Art | Resources
A Toxic-Free Bed & Breakfast
My guest is Terry Mandel, owner of North Berkeley Hills Homestay. Terry began hosting short-term guests from around the world in 2002. After becoming ill in 2005 from the VOCs in paint, she began a journey of toxic-free renovation that has turned her inn into a refuge for people with MCS and EI, and others who prefer a toxic-free environment. Terry loves to share simple ways people can detox their homes, work spaces, and lives. We’ll be talking about toxic travel, how to choose less-toxic lodging, and what Terry has done to make her home a safe place to stay. www.hillshomestay.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
Toxic Phenol + Toxic Formaldehyde = Nontoxic Bakelite
Question from chemistry
Discuss the preparation of bakelite when phenol reacts with formaldehyde?
Debra’s Answer
I am not a chemist, but here is my layperson understanding.
Phenol and formaldehyde are two toxic chemicals, but when they react together, they form a nontoxic material called “bakelite”. This is similar to lye and fat having a chemical reaction to make soap. Lye can burn right through your skin, but when mixed with fat, it becomes soap that is very gentle to skin.
It’s created by an “elimination reaction” in which atoms in a molecule are eliminated and replaced with different atoms to make a new material.
All About Latex Mattresses
My guest Barry Cik is a co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses…and now also adult mattresses. As an environmental engineer Barry understands toxic chemical issues better than most product manufacturers and has a “no compromise” policy when choosing materials from which to make Naturepedic products. Some of the new Naturepedic adult mattresses are made of latex. We’ll talk about everything that has to do with latex: natural vs synthetic, Dunlop and Talalay, certified organic latex, and more. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/Naturepedic
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH BARRY CIK
- Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified “Nontoxic” By New GOTS Standard
- Why Your Newborn Baby Needs an Organic Crib Mattress
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
All About Latex Mattresses
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Barry Cik
Date of Broadcast: : July 31, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, this is Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world because there are many toxic chemicals around us in consumer products and in the environment, and just walking out our front door, it can be a toxic experience, as well as being inside our own homes because of so many toxic chemicals from consumer products.
But there are many, many things that we can do to choose less toxic products, to make things ourselves that are less toxic, to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and all kinds of things that we can do, so that we can create a safe, healthy world for ourselves, in which we can be happy, healthy, and productive, and do anything we want without being stopped by toxic chemicals.
Today is Wednesday, July 31, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining, no thunderstorms today. We had a big one last night though.
Today, we’re going to be talking about latex—latex mattresses. But before we do that, I want to give you a quote from Thomas Paine. Now, Thomas Paine has been called the Father of the American Revolution because he wrote back in the 17-something, he wrote a little book called “Common Sense.” And Common Sense was about being independent, and not being under the tyranny of British rule.
And he said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
We have it in power to begin the world over again.
And from Thomas Paine saying that in this little book called Common Sense, very brave and courageous people made the United States of America to be independent from being a British colony. And in that same spirit, we can make ourselves to be independent of toxic chemicals.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again, and how that not be toxic.
My guest today is Barry Cik, and he’s been on the show, a couple of times, but he has so much to say and so much that we can learn from. He’s the co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now also are making adult mattresses.
So I wanted to have him on to talk about that.
As an environmental engineer, he understands so much about toxic chemicals, so I’ve learned so much from him. And he knows more than most product manufacturers because of his environmental engineer background. And he has a no compromise policy when it comes to choosing materials to make Naturepedic products.
So we’re going to talk today about the adult line for Naturepedic and, specifically, about latex, because there are some things we all should know about it, and some new things happening in the world.
Hi, Barry. Thanks for being with me.
BARRY CIK: Thank you. Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m great. How are you?
BARRY CIK: Great. Thank you.
DEBRA: Good. First, just tell us a little bit about your background. I know that I keep saying you’re an environmental engineer, but would you tell us exactly what an environmental engineer does because I think some people may not know what that is.
BARRY CIK: I suppose it’s a pretty broad term these days. My particular background is, I’ve been chasing chemicals for a living for 30 years or so. But my background was mostly, or my experience was mostly in the industrial side, not so much in residential or consumer products on the residential side.
Back then, nobody was even thinking of issues with consumer products. They were just not on the radar until recently, until the last, I don’t know, 10 to 15 years, when things started to change. I was part of that change.
DEBRA: Well, we’re so happy that you are. So then what happened? Tell us the story of what happened about how you came to be making mattresses for babies and then adults.
BARRY CIK: 10 years ago, my wife sent me to a baby store to buy a crib mattress and a few other things for our first grandchild. And I have to be honest about it. Until that day, I had never been in a baby store in my life. My wife used to take care of those things, and that’s just the way it was.
So 10 years ago, here I am, I walk into the store, read the product labels, read the law labels at the bottom of the mattress that says “under penalty of law, do not remove,” and so on. And I realized that the products contain all kinds of materials that have issues, and certainly, fire retardant chemical issues, plasticizer issues, and so on. And I wasn’t comfortable with that for my own grandchild.
I asked the salesperson if there’s anything else. And she said, “No, these are the way you make quality crib matresses.”
And I said, “Really?”
I was pretty surprised.
And then we went back and forth, and back and forth. And finally, she says to me, “Come on. If it wasn’t safe, the government wouldn’t allow it to be sold.”
So that was the moment of truth, when I realized—what I really realized is that the single biggest problem that we have is we really trust the government, and we really trust that if a product is on the shelf, the government will make sure that it’s safe.
DEBRA: Well, I used to trust the government before I found out that my immune system had been damaged by all those products that I trusted were safe.
BARRY CIK: Exactly.
DEBRA: I think what you just said, and what I just said is something that everybody needs to understand because I think that most people do trust the government, but we know from our experience, not only with—well, I know because of my own physical damage, but we’re learning more about the regulations, both of us, I know, that you’ve done a lot with that, that the regulations just aren’t there to protect us. And that’s part of what is being addressed by organizations, such as Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and organizations like that, that are working to get better regulations. And we very much need them.
I’m sure you agree with that.
BARRY CIK: Yes, absolutely. But along with that, everybody needs to understand that you just can’t assume that something is safe or healthy because it comes in a nice, pretty package. That’s just not the way it works.
One of the lessons that I learned on the corporate side, from the industry side of things, is that in virtually every corporate office, the unwritten rule is that safety equals compliance. If you make sure that your product is compliant with whatever regulations happen to be out there, then you have a safe product.
And your average typical corporate safety person or safety officer, his or her job is to make sure that the product is in compliance. They don’t go beyond that. Nobody thinks beyond that. Their attitude is, it’s not their job to think beyond that. It’s their job to produce products that are in compliance with the law.
DEBRA: So that’s showing that the corporations are just like the consumers in that they’re saying, “Well, the government is setting the standards, so the government must be right, and we don’t need to do anything beyond what the government tells us.”
And yet, other people, like you and I, think outside of that box.
BARRY CIK: Exactly. If the government is not focused on the issues, or not properly focused on the issues, and if Corporate America isn’t going to go beyond whatever is absolutely required of them, and if a typical consumer believes that, “Well, the government is taking care of that. I can’t deal with that issue. The government with deal with them,” then you end up with a big, huge, gaping hole, and nobody is paying attention.
DEBRA: So it’s a good thing that we are. We have to take a break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses. They’re at Naturepedic.com, and we’ll be back right after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Barry Cik. He’s the co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses, and soon to be the leading brand of adult mattresses.
Barry, so let’s talk about latex because I know that you don’t include latex in your babies and kids mattresses, but you chose to have some latex mattresses for adults, and that I want to be clear that not all of your mattresses, adult mattresses have latex.
But you chose to use that. And so I want to talk about all of the issues that have to do with latex starting with—let’s talk about what is latex.
I have some things to say about it too, but I want us both to talk. So why don’t you start by telling us what latex is.
BARRY CIK: Well, latex is a more natural alternative to petrochemical foams, and it serves its purpose very nicely. It’s a more sustainable product, of course. It doesn’t have all the questionable chemicals that are found in petrochemical foams and so on.
And so it works.
Latex really comes from latex sap. There are many forms of latex, of course. But what’s important to us, it comes from latex sap, or rubber sap. The rubber that we know is mostly artificial, of course. But rubber, once upon a time, was actually a natural product.
Rubber sap comes from a tree, a rubber tree. It sounds almost funny, but it’s true. There are trees and this is mostly in Southeast Asia—Sri Lanka, Malaysia and so on, where rubber trees are very common. And you pretty much tap the tree similar, in general, similar to the way you might get maple syrup out of a tree.
It’s really not all that different.
So you tap the trees, and then you collect the sap, and then you can turn it into a foam. And that foam happens to be very comfortable, and it’s very easy to make a mattress, the filling of a mattress from that foam, and it works, and it replaces some of the petrochemical foams.
DEBRA: Now, I have mixed feelings about latex. And I agree with everything that you’ve said. It’s a more natural alternative to a petrochemical foam. But also, we know—it’s quite well-known that latex, people can develop allergies to latex, and that there are a lot of people who are allergic to it in many, many products. And that people are often looking for latex alternatives because of that.
In fact, I just had the occasion to go buy some disposable gloves because we’ve been having some health care going on in my home, and the health care worker wanted some gloves. And I went down to the store, and I had my choice between latex gloves and the non-latex gloves. And it turned out that the non-latex gloves were made out of polyvinyl chloride.
I thought now, “Which one of these two do I buy?”
But the reason that there has been a lot of discussion about latex, especially in hospitals and things is because people were developing latex allergies to them.
So you want to say anything about that?
BARRY CIK: Sure. So there is even a bigger point here that needs to be made, and that is when you’re looking for natural materials, or you’re looking for organic, these are all basically wonderful, and they sound wonderful. But sometimes we’re being a little bit too simplistic about it.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Poison ivy is natural and probably organic, that doesn’t mean that you want to play with it.
I’ll give you another example.
When people get too focused on organic and don’t want to see the bigger picture, here’s my response. “Go please take a walk in the forest and start eating all the wild mushrooms.”
Within an hour, you’ll probably be dead, and guess what will kill you? Guess what we’ll kill you? An organic mushroom.
So there’s more to the issue than just the simplistic notions. And now, you could take that broader perspective and apply it to latex. Latex is basically a natural type product, but it happens to be allergenic. The proteins in the latex are allergenic, or potentially allergenic. Not to everybody, of course, but they are too to a large number of people.
Approximately 8% of the population is or easily becomes allergic to latex.
Now, the latex people try to minimize that by washing the proteins out of the natural rubber latex. And to a great extend, they are able to do that, of course, and that reduces the risk factor. But still, the point is, not everything that is natural is necessarily 100% perfect. That’s just not the reality. And latex is one of those items we are—yes, it’s a good alternative to petrochemicals, and as far as your gloves is concerned, if you’re not allergic, it’s probably the better alternative to the PVC.
DEBRA: I would agree.
BARRY CIK: But if you’re potentially allergenic, or had allergy issues, we probably would want to avoid the latex. And that’s why we’ve made a decision to make a distinction between baby products and adult products.
If you’re an adult, it’s a reasonable assumption that you know by now if you have any allergies, and certainly any allergies to latex, you would know that by now.
But for a baby, you just don’t know. And it’s even possible that a baby could become allergic even if a baby would not otherwise.
So for baby products, we take the position of no latex whatsoever. For adults, we go both ways. If you’re comfortable with the latex, we’re fine with it too.
DEBRA: Okay, good,. We need to take a break. And we’ll be back after this to talk more about latex with Barry Cic, co-founder of Naturepedic, and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses, and they’re now making adult mattresses too, which is what we’re talking about today.
I just wanted to say, before we get back into our conversation, Barry, just one more thing about what we were talking about before the break about allergies to latex. I want to make a distinction between people having individual allergies to something versus a substance being toxic.
To me, the difference is that a toxic chemical would be something that’s more universally injurious to cells in the body, regardless of one’s individual state. And then an allergy could be very individual. It’s a different system in the body.
Sometimes, I think, people get those two things confused.
So for latex, I would not say that latex is toxic. I don’t consider it to be a toxic material at all. But some people do have allergies to it, and allergies can be developed to it. It’s a choice that—it’s something you need to know about, and a choice that you make, just like if you know you’re allergic to seafood, you wouldn’t eat seafood. If you know you’re allergic to latex, you wouldn’t sleep on a latex mattress.
But it’s not something that is particularly going to harm you like a toxic chemical.
In my particular case, my body doesn’t like latex. I remember being exposed to it when I was a child. My grandmother had a sofa that had latex foam in it. And every time I sat on that sofa, it made me sick. And it wasn’t until I was an adult and I smelled latex, and I knew it was latex that I identified what it was.
And so I won’t buy a latex pillow or a mattress, but that doesn’t meant that I don’t recommend them for people who don’t have problems with the natural latex. It’s a natural material. There’s no reason why not to use it if it if you don’t have an individual problem with it.
All that said, let’s go on to—now, there are two different types of latex besides there being natural versus synthetic. There’s also the question of Dunlop or Talalay. Could you explain what those two things are?
BARRY CIK: The original process for curing latex is the Dunlop process. The Talalay process just adds several steps in terms of how they cure it, and how they mix the latex. And so the Talalay latex, until recently, has been considered a better latex. I’m using that in quotes. Some people say it’s a more comfortable latex. Some people say that maybe the second one is the more true, and that is that some people say that the Talalay latex feels a little bit more smooth and comfortable, and it’s more consistent. And that may be true.
But at the other hand, the Talalay latex does contain other ingredients, and it’s not as simple a process as the Dunlop. And that’s why when you go to natural and certainly, when you go to organic, you have to stick with the Dunlop, the more simple process, and stay away from the Talalay. The Talalay is not as natural a product as the Dunlop.
DEBRA: So you mentioned organic. There is now a Global Organic Latex Standard. Tell us about that because I know your latex is certified.
BARRY CIK: Correct. We only use GOLS—Global Organic Latex Standard.
DEBRA: Tell us about that and what is the standard for that.
BARRY CIK: So let me first tell you the background, so everybody understands how this happened. Basically, the latex rubber sap itself, the material that comes out of the tree, that’s under USDA National Organic Program Regulations. If you want that latex sap to be treated as organic, and you want to be able to call it organic, you have to enroll in the USDA Organic Program, of course, you can’t use pesticides and so on, and that latex can be organic.
The problem was that the USDA was not willing to certify the final latex foam that was created later on from the latex sap because that was outside the USDA jurisdiction. It’s been processed, it’s been treated, including some chemicals, not a lot, but it has been treated, and it’s just outside the USDA process. The USDA process basically does not want to go beyond the strict agricultural product. As long as it’s agricultural, USDA will certify it under the USDA. It can be certified under the USDA program.
Once it becomes some other kind of product, it’s been processed, the USDA just backs away at that point.
And so the latex foam people could not get their natural latex certified.
Now, let’s make a quick point here. The real problem is that the public, when the public is buying latex, they don’t know what they’re getting. Most of the time, it’s petro—I’m sorry?
DEBRA: Yes, I was just agreeing with you. They don’t know what they’re getting.
BARRY CIK: They don’t know what they’re getting. Most of the time, latex is petroleum, completely synthetic. So then the manufacturers who wanted to sell natural latex, they started calling it natural latex, but still, the public didn’t quite understand the difference, and then there was no certification.
And so natural became diluted as well because the term “natural” has no legal definition. So much of the natural latex is mixed with petroleum, so if it’s 51% “natural” and 49% petroleum, they can still call it natural. Once again, the public has no idea what they’re getting.
So some private people actually, some certifiers, the Control Union, which is well-known, very well-established, very well-respected, certifier in the organic world, they said, “Look, why don’t we just create a standard where if it’s really all natural latex, and it comes from the real rubber sap, let’s create a standard and let’s certify it.”
And they did. And the standard does recognize that it’s going to get treated in a factory, and there will be some chemicals that are used to treat it with, but at the end of the day, you can be sure that if it’s certified, it all comes from the rubber tree, and it’s basically a very natural product.
DEBRA: Good. We’ll talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Barry Cik, co-founder of Naturepedic, and we’ll be right back with more about latex and mattresses.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, especially find out who’s going to be the guests. All the guests for the week are listed at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And you can also go to the archives and listen to guests from all the shows. They’re all listed there. If you like this particular show with Barry Cik, you can go listen to his other shows. You can find out all the different guests that had been on, and it’s all there at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
So Barry, tell us about your new adult line. What’s special about these mattresses?
BARRY CIK: So it’s as follows—the growth of organic mattresses has been pretty spectacular for the past—or easily, 10 years, organic mattresses have come on the market and have pretty much exploded.
Organic mattresses, there are two sides to an organic mattress. One side is the fact that organic manufacturers tend to try to remove harmful chemicals as much as reasonably possible, they tend to avoid flame retardant chemicals or fire barriers, pretty much across the board, and just try to use healthier materials.
And then that’s the other side of the coin is what constitutes the healthier materials that they’re going to use instead of some of the conventional materials. And that’s where the term organic comes into play. And an organic mattress is a mattress that tends to use healthier materials.
Now, the industry has grown. There are many manufacturers and many fine manufacturers and each manufacturer has their own way of doing things.
The biggest single way that organic manufacturers make organic mattresses is they use organic or at least natural, more natural latex. Like I said at the beginning of the program, latex is a pretty good sustainable replacement for petrochemical foams. And so it lends itself to an organic mattress.
But the irony, of course, is that there’s so much latex in the organic world that consumers now are saying, “Do you have any other way to make an organic mattress?” And Naturepedic actually does not focus mostly on latex. Naturepedic focuses on using encased coils where we have steel coils encased with organic cotton. We use that as the core for most of our products, and we use organic cotton fill as filling over the core for most of our products.
So we use latex also, but not quite as much as some of the other manufacturers. The way we use latex is as one component.
We might have a layer of latex to add to the comfort in a particular mattress. We have one model which is a conventional all-latex mattress.
But that’s a minor part of our company. Most of our models have a combination of latex and encased coils. And then we have some models that are entirely latex-free for those people who don’t want latex.
And like I say, if you’re an adult and you know whether you’re allergic or not, and if you’re not allergic and you don’t care, either way, that’s fine. But if you do care, well, we’ll make the mattress without a drop of latex in it.
So we go both ways.
DEBRA: And you’re certified to make organic mattresses.
BARRY CIK: Correct. So there are three—
DEBRA: There are only one or two companies in the world that’s certified to make organic mattresses, isn’t that right?
BARRY CIK: Pretty much, yes, but it’s growing. The way it works is there are three certifications now that relate to mattresses.
The biggest of the three is GOTS, G-O-T-S, Global Organic Textile Standard. And those mattresses are, or those products, GOTS is not just for mattresses. GOTS is for any textile-related product. But it includes mattresses.
So the mattresses that happen to be certified under the GOTS Organic Program, there are two manufacturers who are certified under that program, and Naturepedic is one of the two. If you’re making just a latex, an organic latex bed, then there’s a new certification which is the GOLS, instead of the GOTS. And the GOLS stands for Global Organic Latex Standard, and there are now more than two manufacturers who are making the mattresses under that standard. There are three or four now who are making mattresses under that standard.
The third standard that’s applicable is what’s used to be known and still is the Organic Exchange 100 Standard. That standard—they used to be an organization called Organic Exchange. Now, it’s called Textile Exchange. And the organic certification program from that certification agency is now going to be called the Organic Content Standard.
But whatever. The point is that under that standard, they will certify that your claims to your organic components are, in fact, correct. That certification doesn’t apply to every single component in your mattress that applies to those components that you’re claiming are certified organic.
In any event, the GOLS, Global Organic Latex Standard, we are one of the few companies that are certified under that standard and all the latex in our beds are only GOLS or GOLS, some people are just calling it GOLS, certified latex.
DEBRA: Good. So I also want to say that you’re a family-owned company, and that all your products are made in the USA, and to very high workmanship standards. And that you have a very clean workspace, clean in the sense that people aren’t smoking or wearing scented products or things like that.
I’ve actually been to the Naturepedic—what do you call it? Workspace? Factory? I don’t want to call it a factory because it’s so un-factory-like. I haven’t been to the new one where they are right now, but I’ve been to the previous one, and it was just such a beautiful, I don’t want to use the word clean again, but it was just beautiful and orderly and simple and restful, not restful in the sense of, like there was no activity going on. But it was restful in a sense of just how it felt. And it felt good. And I can sense that good feeling in the mattresses. It’s just the kind of thing that you would want to sleep on.
I was very pleased at how well you’ve put your business together.
BARRY CIK: Well, thank you very much. The fact of the matter is that we do not allow any toxic chemicals in the facility whatsoever at any time. And it’s very clean, old-fashioned, kind of atmosphere.
Most of the employees are Amish craftsman, and they’re very good, they’re extremely good, frankly, at what they do. They don’t make very many mistakes, and when they do, they own up to it, and they make sure that it’s corrected.
They’re really highly motivated, highly qualified people, and they do an excellent job.
So yes, the joke that we have is that our factory really is your grandfather’s factory. If you can imagine—not that we don’t have modern equipment, yes, we do, but the overall atmosphere, it’s more of an old-fashioned, almost handmade kind of operation where everybody works together, and it’s—
DEBRA: Yes. I would like to—I have this picture still in my mind of seeing it because it’s so different. I want people to understand that this is a room, a big, clean room, there’s not even dust on the floor, and there are people working in an assembly line in the sense that one station are doing one thing, and then it gets passed onto the next station, and the next station.
But there are no conveyor belts. It’s not that kind of an assembly line. And so there are all these people doing their part of the mattress-making in a room together, cooperating together, to make this product. And this very caring family-feeling about the whole entire thing, and you really experience that being in that atmosphere, and I want people to know that this is not—these mattresses are not coming off of a factor assembly line. It’s not that kind of that thing at all. And I think that that really adds to the specialness of the product.
BARRY CIK: Thank you. And I should just mention—I don’t mean to go back to the old topic but I really do want to mention that one of the nice things about latex is that latex has a certain—people love this memory foam feeling. Of course, we would never use memory foam.
DEBRA: I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you because we’ve reached the end of our time. We have the music. So I guess we’ll have to you see on again. Thanks for being here. I’ve been with Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedics at Naturepedics.com. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Are These Bed Sheets Safe?
Question from gb
Bought a set of wamsutta non organic egyptian cotton 750 count sateen sheets, color is chamise which is a light taupe, do u think this product would have formaldehyde or other harmful dyes? The organic set i purchased in the past is no longer available. Thanks
Debra’s Answer
Formaldehyde is generally on bed sheets because of a no-iron or permanent-press finish. The description of this product does not state that it has any such finish, so I would assume there is no formaldehyde.
My rule of thumb regarding dyes is that if the dye is color-fast and does not bleed out of the fabric during washing, it’s OK.
Is It Dangerous to Live Near Old Coal Mines?
Question from curious
We are contemplating purchasing a home and I just found out that the next street over used to be old coal mines a hundred years ago. I believe they refer to them as culm banks. People have been living in the area for hundreds of years, but I was curious if living so close to one of these culm banks would be dangerous to our health, especially our children. The house we are purchasing was NOT built on this, but it was previously just wooded ground. Thanks
Debra’s Answer
I didn’t know what a culm bank was, so I looked it up. It’s a bank of fine-grained anthracite coal produced as a waste byproduct in the mining process. So it’s not a coal mine, it’s a pile of very fine coal. It may have plants growing on it, and look like a natural hill, but it’s a pile of coal underneath.
Now, is it harmful to health to live near one?
Researching the answer to that question, I came across an interesting passage from a book called Environmental Justice by Peter S. Wenz.
He says:
Good Scents for Moms, Babies, Toddlers, and Kids
My guest Fran Loudas is the Founder of Belly Buttons & Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008. Fran has 18 years experience as a Certified Aromatherapist, Aromatherapy & Facial Procedures Specialist, Oriental Diagnostics Consultant, Herbal Remedy Specialist and is certified in the Design & Production of Aromatherapy Skin Care Products. She has also taught Aromatherapy online and writes for various health related websites. And above all, she’s a Mom. We’ll be talking about the difference between toxic fragrance and beneficial essential oils, and about the importance of using natural products before, during and after pregnancy as well as for babies, toddlers and children. www.bellybuttonsandbabies.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Good Scents for Moms, Babies, Toddlers and Kids
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Fran Loudas
Date of Broadcast: July 29, 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. Even though there are lots of toxic chemicals out there in consumer products we might use every day, in the lawn, we might walk across, at our children’s school, all kinds of places at home, and then our own bodies, we don’t have to have toxic chemicals because there are many things that we can do, many non-toxic products we can buy or make to put in our homes. There are ways to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and these are the things that we talk about on this show—how we can be healthy, happy, productive, and do anything we want in our lives unhampered by toxic chemicals.
This weekend, I had a great weekend this weekend because I spent all weekend selling things—having a garage sale, and also looking at what I had, in my garage actually, that had been sitting there that needed to be repaired.
One of the things that I love about garage sales is that so often there are so many things that are old but still can be reused, and they aren’t toxic. One of the things that I’m actually having repaired, and this is something that you can do—instead of buying a new toxic product, you could get an old one repaired.
I have a little spare ceramic heater that’s in a metal case, totally non-toxic. And when you try to buy those nowadays, they don’t make them anymore, I don’t think, the one exactly like I have. And I’ve had mine maybe 10 years.
And it’s really hard to find a metal, ceramic, non-toxic, electric, plug-in heater.
But the motor inside can be repaired, and I found somebody this weekend who came to my garage sale who can repair my heater. And I think I’m going to get my washing machine repaired instead of getting a new washing machine because the washing machine itself is so perfectly good, it’s just one little part that is now functioning.
And in this way, we can save resources, and often, these older products still have many years of life and service in them, and they’re not toxic, and they cost less. And there are some things, if you start getting really old things, there are some things that you have to watch out for like lead paint and things.
But a lot of products that are out there at garage sales, in thrift stores, you can just continue to use them and not be exposed to toxic chemicals. Be careful because it doesn’t apply 100% of the time, but that’s a good source of toxic-free products—just use something again.
Today on the show, we’re going to be talking about personal care products for moms, babies, toddlers and kids. And our guest today is Fran Loudas. She’s the founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008.
Fran is a certified aromatherapist. She’s had 18 years’ experience as an aromatherapist, aromatherapy and facial procedure specialist. She’s an oriental diagnostics consultant, herbal remedy specialist and is certified in the design and production of aromatherapy skin care products. She’s also taught aromatherapy online and writes her various health-related websites.
And I was interested in having her on because she wants to talk about the importance of using natural products before, during and after pregnancy, as well as for babies and toddlers and children. And I want to talk about the difference between toxic fragrance and beneficial essential oils.
So we’ll be covering all of that today.
Fran, thanks for joining me.
FRAN LOUDAS: My pleasure.
DEBRA: So before we get started talking about all those things, tell us how you got into aromatherapy and all these natural things that you’re doing.
FRAN LOUDAS: I’d be happy to. When I first started, I was making bath salts—very simple, very easy, but I found it really interesting. A friend of my daughter approached my daughter and said—she worked for the Children’s Aid Society, and she said, “We’re having a silent auction. Would your mother be interested in donating some products, a gift basket?”
I said, “Sure, I would be happy to.”
I did that. Long story short, my gift basket ended up at a firemen’s silent auction, and one of the firemen’s wives was an aromatherapy teacher, had her own store in another city, got the basket and alled me. Everything I made, she wanted to carry in her store.
That’s how it started. And then I took aromatherapy. I became a certified aromatherapist. She’s a certified teacher of aromatherapy, and I took the classes with her, and then one thing led to another, and it expanded, and it just snowballed from there.
And I took all these courses. I was very, very interested, and I found I preferred making the product. And I also preferred making products for pregnant women. I thought they seemed to be so forgotten. It’s difficult to find products for them in the marketplace.
So I thought, “Well, I’m going to start experimenting.” I’m really interested, and the one thing led to another, and I thought, “Well, if it’s for mom, it’s got to have something for the baby to make their skin soft, less damaging and toxic-free for them.”
The first product I made, My Mom and Baby Cream, I made in 2008, and beginning of 2009, I won an award for it from Parent Tested Parent Approved. And then it’s just snowballed from there, and that’s how I continued on. And we’ve won many awards since then from various organizations.
So it’s something we’re really proud of.
DEBRA: Well, it’s very important for moms, especially if you’d look at babies, they actually start in their moms, of course. And what pregnant women are putting on their bodies, or even before they conceive, the toxic chemicals that they use before conception can still get into the baby after the baby has been conceived.
So the women who are interested in having children, they really need to start looking at their toxic exposure way before they even get pregnant and during pregnancy.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. A lot of these toxic chemicals get through the skin, they get into the bloodstream. And then it’s in the bloodstream, and this is what is fed to the baby. So you’ve got to be really, really careful.
I find I’m a true believer that if you’re using natural essential oils before, during and after pregnancy, the benefit are—there’s a million benefits, so to speak. And with these essential oils, even the carriers, you’re not supposed to put essential oils directly on your skin.
So if you have a carrier, such as a really nice, say, sweet almond oil, or jojoba oil, put a couple of drops in there, and rub that onto your skin. It’s beneficial for your skin, keeps it smooth. If it gets into the bloodstream, it doesn’t matter. There’s no toxicity, so it’s not going to affect the baby, it’s not going to affect the mother.
DEBRA: But in aromatherapy, the essential oils have benefits too.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. While you’re pregnant, there are basically six essentially oils that have the greatest use for a woman while she’s pregnant, and they will not harm the baby because five of these six essential oils can then be used from the time the baby is born up and forever.
These oils, first one, lavender, it’s amazing. It’s excellent in a bath, for a massage, as a room freshener, even as a facial oil.
DEBRA: And what’s the benefit?
FRAN LOUDAS: The benefit, it soothes some aching backs, legs and ligaments. It’s relaxing and has anti-depressant properties. It has a mild sedative action, so it will help with insomnia. It is one of two essential oils that can be put directly on the skin, and the other one is tea tree oil. But I wouldn’t use tea tree oil when I was pregnant. I would wait until way after.
DEBRA: We’re going to hear more of about this after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas. She’s the founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, and that’s at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. We’ll be back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, my guest is Fran Loudas of Belly Buttons and Babies at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. And we’re talking about aromatherapy versus toxic perfume and scent, and why that’s important for moms, babies, toddlers and kids.
Before we go on though, I want to tell you where I do this radio show. I do it at home. And I’m sitting in my office where I have about 17-feet of windows that look out in my backyard. It’s under the canopy of oak trees overhead.
And so I’m constantly glancing out the window, and I see all kinds of birds and butterflies. Recently, I’ve had a lot of butterflies going by my window. And during the break, I was just watching a zebra long wing, which is black and yellow on the head, these big, wide wings, which happens to be the state butterfly of Florida. And I’ve been having a lot of them go past my window recently.
It’s a big butterfly summer. I don’t remember seeing so many butterflies. So this is great. It makes me feel optimistic for the environment.
So Fran, let’s go on with you.
I just get excited. My friends, when I’m talking to my friends on the phone, I say, “There’s a cardinal outside my window.”
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s amazing. I love waking up in the morning, hearing the birds. That’s what I wake up to every morning.
DEBRA: I do too. I hear birds every morning as well, and it’s fun to learn what their bird calls are.
FRAN LOUDAS: And you can listen to them. My husband can imitate one of the birds, and if he hears them, he starts whistling, and it’s like they have a conversation going. It’s hilarious. And it just sounds so nice.
DEBRA: It does. When I got married—actually, I got married in a forest in California, and we had a video. And you could hear, when you watch the video, you could hear the bird’s song getting louder and louder and louder, and more and more birds, as the wedding ceremony went on. It was like all these birds came around and were serenading us while we were getting married.
FRAN LOUDAS: That’s so nice. That’s so nice.
DEBRA: It was. It was great.
So back to the subject at hand, so what I want to talk about for a minute before we go on is, I want to make the distinction between artificial fragrance, which is in a lot of products, and aromatherapy essential oils. And because there are so many people who are being made ill by toxic artificial fragrances that people look at something, anything that’s scented, there’s a lot of people—and I’m not saying that this is the wrong thing, but a lot of people are looking for unscented products. And I want everybody who is listening now and in the future to understand the difference between there are unscented products, there are toxic scented products, and there are aromatherapy products.
And they’re three very different things. And if you want to stay away from toxic fragrance, that doesn’t mean you have to stay away from aromatherapy products. So let’s talk about that for a few minutes. Just go ahead and tell me your viewpoint about that.
FRAN LOUDAS: Well, I agree with you. You can have a beautifully-scented product that’s made with essential oils. A certified aromatherapist or someone that has the same certification I do, creating custom blends, you can mix two, three, four, five different types of essential oils together and come up with an absolutely beautiful scent. And it’s all natural, and it will have benefits for whatever that might ail you, for instance.
For instance, I make a body lotion for a pregnant woman that’s got pink grapefruit essential oil in it. Pink grapefruit is known to ease nausea, morning sickness.
Now, you can buy grapefruit-scented products, but that’s synthetic. The difference with the fragrance is they cause certain ailments in people, such as headaches, dizziness, breathing disorders, allergy, rashes, skin disorder, you can start coughing, some people might vomit or get depressed or become hyperactive, irritable.
The list can go on and on.
Plus, fragrances have up to 400 separate ingredients, 4000 separate ingredients, and you don’t know what they are. It could be something that is petroleum-based that’s not good for you.
DEBRA: They usually are petroleum-based.
FRAN LOUDAS: Well, yes, exactly. With the fragrances, it can interfere with your metabolism, the hormones, endocrine disruptors. The list can go on and on.
One company, or one website that is really good is Environmental Working Group. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. You’ve heard of it, correct?
DEBRA: Yes, and they have a section called Skin Deep, where they evaluate beauty products and personal care products.
FRAN LOUDAS: We have our products listed there. We’ve gone through all the testing for that. There’s another one here in Canada called Environmental Defense, where they do something similar. We’re listed with them as well.
I find it’s really important not to pollute your body, and especially when you’re pregnant, because you’re not only polluting your body, you’re polluting the baby’s body. And you don’t know, the baby might end up having allergies that may not have ever had in their life.
DEBRA: I wanted to ask you personally because part of what I’m attempting to do here with this radio show is to—we’re going to have to wait until after the break. I’ll ask you the question. I’m interested in why, you personally, you don’t want to pollute your body, that you think that’s a good thing to not pollute your body because not everybody in the world feels that way. And so
I’m always asking my guests why, what is it that made you decide that that was important to you.
And we’ll find out the answer to that question when we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, from Belly Buttons and Babies.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Fran Loudas from Belly Buttons and Babies. And before the break, I asked her a question and now, we’re going to get the answer about why it’s important to Fran to not pollute her body.
FRAN LOUDAS: Hi there. Well, for me, first off, I don’t think it’s fair that I do that to my body. I eat properly, I look after myself, I look after my children, feed them properly—everything that a mother should do.
Personally, in my family, my mother, she’s a breast cancer survivor. When that happened to my mom, it scared myself and my sisters. And being an aromatherapist, you never think that it’s going to happen. And then, I thought, “Well, I’m an aromatherapist. I know better.”
So I’m going to make sure that anything I use is not going to carry any of these chemicals that can be cancer-causing. I don’t want to trigger—I don’t know if I have the gene, and I won’t want to aggravate it if I do.
DEBRA: Whether we have the genes or not, I think it’s estimated that 70-something-percent of cancers are caused by environmental exposures to chemicals that cause cancer. And so everybody has the opportunity to reduce their cancer risk right now, today, by deciding to not use chemicals, not use products that contain chemicals that cause cancer, and you can remove chemicals that are already in your body that cause cancer, and then you’re doing the things that you can do to reduce the cancer risk.
If you’re being exposed to—and this applies to anything in life, if you do something, and you know there’s going to be a result at the end, whether it’s a bad result or a good result, then you’re responsible for that result, having chosen to do it.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. When we were growing up, my parents, we had a garden in the backyard, we did not have any processed meats, any canned foods in the house. We grew up, everything was made from scratch, natural.
And then when I got married and started having children, I did the exact same thing.
DEBRA: Good for you.
FRAN LOUDAS: Thank you. I’m teaching my children for them to do that. I made my own baby food, all this stuff. And now, I’m interested in making—so what goes in is good, but what goes on the skin has to be good too because you can’t do one without the other.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. I’m going to say something that I’ve said many times before in the show, but it’ worth repeating until everybody can say it in their sleep. What goes on your skin is as important as what goes in your mouth because people are aware that things that you eat or drink can be toxic because it goes right into your stomach.
But actually, if you put something on your skin that’s toxic, it goes into your blood system faster because when you eat or drink something, it goes into your stomach, in your intestines where it mixes with proteins and fats, and it slows down the absorption process.
But when you put something on your skin, it goes right in.
I’m sure everybody has touched a garlic, and then you’d taste garlic on your tongue within seconds.
FRAN LOUDAS: Debra, I also found with babies and children, they’re more vulnerable to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: Yes, they are.
FRAN LOUDAS: Their immune system, central nervous system, they’re still immature and still developing. And their bodies are less capable of eliminating these toxins. So why slather and feed them toxic when you don’t have to? It’s not necessary.
DEBRA: It’s not necessary. It’s a choice.
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s absolutely not necessary. And that’s one of the reasons why I do that. I figure, if I’m an example, the children will follow me, and hopefully, they will.
Well, I think back to me, with my parents, everything was done naturally, fresh—everything. Honestly, we did not know what butter was in our house until I was about 14 years old. We never had butter in the house. When we ate bread, it was without butter or anything. We had jam.
Actually, we went to the creek that was behind our house, and we would pick the wild raspberries and gooseberries and she’d make jam for us.
So it was really quite nice. I try to do that with my children.
Nowadays, you’re exposed a little bit more with—don’t get me wrong, I would love to, every day, eat a hamburger and French fries. I would love it, but you can’t. Realistically, I can’t do that. Plus, I don’t want to. I’d like to, but I won’t.
DEBRA: I understand. But fortunately, there are many lovely and wonderful fragrant and delicious things that we can have that are healthy for us.
So let’s get back to aromatherapy. You were telling us at the beginning of the show about what was it, six oils that are safe for moms to use and safe for the baby?
FRAN LOUDAS: They’re excellent oils to use while you are pregnant. And the one I did mention, it was lavender.
DEBRA: And tell us about some of the others.
FRAN LOUDAS: I have my list right here. Mandarin is beautiful. It’s a very calming, gentle, and cheery oil. And it’s a bit of a fresher smell than orange, and it’s excellent for leg and ankle massages. And anyone who’s been pregnant knows your feet swell.
Mandarin eases fluid retention. And if you put a couple of drops in the bath, it will help with fatigue. It will just make you not so tired.
Another great oil is neroli. It’s a little bit more expensive, but if you can afford it, and you get it, it’s wonderful on your face. If you’ve got dry, sensitive skin, it regenerates the skin cells, it helps with nervous tension, as in anti-panic. And it’s calming and relaxing. It promotes healthy skin cells, especially when you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: That sounds great. We’re going to hear more about Fran’s products when we come back after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, founder of Belly Buttons and Babies, and she’s at BellyButtonsAndBabies.com. That’s spelled out A-N-D, Belly Buttons, A-N-D, Babies dot com.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Fran Loudas, the founder of Belly Button and Babies, an organic body and skin care company founded in 2008. And we’re talking about essential oils that are good for mom and safe for baby.
Fran, go on with your list. What are the essential oils for moms?
FRAN LOUDAS: I’d be happy to. I earlier mentioned neroli essential oil which is a little bit—
DEBRA: What does that smell like? I’m not familiar with that one.
FRAN LOUDAS: Neroli, it smells like—I’ve had an orange tree where you get the small, little oranges. It’s almost like an ornamental orange tree that I’ve been growing. And when it flowers, when I walk into the room, that’s what it smells like. It’s a little bit stronger. It’s almost—I want to say woody. It’s very distinct. I love the smell. Not everyone likes it. It’s strong. It’s a little bit heavier.
The neroli comes from the flowers. It’s like a bitter orange smell is what it is.
DEBRA: I think I would like that.
FRAN LOUDAS: It’s beautiful. I think it’s absolutely beautiful. As I mentioned, neroli is a little bit on the expensive side, but there’s another one that comes from the leaves and twigs from the same bitter orange tree, and it’s called petitgrain. And it has similar properties, but it’s less sedating, and the scent is a little bit more fresh.
And as I mentioned, it can be used a cheaper alternative to the neroli. It’s great for dealing with depression, either prenatal or postnatal. If you can get mandarin, neroli and petitgrain essential oils, all three of them, and make a blend with a jojoba carrier oil, you will have a total balanced massage oil that is perfect for treating depression.
DEBRA: Sounds good.
FRAN LOUDAS: It is. It’s very nice. Tangerine is another essential oil that’s beautiful. It’s happy. It helps prevent stretch marks, great for massage while you’re pregnant. It’s calming and gentle. It’s good for the nerves. It’s good for the skin. And because it’s so mild, it’s excellent for babies, children and for elderly people.
Now, Ylang ylang is an exotic oil, and ylang ylang is one oil that is used in the production of perfume. It’s relaxing, it has aphrodisiac powers, and it helps lower high blood pressure. And it’s really nice for pregnant women if they’re tense and worried about the upcoming birth, they don’t know what to expect, especially for your firstborn.
It’s nice to be used in baths and massages and as room fresheners.
That’s all the oils that are recommended to use while you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: That’s good to know what that list is because I know that there are a lot of cautions for pregnant women that pregnant women shouldn’t assume just because something is natural that it’s safe. And so it’s good to know the positive list of what’s okay, especially lavender. I love lavender, and it’s easy to remember those too—lavender, mandarin, ylang ylang. How do you say that again?
FRAN LOUDAS: Ylang ylang. What I can do for your listeners is put on my website, the essential oils to use that are good when you’re pregnant, essential oils—
DEBRA: You know what would be great is that on my website, I have a blog that archives all the shows. And so you get your own blog post for this show, and if you send me the list, then I can post it along so people who are listening can have that list just right there.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. I can do that for you. A lot of people, I know a lot of people read about essential oils, and how they’re used, and what you can use, and what you can’t use. But you’ve got to be so careful, especially when you’re pregnant.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree.
FRAN LOUDAS: If you have epilepsy or sensitivity of your nervous system, you should consult an arometherapist instead of trying to treat yourself.
DEBRA: That’s really good advice because I think that there’s a lot, if you can go to the natural food store, and there’s a lot of things on the shelf, and the reason there are professionals is because these things are powerful. They work. And you need to get the right thing.
FRAN LOUDAS: Absolutely. You can even talk to your doctor about it. Say, “I want to use this essential oil while I’m pregnant.
I’ve read about this, this and this.”
The doctor will more than likely know, “No, you can’t. That will cause a miscarriage.”
For some people, if you’d had a miscarriage, I would not use any essential oils in the first trimester of my pregnancy. And a lot of people don’t know that. It can be dangerous.
DEBRA: That’s why they should go to a professional.
When you said ask your doctor, you may have noticed that there was a moment of silence from me because I was just shocked. I was shocked that a doctor would know that answer.
FRAN LOUDAS: I know up here a lot, they’re starting now with aromatherapy, with homeopathy, and naturopathic. They’re starting to recognize it.
DEBRA: That’s good. I think it is good to have a doctor that has medical training, but also is familiar to what some of the natural alternatives are, and that’s why I look for when I’m looking for—I want somebody who’s really good at diagnosis, and then to tell me, “Now, please take this vitamin.” But that they can also write a prescription for me if that’s what I actually need.
FRAN LOUDAS: If there’s an infection or whatever. You just can’t fight it. Sometimes you have to.
On another note, pregnant women should also only use essential oils that are derived from flowers and not herbs. And herb would—
DEBRA: What’s the difference between those two?
FRAN LOUDAS: With the herbs, there’s a whole slew of essential oils that should not be used when—you should avoid them while you are pregnant. And a lot of them are herbs, such as peppermint, rosemary, basil, juniper, savory, sage, cedarwood, slary sage, sweet marjoram, clove, marjoram, tarragon, thyme, fennel, parsley.
Those are all the essential oils. And some people might like the way they smell and figure, “Well, I could use that while I’m pregnant. I’ll put it in some of this oil that I’m going to get my husband to give me a bath, massage or something.”
No. Stay away from those.
I will send you the information, Debra. It’s a concern to me. When I was teaching aromatherapy online, I found there were a lot of people—one essential oil, wintergreen, should not be used ever. And there was someone who was advising other students, “Yes, get wintergreen and mix it with spearmint and peppermint and this and that. You have a nice foot cream.”
I almost fell off my chair.
You can’t be giving me advice on stuff that you don’t know about. I’ve trained for it. I took many years of training, and understanding where these oils come from, why are they used, what are they used for, how to use them properly, you just can’t—
DEBRA: It’s just really important that people, especially on the internet—I hate to say this because I’m on the internet and you’re on the internet, but I think it’s necessary for people to evaluate where the information is coming from, and how experienced and trained somebody because there’s a lot of things that you just got to search engine and you type in a word and you end up on a page where there are no references, nobody tells what their experiences. It’s just like, “Here’s what to do.”
And that’s not going to rest for me. I need to know that something is safe. So I do look at my sources.
We’re just about out of time. Thank you so much for joining me today. Are there any last words you just like to close with?
FRAN LOUDAS: Other than pregnant ladies, please, please be careful what you put on your skin, and make sure that you’re using essential oils. Check Debra’s website, her blog, I will send the information. Please use the correct essential oils on your body. It will help you and your baby in the long run.
DEBRA: It will.
FRAN LOUDAS: And thank you so much for having me on your show. It was fun.
DEBRA: Everybody says that. That is the word that all the guests use. They always say, “That was so much fun.”
FRAN LOUDAS: And it went by so quick. I can’t believe.
DEBRA: It did. And now, I have to sign off because the music is going to come up, and I need to say, this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and get more information about this show and our featured guest. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thanks for being with me today.
Nontoxic Products at Ikea
Question from Stacey
I went to check out Ikea because of the low prices I see advertised. However, I realized some of the prices are low because a lot of the furniture is made with particleboard. I will purchase some curtains, though, which are made of 100% cotton or linen and are a great price. I also need blinds for windows, and Ikea has cheap ones. Some are “solid wood” with a clear lacquer. A lot of products (baskets, furniture, blinds) have this clear lacquer finish. Is this okay? What about aluminum blinds? are those okay? (Blinds To Go has a lot). I also saw some wood hangers at Ikea with an “acrylic lacquer” or “acrylic paint” and am wondering if these finishes are okay too, since the price is so much cheaper than other wood hangers I have seen. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
Ikea is one of my favorite stores because the prices are low and the style is simple. But you have to be very careful. Fortunately they are one of the best at disclosing materials used, so you can avoid the plastics and particleboard in favor of the solid woods and natural fibers.
I haven’t checked the ingredients of their clear lacquer finish, but I have never had a problem with anything I have purchased there that had that finish.
I have my eye on those very wooden blinds, but I don’t have…oh! I just figured out the perfect place to put them! My desk is up against an east-facing window and the sun often gets in my eyes in the morning. I have a shade that I pull up and down but those wooden blinds would be easier to open and close. I’m not concerned about their finish.
What I like most about Ikea is the cotton curtains and the many pieces of unfinished solid wood furniture. Just read the material list carefully and you can get some good nontoxic bargains there.
Bonded Marble and Wool Blend Felt
Question from Donna
Hi Debra,
It seems like I can’t buy anything without worrying about it. I’m trying to do a sports themed kid’s room and found a light fixture made out of bonded marble. Is bonded marble toxic and would it be more so when the light is on and heating it up? I also wanted to use a baseball pennant for a wall hanging, but the pennant is made of a wool blend felt. Do you know if wool blends would contain formaldehyde? Again, thank you fo all that you do.
Donna
Debra’s Answer
I understand the feeling. The solution is to just keep learning what’s toxic and what’s not and over time you will gain confidence in choosing materials.
Bonded marble is made from powdered marble (a naturally occuring stone) mixed with powdered resin. Now resin occurs in plants (pine sap is a resin, for example) but is also made from petroleum. One article I read said, “For the most part…”resins” are actually made with synthetics, which as cheaper and easier to refine. Synthetic varieties are much more stable, predictable, and uniform than natural ones as well, since they are made under controlled conditions without the possibility of the introduction of impurities. They are made by combining chemicals in a laboratory to stimulate a reaction which results in the formulation of a resinous compound.” That’s why they do it, with no thought of whether it is toxic or not.
Using bonded marble allows a manufacturer to make a product that looks and feels like marble by using a mold instead of carving the marble by hand as an artist would. Resins are often made from polyester or urethane. So in a lampshade, heat from a lightbulb would tend to cause a release of these plastics. I wouldn’t use this lamp.
When I was a child, my mother loved modern design. I remember once she bought for my bedroom a very cool lamp with a heavy cylinder base and a big round plastic shade, like a half sphere dome. I remember the smell of that plastic even typing here right now. Of course I didn’t know it was plastic and I didn’t know it was toxic, but now I look back on that childhood memory and see I was being poisoned night after night. We didn’t know then, but we know now and can make choices.
Wool blend felt is wool mixed with another fiber, often polyester. I don’t know for a fact that they don’t contain formaldehyde, but to the best of my knowledge I have no reason to believe that it does. Formaldehyde is used to make permanent press finishes, which are not found in wool felt.
As for the pennant, smell it. Plastic inks are used to print the name of the team on the felt.
How to Find a Lead-Free Lipstick and Other Safe Cosmetics
You’ve probably heard there is lead in lipstick, but do you know how to find a lipstick that is lead-free? Lead is not listed on the label. My guest Kristin Adams is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Afterglow Cosmetics and her company now has a special process to make lead-free lipstick, which they sell along with other organic cosmetics. Kristen is also a beauty writer and advocate for stricter cosmetic safety standards. She is actively involved in The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and is an expert on natural/organic and gluten-free cosmetic formulations and ingredients. The Afterglow line was born out of Kristin belief that women shouldn’t sacrifice color, performance or quality when choosing natural and organic make-up. Afterglow Cosmetics is a full line of organic infused, all natural, bio-active make-up. The cleanest line of make-up on the market, Afterglow offers professional coverage and a striking range of shades. Since its inception in 2004, Afterglow Cosmetics has been featured in top media outlets across the country. Thanks to Kristin’s expertise, Afterglow is a prime example that quality can be achieved naturally without the standard, and often toxic ingredients, petrochemicals, parabens gluten, and synthetics found in traditional cosmetics. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/afterglow-cosmetics
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Find a Lead-Free Lipstick and Other Safe Cosmetics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kristin Adams
Date of Broadcast: July 25, 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 even though there are a lot of toxic chemicals in many consumer products and in the air we breathe and the water we drink, food we eat, et cetera. There are also many safe products and safe places to be that have minimized the toxic exposure if not eliminated it entirely.
So that’s what we’ll talk about in this show, how to identify the toxic chemicals, where are they, what are they doing to our health, but also, the most important thing is to be able to construct a life that is free from these toxic chemicals and the health effects and mental effects and spiritual effects that they cause.
So today, we’re going to be talking about cosmetics and beauty products. My guest has created her own line of cosmetics and beauty products because of her interest in having them be exceptionally toxic-free. The reason why I invited her on – I know about this company before and I actually have it listed on my website.
You know, I forgot to tell you the date. The date is Thursday, July 25th 2013 and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida.
My guest today created her own cosmetics line. And the reason that I decided to have her on the show is because I’m obviously on her mailing list and I received an email promotion that said, “Is lead lurking in your lipstick?”
Now, I’ve written a lot about lead and lipstick and I’ve also tried to find lipsticks that did not have lead in them. As I started calling around to different places (I didn’t call her company at the time), when I was trying to look for lipsticks that had no lead, I would call at people and they would say, “Oh, yeah. We don’t put any lead in our lipstick. There’s no lead in our lipstick,” but as it turns out, it’s not necessarily on the label. And when I started learning more about what they’re doing to make their lipsticks 100% lead-free by a new process that they’ve developed themselves, I thought, “I need to have her on the show, so we can talk about this and other aspects of what’s toxic in cosmetics and what’s not.”
Kristine, are you there?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes, I am. Thanks for having me on.
DEBRA: This is Kristin Adams. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. So Kristine, let’s start. Tell us why you’re interested in having things not be toxic.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, it started – we’re on our ninth year. It started way back nine years ago when I was investigating for myself how to address my own skin issues. I knew that I was eating healthy, I was eating organic. I had a really lifestyle for someone in their mid-twenties, but I still had lots of skin conditions. I had very sensitive skin. I had acne that wasn’t necessarily coordinated with my menstrual cycles. I was starting to investigate, “Okay, if it’s not something I’m eating, what is it topically that I’m putting on my body that’s causing me to react in this way?”
I really feel that what happens on the skin is an expression of what’s going on inside and what you’re doing to your skin on the outside. I started investigating and I immediately went after – and that was back in the early 2000s. There weren’t as many options, but I immediately went after those options that said that they were more natural, more green – no one even talked organics in make-up at that time – and started looking at the ingredients that they actually had in those products and realized that I didn’t even want to use those ingredients on my body once I started investigating each individual ingredient that they were actually claiming as natural.
It got me really angry at first. And then I decided that I could start making the products for myself. I had a background in art and painting. And so for me, making a color pigment is not that different than mixing a paint from scratch.
So I started making it for myself. And many years later, now I work with chemist. We’ve grown and expanded and I reach out to women all over the world with more natural products. But the origin was really how can I honor my body and really advocate for myself and my own beauty.
DEBRA: I totally understand because that was very much situation too where I could see that although I was going away beyond skin problems, I wanted to say two things. I wanted to respond to what you said. One is, first, I wanted to say I can see you’re artistic aesthetic-ness in your products.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Oh, thank you.
DEBRA: …that that really comes across to me, that you’re an artist. And when I put color on my face, when I put make-up on, I do think of my face as being like a painting, like a work of art and that I’m putting colors on to enhance it and make shadows and accents and things. It very much is an artistic thing for me.
But I also wanted to point when I was writing my book, Toxic-Free, I studied a lot about how the body detoxification operates and there are actually different symptoms that you can observe to see when toxic things are getting built up in your body, that there are specific symptoms that actually give you different degrees of showing how toxic what your body burden is.
Skin breakouts is one of the levels. I don’t remember which one it is. It’s in my book. But when people have their skin breaking out, it’s a sign that there’s too much toxic stuff in your body and that your body is trying to get rid of it.
So you did exactly the right thing to be looking at what are you putting your body because it’s getting in there in your skin.
And also, I want to point out because I know most people don’t know this that from a toxic exposure viewpoint, what you put on your skin is actually worse than eating it or drinking it because if you eat something that’s toxic, let’s say pesticides on food, it goes into your digestive system where there’s a lot of proteins and fats and it gets all bound up with everything that’s in your digestive system before it goes into the rest of your body.
When you put something in your skin, it goes straight in to your bloodstream in seconds. And so what we’re putting on our faces and on our bodies is extremely important to have it be as pure as possible because it’s the quickest way it’s going to get into your body.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah. And just to add on to that, a lot of times, people approach that fact with disbelief because it just doesn’t make sense to them because they’re not actually putting it into an orifice. But if you think about the birth control patch or the nicotine patch, those are just simple patches. They go right on your skin and are quickly absorbed and alter your complete body chemistry. So it makes perfect sense.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So this is great. So, let’s talk about lipstick for a minute. I know we’re going to run into the break and I’m going to have to interrupt you, but let’s just get started with that. Why don’t you start with telling us how come there’s lead in lipstick? How does it get there?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah, on your intro, I heard you mention lead isn’t in the ingredient list. “I looked for lead and there was no lead in my ingredients list, so I’m good.” Lipsticks are essentially oils. Most commercial lipsticks use petroleum oil as their base. They might have a few different binders to hold everything together. And then it’s pigments. The pigments come from two different places in the lipstick.
The pigment can come from dyes, FD&C and like dyes among others, which are synthetic pigment that makes the color of the lipsticks or they can come from a natural source.
Most commercial lipsticks still use very readily lots of natural ingredients, natural pigments in addition to the synthetic ones that they use.
The natural sources are normally iron oxide. Iron oxide are a series of pigments. So you’ll see iron oxide in the ingredient list, but then it’ll have a few different numbers. Those numbers indicate which mutation, for lack of a better word, that iron oxide is, whether it’s the black one, the red one, the brown one, the yellow one.
That mixture adds in to make that color. Those iron oxide are mined from the earth and the earth has lots of different contaminants when they pull out that iron oxide that come out with the pigment.
DEBRA: Okay, we’re going to need to go to the commercial break. We need to go to the commercial break, so we’ll continue this in a moment. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with Kristine Adams. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re talking about lead in lipstick and other toxic chemicals and our organic alternatives.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kristine Adams, founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re talking about lead and lipstick. So Kristine, go on, you were just telling us about how lipsticks are made still with iron oxide. Tell us what’s going on with iron oxides.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes, so iron oxide is probably one of the most common pigment ingredients that’s used in make-up in general. There’s nothing wrong with iron oxide, but what it does when it is mined is it brings out of earth lead, arsenic, mercury that comes with it. And just like anything else that’s mined from the earth, gold for example, when you mined gold – and sometimes, this is a much easier analogy for people to understand, gold comes in different purifications.
A very common purification is 24k gold, which means that it has trace elements within that 24k gold. That has nickel and other alloys. The same goes with iron oxide that’s mined from the earth. It too comes with its own trace elements that also come from the earth like lead.
The difference between the iron oxides that some cosmetic companies use and the iron oxide that we use is a purification level.
So iron oxide, to get a wee bit technical, is essentially the oxidation of iron or rust. That’s what gives it the color. But when it is mined from the earth with those trace metals and not purified enough, it goes right into the product and then directly onto your skin.
I guess the question would be…
DEBRA: Wait, wait. I need to ask you a question. I see iron oxides on the labels on all kinds of cosmetic products.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Absolutely.
DEBRA: I mean, everybody is using this mineral product. Just a few months ago, it came to my attention, there was a particular brand, which I won’t mention, but it’s been around for many, many, many years, like from the ‘70s, it’s got lots of iron oxides in it. You can look at any ingredients list for all these mineral make-ups and it’s iron oxide, iron oxide, iron oxide.
And so I always thought that iron oxide must be okay because it’s natural. But what you’re saying makes perfect sense to me. So now, we really need to be careful about which brands we’re buying because of the purification of the iron oxide, yes?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, yes. Even though the FDA has done studies about acceptable levels of lead in cosmetics by this point because of the scare of the studies that were done previously, yes, iron oxide is a commonly used ingredient in all cosmetics, not just natural cosmetics, not just mineral cosmetics, but all cosmetics and that’s where the lead is hidden.
When people don’t see it on their ingredient list, they wonder, “Why is there redness in my lipstick?”, it’s really coming from the iron oxide – not the iron oxide itself, but it’s kind of latched on as a trace metal within the iron oxide. Just like when you look at your 14k gold and say, “Why is it not as pure as that 24k gold and why is it harder?” It’s harder because it’s nickel. And some people that are allergic to nickel are also allergic to 14k gold and that’s because it carries nickel within it because it’s not purified.
DEBRA: For iron oxide, is there a rating number like there is for gold? I mean, how would we know as a consumer. I know when I was calling people, I would say, “Is your lipstick lead-free?” and they would say, “Well, of course, we’re not putting lead in our lipstick,” but they may not have known about lead being in there as a trace contaminant in the iron oxide that they’re using just like I didn’t know.
KRISTINE ADAMS: There are multiple complications with that. One, when you call a customer service rep especially for a company that isn’t dogmatically focused on the natural, pure, organic, as clean as possible as we are, they just aren’t trained to answer that question.
Nowhere down the line of their company have they ever probably asked their chemist, the formulator of that product, “Where are you sourcing this ingredient from? How clean is it? What other trace materials does it have? Does it have any certifications that certify it as clean so when we add it into the product, it doesn’t test out on the other end as something that would be unsavory?”
The customer person, they’re so far removed from that process that they just don’t even know how to begin to answer that question.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Wow! Wow! To me, this is one of those things where what you’re saying makes total sense to me, but it’s like how would anybody have ever known unless somebody like you, we searched it out and found it out and are letting people know about it because it’s just not one of those things that’s known.
So I really appreciate the degree of research that you’ve done. This is really exceptional. Just thank you. Thank you.
KRISTINE ADAMS: And thank you or spreading the word. I really appreciate it.
DEBRA: Okay! So I guess what’s the guideline that people should be using? If they don’t want to have lead in lipstick, obviously, they could use your lipstick at Afterglow Cosmetics, which is at AfterglowCosmetics.com. But if they wanted to find out about lead and lipstick from some other company, what’s the question they should be asking?
KRISTINE ADAMS: So there are some regulation, regulatory bodies like EcoCert that certify pigments for much more intense level standards than are acceptable by the FDA. They are specifically looking at pigments now because there hasn’t been any organic regulation.
And EcoCert is a private organic regulation body that works a lot in Europe and it works a lot with food ingredients and it’s starting to certify more products and ingredients. I hope in the next few years, there will be a standard for cosmetics, but right now, there isn’t.
So what we do at the company when we are formulating any product and with working with our chemist is that I need to make sure that each one of our ingredients is sourced from a place that does get those pigments certified EcoCert.
DEBRA: Good. We need to take another break. We need to take another break. We will be back after the break with Kristine Adams. She’s the founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’ve been talking about lead in lipstick and why there’s oftentimes lead. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here today with my guest, Kristine Adams. She’s the founder and chief executive officer of Afterglow Cosmetics.
Kristine founded Afterglow Cosmetics out of the belief that women shouldn’t sacrifice color, performance or quality when choosing natural or organic make-up. Afterglow Cosmetics is a full line of organic-infused all-natural bioactive make-up. She says that it’s the cleanest line of make-up on the market.
So Kristine, tell us more about your make-up line and what makes it special and everything and everything you’d like us to know about it.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, I think what makes our make-up most special is that it is – we really are dogmatic. That’s the best word I can use to describe it. I’m so empathic about making sure every single ingredient can be at its purest and cleanest. That isn’t marketing talk. That is, really, every time we use an ingredient, I want it to have active properties. Even every organic ingredient needs to contribute some way to the formula. We do that with a focus on skin care, so if the make-up is sitting on your face all day, it shouldn’t just act as pigment. It should do a great job there, but it should also contribute to helping your skin to retain its vitality. And we do that using a lot of certified organic ingredients.
We use aloe vera, organic aloe vera as the base of many of our products. It’s a beautiful carrier for pigment and really helps nourish the skin while the pigment is on there.
DEBRA: I love the aloe vera.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes.
DEBRA: I’ve just been recently putting aloe vera on my skin every night because here in Florida, we get a lot of insect bites. Even with the best insect repellant, we still get insect bites. It really takes away the itch, but it also makes my skin feel so soft.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Right! And it’s so soothing. It’s not heavy. It’s calming. Since we are so natural, focused on organic and use very few ingredient and really avoid a lot of even natural ingredients that are skin sensitizers, we attract women that have skin issues – rosacea, eczema, acne. And just by virtue of ingredients like aloe vera being in our products, it soothes and heals our skin in a way that an average run-of-the-mill cosmetic even the natural one doesn’t do.
DEBRA: Yes, I can see that. I can see that. Yes, that makes sense to me.
KRISTINE ADAMS: And also, I think another thing that’s very unique about our cosmetic line is more about the culture of the company and all the way to the customer service rep that answers your call. We’re all educated on what is actually on these products, what they’re actually doing, what’s the philosophy behind sourcing every single ingredient was and why, why we don’t use [inaudible 00:30:26], why we don’t use carmine colorant in our products and why we use organic.
I’m concerned about trace metals and other trace contaminants at every single level and that includes the botanicals that are in our products. We go that step further to make sure that you don’t have trace residue of pesticide in your make-up because if the product is not reaching for every single organic ingredient it can, you are also putting on your face trace pesticides obviously.
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
KRISTINE ADAMS: If the botanical in your product is not certified organic, that’s what you’re doing. So it’s so important. See, I’m using this. My mother is using this. My sister is using this. My friends are using this. All these women that have made up our community are using this make-up. That has to honor all of us. The choice has to do that.
DEBRA: Yes. Also, another thing is that it’s gluten-free make-up. So how did you come to that decision to make it gluten-free?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah! Gluten is an issue for some and not for others. Some peoplesay gluten will eventually be something as an issue for everyone. My sister, my mother has Celiac Disease. They’re highly gluten intolerant to the point where if they eat any gluten, they get very ill.
My sister was using a lip balm that she’s empathic about. Very, very clean with her diet. She never has any gluten contamination. Once she does, she knows it because she get very bad stomach problems. She had been [inaudible 00:32:06], got a lip balm that was – a beautiful lip balm from a very well-known brand, but one of the base ingredients of this lip balm was wheat, wheat germ oil, which is gluten. And it is emollient, it helps heal the skin and it feels great in a lip balm, but it is wheat. So if you’re allergic to wheat, you are essentially ingesting and dosing yourself multiple times a day (you know how we apply lip balm) and she started to get really bad stomach issues and she could not figure out what she was until she followed it all the way back, traced it all the way back to that glutened lip balm.
DEBRA: Wow!
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah! I have the power to make a gluten-free lip balm because of what I can do in my company. If I can source the ingredients, our chemists are fantastic and we make it. So of course, I made them gluten-free lip balm.
And all of my other products, I’ve never used a gluten ingredient to begin with, but the entirely line is certified gluten-free and we are the only make-up line certified gluten-free. So just like you can trust us to be the cleanest, you can also trust us to be gluten-free. You don’t have to pick and choose, “Oh, with that ingredient, that product is and that product isn’t.” No, it’s a company philosophy. And we are certified, which means we’re not saying it, we’re not just talking about it, we know and we have third-party verification that test each batch to confirm it.
DEBRA: You’re telling me a lot of new things that I had never thought of about cosmetics. In fact, I eat a gluten-free diet itself, but I only think as far as the food itself. It never occurred to me that gluten would be in the wheat germ oil. I think of gluten as being something in the flour or something. This is fascinating, how far these things extend in life. Wow! I have a feeling that before when people talk about gluten-free, it’s not just food. But I haven’t seen the connection until you just explained it.
We need to take another break. But after the break, we’ll come back and talk more with Kristine Adams, founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here today with Kristine Adams, founder and CEO of Afterglow Cosmetics. We’re learning so much about cosmetics. It’s amazing. Kristine, I know that you’re involved with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. So can you tell us a little bit about what are some of the toxic ingredients that women should really be watching out for besides lead in lipsticks? And what’s going on on the regulatory front and what is Campaign for Safe Cosmetics doing?
KRISTINE ADAMS: Well, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is founded by a collection of non-profits including the Breast Cancer Fund out of San Francisco. They are very much focused on – instead of just researching and devoting more money at cancer and breast cancer specifically from some of the research side, they’re really looking to educate women so they understand that perhaps many of the reasons why the rates of cancer have increased is because of our exposure to toxins on so many levels. And one of them is the body burden that we incur every day from all the products that we put on our skin that may be building up within our body and provoking issues that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
So what the campaign for safe cosmetics does on many levels is educate women and educate communities about how they can learn about what they’re buying. Many years ago, when you take up a box of cereal, you didn’t have that nutritional values fact on the back of it.
DEBRA: Right.
KRISTINE ADAMS: But through much regulation, because people did want to know and advocated for this, what was in that cereal that they were eating or in that packaged product that they were actually eating, how much sodium was really in there. Now, it’s second nature for us to do that, to pick up a box of cereal and what-have-you and look at what is actually in that pre-made product.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is very much advocating for the same standard for transparency and disclosure of personal care products. So if you are [inaudible 00:41:24] like Afterglow is, you have confirmed that you will not use many, many, many ingredients that may be harmful to the body within the product.
DEBRA: That’s very good. I’m glad…
KRISTINE ADAMS: They’re still working on the regulatory front – with the bureaucracy, that is – the government to bring that to fruition.
DEBRA: There is a lot that needs to be done. It seems like in every radio shows we have been doing, we’ve been talking about disclosure in ingredients and how we can find out. I think that this is one of the difficulties that I’ve had for all the number of years that I’ve been writing about safer products and harmful chemicals. It’ll be so much easier if we could just go to a product label and actually see what’s in a product. And yet, there’s so many products that don’t disclose.
I really think personally that disclosure is going to be the next major issue for manufacturers and I think that there’s a big push to get that disclosure and that companies like yours who are giving the disclosure and talking about their ingredients I think are leading the way for what other companies are going to come to need to do.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah.
DEBRA: I’m not even sure that it’s going to be a regulatory thing as much as if some companies start doing it and start doing it correctly, then consumers will know about that and then they’ll start demanding it from the other companies.
I’m trying to remember the company, the Johnson – I get confused with Johnson & Johnson and the Johnson Company. They’re two different companies and they make all these [inaudible 00:43:33] and everything. They have this big campaign about we disclose what’s in our products. I went to their website and I looked at it and I said, “Well, this is a really good disclosure, but they’re disclosing to us chemicals that I don’t want to put anywhere near my house.”
KRISTINE ADAMS: Exactly! They’re great, but…
DEBRA: Yeah!
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yeah.
DEBRA: Well, I’m glad that they disclosed, but people often don’t know that they could read – this is the other problem. Consumers knows so little about ingredients that if somebody is like that company could disclose their ingredients and the consumer could read it and go, “Well, that sounds fine to me.” It’s unfortunate that it’s so necessary for people like you and me to have to study, study, study, study, to find out about the ingredients because we should be able to live in a world where we don’t have to be so educated, that it’s the general rule that product is going to be safe and life-affirming and eco-friendly and that they’re going to be good for us. Don’t you think that’s how the world should be?
KRISTINE ADAMS: And unfortunately, here are lots of ways to game the system. One, when you read that ingredient list for cosmetics, it’s very difficult to understand because they’re not common chemicals often. The second is that the FDA doesn’t require disclosure of many ingredients that might be lurking in those cosmetics because they simply don’t. The FDA doesn’t require any disclosure of ingredients under 1%, which can include parabens and many other things you might be trying to avoid.
You can game the system by using a lesser known name for the same ingredient. And since there’s not enough regulation to catch those slights of hand, they get away with it and then you pick up a product that you think is clean, they’re hiding stuff inthe word perfume or under 1% of the product, they don’t have to disclose or in a poetic use of a different term for an ingredient you might be trying to avoid and you’re stuck in the same situation – not to be dire about it, but that’s the fact.
DEBRA: No, I understand because I see this in every field. It’s not just cosmetics. In food, they don’t have to list the ingredients on ingredients. So for example, if you were buying, say, frozen quiche and it says it’s got eggs in it and ham, they don’t need to tell you all the additives that they put in the ham. The nitrates and everything that’s in the ham because all you need to do is list the ingredients. That’s a big situation like that in food.
But for me, I just eliminated all processed food entirely. I only eat things that I cut myself from the actual food that I can see the whole food in my hand and then I prepare it because who knows what’s in those other things?
But when it comes to cosmetics, you have beautiful cosmetics and a consumer wants to be able to buy those cosmetics – in our culture, it’s considered to be a good thing to enhance the way we look by putting cosmetics on our faces – if we don’t understand what those ingredients are, we don’t have a company that we can trust or that companies can’t be trusted because they’re not talking about their ingredients or they don’t have that ethics to be life-enhancing, that they’re just doing what’s the standard thing, then the consumers just don’t know.
I used to think quite innocently that I can just look on the label and choose the ones that didn’t have toxic ingredients. I’ll just find one without toxic ingredients and choose the ones that don’t have it. It’s all these little things about how they don’t have to put it on the label or it’s a trade secret. What we need to do is we need to get rid of all that mystery around the ingredients. And I think it’s going to start happening because businesses who have nothing to hide are going to just disclose.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Yes. And it’s interesting, we are certified by Leaping Bunny, which is part of the Humane Society and Anti-Vivisection Society. It’s a cute, little leaping bunny logo that actually certifies as cruelty-free. But it does in a much more intense way than PETA.
We just got audited, so I know this intimately. They look at every single product that you make and every single ingredient and they want a statement. So we have to go back for every ingredient that we used to that manufacturer that made that iron oxide or whatever ingredient we’re using and get a statement from them swearing that they are not testing at any point this ingredient on animals. So it’s not only our end product. It’s also every ingredient every step of the chain.
And it’s interesting that there is certification available that is that intense because PETA is not, but to give those that are very interested in making sure their products are cruelty-free, that peace of mind, that there’s not something similar for humans, that there’s not like human cruelty-free certification that we could get that has the same level of integrity and intensity as the Leaping Buddy certification.
DEBRA: It just doesn’t exist right now. I’m going to say this really fast because we’re going to run out of time really quickly here. A lot of the behind-the-scenes GotoWebinar and things like this that people within industry are talking, there’s [inaudible 00:49:39] where somebody has compiled the toxicity information about ingredients that all companies can go to.
Everybody has to do their own research from square one to figure out what the toxic ingredients are and that’s part of the problem.
I’m thankful that you joined me today, Kristine. Thank you so much. I hope we’ll talk again.
KRISTINE ADAMS: Bye bye. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Great talking to you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Tune in tomorrow.
Choosing Toxic Free Toys
My guest Bethany Gonzalez Moreno is the founder of B. EcoChic and the B. EcoChic Seal of Approval. As a childhood cancer survivor, she knew when she got pregnant with her first child that she needed to find safe, non-toxic products for her little one. She decided to launch B. EcoChic to help other parents in their search. She’s been featured on ABC / NBC affiliate First Coast News and has been interviewed for many websites and magazines like Kiwi, Woman’s World, and E: The Environmental Magazine. We’ll be talking about how Bethany chooses toxic free toys for her Seal of Approval, toxic chemicals in toys you want to watch out for, and where to find the safest toys. www.b-ecochic.com (no longer in business).
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing Toxic Free Toys
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Bethany Gonzales Moreno
Date of Broadcast: July 24, 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. Even though there are many toxic things in the world today, in consumer products, in the environment—it seems like every time we turn on the radio or read the newspaper, somebody is talking about some new toxic chemical in some other product.
But there are many, many products that are not toxic. There are many wonderful things that we can do that are not toxic, there are many ways that we can remove toxic chemicals from our homes and from our bodies, and there are many people who are doing wonderful things to make our world a less toxic place to be.
And I have talked to many of them on this show. And this is what we talk about—it’s how to be less toxic, more healthy, happier, more productive, and making our dreams come true.
Today, we’re going to be talking with a young mother, about how she chooses toxic-free toys and other products, and why she does this, and her whole story about choosing toxic-free.
But first, I want to give you a quote from Buckminster Fuller. If you don’t know Buckminster Fuller, he went from 1895 to 1983, so hearing about Buckminster Fuller was something that I grew up with. He was a wonderful architect and a systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist. And he had a lot of great ideas.
And here’s one of them—and I actually live by this statement.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
And that’s what I’m doing here with this radio show, and everything that I do, is that I’m building a new model of how we can live without toxic chemicals that are so prevalent in the old model, and showing you what the ideas are, and where you can find the products, and how to think about this—that we’re really building a new toxic-free world by choosing to be toxic-free, buying toxic-free products, making things that are non-toxic.
And by actually making this happen, we’ll building a new world. And I just love this statement and totally agree with everything I’ve ever heard Buckminster Fuller say. So you might want to look him up and get to know him better.
My guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno, and she’s the founder of B. Eco Chic, and the B, that’s the initial B. Eco Chic Seal of Approval. And she is a cancer survivor, and for when she had a child, it became even more important to her to choose non-toxic products.
Hi, Bethany. Thanks for being with me today.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Hi. Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us your story. What happened in your own life?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So, I got Hodgkin’s disease when I was 15. And after a few months of chemo, they said that I could stop, and they would be checking on me. And I became more interested in healthy living and green living after that.
And I was launching B. Eco Chic right before I found out I was pregnant, and once I became pregnant, all of my research turned to how to make my house and my life safer and healthier for this child that was coming into the world.
DEBRA: I want to point out, so that everybody makes the connection here, you say on your website about yourself, you said, “Like most of you, I was raised with toxic chemicals. I’d played with plastic toys that likely leeched endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates. I ate food that was laced with hormones, antibiotics and pesticides. And yes, that is the story for each one of us.”
There’s a book called Silent Spring which, I think, probably everybody has heard of, but not everybody has read it. And when I read it a couple of years ago, I found out that virtually everybody who was born after 1944, which is you and I, at least, everybody who was born after 1944 was already born with toxic chemicals in their bodies because they were already ubiquitous in the environment.
And so we hear today about penguins in the North Pole having pesticides, and having toxic chemicals in their body, even there where they’re not being used.
That’s how it moves around the ecosystem. And that was already happening in 1944.
So the sequence here for you was that you were born with toxic chemicals, you were exposed to toxic chemicals, and by the time you were age 15, you were diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.
And that could be the future for any child, and I’m very happy that you went through your treatment, and that you survived, and that you regained your health. And that’s not the case for everybody.
This is why it’s so important that we be looking at what are the toxic chemicals we’re being exposed to, and particularly, women who are about to conceive, want to conceive, women who are pregnant, that the babies are getting the toxic chemicals right through the mother’s body.
And so this is the underlying thing that we need to keep in mind.
So the important thing here, why I was really interested in having you on the show is because you are evaluating products one by one, and you’ve come up with a method of doing that. So I want us to talk a lot about that—about how you go through that process.
Let’s go ahead and start talking about what you do and how you do it.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So there are other people who research products, and one of the methods that they use, and that I used at first was finding a product they wanted, writing to the company, and hoping somebody would answer me and tell me what was in the product.
And that did not work well. And often times, I would get conflicting answers or I would get answers back where they were wrong. And I found out later.
So I said, “I’m not going to do it this way. I’ve done all my research. I’m going to create a standard of how I want things to be if I’m going to allow these products into my own home, and then I’m going to invite the companies to apply, and that’s the only way that I’ll recommend their products or review them or let them into my own home.”
So I started with a safe toy guide, and I have developed an assessment. And it was very complex because there are a lot of different kinds of toys and activities and things for children, so I have to think about a lot of different materials and ingredients and things like that.
And then the companies had to apply and fill out the assessment. Not everyone wanted to apply or tried to apply made it through. A lot didn’t. But I was quite happy with the selection of products that I came up with at the end that I felt comfortable recommending to all of my readers on B. Eco Chic that I had.
DEBRA: I want to point out to everyone who is listening that everybody, each of us, as consumers, even though we’re not making a guide like Bethany has done, or like I do, even though everybody does not make a guide, as consumers, we each go through this process of making decisions about products.
And how do we make that decision? Do you make a decision based on advertising? Do you see a commercial on TV, and they tell you—I just have to say this. There’s a commercial running now on television, not that I watch that much TV, but late at night, when I’m falling asleep. There’s this commercial running now about use your Mastercard to stop cancer.
And I haven’t gone to their website.
You laughed. So did I.
And that really is the slogan. They say, “Use your Mastercard to stop cancer.”
And they’re showing a picture of a guy driving out to a fastfood window or something.
And the point, I think, of the advertisement is to get you to use your Mastercard, and then Mastercard will make a donation to the American Cancer Society or something. And I haven’t gone to their website to find out exactly what they did.
But the point I wanted to make is, they want you to buy something, so that they get more business, and then they’ll make a donation to cancer. Why don’t they just say, “Let’s get rid of the cancer-causing chemicals.”
And we’ll talk about that after we come back from the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic. That’s the initial B, Eco Chic. And it’s B-Eco C-H-I-C dot com. B, hyphen, E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com. B-EcoChic.
And she has put together a list of—are you there? She’s put together a list of toys that she has reviewed to make sure that they don’t have toxic chemicals.
Bethany, are you there?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes, I’m here.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So let’s go on discussing that consumers make choices based on different criteria. And Bethany, going through her process here, and me, when I go through my process, as consumers, we’re not just following a commercial on television or an ad in the magazine, or we’re not looking to see if the label is pretty. What we’re doing is we’re actually looking at the materials.
So Bethany, tell us more about how you look at those materials, what you’re looking for, and the process that you go through because I think that every consumer needs to be doing this. And people like Bethany and myself, and environmental working group, and other people who do this, we’re doing that assessment for you. But this is what every consumer needs to be doing for every single product.
So go ahead, Bethany. Tell us more about this.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: That’s pretty overwhelming for a consumer, which is why we’re doing it for them. There are so many products out there.
The first thing is we can’t buy into any of the marketing. You were talking about the credit card, curing cancer, and I just, over the break, was just thinking about how they’re made with PVC.
I don’t know if it’s irony or hypocrisy since PVC is so polluting in the production of it, or that PVC is toxic.
DEBRA: Yes, let’s use cancer-causing chemicals to make a credit card that we want to fight cancer with.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Make-up companies do have toxic ingredients who have pink ribbons all over their stuff. I can’t! I can’t buy into that.
Every single product is different. For toys, I decided that I was going to ban four ingredients right away. If they have it in their packaging or their product, I just said, “No, you can’t apply.”
And those four were Bisphenol-A which is found in polycarbonates and can disrupt hormones; and PVC, polyvinyl chloride, which is toxic; and phthalates and flame retardants.
Questionable plastics, I would say questionable plastics—I prefer polypropylene or polyethylene to approve because those are considered the safer plastics, as you know. And I didn’t want polycarbonates because of the BPA leeching.
And then for soft toys, I prefer the organic, but what I was really looking at is what kinds of dyes were being used, that they weren’t using heavy metal dyes, that they weren’t using toxic flame retardants in their toys because those are still used in stuffed animals, which I just think is not okay.
And then paint on wooden toys—there’s been recalls for lead paint on wooden toys and plastic toys. So I had lot of them send me their test reports, so I could see the actual levels. They couldn’t just send me their certificate of compliance or whatever.
They had to send me their actual level, so I could see them for myself because some of the levels that the government approves, I don’t approve of.
DEBRA: I agree with you. There are a lot of government regulations that I don’t approve of either.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I had to do a lot of research on heavy metals, but I came up with my own thing that I was comfortable with. Even if the government approves it, I don’t necessarily approve it, especially if I saw other companies were able to do it with much less of whatever heavy metal it was in the paint. I said, “No.”
DEBRA: Good for you. Don’t you think that’s something that you and I should be setting the [unintelligible 14:43] instead of the government?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes. It’s very complex. There are so many chemicals out there, and it’s just extremely complex, and no one person seems to know everything that they need to know, and especially people who are making the regulations. They’re trying to teach themselves just like we are. And they’ve got other things they’ve got to deal with.
I’ve talked to a few people in different states about how they’re dealing with the problem in their state. And it’s a lot to learn for them.
DEBRA: It is. It is a lot to learn. It’s a lot to learn. What are some examples of products that you find—tell me the toxic version of a product, and then the less toxic version that you find. Say, a stuffed animal. Let’s just take a stuffed animal, if they were to get a toxic stuffed animal versus a non-toxic one.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: There weren’t even brand names, but I’ll just say that there’s a major toy company, and some of their stuffed animals are found to have flame retardants in them. There are safer versions.
Two of the companies I approved. One was Pebble. I know they’re fair trade hand-knit toys from the UK, based in the UK; and then Apple Park is organic toys. And neither one of them have any flame retardants.
The traditional rubber ducky is not really made with rubber. It’s made with PVC, and it can leech phthalates and lead and chlorine. It’s not something you want your baby mouthing in the tub. So you can get a natural rubber duck from [inaudible 16:30], or you can get—well, that’s the only one I can recommend right now for rubber duck.
For wooden toys, I love PlanToys. They use formaldehyde-free wood glue for all of their toys. They use safe paint on their toys.
Sometimes there’s, like on Etsy, there’s one company called Smiling Tree Toys that got the seal of approval, and they’re made with natural wood, like organic vegetable oil they grow on their farm. So if you really want to get natural, that would be where to go.
DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about this after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno.
She’s the founder of B. Eco Chic, and the B. Eco Chic Seal of Approval. And I want to make sure you can get to her website.
It’s B-EcoChic.com(no longer in business). And she has a seal of approval, and you can go to her website, and see the list of toys and other products that she’s approved of according to her standards.
Bethany, do you find these products that meet your standards, do you have find them in any kind of retail stores, or do you need to order them online? Are they more expensive? Tell us what your experience is like shopping for these products.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Some of them are major retailers, but many of them aren’t. Some of them have been getting picked up more. Some of them are more expensive, but as I always tell the parents and subscribers, I always tell them it’s worth your money to just buy one set of the wooden blocks instead of a bunch of the plastic stuff. It’s a better investment and your child doesn’t need a playroom overflowing with plastic junk that’s going to break anyway.
So, it is a little more expensive. And you usually do have to go online to get many of them.
DEBRA: I have found that too. I have noticed in going to the website that have more natural products that they have a different concept of what play is about as well. Have you noticed that?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Yes. It’s sort of [unintelligible 19:24], simple toys, open-ended toys, not a whole lot of license, the characters, it’s about the child learning and growing and using her imagination with the toy she has instead of getting a doll that already has shape features. With a simpler doll, she can always imagine different expressions.
They are a little different.
DEBRA: They are different, and I really appreciate that, that they’re cultivating the child’s imagination rather than trying to, as you mention, sell a brand, that you don’t find natural toys made of natural materials, selling the latest super hero. It just doesn’t happen on those kinds of websites because it’s not industrial/consumer-oriented. It’s about developing the child and their imagination and their creativity.
One of the things that I love is the colored silk scarves because you can use those with so many different things. They could be veils, they could be flags, they could be kites—all these different things, and it really gets the children looking at how they can play and create together.
It really is a whole different thing, and I think very worthwhile for parents to explore.
For me, it’s been a process of seeing that there’s this toxic industrial commercial world, and then there’s this whole other world that’s made up of natural materials, and safe and healthy, and they’re going to have different orientation.
And so it’s very good that you’re promoting that and that you are finding those toys, and finding that they’re safe.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It has another benefit. The toys look gorgeous in your home. That may not matter to some people, but a lot of people think like, “I’m going to have a child, and my living room is going to be taken over by brightly-colored plastic.”
And that just isn’t the case.
You can buy a gorgeous wooden walker that looks great in your living room. There’s no chunks of plastic just laying all over your floor.
DEBRA: Isn’t that wonderful?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Green Toys makes recycled plastic toys, and we have some of them, and we love them.
But my daughter does love her wooden toys, and some people are really surprised that. She loves the wooden toys, she loves the open-ended toys, and I love how they look in my house. They look great.
DEBRA: Also, when I first started doing this work, I remember meeting somebody who had lived a very toxic life, and he then looked at what I was doing. I was like wearing a jacket made out of cotton, that I had wooden utensils in my kitchen and things like that. And his observation was, “Oh, these materials feel so good.”
They just feel comfortable with your body that your body says, “I want to be wrapped in cotton,” or my food tastes better because I’m stirring it with a wooden spoon.
And I think that babies and children notice that. They may not know it intellectually, but they know that it feels good. They know that their mother’s body feels good. And these are the materials of nature, and it’s what all living things grew up with.
And so I think that babies, this is my extrapolation here, I think that babies would feel more comfortable, and children would just feel more comfortable touching the wood, and touching the natural fabrics, and it just gives them a much more connected experience with the rest of creation.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I wrote a prose about that one time. It just feels more real. It has a link to it. And also, it lasts. If you have several kids, you’re going to keep that wooden toy for the whole time.
All my friends are always selling their broken plastic toys, or throwing them away, or donating them.
I can pass so many toys down to my grandchildren honestly. They’re good investments, they’re better for the environment, and they look nice, and they feel nice. Overall, I think they’re good investments.
DEBRA: I think so too. And it’s ironic to me to notice that plastic toys, that if you think of plastic, it’s lasting forever, because plastic does last forever. In the environment, it’s very hard to break down. But the toys themselves, the plastic gets brittle, and the toys break very easily.
And yet, something like wood will biodegrade easily. You could take that wooden toy and put it out in your backyard, and it will be gone in a couple of years. But as a toy, being used as a toy, and being handled and protected in the house instead of out in the ecosystem, it will last and last and last.
And I just think that’s a very interesting dichotomy as well.
We need to take another break, and we’ll be back with Bethany, I’m going to get it right this time, Bethany Gonzalez Moreno from B. Eco Chic. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And you can also get a [inaudible 25:15].
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. My guest today is Bethany Gonzalez Moreno. Did I get that right? I’m sorry, Bethany.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: No, I think you did.
DEBRA: Bethany Gonzalez Moreno. And her website is B. Eco Chic, and her website address is B-EcoChic.com(no longer in business). E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com. And she has a lot of information on her website, in addition to the list of non-toxic toys.
I’m looking at a page right now for homemade baby wipes, and it tells you how to make them yourself, and they’re reusable, so you can save lots of money on baby wipes, and make baby wipes that are toxic-free.
Bethany, tell us more about the different things that you offer and services that are on your website.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: Right now, I have—in addition to the wipes, the very first thing that I wrote was a cloth diaper guide because I bought a lot of cloth diapers for my daughter. And I’ve got a safe toy guide, and product reviews about 80 different products. Most of them right now are toys because they were samples sent to me last year as a part of the assessment process. I have a healthy eating guide, and you can learn how to make your own green cleaning products, or learn how to choose safer ones. You can learn how to choose safer lunch and food storage options.
I’m actually writing a baby steps course right now for my e-mail subscribers, to help them fight overwhelm, and slowly change their family’s lives and homes to be healthier and greener because I know it’s really overwhelming. That’s what I’ve heard, and it is for me too.
DEBRA: It’s interesting that you say that because I know that toys are something that the baby and kids are using that are white, up close and personal, so to speak, in their hands, in their mouths. And it’s a good place to start.
But really, the child is being affected by the entire home environment, and a pregnant mother is being affected by the entire home environment. And so to have a safe place to raise children really requires making an entire toxic-free home. It goes way beyond the toys, way beyond the clothes that you buy, or the crib, all of those things that you buy personally for the child need to be toxic-free.
But then the entire environment needs to be that way as well.
So it’s good that you’re giving all these recommendations from your personal viewpoint as a mother. That’s one thing that I can’t do because I’m not a mother. I can look at all the baby and kids products, and I can say, “Well, they meet a criteria that I’ve established for what I think is minimally required.” But I have no personal experience with any of these products like you do because I’m not a mother. So I have to rely on others for that personal experience.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It’s terrifying. Once you start realizing how many chemicals are there—you read one article, and then you do a lot of research, and everything starts to multiple, and that feeling is, once I started gathering research from all the corners of the internet, I wanted to put it on B. Eco Chic, so that other mothers wouldn’t have to do this searching that I had to just to get answers.
Mothers really have to—they have a lot on their plate, especially when they have a newborn. And I want mothers to realize that—do as much as you can, and it doesn’t have to be perfect because the kind of mother who is researching this stuff is the kind of mother who wants to get it right, who has high standards already.
DEBRA: Yes, I understand that.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: So myself included, I think I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so I had to tell myself that I’m doing the best I can, I can’t get everything, I can’t control everything that my child comes into contact with. I could just do my best, and keep making small changes.
So that’s the message I’m putting out there for other mothers, to help them just tackle it one tiny step at a time because that’s the way you got to do it. There’s just too much—
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. When I started my own non-toxic journey for a completely different reason, I got really sick myself from the exposure to chemicals just in my own home. And when I learned that it was toxic chemicals in the everyday consumer products I used every day, I just wanted to get them all out. I just went in in one fell swoop and took out everything that I had learned with toxic, and I had an empty house.
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I was reading the book, and I was like, “Wow, she really went [unintelligible 30:46] everything out.” It’s kind of like there’s nothing left.
DEBRA: But not everybody can do that. Different people have different situations. I knew that toxic chemicals were making me sick, and I just wanted to get rid of them because they were making me sick. I was having symptoms right then, and I knew that I needed to eliminate all the toxic chemicals I could in order to lessen my symptoms.
But for somebody who is healthy, you can prevent getting cancer as Bethany did, or having immune system problems as I did, by making changes one by one. And every time you go to the store, decide you’re going to get a different non-toxic product.
You can start by buying one cleaning product or one bar of soap or getting organic catsup instead of regular catsup.
It really doesn’t matter where you start—buy your children non-toxic toys.
It really doesn’t matter where you start. It matters that you start. And then as you start making the changes as time goes by, then your health goes from being very toxic to being very natural. And it feels different to live in that kind of house
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: It is a lifestyle, and it requires you to change habits. And those take a while. It took me a long time to switch to vinegar, to cleaning with vinegar and water. And as soon as I found out that I was pregnant, I made the final switch.
But I resisted just because I didn’t like the smell of vinegar, and I would buy the natural cleaning products. But then I decided,
“You know what? I just want the most natural cleaning product that I can have.”
So you have to be patient with yourself too. It’s hard to give up sometimes the convenience of some of the other options, or to cook food from scratch when you don’t even know how to cook an egg, which is what I was four years ago.
DEBRA: I understand. It is. We do need to learn how to do these things. And a lot of it is doing things for ourselves and not relying so much on consumer products. It’s empowering ourselves to make our own decisions to our own standards, and then making those things happen to our own standards in our own homes instead of just sitting there watching TV and having someone else tell us what it is that we’re supposed to buy.
Not that I think that advertising is bad, but advertising too often is advertising something that is not good for us. And lately, there have been better products that are being advertised, but still, there’s a lot of advertising going on which none in the industry is green washing where they’ll advertise something and say a good thing like it saves energy, but they don’t tell you there’s mercury, there’s toxic in that light bulb that saves energy.
So there’s a lot of misleading in advertising, and as consumers, we need to be deciding for ourselves, and sometimes we need to make things for ourselves, and invent things for ourselves, and look and see how people used to do them in another time period.
There are thousands and thousands of years of history and experiences that people, having babies, preparing food, going through every aspects of life without toxic chemicals. And we can learn from that. And we can do things differently. We don’t have to just accept this.
So Bethany, we have a couple of minutes left. Is there a final statement that you’d like to make sure that people remember when they stop listening to this show?
BETHANY GONZALEZ MORENO: I would just say that if you’re a parent or you know a parent—I have some grandparents on my list who want safer products for their grandchildren, just to check out the site and use the shopping guides to help you first get an idea of which products are safer. Read some of the guides I have to teach you what you need to know to make better decisions yourself.
Everyone’s on a different level of what they know so far.
And for businesses, I’ve just branched out, and I’m starting to do stainless steel baby bottles. I just did one by Organic Kids that got approved. I just did a body wash by Belly Buttons & Babies that got approved yesterday. So we’re going to have a nursery guide soon coming out.
I think that we should be conscious consumers, like you were saying, and make our own decisions and don’t just believe what we’re being told because we’re not always being told the truth.
DEBRA: We aren’t always being told the truth, and we’re not even always being told everything that there is to know.
I so appreciate what you’re doing, Bethany. I’m sure that many mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers and babies are appreciating what you’re doing.
Again, the website B-EcoChic.com (no longer in business), B, hyphen, E-C-O-C-H-I-C dot com, and you can go there and find out everything that
Bethany has, all the products and services and information in order to create a less toxic life for your babies and children.
And I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
