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Patient Centered Healthcare Helps You Find a Doc That Understands Toxic Chemical Detox
Today my guest is James Maskell, CEO of Revive Primary Care, a new project dedicated to restoring the health of America. By combining proven, dedicated, holistic doctors and practitioners with a scalable, digital, education platform, their intention is to inspire a revolution of empowered health advocates. We’ll be talking about the state of healthcare today, what you need to be healthy, and his new healthcare program that includes doctors who detox toxic chemicals. www.reviveprimarycare.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Patient-Centered Healthcare Helps You Find a Doc That Understands Toxic Chemical Detox
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: James Maskell
Date of Broadcast: January 06, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
It’s Monday, January 6, 2014, the first show of the year in 2014. And I’m actually very excited to be back after the holiday. I took three weeks’ off, and I know you’ve all been listening to shows in the archives because all of the shows are recorded and are in the archives. You can listen to any show from the beginning of Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ve been on the air now since April 22nd of last year.
So that’s more than a hundred shows. They’re all in archives for you to listen to. You can even listen to today’s show again, or if you want to tell a friend about it, you can tell a friend, and they can listen to it any time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from any electronic device in the world.
So I’m very happy to be back. I just can’t tell you how happy I am to be back. This is actually one of the highlights of my day.
So I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where it’s about to rain, but I don’t think that we’ll be disconnected.
Today, we’re just going to start the new year off with talking about healthcare. And we’re not going to talk much about that healthcare that everybody is talking about, but we’ll talk about it a little bit. We’re going to talk about how you can choose healthcare that is patient-centered, and includes education, and also includes dealing with toxic chemicals, and helping you remove toxic chemicals from your body because there are doctors out there who can help you with that. We’re going to talk about some of that today.
My guest is James Maskell, and he’s the CEO of a business called Revive Primary Care, and it’s a new project that’s dedicated to restoring health of America, by combining proven, dedicated holistic doctors and practitioners with a digital education system. Their intention is to inspire a revolution of empowered advocates.
Doesn’t that sound great? Empowered health advocates.
I’d rather be an empowered health advocate than a patient. And I’d rather be healthy than sick. And the whole idea is to keep us healthy, for us to be doing things, so that we stay healthy and know what to do if, by any chance, we get sick.
In Ancient China, the doctors were paid on a regular basis to keep people healthy, and they stopped paying them when they got sick. I think that’s a fine idea.
So welcome to the show, James.
JAMES MASKELL: Great to be with you here today, Debra. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you for being here. So could you just tell us very briefly—we’re going to have a lot of time to talk about this later, but just give us a brief introduction to what your business is about?
JAMES MASKELL: Well, first and foremost, I feel like Revive Primary Care is a rational response to these types of epidemics that we see today in America. The healthcare picture that we look at and see today is very different than times gone by. And I just really felt that, coming in, the healthcare system that we have doesn’t really aim to deal with the epidemics that we have now. And so my goal with Revive Primary Care is to provide a rational response to that, something that can help to deal with […] epidemic.
DEBRA: Good. Now, tell us, I know you have an interesting story that you’ve already told me about how you became interested in this and why you’re doing this. So tell our listeners, so they know who you are.
JAMES MASKELL: Well, despite my English accent, I was actually born in America. I was born in Colorado to South African and English parents who were on vacation (and I think sort of working too).
I grew up in England. I was definitely the weird kid at school. We did a lot of alternative medicine. I had chiropractic. I always used homeopathy. And I had good results from that. My parents were very interested in that.
I sort of followed a rebellious path for a while where I thought I needed to be an investment banker. I did economics, and went down that route. But I very quickly realized that I was playing for the wrong team.
The way that I had grown up, I realized that there was a lot that needed to be done. There were a lot of problems that needed to be solved. And from my economics training, I really realized that the biggest problem in the biggest economy in the biggest country in the world is healthcare in the United States. And I really just had an inkling that what I had growing up with could provide some sort of answer to this problem that was identified years and years ago. But it’s still coming to fruition even now.
And so in 2005, I moved to America and started on this course towards trying to make a difference in American medicine. And it’s been a wonderful journey. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not glad that I left job and started in this.
DEBRA: It’s a very interesting field. I love alternative medicine. What was your first job in the field?
JAMES MASKELL: My first job was I actually worked in a clinic. A friend of the family convinced me to come to America and work for him. He had started a clinic that he thought could be a model for the future of primary care, which is essentially holistic, naturopathic medicine delivered in a spa environment.
And he felt that, for the baby boomers, and also moving forward, there was going to be a movement away from a hyper-clinical medicine towards more of a lifestyle medicine. And you have to get people involved.
And in order to get the patients involved in their care, they have to want to be there.
And so, that was his vision.
So, for a year and a half, I worked in his clinic. It was in rural Georgia. It was not a major, major metropolitan area. It was not even necessarily a very rich area. What they wanted to do was to provide a model for the future of primary care.
I moved to Georgia. I worked there for a year and a half, getting that business going, really learning about what it took to run and grow a successful wellness/holistic medical practice.
DEBRA: And then, how did you get from there to putting together this business?
JAMES MASKELL: It’s about seven years in between. So, after a year and a half, I really got a good understanding of that, and I became a regional manager for a supplement company. It’s a supplement company that only sold through doctors. It’s called Energetics. It’s based out of Georgia.
And in 2007, I moved up to New York to be the representative in the Northeast. And so for a few years, I just did that.
And that was really what brought concretely down my understanding of how toxins and all of these other factors could affect health. I worked with practitioners and doctors who were getting great results with kids on the autism spectrum and Lyme disease and had digestive complaints. And I really saw that there was another type of medicine that was dealing with these kinds of chronic cases, and that it was useful and valuable.
So, for three years, I was really focused on that. And then in 2009, I just had this inkling that there are these doctors out there, they are doing amazing work, but they don’t really communicate what they do very well, especially online.
Still, they’re sort of stuck in ‘70s mentality. Everything looks a bit hokey. I knew that there was value out there, but I just felt like these practitioners weren’t doing a good job of communicating that out.
So, I started a digital branding agency in New York. We would take these brands and doctors and help them communicate their vision better.
And then after three years of that, I really saw that we’d learned a lot from that process, but it really didn’t scale. Making websites, doing social media and helping doctors to do that, we were just doing it one doctor by one doctor. And we learned a lot through that process, but there’s a lot more people out there that needed help than just the doctor in whatever zip code we were working in. And Revive Primary Care is my first iteration of trying to scale that out to a lot more patients across the country.
DEBRA: Good. And as I said, we are going to talk about that in detail as we go through the show.
So, I’m looking at your website which is RevivePrimaryCare.com. And one of the first things at the top, it says, “Fire Your
Doctor.” Why should you fire your doctor?
JAMES MASKELL: That’s a great question. I generally feel like if you have a doctor that is not treating the causes of your disease—
You know, in the past, the doctor-patient relationship was very one-sided. If you had a car accident, or if you had an acute infection or otherwise, this is the way that the doctor-patient relationship evolved. The doctor knew what was going on, the patient didn’t know anything, and the doctor was there to fix you essentially.
Now, in the future of medicine, and in the current epidemics that we see, these are not those kinds of issues. Those kinds of issues have fallen away. We’re very good at dealing with them in America, maybe the best in the world, but what we’re not very good at dealing with is conditions where there is not a single cause, where different causes are building up over time, where we have a chronicity of cause, and then we have a chronicity of symptoms.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a second because we need to go to the break. But we’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is James Maskell from Revive Primary Care. He’s the CEO and founder. And that’s RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is James Maskell who is the CEO of a new company called Revive Primary Care.
And James, before the break, you were telling us about why you should fire your doctor. So continue with that.
JAMES MASKELL: Thanks, Debra. I feel like if you have a chronic condition, and your doctor is treating you as though you have an acute condition, there’s no way that you’re going to get better.
All of these types of things, a lot of chronic disease, if we go right from the top of the body to things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease right through the chronic classic autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, and those types of things, plus all the big chronic diseases that we’re seeing—heart disease, hypertension and so forth—if your symptoms are being managed with drugs for those diseases, I think it’s time to take a new approach because it’s not a cure.
And in the past, these kinds of approaches have been a cure for acute infections and so forth. But this is not a cure. You’re looking purely to manage symptoms. And I think that if you find yourself in that category, then it would be a good idea to seek a second, third or fourth opinion from someone who understands the causes of chronic disease and the best ways to work with those causes.
DEBRA: I completely agree with you. I know that in my life, I have been dealing with ongoing conditions. And sometimes, they’re better; and sometimes, they’re worse. And yet, I do need to go to a medical doctor for a prescription because I take a thyroid supplement.
And so, I go to the doctor, and I say, “I want a thyroid supplement,” which I take Natural Armour Thyroid. And every time I go, I get this whole lecture about how this symptom and that symptom is going to get worse and turn into this, and what I need to do is take this drug, and that drug, and another drug, and another drug, and another drug.
It’s like I just go to primary care to get my little prescription. And I have to keep going from one primary care to the next (you know, the little express doctors), because if I go to a regular doctor, if I go to a regular MD in an office and become a patient, all they want to do is give me a program of drugs.
And there are some types of doctors, which we’re going to talk about later, that don’t do that. But a lot of those doctors can’t give prescriptions.
So, it’s been really difficult for me to find the right kind of healthcare that I want. And I think it’s probably difficult for other people too which is one of the reasons why I’m really, really interested in your program. I think that you’re doing a fantastic job with this, what you’re putting together.
So, could we just talk about ObamaCare for a minute? Do you want to talk about that?
JAMES MASKELL: Sure! Sure, absolutely. Yes, we can definitely do that.
DEBRA: What I want to say, first of all, was that I couldn’t even figure it out. And I have a very tiny, little type of insurance. It’s called Go Blue. I don’t know if they have it in other states. It’s in the State of California that is put out by Blue Cross and Blue Shield. I pay $68 a month, and I get unlimited lab tests, I get a big discount on my thyroid prescription, and they’ll pay $50 towards a doctor visit. And that’s all it covers. But if you’re going to get lab tests on a regular basis, then that’s a huge amount of savings.
And so, that plan fit just fine for me. And it costs $68 a month. It saves me a lot of money. I even once got an MRI on that plan, and they paid 100% of it.
And so then I get a letter saying Obamacare is saying that we can’t have this plan anymore. And so now, you couldn’t pay—this recommended plan is $585 a month. Well, I don’t want to pay $585 a month because the government tells me I have to.
Otherwise, I have to pay a penalty.
I’m sorry, it just doesn’t make sense.
JAMES MASKELL: Yes, I completely agree. We’re operating in a medical industry that is changing in front of our eyes as we speak. And I think January 1st 2014 is a big wake-up for all the people that they’re not getting what they want.
And it’s actually called the Affordable Care Act. That’s the name of it.
If you look in history, you see that they name these bills to really confuse people as to what the problem is. I mean, when you look at who wrote this legislation, and you look at the revolving door between industry and government, the people who wrote this [inaudible 15:11] now work for industry, and it’s the main industries that benefits. Obviously, the insurance companies benefit because now you’re forcing people to buy their product and service. And then the pharmaceutical industry benefit because you have to operate within their network of doctors and all strange and pharmaceutical prescriptions.
And so, I’m not a big fan. I don’t think it could move in the right direction. But in some ways, I think it’s maybe a wake-up call to Americans that if you don’t stand up and look after your own health, the government will be taking care of it for you.
And I think maybe in the medium-term, it will actually be valuable as a wake-up call, but I don’t think as a way of dealing with the big problem.
I grew up in England, Debra. And even in England now, they’re saying that England is looked at by a lot of people as amazing because it has this single payer health system, where basically, all care is free for everyone. You have to maybe wait in a waiting list. But generally, all of your care is free.
But even now in England, they’re saying, by 2015, they’re not going to be able to continue on with that plan. They’re not going to be able to have a single payer system. And it’s the same reason why they can’t have that there as they can’t have it here in America or why almost all healthcare systems are unsustainable. It’s because they’re not dealing with the causes of the disease.
Until we actually deal with the causes of chronic disease—chronic disease management is ridiculously expensive. And until we actually can deal with the causes of chronic disease, it doesn’t matter who’s paying for it—small business (which is only in America, businesses pay for the insurance. That’s unique to America really) or single payer (the government pays for everything), or this bit of hybrid system that we have right now where, essentially, some patients are paying some of it, businesses are paying some of it, small government is paying some of it, the local government and also the federal government.
It doesn’t really matter who’s paying. If the costs continue to ratchet up at this pace, no one can afford it. It will bankrupt everyone.
And so, that’s why we really need another—it doesn’t matter who’s paying for it. We need a way to control the cost. And from my perspective, the only way that we can control the cost is to actually deal with the causes of these chronic diseases and catch them a lot earlier than we’re catching them right now (which is basically when they’re symptomatic).
DEBRA: I completely agree. And we’re going to talk more about your program, and what you think that we all should do, and what kind of system we should have after this break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is James Maskell from Revive Primary Care.
And his website is RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is James Maskell. He’s the CEO of Revive Primary Care. We’re going to be talking about all the details of that now, and you’ll probably want to go to RevivePrimaryCare.com to find out more and to sign up yourself.
So James, tell us everything. Describe the program. I remember, when I first went to your site, I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about. So tell me.
JAMES MASKELL: Thank you for saying that. And you’re right. I mentioned at the beginning of the call, this is really the first iteration of Revive. We launched in October. We had a really amazing response right from the beginning. And we filled out our memberships.
We’re actually sold out right now. We’re trying to get to a point where we can take a lot more people through the system. But we learned a lot at the beginning.
And essentially, what we’re trying to do, the name, Revive Primary Care, to me, I really wanted to call it something that really talks about what it is. Primary care refers to, in medical terms, your first thought of call in medicine. So you go to a primary care doctor, and they take care of you.
However, those two words by themselves really have meaning by themselves. Primary, what is really primary? I think that primary needs to be redefined because the way that we take care of ourselves and our home is really primary—before the doctor visit. And care also, what kind of care that we take?
So, what I saw out there was that there was this big network of holistic doctors that were doing great work in dealing with the causes of chronic disease.
So, what Revive Primary Care does is basically a three-step process. The best way to get the most out of Revive is this:
First of all, to understand the four major cause of chronic disease. There are probably more causes, and more will come to light, but from what I understand, and from speaking to the top doctors and the top lecturers across the country in integrative medicine who have been doing this for years, is that there are four main causes of chronic disease. And that’s what you can find out. Anyone can go to our site now and look at some of the videos that we have and some of the articles that talk about those main four courses.
A couple will be obvious to you. Obviously, diet is a huge driver of chronic disease. The American diet is very different from others all around the world (although there’s KFC in Iraq, in Afghanistan. So we’ll see how that proliferates across the country, across the world). But diet one is one thing.
Obviously, stress is a huge driver as well. And those are the two obvious ones. I think people really understand that stress and diet now can affect their health.
But there are two other ones. One of them, I think, will be very obvious to you and your listeners if they’ve been listening to you for a while. There’s toxicity in all of its forms. And I love to talk more about that because I just think it’s such an interesting issue.
And the fourth is more about the bugs. We call it immunity, but it’s the new understanding of the bugs that we live on and around us.
I really got fired up about a year and a half ago because I went to a conference all about this on the human microbiome which is a new understanding of the microbes that live on and around us. We have misunderstood them for years. We thought they were bad. Ninety-nine percent of them are actually good. They do a lot of work in detoxification or otherwise.
But what I basically identified was these are the four major causes of chronic disease. The fifth cause that I think that we can deal with as well is what we call iatrogenic disease, which means caused by medicine or doctors which is the third or fourth biggest killer in America which is a great concern.
So, what Revive Primary Care really does is, first of all, help you to identify the four major causes of chronic disease that you can do something about without ever seeing a doctor. The second phase is to actually do something about it, to put some of that into action. And this is all free. We’re all at free level at this stage.
And then the third phase is to actually go and see one of these doctors who will support those choices.
I think one of the things that I feel, and what I hear from patients—and we took a bunch of new patients in—they just didn’t feel like their doctor is listening to them. They understand their body. They understand the cause and effect that’s happening between these causes and their disease appearing, their chronic disease. But the doctor is not listening. The doctor is listening for 7 seconds or 23 seconds, cutting them off and then prescribing.
But I think that between those four causes and iatrogenic disease, if we can do what we can do to eliminate those, then I think we can actually not need so much healthcare. And that’s how we actually contain cost—not actually needing as much care.
We’re feeding the beast all this time because we still go to the doctor, we still do our prescriptions, we still go to the hospital.
We really need to starve the beast. And I think the way to starve the beast is to actually take what’s ours to take, and take responsibility for those things that we can take responsibility for. And then use the doctors and use those practitioners that have a history and experience in reversing the cause of the chronic disease.
DEBRA: I just so completely agree with this because I know in my own life, in dealing with my own health, I have observed that the body wants to be healthy. For me, it’s just been a matter of figuring out what it is that I’m doing to make it sick.
It’s not like illness is this random thing. I don’t even think in terms of illness anymore. For me, illness is only if you catch a bug.
But for me, everything is about body condition, and that that condition is a result of what we do day in and day out, the choices that we make. It’s a result of the foods that we eat and the toxic chemicals that we are exposed to, and how much sleep we get, and how much stress, and how much love, and all these things that contribute to our health.
And so, at this point in my life, I am not even thinking in terms of fighting disease. I’m thinking in terms of building health. And as I build health, and build health, and build health, then I get healthier. And so even though I’m getting older, I’m healthier than
I was when I was younger.
And I have a wonderful doctor that I work with who is not an MD, but he’s a holistic practitioner. He can’t give me my prescription, which is why I have to go to the instant doctors to get prescription. But he listens to me, and he encourages me to think for myself. And we talk about different issues.
And so, I use him more as an adviser or a consultant to say, “This is what I’m thinking about doing. What do you think? And what can you offer me? And what recommendations can you make?”
But it’s my responsibility. Instead of putting the responsibility in the hands of the doctor, instead of us just living however we live, and then saying, “Doctor, fix me,” it’s about us living to be healthy, and then using health advisers, what I would call health advisers.
That’s why I love when you say that you want to be making health advocates. That’s what we should be—advocating for our own health.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re going to go to break. We’ll be back with my guest, James Maskell, from Revive Primary Care. And that’s RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is James Maskell, CEO of Revive Primary Care. And that’s at RevivePrimaryCare.com, where you can go, as he said, and get a lot of free information about the four main causes of illness—which are immunity, stress, toxicity and diet.
Now James, would you tell us when people do have the opportunity to sign up with you, and go through your program, could you tell them step by step what happens? First, they get the information, and then what happens?
JAMES MASKELL: So, at the moment, for our first iteration, you sign up, you went through what we call a Patient Preparation Program, which essentially was a daily video and a blog post that was sent to you. It will take you about 10 or 15 minutes a day for a week to just prepare you so that you’re going to get the most out of your relationship.
Most of these doctors at this point, some of them take insurance, some of them don’t. Most of the insurance that people can afford now is going to be a high deductible insurance. So most of the time, you’re actually going to be paying for your care anyway until you meet that deductible. And you’re in a position now where you’re having to pay for your care.
So, I want to make sure that if you choose to go to one of these doctors around the country that does this kind of work, that you get the most out of your time and get the most bang for your buck. And the way to get the most bang for your buck is to make sure that you’re dealing with these four issues before you go and see them.
So, you’re eating a good diet. You’re eliminating toxicity. You’re respecting your microbes and doing things to actually honor the fact that the majority of these microbes are extremely valuable. And you’re taking active work in de-stressing.
If any of those four are crazily out of balance, then you’re not going to get the most out of the time with a practitioner. And so it’s good to go and see them, but I want you to make sure that your investment and your time and their time, and maybe the supplements that they recommend for you or otherwise, you’re getting the most return on your investment.
So, the first step is to go through this Patient Preparation Program. And then the second step is that we actually pair you with a practitioner in your zip code. That’s been the process up until now. We launched it in October. We took a hundred patients through the system to really test the system, see what its strengths were, see what its weaknesses are. And now, we’re in the process of re-jigging it, so that we can actually scale a lot more quickly.
And we learned so much from our first group. We had a great group of patients, people who were really excited about this new paradigm of medicine. But we also learned things. It’s always an evolving process. Everything you do has things that really work or otherwise. And we’re just continuing to build on all the things that worked, switch up the things that didn’t. And we hope to re-launch at the beginning of February with an opportunity for every American to come through the system and get a lot of benefit from it.
So, that’s where we are right now. It’s been a great journey. We look forward to serving a lot more people.
And more than anything, we have so much feedback that people were just blown away by what it was like to have this kind of different relationship with a doctor—where they listen to you, where your story was important to them, where they actually ask questions of clarification about your story and the details of it.
I think on a lot of levels, that’s almost the best thing that came out of it. People realized that there was another option out there.
And I think that’s part of our mission here, re-educating and re-alerting the population to the fact that your doctor visits don’t have to be this sort of like—just as you explained earlier, bullying type of experience that a lot of people are used to right now.
DEBRA: I’m always looking for doctors who will write my prescription. And I went into one of these little primary care places.
And the doctor so immediately bombarded me. But I just walked out. I said, “I’m sorry. This is not going to work,” and I walked out. And I had never done that before, but that’s how bad it was.
I want to say that one of the things that I like so much about your program is that—and I hope to be one of your members when you start again in February—you have education on your website which includes about toxic chemicals in your home and in your body. And then, when you go to the doctors that are in your program, they know what you’re talking about.
When I wrote my book, Toxic Free, I thought—and this was just a couple of years ago—I thought, “I need to tell people where they can find doctors who might understand what they’re talking about when they start talking about toxic chemicals, and ask them.”
I actually have a page on my website. If you go to ToxicFreeNutrition.com, and look over in the right-hand column, there’s a link that says Professional Help. And it lists the types of doctors who might know something about toxicity, might know something about toxic chemical exposures, and might have an idea about how you might remove toxic chemicals from your body.
And those would be naturopathic doctors, doctors who practice environmental medicine, doctors who practice functional medicine, anti-aging medicine, a clinical nutritionist, a chiropractor, or a biological dentist—but then, not necessarily. Just because they’re in this field, they’re not necessarily going to understand what we’re talking about.
And what you have here is an opportunity to put together a viewpoint of body of information that is consistent from the patient education through them going and seeing a practitioner. So, when you sign up to be a member of this program, you know that there will be a consistent viewpoint from one end to the other.
JAMES MASKELL: Yes, we’re just trying to create a unified combination of the practitioners and the digital education platform that has so many synergies and efficiencies with providing this kind of education.
People are making amazing content all the time. On our website, you’ll see there’s a video made by the [Story of Stuff] talking about toxic chemicals. It’s an 11-minute video, and it really shows why you can go into the supermarket, and there’s a thousand different types of shampoo, and they’re all toxic. That is something that is changing slowly. But there’s no reason why every person in the world could not watch that video. It’s available, it’s free, it’s on YouTube [inaudible 32:45].
What we’re really in the job of is curating the best stuff that’s coming out for the patients, so you don’t have to go and try and find it yourself. We curate the best ongoing education on those topics. And so patients stay up to date, they get the best information, the coolest stuff. And also, when they go to their doctor, they know that they can have a proper conversation about these causes, and the doctor is going to be clued into it.
And I would say that most of those professionals that you’ve included—the naturopath, the environmental medicine, functional medicine—it’s a big part of their training to really understand toxicity as a cause.
But you’ll also see that all of these different four causes are not just operating in isolation, they’re also synergistic. So the majority of methyl detoxification in your body is being done by the microbes in your gut. Stress, if the immune system is stressed, then the detoxification pathways are stressed, and you’re not going to detoxify in the way that the body is doing all of the time. And if you eat a crappy diet, you’re going to be introducing more toxins into it.
So, toxicity is one thing. But they all interact, and they all have a synergistic effect.
DEBRA: They do. I agree. I agree, I agree. I used to think you could just avoid toxic chemicals and all would be fine. But I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that we also have to be looking at how we can help the body rejuvenate. And we need to be caring our detox systems because we can’t avoid every single toxic chemical. Our body has a system, the detoxification system, that can process some chemicals, but we have to keep it in good shape. And that requires having nutrition. That requires exercise. You even have to be able to get enough sleep in order to detox.
So, it does all work together; it really does.
We have just about two minutes left. Is there anything else that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
JAMES MASKELL: I just wanted to share my appreciation for you, Debra. Part of the reason why this is easier for me—I was only born in 1980, so I’m a newbie onto the scene, and I know that you’ve been doing this for a long time. But it’s really the hard work of those advocates like yourself, and all the other doctors—
You know, one of the people I introduced and interviewed on toxicity and stress is Dr. Ronald Hoffman. He’s been on the radio for 25 years talking about this kind of stuff.
It’s the work of the pioneers that have gone forth at the beginning that are allowing these next steps to occur.
And it takes time to happen. I was just meeting with a practitioner the other day who started their own gluten-free plan in 1997.
And now, you can get a gluten-free Domino’s pizza. So, you can see that it takes time.
DEBRA: It takes time, I know.
JAMES MASKELL: It takes time for stuff to happen. But I really just wanted to say I appreciate yourself and all of those other people out there who have been on this bandwagon for a long time. The bandwagon is moving more quickly, it’s moving downhill, and more and more Americans are realizing that what they do affects their healthcare outcomes—what they do at home.
And for me, Revive Primary Care is just the next logical extension of that. If you know that what you do with your body and so forth is going to affect your health outcomes, why not have a doctor that also understands that so you can have a proper conversation? And that is really what we’re trying to with Revive Primary Care.
DEBRA: That’s so great. So, everybody can go to RevivePrimaryCare.com. And right at the top of the homepage, there’s a place where you can put in your name and your e-mail, and click the submit button. And I’m sure if you do that, James, you’re going to send them an e-mail when it’s time to sign up for being a member, right?
JAMES MASKELL: Absolutely, yes. That will be the best way to stay up-to-date. Also, on Facebook.com/RevivePrimaryCare, that’s where we’re putting up all the best articles that we’re seeing on all this range of topics. You’re good to go on there and share out with your friends if you’re an advocate. If you are an empowered advocate already, social media does provide an opportunity to be able to spread information very quickly.
And so, those would be the two actions that I would take right now.
DEBRA: We are just running out of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be back tomorrow.
Cotton Blankets
Question from Katie
Hi Debra, I am grateful for your site and the information it contains. I am trying to find safe bedding for my family.
I purchased some 100% cotton blankets (non-organic) but now am concerned that they may be treated with flame retardants or other chemicals.
In your opinion, are regular cotton blankets a good option for those of us trying find chemical-free bedding? (I can’t afford the organic kind, which I know would be preferable).
Thank you for your expertise and insight!
Debra’s Answer
It is always preferable to purchase organic cotton, because it is very well regulated to be free of toxic pesticides and other chemicals that contaminate the environment, adding toxics to our air, soil, and water which we then breathe, eat, and drink.
However, once the cotton is processed into yarn to make fabric or blankets, those chemicals are no longer there. There have been lab tests done on this.
To the best of my knowledge, regular cotton blankets are not treated with fire retardants. I have purchased a number of cotton blankets over the years and have never had a problem with any of them.
Orange or Mold Odor in Closet
Question from amie
Odor in closet from a orange that had molded! My daughter left it in her closet in a coat! Yikes about a week later I could smell almost a chemical like odor. Found the orange completely covered in mold. Removed it and it has been 5 days later cant seem to get odor out. I have ventilated closet and room and have a IQ air filter running in closet..Can you recommend anything to get this odor under control Thank you
Debra’s Answer
If it smells “almost chemical” it may not be mold you are smelling. Most oranges pick up fungicide from the packing material they are wrapped in for shipping. I used to think that smell was the smell of an orange until I smelled an organic orange for the first time.
Readers, any suggestions for this?
Copper Cookware with Polyurethane Finish
Question from Jose
I have been offered a set of copper cookware that was used only as display, for which purpose they were dipped in a vat of Rustoleum Pro Finish polyurethane. The seeler thinks it is possible to remove the polyurethane and make this cookware safe for use. What is your advise?
Thanks,
–J.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know how to remove polyurethane finish from copper. But even if you could, I’m reluctant to agree with using copper cookware. If the interior is copper it can leach copper into the food. If the interior is tin, it can leach tin into the food. If it’s stainless steel, it would leach nickel and cadmium.
I would just forgo this cookware and choose a [safe cookware]=link to cookware page on debralist.com
Lead-Free Slow Cooker: Create it Yourself With Your Own Pot
Question from Barb
Hi Debra, I am trying to find a slow cooker which is made of high quality stainless steel. – In the process of researching I came to your web-site, and I am very much impressed with all the work you did, it’s a wealth of information.
I noticed that you recommend the Vitaclay cooker. I like the fact that it is made of a natural material, but would prefer stainless steel because it is easier to clean since the cooker will be used almost daily.
Since stainless steel slow cookers are very hard to find, I am thinking of getting a slow cooker base and a stainless steel Dutch Oven.
I found a used slow cooker base whose surface is made of aluminum, but it is probably NOT anondized. Would you happen to know if the aluminum surface of such a slow cooker base would give off toxic fumes when hot.
I would greatly appreciate your comments. There is also a company called Lifetime Cookware, which sells slow cooker bases. I have e-mailed them to get information on the surface material they use. On their product web site it shows a shiny surface, perhaps anondized aluminum, would that be ok to use for a slow cooker base, or would it also give off toxic fumes when in use for hours?
Debra’s Answer
I was really interested in your question because I didn’t know you could buy slow cooker bases separately.
As for your question about heated aluminum creating toxic fumes, it doesn’t. The problem with cooking with aluminum is the contact between the aluminum pot and the food. When there is contact, aluminum can leach into the food, but heating aluminum does not release toxic fumes into the air at cooking temperatures. It would be interesting to research the various bases, though, and see what they are made of. If you’d like to do that, I would be happy to publish the results here. You’ll want to choose one that doesn’t have a non-stick finish. Other than that, any metal is OK.
Here are the ones I found.
The Joy of Beeswax Candles
My guest today is Heidi Sanner, founder and managing member of Candle Bee Farm. We’ll be talking today about toxic elements in candles and how natural, toxic-free beeswax candles are made. Heidi is an eclectic personality who literally dreamed this venture into bee-ing. Heidi, who formerly worked as a CPA in one of the largest national firms, has turned an 83-acre farm and beekeeping activity into a thriving beeswax candle business. She calls it “Commerce with a Conscience…Candle Bee Farm™ is my opportunity to pull from all areas of my life, my business experience, love of nature and organic lifestyle and create products that are good for people.” She is an organic beekeeper and a chandelier (candle maker) by trade. Her exquisite, hand crafted 100% beeswax candles are sought and used by famous celebrities, exquisite restaurants, high end hotels and others of discerning taste. They have even been in Hollywood movies such Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator.” Heidi is an accomplished herbalist and naturalist, expert beekeeper and crafter of unique beeswax candles utilizing molding and press techniques developed by her ancestors. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/candle-bee-farm
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“The Joy of Beeswax Candles”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Heidi Sanner
DATE OF BROADCAST: December 12, 2013
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 chemicals around in all kinds of things; in our consumer products , in our homes, in our bodies, in the air we breathe etcetera, etcetera, and there are also so many things that are not toxic, so many wonderful things that are not toxic; like organic food and natural toys and natural fiber clothing and I just love all these not toxic things.
Today we are going to talk about beeswax candles. It’s that time of year when we are celebrating the holidays. It’s also dark outside and traditionally there is this tradition of doing things like lighting fires and lighting candles to keep the light burning; the light of the sun going through the darkest nights of the year and so today we are going to talk about beeswax candles as a safe alternative to those other candles and how beautiful they are to use. It’s just…. (laughter); I will get myself together here.
My guest today is Heidi Sanner, Founder and Managing Member of Candle Bee Farm. We’ll be talking about, as I said, beeswax candles and she is.. you know what? I’m just going to say; hi Heidi and you can just tell us all about yourself (laughter..)
HEIDI SANNER: Hi Debra. Has the cold gotten to you up there?
DEBRA: No, actually what’s going on this morning is that I’m having trouble with my e-mail and so I’m back and forth trying to, like, handle all these technical problems and so I’m doing things at the last minute and usually I’m sitting here being very prepared. We’ll just get started and I don’t have your e-mail.
Heidi sent me a lovely e-mail with a lot of information and we talked about what the questions were going to be and everything and I just don’t have anything, so..
HEIDI SANNER: Well that’s great, that leaves it all up to me and I can talk about whatever I care to.
DEBRA: That’s right, you can; so why don’t you start by telling us all about yourself and specifically I’ll ask you the question; tell us about your business and what you do; but also tell us your story about how you became interested in this; where did you come from; what changed your mind; what changed your mind to make you raise bees and make candles and all of this?
HEIDI SANNER: Well, I’ll tell what; this endeavour has taught me that every piece and portion of our life is important and how it comes together and we don’t see it at the time but later all the pieces fit and you learn from them.
DEBRA: I totally agree.
HEIDI SANNER: In saying that, people who ask me the question you just asked me, they think my life and what I’ve done is so disjointed and if you look at it piece by piece, you would say yes, but in the end it all came together.
How I got into the natural side of living was that I really grew up that way. I was the daughter of German immigrants, so I spent summers with family in Europe and in Europe, especially then (I’ll give away my age here) in the 1960s, they lived very naturally still. They weren’t into the 1950s, 1960s, packaged foods and all those really neat over the counter, you know, goodies we could get here. They were still collecting herbs on every walk and hung them in their attics. My relatives still kept goats and they used dogs to herd them up in the mountains.
I know this sounds like a story but it really is true and my relatives also kept bees. That was their way of sweetening and Germans are big into their baking; they want their sweets, so yeah, I remember my grandfather’s bee houses; they kept them actually in houses and every bee hive had its own entrance and we would go in through the back with the little door; you know? They keep them that way because it’s so cold over there and he would be smoking his pipe and would tend these bees and it was really cool so that was in my memory bank.
They made their own soaps and everything was very natural in my life; how we ate and I grew up that way, so over here, fast forward to my life here in USA, I don’t know, you may have an international listener base.
DEBRA: We actually do have an international listener base.
HEIDI SANNER: Ok, ok. Well, I grew up in the USA though basically with summers in Europe, so I became, when I got out of college, a Medical Technologist. People think you tend bees; you have your bee keeping business so you must be really laid back and just you know, feed birds, drink tea and have a wonderful life. Honestly, no. You can probably hear it in my voice. I’m very Type A. I’m a very analytical; I’m very scientific oriented so what appealed to me was medical technology and I have a degree, a four (4) year degree and two (2) year internship in medical technology and I did my internship at a Veteran’s Hospital so I saw everything, everything in that type of environment.
Again, you are up for the good and the bad, it all pieces together and finally I couldn’t take that any more. It was so depressing and the hours were horrendous so I decided I would do something besides with a nine to five kind of job and have a life and what I picked was Certified Public Accounting. I became a CPA; yeah, like right; then I was really up all night doing taxes. I did that and worked in a corporate atmosphere, learnt how to run businesses and being Controller and Financial Analyst which I did enjoy because I like the sciences. I like that type of thing, problem solving but I couldn’t take the politics and after a lay off; I had in the meantime bought this farm and sort of built my home here; 183 acres in the hills of Kentucky and this was my place to have peace and I started keeping bees as a hobby because it appealed to me from of my roots.
After the layoff I just thought, I’m not doing this anymore; I’m not doing the rat race; I’m not going to be what other people want me to be. What can I do here on this farm that I can make a living off of; make something good for people; create non toxic products from renewable resources?
The bee keeping, that’s something I could do; you know? I can’t keep livestock by myself. I can’t farm, I didn’t have the equipment but I could do the bee keeping and I just grew that and grew it and that’s how they came about. I started making the beeswax candle just like my relatives did and that’s the history about how that evolved. It was not planned.
DEBRA: Well, often that’s the way it does and I must say that your candles are beautiful. They are unique and artistic and beautiful and it’s more than just, you know.., the little rolled up beeswax candle or even a dipped candle. These..; I really encourage everybody to go to your website which is, candlebeefarm.com and see the artistry that you put into these candles and I think you sent me in your bio that these are handcrafted and that they are sought after and used by famous celebrities and they are in exquisite restaurants and high end hotels and I can see why, because they really are those kinds of candles and they’ve been in Hollywood movies. So there’s this balance between this really beautiful artistic thing that you’ve created and the naturalness that are close to nature and having them be healthy and not toxic.
You know, when I first started looking for non toxic products I had this idea that the industrial consumer world was the standard. It’s like everything had to be like the industrial products and I soon found that the things that were handmade and natural and grown on farms and all these things, they were so much more lovely and pleasing to be with and your products really epitomize that, really embody that whole different world, and that’s as opposite from industrialism as you can get.
HEIDI SANNER: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
DEBRA: Heidi, during the break I actually got the e-mail going, so I have the questions that we discussed so now that we know who you are, let’s talk about candles in general and some of the toxic exposures that people can get from ordinary candles.
HEIDI SANNER: Ok. You want me to take off?
DEBRA: Go ahead. Take off.
HEIDI SANNER: Well, I think, I can’t really speak for other candles because I don’t delve in other candles; the petroleum based, soy based, palm based. I deal with beeswax and I’ll tell you why. Beeswax, one hundred percent (100%) beeswax is the only wax that is naturally occurring in nature and if you think about it; I scrape it right out of the hive, filter it to get the bees knees out of it and it goes right into the candle. There is nothing in between, there is nothing added whatsoever. It doesn’t need to be, most manufacturers do and we can delve into why later but beeswax is the only true wax. You cannot take a soy plant and make it into a wax without adding something else which is, i.e., petroleum products. You can’t take a palm tree and make it into a candle without making it into a wax; it’s not a wax.
This is all.., you mentioned about toxic products and what we have to be careful of is, these are all marketing schemes and we get lulled very easily into these gentle sounding, beautiful terminology, words that when you start to deduct it down, it’s like, wait a minute, I’m burning a soy plant and smelling it; no, so beeswax is wax. It’s made from the bee’s thorax; they make it in little shavings, little discs just like a spider spins a web, a bee makes beeswax. We don’t have to add anything to it.
The other thing to be very careful of if you buy a beeswax candle is; does it say one hundred percent (100%) beeswax? because if it doesn’t say 100% beeswax, it’s only fifty percent (50%) beeswax.
DEBRA: Well what are they mixing it with?
HEIDI SANNER: Petroleum products. They are mixing it with your basic petroleum wax.
DEBRA: Yeah, there’s something I’d like to say here in response to what you said. Throughout all different kinds of products I’ve found that and I’ll just use as an example; say the cosmetic industry because when I first started doing this more than thirty (30) years ago, what were called natural cosmetics were cosmetics where the original source material might have come from a coconut or something like that, that is, natural renewable resource but then it got processed and mixed with petrochemicals and petroleum so it was no longer a coconut. It was no longer what you found in nature.
HEIDI SANNER: Right, or it has been cooked down and the properties of what you are buying are no longer in there.
DEBRA: Right. It’s not something of nature; it’s an industrialized nature.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah; and generally it’s the opposite; it’s the basic industrial product that has a little natural thrown in it or they take the petroleum base product and throw a little coconut oil in there and call it natural.
DEBRA: Right, but that’s another way to do it. But the point I’m trying to make is that there are natural materials that comes directly from nature. It’s made by nature, like an apple is made by nature and you eat it in its natural form and I want to be really sure that you’re saying that beeswax comes from nature in the state that you see it in the beeswax candle. It’s just like eating an apple, it’s that natural and even though you may see on the label, things like soy and palm and hemp or other vegetable waxes, as you said, you can’t burn those plants but they need to be transformed into these waxes. They need to have the wax pulled out of them or they need to have the wax mixed with petroleum or whatever to make it burn and so they are kind of misleading or air socked I think is the word but I think most people don’t know what air socked means. It’s like it’s pretend; it’s says that it’s something but it’s not 100%, as you said and this is something that happens all throughout industry. It’s that something is labeled to be natural but it’s not; so I think that it is a very, very good point that you made and I am going to make sure that everybody gets it; that beeswax is the only thing, the only wax that when you have a beeswax candle it’s absolutely a hundred percent nature made by the bees.
HEIDI SANNER: Correct and make sure it says 100% beeswax.
DEBRA: Yes.
HEIDI SANNER: Even within the manufacturers that make 100% beeswax because if it’s not, it’s 50/50 something else. Even the manufacturers that say 100% beeswax often add hardeners to the wax. This gives it a little more of a sheen and makes it …
Beeswax is rather soft; if you hold one of my candles…, I’ve had a man once said, my goodness, they touch you back. It’s because it’s a very soft energetic type of feeling. It’s a softer wax, it feels different, it’s denser, it’s heavier than you’re used to when you pick up a candle. Beeswax candles are very heavy and condensed; 100% as compared to any other candle you would pick up so they are more expensive to ship also but that’s ok.
That’s the other thing, make sure it says100% and then within that, ask your manufacturer, are there any chemicals added and they’ll say no because they won’t even consider that a chemical is just part of their process; that there are hardeners and there are chemicals used to make the candle molds release faster. There are all kinds of things within the process that we don’t know about that you have to be very careful of.
They tell me I’m nuts for not adding these things. I just refuse to but then I get the sensitive people in my market who know; they know the value of my candles so that’s important to me and I don’t mind.
DEBRA: I think that one of the good things about ordering products directly from the person who makes them.., I mean, here you are directly collecting the beeswax from the hive and making it into a candle so you know what’s in it and what isn’t in it and that’s in comparison to somebody who is, say, buying the beeswax from someone else and then making an end product.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
DEBRA: Heidi, how is beeswax different from other waxes; isn’t a flame a flame, a flame, a flame? I know one of the ways it’s different is that it smells gorgeous; I love having that honey smell when I burn my beeswax candles.
HEIDI SANNER: Well, it’s very different, you know, aside from what we just talked about, the makeup of it; actually it burns differently also. The flame of a 100% beeswax is stronger, it’s larger; it’s taller it’s much brighter, very bright flame and the reason is, beeswax is the only wax that when it burns it’s totally consumed within the flame and that’s why it burns non toxic, hypoallergenic, smokeless, dripless, sootless because theoretically, there is nothing given off; it’s all consumed within the flame and that’s the phenomenon that makes it the perfect non toxic product, the only non toxic wax to burn in a candle.
DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that about beeswax candles. Can you tell us about the wicks that are used because I that know that there are lead wicks in some candles? Of course there would not be lead wicks in yours?
HEIDI SANNER: No, I use 100% cotton. There are lead wicks, there are paper wicks, there are lead core, paper core wicks, there are cotton wicks that are lead core, cotton wicks that are paper and there are all kinds of tricks to the trade but what you want is 100% cotton wick. They burn the cleanest, they burn most totally with the least amount of emission and even within the 100% cotton wicks, again, you have to be careful because how was that cotton processed into a wick, was it given acid rinses, lubricants, what was the process in the weaving? So you need a true natural fiber and of all what we’ve just listed, lead, paper; cotton is actually the only true natural fiber.
Now there have been experiments with hemp wicks. The only thing is, from what I’ve found, my personal experiments and research and what I’ve done here is that the hemp does not uptake the beeswax very well.
DEBRA: Now hemp is a denser fiber.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, it will not uptake the wax and the flame doesn’t stay lit. I could not get it to work whereas the cotton is very absorbent, much more absorbent and absorbs the wax and it all goes away and it’s just beautiful and you have your wonderful non toxic candle.
DEBRA: I just love beeswax candles; I do.
So, what about essential oils or other scents that are added to candles?
HEIDI SANNER: Yes; I’m sorry. You mentioned that they smell so good; the reason that they smell so good or Candle Bee Farm candles smell so good is because we do not add anything. The beehive itself is enthused with the smell of honey and it’s totally natural and it comes through in the wax, in the yellow wax.
Now if you want a white wax candle, we filter it. We have to filter it at least five (5) times to get it back to an off white, whiter ivory colour. It will never be white, white here because we
don’t bleach but even our ivory coloured ones will have less scent because I’m also filtering out that honey scent and that is naturally in there. It’s an aroma. I hate to use the word scent because we associate that with something we put in.
DEBRA: Right. No, I think aroma is a really good word and it’s just so lovely. It’s just so warm; I only burn just the natural yellow beeswax candles.
HEIDI SANNER: and Debra, please let me talk to essential oils because this is extremely important.
DEBRA: Oh, please do, please do.
HEIDI SANNER: People are very confused about this. I get e-mails and people get mad at me because I will not put essential oils in my candles and make them smell like rose or lavender and here’s what I’m going to say about that. Essential oils are wonderful; put them in your bath water, sprinkle them on your pillowcase, put them on your wrist, that’s aromatherapy, yes, wonderful! However, think about this, a tobacco plant growing in this field is a beautiful flower and we can go out and smell that flower, we can smell the tobacco plant and that’s wonderful, but it’s not meant to be burned and inhaled. The minute we burn it and inhale it, it’s not good for us. Right?
DEBRA: Right.
HEIDI SANNER: Ok, the same is true for a rose or lavender or any of these things that essential oils are made out of. They are condensed, they condense the scent; they’re in a carrier oil and even if it’s all a perfectly strained process, it is wonderful to smell it; it is not meant to be burned and inhaled and then it is still dangerous. It’s still toxic and I want to make sure people understand that and that’s the reason I will not use them in my candles.
DEBRA: Thank you. That’s a very important point. So, are there any manufacturing guidelines or restrictions or labeling laws or any kind of laws that relate to candles for public protection?
HEIDI SANNER: Oh, sadly, actually there are not but the Environmental Protection Agency in conjunction with the Center for Disease Control (“CDC”) has done studies about safety within an enclosed room. They conducted an extensive study; I think it was in 2001 they actually did a scientific setup in a 15’ x 12’ room with 10’ ceilings which is a pretty big room; not many of us have 10’ ceilings and 15’ x 12’ and they burned all these different types of candles and they have a set limit of what they consider safe to breathe in of lead and petrochemicals; if you think any of that’s safe but it was like 1.5..
DEBRA: There is no safe level.
HEIDI SANNER: No. Well, their safe levels (are official safe levels) were 1.5 micro grams per cubic metre. Now when they did the study and they revised it later, like 2004, 2005 (you can look it up on the CDC website) they found that burning a candle in that big of a room for one (1) hour (I forget the size of the candle but it was a one wick candle) exceeded their acceptable levels by thirteen percent (13%).
Burning it for five (5) hours exceeded acceptable levels by twenty seven percent (27%) and if you added multi wicks or multi candles that would be even worse so that’s pretty scary and that was unscented candles. If they had added scents or any additives to these candles it would have been even worse so it gives you an idea of what you are breathing in when we burn other types of candles. So, 100% beeswax is the only candle deemed to be non toxic.
DEBRA: Excellent! Excellent to find that out.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
DEBRA: Heidi, I’ve just been looking at your website during the break again. I looked at it earlier and you have so many different kinds of candles and there are different types, so why don’t you tell us about the different ways that you can turn beeswax into candles?
HEIDI SANNER: Well, I have to disagree a little bit. I don’t turn beeswax into anything; the wax is naturally in the honeycomb.
DEBRA: Well, maybe I mis-spelt; you have beeswax and then it becomes a candle and I’m looking at these and I see you have tapers and I see that you have the kind that are rolled up then I see you have some that look like they’re carved. How do you fashion the wax into candles? Is that a better way to put it?
HEIDI SANNER: Yes. The wax is actually the honeycomb within the hive. The honeycomb is made of wax. Now they store the honey in the honeycomb so when we as beekeepers extract the honey, you’re left with the honeycomb, which is then returned to the hive but at the end of the season you don’t want all that returned because those hives get like five and eight storeys high and it will reduce them down so that the bees will actually survive over the winter so that they can heat a smaller space; if that makes sense and they will regenerate that honeycomb in spring and it’s their natural way of doing things. That’s what they would do in the wilds even; they would do that within a tree; they would cut that down into a smaller space so that they can keep warm over the winter.
This left over honeycomb is then heated down. It will melt at 140 degrees, so, that’s another important aspect of different ways of making candle. Here we use the Solar Melter; which is just glass under the sun in a big pan about as big as a screen door. As big as someone’s front door and it goes through there and it goes through a wire grate and several types of
filtration until we get it clean because there is stuff in there, you know, bees die in the hive, bees defecate, you want all that out of there; it all gets filtered out through different filtrations and what you use to filter is very important as well. We use only natural increasingly smaller and smaller filters so as it’s warmed by the sun it goes down through these little gutters and we come out with hives. It’s a very time consuming process but it’s a natural process.
DEBRA: It just seems so beautiful to me. Listening to this I can see the wax; I’ve seen beehives so I know exactly what you are talking about so I can see the wax being made by the bees and coming out of the hive, and going in your solar pan with the glass on it and the sun, the light of the sun and then it turns into a candle and then you burn the light and it just all seems like such a beautiful natural process.
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, when you do it that way it preserves all the properties that was in there to begin with that nature put in and that’s what I like about it, plus I don’t have much cooking and burning and if you overheat beeswax, like I said, it burns at 140 degrees. If you overheat it, it actually will not perform well in the candle which is why Candle Bee Farm’s candles perform very well because it’s their first burning, so to speak. I never recommend taking a beeswax candle and melting it down to make it into another candle. I would never do that, it’s just that it won’t perform correctly.
DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that either; so then what’s behind it?
HEIDI SANNER: There’s a lot of science behind it. When you really do it correctly and very few people know how to do that. You really need a Chandelier, which is a fancy word for expert candle maker, to know these things.
DEBRA: So once you have your melted beeswax then what do you do next?
HEIDI SANNER: Well, then I have the molds, pour them into the different molds and it takes about four (4) hours for each one to set up then you put your cotton wicks through your molds and you pour your beeswax in and then at the end of about four hours you gently peel off the mold and at that point you have your candle and there is still the leveling process and cutting the wicks to the proper size; inspection; they don’t all turn out all the time, little air bubbles get in there sometimes and that’s basically it. It’s a very old world process here.
DEBRA: How do you get those beautiful shapes, like I’m looking at your pillars that have little scroll work and textures and things; is that part of the mold or ..?
HEIDI SANNER: That’s a carved mold. Yes, we have a carving and had a mold made out of it, yeah.
DEBRA: I just love the way your candles look; so, I keep talking about these beautiful candles and I should tell our listeners that you have everything from just plain tapers. You also have the octagonal shaped tapers, you’ve got the rolled honeycomb kind of candles, you’ve got tea lights, you’ve got little tapers that you can use as birthday candles and you’ve got these other beautiful ones too. You’ve got molds for animal shapes and angels and gargoyles and did I leave anything out? and even an ear of corn.
HEIDI SANNER: The lanterns.
DEBRA: The lanterns, tell us about the lanterns.
HEIDI SANNER: They are beeswax lanterns and we set a beeswax tea light within the lantern. The lantern is decorated with wild flowers from the farm, real wild flowers, they’re embedded into the wax and it’s just a globe and the tea lights sits down into there and burns so it’s reusable; you just keep replacing the tea lights and when the lanterns burn it’s beautiful, you can see the silhouettes and the colours of the flowers come through. That’s always a very nice gift especially because it is reusable. I’ve got them scenting everywhere and that’s something rather unique.
DEBRA: Yeah, there is a beautiful picture of this on the website and I’m imagining that each one is unique and handmade of course because the flowers are from the farm so there’s no two alike. Yes, it’s very beautiful.
HEIDI SANNER: The best value.., and people say, why is beeswax so expensive? Well, through everything we just discussed plus our beeswax is organic, we do not use chemicals in our hives, which most, I would say ninety nine (99%) beekeepers do; but beeswax is actually of value because it burns five times longer than other waxes or wax combinations so in the long run you’re getting a better value; you get a longer burning, brighter flame and you have to be careful about the source of the wax as well.
I’m sorry; that didn’t answer your question. I’ve gotten off on track here.
DEBRA: It’s ok. What was my question you didn’t answer?
HEIDI SANNER: I don’t remember.
DEBRA: I don’t either. I’m just so fascinated by everything you’re saying and hearing all about how..,
As I said earlier, this is just about the most opposite as you can get from something that’s industrial but I want to really make this point because we rely so much in this culture on things being made in factories and things being made by machines that when you actually have a material that comes from nature where the bees are making it because it’s part of their own life process but then at the end of that they give it to us, it’s not like we’re taking anything from the bees that they need in order to live. It’s something that’s left over from their life process and then we can take that and turn it into something that’s a source of light and useful to us and it’s just, to me everything should be that way. We should just be able to take materials from nature that are offered to us by the other species and use them to our benefit so that there’s an interchange of life.
HEIDI SANNER: That all depends on good beekeeping, good animal husbandry where we respect our hives; we know what our bees need to keep for themselves and what we can take. Again, it helps both that way. That does get exploited a lot; I never understand why because those that exploit and take too much from the bees actually hurt themselves because next year they’re not gonna have that beehive.
DEBRA: It’s not gonna be there. Yes, yes.
HEIDI SANNER: If you do all this with an ear for what happens naturally, everybody wins, especially humans. Even with using the chemicals in the hives; I’ve always done that naturally plus my ancestors didn’t have chemicals so I knew no other way but most beekeepers will get in there and they’ll clean out what we call the drone cells which is the cells for the male bees. You don’t want too many male bees in your hive; all they do is eat and take up room, they don’t really contribute.
DEBRA: Laughter…
HEIDI SANNER: Yeah, we’ll just leave that hanging. (laughter)
DEBRA: I won’t comment on that.
HEIDI SANNER: Yes, it’s a very female universe in a beehive. All worker bees, all honey gatherers are female but if you clean out the drone cells, the drone cells are what attracts the mites, the varroa mites. That would happen naturally if we humans would just leave them alone.
DEBRA: Heidi, I need to interrupt you right now because we’ve only got about fifteen (15) seconds left.
HEIDI SANNER: Ok.
DEBRA: And so, I just want to thank you so much or being on the show and again tell my listeners that your website is; candlebeefarm.com and it’s really been a pleasure today. Thank you so much.
HEIDI SANNER: Oh. Well thanks for helping me get the word out to people and I think you can tell I’m very passionate about that.
DEBRA: Yes I can.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What Goes Into Organic Products
My guest today is Peggy Miars, Executive Director/CEO of the Organic Materials Review Institute. Founded in 1997, OMRI provides organic certifiers, grower, manufacturers, and suppliers an independent review of products intended for use in certified organic products, handline, and processing. They also prove subscribers and certifiers guidance on the acceptability of various material inputs in general under the National Organic Program. Peggy came to OMRI in 2010 from California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), where she served for six years as the Executive Director/CEO. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Western Michigan University and completed post-graduate courses in nonprofit management at Regis University in Colorado Springs. Peggy has worked in the organic industry for more than 17 years, previously in marketing and management positions with Earthbound Farm, Whole Foods Market, Granary Market, various nonprofit organizations, and her own marketing consulting business. She completed International Organic Inspector Association training for organic inspectors of crop products in 2007. www.omri.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What Goes Into Organic Products”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Peggy Miars
DATE OF BROADCAST: December 11, 2013
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 chemicals in our consumer products, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and the food we eat; even in our bodies which they are storing from past exposures and so in order to be healthy we need to do everything that we can do to identify toxic chemicals around us; to make choices to buy products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them; to remove toxic chemicals from our body and on this show we talk about how to do all those things and I interview wonderful guests who are doing these things; who are making these products; who are working behind the scenes; who are working to change regulations, all the things that need to happen in order to have a world without toxics.
Today is Wednesday, December 11, 2013 and I’m here on a beautiful winter day in Florida where the sun is shining and it’s 70 degrees and that’s how it is going to be all winter. Usually it doesn’t rain here. It rains in the summer, it rains all summer but here this is just about what it’s like in Florida, so you can imagine me sitting here at the microphone looking out over my garden with the sun shining.
Today, we are going to talk about something a little different than we usually talk about. We are not going to talk about what happens on the consumer end; we are going to talk about what happens behind the scenes; and my guest today is Peggy Miars. She is the executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) of the Organic Materials Review Institute and what they do, is, they provide organic certifiers, growers, manufacturers and suppliers an independent review of the products and materials intended for use in certified organic products and in the handling of them and processing; and so just like you and I are looking for say, a product that has the United States Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) Certified Organic Seal on it, people who are certifying those people who are doing that certification and the growers, are looking to this organization to tell them what are the products they can use on organic fruits and fibers in the growing process when they are certifying. So if somebody, say a certifier, is looking at a process that a grower is using, he might look and say, well are you using this and this or this chemical and what this organization does is make lists of chemicals, materials, products that can be used in the organic process so that it makes everything easier. Anyway, hello Peggy, thank you for being with me today.
PEGGY MIARS: Hello Debra, thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Ok, well, we have a lot to talk about; this is a big subject. First, tell me about your organization. I know you personally have a long history of working in the organic movement, so tell us about you and the organization and how the two of you came together.
PEGGY MIARS: Sure, I’ll be happy to do that, but first of all the Organic Materials Review Institute or “OMRI” as we call it, is a non-profit organization and we were founded back in 1997. Now some of the first Organic Certifiers started doing their work back in the early 1970s and part of their work, as you said was what OMRI does now. They were having to look at all the inputs, the fertilizers, the pest control products and so forth that the organic farmers were using and the certifier had to look at that and determine whether it was compliant to the organic standards. So in the late 1990s some certifiers got together and said, we are so busy doing this material review that we don’t really have time for our main work, which is organic certification and so they actually pooled their material review programmes and they took their lists that existed at the time and their files and everything and put them all together and created this non-profit organization called OMRI, so that we could do that detailed material review work and allow the certifiers to do the organic certification work that they were intended to do. So, like I said, we’ve been in existence since 1997 and really our main clients are the certifiers who rely on our decisions, and so…..
DEBRA: So it goes, just for the listeners to get the line up straight, so there is you, who you are determining the safety of the materials that are used and then there’s the certifiers and then there’s the growers and the certifiers are saying to the growers, this is ok, and then when the certifier says it’s ok then it becomes a product and it gets sold with the USDA seal on it.
PEGGY MIARS: Correct, that’s right; you got it exactly right there.
I’ve been involved in organics since 1996 when I was working for a small natural food store and we sold primarily organic products. I’ve actually been buying organic myself as a consumer since 1985. That’s when I started looking at labels and understanding where my food came from and so forth, so I’m what you would call a core organic consumer, buying primarily organic.
DEBRA: Me too, that’s about when I started, 1987.
PEGGY MIARS: Ok, good, excellent! great. So that’s my personal passion and I’ve worked in not-profit organizations; I’ve worked in Girl Scouts Council, I’ve worked for a Humane Society, and so non-profit has really been my focus in my career. I’ve been in non-profit for about seventeen (17) years. I’ve been in the organic industry since 1996 and so together my personal interest and my professional experience brought me here to OMRI to be the Executive Director. Before that I was the Executive Director and CEO of California Certified Organic Farmers or “CCOF” which is one of the largest and oldest organic certification agencies in North America.
DEBRA: And I remember them because I used to live in California.
PEGGY MIARS: Oh, alright, we’ve got a lot in common.
DEBRA: So I was always looking for COF (Certified Organic Food).
PEGGY MIARS: Ah, excellent, great!
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
PEGGY MIARS: The other thing too that I’ll mention at this point is, OMRI review and OMRI listing is voluntary. It’s not required for an input manufacturer to be OMRI listed in order for farmers to use their products. However, certifiers really rely on OMRI; the growers look for OMRI listing so the manufacturers know that in order to make it easier for everyone they get the OMRI listing and then it’s good to go.
DEBRA: That’s so great, so you’re the one in charge of the organization that is really defining what goes into organic foods and fibers, Yes?
PEGGY MIARS: Somewhat, yeah. I wouldn’t say that we define it, because that is really up to the USDA National Organic Prorgramme.
DEBRA: True; but you are actually the one that is kind of executing the orders to come up with a practical way to meet those standards.
PEGGY MIARS: Right, executing and also there is some interpretation as well because the standard, the National Organic Standards aren’t overly prescriptive so there are some areas that require interpretation and one of those gray areas really is, material review and so we do have to interpret the National Organic Programme (“NOP”) Standards and we actually create our own standards for areas where it is gray and we’ve interpreted them in our way and so we publish those standards so everyone understands how we are conducting our reviews.
DEBRA: Ok, good. That’s a very important role that you are playing. I have seen this term ISO accreditation, what is that?
PEGGY MIARS: ISO accreditation is something that is well known in the world of certification and what that means is, it’s an international standard and OMRI is ISO accredited. What that means, is that you can receive that accreditation from a number of bodies out there. We receive our accreditation from the USDA not from the NOP but from the USDA and what they do is, they look at the ISO standards. Just like there are organic standards there are ISO standards.
DEBRA: What does ISO* stand for?
PEGGY MIARS: I knew you were going to ask that. It’s one of those international terms where the letters don’t match up with the actual words. International Standard setting, something or the other; but essentially what the USDA does is that we’re audited every year and they review our policies and procedures and they do two (2) things:
1. they ensure that our policies and procedures are in line with the ISO standards and number two; which is really important is;
2. they audit us to make sure that we are doing what we say we’re doing because they don’t want organizations putting something in the policies and then not following them.
*ISO – International Organization for Standardization
DEBRA: Of course.
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DEBRA: Ok, so the reason that your organization exists, Peggy is because you are offering a solution to the toxic chemicals that are in our food supply, so tell us about what these toxic inputs are.
PEGGY MIARS: Well, I think probably when people think mostly about toxic inputs they’re thinking about pesticides and that’s something that people look to organic for. It’s less persistent toxic pest control products and fertilizers and so forth. Obviously, with any kind of pest control product there is some toxicity to it just because of its intention to kill pests but in organic they tend to be less toxic, less persistent in the environment. In other words, they don’t hang around as long and there is something called the National List that is maintained by the National Organic Programme and the national list in general, is described as..; let me start over again. In general, non synthetic substances are allowed in organic production unless they are specifically prohibited.
DEBRA: May I interrupt you for a minute? I want to ask a question. This has been on my mind a couple of days since one of my other guests talked about this.
PEGGY MIARS: Yes.
DEBRA: The first thing is that there is synthetic chemicals which are made from petroleum and then there is what we could call natural chemicals that are made from or are just straight out of nature or made with renewable ingredients as the feedsource and the feedsource, for those people who don’t know what that term is; is the original raw source material that is used to make something industrially. So, on this list you would have pest control or other chemicals for other purposes which are both synthetic and natural. Right?
PEGGY MIARS: Right.
DEBRA: The question I really have, is that, this previous guest said that an organic grower could be using a renewable natural chemical that actually is toxic and so I got a little confused about that and I’m hoping you can clear this up about that there is toxic versus non toxic and there is natural versus synthetic and I’ll just clarify that, just because something is synthetic does not mean it is toxic and just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. Could you address all that?
PEGGY MIARS: I will try because I’m not a scientist and I’m not a technical expert. There are both synthetic and natural or non synthetic and those terms are used interchangeably. First, I’ll clarify that non synthetic materials are allowed in organic production unless they are specifically prohibited and in general, synthetic substances are prohibited unless they are specifically allowed, so right there the national list is intended to primarily be natural materials. However, there are synthetics that are reviewed and looked at and allowed. So in terms of toxicity in organics (I’m not a scientist) what I can tell you for example, one thing that I’ve heard of; for example, pyrethrum which comes from natural plants; it’s a botanical extract and so I’m looking here, for example, that is a non synthetic material because it is plant based. It is allowed in organic production; there are some restrictions, for example, they are saying liquid formulations that have a prohibited inert ingredient are not allowed but otherwise those are allowed. Now pyrethroids which I understand are also plant based are somehow synthetic in the way that they are processed and so in that case it’s prohibited; so that would be an example of something that would be natural. It comes from the environment but in one case it’s allowed but in another case it’s prohibited and it has to do with the way it’s manufactured. So I would agree that there are some natural products that are pretty non toxic, for example, garlic. Garlic can be used as a pest control product, that’s clearly a natural product that is non toxic but yet there are other natural products that can be toxic primarily because of the way they are combined with other chemicals, because of the way they are manufactured and that sort of thing.
DEBRA: So they would then be an exception on the national list? I mean, can we assume, as consumers that there is not going to be toxic chemicals on our organic food or fibers and if they are certified there is not going to be toxic ingredients there, whether they’re natural or synthetic?
PEGGY MIARS: Well that’s something that’s being worked on right now, because in the past; this is something that people don’t realize; that organic certification is a process certification. In other words, the certifiers look at, how is that food grown and processed. What they don’t necessarily do, they do not certify the end product even though it looks like they do; even though the seal is there on the product; what they are certifying is the process. But what has been happening over the last year is that the National Organic Programme has told certifiers, you must test a certain amount; I think, maybe five percent (5%) of the products that you certify. You must randomly test them to see what kind of residues there are and so this is something that the NOP is starting to get into; looking more at the end product and what sort of residues may exist at that time.
DEBRA: I’m so glad they’re doing that. This is fascinating. This is exactly what we need to be knowing.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: Peggy, we were talking before the break about synthetic compounds that are allowed and I know that those are reviewed and evaluated by the National Organic Standards Board. Can you tell us more about that?
PEGGY MIARS: Sure, I would love to tell you. The National Organic Standards Board or the “NOSB” is a Federal Advisory Committee to the National Organic Programme, so nothing can be added to, removed from or changed on the national list without the NOSB first making a recommendation. The NOSB is a fifteen (15) member voluntary board. They are appointed by the US Secretary of Agriculture and these people represent different aspects of the organic industry; for example, there are certain environmentalist seats, there is a scientist seat, there are seats for farmers and processors, there is a retailer seat, so the idea is that these people are supposed to represent these different groups within the organic industry and so really, the main reason for the NOSB is to review materials for consideration to be added to or removed from or changed on the national list. So there is quite a process that is gone through before anything is changed on the national list. For example, if someone wanted to add a material to the national list, they could submit a petition and there is a humongous and a lengthy process to do this. In fact, it takes about two (2) years for the whole process to go through, from the time the petition is submitted until a decision is made and within that timeframe there are no less than two (2) opportunities for public comment on that material and there are some consumer groups who definitely take advantage of that; who notify their members and supporters when issues come up, like toxic synthetic materials are being proposed for addition on the list.
So, the NOSB looks at the petition, they usually have a technical report that’s been provided that goes into great detail about the material, its toxicity, its persistence in the environment, the impact on the environment and human health and so forth; so there is very much a lengthy process, like I said, that includes public comments before anything is changed on the national list.
The other thing I’ll say is that your listeners, anyone, can make comments. The National Organic Standards Board meets twice a year, once in the Fall, usually October and once in the Spring, usually, April and their Agenda is published, their recommendations are published and so anyone can submit a comment, saying, I agree, or I disagree with this recommendation for these reasons and the NOSB really listens to those public comments. I’ve actually seen them change their recommendations based on the comments that they receive.
DEBRA: Yeah, I’m very happy to hear that.
PEGGY MIARS: Let me tell you a quick story. Back in 1997 when the first organic standards were proposed and drafted and they included what we now call the Big Three, GMO, Sewage/Sludge and Radiation and at that point in time the USDA received more than two hundred and seventy five thousand (275,000) comments in opposition to those three and to this day that remains the largest number of comments the USDA has received on any topic, and so, public comment is very important and it can make big changes.
DEBRA: Good! Good! Good! Good! I’m glad to know that we have some power and that’s a very good story; a very good example.
So tell us how the organic certification system works? Where does OMRI fit in and give us the whole process so that we know when we buy organic, what has happened.
PEGGY MIARS: Ok. Well that sounds fun and feel free to interrupt at any point, otherwise I’ll just keep talking.
I would say that OMRI and seeds are the basis of organics. Clearly, seeds need to be organic or non treated as much as possible and so that’s the beginning of where our foods come from and then the inputs that are used to grow the foods are very important as well and as we said that’s what OMRI looks at; pest control products, fertilizing products, sanitizers used in processing facilities, detergents used in processing facilities and that sort of thing.
DEBRA: So, you are not looking at the seeds themselves?
PEGGY MIARS: We are not looking at the seeds. The certifiers look at the seeds and organic seed is always preferred and if a farmer does not use organic seeds, he needs to prove to his certifier that he tried to find the organic seeds in the quantity and form that they need. Price cannot be a consideration. A farmer cannot say he didn’t buy organic seeds because they are too expensive; that will not fly, that’s not allowed. So the certifier is definitely looking at the seeds, OMRI is looking at the input materials to determine whether they are compliant and so I am going to say farmer, just for this example, even though we know there are processed products as well; but a farmer would want to become organic and the first step there, would be to apply to an organic certification agency and some certifiers are non profit; some are for profits and some are government agencies so they all operate a little differently; they have different fees and procedures and so forth but they all follow the National Organic Standards.
The first thing that the Certifier is going to want from the farmer would be an Organic System Plan (“OSP”). I like to call that their organic business plan; what are you going to grow, what inputs are you going to use, where are you going to source these inputs, where are you going to source your seeds, what crop rotation are you going to use, how are you going to harvest and so forth. The Certifier needs to have a written document of what the farmer’s plan is and so they do their initial review of that and based on that Plan they can determine whether it looks like the farmer can achieve certification or not. If there is a problem they will go back to the Certifier or to the farmer and say, we are missing this information or we need more detail on this particular item.
Once the Certifier is satisfied that they have all the documentation they need then they schedule an inspection of the farm or the processing facility and an Inspector does go out. It is an announced inspection because they want to make sure that the Manager is there and that they got the documentation and so forth. The Certifier sends out an inspector who is for all intents and purposes really the face of the Certifier; they’re the ones that are seen out in the farms and the processing facilities.
For the visit the Inspector takes the Organic System Plan, confirms that this was submitted by the farmer then requests that the farmer explains how the plan is being followed. The farmer is asked to show his records of where he bought the seeds and where he bought his inputs. The farm is closely inspected to make sure that everything works and then the Inspector submits a report back to the Certifier telling them what they found. The Certifier then reviews the inspection report along with the documentation and determines whether the farmer meets certification and if so, they issue a certificate that the farmer can then show as proof of their certification.
DEBRA: Ok.
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DEBRA: I guess we are not talking about the products, we are talking about the ingredients that go into products. The products themselves don’t actually get certified; right?
PEGGY MIARS: Right, it’s a process certification so the certifier looks at how the product is made.
DEBRA: Right and so there are other organizations like, for example, the Global Organic Textile Standards (“GOTS”) that certifies an end product but they are not certifying the process, like how the cotton is grown and so there are different certifiers along the way. A lot is going on.
Here’s the next question; what does your organization look at and verify when making final decisions about a product and product, meaning, those products that are used in the growing and handling and processing of organic foods and fibers?
PEGGY MIARS: Well, our process is actually very similar to the organic certification process in that we require first, documentation from the manufacturer of the input product and it’s important for people to know that we really look in great detail at these products. We require the total ingredients list of the product; everything that’s in it; not only ingredients but also ingredients within ingredients because some ingredients are formulated themselves. We also require the complete manufacturing process explained to us, from the beginning to the end so that we can determine if it is synthetic (that’s one way we can determine if something is synthetic, it may start out natural but then something may be added or something done to it in the manufacturing process that renders it synthetic). We look at that as well.
We also require record keeping. When we do inspections it’s very similar to a certifier’s inspection in that we look at purchase records, you know, where did you buy your ingredients and show us your sales records as well, something that certifiers do and that OMRI does. When we conduct an inspection there is something called an in/out balance; we look at what they bought, the ingredients that they bought, determine from that what their output should be and we look at their output. This is a way to prevent fraud because someone who is dishonest could show records that, oh, I bought these inputs and then on the side buy some more and then mix them together but that would be discovered at the end because they would come out with way more products than what would be feasible based on what they showed in their records.
I hope that makes sense but it’s definitely a way to reduce fraud and to find out when people are dishonest. In some cases we do require a Lab analysis mainly for crop fertilizing products. We look at the label, what they say their nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium levels are and we check those. Another important area that we look at when it comes to fertilizers and soil amendments; we look at heavy metals and we require tests of heavy metals to ensure that those are not excessive as well.
It is important to note that not one individual makes a decision. Decisions at OMRI are always made by a review panel that includes a minimum of three (3) individuals who have to agree on a decision; so it’s a group process. It’s very detailed; the people who do this work for OMRI are brilliant individuals. They are much more knowledgeable than I am about chemistry and science and that sort of thing and so it’s a very detailed process and I would say that consumers could rely on the work that OMRI does and that certifiers do as well.
DEBRA: Wow, it’s a big job. You know, as consumers we don’t always understand. One of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show was because when I heard about your organizations, I thought, wow! this is all the stuff consumers don’t know. I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about this myself, having been a consumer advocate for thirty (30) years and have been talking about how we can eliminate toxic chemicals from our lives. Not being a scientist, not being a doctor not being any one of those kinds of chemists or anything, I’m just looking at it from the consumer view point and what can I find out as a consumer that can help me make that decision and I hear a lot from consumers. How do they know who to trust and can we trust people and all the information. I actually drew a little picture. I‘ve studied a lot of this stuff, like, life cycle analysis and a lot of these things that you talk about and I understand about a system and an input and all those things which most consumers don’t, but I do, because I’ve studied it and so I try to draw pictures and flow charts. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.
While you were talking I’m making this little flow chart, NSOB, NOP, OMRI and so I’m really trying to understand this and then communicate it to consumers and what I ended up with the other day was that I drew a thick black line and on top of the black line I put ingredients and I had just made up some ingredients, like flour and cotton and I put those above the black line and those were the ingredients that are on the label and then below the black line are all these other things that you were talking about; like the process and the other sub ingredients that go in during the process and the fact that some of those sub ingredients are ingredients themselves which have ingredients and so we have this whole thing.
Consumers; it’s called the supply chain and so that’s all the things that go into each of the ingredients and at the end of the line all you have above that black line which is what we can see as consumers on the surface, so to speak, is like, I think of it like the earth, you know there’s the crust of the earth and you can only see the top and underneath there are all these incredible processes that are going on, the molten core and all this stuff and it’s like manufacturing is all that stuff and all we get to see is the surface. We see the end product and you get this little list that says this ingredient contains this and this and this and you never know what’s going on behind the scenes and yet organizations like yours and others that I’m aware of, you’re looking at the whole supply chain. You’re saying we can’t say that something is toxic or not toxic unless we look at the whole supply chain and yet this is an entirely new concept to consumers.
PEGGY MIARS: You’re right. When I’m out in the community or when I’m out on business trips or whatever and I’m chatting with people who ask, what do you do? and I tell them, people are amazed and excited that there is someone doing this and watching out for their interest and I’m happy to tell people what we do because they are always excited to hear about it.
DEBRA: Well we need this for every single product, not just organic food. There needs to be a structure set up so that every product gets analyzed. It’s like as a consumer advocate I actually feel….; I am going to give myself a pat on the back here, because I’ve been doing a pretty good job for over thirty years, finding and identifying products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them, enough, to make a difference in my own health and that I can see that if I don’t use this product that I can identify has this toxic chemical in it and I use something safer but the only thing I know about it is to say that it has organic tomatoes in it, you know, that’s all I know. That’s the only information I have to make that decision; but even just using that small amount of information I’ve been able to find products that are less toxic. Imagine what it would be like if there was a system all set up so that all the manufacturers would be doing what a certified organic farmer has to do for every single product.
PEGGY MIARS: Ooh my gosh, that would be so exciting! Yes, because people don’t realize that organic farmers are much more regulated and have someone looking over their shoulder much more than the non organic farmers do.
DEBRA: Yes! What you’ve described today, because I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been watching this, I’ve been looking , I’ve been researching and everything that you’ve said is like exactly my plan of what should be happening. I mean I’ve already been drawing this all out and writing it all out and everything and I’m going, why isn’t this happening? and now you’re telling me, this is happening and we just need to take what you are doing, what that whole process is in organic farming and we need to apply it to every other product in the world.
PEGGY MIARS: Yes, I agree with that completely and I want to say one thing before we run out of time for all your listeners because we’ve been talking about certified organic production which is really why OMRI exists but I want your listeners to know that they can go to our website, omri.org and there is a free search function there. You can search for brand name products, you can search for generic products like your feather meal and that sort of thing that’s used in organic production to see what’s allowed and, I think, more importantly for your listeners, there are OMRI listed products in your home and garden stores, you know, your big box stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot and also your local independent garden stores. You can go in and find OMRI listed products there.
DEBRA: Oh, so you can go to OMRI and you are talking about OMRI listed products for growing organic?
PEGGY MIARS: For your home garden. You can find them because a lot of manufacturers have different packaging, the big bulk for the farmers and then they have consumer packaging that you will find in your local stores.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. We are going to be done with the show in about two seconds so I thank you for coming.
PEGGY MIARS: Thank you! very much.
DEBRA: Thank you; you are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and Wow! What a show!!
A Different Way to Play—Natural Toys Inspired by Waldorf Education
My guest today is Sarah Baldwin, owner of Bella Luna Toys, a leading website offering families natural, wooden, and eco-friendly toys inspired by Waldorf education. We’ll be talking about how natural toys are a safe alternative to the usual toxic toys, and how Waldorf education offers children a different way to play. Sarah is a former actress and teacher and is the author of Nurturing Children and Families, a guide for Waldorf-inspired play group leaders. She has taught music-and-movement classes for parents and toddlers; started a support and activity group for stay-at-home-mothers; and worked in preschool classrooms in Los Angeles before earning a master’s degree in Waldorf early childhood education in 1999. Sarah taught early childhood classes at the Ashwood Waldorf School in Rockport, ME for ten years, and currently serves as a board member of LifeWays North America, an organization devoted to developing healthy childcare and training programs for caregivers, parents and educators. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/bella-luna-toys
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“A Different Way to Play—Natural Toys Inspired by Waldorf Education”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Sarah Baldwin
DATE OF BROADCAST: December 10, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, this is Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Talk Free Radio, where we talk about how to survive in a toxic world because there are many toxic chemicals around; there’re all over the place. They are in consumer products, in the foods that we eat, in the water we drink, in our bodies, in our homes and today we’re going to be talking about them in our toys and what we can do instead and especially, we are going to talk about not just finding non toxic toys but we are going to be talking about a different way to play altogether. It’s Tuesday, December 10, 2013; the sun is shining here in Cool Water, Florida and my guest today is Sarah Baldwin. She is the owner of Bella Luna Toys.
Hi Sarah!
SARAH BALDWIN: Hi Debra, thanks for having me
DEBRA: Thank you for being here. Well, the title I put on the show today is, “A Different Way to Play – Natural Toys Inspired by Waldorf Education” and at Bella Luna Toys you sell natural, wooden and eco-friendly toys inspired by Waldorf Education. So, first, why don’t you tell us what is Waldorf Education? I know what it is but I know a lot of people don’t
SARAH BALDWIN: Well, Waldorf Education is an educational movement that actually started in the 1920s in Germany; has been in the US (United States) for many years but recently, I’d say, in the last ten (10) to twenty (20) years has exploded in popularity around the world. There are now over a hundred (100) Waldorf schools in the US and hundreds worldwide. It’s growing in China and really exploding around the world and Waldorf is always putting emphasis on natural childhood, natural play, the importance of play, the importance of imagination for young children and I think the reason it’s really exploding in popularity is because more and more research on studies on the brain and studies on child development are showing how important imaginative play is in early childhood and we believe this is the key to creative thinking later in life, when children are allowed to play freely out of their own imaginations in their early years. Imagine the future and the future creators, not just consumers; that imagination is so important and healthy toys are so important.
DEBRA: Part of that imagination is playing with that imagination. So, before we get into talking more about that, tell me your story. How did you become interested and why is this important to you?
SARAH BALDWIN: Well, I discovered Waldorf Education soon after my first child was born and that was over twenty (20) years ago. Prior to that I had been an actress but always interested in education and always thought about teaching and after I became a mother my priorities in life really began to change and I became more and more interested in children and education and I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to teach and I wasn’t too inspired by any of the programmes I was looking at for teacher education and while my son was still a baby I learned about Waldorf Education and visited a Waldorf school. I stepped into a kindergarten and I just had this moment; hard to describe, where I just saw this beautiful environment, wooden toys and silk curtains and it just seemed so calm and nurturing. The children had been baking bread and I smelled that bread and outside there was a garden and the children seemed so healthy and imaginative in their play and there were little slippers all lined up in the room and I had this moment where I felt so excited. I thought this is the right environment for children and then a moment later I thought, oh, but wait, I was visiting.
At that point, thinking about my son, I thought, I want to come here every day too and at that kindergarten interview I asked the teacher about teacher training options and found out (I was living in Los Angeles at the time) there was a part time training right in Los Angeles that I could do as a young mother and so before my kids ever got to a Waldorf school, I enrolled in the teacher training and really changed my life and my family’s life in profound ways. So anyway, fast forward, I completed the training. I taught early childhood classes in a Waldorf school; later moved to Maine, where I live now; taught at the Ashwood Waldorf School in Rockport, Maine for about ten (10) years. I taught everything from parent/child classes to children as young as two (2) and later nursery and kindergarten classes, four, five and six year olds and then about five (5) years ago after teaching for a quite a number of years I was feeling ready to make another change, but I wasn’t sure what I would do next.
My children were older, were teenagers by this time and our school enrolment had dropped and they needed to drop one teacher and I was ready for a change; so I kind of volunteered to step back and almost as soon as I made that decision I found out that Bella Luna Toys which was a website selling Waldorf toys or the kinds of toys we use in Waldorf Education, was for sale and even though I had no experience at the time in business or in retail, it really appealed to me because I really know these toys and I love these toys and I was really excited about introducing them to a whole new generation of young parents and to not only have a website to sell stuff but to use it to share my knowledge, my love of these toys, to promote the importance of play and imagination for young children and to support parents. So, I took a plunge and I bought the website and we are in the midst of our fifth holiday season. It’s grown considerably and I now have a blog and a video series where I share my passion not only for the toys but for Waldorf Education.
DEBRA: We just have a couple of minutes before we need to go to the break, but I want to ask you a question and not start talking about this even though I may interrupt you. First, I want to say, I understand that moment when your walked into the room at the Waldorf School, because I have had some more experiences, not only walking in the room but also even just seeing a flyer or a picture that was painted by a Waldrof child and seeing the beauty in it and the naturalness and that it has a whole different feel which is something that I identified with right away, so I totally, totally, understand. When I was a child I don’t think we even had Waldrof schools here or at least my parents didn’t know anything about it or they probably would have sent me to Waldrof School. It’s just something that I think is a very wonderful thing and I am very happy that people like you are doing it. Could you just start to describe, before I interrupt you; what’s the difference between Waldrof play and children playing with ordinary regular toys that you would buy in a toy store?
SARAH BALDWIN: For one thing Waldorf toys are almost always made out of natural materials; wood, cotton, wool, silk, so not only are these healthy and safe materials for children, but they also nourish a child’s senses and Rudolf Steiner who is the founder of Waldorf Education talked about the importance of a young child, a baby learning all about the world through his or her senses and so to nurture those senses with things that feel good.
DEBRA: And feel natural to your body and connect you with the natural world
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: So, Sarah, before the break we were talking about what’s different about Waldorf Education and you were telling us about how the natural materials in addition to being safe and non toxic for children also nourished their senses
SARAH BALDWIN: Yes, and another thing that differentiates Waldorf toys from more mainstream toys is, we look for toys that are unformed, not too formed so that for instance, a great toy is natural blocks made out of tree branches that have just been sawed so they’re organic forms. They’re not fixed and hard, they’re not rigid shapes so it really allows a child’s imagination to go all kinds of places; little discs of sawed wood could be plates or they could be money or they could just be any number of things. Great toys that were in my classroom were things just found in nature, a basket of pine cones, a basket of shawls, a basket of smooth river stones and the kinds of toys that we would introduce could be handmade dolls from natural fibers, cotton skin, silk stuffed with wool, yarn for hair, mohair and these dolls have intentionally very simple faces. This is a hallmark of a Waldorf doll. Sometimes there is no face at all but most dolls will have just two dots for eyes and a little dot for a mouth and this way a child can really use her imagination to imagine, this doll is happy or sad or crying or sleeping, unlike a hard rigid moulded plastic doll with a fixed smile on its face that’s always wide awake and happy. So we’re looking for unformed toys that are open ended; can be used in any number of ways not just play with one way, can become any number of things to really enliven a child’s imagination
DEBRA: I just think that’s so beautiful, I just love everything that you’re saying. I love everything that this is all about because as you said earlier, it encourages the child to use their imagination which then becomes an excellent tool later in life to be able to imagine what they want to create in the world and then go create it because they are already accustomed to doing that. It’s just so great.
SARAH BALDWIN: Exactly
DEBRA: In contrast, can you give us some information about regular toys; what kind of toxic chemicals might be used in those toys that are not used in your Waldorf toys?
SARAH BALDWIN: Hmm, I think everyone is aware of the high number of toys that have been found to have lead in them; a lot of toys mass produced in China even when lead is illegal. They’ve tested toys and still found unacceptably high levels of lead and BPA (Bisphenol A) which has been found in baby bottles and other children’s toys; they are known to be hormone disruptors; again even in spite of more stringent safety laws for toys in the US . Recently they just did random testing and I believe they found toys imported from China that had four (400) times the legal limit of BPA; so at Bella Luna Toys we carry nothing plastic, so that can reassure parents. We do have some toys with stains and paints but I am very careful to source our toys and make sure that the companies whose toys we sell take these safety standards very highly. They are all third party tested and use eco-friendly paints and on our website every toy we sell we list the country of origin and the materials used in its manufacture and that’s something that parents should be aware of, whatever kind of toys they shop for, wherever they shop because there are just too many toys being produced with harmful chemicals that very young children should not be exposed to.
DEBRA: And often those toys don’t tell you anything about what the materials are. I’m looking at your website right now; I’m looking at the page of coloured wooden Waldorf building blocks and it says, let’s see; these blocks offer colours, textures and organic shapes that will enliven children’s imagination, dah.. dah.. dah… Handcrafted in Europe of sustainable alder wood, the blocks are dyed using non toxic water based stains and food grade vegetable oil; no paint or lacquer and it says that they are made in the European Union. So, that gives the shoppers, the parents, an idea of what’s there and I really appreciate your describing them so well because we need to be able to have the information about what all these products, toys or whatever, are made from in order to make these decisions.
SARAH BALDWIN: Yes, yes, absolutely and true also if a child has allergies and sometimes some of our non toxic stains might have almond oil it so if your child has an allergy to it, it’s especially important even though that might be non toxic for most of us. Children with sensitivities or allergies, parents need to be really vigilant about what toys have been finished with and for that reason we also sell quite a large number of unfinished wooden toys; just unfinished raw wood.
DEBRA: I like the unfinished ones because they are even a little more abstract
SARAH BALDWIN: Yes, yes indeed
DEBRA: I remember some years ago when I first started discovering these toys, my husband and I bought different toys just because we wanted to have the shapes of different things. At that time he was trading futures for pork bellies and I bought him a little pig (laughter) He just loved it because he loves anything that’s wood, even though he’s not a child he still appreciates the smell and the touch and the feel of wood.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: I was looking at your website; I’ve looked at it before but during the break I was looking at it again and there’s so many different and interesting things, that I’d just like us to go through and talk about how some of these different toys, how children play with them and how they give children a different look at the world and the page I’m on right now is about children’s books and I’m noticing that they revolve around the seasons; like I’m looking at the page for Spring right now and the book talks about children engaged in springtime activities, like playing with new born lambs, planting a garden, decorating Easter eggs, watching baby birds and things like that and that’s so different than many of the children’s books that are sold otherwise
SARAH BALDWIN: Yes, yeah, the series you’re looking at is a set of four (4) board books for toddlers and as I was talking before about the simplicity of the toys there is simplicity in these books too. They have no words and just as Waldorf dolls have no face a child and parent can look together at these pictures of children doing seasonal things, as you said like dyeing Easter eggs in Spring or walking through a mud puddle or jumping in leaves in the Autumn book and so this will help children with their own language. As a toddler is developing his or her vocabulary they can make up the words, they can make up their own stories as they go through these books.
DEBRA: And the stories could be different every time they are told whether the parent is telling the story or the child is making up the story
SARAH BALDWIN: Exactly
DEBRA: Again it’s use of imagination and that they can see different things in the picture. It’s just another way I see of connecting the child and the parents too, to the natural world as the basis of life, rather than having the industrial world be the basis of life as is in our industrial consumer society. This takes you into that bigger world, whether it’s a toy or book. That’s the whole basis of this
SARAH BALDWIN: Exactly, exactly. Story telling is such a big part of Waldorf Education throughout all the grades, starting in early childhood in the nursery and kindergarten and going through eighth grade and even through high school; some Waldorf schools go up to twelfth grade; and in the early years we tell stories by heart, we don’t use a lot of picture books. In kindergarten we tell a lot of fairy tales and the teacher tells them by heart and repeats them over and over again. Sometimes we tell the same story every day for a week until it really becomes a part of the child and those children then start telling the stories themselves and you hear it in their play. It’s a very different thing, telling a story by heart than reading it from a book and for parents to make up stories with their children is the best gift of all. A lot of parents think, oh, I can’t do that, I can’t think of anything; well it’s so easy really once you start. Children love to hear stories about when I was a little girl or when daddy was a little boy and I did this, or, a great thing to do at bedtime is to review the day with a child and you could make a story up about a little squirrel or a mouse who did all the same things your child did that day
DEBRA: Speaking of stories, I just want to also mention that there is a page where there was a birthday, what’s it called? the birthday ring with little animals and things on it
SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah
DEBRA: Here it is, Waldorf birthday; it’s along the Menu on the left, click on Waldorf birthday, listeners when you go to the site and you will see it and at the bottom there is a lovely… oh, if you click on Waldorf birthday ring set it explains how to use this product and what it’s made from and everything and at the bottom part of the instructions was to tell the child’s birthday story. You want to talk about the child’s birthday story? I think this is great
SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah, well the birthday ring comes out of a European tradition. It’s a round wooden ring candleholder and so you can put one candle in there for each year, whatever, so, for a three (3) year old, you put in three candles, for a four (4) year old, four candles and in the other holes we have little decorations that can take up the spaces; little wooden painted decorations; a flower, a snail, a tree; very festive, very pretty and so when we celebrated birthdays in my classroom and most Waldorf teachers will do this; birthdays are big a celebration for each child in our classes and you tell the story. Well, when Mary was born it was a cold wintry day and her grandmother and grandfather were there waiting for her, waiting for the new baby to be born and whatever the circumstances of the birth are and then during that first year she learned to do many, many things. She learnt to walk and to talk and to crawl and before she was one (1) year old she said her first word which was, “Da”, “Da” and then it was a frolick trip around the sun and then Mary had her first birthday and then she was one year old and then you light the first candle; and then when Mary was one year old she learnt to do many more things. She learned to walk and then to run and that was the year when her aunt and uncle came to visit from Michigan and they all went to the mountains etcetera; and then she was two (2) years old and you light the second candle; and when she was two, whatever milestone happened that year
DEBRA: I think this is just so.., it’s such a wonderful tradition and I had never even heard of this before until I was looking at your website and it’s meaningful to me because just recently I have started..; I made a page for every year of my life and I started trying to remember what happened in each year of my life. I was going back and I was looking at journals and my check register and things like that because I was forgetting; when did I take that trip to Europe and what year did I get married and little things like those and it’s like I wanted to, in retrospect, have the whole of the milestones of my life so that I could just go back and look at it and I didn’t have it and how wonderful to begin that for a child right at birth
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: Before we get off the subject of storytelling I want to say that in addition to the story- telling books there are also storytelling cards so a child could choose a card and tell a story or choose a card and give to a parent or an adult or another child and ask them to tell a story. I just .., you know, Sarah, I want to be a child; I want to play with all these toys; I want to play with these things and spark my imagination (…laughter). Wow! wow, wow, wow. Ok, I also want to mention that some of the other toy categories are; art supplies so that children learn drawing and writing and painting and modeling and crafts to help them learn skills like knitting and sewing and some of the other toys have to do with playing things like cooking and so there’s a lot of skills that children learn while they are playing
SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah, yeah, exactly and I’m glad you mentioned the arts and crafts supplies and kits that we have. Another thing that is unique about Waldrof Education is the emphasis on handwork and all children starting in the early years learn to work with their fingers. Kindergarteners will learn what we call finger knitting, kind of like making a crochet chain by hand with their fingers and what we know now, what all the recent research bears out, is how directly connected the finger tips are with the brain and so by developing fine motor skills children are actually developing their brains and increasing their capacity for learning and when children get to first grade all children in the Waldrof School, boys and girls, will learn to knit with knitting needles. They later learn crochet and embroidery; by sixth grade they are sewing and learning to use the sewing machine but these just aren’t artistic activities, these are learning activities and as I said, really help in their brain development as well as producing beautiful things with their hands; things they can give as gifts or use themselves. It’s a wonderful thing and so I also offer…
DEBRA: And it’s a useful skill in life, that people should know how to do things, like sew a button on their shirt, at least and..
SARAH BALDWIN: Exactly, yes
DEBRA: Children should be learning how to cook and how to plant a garden, and all these things and so it’s giving children basic life skills while they are playing, instead of sitting them down with a book and saying, now read this. It’s that actual hands on activity and a lot of these toys are the things like a stove or a cash register or something like that that is an object that is a toy for a real life skill
SARAH BALDWIN: Yes, yes, yes
DEBRA: And they can play going to the store and learn how to count money and things like that and that’s just one of the things I love
SARAH BALDWIN: Exactly, you bring up a good point. Children love.., especially young children, their play is all imitation. They love to imitate the world that they see around them and young children love to imitate the work of adults so as teachers we are very conscious of what we say, being worthy of imitation. What are the actions, what are the children seeing us do and how are we doing them; are we harried and stressed as we do our daily work or can we remain calm and relaxed as we are preparing meals or cleaning or doing whatever the mundane tasks? Are we doing them consciously and with intention, knowing that those children around us will be imitating not just our actions but our mood as well?
DEBRA: Yes, yes. So, tell us about play silks? What do children do with play silks? Well, first, tell us what they are. I’ve seen them; I know what they are but tell us what they are?
SARAH BALDWIN: They’re just large squares of dyed silk in different colours, about one yard by one yard square and these are played with in so many ways; most Waldorf kindergarten classes will have a big basket of coloured silk. What do the children do with them? They use them as dress ups, they will tie them on as a cape or a skirt or a veil or they become wings or you might tie it around your waist as a belt for a pirate sword and they also use them as landscapes in their play. They’ll take a green silk and it will become green grass for little wooden horses and a blue silk will become a pond or a lake and a brown silk draped over some blocks becomes a mountain and again we talked earlier about materials that are nourishing to the senses and the silk just feels so lovely to the skin and really fulfils that need of toys that are nourishing to the senses
DEBRA: Yes, yes, silk does feel so different than polyester. What else do you have? The seasonal toys; tell us about some of the seasonal toys
SARAH BALDWIN: Well, we also try to.., I always try to have a collection of things for the season because again, in Waldorf Education the seasons are very important and we talk a lot about rhythm. Having a rhythm of the day, a rhythm of the week and a rhythm of the year and the rhythm of the year is the season. A lot of it is how children in the early years are learning about the world and nature which is kind of their science study but celebrating festivals throughout the year too, really is healthy for children and I mean if you just think back to your own childhood and our holidays through the year gives you a reference for the frame of the year but also we can bring reverence and meaning to the seasons and to whatever holidays and whatever culture we’re from. Children love ritual and celebration and so at this time of year we have some German wooden advent figures, a spiral where you can light candles whether you celebrate Solstice or Advent or Christmas or Hanukkah. They’re all celebrations about light; bringing into this darkest time of the year with the short days and the long nights and lighting candles, so all these different festivals from different traditions, a lot of them have to do with light this year. So we have this lovely wooden spiral that holds twenty four (24) candles that you can either count off leading up to Christmas or whatever festival you celebrate and at Easter we’ll have lots of springtime grass planting kits and natural egg dyeing kits and gardening things in the summer and so on
DEBRA: Oh wonderful; so, I want to make sure my listeners know that in addition to all these unusual things that there also are the usual things, like wooden blocks and push/pull toys and puzzles and stuffed toys and so you’ll see some familiar things as well as some new and different things.
Well, Sarah, our hour is almost up; it always goes by so fast and what a magical hour it has been. I so appreciate you being here as a guest. Is there anything else that you would like to say before we end?
SARAH BALDWIN: Oh, I just want to thank you so much Debra. Thank you for your interest. I’m glad you discovered Bella Luna Toys and I really appreciate your enthusiasm and interest and everything you are doing to promote green and healthy living
DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. So, I wanna say that this is just one example of how what we’re doing here is just not to be not toxic but to show that there are whole other worlds that are on the other side of being toxic; that it’s not just about having things be exactly the same but in a non toxic version but there are other ideas and other ways of being that I think are wonderful that I’ve incorporated into my life over the years and being closer to nature is one of those; but we also need to remember that if we are using toxic products in our home, they’re getting into nature and destroying nature so it’s not just about being aware of nature, it’s about looking at how our actions affect the natural world and continuing to have it there for all of life as well as ourselves.
Giving Organic Flowers
My guest today is Robert McLaughlin, CEO of Organic Bouquet. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals used in the floral industry, growing commercial flowers organically, and how you can have organically-grown flowers delivered to your door. Robert has worked in every phase of the floral industry since 1984 and has seen first-hand the effects of toxic agro-chemicals on workers. Organic Bouquet sells a unique online collection of stylish and one-of kind-products that are carefully selected with the highest social and environmental standards and practices. Sustainably grown flowers are gentle on the earth and safeguard ecology, while sustainable, biodegradable, green packaging is innovative and stylish. All of Organic Bouquet’s products, from floral arrangements and gourmet gifts to unique home accessories, have been certified by third-party agencies, such as USDA, Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/organic-bouquet
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Giving Organic Flowers
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Robert McLaughlin
Date of Broadcast: February 06, 2015
Debra: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. We do this, I do this every Monday through Friday, 12 noon Eastern because there’s so many toxic chemicals in the world that are causing so much harm to the environment and to our health and well-being, to the way our bodies feel, how we think, how we feel and it doesn’t need to be that way.
There are so many people in the world, so many businesses in the world and organizations who are doing good things to make our world a less toxic place to live so that we can all be healthier and happier that we just need to know that these options exist and chose them and we can all be living in a more toxic free way.
Today is Monday, December 9th 2013 and I’m here in – well, usually, sunny Clearwater, Florida, but it’s overcast today, so it feels a little winter-ish, which is great. At the studio, they were saying – they’re in Pennsylvania and they said that they had their first snowfall. So it’s starting to feel like the holidays.
Today, my guest is Robert McLaughlin. He’s the CEO of Organic Bouquet. And what Organic Bouquet does is that they deliver right to your home gorgeous, beautiful, organic flowers and other things like Christmas trees and gifts, baskets and all kinds of things that you might want to consider for holiday gifts this year.
Hi Robert, thanks for being here.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Debra: You’re welcome. So first, tell us a little bit about how Organic Bouquet started and then your background. I know that you’ve spent your whole, entire adult life if not more working in the floral industry. So tell us the story of how you and Organic Bouquet came together.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Sure! Organic Bouquet was started in 2001. I actually came to work at Organic Bouquet in 2007, but the gentleman who started it was from the organic fruit and vegetable industry and wanted to get into the floral industry.
My background, I started in 1984 in the floraculture industry and horticulture industry working mainly with U.S. growers as well as growers in South America marketing most of these products to supermarkets.
Debra: And what was the motivation for starting Organic Bouquet?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I think it started out as more of a social program working with workers in South American Colombia and Ecuador. About 70% of the flowers that are sold in the U.S. come from Colombia and Ecuador. So I think it started as a human rights issue.
And then as you get into that, you think, “Okay, you can pay fair level wages to workers. But what’s one of the worst things you can do to them?” and that’s spray toxic chemicals on them. So we had to find a way to end that.
Debra: Yeah. I saw on your bio on the website that you had experience working in the greenhouses and the packing houses. You’ve held just about every job there in the floral industry. Can you tell us some of the things that you observed about what kind of toxic chemicals were being used and what the effects were on the workers?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I did. I started in Central Florida working in a greenhouse just as a laborer. I pulled weed, packed boxes and even sprayed some of those nasty agrochemicals.
Then I had an agronomist or a grower who had been growing for years through the sixties and seventies and he understood the effects of toxicity and chemicals, but in the greenhouse, it was all business and you sprayed the chemicals that it took to get rid of the pest or fungi that you were trying to get rid of.
But what was interesting is outside of the greenhouse, he taught me how to kill weeds around the greenhouse using salt water, he taught me how to kill aphids off of the bushes around the greenhouse using soapy water. So we really started looking at in the early eighties. There was an awareness of it, at least from the grower’s perspective.
And then that particular grower, he passed away in the early nineties of toxic chemical overexposure. He would always come back to the greenhouse soaked in the chemicals that he was spraying all over the plants. So there had to be a better way.
Debra: Yeah, yeah. There has to be a better way. You talked about how you and the other workers would just spray the chemicals and you’re walking around in your bare feet. I think that this has gone on a lot in the past, but I think that it’s still going on, right?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, it is. We were somewhat fortunate in the U.S. compared to some other developing natures. But yeah, when we’re spraying chemicals, the last thing we want to do is get our shirts or our shoes wet. So we would just drip them off and go out and spray the chemicals.
If you look around the world, that’s happening in India, it’s happening in China. I’m sure it’s still happening somewhere in the U.S. as well. But where you have a village that’s spraying chemicals on cotton for instance and you have a worker that barely has a fresh supply of water, they may only have a cup of water to rinse the chemicals off of them.
Debra: And that doesn’t do the job. But of course, they’re breathing them and everything and all of these chemicals are going into the environment. Can you tell us what some of the chemicals are?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: There are a lot of nasty chemicals. I think methyl bromide is probably one of the worst that was used in the produce industry as well as in some of the floral industry. That’s just a nasty chemical that they fog greenhouses with to sterilize soil, among other uses. That’s probably the worst.
Debra: And then there are all the pesticides. I know you probably use a lot of different pesticides.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Pesticides and fertilizers.
Debra: And fertilizers. Is it pretty much the same thing that is being used when you’re growing food?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, a lot of the same chemicals are used for food. Fortunately, with food production, there’s been a lot of research dollars put into growing organic food, which we’ve been able to benefit from that research in the floral industry.
Debra: And do you know if there are any residues of pesticides or toxic chemicals left on the flowers? If I were to go buy flowers at my grocery store, would I be exposed to those pesticides like I would be exposed to pesticides on food.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, in many cases, you are. Again, floriculture is kind of the gem of the agricultural world in South America. In other words, it has a lot more advanced and progressive growers that are getting away from that. But yeah, traditionally grown flower may have been dipped in a fungicide before it was even shipped just to keep the bacteria and fungi down in transit.
Debra: Oh, I remember when I was a child – I’ve told this story before, but it bears telling again – when I would smell an orange, what I’d be smelling are the fungicide. They wrap the oranges in paper with fungicide on it and the fungicide gets on the orange. I would smell an orange and I would think, “Oh, that’s what an orange smell like,” that fungicide smell.
It wasn’t until I ate organic oranges for the first time that I realized that what I had been smelling and tasting was fungicide and not an orange.
I didn’t know that they dipped flowers in fungicide. If they’re dipping flowers in fungicide to keep them fresh in transit, then that fungicide would still be there as part of the flower by the time it got to us.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, absolutely. And there are residues on flowers from fertilization. There’s residue from pesticides. Ironically, a lot of people don’t understand that even organic chemicals can be highly caustic chemicals. So you’ll have residues potentially from organic chemicals that need to be cleaned off as well.
Debra: And how would you clean those chemicals off of a flower?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Just by dipping them in water. If it’s truly an organic chemical, it’s water soluble. The synthetic chemical is not meant to break down with water. So that’s really the main difference.
Debra: Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, good. Good, good, good.
Well, thank you for sending me some flowers. I am really enjoying them. Robert sent me a beautiful bouquet of white carnations with lilies and red tulips and evergreens and it’s sitting here right on my desk and it’s so fresh and beautiful.
He also sent the most gorgeous Christmas wreath I’ve ever seen. First of all, it’s really big, it’s really lush. First of all, it’s really big. It’s really lush. If you think about the kind of wreaths you get at the Christmas tree lot or at the grocery store, this is nothing like that. It’s so beautiful.
I’ll tell you more about it when we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Robert McLaughlin, the CEO of Organic Bouquet. We’ll come back and talk more about organic flowers.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Robert McLaughlin, CEO of Organic Bouquet.
Before the break, I was starting to tell you about these beautiful flowers. In addition to the flowers being so gorgeous, also, the bouquet came with a vase. I need to tell you this about the vase.
The vase is designed in such a way – and I’m not sure if they did this intentionally or not. The vase is designed in such a way that all I had to do was put the flowers in the vase and they spread out perfectly to look like a gorgeous bouquet the way it looks in the picture. I didn’t have to do any flower arranging. The flowers just kind of arrange themselves. It was just such a delight when I did that. I just put the flowers in, the vase did all the work and I have this gorgeous bouquet on my desk.
So I want to tell you about this wreath too because we’re now at the holiday season and people are probably buying wreaths. This wreath is the largest wreath that I’ve ever seen. Every single piece of it has fresh evergreens. They’re all fresh. It’s beautifully put together. This is the highest quality floral arrangement that I’ve ever seen. And so I’m delighted that they are also organic and fair trade and all the wonderful, sustainable things that they are.
So, well done!
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Well, great! Thank you for that. I’m very happy that you’re enjoying them.
Debra: I’m very happy with them. I’m very, very happy. There’s so much we could talk about. Here’s another thing I wanted to say. You have same day delivery, right?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: We do! We actually just launched that capability recently. I was surprised because I know you were checking on my address. You only got my address on Saturday morning. By Saturday at 10 o’clock in the morning, I had flowers. That was pretty amazing to me.
So this is something that if people are wanting to send holiday gifts, they could be ordering at the last minute and you can fulfill those orders, right?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, absolutely. And we sent you those flowers, the bouquet from a farm in California and the wreath came from Oregon. So everything was and cut fresh and produced and shipped to you by the next day.
Debra: That’s amazing. It’s amazing to me that it can all happen so fast and the delivery times and things.
So tell us about some of the things that you have that our listeners would be interested in that they could give for gifts, the varieties of things and different types of flowers. Describe your products.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: We have a full line of floral gifting products. We have everything from roses to lilies all grown in a certified, sustainable manner. We have, as you mentioned, the wreath that come from the northwest. Those are grown organically on a national preserve.
And then we also have organic food baskets, organic chocolate, various types of products there. We do a lot of corporate gift-giving type work during the Christmas holiday. So they’re great gifts to send out to your customers, friends and family.
Debra: Yes, I absolutely would agree with that because it’s just a very high quality presentation. They’re beautiful.
I guess I’m wanting to describe these because when I first started hearing the word ‘organic’ many, many years ago, I don’t know how people think of it today, but organic didn’t always mean high quality. So that’s why I’m talking so much about the quality and also the fact that you can’t always get sometimes what you consider to be the standard kinds of things organic.
But if you go to OrganicBouquet.com, you’ll see the same kind of flowers that you would see on a regular floral site except they’re organic. It has roses and irises and just everything that you would want at a regular floral place except that they’re organic and beautiful – lilies, gorgeous lilies.
So tell us a little bit about sustainability.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: It’s interesting that you bring up organic because organic has not been necessarily known as good quality. In years past, it’s a very difficult growing method.
A few things to know about organic. If you have something that’s USDA organic certified, it really only pertains to the way that that product is grown. The reason we focus on sustainability is because it focuses on environmental, but also social aspects.
Debra: Yes, organic has nothing to do with social aspects.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: No, it really doesn’t. It doesn’t have necessarily anything to do with the local ecology surrounding a farm or a factory.
So if you have something that’s USDA certified and you use organic chemicals, again, water soluble chemicals, if you allow those to run off of the farm and run into a stream, it can pollute the stream. It can choke out vegetation in the stream. It can create a large plume of different organic materials that choke out a stream and kill wild life up and down. So we go a step further than just organic.
Debra: So before you talk about sustainability because I know that’s a bigger issue, could you just give us a little more detail about what the organic part of the growing is. What is the USDA certifying you for? What does that look like?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yes. So they’re certifying that they are using only organic agrichemicals on your production, whether it’s fruits and vegetables or cut flowers. It’s making sure that you’re using chemicals that are water soluble, that have no synthetics in it. It’s a great growing method because it doesn’t kill the microbial life in the soil. So it’s rejuvenating. The soil can rejuvenate and you can grow year after year.
Debra: Yes. But it’s only concerned about building soil and no synthetic chemicals.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Correct! Organic chemicals can be very toxic.
Debra: Yeah, I was about to say no toxic chemicals, but that’s not what they’re certifying for.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Right! You can have workers in the field and you can spray them with organic chemicals and it can burn the skin right off their body. So it’s important to go a step beyond organic and make sure that you’re buying something that is certified sustainable as well as organic. I think that’s important.
We haven’t gotten to fair, livable wages, fair labor, fair training of workers and safety equipment, all of these things, but…
Debra: We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And today, we’re talking about organic, sustainable floral industry with Robert McLaughlin who’s the CEO of Organic Bouquet. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, we’re talking with Robert McLaughlin who’s the CEO of Organic Bouquet. Robert, I’m looking at your website. First, let me ask you, what’s your bestselling product?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Roses are the bestselling product year round.
Debra: Good, good. And it looks like you have beautiful roses. I was just clicking around to different products. One of the things that I’m really interested in is how much information various companies give about how organic or non-toxic or sustainable they are in different ways. I clicked to [inaudible 00:27:26] Rose Bouquet, which happens to be a beautiful bouquet of red roses with some white flowers and evergreens mixed in with it.
So here are some things that I’m seeing on here. “Green Shipping,” what’s that?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: We use overnight delivery services like FedEx and UPS. So we calculate all of the carbon that we emit into the atmosphere each year by all of our shipment. And then we participate in a carbon neutral program that supports reforestation in Guatemala.
Debra: Oh, great! Great! That’s very good. So now, I see that this is certified by Veriflora, which is a comprehensive sustainability certification program for the floral and potted plant industries. Tell us about that program.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: So our company, we were one of the original founders of Veriflora because North America did not have a certification or a set of standards for floriculture. There are various countries that have their own non-regulated or self-regulated sustainability standards, but we wanted something that was the first for North America.
So we contracted scientific certification systems who’s well known in the certification industry and we did a GAP analysis of all the other certifications to come up with something specifically for floriculture.
So since we helped start that, over 1500 acres of traditional growing methods had been transitioned into certified sustainable.
Debra: And what are some of the points that they’re looking at in sustainability. I know that word is used a lot, but I don’t think that people really understand how comprehensive it is. So what are some of the things that they’re looking for?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yes, so there’s an environment component that the farm has to be on a pathway to organic if they’re not already organic. They can’t use any chemicals banned by the World Health Organization or the USCPA. They have to have protections of water, reclaim and collection. They have to pay fair, livable wages above minimum wage. They have to provide proper safety training and safety equipment for the workers.
And then there is a custody chain that is followed all the way from the farm out to the retailer in order to be Veriflora certified, so that we know that it’s been controlled in a particular manner.
With Veriflora, each farm is certified on an annual basis by a third party auditor, not by our company, not by themselves, but a third party auditor comes in…
Debra: …to make sure that they’re doing all those things.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah. And on the day that they do the inspections of the farms, the farm owners are not invited to the farm. They walk the farm with the people who do the actual work. They go through all of the different processes.
Debra: Excellent! Excellent! So in terms of sustainability, it seems to me that sustainability is something that we’re moving to. It’s a direction that we’re moving into rather than something that’s absolute. Is that something you agree with?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah! I think it’s critical that the sustainability component is in all of the products that we buy. I used to run a sustainable investment fund. I visited one of the greenhouses that we were invested in and it was a USDA certified organic. And that was it.
As I was waiting for the grower to show up, I’m looking around on the loading dock and they had a huge refrigeration unit that had been shut down. It’s been used seasonally. So I stuck my head in, looked inside and there were nothing but palettes with blankets and beds for immigrant workers.
So these were likely undocumented workers that were living in a dark, damp cooler during the harvest period.
With USDA, there’s no standard to stop that from happening. That’s why sustainability is important.
Debra: There are so many things to look at. It really is a challenge. It can be a challenge. One of the things I just want to complement you on, Organic Bouquet and you as the CEO is that I’ve been looking at various types of organic, natural, non-toxic, green products, et cetera for over 30 years. One of the things that I see is that there are companies that are dedicated to the idea and that they do everything that they can to make it happen.
And then there are other companies where they’ll carry one or two things and they don’t quite understand it. It’s really great to see your company be one that not only applies these principles, but has been a participant in creating them and that it’s part of the fabric of your company, it’s part of what you do. So it’s not just something that’s added on later. Everything that you do is based on these ideas. I think that that’s important for consumers to understand the difference between just seeing a package on a shelf that might be organic versus having the whole company be about a way of doing business.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, we offer consumers responsible choices when they’re looking at buying floral products online. And there are a lot of companies out there. I would say to consumers to look for companies when you’re purchasing something. The more transparent, the better.
Debra: I totally agree.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: …the companies that are really not afraid to outline what it is they represent and what they define themselves as.
Debra: Yes, I agree, I agree. I’m just looking at your website here because there’s so much to choose from. Let’s see, here we have an organic fruit basket. Let’s see what’s in this one. It has organic pears, organic apples, organic oranges, chocolate-covered dried cherries (organic), organic dark chocolate almonds, organic cashews.
I remember when I was a kid that we used to get these fruits baskets. I won’t say the name of the company. The people in California would recognize it. When I was a kid, we used to get these fruit baskets that had fruit and dried fruit. That was part of our family Christmas present.
I can see that you have that same idea about these traditional things like flowers and fruits that people are accustomed to giving at the holidays, but in organic form.
We’ll be back after this break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Robert McLaughlin from Organic Bouquet. That’s OrganicBouquet.com. They have all kinds of holiday gifts that can be delivered same day. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Robert McLaughlin from Organic Bouquet. That’s OrganicBouquet.com. We’re talking about the floral industry, holiday gifts – organic, sustainable.
Robert, I’m looking at your wreaths and plants page. As I’ve said before, the wreath that you sent me is absolutely gorgeous, just the highest quality I’ve ever seen in a wreath.
I know it would be gorgeous to put on my front door, but I have it hanging on my living room because I want to see it. If it’s on the front door, it’s outside.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Great!
Debra: Everyone else would see it. My living room now smells wonderful from all these evergreens. It’s just a great thing to have for the holiday.
Tell us about some of the different things that you have on this page. There are all kinds of things that you can choose from.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, we love that grower in Oregon. He actually has a great relationship with the National Forest Department in Oregon. They harvest all of those directly out of the forest, which serves two purposes. One, they get certainly 100% organic grains because they can’t be spraying it on a national forest and two, it thins out the growth in the forest, which is helpful for the plants, so the trees grow much healthier and larger. It’s a great program that they have. And of course, the products are beautiful.
Debra: They are beautiful. I’m looking here on the page and there’s a number of different kinds of wreaths and swags. Here’s a little moss, ivy reindeer and there’s a little olive tree and a heart-shaped wreath, (that’s a lavender heart-shaped wreath) and a little ivy cone tree so that you could just have a little tabletop tree if you wanted. There’s even a succulent living wreath, all kinds of things. So you’re not limited just to evergreens although I love evergreens at the holiday time. There are just so many things that you have put together.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, a lot of those potted plants are grown in Salinas, California and northern California. We love to support local growers. While the industry brings in 70% of its cut flowers from South America and we do offer products from certified farms in South America, we really like to focus on our U.S. growers as well.
Debra: Good, good. Even some of the things that you have here that are not organic (because some of them, I’m looking and I’m just clicking around and some of them are organic and some of them are not, a lot are organic), one of the benefits of buying from you is that all the shipping has carbon offsets.
The thing that I would like to say about buying local and carbon offsets and things like that, my viewpoint is that I’m concerned about putting toxic chemicals into my body and into the environment. If we put toxic chemicals into the environment, they’re going to end up in my body. I’m going to breathe them, they’re going to be in the food, and they’re going to be wherever.
When you’re shipping things from great distances, then that puts more pollution into the area unless you’re doing something to negate that, unless you’re using renewable energy or there’s carbon offsets or things like that.
And so, if you’re going to buy a potted plant, the difference of having it shipped from Organic Bouquet or someplace else, even if you’re not buying something organic on the site, just the fact that they’re being concerned about the shipping makes a difference in the larger environment than ordering from someone else.
So I can see from my understanding of sustainability, I can look at this site and I can see that they’re incorporating everything that I can think of that can be incorporated right now. And of course, the whole idea of sustainability as we understand it better, everybody can do better at it. I just see on every page that I go to, there’s something about sustainability being applied to each and every product.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, we have meetings internally whenever we’re looking at new products or we’re just looking at our business in general, we’re looking at what good are we doing with a product. That’s great! Can you make money on the product?
But how does it serve the environment? How does it serve our community? We look at everything. My business cards are made on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper. We use soy-based vegetable ink dyes. And of course, the carbon offset program.
For carbon offset, there’s been a lot of debate about it, but I think the concept is pretty simple. If you put x amount of carbon into the atmosphere, what can you do to pull that equal amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
And then we also work with cause marketing. We have over 40 different partnerships with charitable organizations. So you can buy a bouquet that’s for the American Red Cross and 15% of the sale goes back to the American Red Cross. It’s the same thing we have, again, over 40 different partners.
Debra: Yes. Great! It’s great, what you’ve put together here. I was just looking at something and then I clicked away from it. Oh, packaging. Tell us about the packaging.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Yes, so packaging, again, we look at using recycled materials. If we’re using plastics, we look at non-GMO corn based plastics, so that it’s biodegradable. It breaks down in the landfill. And of course, it doesn’t support genetically-modified corn.
So again, we look at every corner, every aspect of our business that we can and we’re constantly coming up with new improvements and new ideas.
Debra: Well, I must say that when I received my packages with the wreath and the flowers, the packages themselves were very sturdy and they protected the plants very, very well. I have received things that I have ordered online in the past where by the time I get them, the packages are so beat up.
Once, I ordered a hand-thrown clay pot. By the time it got to me, it was just in pieces because the packaging wasn’t well. So that’s in addition to having high quality products that are high quality packaging that are keeping them in good condition on their way to you made from recycled materials.
So we just have a few minutes left of the show. Is there anything else that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I would just like to say that our business model (as well as other businesses) supports this type of eco lifestyle choices and stances on sustainability. I just ask consumers to look out when you’re doing your shopping online and vote with your dollars. Support companies that support change for the environment and for the human rights around the world.
A lot of products are imported around the world. We can’t have everything grown in the U.S.A., so we really have to make sure that we’re doing the right things in other developing nations as well, making sure workers are paid fair, livable wages, making sure they’re being treated well, that they’re being protected and whatever it is that they’re doing.
Debra: I totally agree. I would like to say to consumers that we could have everything all grown in the United States, but one of the reasons why businesses need to bring things in from other countries has to do with consumer demand. And so it’s because we want to have those flowers that need to be grown in South America.
But if we were to choose what grows in our areas and decide that we want – I’m not saying people shouldn’t buy these flowers from you. I’m just saying that if we thought differently, if we said like I decided many, many years ago to live as local as I can live, I look around and I see what are the kinds of plants here that I could use, what kind of flowers are here in Florida, what kinds of food are here in Florida, I try to get everything as local as possible.
And so it really comes down to our consumer decisions. We have so much power as consumers and so we can make our lives more local if we choose that. Be aware of what’s local. Support our local people. We can turn a lot of things around by the choices that we make.
Debra: Well, thank you so much for being with me today. Happy holidays! I appreciate you being here because I think you’re doing a fabulous job.
ROBERT MCLAUGHLIN: Great! Well, thank you so much for having me.
Debra: You’re welcome. So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more about the show and find out about other past guests by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Each one of the shows is recorded and in the archives. You can listen to more than a hundred shows that are in the archives now. You can listen to this show again. You can tell your friends to listen to this show. You can tell your friends to go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to the shows live or in the archives. They are available seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Also, Organic Bouquet is one of many hundreds of websites that I have on my website, links to websites that sell organic, natural, non-toxic, fair trade, all those kinds of products. If you just go ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, go up to the top (in the navigation bar, it says ‘Shop’), click on Shop and shop!
How Your Body Tells You it has Toxic Overload
Today my guest is Dawn Roberts, author of Warnings of Disease: Your Body Uses Symptoms to Communicate. We’ll be talking about why you should pay attention to your symptoms as indicators something is wrong with your body that needs healing, rather than making them go away with drugs or even natural remedies. While struggling with over 100 symptoms, 35 diagnosed diseases, and weight gain, Dawn had questions regarding her failing health, yet no medical doctor could provide an answer. Suffering with neurological problems, doctors suspected that Dawn had either MS, Parkinson’s, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. But the reality was that doctors were doing nothing to help, neither were the 23 medications that they prescribed. In fact, Dawn got sicker with each passing day until she said, “Enough, is enough!” This began her crusade to find the cause of disease and to eliminate it from her life. Dawn turned to a Chiropractor/Homeopath for help. With his assistance, and a total change in her lifestyle and eating habits, Dawn was totally healed. Chronic disorders, even heart disease, simply vanished. At the persuasion of her Chiropractor to write a book, Dawn embarked on a 15-year scientific journey to do research. She then took a hiatus from her work as a Forensic Document Examiner to write Warnings of Disease. Through this work, Dawn hopes to use her personal experience to help others. Her mission is to help people, who are sick, diseased and overweight, 
realize that junk food and toxic chemicals are perpetuating their problems. Dawn has been happily married for 32 years, and is the proud mother of two sons and a new daughter-in-law. She lives alongside a tranquil and serene river bordered by a Florida State Forest with her high tech husband, pre-Chiropractic son, 2 rambunctious dogs, a brood of chickens, and some crazy guinea hens. www.dakemani.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“How Your Body Tells You it has Toxic Overload”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Dawn Roberts
DATE OF BROADCAST: December 4, 2013
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 I’m clearing my throat today; it’s wintertime and it’s cold and I have a little cough but we are going to get through the show. Today we are going to be talking about symptoms.
My guest today is Dawn Roberts; she is the author of “Warnings of Disease: Your Body Uses Symptoms to Communicate”, and your body really does use symptoms to communicate.
I had Dawn on as a guest a couple of months ago and we had some technical problems that day with sound and there are big gaps in the sound on that recording so I wanted to have her on again because this is such an important issue; it’s such an important subject and it’s such an important thing for each of us to be aware of because…. You may have heard that old phrase; ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and for many years I wondered what that meant until finally one day I recognised that they are saying that a stitch in time, it’s not about taking a stitch in time, you know, like the clock ticking, it’s about taking a stitch soon enough.
A stitch in time saves nine, means that if you have a rip in your fabric and you take that one stitch to repair it then you save having to take nine stitches and that just holds true with anything in our world; that if you have anything that needs some repair, if you take that repair right away then you’ll have less damage and it will be easier to fix and that’s what goes on with our bodies. If we can recognise our symptoms and recognise that symptoms are our bodies saying, wait, there is something wrong, do something different! Help! help! help! and we see the small symptoms and don’t wait for the big symptoms, then there is so much we can do to help our bodies and right now a lot of people are having a lot of symptoms because our bodies are screaming at us because of toxic chemical exposure and then if we can listen to those symptoms and not take drugs in order to make our symptoms stop, because this is what we are taught to do in our culture; is not to listen to our symptoms but to take a drug.
If you have a headache, take a drug; if you have stomach ache, take a drug; don’t look for the cause and what we need to be doing is looking for the cause and not taking drugs or even natural remedies to make the symptoms stop. What we need to do is look at what is causing the symptom and handle the problem. In some cases it’s gonna be toxic chemical exposure, in some cases it’s gonna be the foods we eat and in some cases, it might even be an illness or a malfunction in our bodies; but we need to see our symptoms, acknowledge our symptoms and see what’s causing them and that’s what our show is about today; it’s listening to our bodies; watching our symptoms.
My guest is Dawn Roberts, author of, “Warnings of Disease: Your Body Uses Symptoms to Communicate.”
Hi Dawn, thanks for being here with me.
DAWN ROBERTS: Hi Debra thank you for having me back. I really appreciate it and when you came on you said you had a cough and you’ve had some drainage and all and my response to that would be, you probably had a little too much Thanksgiving.
DEBRA: (Laughter)
Well actually I didn’t have any Thanksgiving. I actually I think that I was in a building that was mouldy a couple weeks ago and I think that that’s what’s going on. It’s a reaction to mould; it doesn’t seem to be a cold because I’m not having symptoms, like flu symptoms or anything like that, I’m just having that my sinuses started burning. I was only in this building for half an hour and my sinuses started burning and then I started having drainage and then I started having a cough and all these things and so I think this is entirely environmental and I think I just need to let it run out.
DAWN ROBERTS: Exactly, I know, I’ve been through that many times myself and I write about it in my book too.
DEBRA: So, let’s start by having you tell us your story. I know you have a very dramatic story of having many symptoms and diseases and taking many drugs and yet when you stopped taking the drugs and started listening to your body and seeing what was going on you found out some surprising things and were able to rid yourself of all your symptoms; so go ahead and tell us your story.
DAWN ROBERTS: Yes, thanks. Back in 1996 my body literally fell apart, like so many people’s bodies are doing today. I was diagnosed with thirty five (35) different diseases. I had heart disease, hypoglycemia, hypothyroidism, I had a lot of chronic diseases; sinusitis, endometriosis, I had kidney stones, gall stones, fibrocystic breast disease, I had multiple chemical sensitivities, I had acid reflux, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, ulcerative colitis, I had vertigo, I had tinnitus, peripheral neuropathy, mitral valve prolapse, I had ocular migraine and so on and so on, restless legs syndrome. The last thing was, the doctors said well you have symptoms of M S Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease, so their next plan of attack was to send me to Shands Teaching Hospital in Gainesville, Florida, to figure out exactly which one I had.
All in all, I had over a hundred documented symptoms. I was taking twenty three (23) different powerful drugs, including heavy duty heart drugs and the doctors were really doing nothing to help me other than to just describe what my symptoms were by giving me a diagnosis and then they would write me a prescription and if that didn’t work then they started advocating surgery. The last thing they wanted to do was replace my heart valves and finally I got so frustrated with the whole situation and I was so sick and not getting better; I had two young children to raise; I started doing my own research.
I turned away from the medical community. I turned to a Homeopathic Physician and also a Chiropractor and I was just led down the path to healing myself through all of my research and what I did was, I went through my house, I cleared out every chemical that was in my house that had a warning sign or danger notice. I went into my refrigerator and my freezers and my pantry and every product that had a chemical in it that I did not know what it was; in other words, any food that was not a whole food, I got rid of it and I said, ok, now let’s start from the beginning and I also did take some supplements that were not in the gelatin cap because those in themselves are chemicals.
I took hard pressed supplements and as a detox I ate a lot of beef, organic beef and spinach to detox my body and within two (2) to three (3) months diseases and symptoms started disappearing so fast; sixty (60) pounds dropped off of me. I didn’t know what was happening. Within six (6) months just about every disease and symptom that I had was gone and by eleven (11) months I was a totally new person and I have been completely healthy since 1997.
DEBRA: This is a very dramatic example of the difference it makes when we stop eating processed foods and when we remove toxic chemicals from our homes. I had a very similar experience where I don’t even remember all the symptoms that I had now but I remember at the time I said, these symptoms just are bizarre, they don’t seem like any illness that I can identify because I had everything from headaches and insomnia and exhaustion and depression; like, what illness is that; you know?
DAWN ROBERTS: Exactly, I had all those too. I was diagnosed with them.
DEBRA: Yes and so it wasn’t until I found out, actually by accident; it was just my mother actually at the time was dying of cancer and my father took her to a doctor for intravenous Vitamin C treatments and he happened to be a doctor called a Clinical Ecologist; it’s now called Environmental Medicine and he was testing people and authors for exposure to various chemicals and my father looked at this; he looked at the way the doctor could turn the symptoms on and off then… I see it’s time to take a break, so I will continue my story later after the break. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we are talking with my guest Dawn Roberts about how our symptoms can tell us what’s going on with our bodies. We’ll be right back.
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DEBRA: Before the break I was talking about how I found out that toxic chemicals were causing my symptoms because my father had taken my mother to a doctor and my mother was dying of cancer and he had taken her to a doctor who would give her intravenous Vitamin C treatments and while they were there, while he was waiting for her appointment he noticed that the doctor was doing something called Provocation Neutralization Testing where they would give a small amount of a food or cat dander or toxic chemicals to the patient and it would turn on symptoms and then they would give another dose and it would turn off the symptoms and he looked at this and he said, this is what’s going on with my daughter because he could see that my symptoms would just turn on and turn off and my symptoms were actually being turned on by very specific chemical exposures and once I got that idea that a symptom could get turned on and off by an environmental exposure, whether it was a chemical or food or something else, then I started watching for this and I even started keeping a journal and what I found was that when I would spray my perfume on I’d get a headache.
When I took a shower and there was chlorine coming out of the shower water in the steam I would feel faint and then I’d get out of the shower and I’d stop feeling faint and when I would go to bed at night, instead of sleeping I’d have insomnia and later then I found that there was formaldehyde resin on my permanent pressed bed sheets and formaldehyde causes insomnia and so when I changed the sheets on my bed I had no more insomnia and so this was quite a revelation for me to be able to make these connections between the symptoms I was having and my environmental exposures and that I could turn my symptoms on and off at will by what I was being exposed to and that is just very, very different from the idea of saying, I have a headache I’d better take an aspirin; very dramatic. It was very dramatic and I did a similar thing to what Dawn did; one day just went through my house and I took out everything that was a toxic chemical; anything that I could identify at the time that was a toxic chemical, so we have similar experiences Dawn.
DAWN ROBERTS: Yeah.
DEBRA: So, one of the things that I like about your book is that you really have it organised around symptoms and exposures and let’s just take.., Chapter Three is about the Nervous System; so could you just tell us more about, like.., what to look for, what kind of symptoms are associated, like if your nervous system is giving you symptoms, what would those symptoms look like and what your experience was? You have quite a lot of information here about identifying neurological symptoms and what to do.
DAWN ROBERTS: Ahmm, neurological symptoms begin in the neurological system. For the symptoms to react that means something that you’re taking in, something that you’re being exposed to is being taken into the body and it’s going directly into the brain.
What I learned as a Forensic Document Examiner and I’m used to doing scientific research, so I started doing a lot of scientific research and what I found was, that the chemicals that we eat, the chemicals that are put on to our skin even as far as the toothpaste that we use that has warning, danger notices to call Poison Control if we swallow more than a pea sized amount, these chemicals that we are ingesting into our body through the foods and the products that we use and like you said, the formaldehyde that you breathe in, they go into your neurological system and they cause a whole host of symptoms and they can be some that we blame on everything but the actual cause of what’s the cause.
DEBRA: Yes, yeah.
DAWN ROBERTS: What we need to know and what I learned was that our body.., an allergic reaction is the exact same thing as an immune response; our immune response, when we are exposed to any allergen which is nothing more than a chemical poison or toxin; then our body sends forth symptoms.
There are five (5) basic symptoms that our body sends forth. They start out in the form of inflammation and what the body does, is, it kind of talks to us; it says that whenever we are injured or whenever we are exposed to some abnormal stimulation caused by these toxic physical chemicals or biologic agents then this is the starting point of diseases; it’s the starting point of symptoms and this is where our body starts talking to us. There are five (5) cardinal signs of inflammation and this is basically the only way our body can communicate with us; it turns red, it gets hot, it swells up, it has pain and it either inhibits or loses function in some way; so any of those five symptoms, if you were to take any disease that you have or any syndrome that you have, you’ll find that your symptoms fall into one of those five categories; so like you said earlier, that’s our body saying, STOP! Stop what you’re doing! it’s wrong, you know, stop! if you don’t stop you’re not going to be able to use me anymore and I’m going to die on you, basically.
DEBRA: Well, I mean, yeah, that is what happens and I see that symptoms really, they escalate. We’re gonna need to take a break just in less than a minute here but when we come back I want to talk about symptoms, that there is actually a hierarchy of symptoms that gets worse and worse and it tells you about different degrees of toxicity and I wrote about these in my book, “Toxic Free” but I also want to mention that in my book ,Toxic Free, one of the things that I learned in doing that research was that every single body system, it’s now known that toxic chemicals affect every single system and so I actually wrote out different systems and the symptoms in each system and how those are affected by toxic chemicals. That’s in the appendix to my book, so that’s something that anybody could go and read; it’s very enlightening. So, we are going to take a break. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dawn Roberts; She is the author of “Warnings of Disease: Your Body Uses Systems to Communicate”. We’ll be right back.
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DEBRA: Before the break I mentioned that in my book, Toxic Free, I had written about some symptoms and a hierarchy of symptoms that you can tell if your body is a little bit toxic or a lot toxic and first, let me tell you, there’s actually a word, which is, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing this right, but it’s, emotories, which is from the Latin emotus which means to blow your nose and I love that because it’s like your body is wanting to blow it’s nose and get things out and that’s why it has these kinds of symptoms. So, when the primary emotories fail and these are the processes in your body; your body will continue to try to eliminate toxics through secondary emotories, which are all the mucus membranes and many symptoms of illness that you think of as common; such as, coughing, sneezing, vomiting, diarrhea, excessive urination and mucus membrane secretions are actually your body at work trying to remove substances that do not belong with it. So, here I have this runny nose and I have this cough and as I said at the beginning of the show, I was in a building that was very mouldy and so my body is saying, let’s get this stuff out; but just know that this list of symptoms that I read to you are all the major symptoms that we take so many over-the-counter drugs for and so when people have those symptoms, you should be looking to see what is causing those symptoms and doing things like detoxing your body, doing things like, I recommend people take Liquid C Lite, Pure Body Liquid C Lite because it removes toxic chemicals that cause those kinds of symptoms and it helps your body detox.
Ok, so you don’t do anything about it if you just take the over-the- counter drugs or the natural remedies or whatever you take and if you aren’t detoxing your body then your body will begin to store the toxic chemicals it cannot excrete. They might accumulate in your joints as arthritis; they can affect your brain and show up as fatigue, depression or memory loss.
When your sweat glands fail to do the job of detoxing your body your skin tries to drain toxics through oil glands, resulting in rashes, acne and eczema. So then, if you aren’t detoxing your body at that level then you can go on to have other illnesses like, cancer, birth defects and all of these things are because of toxic chemicals building up in your body and even if these toxic chemicals even affect things like your weight, your blood sugar, your sex drive; all of these things, every single thing is going on with your body if you’re having any problem, any illness, a symptom, it’s build up of toxic chemicals in your body and before you do any other treatment; from the research that I’ve done for over thirty (30) years; I would say, before you do any other treatment for any disease, remove the toxic chemicals from your home, remove the toxic chemicals from your body and I think that Dawn will agree with that.
DAWN ROBERTS: Absolutely. That’s exactly what I’ve found in seventeen (17) years of research. You’ve got a few years on me. All the diseases that are out there today, there are so many different ‘itises’; there’s gingivitis, hepatitis, arthritis, appendicitis, colitis, endometritis, the list just goes on. There’s hundreds and hundreds of these diseases and very few people realise that the ‘itis’ means inflammation. Every time you suffer with a disease that’s given a name with an ‘itis’, like arthritis, it means that you have inflammation and that is a sign that you have either been injured and if you can rule out injury then you’ve been exposed to some toxin.
The other thing is all the ‘osis’ diseases; there’s cystic fibrosis and histosis and there’s just so many of them, necrosis and multiple sclerosis and these ‘osis’ diseases means that some pathological condition has happened within the body that is causing a functional disorder that is a circumstance of the way we live; in other words, we are exposing our bodies to toxins in some way and that’s how all these ‘osises’ come about; and the way to cure yourself of these diseases, is like you said, we remove them from our body.
We don’t put more drugs into ourselves, which there is not one drug on the market and I done years and years of research into this; there’s not one drug on the market which does not cause symptoms. They’re all chemical drugs and they cause more symptoms. They cause more disease, that’s why people with diabetes and heart disease and depression and allergies, they just continue to get sick all the time.
DEBRA: Well they do and they continue to take more drugs and we don’t even need to do research in order to find out that these drugs are causing symptoms; all we need to do is watch television and watch all those commercials, and how many are there per hour, where they tell you some brand name drug and that it will cure this and it’ll cure that and by the way you’ll get liver disease and taking it may be fatal while this beautiful music is playing and they are showing you beautiful scenes of walking through the meadow, so……
DAWN ROBERTS: And it’s not that way, I mean, my mother was in the hospital last week, which is very disturbing to me whenever she goes in the hospital because she still does things that she shouldn’t do and she still exposes herself to toxins even though she’s read my book; even though she knows the lifestyle that I live but as you walk through the halls of the hospital people are so caught up into their symptoms and their diseases and taking drugs, it’s almost as if people don’t want to see the light because they take these diseases into themselves and they accept them and they go out and tell everybody that they are diseased and it’s like people are happy to be this way and I wasn’t. I was miserable.…
DEBRA: I totally understand.
DAWN ROBERTS: I was tired of being depressed, I was tired of being angry all the time, I was tired of having headaches, I was tired of being bloated and overweight and in pain. I was in pain twenty four hours a day with fibromyalgia. I was tired of these things but we don’t have to be that way, is what I learned.
DEBRA: Yes, I learned that too and we’ll talk more after the break.
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DEBRA: We’re talking about how our bodies use symptoms to communicate and it’s a very interesting subject and how we should be listening to our bodies and what they’re telling us through symptoms instead of suppressing those symptoms by using drugs.
Dawn, we could talk for hours and hours and hours; we could have an entire seminar, a whole week’s worth of a conference on this subject.
DAWN ROBERTS: Yes maam, let’s do it!
DEBRA: It really needs to be talked about more and more and more. This is like one of the key things that needs to change in our culture and before the break you were talking about going to the hospital and people just accepting that they have their illnesses and that you said that you didn’t want to have your illness and that’s exactly what happened.
There was something in me which said, no, I’m not going to be sick with this for the rest of my life and that’s what people were telling me. They were always saying that once your body is damaged by toxic chemicals there is nothing you can do and that’s not true. That’s absolutely not true and I’ve really found that there is a whole field of toxicology and people have been studying toxic exposures for centuries actually but we have a recent field of toxicology that is only forty (40) or so years old and I studied toxicology; I’ve studied it a lot in the past thirty (30) years and the number one thing you do when somebody is being poisoned is; you remove the person from the poison.
You take the poison away or you take the person away from the poison, that’s the number one thing that you do. You could go to any Poison Control Centre and they’ll say, take the person out of the house, give them fresh air, make them vomit, you know, whatever; the first thing is, get the poison away from the person and yet we are sitting here being poisoned in our homes.
We are being poisoned by the food we eat, poisoned by the water that we drink and yet people don’t even know it, people still don’t know it even though I have been talking about it for thirty years, even though it’s on TV. People are being poisoned by almost everything that’s in their environment and yet we don’t have to be poisoned because you and I have done all the research to show that there are non toxic products available.
There are things we can do to detox. We can drink clean water, we can sleep in a clean bed that we don’t have to be poisoned and this is the big lesson that I think needs to be learned by everyone in the world right now, is that there are toxic chemicals, they are all around us; that there are non toxic choices and when we make those non toxic choices, when we live toxic free we can get well and that’s the number one thing to do.
DAWN ROBERTS: Yes, absolutely. I totally agree and what I learned was we do not have to be sick. We do not have to be fat; we do not have to be unhealthy. This is what modern medicine wants us to think but it’s not that way. We’ve taken blame to a new level, in my opinion. We blame everything but the truth and the truth is, toxins cause disease and illness, toxins cause weight gain.
DEBRA: Yes.
DAWN ROBERTS: You don’t just sit and gain weight for no reason, you know, you’re taking in the toxins; the body cannot process the toxin; it’s putting it into fat cells and then you swell up and you gain weight.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s exactly right. I can’t tell you how many people… I used to work in a doctor’s office where we were treating people who had chemical poisoning and I can’t tell you how many people I just watched gain weight just from their toxic chemical exposure.
DAWN: Yeah. So many people were given prednisone, steroids and what’s the first thing they do? They swell up but they take it any way. I run from those things and we can live this life.
I’ve lived this life from 1996/97. I have not been sick; I take no drugs; I’m fifty eight (58) years old; all body signs are fine; everything’s perfect; my weight is normal and the first half of my life up till I was forty (40), I was deathly ill all the time. I live a healthy lifestyle; I know what to eat; I know what not to eat; I know what chemicals not to expose myself to.
Formaldehyde you mentioned earlier is huge. A couple of years ago the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) finally came out and put it on the list saying that, yes, formaldehyde is known to cause cancer. Of course the chemical manufacturers were up in arms at that because it’s big business for them but we as individuals have to take our own health into our own hands; we can’t just give it to the doctor and go, here, fix it, because they’re not fixing it; we are getting sicker and fatter.
DEBRA: Well I think doctors are well intentioned but I think that everybody has been educated. The doctors have been educated in our modern medical system and they haven’t been educated in the basics of healthy living…
DAWN ROBERTS: No, they haven’t.
DEBRA: and you and I managed to find that if we do the right things to build health then we are healthy.
DAWN ROBERTS: Exactly.
DEBRA: It really comes down to that.
DAWN ROBERTS: It does and our body does have the ability to heal itself, even from heart disease. I was going to a Cardiologist every month. The heart meds that they put me on they were increasing the dosage couple times a year; they wanted to replace the valve on my heart. I have no heart disease now; I have no symptom; it’s gone, my body healed itself. Neuropathy; I shook so bad everything twitched; my head bobbed around, I tripped when I walked, I dropped a lot of things, I walked sideways, I was dizzy, I was disoriented, my head spun all the time. It’s gone!
When I cleaned out my body and quit exposing myself to all these terrible things, it went away and that’s what people need to learn; you stop exposing your body to these things. It’s your body and you’re exposing it; you need to stop!
DEBRA: I totally agree. There was a time when I just realized, you know, you just have these realizations of things that are just so blindingly true and many, many years ago I realized one day that my body is designed by nature to be healthy and that is my natural state, it’s to be healthy …
DAWN ROBERTS: Exactly.
DEBRA: and if my body isn’t healthy it’s because I’m doing something to it to change its state of health and that what I need to do is figure out what I’ve done and stop doing it and that I don’t need surgery, I don’t need drugs; I just need to stop interfering with my natural condition.
DAWN: Exactly and the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself. It can definitely heal. I think you and I are both proof,
DEBRA: We are, we are, we are. So we only have about three minutes left, is there anything that you’d really like to say that you haven’t said?
DAWN ROBERTS: Well, I do like the idea of you and I doing a seminar; I think that would be good since we’re both in Florida.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s right; where in Florida are you?
DAWN ROBERTS: That’s right. I’m in Central Florida and east of Orlando.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s not far from me at all. Hmm, well, we’ll have to figure out what we can do about that.
DAWN ROBERTS: Yes, we should; but what I want people to know is and I’m like you, it’s just I want people to know the truth. I don’t want people to be hurting anymore because I was hurting and in so much pain and I suffered so much and I was going broke, going to doctors and taking tests and taking drugs and I was just a miserable person and now I’m not and now I’m very blessed to have learned all the things that I’ve learnt. What people need to do is do their own research. I feel like sometimes people are.., it’s almost like people are being brainwashed into thinking that they can’t get better but we can and that’s what I want people to know; that there is hope and just start doing your research. The research is out there, the information is out there. There is your book and there is my book.
My book is available on Amazon and Dakemani the Publisher, dakemani.com. Start reading everything that you can.
Another book that really helped me was “Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills”, by Dr. Russell Blaylock. That was a great book that helped me; so just….
Oh and allergies; the quick thing is with allergies; people blame everything; I’m allergic, I’m allergic, I’m allergic. An allergy is an immune response. Every time you have some allergy attack it means your body is reacting the way it’s supposed to with the immune response; you start sniffling, you start drainage, you start coughing, sneezing, your body gets fever; it goes through all those inflammatory, deciding inflammatory processes and then that’s just your body telling you, hey, I’ve been exposed to some chemical. A lot of people think they are allergic to dogs or cats; what I found was, I wasn’t allergic to dogs and cats; I was allergic to dogs who were being fed bad food and bad treats and human foods and dogs are taking all these vaccines and the …..
DEBRA: Dawn I need to interrupt you because we are coming up to the end of the show. Thank you so much for being on and I’m glad that we did this again and we’ll talk soon.
DAWN ROBERTS: Ok.
DEBRA: Thank you for being here with me. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio; I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’ll be back tomorrow.
