. It goes right through your body just like that.
KATIE LYNCH: That was through the professor. I don’t remember if it was blood or urine that they tested, but they actually used perfume, and then tested the blood or the urine directly after. And then, of course, before, and they noticed it in the output right away. Very fast.
DEBRA: That’s interesting how fast.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, it really was. So it made a huge impact on me. So I thought about it, I went home and I threw out all of my perfume because that was the product that I knew I didn’t need, and why would I keep using it if it was just going to be harming my body?
DEBRA: Good thought.
KATIE LYNCH: And really, it’s funny. It was so many years ago, but I can distinctly remember the room and just coming [inaudible 06:31].
So then I started to look at the rest of my products. And for financial reasons, I wasn’t able to make healthier choices all at once. But over time, I drastically reduced the number of products that I use, and then those products that I couldn’t live without, I made better choices when I bought new items—like the soap, the lotion, toothpaste, deodorant. Those are products that I couldn’t live without, and so I just made better choices when I purchased them.
And so over the past 10 years, I keep looking for the safest, least toxic, healthiest products to use in my home, and on my skin.
And over that time, I discovered the Environmental Working Group Skin Deep Database, and I used that as a guide. And [inaudible 07:16], it became a passion of mine to find affordable skin care and [inaudible 07:19] for me and my family to use.
I had my first child in 2008, and then my second child in 2011. And, of course, [inaudible 07:29] stronger. And so, in 2012, my daughter had a really bad diaper rash that wasn’t [inaudible 07:37] with any of the other toxic-free creams that I was already using. So I went to the health food store to see what new products I might try. And that’s when I found Poofy Organics.
It was on the shelf, and I tried it out. I ended up purchasing the diaper rash cream because it had really fabulous ingredients […] and also because to me, it was a local company, and I thought that that was very fascinating.
DEBRA: It’s great to buy local. That’s a very good thing. And so then, what made you decide—we’re almost coming up on the break, but I’ll ask you this question, and we’ll just have a little bit of time to talk about this, but we can continue.
I’m looking at the website, and it talks about hosting an affair. So is this a multilevel company, or is it a give a party company?
KATIE LYNCH: It is. About 18 months ago, they decided to try the multilevel direct sales model. The company started in 2006, and then about 18 months ago, they went to the direct sales model.
One of my friends became a diva, which is what we call ourselves […] She became a diva just this past summer, and when she started telling me about all the Poofy products, I became really intrigued.
I was only familiar with the Baby Poof diaper rash cream. [Inaudible 09:11] that they made over a hundred different skin, beauty and home products. And direct sales is something I had contemplated in the past year, but I could not see myself selling any products that I didn’t believe in 100%, and none of the companies that I’m familiar with had that requirement.
So I spent some time researching Poofy Organics, the products they were selling and realized that Poofy Organics was a company I could get behind and really be excited to introduce people to.
DEBRA: We need to take a break now, but we’ll be back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch. She’s an independent consultant with Poofy Organics, and we’re talking about personal care products for the whole family. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch. She’s an independent consultant with Poofy Organics, who sells organic personal care products for the whole family.
Katie, tell us why would somebody want to use organic products instead of the ones they find just in the shelf at the supermarket or the drugstore?
KATIE LYNCH: Well, like I mentioned before, we absorb up to 50% of what we put on our skin. Children’s bodies actually absorb more than adults do. And so, since we are absorbing what we put on our skin, it’s like, in my mind, we’re eating the products that we’re putting on our skin, in a sense, because they’re ending up in our body.
So many of the conventional products out there are filled with toxic ingredients—things that I definitely would not want to put in my body. And so I’m not going to put them on my body.
DEBRA: What are some of those chemicals and their health effects?
KATIE LYNCH: So I have an infograph that was created by the Natural Health Concepts in July of 2012. And it had the 12 toxic and carcinogenic compounds found in beauty and skin care products.
Some of them are benzoyl peroxide, and that is used in acne products. It’s a possible tumor promoter with access to mutagen, produces DNA damage to human and other mammalian cells.
Another toxic ingredient is dioxin. And this [inaudible 11:50] ingredient. It’s also found in antibacterial ingredients, like triclosan, emulsifiers, [inaudible 11:59] sodium lauryl sulfate or SLS. Dioxin causes cancer, reduces the immunity, nervous system disorder, miscarriages and birth deformities.
Other common ones are parabens, methyl, butyl, ethyl, propyl. They’re used as preservatives. Again, this is not always labeled. Used in deodorants and other skin care products. This chemical has been found in breast cancer tumors. It may also contribute to sterility in male, hormone imbalance in females, and early puberty.
Triclosan, I know that has been in the news recently.
DEBRA: A lot, yes.
KATIE LYNCH: It’s a synthetic antibacterial ingredient. EPA registers it as a pesticide, which poses risks to human health and in the environment. Classified as a chemical suspected of causing cancer in humans.
DEBRA: You’ve been talking about how some of these aren’t necessarily on the label. Triclosan actually is required by law to be on the label because of its status as a pesticide. So it’s not something that’s going to be hidden. If it’s there, you’re going to see it on the label.
KATIE LYNCH: I personally think that all of those ingredients should be listed and that they shouldn’t be allowed to leave any of them off.
DEBRA: I agree. I agree, but sometimes dioxin, for example, I know, is sometimes a byproduct thing, or it’s a contaminant.
And so it’s not added as an ingredient in itself, but it’s there because it’s in one of the ingredients as a contaminant.
We can’t say that’s something to watch out for because it’s not something that you can see. But this is one of the reasons why it’s important to choose organic.
I had a guest on a few weeks ago. What she does is she works on the level of helping establish the ingredients that are allowed to be used by organic farmers in organic farming. And it was a very interesting show because she told us the whole hierarchy of everything that goes into the making of an organic product, and there’s actually a whole board at the top of where they have public review and everything of the ingredients, the materials that are allowed to be used in organic.
So there’s a lot of room for people objecting to things that are toxic. And she said that there have been times when that board wanted to approve things that were toxic, and the public wouldn’t let them.
And so then it comes down to—there are the laws, and then there’s her organization that actually fixes these regulations and finds the products and says, “Here’s the products,” and then there are the certifiers that are certifying the organic farmers are actually using these safe materials in the growing of these organic ingredients. And then there are the farmers, who are growing organic because they want to be growing organic.
It really is very well-regulated all the way down the line. So if you get something that says certified USDA organic, those ingredients really are going to be organic. And they’re ingredients that are grown and come from the soil in a natural environment versus some of these other chemicals that are synthetic, which is another word for petroleum or coal tar or petrochemical. And it’s made in a factory.
And so when you have ingredients that are being made from these synthetic materials, it’s very easy to get those contaminants in them.
That’s just another way to think of it—that if you’re going organic, you’re not going to have to worry about dioxin because it’s just not there.
KATIE LYNCH: You said that very well.
DEBRA: Thank you.
KATIE LYNCH: That’s better than I could have. Again, I’m an independent consultant, but the owner, she does go through the certification, the USDA certification process every year. And she does have a lot of paperwork. It does take a long time for her to make all these products certified, USDA-certified organic.
But she does it because she wants that certification because she wants people to know that her products are the safest that they could get. And so it’s very important to her, and she puts the time to get the certification.
DEBRA: Is the product itself certified, or are the ingredients certified?
KATIE LYNCH: Many of the products are USDA-certified organic. Not all of them. But those that are not are made with organic ingredients. But many of the products are certified organic.
DEBRA: And what does it mean that a product is certified organic, the product itself?
We have to go to break. So we’ll answer that question when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch, and she’s an independent consultant with Poofy Organics. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My name is Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch, an independent consultant with Poofy Organics. And we’re talking about organic personal care products for the entire family.
Right before the break, we were talking about certified USDA, certified organic personal care products. And you were going to tell us about that.
KATIE LYNCH: In order to place the USDA organic seal on a product, it has to have at least 95% of organic ingredients in it.
And then the 5% that is not organic, that needs to go through another process which maintains that those ingredients have not been manufactured using sewage sludge or ionizing radiation and have not been created using GMOs.
An example of such an ingredient would be baking soda. Baking soda cannot be found organically, and so, the use a company like Bob’s Red Mill as a staple for their baking soda because it upholds the highest standards in the industry.
Something else that cannot be certified organic is something like a lotion because in order to be certified organic, a product cannot have zinc oxide, decyl polyglucose, emulsifying wax, or micaceous iron oxide. That’s part of the regulation.
An emulsifying wax is needed in a regular lotion to make it work, to make the pieces of the product stay together in a lotion form.
DEBRA: It’s like mixing oil and water. They don’t mix.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: And so that’s why you need an emulsifying wax to put together.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, exactly. And so Poofy Organics uses the purest and simplest one out there. It’s comprised of phenyl alcohol and [inaudible 19:50]. They’re both benign ingredients. And they don’t use [inaudible 19:55] to make it work.
DEBRA: Excellent. Let’s talk about your product line. First, before we do, if you’re interested in these products, listeners, go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and look for the description of this show because it has a link to Katie’s specific website as a distributor. And that way, you’ll be able to reach her directly.
And when you go to her website—it’s long. That’s why I’m telling you to go like this. It’s too much to write down. When you go to this website, it’s not going to say Poofy Organics. There’s a little logo that says Poofy Organics, but the big banner right now today at the time of this show says, “I am Goddess,” which is one of their lines. Is that correct?
KATIE LYNCH: Yes. And so that website will eventually be changing over to the Poofy Organics. As the company has evolved, they are making changes and trying to make it more organized and user-friendly for the clients.
DEBRA: I understand how businesses grow like that. That happens with my website too. I think I’ve got it all down, and then I started adding things. And every once in a while, you have to come back and say, “Okay, I’m going to make this cohesive again.”
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, exactly. That’s why our website is now MyPoofyOrganics.com.
DEBRA: So you’ll know that you’re in the right place.
KATIE LYNCH: Correct. So yes, I am Goddess is one of the lines, and that is the line for women.
DEBRA: And tell us what is contained in that line.
KATIE LYNCH: In that line, there are body washes and lotions. I think there are about eight different scents, again, all made with essential oils or food extract. There is a delicious sugar scrub, a body scrub, and those are USDA-certified organic. The body washes are as well.
There is soap, and there is a body spritzer which is, I think, close to perfume, but with good ingredients in it. There is also massage oil as part of the I am Goddess line.
Are you interested in me naming any of the ingredients in there or—
DEBRA: Tell us what kinds of ingredients, just so that people get an idea—the kinds of things that you’re including.
KATIE LYNCH: In the body of lotion, which is called the Blessing, the ingredients are distilled water, organic apricot kernel oil, organic and refined shea butter, organic vegetable glycerin, emulsifying wax (which is the [inaudible 23:17]) organic rosemary extract, [inaudible 00:23:24] ferment filtrate which is kimchi seawood extract (and that is the preservative), and organic essential oils.
DEBRA: I was going to say how, when you’re listening to that list of ingredients, it sounds like things that you recognize. It doesn’t sound like a bunch of chemicals because it isn’t.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: Go on with what you were going to say.
KATIE LYNCH: I was just going to say because these products are made fresh, and preservatives are used sparingly, there is an expiration date on each lotion. But because they’re made fresh to order, they’re very fresh when you get them, which is another thing that I like. A couple of times, a client had to wait on a product because they were waiting to get the ingredients, but that’s something that happens when you have things made in small batches by hand.
DEBRA: Another benefit of direct sales is that they’re not products that are just sitting on shelves for months. And so it is very fresh. And when your order comes in, they can put it together, or they made it a very short period of time before because the mass market model says that you make millions of units or thousands of units, and they sit in a warehouse, and then they go sit on a store shelf.
So by the time you actually buy something in a store, it could have been made six months ago, or a year ago.
With direct sales, you get it immediately.
We’re going to go to break again. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch.
She’s an independent consultant with Poofy Organics. And again, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, in order to get the link to her website.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Katie Lynch, independent consultant with Poofy Organics, and we’re talking about personal care products for the entire family. Again, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look for Katie Lynch, and you’ll see the link that goes to her website.
Katie, let’s talk about nail polish for a minute. We’ve talked about nail polish on this show before, and people are always wanting to wear nail polish, and I keep saying, “But I haven’t found one that’s pure enough.”
And it’s because, as you say, or as your company says, right on the side, it says, “Although nail polish can never be completely natural,” and that’s true, I don’t know how a nail polish would be completely natural. The best you can do with nail polish is to eliminate the most toxic ingredients. But you’re still going to have some ingredients that are basically industrial, petrochemical kind of ingredients.
So tell us about your nail polish.
KATIE LYNCH: Well, our nail polish does not use ingredients, such as polyne, dibutyl phthalate, formaldehyde and camphor.
And those are the most four toxic ingredients normally found in nail polish.
So if the recipe is biodegradable and safe for pregnant and nursing women, and children as well, I will say there is an odor, but I think that comes along with nail polish in general. I don’t think you could ever make an odorless nail polish.
DEBRA: I think that’s true.
KATIE LYNCH: And it does stay on like regular nail polish does. I have been using it and have had success with it. And I’ve had a couple of clients use it and been very happy with it.
We also make polish remover, which is chemical-free, and does not contain an inky smell. Right now, it just comes in unscented and there are five ingredients in that—soluble methyl ester, dimethyl butyrate, dimethyl adipate, dimethyl succinate, and methylated trimethylol.
DEBRA: Lots of ethyls.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, I know. And I apologize for the mispronunciation […]
DEBRA: It’s okay.
KATIE LYNCH: So the nail polish, we have over 50 nail polish colors, and there are a lot of fun colors on there. If you’re somebody who has been looking for nail polish, I would love for you to try one.
DEBRA: Well, all I can say about nail polish is that I think that it’s one of those unnecessary things, but if you decide that you must wear nail polish, then this is as good as any of the other less toxic nail polishes. My personal opinion is that it’s not so important to me personally to wear nail polish, to put those ingredients on my fingers.
Let’s talk about your cosmetics.
KATIE LYNCH: So Poofy Organics does have a line of cosmetics, including eye shadow, mascara, eyeliner, foundation and blush, lip gloss and lipstick.
DEBRA: What’s in your mascara? I’m always looking for mascara.
KATIE LYNCH: In the mascara, the ingredients are water, chamomile, hydrosol, cera alba, which is beeswax, carnauba wax, mica, coffee powder, rice powder, sunflower seed oil, cornstarch, lecithin, vitamin E, and then a couple of extracts, including cinnamon bark extract, rosemary flower extract, and a couple other extracts in there.
DEBRA: That sounds very natural because I’ve looked at a lot of mascaras, and that sounds like one that I personally would try, and see how I like that one. I don’t wear a lot of make-up, but mascara does make my eyes look bigger, so I’m always looking for a mascara that I like. Good job on those ingredients.
So what do you have for babies and children? Babies, I guess, it is.
KATIE LYNCH: So for the babies, there is a bath and shampoo wash. There’s a baby lotion. There is something that’s called Happy Chicks, which is a baby balm stick, which is very easy to apply. There is the diaper rash cream which I have talked about before. And there is something called a Vapor Rub-A-Dub-Dub, which I really like a lot personally. It’s a little something like Vicks, and this is a USDA-certified organic product.
And so when my children get stuffy, and are coughing at night, I typically put this on their feet, put socks over it, and it definitely helps with their cough.
And so the ingredients in the Vapor Rub-A-Dub-Dub are organic sunflower oil, organic beeswax, organic essential oils, chamomile, lavender, eucalyptus, coriander and peppermint.
DEBRA: That sounds very soothing.
KATIE LYNCH: it is very soothing.
DEBRA: What’s a Booboo stick?
KATIE LYNCH: A Booboo stick is a natural soothing bomb, and that protects and heals skin irritation. It’s great to put in your purse or your diaper bags, and just to have with you if your toddler gets a little cut or scratch. It’s nice to have it, to put it on there.
And so in that, that contains organic beeswax, organic virgin coconut oil, organic sunflower oil, organic neem oil, organic cocoa butter, organic calendula, organic comfrey oil, organic sea buckthorn oil, organic st john’s wort extract, organic essential oils as rosemary, tea tree, sage chamomile and lavender.
DEBRA: Tell us about what you have for men.
KATIE LYNCH: For men, this is one of the newer lines. There are three scents that the products come in—coconut and honey, lemongrass and vanilla, and wood and citrus. And the products are an aftershave and body lotion, a body wash, [inaudible 32:33], cologne, shaving gel and an aftershave tonic.
DEBRA: In addition to products for babies, you also have a line for kids.
KATIE LYNCH: Yes, that is also one of the newer products. My children are now almost six, and two and a half, and they really love the scent. I’ve never let them use scents before because, again, I don’t like scents unless they’re made from essential oils. So all of these scents are made from essential oil, and the scents are candy crush, which is a peppermint, it reminds me of a candy cane, raspberry lemonade punch, [inaudible 00:33:14] orange milkshake, aloha smoothie and peace-loving vanilla.
And those products are lotions, body washes, body sprays, lip balm and deodorant. And my children really have a fun time after bath, picking what scent they want to wear that evening.
DEBRA: I think that this is a really good combination of the organic ingredients, but also the fun aspect. And I know that a lot of times—I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years, and so, a lot of the products early on were just very simple and straightforward. And I personally like simple, straightforward products.
But I also know that one of the conversations that I have over and over with manufacturers is that you have to make something that the public will buy, what consumers want. And consumers want to have scents and colors, and all these things, and nail polish.
And so it’s always good to make things as non-toxic and organic as possible to match with the consumer wants to buy.
Looking at this product line, I think that Poofy Organics has done a good job of doing that.
KATIE LYNCH: Thank you. And there’s something I forgot from the children’s products. There’s a Cheery, Cherry Toddler Toothpaste, which is certified organic, and I believe it’s the only USDA-certified organic toddler toothpaste on the market, and so I just wanted to make mention of that as well.
DEBRA: Good, thank you.
KATIE LYNCH: It’s gluten-free and fluoride-free, and my kids love these as well.
DEBRA: Good.
KATIE LYNCH: It’s made with bentonite clay, and a bunch of other good ingredients.
DEBRA: So we only just have a couple of minutes left. Is there anything that you want to make sure you say before we end?
KATIE LYNCH: Anybody who is looking for a petroleum jelly replacement, we make a product called Greener Than Petroleum Jelly, and it is USDA-certified organic, and made with sunflower oil and beeswax. I gave up petroleum jelly 10 years ago when I realized what it was. And I am very pleased to be back to using something very similar.
DEBRA: I never used a lot of petroleum jelly, but petroleum jelly is just what it says. It’s jelly made out of petroleum. How much more petroleum can you get than petroleum jelly?
So it’s good to have organic alternatives to that.
Thank you so much for being with us today, Katie. I think that we all learned a lot. And if you’re interested in learning more about these, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. If you want to become an independent consultant, give a party, make some money, this is a product line that you can do that. And now, that it’s something that’s organic.
KATIE LYNCH: We can also do virtual parties as well.
DEBRA: So if you want to do virtual parties, then contact Katie. Again, it’s ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and look for Katie Lynch.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
KATIE LYNCH: Thank you.
The Ethics of Toxics
Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- The Basic Principles of Toxicology
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Ethics of Toxics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: January 13, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
And we talk about this because there are so many toxic chemicals out in the world today. We find them in consumer products in our homes. We’re storing them in our bodies from past exposures. And so we talk about how you can make less toxic choices, choose products that don’t have toxic chemicals, how to get the toxic chemicals out of your body, what we can do about legislation, how to think about toxics, and anything that has to do with toxic chemical exposures and how we can be healthier and less toxic.
Today is Monday, January 13, 2014. And it’s a little bit overcast here in Clearwater, Florida. So it’s a nice Florida winter day, 70 degrees. I know some of you are freezing, but it’s not as cold as it was last week.
So today, we’re going to talk about the ethics of toxics. Ethics is actually one of my favorite subjects. And I know that our guest is very interested in ethics as well. So we’re going to talk about how ethics can be applied to questions of toxics.
My guest is a toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. He is the director and founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of an excellent book called A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. You can get this book for free on his website, which is Toxipedia.org, T-O-X-I-P-E-D-I-A dot org. And if you go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I have a link that goes directly to this book.
You can just download it, and it’s got great basic information about toxicology that everybody needs to know, written in a very clear, concise, easy-to-read and understand way.
So, I think this is a book that every person on the planet should be reading because it really gives you the basics by somebody who’s trained in this field.
Hello, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: Hi, Debra. How are you doing this morning?
DEBRA: I’m doing very well. How are you?
STEVEN GILBERT: Very good.
DEBRA: Good! Well, let’s just start by talking about what’s the definition of ethics. What is ethics?
STEVEN GILBERT: That is a really tough question because ethics—
DEBRA: I know.
STEVEN GILBERT: There are many different perspectives and different applications to it. And I think the most important part for me is ethics is part of decision-making in our values—how we approach decision-making when it comes to exposure to toxic chemicals.
In that regard, with what our definition of human and environmental health is, how do we define that, and how do we approach our decision-making in toxicology, and then risk assessment in particular.
DEBRA: I read your whole entire chapter on ethics and a lot of the sub-links that you have this morning. And one of the things that you have is one of my favorite quotes in the entire universe, which is from Aldo Leopold. He was America’s first bio-ethicist. And he said this in 1949, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It’s wrong when it tends otherwise.”
And I think that this is not only a statement full of wisdom, but I think that we tend to, in our culture, think in terms of right and wrong, but we don’t know what right and wrong means. How do you determine something is right versus something being wrong?
And in the song that I played at the beginning of the show every day, it talks about standing up for what’s right. But in our culture, we don’t have a lot of agreement on what right is. Yet this statement, this simple statement, explains it entirely, the thing to base decisions on.
Why don’t you say it again, so that everybody can hear it twice?
STEVEN GILBERT: I love this quote. I use it frequently when I lecture. So it says, “A thing is right,” and you’re absolutely correct in that defining what right is is very tricky. But it’s done brilliantly here.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.”
And I love those words—the biotic community.
“It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
So when we expose, for example, children to alcohol or PCBs, or lead, or mercury, we’re robbing them of their integrity, stability and beauty. And that just is wrong. And I think we start with a definition like this and think about integrity, stability and beauty, we’re a long way toward protecting human and environmental health.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And it does apply to, when Aldo Leopold says, “the biotic community.” I’ve read his book, so I know what he’s talking about ecosystems. But also, our bodies are biotic communities. And so whatever we do that’s harmful to them—
It’s like we’re doing all these things—take vitamins, or try to eat nutritious foods, or things like that, and all of those are having a positive effect—but if you have a huge negative effect like exposures to toxic chemicals day in and day out, that’s all moving towards demise rather than moving towards health.
And so, when we apply this beautiful statement, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community,” then immediately, we have to ask ourselves, “What are the things that are destroying that and how do we eliminate them?”
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s right! And I think that’s absolutely correct. And I want to bring up another quote that he has. It’s called, “An ethic ecologically,” and he was, like you pointed out, an ecological bioethicist. “So an ethic ecologically is a limitation on the freedom of action and the struggle for existence.”
So, really, it’s saying to me that we need some regulation. We need to govern ourselves appropriately to ensure that we have integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.
So regulation is not bad. We all wear seatbelts. And there’s a limitation to our freedom, but it has huge benefits. So I think small limitations to our freedom are really important when it comes to protecting human and environmental health.
DEBRA: I agree with that too. I think that freedom is really important, but it’s hard to be free if—I mean, I don’t think that people should have the freedom to destroy life. That’s a freedom we shouldn’t have. We should all be able to unite together around a statement like this and say that this is the ethic of how we live in a community, or how we live as a family, or as individuals, or as a nation, or as a planet. If everybody were to just take the statement, and put it up on the wall, and say, “This is what we’re living by. All our decisions are based on this,” we would have a very different world.
And I think it’s simply, at the very root of it, people and organizations and governments and businesses don’t have this ethical foundation that you and I have found. And of course, there are some other people who have too, not just you and I. But if this were more widely agreed upon, then of course, manufacturers would be producing products without toxic chemicals.
Governments wouldn’t even be arguing about regulations because it just would be a moot point. This is the way we should be living. And it’s ethics. It’s ethics.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes. And a correlate to that is we have certain rights. And I used to frame this as that we have a right to conditions that ensure that all living things have the best opportunity to reach and maintain their full potential.
DEBRA: I love that.
STEVEN GILBERT: Let me just say that again. I think we should have environmental conditions and conditions that ensure that all living things have the best opportunity to reach and maintain their full genetic potential.
Basically, if you’re exposing kids to lead and mercury and other toxicants, you rob them of their potential, genetic potential. And the same thing with wildlife.
I’m in Pacific Northwest. And we have salmon. We have blocked the salmon from going upstream where we put copper in the water. We’re blocking their ability to reproduce which is robbing them of their potential.
I think we have to look at this, that we have certain rights. We have a right to know what we’re exposed to and right to a clean air, clean water, clean soil. And we have a right to an environment that protects our health.
DEBRA: We do! Each one of us has that as our birth right, absolutely. We’re coming up on needing to take a break. And when we come back, we’ll be talking more about ethics with Dr. Steven Gilbert. And he’s from the Institute of Neurotoxicology, and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. You can get that for free at Toxipedia.org.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: Okay! So, we had a little technical difficulty there, but I understand you all can hear me now. Steven, can you hear me?
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you.
DEBRA: Good! Okay, there you are.
So, we’ve been talking about ethics, the ethics of toxics with Dr. Steven Gilbert. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
So, we do have a right to this. And it’s right in the Declaration of Independence. I want to read this.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
It’s not just a right, it’s an unalienable right.
“…that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It’s the first one. Our first unalienable right is the right to life, to be alive, to be healthy, and to be healthy enough that we can pursue happiness.
This is what the United States was founded upon, this statement of our rights that we should be able to be healthy. So there!
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s just great, Debra. Thank you for saying that.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Now, I noticed in your book that you had a section on human rights, but you also have a section on children’s rights. So, tell us how children’s rights are different from the standard human rights.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think children’s rights, we have the certain responsibility as “adults.” We have a responsibility to our children to ensure that they have an environment that they can reach and maintain their full potential.
The children are more vulnerable. They eat more, breathe more, drink more than adults do. So they’re more vulnerable to toxic exposures. I think that they have a special right and attention that need to be paid to the conditions with which they grow and develop in.
But I think that’s what I refer to. I actually have a paper I wrote on that, Why Children’s Rights. And that’s where that quote comes from, “conditions that ensure all of these things have the best opportunity to reach and maintain their full potential.” It was my really thinking about children and that we do have a responsibility to ensure that they have an environment worthy of their existence.
DEBRA: I completely agree. What are some other ideas? I’m thinking precautionary principle, let’s talk about that. I know we’ve talked about it before, but I think that some of these things bear repeating. So let’s talk about precautionary principle.
STEVEN GILBERT: They do. I love the precautionary principle. I think this is [really important for] decision-making.
And just to back up a little bit, historically, there’s a lot of controversy around the precautionary principle. But if you look back,
Sir Bradford Hill, who did a lot of work on smoking, and the documentation that tobacco causes lung cancer—and this is a good example of where economics has trumped health issues. But he wrote in 1965, “All scientific work is incomplete, whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us the freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have or postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.”
And he was probably referring to the issue of smoking causing lung cancer. The industry created a lot of uncertainty around this. And he came out with a number of principles about causation.
So, I think that’s very important, to establish causation. But if you don’t have all the scientific proof, you have good indications, then you move forward with action to protect human and environmental health.
And this is where the precautionary principle comes in which was defined in 1998 at the Wingspread Conference. It says,
“When activity raises threat of harm to human or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
So, even if there’s some uncertainty, we need to move forward to protect human and environmental health. And it took us years and decades to figure out, “Do we indeed cause a lot of harm?” and give the government the authority to restrict the uses and to modify advertising around cigarettes?”
And this is just one example. There’s a great book called Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels. If want to read more about this, I have other examples.
Lead is another good example of that. I spent years doing lead research. But why wasn’t it the responsibility of the corporations to show that lead was safe? We had the burden of showing that lead was harmful, which I think is the wrong way to be going about this.
I can go into other examples of that. But one of them is the Food and Drug Administration. We have a very precautionary approach when they put new drugs on the market. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry is required to produce enormous volumes of data to show that the product is both effective and safe.
We don’t have that condition when they put chemicals on the marketplace for industrial chemicals. For example, Bisphenol A.
Many of us are exposed, almost all of us are exposed to Bisphenol A. But we never gave consent to be exposed to that chemical, nor was there adequate research done to show that it was safe for all this exposure.
DEBRA: And we’re just at this point where there are so many chemicals on the market that haven’t been tested. And we need to be making individual decisions to protect our health.
It would be better if we could just assume that everything was safe, but we can’t. And that’s where each one of us, individually—
I’m working on re-designing my website right now. It’s going to be ready in a couple of weeks. And one of the things that I was thinking was about how I did all this research for myself as an individual. And then I said, “Well, there’s no need for every single person to start at square one and research all these chemicals. And I should just share this information.”
But it really is about each one of us having to make that decision because we don’t have the ethics as a nation, as a government, as a society, to say, “We need to be doing the things that contribute to the health of our biotic communities and our bodies, rather than allowing them to be destroyed.”
And we’ll be right back after this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbet, toxicologist. And he’s got a great book called A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and the link will take you right to the free copy.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. And he’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals, which you can get for free. The link is on my website at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, or you can go to his website, Toxipedia.org, which has lots and lots of all kinds of information about all different aspects of toxics, including the history, the ethics, the social implications—everything. It’s very thorough.
So, the next thing I’d like to talk about is your page, Ethics of Epi-Precaution. And there are two points on there that I think are really important.
The first one is the idea that we need to move beyond just doing no harm to doing good. So tell us about that first.
STEVEN GILBERT: Very good. Thank you for bringing this up. So epigenetics is a new understanding of how DNA expressed itself. We used to think that DNA was made up of certain chemicals, tyrosine to adenine, cytosine and guanine. And that was the way things worked. We had to modify the DNA to make changes.
But in the last few years, we’ve learned that you can modify the expression of DNA. So DNA creates proteins and governs our bodies and governs life. And you can change the expression of this DNA by modifying the DNA.
So, this is a really important understanding because it’s not just changing DNA, it’s making subtle changes to the DNA that modifies its expression.
So, this is important because chemicals can do that, make subtle changes. But even more important, our environment can do that—how we were raised, our stress can change that. So we interact with our environment and the conditions that we grow up in.
So, my thought was with that understanding, I really need to be thinking more broadly that our environment and the conditions in our environment are important. So it’s not just the matter of doing a harm—and doing a harm is usually construed as not having chemical exposure (so no lead exposure, for example, or no PCB exposure)—but we also need to have a good environment that’s more stress-free, that honors people’s development, that provides good education, that really, we need to do good, not just do no harm.
So, I think that’s going to be the challenge in the future. How do we create an environment where we’re actually optimizing the potential of people to develop and maintain their potential?
DEBRA: I completely agree with you. I’ve been looking at these issues of toxics for more than 30 years. And a long time ago, when I started trying to sort out, well, what was toxic and what wasn’t toxic, I had one of those realizations that looks so obvious after you have it, but you don’t even see it at all before you have it. And that is that things can be categorized actually in three categories—they can be harmful, they can be beneficial, but they could also do nothing.
And so I started looking and saying, “Well, okay, so here’s a toxic chemical. Let’s not have this in my environment.” And then here’s something like cotton, which is just there, but not doing anything either way. It’s not providing a benefit. It’s not causing a harm.
And then, there would be something like say a nutritious food, and that nutritious food would be giving a positive plus benefit.
And then I started seeing, well, what are more of these positive things that we could be having. Like clean water is a positive thing, as well social connections and education, love, all those things that provide positive things in our lives.
And I also recognized that many years ago, I thought that if I would just avoid the toxic chemicals, that my body would heal.
And I think that that’s true to a certain degree because I think that bodies tend towards health if you don’t suppress that health with toxic chemicals. But I found more recently that if I do things that positively push my body towards health (like eat proper nutrition, take proper supplements, exercise, get enough sleep, those kinds of things), then my recovery from toxic chemical exposure goes much faster.
So, I’m in total agreement with you about this “doing good” part, that if we think about what do we need to do to reduce those harmful factors, and then put our efforts and attention into building those positive things, then we’re going to be in really good shape.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, that’s why I called it “epi-precaution” because really you really need to move above and beyond precaution. Precautionary approach says to reduce harm, but epi-precaution is going beyond the precautionary approach and has them doing good.
Just like epigenetics is above and beyond the gene, epi-precaution is above and beyond the precautionary principle.
It says, “the need to provide a loving and supporting environment and doing a harm is just not good enough. We need to have a positive environment to ensure the children, and we all, can reach and maintain our full potential.”
DEBRA: I just love all of these thoughts. I wish that everybody far and wide would think this way because it just produces such a good result.
STEVEN GILBERT: We really need to be thinking more in a preventative approach, and how do we prevent disease rather than just treat it.
We have a system that has worked very hard to cure disease, and not prevent it. There are lots of money to be made off curing disease and treating disease—our hospitals, our insurance system. Everybody makes money off disease. It’s very difficult to make money off of prevention. It’s even more difficult to make it off of kind of having a loving and supporting environment.
That’s really what it’s about, creating an environment that prevents exposure to chemicals and reduces the exposure to chemicals. It creates an environment that supports and honors health, and promotes health, rather than just trying to fix it when it’s gone wrong.
DEBRA: Yes, and that requires, I think, about 180-degree turnaround in our society because that’s just not how we think—but that is what is the effective thing to do.
And so the first step—I think you and I would agree—would be to reduce the harmful factors, and then put in the good factors.
And certainly, you can do those side by side. But both are necessary, so that you’re not having the harmful chemicals fighting the positive benefits of what we’re trying to do.
STEVEN GILBERT: In that regard, we need to know what we’re exposed to. We should have a right to know. That’s one of the rights we should have, it’s to know what we’re consuming.
We should have some battles politically over this Toxic Substance Control Act, TSCA (which needs to be modified, so we have more control over the chemicals we’re exposed to and know more about them). We’ve had battles politically over genetically-modified organisms and whether we should have a right to know what’s in our food supply and the GMO in our food.
I really believe we have a right to know what we’re exposed to. And industry often takes the opposite side, that everything’s fine, we don’t need to know all that stuff.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. If we don’t know, then we can’t make choices. I’ve given this example before, but I’ll give it again—oops, no! We’re going to go to break, and then I’ll give the example after the break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist, and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And you can get that at my website for free, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals and publisher of the exceptionally comprehensive toxic site, Toxipedia.org.
So, before the break, I said that I wanted to give an example, and that is that in our marketplaces today, if you were to buy, say, apple sauce (that’s a good example), and you were to go into a supermarket, you would look at a jar and read the ingredients, and it would say apples and water, and maybe sugar. And what it doesn’t tell you is chlorine and fluoride in the water, and pesticides on the apples, and wax on the apple peels, and all the chemicals that are involved in that.
The way it is labeled though is that if you were to go to a natural food store and buy apple sauce, it would say “certified organically grown,” “certified USDA,” “certified organic apples and filtered water,” and “evaporated cane juice,” and all these ingredients that indicate the absence of chemicals. So, they don’t tell you that there are toxic chemicals in products, and that the ones that don’t have the toxic chemicals have to label themselves in ways to explain that.
And that’s backwards. I think that our shopping patterns would be very different if the organic ones just didn’t say anything and the toxic ones said, “This contains this toxic chemical and that toxic chemical and another toxic chemical.” And I think that’s where the labeling really does need to change. We need to see those toxic chemicals on the label.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, we could certainly do a lot better job of providing information. It goes to all kinds of products too, not just our food, but the cosmetics—
DEBRA: Everything!
STEVEN GILBERT: …from what’s used in personal care products to what’s used in the receipts in our cash registers, receipts that have BPA in them. It’s just a pervasive issue.
And I think Europe has done a better job, is working hard to do that, and has more precautionary approach. They give more credence to that, that we have a right to know about what we’re being exposed to and a right to know what chemicals are in the products that we use.
DEBRA: I think so too. I saw that many years ago when I went to Germany. It’s funny in Germany because people are still allowed to smoke cigarettes everywhere, and they do. And they sit down in the cafes, eating sugar pastries, and drinking coffee with pesticides on it.
But if you look at their personal care products, they had natural fiber beds, and certified organic food and all these kinds of things, it’s very, very natural in that regard. And then they have these little pockets where they’re still doing things that some of us here haven’t been doing for a long time.
STEVEN GILBERT: We do a funny job about regulation. I’d like to pick up one other person before I move on, Garrett Hardin in The Tragedy of the Commons. And this is a really interesting paper that was produced in the 1960s.
He talked about that the products we use, the technology we have is also part of the problem. And the conclusion of this paper was it is our professional judgment that the dilemma has no technical solution. He states that from saying that many of the problems we have require regulation. There is no technical solution to a problem.
For example, over-fishing, we have the technology now to find fish in the ocean, and destroy any fish we want in the ocean.
We’re doing that actually with tuna. But the rules and the fix to that problem is not technology, but it is restriction of the fishing.
And so we have to be really aware that technology is not the solution to all problems. It actually creates some problems, and we need to have regulation to deal with these issues.
DEBRA: Well, I would argue, since we’re talking about ethics, that if people had ethics, then each person individually, and each company individually, would say, “We need to do the thing that supports the biotic community” and that they wouldn’t overfish because it would just feel wrong to them.
This kind of ethic was part of native cultures. They had an idea that they were living in an ecosystem. And if they overfish, and if they over-hunted, that there wasn’t going to be anything else there for them to eat.
And we don’t have that sense today because all our food comes from the supermarket. And so it’s always going to be there.
I remember my mother, when I was a child, she said this so many times that it’s imprinted in my brain. She would always say,
“Well, there’s always more at the store.” Well, there isn’t always more at the store.
STEVEN GILBERT: Things like that, I think, is part of the problem.
DEBRA: That is part of the problem. And so we’re not out there in the fishing boats, looking at the fish, and saying, “How many fish are there? How many can we take out? How many needs to stay in order for them to reproduce and produce more fish?”
Those things are just not part of our awareness. And yet, we think—this is another thing I realized a long time ago. Our survival sense is “How do we survive in the industrial world? How do we make enough money to go buy something?” But our actual survival is dependent on us understanding the natural world, and how our actions affect what goes on in ecosystems, and how those ecosystems provide for us, that what’s providing for us is not multinational corporations, it’s the earth. And if we’re not taking care of the earth, it’s not going to be there to provide for us.
STEVEN GILBERT: I really agree with that. We have spent a lot of years externalizing the cost over to the environment. We’re doing that now with coal-burning utility plants that spew a lot of toxic chemicals from up the smoke stacks that’s from burning coal and that contaminates the ocean with mercury, for example, which turns up in our fish.
Unless we start looking at more holistic issues and take into account that we just cannot keep externalizing and doing things cheaply because the environment just cannot take it in—global warming and climate change are other examples of that. Like I mentioned, coal-burning is another one. It’s a big issue here on the West Coast. They’re shipping coal to China to be burned.
And then the smoke, and then the contaminants from that coal-burning ends up blowing towards the West Coast as well as contaminating China. You could see the consequence in China with its enormous air pollution problem.
So, we really do need to be looking at more holistic ways of thinking collectively about what the earth can tolerate.
DEBRA: I completely agree. That hour just went by fast. We only have about four minutes left. I would like to ask you what final things would you like to say that you haven’t said? I’ve been doing all the talking and asking questions.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think the important thing is for people to come up with a definition of human and environmental health that they feel like is their own, and to look at the precautionary principle as the foundation for decision-making, raising threats of harm, and we need to take action even if things are uncertain, that we don’t need to have adequate proof all the time. We need to accept some uncertainty.
And the burden of responsibility demonstrating safety needs to be on the proponent. Right now, the safety of the issue is usually demonstrated by showing there is harm. So we get caught on—I mean, I spent years of research trying to show that lead is harmful at very low levels. But the industry who made a fortune off of lead should have had the burden of responsibility of demonstrating that it’s safe at low levels.
So, we really got to change that. I urge people to get involved in the legislative process—for example, the Chemical Policy Reform Act. We’re really working on a policy level also to change the way we govern ourselves.
DEBRA: I agree with all of that. I do. So would you read to us again Aldo Leopold’s statement?
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s really a wonderful statement.
DEBRA: It is!
STEVEN GILBERT: It was in A Sand County Almanac, 1949.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
I think it’s such a wonderful statement that is really the heart of the matter. It really speaks to what rights we have, and how we need to protect our environment going forward and preserve human and environmental health.
DEBRA: I totally agree.
STEVEN GILBERT: I also want to mention that my book, A Small Dose of Toxicology is now in Chinese. It was just printed in China about a week ago. And it’s global. You can purchase it. But we’re making a huge effort to try to reach out to other people and provide the information around the world.
DEBRA: That’s great. My book, Toxic-Free, was just published in Latvia.
STEVEN GILBERT: Fantastic!
DEBRA: So, it’s now in Latvian, French, Hebrew, five languages. I don’t remember what they are. But this is good. It’s good that all this information is getting out, and that these ideas are getting out.
Well, thank you so much for being with us. And we’ll have you on again. There’s so much to talk about. Maybe next time, we’ll talk about the history of toxic chemicals. That’s a good one. Next time, we’ll talk about that.
STEVEN GILBERT: Debra, thank you for the work you do.
DEBRA: Thanks! So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can find more information about upcoming guests. You can listen to all the past shows in the archives. You can even leave comments if you want on the archive shows about questions you might have—well, I’m not sure that they’ll all get answered, but you can make comments about what you think about things in the show, add additional information, and find out so much from the people who are actually working in the world today to make our lives and our world a less toxic place to live.
Also, across the top of the page, there is a menu to different parts of my website where you can go to click the shop button, for example, and it will take you to website links of more than 500 places where you can buy toxic-free products. You can click on body detox, and find out how to get rid of toxic chemicals out of your body.
And that’s all the time we have for today. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Safe Play Sand
Question from Concerned Mom
We are looking for play sand for our toddler – the type of sand that is used for playing in sand boxes or sand tables outdoors.
We found Quikrete brand at Home Depot, but then discovered negative reviews on Amazon stating that it produces a large cloud of dust (concerns about inhaling silica dust), that some people had rashes, scratchy throats, etc, after exposure to it, that it isn’t safe for children, and that even though it is supposedly screened/cleaned, this product is “filthy.”
And the MSDS for the Quikrete play sand does mention the respiratory concerns about silica, but of course they refer to continuous occupational exposure and state that this sand is safe for children to play in. However, it seems to me that a child sitting and playing in sand is also being exposed continually and repeatedly.
So it looks like we’ll be returning this product to Home Depot rather than opening and using it.
But that leads me on a search for an alternative. I also noticed the Sandtastik brand on Amazon, with lots of positive reviews and claims that it is safe, non-toxic, contains no free silica or quartz, etc. But I don’t know what to make of it.
But that leads me on a search for an alternative. I also noticed the Sandtastik brand on Amazon, with lots of positive reviews and claims that it is safe, non-toxic, contains no free silica or quartz, etc. But I don’t know what to make of it.
What would make a play sand safe?
Obviously we don’t want the ones that are reported to be scratchy, dirty, and causing rashes. But other than that, is there particular wording that would indicate that it is a safe product?
Children play in sand at the beach and it’s a natural substance. Yet I saw remarks about some play sand being man-made, about sand at the beach containing carcinogenic substances (referring to the silica and quartz, I think), and so forth.
I’d just like to find a safe product for my child to play with, and while I’m used to checking things out thoroughly, it would be nice if something – anything! – were easy to buy without becoming a research project!
This is from the FAQ on the Sandtastik website:
WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY THAT OUR SAND CONTAINS NO FREE SILICA OR QUARTZ? Firstly, let’s examine sand found in dunes and on beaches. Toxicologists have proven that some of those tiny little grains of sand may contain known natural carcinogens. A carcinogen is a substance that causes cancer. Substances like silica and quartz through prolonged exposure to skin, inhalation or ingestion have potential health risks. Sandtastik sand is made from the feldspar family of rock which does not contain any carcinogens. It is 100% pure safe sand. www.sandtastik.com/faq
This is the product info page: www.sandtastik.com/100-sand/101-white-play-sand/1280-play-sand-50-lbs
I am also wondering how they make it white rather than the typical sand color. This product is also far more expensive than the play sand at places like Home Depot, and it takes multiple 50-pound bags to fill up a sandbox.
So while I’m willing to pay more for safe things for my child, I’d like to know that what I am buying truly is safe, and how to tell if this is a good product or if I should keep looking.
Debra’s Answer
Here’s an answer from a nontoxic mom who did some research on this.
The problem with free silica and quartz occurs in sand made from crushed rock.
If you’ve ever looked at beach sand up close, it’s rock that has been worn down by the water. Crushed rock creates a lot of dust, and thus, the dust hazard of this type of sand.
The recommendations are
look for river or beach sand in landscape and gardening store.
Buy Safe Sand (this site has more information about the problem.
Paint with Mildewcide for Bathroom?
Question from Allison
Debra, Thanks again for all your help. For painting a bathroom, do you recommend using a paint that contains mildewcide? AFM Safecoat will add it, if I request it.
If I do have the mildewcide added, will it be any danger to my health once the paint is completely dried and cured?
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
Oh, this is a difficult question to answer because “mildewcide” refers to a broad range of chemcials, some of which are more toxic than others.
The bathroom is a room where there is a lot of moisture that could cause mold to grow on walls.
One way to control mold growth is with a mildewcide in the paint.
What I did was tile up seven feet on all the walls, and then applied colored clay plaster from American Clay. The clay plaster absorbs moisture when it is present, and releases it back into the air when the air is dry, so there is no buildup of moisture on the surface of the wall for mold growth.
My best recommendation for bathroom walls is tile and clay plaster.
Contact AFM and find out what mildewcide they use and then evaluate it’s toxicity. That will give you your answer.
Smoke Coming Into House
Question from Nancy
We just moved to a beautiful country setting here in NE Arizona, however the distant hills (about 20 miles away) have prescribed burns by the forest service and it’s quite often. (I learned this AFTER our move!) During sleep hours, the smoke rolls into our area and into our house. I have terrible allergies and have to close the vents, but it’s not enough. Is there any kind of vent filter I can use to keep smoke from coming in that way? I currently use 2 air purifiers in the bedroom, but it’s very frustrating knowing that smoke is always coming in from the attic, and the purifiers aren’t taking care of the problem the way I need. Any help is appreciated!
Debra’s Answer
It sounds like you need to seal up cracks and any openings that are allowing smoke to come through.
Do you know or can you find out when the burns are going to be so you can close your vents.
Readers, have any of you had this experience?
Watch Out for Wi-Fi in Everything
My guest today is Oram Miller, a Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant based in Los Angeles. Last Sunday the LA Times ran an article about the explosion of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transmitting chips that are being put in any product that can contain a battery and transmitter. This allows users to have the device constantly feed data to their smartphone or tablet to improve performance. But there is a health downside to all this. We’ll talk about electromagnetic sensitivities, how these devices can affect your health, how to locate this products and identify them in stores before you buy, and how to choose “wi-fi-free” products..Oram received his certification from the International Institute for Bau-biology and Ecology. He provides healthy home and office evaluations for clients throughout Southern California who have electro-magnetic sensitivities, as well as those who just want a healthier home. Oram also consults on the healthy design and construction of new and remodeled homes. Oram specializes in the effects of EMFs from cell phones, cordless telephones, Wi-Fi, tablets and smart meters, as well as health effects caused by basic EMFs from house wiring, including wiring errors and unwanted current on water pipes and other parts of the grounding system. Oram is available for on-site EMF consultations in Southern California and provides telephone consultations for clients nationwide. He writes extensively on the health hazards of EMFs on his website, www.createhealthyhomes.com
This is the first of three interviews with this guest about EMF exposure in your home. He’ll be back..
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“Watch Out for Wi-Fi in Everything”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Oram Miller
DATE OF BROADCAST: January 8, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and we do that because there are so many toxic things out there but if we know where they are and we know how to avoid them and we know how to take care of our bodies and how to support them in processing those chemicals that we are exposed to first we reduce the amount then help our bodies them, then we can still live healthy, happy lives and we don’t have to be victims of those chemical exposures.
So today is Wednesday, the 8th of January 2014 and today we’re gonna be talking about something different. Usually we talk about toxic chemicals but today we’re gonna talk about toxic electromagnetic fields and what prompted this show was an article in last Sunday’s LA Times and it was all about an electronics tradeshow that is happening right now in Las Vegas this week and the proliferation of many personal and home products that now have smart chips in them. So it’s essentially Wi-Fi everywhere and they are now calling it the next wave of electronics. It’s gonna be the internet of things. Virtually every type of product in the near future is going to be connected to your smart phone or your tablet or your computer; collecting information, giving us information but also sending EMF fields, radio frequencies and all those things all over the place where they never have been before. I personally don’t have Wi-Fi, I don’t have a wireless printer on my computer, I don’t have a cordless phone; I do have a cell phone that I rarely use but I try to keep my home as EMF free as possible. So today I invited a gentleman Oram Miller, who is a Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant in Los Angeles to come on the show and explain how these products can affect our health.
DEBRA: Hi Oram
ORAM MILLER: Hi Debra
DEBRA: It’s very cold here.
ORAM MILLER: In Florida?
DEBRA: Yes. And yesterday we were talking about heating our houses, toxic free, and how to save energy and many doing so. And we were talking about how cold it was in Florida and my guess in Montana said it was 11 degrees or something; my producer in Pennsylvania it was minus two (-2). Today its 52 here and its 3 degrees in Pennsylvania and you’re gonna tell me its 75 in Los Angeles.
ORAM MILLER: In a few hours, yes. It’s just after 9’o clock in the morning here and it’s been in the 70’s.
DEBRA: So I guess you don’t need to heat your home?
ORAM MILLER: Well, let me tell you something. Having lived in the upper mid-west in Minnesota before moving here four years ago; I’m not used to the winters here because and everywhere else in the north, you turn your thermostat on in October and you don’t open your windows, hardly at all as its always 68 or 70 degrees until April or May but here we open our windows in the daytime and in the night we don’t heat the house and it gets down to the low 50’s so I’m freezing in the morning when I wake up.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s nice! Well, it’s actually nice for me because I grew up in Northern California where it was very temperate in the San Francisco Bay area and it was with the vonk and everything in the summer. Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was the summer in San Francisco and that was about right. We had warmer winters and colder summers so it all balanced out.
But anyway, we’re here to talk about EMFs and I know that you have quite a bit of experience and knowledge in this field. Tell us how you got interested in it?
ORAM MILLER: Well, I’ve always been interested in the environment and environmental consulting. This is a way in which we can help people and families to learn about the toxicities that lurk in their homes that they may or may not know about and the building biology profession which I know you are aware of and endorse. In fact, you’re in Clearwater, correct?
DEBRA: I’m in Clearwater, home of International Institute of Bau Biology but didn’t they move?
ORAM MILLER: Well, actually, Helmet just passed away; our founder – lived there and his wife or surviving widow, Suzanna still lives there of course. And that was where the headquarters was officially for many years. Wherever the Executive Director lives is sort of where the active office is and right now it’s being manned by Michael Khan
DEBRA: Oh, I know Michael.
ORAM MILLER: Oh, you do?
DEBRA: Yes, and I was very good friends with Helmet too. He and Suzanna and my husband and I used to go out to dinner together, talk, etc.
ORAM MILLER: Well, your name is familiar to us Debra. I know that you’ve been aware of us and promoting bell biology or building biology and great work with encouraging people to learn about toxicities in their home. So thank you for all of your work over the years.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us a little about what bell biology is because I know that not all of our listeners know about what it is.
ORAM MILLER: The Bell Biology profession came from Germany 35 years ago. Anton Shnider is the architect who founded the profession 35 years ago and basically it came out of the rebuilding efforts that were underway in post World War II Germany; where they literally had to rebuild their housing stock. For better or for worst, a lot of American methods and materials were brought which was a part of the martial plan and that was good except that they didn’t emphasize the tried and true building materials and building methods that were used in Europe over the last centuries and even millennia where they used post and beam construction daub and bothole construction where they had thick walls made out of local materials that were from the local soil; clays and that sort of thing. Materials that have the capacity to breathe and we don’t mean breathe in air; we mean breathe in moisture that contain in air – high gross capacity. High gross capacity is the capacity of a wall to allow moisture to slowly move through and dry out so that the materials in the wall never get moldy. I actually co-wrote a book with a Building Biologist in Texas name George Swanson and also Wayne Federo. The three of us wrote “Build a Breathing Wall” and that’s a 350 page self-published manual that talks all about how to build walls without mould. So that’s available through my website and through breathingwalls.com and my website is www.createhealthyhomes.com.
Anyways, out of World War II – post World War II Germany, there was enough illness that developed in people’s lives from the new building materials and methods that were used and also from the electromagnetic field and defining quality of indoor air. So, as a result of that, physicians, individuals who were suffering from this, and builders and architects, got together and founded the IBM and I am not sure exactly what that stands for in German but it’s the building biology profession but they call “bau biologe”. “Bau” is the German word for house or building and “biologe” is their pronunciation of our English word biology. So we translated as building biology in this country and in the English speaking world.
Over the last 35 years the whole profession has developed in Germany and throughout Europe, teaching individuals how to assess homes for sources of toxicities and then that spread through America when Helmet brought this knowledge 25 years ago so he founded the International Institute for Bau Biology and Ecology in Clearwater Florida, where you live, and from there he had people come, learn the knowledge and become teachers for him. I’m actually an assistant instructor for the EMF courses now. What we teach our students is training in identification and mitigation of toxicities from buildings, homes and offices, including indoor air quality; mould, asbestos, lead, radon, natural gas, carbon monoxide and then natural building materials, like I talk about the breathing wall and then the third thing is the whole area of electromagnetic field. Now, I practiced for many years in the upper Midwest doing the full range of building biology services so I have experience in that but 4 years ago, to get out of the cold weather, I moved to Southern California. I do just EMF now and work with others in the area, Southern California who do air quality work.
DEBRA: I need to just interrupt you because we need to go to the break but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio and I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Oram Miller, Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant and we’re gonna be talking about EMFs so stay with us…
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Oram Miller, Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant based in Los Angeles but you can go to his website if you have questions for him; he does consulting all across the country and probably around the world so you can get in touch and he can talk to you on the phone or email with you or whatever to answer your questions. His website is www.createhealthyhomes.com.
So Oram, why don’t you give us a little lesson here about electromagnetic fields and I know that there are three types and this is actually the first of three shows that we’re gonna have you on so that we can talk about each type. But give us an overview and tell us about how people are sensitive, how it can affect otherwise healthy people.
ORAM MILLER: First of all, there really are four types but the three major types that we emphasize in the building biology profession are: magnetic field from house wiring, then there are electric fields from house wiring which are different from magnetic field and you don’t measure electric field with the gallos meter, you measure them with different meters and they both come from house wiring. We’ll get into electric field in details in one of the upcoming shows. Then the third major group would be all the wireless devices which we’re pretty much talking about today; and then the fourth area would be the area of electricity that represents harmonics of fundamental frequency that could be the 60 hertz per second.
DEBRA: Well, we’re gonna have to have you on four times because I think we need to do a whole show on dirty electricity. It’s my understanding that dirty electricity actually makes you more sensitive to toxic chemical exposures but lets just stop right there because we’re gonna talk about radio frequencies today so we’ll address it in the future.
ORAM MILLER: Ok. But all four types of EMFs make people sensitive and susceptible to toxicities and there’s a lot of cross-sensitivity and because we are trained in all of these toxicities in whole, we understand that and we work with people who are sensitive to both or don’t know that they’re sensitive to the other. They may call us up and say that they are chemically sensitive and then they find out that they are electrically sensitive and vice versa.
So anyways, sticking with EMFs, the magnetic fields come from outside power lines which go right through building material; you cant shield those and they’re really hard to deal with. The second source of magnetic field would be wiring errors which can cause an unbalanced mode between the hot and the neutral in the circuits and in cords that you plug in. Thirdly would be point sources like transformers and motors but the magnetic fields from those drop off within two to three feet fortunately. The fourth would be current grounding power like water pipes under your floor, believe it or not, or the heat cable coming from outside. So I’ll cover that in another show on magnetic fields.
An electric field, just in summary, comes from voltage not currant; magnetic fields are from currant. Voltage is what causes electric fields. Electric fields come out from unshielded wires like plastic romex wires in your walls and circuit and the cords that you plug in and they’re especially a problem where you sleep. So one of the things that we do is to make sure that the sleeping environment is devoid of electric field, magnetic fields, radio frequencies for all of our clients, whether they are symptomatic or not and we may actually determine which circuit raise the electric field levels where people sleep, when they sleep, and then tell them to shut that circuit off. And there are automatic or convenient ways of doing that from the bedroom and the value of this is that people sleep more deeply or release more melatonin in the middle of the night and they awaken much more refreshed and it really has the good effect of boosting the benefit from all medical therapies whether traditional or imperative to help improve the health of people who are symptomatic. It even improves the lives of people who are otherwise healthy.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that because everything we do either has a positive effect on our bodies, health and well-being; or a negative effect or no effect at all. And what we’re doing most of the times in our world today are things that have negative effects; electromagnetic field exposures being one of them, and we aren’t doing enough positive things to balance it out. So when we go to the doctor or some kind of practitioner and get some kind of positive, health affirming treatment; if we still are being exposed to toxic chemicals or electromagnetic fields or all those things on the negative side of the ledger, it’s gonna be more difficult for any kind of treatment to actually improve your health. So this is one of the reasons why it’s so important that we understand what these negative effects are so we can stop beating up our bodies with them.
ORAM MILLER: Exactly! That’s actually the philosophy of our profession as you well know. Building biology considers the house to be the third skin; we have the skin of our bodies, our clothes is the second skin or layer that protects us and then the building enclosure is the third skin and we want the environment within that to be as healthy as possible. You get a lot of referrals from healthcare practitioners in the Southern California area, who have seen that the clients and patients that they’ve referred to me are getting more improvements from the therapies that they’re providing with the addition of the building biology evaluation of the home; whether EMF or indoor air quality and so that’s a lot of my work. I haven’t had to advertise in three and a half (3 ½) years.
DEBRA: That’s great! I’m glad that the people are recognizing the value of this.
ORAM MILLER: Thank you. In regards to this issue, the reason why you had me on this is because I sent out a post to the building body website yahoo chat group that was picked up by a gentleman in Montreal, Andre Fachoo who then put it on his blog and then you saw that and that’s why you called me. What I wrote about was this article that I read in my home town newspaper, The Los Angeles Times Sunday morning which said that the consumer electronics show is in Las Vegas and about to begin and one of the quote is that “by 2050 there will be 50 billion internet connected devices or five gadgets for every man, woman and child in people’s home” and they say you’re gonna see an explosion of device. Now I knew this was coming but I didn’t realize it was gonna be in tennis rackets, toothbrushes and that sort of thing. I know it’s already in wearable wristbands, they call it, like you said in your introduction “the internet of everything” and one of the areas that they’re pushing into very aggressively technologically is called wearables: watches, glasses, and so on. Here’s the issue that I deal with. Fortunately for me I’m not personally electrically hypersensitive but sixty to seventy percent (60 – 70%) of my clients are.
DEBRA: What does that mean “electrically hypersensitive”?
ORAM MILLER: These are people who already have figured out that they have symptoms and they even may be ill from them. There’s a slight difference – some people are just sensitive but they can tolerate these things but they don’t feel well. There are other people who are frankly ill; so sixty to seventy percent of my clients are in that large category and then maybe two-thirds of them are actually ill. These are people who notice they develop headaches, numbness and tingling, brain fog, lethargy, weakness and other symptoms that they know are specifically related to one form or another. Now interestingly enough, in the last few months, I’ve figured out that over the years the many clients I’ve worked with, I’ve become able to pretty much determine which EMF I’m going to find that will be elevated in their home based on the cluster of symptoms that they tell me about.
People who have radio frequency sensitivity to Wi-Fi and to those kinds of devices – cell phones, Wi-Fi, cordless phones – they can’t sleep, they have numbness and tingling, ringing in the ears, headaches, agitation and brain fog; but mostly its ringing in the ears, headaches and lethargy. Someone on the other hand who has a strong magnetic field occurring under their water pipe, under their floor, in the ceiling of their basement or in the cross base in their house or they have wiring errors when they turn on light and they don’t know it or they have power lines. Those people, their immune system just starts to fail, they develop general debilitation over time because it affects their immunity and their vitality. Now people who have high electric field, they definitely have insomnia, they have agitation, they’re very tired, a lot of chronic fatigue and they just feel dosed all the time. That points to electrical hypersensitivity and that can also extend to their laptop, if they plug in the power cord with a two-sprung plug instead of a three-sprung plug because in the former case you’re ungrounded and in the latter you’re grounded and that’s a huge difference so that’s another thing you have to check out. That should give you an idea of the symptoms people report.
DEBRA: Let’s talk more about these new products that the article talked about.
ORAM MILLER: This is really an interesting turn of events. Our profession, me included, we have no problem with the connectivity; we love the connectivity, we love all of the conveniences that these things provide but what we don’t like is the technology that’s used for the communication. The actual radio frequency based, wireless communication and in fact, very extensive research that I suggest listeners look at for themselves through my website, what I do is I have list of links to other websites that have hundreds of studies that document harm to people; most of the research is done outside the United States but it is well documented and countries around the world, outside of the US, are actually encouraging people to reduce use of these devices. They’re taking Wi-Fi out of schools and hospitals because they see a looming health crisis because enough time has elapsed that people are starting to show up with these symptoms and go into health clinics that of course the Government pay for; that’s how healthcare is provided in those countries we know and its not profit driven so they have every incentive in the world to get ahead of what they see as the fourth looming health crisis that we’ve seen in the last century – the first three being asbestos lead, gas or petrol as they call it, and tobacco. So we’re entering the script for four and we don’t want to have it go through its full cycle the way it has in the past so they’re trying to get ahead of the curve and they’re making efforts to reduce these effects. I point to that when I have conversations quietly after presentations by electric utility officials or people who represent health and companies when they make the claim, as they always do, in the United States that there is no harm from these things because the FDC says that one mill watt per square meter is a safe level but that’s only based on thermo heating effects in experiments that were done decades ago with laboratory animals and it completely had disregarded all this time, all of the effects that occur at much lower level that are non-heating but biological in nature. So the emerging EMF safety community is made up not of engineers and physicist as in the past but rather experimental biologist who are looking at the effects of these technologies on cells and tissue functioning at the biological level and they are seeing a tremendous number of effects on sperm and reproduction, on autism, on genotoxicity, neurotoxicity. Its one effect after another that are well documented so I say to these officials and representatives from these companies; if what you say is true, if there is actually no evidence – and they actually make the statement that there is no harm below the official level, but they’re lying through their teeth (I hate to say it that way but they are). The problem is the institutions that they look to aren’t reporting these effects. Because they look to the EPRI which is the Electric Power Research Institute in San Francisco but that’s bio industry, bio electric utility and they look at the IEEE which is the International Electrical and Electronics Engineers who again say we’ve reviewed thousands of studies and we’ve found no evidence of any harm. They’re just not reporting on those things that are being reported by other places in the world. In fact, a Danish study that came out a couple years ago that showed no significant effect, but now it turns out that in the study they totally disregarded the class of users in Denmark that were the heaviest which are those individuals who were given cell phones by their company; they were excluded from the study. And in study after study, there is evidence that they are totally ignoring and withholding information regarding certain tumors. So they’re very selective in what they announce, unfortunately.
DEBRA: Unfortunately yea. So give us some examples of some of the kinds of products that are available now that we should be watching out for. Like one of the ones that you mentioned in your email that went out is the “nest thermostat”. Talk to us about that because my thermostat broke. Fortunately, it broke at the end of the summer so right now I don’t have heat but I don’t need it for many days except for today when I’m sitting on top of the little space heater underneath my desk but when it comes up I’m gonna have to replace my thermostat before it gets hot because I need my air conditioner here in Florida. So, I was looking at the thermostats at Home Depot and of course they have a big display for nest and I was looking at how cute it looks; its got that little leaf and it helps you save energy and I thought, these are good features but tell us why.
ORAM MILLER: First of all, I want to start by saying I don’t want to single out any particular company or manufacturer by name; I mentioned that in the email not knowing I was gonna end up on your radio show and I’m not opposed to that company in particular or any company for that matter.
DEBRA: Neither am I. It’s just an example.
ORAM MILLER: I use the cell phones and we’re all in favor of technologies that give energy but here’s the issue; the issue is not their fault, it’s the technologies they’re harnessing and tapping into which is the technology for connectivity and that’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. So the last few times I’ve come across those digital thermostat in four or five homes over the last six months, I’ve noticed I pick up a Wi-Fi signal with the radio frequency detector that I use. I know what devices normally produce that: cordless phones – base units put out not Wi-Fi but another signal, even when you hang up the phone they fill the room with frequencies on a continuous basis. Just like an ashtray with four or five burning lit cigarettes filling the room with smoke which you can’t see or smell the radio frequencies and it’s harmful to everyone on a cellular level but not everyone is symptomatic so it’s really a question of; if you’re symptomatic you need to get rid of it and replace it with cord service which we will talk about in a few minutes on the show here, but if you’re not symptomatic and you want to be health conscious then I say to my clients, how many cigarettes are you willing to smoke on a daily basis. You’re exposing yourself to a known toxic agent that does cause harm at the cellular level which is proven with hundreds of thousands of studies now so you have to ask yourself, how much exposure are you willing to experience. And we know that people who smoke cigarettes, decades ago, the majority of them did not get ill but a certain percentage did so…
DEBRA: And you also don’t know, as you said cigarette, people have to smoke for 30 years some of them before they get cancer and other problems.
We need to go for a break and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Oram Miller, a Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant in Los Angeles and we’re talking about EMFs and we’ll be back after the break to learn more about regular everyday products that now have these EMFs emitting from them affecting our health.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Oram Miller, Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant and we’re talking about all these new products that have Wi-Fi coming out of them and getting into our bodies and emitting all over the place. Oram, could you just tell us about what are some of the different kinds of products – the LA article mentioned tennis rackets. I think the thing that surprised me why I mentioned that is I was looking for a thermostat and it had a lot of great features it didn’t even occur to me to check and see if it was a wireless device; if there was a radio frequency problem. So I’d like to make sure that our listeners today, by the end of the show, understand – what should they be looking for? How should we be alert for not inadvertently buying a product like this if we don’t want it?
ORAM MILLER: Well, first of all you have to make a decision to not want it and to educate yourself because we know the industry is not gonna tell us these things are bad for you and unfortunately the regulatory agencies in our country don’t do that either so you’ll have to go to institutions like the building biology profession and others. Look at what Europe’s doing – Europe, Israel, Russia – they’re taking Wi-Fi out of schools in all of those countries because they know that these things are harmful. So, to answer your question – become educated (I’ll go over break quickly the recommendation that I make/we make at building biology to our client) telephones, internet, media and quote everything else – besides you cordless telephone and the handset that you hold in your hand, smart phones, the tablets that you have, laptops, Wi-Fi routers – besides those things, you’re now seeing Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in thermostat and security systems; like when you open closed doors and windows – toothbrushes, tennis rackets but also in beds. This is from an MPR that I heard weeks ago, they’re monitoring your heart rate, your movements, your respiratory rate and all that information; its not computed in the device, the toothbrush or the tennis racket, its sent wirelessly to your smart phone and then you have an app that can analyze this for you and tells you the quality of your strokes of your tennis racket or how deeply you slept – that sort of thing. We don’t like electricity in beds at all so motorized beds should be used to help improve your sleep.
DEBRA: So it would be if the product is advertising something like its collecting information and sending it your smart phone or that you can change your thermostat from your smart phone while you’re away from home or something like that.
ORAM MILLER: The interest of all the benefits that any particular company has come up with to programmable thermostat is that the Nest Company has gone much further than that. I read an article about that company and particularly I was very impressed as a building biologist in terms of what they are thinking of and providing through their technology. So all we say then is just have it connected to your furnace to a low voltage wire like we have done for decades. In fact, our guiding principle is; number 1: does any device have the capacity to provide and convey information in a harb wire way?
There are devices you can buy to go in your entertainment center and directly connect to your TV set that get a wireless signal from your router in another room and then you can stream movies and shows through networks that are coming up. That way with these rowco and Netflix, and android/Google and apple; they’re all coming up with their own TV network conduit for providing content and one of these devices, the rowco device I believe has an Ethernet port so you can put an Ethernet cable in there. I remember reading a week or two ago from a client thing saying that they checked with one of these manufacturers and were told that if you plug in an Ethernet cable that turns off the Wi-Fi because it cant do both; it has to do one or the other. So my criteria for a laptop or a router is, when you plug in an Ethernet cable, that’s only half of the job, you have your connectivity now but you have to shut off the Wi-Fi manually on your laptop and on your router because otherwise that still is transmitted on a continuous basis even though you’re connected with an Ethernet cable.
DEBRA: Oh, good tip!
ORAM MILLER: Now you can have an Ethernet cable in the walls, in the cross space, in the attic, in the basement or you can get network extenders if you’re not overly, electric hypersensitive. Netgear and other manufacturers make non-Wi-Fi network extenders where you plug the little device into an outlet in the room with the router and a support on the side for Ethernet cable and they actually provide two 6-foot Ethernet cables in the box. So you plug your Ethernet cable from the router – there’s a little device that you plug in that room – and then you plug the other in an electrical outlet in any other room in the house and have an Ethernet cable to your computer up there using the circuitry in the house to convey the internet signal if you can’t put in an Ethernet cable because that can be very expensive or you can do this over the TV cable as well, even if you’re running TV station or signals. So these are called networks extenders. There are technologies to provide high-speed, safe, secure, non-hackable internet connectivity in your home and what we call a local area harbwire, local area network as opposed to a wireless network in the home. Now the only problem with that is your tablet will not be able to pick up the signal; you can’t get on the internet with your tablet unless you have the Microsoft brand Surface – the new Surface that’s out now for tablets that’s the brand name that they have, not the basic but the Surface Pro and the Surface 2. Not only do they have a USB port for the basic model, but the Surface Pro and the Surface 2 are programmed to be able to handle the internet through an adapter that you plug into the USB port and then has an Ethernet port on the other end of that adapter into which you plug an Ethernet cable and now you can put that tablet on airplay mode and be connected to the internet with the tablet. But what we don’t want people to do is, mom’s should not be putting a tablet in front of a young child to pacify them and have them watch movies without putting it in airplay mode because if they don’t that tablet, just like a smart phone, is putting a signal looking for a Wi-Fi router even if it doesn’t exist in the house but sometimes maybe connected to the 3G and the 4G up in the tower. The point is, these tablets and smart phones put a signal looking for a Wi-Fi router and in the case of the smart phone looking for a cell tower – the beacon signal – and people don’t even know this. So if you have your cell phone as an alarm clock, it sending out a signal every few minutes looking for a tower or to tell the tower that it’s here and looking for a call and you need to put it in airplay mode at night when you have it near your head as an alarm clock.
These are all tips that are on my website and that we educate our clients about.
DEBRA: I think these are very important because we don’t know and it’s just another stress on your body to be exposed to these electromagnetic and radio fields that make it more difficult to live in a toxic world and process those toxic chemicals and it’s a stress on your body in its own right. We only have about two minutes left so is there something that you want to make sure you say today that you haven’t yet said?
ORAM MILLER: In general people should follow the principles that we recommend for radio frequencies exposure and that is reduce that and increase this so if you could apply those rules or those principles you’ll go a long way towards improving your health. For instance, we tell people to give out their home number – keep their landline, get a corded telephone not a cordless telephone and give their home number to their friends and family and say call that number first and also use that phone to make outgoing calls. Just generally reduce the number of cigarettes you’re smoking per day – if you want to use that analogy.
DEBRA: That is exactly what I do and I have a cell phone and I don’t answer when I’m at home and I tell people, don’t call me on my cell phone call my corded phone first and I only use the cell phone – I carry it when I’m travelling and things like that.
ORAM MILLER: Well, good for you. So you’ve reduced your exposure to these things.
DEBRA: And I also have on my phone, a pong case that redirects signal.
ORAM MILLER: I am in favor of these chips and pendants and pong cases and other technologies that reduce the influence of these negative influences on the body but we don’t recommend them in my profession as primary ways of protecting themselves.
DEBRA: I totally agree and I’m sorry again to interrupt you. The music’s gonna come on and we’re gonna be done and I want to make sure that I say thank you so much for being on and everyone can go to toxicfreetalkradio.com and Oram will be on again and we will continue this conversation. You’re listening to toxic free talk radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Nontoxic Night Guard?
Question from Brian
My dentist prescribed a night-guard for bruxism and the lab sent me the MSDS sheet and assured me the device was BPA free.
However, after reading the MSDS sheet for the main ingredients of the plastic/acrylic (Modified Ethyl Methacrylate Monomer and polymer), I found they have very similar toxic effects as BPA, including the following: Eye Causes irritation, skin irritation, absorbed through the skin, may cause sensitization by skin contact, irritating to mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract. Symptoms of exposure may include burning sensation, coughing, laryngitis, dyspnea, headache, nausea, vomiting, drowsiness, and unconsciousness. May cause sensitization by inhalation. Causes gastrointestinal irritation. May cause nervous system damage. Embryotoxic and/or foetotoxic in animal. To the best of our knowledge, the chemical, physical, and toxicity of this substance has not been fully investigated”.
Given the toxicity of the BPA free ingredients, are there any effective, non-toxic alternatives?
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know of any. Readers?
Looking for Plastic Tubs That Don’t Smell
Question from C Thomas
I have a long history of storing non-food items in plastic tubs, and have many of these in my home. But in the past two years, there has occurred a clear and obvious difference in the plastics used in the general storage tubs sold in the big box stores. They reek of an unpleasant odor, which does not resolve even after airing them for as long as a year, or by storing cedar chips in the tubs for months, washing with vinegar then leaving them in the sun, or any other method I have tried. Not only does fibrous content (clothing, books, papers) pick up this odor, but I assume that VOCs are at the root of the problem which carry health risks to chronic exposure to the source. I have refused to purchase such odiferous tubs after noting the problem with the first couple of tubs; however, I continue to have need to acquire more general item storage tubs and am hoping you can offer some information on this issue and perhaps a source for safer tubs at a reasonable cost.
Thank you very much.
Debra’s Answer
You don’t say what size or shape of tubs you are looking for, so let me just answer your question generally.
I would call the manufacturer and find out what type of plastic the tubs are made from. Often they are polyethylene or polypropylene, which should not produce this odor, but could be polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which would. You don’t want to be breathing PVC.
Not all tubs are made from the same plastic, so check around.
Readers, any suggestions?
Another Thing to Watch Out For: Wi-Fi in Everything…
Well, now we’re going to need to start checking to see if common everyday products are transmitting radio frequency signals through our homes.
Sunday’s LA Times had an article about an explosion of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transmitting chips going into anything that can contain a battery and a transmitter. Thermostats, tennis rackets, home entertainment centers and more are all being designed to constantly feed information to the user’s smart phone or tablet with the intention of improving performance, health and happiness.
I don’t have wi-fi or a cordless phone or a wireless printer and I don’t want any wireless in my home. Yet it could now be in almost any consumer product.
If you are aware of consumer products that are transmitting, you are welcome to list them here, along with products of the same type that are not transmitting.
CES 2014: Consumer electronics show to feature ‘Internet of things’
