Art | Resources
A Taste of Honey
My guest is Ted Dannard, Founder of Savannah Bee Company. Ted grew up on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, and was first introduced to honey as a 12-year old boy. An elderly beekeeper named Roy Hightower opened his eyes to a world of magic in honeybees. For Ted, the love of bees is a way of life. He kept bees in high school and college. He taught beekeeping to Jamaican farmers in the Peace Corps. Fifteen years ago, Ted had beehives along the Altamaha River. He bottled some of that honey and gave it to a friend who was opening a store in downtown Savannah. When more stores wanted to sell his honey, Ted moved the operation to his garage.With his passion blossoming into a business, Ted decided to quit his job and put all his efforts into Savannah Bee Company. Today Ted is in a 40,000 square foot warehouse on Wilmington Island, Georgia, operating four retail stores, bottling distinct world-class honeys, and creating a luxury beeswax-based body care line. We’ll talk about the health benefits of honey, how to choose pure honey, how to use honey in delicious dishes, and how to pair honeys with various foods. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/savannah-bee-company
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Taste of Honey
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ted Dannard
Date of Broadcast: June 12, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
I’m hoping that you’re hearing me because I am once again having some technical problems here this morning. Okay, my producer is saying that he can hear me fine. Good!
Sometimes, we have difficulties finding our guests when we call them. But I’m sure that my guest is going to arrive. Anyway, it’s Wednesday, June 12th 2013. And I’m sitting here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida. No hurricanes today. And today, we’re going to talk about honey as soon as our guest arrives.
But in the meanwhile, I need to tell you something else. So what can I talk about here? Let me talk about honey because honey is one of my favorite foods. It’s also something that is very nutritious. It’s very nutritious. And it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time eating and enjoying.
I was thinking about this. And one of my favorite dishes with honey that I’ve ever had was in a restaurant where they brought me a beautiful piece of bread. I don’t normally eat bread. But I eat bread upon occasion. It was a beautiful piece of toasted, artisan-baked bread. And alongside, there was a little jar, like an old-fashioned jam jar, a little one. And inside was some goat cheese on the bottom—soft goat cheese. And then, there was a layer of honey on top of the goat cheese in the jar. And as the diner, I was allowed to take that combination of honey and goat cheese and spread it on the bread as much or as little as I liked.
And I just thought that that was so wonderful. The thing about honey is that honey has some very nutritious properties, which
I’m sure we’ll hear about later. It’s antibiotic. I think it’s one of those things called the food of the gods.
I read a book once where they were talking about all the beneficial health effects of honey. But in order to have those beneficial health effects, you need to have raw honey and you need to not cook it. And what happens is if you bake with it or put it into some type of—we’re still working on getting the guest.
If you bake with honey or put it in hot tea or anything like that, you get the sweetness, but you don’t get the positive health effects. And so I’m always looking for ways to use honey where I can use it raw. You want to buy it raw, and you also then want to use it raw.
Now, here’s another thing I thought of. As a child, I did used to eat toast for breakfast every morning. And one of the ways I ate toast that was my very, very favorite was that I put butter on the toast and honey, then my mother would grind up almonds in a little coffee grinder. She would put that on top of the toast. And this was the most delicious thing—toast, butter, honey and ground almonds.
And just spreading it on warm toast, it’s not enough to heat or cook the honey. But it warms it up.
Ah, okay! So, my guest is coming on the line soon. My producer says “stand by.”
So, here’s another thing that I thought with that honey. I lot of people like to put honey in tea. And so if you just let the tea cool off to the point where you can actually drink it, and then add your honey, then it would maintain some of those honey properties. And I also thought when I’m making iced tea, that you need to let the honey cool down, and again put your honey in when the iced tea is cool—not all the way cold, but still warm enough to the touch is about the right thing. And then, you’ll maintain those wonderful properties of honey.
Ted, can you hear me? This is Debra.
TED DANNARD: Yes! Hello.
DEBRA: Hello, thank you for being with me today on Toxic Free Talk Radio. This is Ted Dannard—is that how you say it?
TED DANNARD: Yes!
DEBRA: Great! And he’s the founder of Savannah Bee Company which is in Georgia. And they have a wonderful website. It’s SavannahBee.com. And what they do is that they bottle honeys. They have their own honey, but they also bottle honeys that they’ve chosen from exceptionally conscientious beekeepers. And they have a lot of recipes, and they have a lot of different flavors and a lot of suggestions about how you can use the honey. It’s more than just selling a bottle of honey. So I was very interested to have him on.
Thanks for being with me, Ted.
TED DANNARD: No, I’m excited to be here.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you.
So, would you start just by telling us your story about beekeeping and how you came to love bees as a child and what happened after that.
TED DANNARD: Well, it’s pretty simple. I had an introduction to honeybees from an older gentleman. He was probably 70.
And I was 12 years old. He took me in his hives. He put some bees on my dad’s property. We had a hundred acres of land.
And then, he basically took me in a beehive. And once I saw them, I was enthralled and hooked.
And it’s so easy. I mean, even today, I’m literally coming in out of a beehive. I’m covered in sweat under the southern heat. I love it! I love them flying around. I love smelling them, seeing them.
And what I find is that, pretty much, everybody does. Once you get properly introduced where you’re not afraid, you just love them.
So, that’s what happened. And then, forever on, I kept bees. He died, I kept his bees. And when I went to college, I had a landlord that had bees. He taught me a lot of really interesting cerebral facts like how the queen is born a worker bee, and like Cinderella, is fed royal jelly, and she turns into a queen. Workers only live for six weeks, but she can live for five years. And all of these amazing honeybee facts…
And then, upon my graduation with a degree in religion, I thought I wanted to be a professor.
DEBRA: Goodness! Honeybees to religion…
TED DANNARD: Well, I thought, “I want to join the Peace Corp.” They sent me to Jamaica. I spent two years there. They wanted me to work with beekeepers and beekeeping.
So, it kind of was with me my whole life. And then, the business part, which I didn’t really want to do, a friend of mine opened a store, and convinced me to let her a few jars of honey. And then, another store owner saw it in her store and called me saying that she wanted some. And then, another one… it just started snowballing from there.
So that’s how the business got started. And I’ve just been doing crash courses in business trying to learn as much as I can.
DEBRA: I understand that.
TED DANNARD: And it’s been about 12 years. It’s been fun!
DEBRA: That’s great. You know, some of you listening may have seen a bottle of Savannah Bee Honey, but not known it was Savannah. And I know that I had so many bottles of your honey. And every time I saw it, the bottle, I admired it. I wanted to buy it just for the bottle.
TED DANNARD: We put the honey in a flute instead of a wine bottle, a little French wine bottle. It is pretty. It dresses the honey to look as good as it should look. The honey is so good. Now that I know business, I know I was differentiating myself in the marketplace. But when I first put the honey in that bottle, it was just out of pride because I wanted people to know that the honey in that bottle is better than that old sticky plastic bear.
DEBRA: Well, we’re going to talk about that when we come back from the break, which we need to start in just a few seconds.
But I do want to say that, finally, I discovered Savannah Bee as a company and not just a beautiful bottle. And that’s when I took a look at the website and decided I needed to have Ted on the radio show.
We’ll be back in just a few minutes and talk more about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here today with Ted Dannard, the founder of Savannah Bee Company. And they sell honey and other bee products.
Ted, I have to say that honey is actually my favorite sweetener because it’s not only delicious, but it’s probably the purest form, the closest to nature of any of the sweeteners. You can just take it out of the hive. I’ve had bees making honey in hollowed out trees.
TED DANNARD: Right!
DEBRA: It’s not an industrial product at all. It’s something that has existed in nature since maybe the beginning of time. It’s an ancient sweetener. And you can just, if you find a tree, take it out of the tree and use it.
So, you mentioned before the break that your honey was so much better than the stuff in the little plastic bear. So tell us what are the downfalls of honey that you might find in that plastic bear. What’s wrong with honey at the supermarket? And why is your honey so much better?
TED DANNARD: Okay. So there’s a couple of different angles. One comment just on what you were just saying is that honey is one of those things that—the plants are creating it using the sun’s energy, the honeybees gather that nectar and concentrate it into the honey. They take the nectar from about 83% or 85% water. They fan it with their wings down to about 17% water.
And that’s when it’s honey. And it’s the only food that never spoils. It’s good forever.
DEBRA: You know, it never occurred to me that the plants were making the nectar and then the bees were processing it. I always thought the bees somehow made it. So I’m really glad you told us that.
TED DANNARD: Well, they kind of are. They’re distilling it. But to me, it’s kind of the sun’s energy turned into sugar which is a different form of energy. I think it’s really, truly amazing.
And some things like the agave nectar—and I don’t want to disparage other things—there’s a process, like you mentioned. You have to convert the starch into sugars using some process that’s chemical-based. And I really don’t know much about it. But it’s not as easy as just squeezing a honeycomb like you can with honey.
DEBRA: Right, right. I mean, honey truly is the sweetener that is directly a product of nature. You eat it in the form that it exists in nature. But what ends up happening is before it goes into the little plastic bear, they do things to it.
TED DANNARD: Well, I mean with any plastic, you do want to make sure it’s the right kind of plastic that won’t leech into whatever food you have. Honey is pretty good about being innocuous touching other materials.
And then, the honey itself—I mean, there’s really two answers to your question like why would my honey be better. And I’d say that anybody’s fresh honey, any honey out of a tree or right out of a beehive is going to be delicious and good and no worse or better than anybody else. So, it would all be good.
But I do think that some honeys are great. And where that extra little greatness comes from is when you can create a single flower varietal honey where the bees have only been going to one nectar source, one species of flower like a tupelo tree or a sourwood tree. And so you get a completely unique and individual taste from the honey. So it’s going to be different from honey on the grocery store.
Grocery store honey is typically blended for color. And so it’s not made for taste. So you’re going to have different types of honey often mixed in just to achieve a uniform color always.
DEBRA: Well, I didn’t know that either. My goodness!
TED DANNARD: Yes! And it’s not that the honey is bad, it’s just that the taste won’t be there. And then, a lot of times, when you mix different honeys, it can get strange. You can combine two really good honeys that just complemented one another, and it could be wonderful. But you could also get two or three honeys that really kind of compete and make the honey not very good at all. So that’s one answer.
DEBRA: Okay, give me the other answer to the question.
TED DANNARD: Yes, that is one answer.
And so, the other one is a lot of the honey that is in those grocery stores is really heated and really filtered. And the reason you heat and filter honey is to keep it from granulating in the body. In America or the United States, people just are not used to eating honey that’s kind of crystallized which is a completely natural process. When there is that granulation in honey, that doesn’t mean anything’s been added. It’s not sugar added. It’s just that it granulates naturally.
And so, you heat it, and you filter it. And sometimes, in the heating, if you heat it too high, over 140°, or for too long even at 120°, or microfilter it, then you’ve lost some of the nutrients and pollens and the enzymes that made it really nutritional to begin with.
DEBRA: Yes.
TED DANNARD: But full disclosure, there are some of our honeys that we do heat. We try not to go over 140°. And we don’t really filter them very finely at all because we want to live the pollens and all the goodness in there. But the ones that granulate, we will heat them. But the ones that we do not heat, we call that raw on the label. So, raw honey means the honey hasn’t been heated or filtered. It still has the pollens and enzymes that make it so good for you.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
TED DANNARD: And here’s another interesting thing. Honey from a clover flower is going to have a lot of glucose sugars versus fructose sugars. And then, honey from a tupelo flower is going to have lots of fructose sugars versus glucose sugars.
And so, tupelo honey, for a long time, they thought that was the honey that diabetics could eat because it slowly assimilated the fructose sugars. It can never, ever granulate. If it does, it’s not tupelo honey. And it has a really soft sweet. Whereas the clover honey, it’s going to granulate. And it’ll be a little more candy sweet.
And it’s not that the taste of one is better or worse than the other necessarily. Every different honey is a different type of sugar as well or different combination of sugars. So, lots of differentiation out there!
DEBRA: Yes! We’ll talk more about honey and the differences and what to do with them after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest is Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company.
To learn more about Toxic Free Talk Radio, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And Ted’s website is SavannahBee.com.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here today with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company. And we’re talking about honey.
And before I go on with Ted, I just want to give you some of the health benefits of honey. One is that it contains antioxidants which can help reduce the risk of some cancers and also heal problems from exposure to toxic chemicals. It can help ulcers and bacterial gastroenteritis. All honey is antibacterial because honey is on an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide. That’s from the Honey Research Unit in New Zealand. It increases athletic performance. Apparently, ancient Olympic athlete would eat honey and dried figs to enhance their performance. And that’s now been verified with modern studies.
It reduces cough and throat irritation. Now I can vouch for that because when I have a sore throat, I make a concoction that my parents actually made which was pouring honey over sliced onions. And believe me, if you have anything wrong with your throat, put a plate over the bowl so that it just sweats. And then, drink that juice, that resulting juice a few tablespoons at a time. And by the next day, there will be nothing wrong with your throat for sure.
Also, some honeys balance blood sugar if you take it in moderation. It also heals wounds and burns if I ever cut my finger.
What I do is I put honey on it and put a band-aid around it.
And it gives you beautiful skin. Once again, I’ll see that, in my own experience, the best skin cleanser I ever had was an eastern Indian potion that was made with a honey base. Every morning, I would put honey on my face, and you could really see the difference—honey and herbs.
So, Ted, I’m really interested. How do you get bees to just go to one tree?
TED DANNARD: That’s a question we get a lot.
Well, the bees have something called flower fidelity. They determine what is the best source of nectar.
So, if you want to make a tupelo honey, then you would take your beehives out to the tupelo forest and farms really. The trees grow along the river banks. So you take your beehives in there in April. You watch the blooms. And right when they’re beginning to open up, you take all your honey boxes off—and usually, the boxes that have the bees with all their babies and brood (they call it the brood chamber)—you put empty honey boxes on, and that’s the honey they bring in. All that nectar, they create tupelo honey in those new empty boxes. So, they fill them up. And as soon as that bloom finishes, you take those boxes off and extract that honey.
So, it’s a little art, a little science. And then, of course, everything is dependent upon the weather. You can have it where it will end up—the weather could be terrible, and they might not go to that. They might fly a mile away to something else. So you need a lot of forces to cooperate, from bees, to rain, the sun, everything.
DEBRA: Well then, I can understand now why these single varietal honeys—it’s like I’m looking at your site, and you have a list of specialty honeys that are single varieties. Varietal chocolate, we have now; varietal wines, we’ve always had. But now we have varietal honeys.
And I was really interested on your site to see how you used different honeys for different purposes. You have a special honey used for grilling, for example, and how there are different flavors. This is another thing that I think is so exciting about honey.
Honey isn’t just honey. If the only honey you’re buying is in the little plastic bear, you would think that all honey tastes the same—but it doesn’t.
And there’s so many different varieties and so many flavors. And you would really pair honey and foods, right?
TED DANNARD: Yes, absolutely!
DEBRA: Like you would pair wine and food.
So, talk to us about these different uses and different flavors and what you’ve learned.
TED DANNARD: Some of it is personal opinion. Just like in wine, you can drink whatever wine you want to drink with whatever you’re eating. But I have been doing this since I was little, and I’m sort of a honey snob. And so I’m particular. And I do think there are many different honeys that can be good with tea, but wouldn’t be as good with something else. It just depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
I love tea, like green tea and black teas. And I don’t want to overpower the taste of the tea, the subtle flavor. So I would use a really mild-tasting honey and probably with fructose kind of sugars because, those, you taste on the back of your tongue and allows you to taste the tea on the front.
So, it gets kind of complex. But a lot of it is just trial-and-error. One of the honeys that we think pairs the best with cheese is a star thistle honey. We have a bottle of honey that says “honey for cheese.” Just by experimentation, we found like “This honey is so good with cheese. It’s really spicy and apple-y.” And so, typically, I love tupelo honey the most. But this was better with the cheese than tupelo. I just had to acknowledge that and create a bottle of honey that told everybody else how good it was.
DEBRA: But you can really add a lot of variety of flavors to what you’re eating, all of your dishes, by having different flavors of honey. I mean, even if you were eating mostly salad—like I eat a lot of salad—you could make delicious, raw honey salad dressings, and they could all taste different from day to day.
I mean, this is one of the things about you’re eating, especially, lettuce day after day after day. Well, how are you going to get it to taste different? One of the ways you can get it to taste different is to make a lovely salad dressing with a good oil and a nice honey and change those honey flavors. And you would still be able to use the honey at their wild state.
TED DANNARD: Right! Absolutely. And you use this type of honey one day and another one the next day and discover which one you like the most. They really will be different.
DEBRA: I had the pleasure of getting one of your samplers. And I think you have several different sampler packages where you can get three different types of honey in small bottles. And I was tasting them this morning, and I really could taste the difference between the honeys when you taste them side by side.
TED DANNARD: Oh, yeah.
DEBRA: I really recommend that people get small bottles and taste and see what it is they like. I know when I went to the state fair, the Florida State Fair a few years ago, and there was a company that was selling honey—not your company, but somebody else—they had all their different flavors all laid out on the table, I could taste them and I could see which ones I liked.
I think I find for myself I like the ones that have a little more flavor to them as opposed to simply sweetness.
We’re going to talk more about honey when we come back from this break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company talking about honey.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today we’re talking about honey with Ted Dannard from Savannah Bee Company.
You have all these recipes. I was just looking at them during the break. I’m looking at the salted honey pie. Have you tried all these recipes?
TED DANNARD: I have definitely not tried all of them. But we do have some people constantly sending recipes, suggesting recipes. We have some of our folks in our offices and stores, they’re always experimenting and coming up with some—I mean, honey caramels, and these honey cheese cakes. There are some fantastic stuff that they’re coming up with.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I’m going to send you some honey recipes too because, as I said in the beginning, I do love honey. But I was interested in this one, Salted Honey Pie, because I imagine that salt, especially if you get a really good—we have so many varietal salts now that if you got a really good salt and paired it with just the right honey…
TED DANNARD: Absolutely!
DEBRA: I’m laughing because that sounds so gourmet. But yes, there are so many flavors. There really is so many flavors in nature. And we end up eating only the small handful of industrialized flavors that I just love seeing all these variations in the recipe heading here.
We’ve got recipes for beverages with honey, breads, desserts, salad dressings, sauces, marinades, entrees, side dishes, soups, starters; but also, beauty recipes. As I’ve said earlier, one of the best facial cleansers I’ve ever used was honey-based.
But you also have some body care products that you’re making with your honeys. So tell us about those.
TED DANNARD: Well, bees and people or bee products and people go back to the beginning of—people. We’ve been around a long time, like before t-rex even. But no, they’ve got cave drawings depicting people gathering honey from 16,000 years ago.
But really, since then, people have been making mead (which is an alcoholic fermented water and honey beverage)…
DEBRA: I love mead.
TED DANNARD: …and using honey for all of their cooking needs and then for beauty needs. The sugars and some of the peroxides and all these stuff can really be good for your skin. They can soften it, moisturize it, kill all the bacteria. It really cleans it.
When you work with honey, you just rinse your hands off with warm water and honey comes off. And your hands are literally squeaky clean and soft. I think Cleopatra is supposed to have used honey in her baths.
So, what we are doing here is it’s not like we’re necessarily inventing this. We’re kind of re-inventing it and just creating lotions with honey. But not just honey, there are other hive products which may be even more beneficial. The beeswax is really good for you. It makes a really good base for these products, lotions and creams, lip balm and salves. It’s got tons of vitamin A which helps regenerate skin cells.
And we have people writing us telling us, “Oh, this cleared up this eczema… psoriasis…” or “did this… or that… or took that spot away.” But I don’t necessarily think it’s our unique formulation. I think it’s just sort of the magic of the honeybees. The royal jelly that the queen eats is really pack-full of vitamins and lots of goodness that is good for your skin. It’s a big antioxidant.
So anyway, it’s incredible, the products. And so what we’re just doing is trying to re-pioneer stuff. And there’s about a hundred more things we want to put together because it’s really fun to do. And people love it! I think it’s good for them. It makes you feel good.
Beekeepers are supposed to live longer than any other profession. While I don’t know that that will be true for me, it does give you hope that these products are really good for you.
DEBRA: I think they really are good for you. And I’ll just keep saying again and again that honey does have these natural nutrients in them, but also these health-giving properties like having antioxidants in them, for example. People are eating chocolates and all kinds of things for antioxidants, but they could also be eating honey. It’s just a fully alive, raw, natural food—and especially if you get it in its natural state. That is a really important thing, to have it be raw and unfiltered, and then it has a lot of qualities to it.
TED DANNARD: And on that note, the honeycomb, you can get a honeycomb straight out of a beehive. The honey that’s in the bottle, basically, all you do is you take a knife and slice the cappings of these beeswax honeycombs off, and then you spin the honey out in a little basket that’s inside of a stainless steel drum. The honey kind of flings out of the cells of the honeycomb. So you’re just mechanically extracting it from the combs.
But you can just eat the honeycomb itself. And it’s really good. Like I mentioned, there’s a lot of other stuff. Vitamin A is one of the main things. And beeswax is good for you.
But everything is kind of still locked inside the cells of the honeycombs when you’re eating it. You can just grab a piece of honeycomb and chew on it, and then the wax ends up like gum. Or you could put it in between a slice of bread or a biscuit and just put cheese with it. It’s just fantastic! There are so many things you can do with it that you’d never think.
But that is the most raw, I feel like the most beneficial way to eat honeycomb. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s our honeycomb or your beekeeper down the street. But get somebody’s local beekeeper’s honeycomb and give that a try.
DEBRA: The best honeycomb—I was going to say “recipe” but it’s not even really a recipe. The best pairing–that’s the word.
The best pairing of honeycomb I’ve ever eaten is honeycomb and blue cheese.
TED DANNARD: Yes! So good…
DEBRA: Oh, my God! When I tasted that at my natural food store, they were trying to sell the honeycomb and the blue cheese, and they put them together, I took one bite and I bought the honeycomb and the blue cheese.
TED DANNARD: Oh, yeah. It is fantastic! It’s so good. It’s sort of an old Mediterranean of eating gorgonzolas and things. It is fantastic!
DEBRA: Yes! Yes, just the combination of those things.
At the beginning of the show, you were talking about being properly introduced to bees. How does one get properly introduced to bees?
I love bees. And I’ve been around beehives. And I’ve been to workshops with beekeepers and things like that. Btu I know that a lot of people are afraid of bees, and they don’t want to be stung.
And so, can you just say something about your love of bees and your comfortableness being around them?
DEBRA: Yes! Well, I will say that it took me a long time before I was not afraid to be stung. And so when you have gloves, and you’re always kind of concerned and worried, that’s not as fun. But once you can lose the fear and realize the honeybee sting, it’s going to hurt, it might swell a little bit, but it’s not that big a deal—and the more you get stung, the less that happens—when you lose that fear, it’s like a zen-like state that you’re in because you’re just calm. It’s sort of like falling into the rabbit hole. You just get lost in the beehive—the colors, the sounds, the smells. You’ll smell this ripening honey. I mean it makes your heart beat fast.
I mean, even yesterday, this woman that works in our web department, she’s really gotten into working with the bees. But she’s really new. She’s out there, she’s got no veil on. There’s a big, giant lump of bees hanging off the beehive. She got a big handful of them.
And they’re not stinging. They won’t sting unless you squeeze them. They’re not only wiggling and tickling. But there’s almost like a little vibration in there going up your arm.
And we were talking about it. Even for me, the first time I’ve ever been in a beehive, you can’t help but love them.
DEBRA: You know, I think that there is an affinity between humans and all living things. We have some fears that get taught to us in our culture. But if we just understand that if we’re not afraid, that they’re not going to be afraid. That affinity will come through. And why would they want to hurt you?
TED DANNARD: The honeybees die when they sting you.
DEBRA: The more I’m around bees, the more I just calm down and just love them, the more confident I feel that I’m going to be okay. I just love honey so much. I just couldn’t imagine how much you love it. When I read about your experience and hearing you talk, I can just see what a great thing bees are in your life.
TED DANNARD: Oh, they really are.
DEBRA: With that, we’re almost at the end of our time. So thank you so much for being with me, Ted.
TED DANNARD: You’re welcome.
DEBRA: Again, Ted, you’re the founder of Savannah Bee Company. And it’s SavannahBee.com. You’re listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I now have a blog where there is a blog post for each show. So you can go to the blog, go to the show, the post for this show, Savannah Bee Company—I think it’s called The Taste of Honey—and you can put a comment or a question (tell us how much you liked the show or ask a question.
And if you enjoyed this show today, please tell your friends. I’m here Monday through Friday at noon, Eastern time. So please join me again.
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Question from LI
What do you use to travel with coffee? We thought stainless steel was the way to go until we read your article. We use glass containers to drink our water, but glass can’t be used for hot items.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t travel with hot coffee, but happened to notice the perfect hot travel mug at Starbuck’s the other day when I was getting an unsweetened iced green tea.
It’s Starbucks Stainless Steel & Ceramic Tumbler. It’s got a stainless steel exterior to keep hot beverages warm with a ceramic inner liner like a coffee mug. Sleek design too, I wanted to buy one just because they were so pretty.
Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified “Nontoxic” By New GOTS Standard
My guest is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand for organic baby and children’s mattresses (they now make adult mattresses too). As an environmental engineer with hi first grandchild on the way, Barry was appalled to learn what toxic chemicals were used to make baby mattresses, and designed a safe mattress of his own. Last week Naturepedic mattresses received a new certification for the organic and nontoxic standards of the Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS). Barry will explain this new “nontoxic” GOTS certification, as well as what it takes to have a GOTS certified organic mattress. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/Naturepedic
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH BARRY CIK
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Naturepedic Mattresses Now Certified Non-Toxic by New GOTS Standard
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Barry Cik
Date of Broadcast: June 11, 2013
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And apparently, we have a little technical glitch there, but I’m here now. And it is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. But even though there are toxic chemicals all around, we don’t have to get sick from them, we can remove them from our homes, we can remove them from our bodies. And that’s what we talk about here on this show.
It’s Tuesday, June 11th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re right on the edge of a thunderstorm right now. You may hear some thunder in the background. We may have a power failure. But I’m just going to go on with my show despite the thunderstorms which are a regular summertime occurrence here.
My guest today is Barry Cik who is the founder of Naturepedic. And we’re going to talk about labeling mattresses and certifications of things. But first, I want to read you a quote. And every morning, I send out what I call words of wisdom, inspirational quotations. And this one is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a philosopher from the 1800s in Germany. And he said:
“Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
And I think that’s so applicable to what we’re talking about because things that matter most are our health and our ability to think and our spiritual awareness and our ability to be productive and our families and happiness and creativity. And they shouldn’t be at the mercy of things like toxic chemicals, especially toxic chemicals in products we don’t even need to have. And we don’t need to have toxic chemicals even in products that we do need to have—like beds for example. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
Hi Barry! It’s so great to have you on.
BARRY CIK: Well, thank you, Debra. It’s a pleasure.
DEBRA: Now, I know you’ve been on the show about a month ago. So some of our listeners heard you speak before. But I’d like you to just introduce yourself again and tell us your story of what you’ve been doing in your life and how that made a difference when it was time for you to buy a mattress for your first grandchild.
BARRY CIK: Well, I’m a board certified environmental engineer. And I’ve been tracing chemicals for a living my entire adult life.
I’m also certified by the Institute of Profession Environmental Practice. I’m also a certified Hazardous Materials Manager. I’m an author of a textbook for government institutes. I’m a diplomat forensic engineer which entitles me to testify in court as an expert witness. I’m certified by the EPA and a few other smaller things. So, I’ve had some experience tracing chemicals.
And 10 years ago, that moment of truth came to me when my wife sent me to a baby store to buy a crib mattress for our first grandchild. I walked into the store, and there are plasticizers in the vinyl, there’s fire retardants in the polyurethane foam, there’s some pesticides in some of the products and so on. And I was pretty shocked! I just never realized that baby products would have these kinds of ingredients—not that I recommend them for adults either, but it was particularly shocking for baby products.
And so, one thing led to the other. And while I’ve been an environmental activist all my life, this really gave me a push to try to change the thinking in our overall society. It’s time to take more careful additives about the chemicals that we put into all of our products.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree. So then you didn’t like what you saw at the baby store, and you decided to design your own mattress and start Naturepedic. And the rest, as I say, is history!
Now Naturepedic is the leading brand for organic, baby and children’s mattresses. And they also make adult mattresses too.
There are lots of things we could talk about, but we’re going to typically focus today on how mattresses are labeled and certifications and what those certifications mean.
So Barry, would you start by talking about the Law Label, what it says, and where people can find it?
BARRY CIK: Sure! So there are many forms of certifications. The Law Label is actually the oldest form. It’s governed by state law. And Law Labels came about way back when, close to a hundred years ago, when mattress manufacturers realized—or at least some mattress manufacturers—that, “Hey, who opens up a mattress anyways? Nobody! So why do we have to be so cautious. We might make a few more dollars and use cheaper materials or inappropriate materials?”
And in fact, some mattresses, according to what I’ve been told, was just putting garbage inside their mattress. And consumers had no clue because the consumers can’t inspect what goes into a mattress.
So, there was a […] cry back then. It was of course before my time, but this is the way I understand it. There were unsanitary and unsafe materials being sold to the public. So this is really one of the first and earliest manifestations of government oversight and improper certification. And what happened was the state started enacting laws that said you have to put a label on every mattress. And it’s called a Law Label, almost like [unclear 06:56] term, but that’s what it was called. It’s the label that the law required you to do, so it’s called a Law Label. Some people called it a Law Tag. It means the same thing.
In effect, that particular government requirement, the Law Label mandates that the manufacturer indicate the filling material, the primary filling material of the mattress. So when you look at a Law Label, it will not tell you what the surface material is. In fact, the law doesn’t permit the manufacturer to indicate what the surface fabric is. The thinking behind the Law way back then was, “Well, we can look at the surface material ourselves. We don’t want you, the manufacturer, to highlight your nice surface material. We want you tell us what’s really inside it.”
DEBRA: But the surface material, you can’t always tell what the surface material is.
BARRY CIK: Well, that’s true today. But you see, back in 1920, you didn’t have any of the synthetics.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s true. That’s true. Basically, it was like glue and white stripe cotton ticking or something like that.
BARRY CIK: Yeah. So, they weren’t concerned with the surface material. The surface material of the mattress is called the ticking material. They weren’t concerned with that. It was probably cotton. It was probably organic cotton even though there was no official organic program at the time, but it probably was organic cotton.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was “Well, what are you guys stuffing the mattress with? That’s what you better tell us.”
So, until today, that is the requirement. You have to say what’s in the mattress.
Now, they don’t want you to say everything actually. I mean if you have just some thin fabrics that separate layers, they don’t want you to say that. For a long time, if you had a flame barrier, they didn’t want you to say that. They excluded that. Although now that’s changed.
But nonetheless, even though the Law Label is not exactly perfect, it still serves as a basic way to see what you’re buying. If you take a mattress, at one end—usually, the bottom end, but it doesn’t matter—you’ll have that Law Label. It will begin with the words “do not remove under penalty of law except by the consumer.” And that has to be on the mattress. And you could look at it, and it will tell you what the main ingredients are—or at least it will tell you to some degree what the main ingredients are. And it’s a very good way to see if your mattress has an inner spring or does not have an inner spring, if your mattress has polyurethane foam or cotton or polyester or whatever.
Now, the next thing to understand is that the descriptive words that are used (or at least that are supposed to be used) are also mandated. There is a national document that the state officials have put together that describes the wording that is permitted.
And you have to pick one word. Whatever you’re describing, you have to pick the word or the term that they want you to use for that material. And that’s good. That’s good because, for example, they won’t allow you to use brand names. You can’t just say, “This is filled with brand X whatever.” The consumer has no idea what that means. You have to use descriptive terms that the state Law Labels have agreed upon which, fundamentally, is a good thing.
There’s one small drawback. It’s not the biggest deal, but it’s a small drawback. And that is they don’t allow the use of the term “organic cotton.” So if you’re actually going above and beyond, and you’re not just giving the consumer cotton, but rather, you’re giving the consumer organic cotton, the law label cannot use that term. You must use the term that they have decided you have to use.
DEBRA: Do you know why they won’t allow “organic cotton”?
BARRY CIK: Oh, only because the terms that are approved were approved many, many years ago. The term “organic cotton” was not part of the vocabulary at the time.
Really, truthfully, until the 80s or the 90s, the term “organic cotton” pretty much didn’t exist. It was way back when cotton was organic cotton. And one of my little projects for the next few years is going to be “Let’s go to the Law Label people and see if they will permit the use of the term ‘organic cotton’ instead of just regular, blended cotton.” Blended cotton batting, that’s what they want you to say. Although that might not be so easy, to get them to change it because I can see them objecting and saying, “We’re not interested in how you grew the cotton. We’re not interested in the environmental benefits to society. That’s not the point. If it’s cotton, just tell people that it’s cotton.” So I can see them not changing their rules quite so fast. But hopefully, they will.
There is one manufacturer that I noticed has a second label attached to the first label. And the second label says, “Well, the state of California does not permit us to say it’s organic cotton on the Law Label, but we just want you to know it is organic cotton.” I thought that was pretty cute. It’s fine! I fully support that.
DEBRA: I like that too.
But I want to back up for a minute. You used the term “blended cotton.” What’s being blended?
BARRY CIK: Well, let me explain that. This goes back to an earlier era. Where the different parts of the cotton plant were distinguished one from the other, when you harvest a cotton plant, you have long hair fibers and you have short hair fibers.
And the long hair fibers are typically—typically—used, for example, in making a textile, like a shirt or something. The short hair fibers are more commonly used in filling materials.
But the other way of distinguishing the different parts of the cotton plant are that the surface material is the cleanest and the nicest looking. And then, as you go different layers, you start getting more of the leaves that get mixed in and hard to get out.
And then, the worst—I shouldn’t say “the worst.” The least pretty and the least “pure” I guess part of the cotton plan is called the motes. And the motes sometimes get mixed in.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the motes or anything wrong with any part of the cotton plant. But back in the old days, they made a big deal about which part of the cotton plant you were using.
The reason they made it a big deal is because, back in the olden days, almost all consumer products, whether it was clothing or whether it was home furnishings like a coach or a mattress or whatever, all these things were made from cotton. So the part of the cotton plant that you used became very important.
And blended just means, well, it’s a mix of all the parts of a cotton plant.
DEBRA: All the parts of the cotton plant, yeah. It doesn’t mean polyester. They didn’t have such things then.
We need to go to a commercial break. But we’ll be back in a few minutes, more with Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. We’re talking about labeling mattresses—and particularly, organic mattresses. And we’ll be talking more about that after the break.
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. And my guest today is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. And I don’t know if you just heard that, but we just had a big clap of thunder here. It sounds like the storm is getting closer.
Naturepedic is the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses too.
So Barry, let’s go along chronologically. I think that the first thing that was certified organic for mattresses was the organic cotton that went inside, right?
BARRY CIK: Well, all cotton used to be organic. But then they started growing cotton with pesticides. And the use of pesticides in cotton is tremendous. I mean I don’t remember the exact statistic. But a huge percentage of pesticides used across the world are used for cotton production.
DEBRA: …more than for food. There’s more pesticides in cotton production than in food production. And the pesticides stay in the cotton […]
I don’t know if some people had overseen cotton growing in the field. I have because I live in California. I would drive down the Central Valley and there’s cotton, cotton, cotton, cotton. And so if you’ve ever seen a cotton plant, that ball of cotton grows like a cotton ball that you would buy at the drugstore in the plant, except it’s larger (about the size of a tangerine I think). And then it gets sprayed with pesticides. Whatever pesticide had been sprayed on it continue to be there if you buy cotton batting. The pesticides don’t go away. They’re still there.
BARRY CIK: That’s correct. And so what happens chronologically is, for decades, cotton was treated with pesticides. And at the same time, for decades, synthetic fabrics came into being—certainly polyester and vinyl and nylon and so on. And then, people began waking up and saying, “You know, this is not really sustainable. And this is not appropriate for our environment.
It’s time to go back to a more natural fiber or fabric.”
And of course, cotton is the most commonly used. There are other fabrics of course, other natural fabrics. Cotton is certainly the most common used. People said, “Let’s go back to the natural. But let’s not use all the pesticides.”
So then, here comes the advent of the modern organic cotton. It’s the same cotton as your great grandfather’s cotton. But we have to be careful today that we don’t want to use the pesticides that have come along the way. We want to go back to the original cotton that was grown naturally and no GMO’s either—which is another problem.
GMO’s are all over the place. And the natural community wants to just go back to pure, natural cotton. No GMO’s, no synthetic fertilizers, no pesticides, no herbicides and so on.
DEBRA: So then tell us about the certification for organic cotton.
BARRY CIK: Okay! So there are two certifications that are relevant. And let’s go to both of them. So the first one is the USDA, United States Department of Agriculture. Everybody knows that label because when you go into the supermarket and you buy organic tomatoes or cherries or whatever, you’ll have that circle and it’ll say “USDA Organic.” And you’ll see that on every organic food item. You’ll see that label. And what that means is that that item—tomatoes, cherries or whatever—was grown organically.
Now, there is a program run by the USDA. And if you want to grow your crop organically, you must, by law, be enrolled in the USDA certification program.
Now, the USDA certification program, the way it works is they wrote the bible as to what you are permitted to do and what you’re not permitted to do. Then what they did is they turned around and they approved approximately 50 organizations to certify products under the USDA program.
So, if you want to get your product certified, you have to go to one of those 50 approved certifiers who have the authority to certify you. And then if you are certified, you can put that USDA label on your product which is why, for example, when you walk into the supermarket and you buy organic anything, even like an organic orange juice, you look at the container, you’ll see the USDA logo, and then you’ll also see somewhere on the product who is the certifier. There are many certifiers. You’ll see the name of the certifier. And that name will always be one of those 50 approved certifiers. That’s how the system works with the USDA.
Now, the USDA program only applies to agricultural products. It does not apply to finished goods like a shirt or a mattress or any other finished product. Once it’s been processed, and it’s no longer an agricultural item, you don’t qualify for USDA certification.
Now, the raw organic cotton that goes into our mattresses, like all raw organic cotton, that one item is certified by the USDA because that’s still an agricultural item. The USDA program does not distinguish or care whether you’re going to eat the product or you’re not going to eat the product. So there’s no difference between a tomato plant and a cotton plant. As far as the USDA is concerned, if it was grown on a farm, and it was grown to the organic standards, it’s part of the USDA program.
So, the raw cotton that we use and that goes into any cotton product, even a shirt or whatever, is going to be USDA.
Now, one more point here. When it comes to the raw agricultural product, regardless of whether it’s a tomato or a cotton, by law, you cannot sell that product and call it “organic” unless it’s been certified by the USDA program. There’s no other certification available.
DEBRA: Okay. Well, we’ll hear more about organic cotton and about the GOTS standard, which is Global Organic Textile Standard when we come back from the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Barry Cik, founder of Naturepedic, the leading brand of organic baby and children’s mattresses. And they now make adult mattresses too.
So Barry, before the break, we were talking about the USDA organic certification for cotton and how that only applies to the cotton inside a mattress, but it doesn’t apply to the mattress or any other finished goods as a whole.
So that brings us now to the GOTS certification which does certify finished goods as a whole to be organic, yes?
BARRY CIK: Correct! The next step is the USDA only certifies the raw cotton. Once that raw cotton is transformed into anything, it then goes to a different certification.
For example, even if you just turn that raw cotton into a fabric, once it’s turned into a fabric, it now goes to a different certification which is called the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) or commonly just called “gots.”
Now, the GOTS standard actually doesn’t compete with the USDA standard. The GOTS standard actually goes along with the USDA. It just picks up where USDA drops off. So when the organic cotton gets transformed into something, the USDA drops off and is no longer involved, and the GOTS picks up from there.
The main item on the GOTS side is that 95% of the fiber material in the product that needs to be certified, 95% of that, has to come from USDA certified organic cotton or organic whatever the fiber might be. It could be other fibers like wool or flax or whatever, whatever it is. It’s usually cotton.
So, that’s the GOTS program. The GOTS program then deals with practical consumer goods that are made from the raw organic cotton and so on.
For example, a shirt. If you want to make a shirt with pure 100% organic cotton, you’d go to GOTS, and GOTS will certify the shirt. That’s where GOTS come in.
Now, there are two points here. The first point that’s important to remember is that GOTS is voluntary. GOTS is not mandatory, whereas the USDA is mandatory. Let me explain. If you want to sell raw, organic cotton, you must be enrolled in the USDA program. That’s the law. The only thing in the law regarding organic is raw organic controlled by the USDA. The law doesn’t go beyond that. So if you want to make a shirt, the law does not mandate that you have to have an organic certified to call it organic. You can just say, “You know what? I made this from organic cotton” or “I made this from 30% organic cotton.”
You still have to be truthful of course. The Federal Trade Commission just recently, in the past year or so, published a document called The Green Guide which, among other things, reinforces the fact that you have to be honest and clear about your claim.
But nonetheless, aside from the FTC control and jurisdiction, there are no government organic certification programs for consumer goods made with organic material.
DEBRA: Okay, wait. I just want to be clear for a second that if I was a manufacturer, and I was making a shirt, I could say, “My shirt is made from USDA certified organic cotton.” But I can’t say that it’s an organic shirt.
BARRY CIK: I would agree with you, or to be more accurate, I would like to agree with you. But it’s not quite as clear cut as those of us in the organic industry would like it to be. It’s a little bit of a gray area. If you called it an “organic shirt,” as long as you didn’t use the word “certified”—you certainly couldn’t say “certified organic shirt.” But if you just said “organic shirt,” I don’t think the FTC would like it, and I know that the Organic Trade Association would not like it, but is the FTC going to come after you? I would say no, they probably aren’t because they have much more pressing issue than to deal with some of the fine points. And this is one of the fine points.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
BARRY CIK: So, unfortunately, at the end of the day, there is quite a bit of greenwashing going on when it comes to organic claims in consumer products because there is no very strong, clear standards—at least legal standards. They’re not that strong. They’re not that clear.
But if you really want to buy something and be sure that it’s an organic item, it’s best to look for something that’s “certified organic.”
Now, we get to the labeling issue. If it was certified by GOTS, then you can say, “This is a certified organic item,” whether it’s a shirt or a mattress or whatever. And that’s the value of labeling.
DEBRA: I just want to say something before we start talking about GOTS because I do want you to explain GOTS.
I’ve had a fair amount of experience reading websites. And I say that kind of touch-and-cheek because that is what I do all day, read websites [unclear 31:40] organic products and non-toxic products. But I’ve also been on the other side where I’ve written advertising copy and product labels and things like that.
And I know that one of the things that happens—and I can tell not only from my experience in writing, but also from my experience reading—is that, lots of times, people who are doing this writing—there’s another clap of thunder—really don’t understand what they’re writing about or what the rules are. And so they’ll just say, “This is our organic cotton shirt” or “This is our organic mattress,” and they don’t know what the FTC has to say.
And so, it really is up to us as consumers that if we see places like that, we need to dig a little deeper and say, “Well, is this thing called ‘organic cotton shirt’ made from certified organic cotton?”—or in this case, we’re talking about mattresses.
I’m going to go ahead and let you speak because we’re actually coming to the end of our hour. And I want to make sure that you talk about GOTS. Go ahead!
BARRY CIK: Oh, okay. So, GOTS goes one step further. GOTS also recognizes that, when you make a consumer good, you might need to add—and in fact, usually, you do need to add—certain components that are not organic at all.
For example, on a shirt, you might need to add a button. And you can’t really use cherry pits as your buttons. It doesn’t work!
Nobody will buy the shirt. Or in a mattress, you can’t just fill the mattress with organic cotton because it won’t be a mattress, it would be a big, huge, oversized pillow. So, in a mattress, you need something in the cord to give it shape and to give it firmness and so on.
So, GOTS actually does two things. GOTS will guarantee that the fiber part of the product will be at least 95% certified organic cotton or whatever it is—cotton or wool or whatever it is. That’s one half of the GOTS program.
The other half of the GOTS program is that any accessories that you need in the product has to meet a GOTS non-toxic standard. You can’t just add toxic chemicals. You have to use materials that are reasonably non-toxic per the GOTS program.
And then they will allow you to add those obviously non-organic components into your product.
Now, if you only have organic fiber fabric, then you can only claim that the organic fiber or fabric is GOTS certified. That’s as far as you can really go. But if you present your entire product to GOTS, including the non-organic components that you happen to need for your product, as long as you meet their non-toxic standard, they will certify the entire product under the organic program even though the shirt has buttons or the mattress has an inner spring or whatever.
So that’s how the GOTS program works. And the benefit to the consumer is if the overall item was certified to GOTS, the consumer can rely on that and be sure that this is a high quality product that’s free of toxic chemicals, and it’s a kind of product that a consumer hopefully would want to have. And that’s the essence of the GOTS program.
DEBRA: I need to stop you there because we actually are at the end of our time. You’ve explained everything so clearly.
Our listeners can go see all your certified products at Naturepedic.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to Toxic
Free Talk Radio with Barry Cik from Naturepedic who’s been our guest. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com for more information about the show.
If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Least Toxic Dentures?
Question from “C”
I am facing having to get dentures (false teeth) can anyone offer any suggestions.. I hear there are many different kinds.. and , do they need to offgass… I hate this is happening and I just would like advice on your experiences and any suggestions/help
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any suggestions?
I personally have no experience with this, and you are the first to ask me about them.
Let’s see what my readers say and if there are no suggestions, I can help you evaluate the different materials.
Bamboee Reusable Bamboo Towel
A towel made from certified organic bamboo that you use like a paper towel, but can be washed and re-used more than 100 times. It is stonger, more absorbent, more durable and cleans better than any paper towel, but looks and feels like a paper towel—they even come on a roll that you can put in your paper towel holder. The bamboo is grown and harvested using sustainable practice. By nature, once harvested bamboo regrows new sprouts every year. Trees grown to make paper towels do not regrow once harvested. 1 roll of Bambooee can replace up to 500 rolls of paper towels.
Benjamin Moore Paints
Benjamin Moore paints are easy to find locally if you need a low- or no-VOC paint today and can’t wait to order a specialty paint online. I’ve used their Eco Spec WB and Aura paints in my own home; Natura is another good choice that is zero VOC. Search for these paints on their website for more information on each, or visit your local Benjamin Moore store. ” Eco Spec WB meets the highest environmental requirements including LEED credit.”
How Bau-Biology Can Help Cure Your Sick Home
My guest Lawrence J. Gust from Gust Environmental is an electrical engineer and a certified Bau-biologist. He worked for 25 years in middle management of two Fortune 500 companies. Thirteen years ago building caused health issues within his own family forced him to become knowledgeable sick buildings and how to fix them. This knowledge led to a second career as a Bau-biologist. We’ll talk about various indoor air quality problems your home might have, and what you can do to create a healthier home environment. www.gustenviro.com
Links mentioned on the show:
My Bau-biologie Home Inspection
Bau-Biologie: Humidity, Moisture, and Mold
Bau-Biologie: Mold Inspection and Remediation
Bau-Biologie: How I Reduced House Dust in My Home
Find a Bau-biologie Home Inspector
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Bau Biology Can Help Your Sick Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lawrence Gust
Date of Broadcast: June 10, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And there are toxic chemicals all around us. It is a toxic world. But we can make our homes safe. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. We can be healthy and happy and not be affected by the toxic chemicals around us.
Today, we’re going to have a guest talking about indoor air quality. And he is quite knowledgeable on the subject. And so we are going to be talking about the toxic chemicals and other harmful things that you might be breathing or exposing your body to through the air.
But before we do that, I just want to read a quote from a very wise person back in Greek times named Herophilus. And he said:
“When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot become manifest, strength cannot be exerted, wealth is useless, and reason is powerless.”
So, it really does all come back down to health. And the more that we can do to have good health, take care of our bodies, and then everything else stems from that. I know that when my body is not feeling well, it kind of stops me from doing everything else in my life.
And toxic chemicals can make you do that. And that’s one of the reasons why I do this show, is so that you can be healthy, happy, have great relationships, be productive, do whatever it is that you want to do without being hampered by toxic chemicals and their effects.
My guest today is Larry Gust. He’s a—
Oh, before we do this, I want to tell you one more thing.
First of all, you may have noticed that this show is now at noon Eastern time instead of 3:00 Eastern time. So it’s noon, Eastern.
And the other thing is I want to tell you about a new feature that I have on my website. if you go to Toxic Free Talk Radio, there’s a link to a new blog I just created over the weekend where it has all the archived shows. And you can go to get more information about the different businesses, the different guests that I’ve interviewed. You can leave a comment. You can ask a question. And there’ll be just more information about each of the topics. I’m really excited about this because, now, each one of these shows will become its own page. It’ll be able to be searched on search engines as its own individual page. And the guest will be able to, themselves, add whatever information they want to add by leaving comments about the show. And you can leave comments to. So, let’s get lots of interesting dialogue and conversation going about these topics.
So, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And then, there are two places where the link is. The first one is right under where it says “visit archived shows blog and learn more.” There’s a link that says “visit my Toxic Free Talk Radio archives shows blog.” Just click on that, and it’ll take you to a blog where all the past shows where you can listen to the archived version and also leave any comments or questions that you want. I’m very excited. I hope you’ll go visit my blog, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Okay, Larry, I am now to you. So I hope you’re standing by. I know you are.
LAWRENCE GUST: Good morning! I am.
DEBRA: Good morning. Yeah, let me just tell our listeners a little bit about you. My guest, Larry Gust from Gust Environmental is an electrical engineer and certified bau biologist. He worked for 25 years in middle management of two Fortune 500 companies. But then health issues within his own family forced him to find out about sick buildings and what to do to fix them.
So Larry, tell us more about your story. How did you go from Fortune 500 middle management to being an expert in indoor air quality.
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, Debra, good morning. This was back in the mid-1980s. My wife who was a real estate agent babysat a new home for two weeks. It had just been completed in construction. And she began sicker and sicker. Eventually, she was no longer able to work. She was home all the time. And initially, the medical establishment didn’t know what to do with her.
In summary, she was really allergic to the 21st century. Everything that connected with modern products set her off. And it was the quest to find a solution for her medical problem that took me from being an engineer in a major corporation to discovering building biology which is a study program particularly that comes from Europe and grew out from the post-war building boom in Germany when people were noticing that these buildings were making people sick and they wondered why. And so an entire course of study grew up around this idea of buildings, they can either be health-supporting or they can be something that will compromise or fail to support or even tear down your health depending on the extent of the problem.
And so, this whole course of study grew out of this whole area of study. It was called Bau-Biology in Germany. Building Biology is the English translation for that. And they discovered about the kinds of materials and conditions that ought to be on the inside of the house that would help support human health.
And so, I learned about these things. And lo, and behold, I had discovered that the plywood in my home was defective. It was breaking down rapidly and releasing formaldehyde into the environment. And formaldehyde is a potent allergy sensitizer as well as it causes cancer.
And I also discovered that the air-cleaning system I put in to help my wife’s breathing—we lived in the middle of the woods at that time. There’s lots of pollens and so forth—that was generating large electromagnetic fields. And she was spending the better part of every day in that unbeknownst to me. Being an electrical engineer, that was sort of like, “Okay,” right? I mean, that’s what we did.
I discovered these things. And all of a sudden, my home didn’t seem as safe and as health-affirming as I thought it was. And I cured these things by doing some things with the flooring and removing this air filtration device into a whole lot of efforts that we put into this. My wife finally recovered, but it took three years and a lot of money.
And that’s what took me into this business, Debra, trying to apply what I learn to help other people to avoid this sort of thing.
DEBRA: I completely understand because my story is very similar. As you may know, I became chemically sensitive in the same way. And I regained my health by identifying a different set of toxic chemicals than you did. But I found the ones that were affecting me. and then, my recovery was so dramatic that I thought, “Wait a minute! People don’t need to be sick in the first place from this. They just need to know that toxic chemicals can make you sick and that if they take those steps to remove the toxic chemicals, this whole illness can be avoided.
LAWRENCE GUST: Exactly!
DEBRA: There’s just no reason why, in this day and age, with what you and I know (and many others that I have as guests on my show), what we know really makes it entirely unnecessary to have any illness from toxic chemical exposure.
So, tell us just a little more about Bau Biology. I know that it has to do with building health and what ca make you sick and how you can be well. We’re almost coming up on the break, but give us a couple of sentences, and then we’ll talk about it more after the break when we come back.
LAWRENCE GUST: Surely! Well, this is the relationship between the built environment and human health. And when it gets into the details, you’re looking at the kinds of materials you’re putting into your building. Are they natural or unnatural? Are they emitting pollutants or are they not? Are they able to control water and so forth?
DEBRA: And we’ll hear more about this after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m talking with Larry Gust from Gust Environmental about indoor air quality, Bau Biology and how your house can make you sick or support your health. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Larry Gust from Gust Environmental. We’re talking about Bau Biology, sick homes, indoor air quality. And Larry, I know that Bau Biology is much more than looking at just the materials. I have never taken the course. I know a lot of people who have taken the course. And I was friends with Helmut Ziehe—Helmut Ziehe being the architect who brought Bau Biology from Germany to America and started the whole movement in America.
And I had the honor of actually having my house have a Bau Biology inspection by a graduating class of Bau biologists living here in Clearwater where, until recently, most Bau biologists get trained.
And when they came in, I’m not going to tell about the inspection. I’m going to let you do that. But I do want to mention that I wrote up my whole experience of having a Bau Biology home inspection. It’s on my website. And I’ll put a link to that after the show if anyone wants to go to the blog that I mentioned earlier. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, click on the blog, look for the show. I’ll put a link there, so that you can see the description of the complete Bau Biology inspection that I had.
So, Larry, tell us more about the different things that you look for. Or perhaps maybe you should start with how you were trained and all the different areas that you got trained in that all have collectively do with the health of the home.
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, the curriculum for building biology is put into three pieces, Debra: the first being indoor air quality.
And those are questions about not only what you bring into the house, but what you build the house out of, but also how to take care of the air in the house. Are you sitting in a soup without exterior or outside air coming in, or do you have some sort of means for bringing outside air. Most homes do not have that other than opening the windows and the doors. And of course, that’s not feasible some periods during the year. So indoor air quality is one of the things that we look at.
We also look at the issue of electromagnetic fields that are possibly being created by wiring errors, the type of wiring we have in houses. And then, more recently, in the last 20 years was the advent of wireless communication. There’s an issue now with external radiation coming from our variety of systems like cellphone, networks, smart meter networks, and then what people bring into their own home in the way of cellphone, wireless, Internet connection, cordless telephone, so on and so forth.
So then there is the aspect of what you are actually using in your home. What are you cleaning with? What kind of cleaning products do you use? Are they toxic? Do they say on the label “only use with the windows and door open or a well-ventilated room”? Or are they something that you can feel more comfortable using, that they’re not going to pollute your body and cause possible harm?
So, the inspection deals with indoor air quality chemicals, electromagnetic radiation. And the average house takes two to three hours to take a look at.
DEBRA: Good! Let’s see… how is this inspection different from the normal building inspection that people have done when they buy a home? And do you do inspections on homes—like if somebody was buying a house, would you go in addition to that home inspector and tell people what’s going on in the house before they buy it?
LAWRENCE GUST: I do! And I frequently get calls to do that. The typical home inspection is really a mechanical and structural inspection. We want to find out whether the building is in good shape structurally, are there termites, were things built according to code, or were they built in some other fashion that could be dangerous or will reduce the life of the building, does the heating system work, does the plumbing look good, is the water pressure great in the bathroom. That’s the sort of thing that a typical home inspector will look at.
Now, in the last few years, they’ve become more aware of mold. If they see something that looks like it could be an indication of mold growth in the home, they’ll tell the homeowner about that. But they’re really not trained to delve into that. The homeowner would have to get somebody like me who would do an environmental inspection, looking at the types of materials, the chemicals, the mold issues, make recommendations to the house […] So that’s the difference between those two things, those two skills.
DEBRA: How much experience does a building biologist have in inspecting homes and offices?
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, everybody has to start at the beginning. The training curriculum for building biology involves a fairly extensive home study course (which is now online) as well as a series of seminars. There are three of them. And each one of those seminars is a week long. So people are spending 40 hours learning about this. It’s split between learning about the material and labs where people take equipment as available and they do inspections.
Each of the seminars culminated with the inspection of a home where they actually get to try these things out, and then it’s also for their own home inspection project where they go back and they apply all of these things they’ve learned to a home and create a report that is sent to a mentor who looks it over and actually grades it.
Every one of these seminars is followed by an exam at the end to check if people have absorbed the material.
I mentioned to you that the third seminar is one on natural, healthy building. And this is where we learn all the different ways we can build differently that will result in a healthier home. Now that’s not only the kinds of materials that we use, Debra, but it’s actually about the kinds of wall structures we have and do they let oxygen and water move through them without trapping them in the house. And that’s the sort of [cross-talking 17:18].
DEBRA: I want us to talk more about that wall structure because it’s one of the differences between Bau Biology and just looking at the materials itself. And so let’s talk about that more after the break.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I have one more commercial for you.
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This marvelous cookware is called Xtrema. You can buy their skillets, woks, bake ware, sauce pans, and sauce pods at Xtrema.com. Use coupon code DEBRA10 to save 10%. That’s X-T-R-E-M-A dot-com. It begins with an X. X-T-R-E-M-A dot-com. That’s Xtrema.com.
And right now, one of the advantages of having a home office is that I get to cook all day long. And right now, my house smells wonderful because I’m making chicken stock from actual chicken bones. And it’s going to taste delicious—vegetables, chicken bones, hmmm… hmmm… hmmm…
Well, Larry, if you were here, I would invite you to lunch.
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, thank you very much. I’ll make a quick trip to Florida.
DEBRA: I’m just so excited about my chicken soup. It smells so good.
So, tell us about walls breathing. That’s what we were talking about, walls breathing.
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, one of the […] problems in western building technique (which is to make a wall out of 2 x 4 studs, and then put dry wall on the inside, and some sort of an outside finish like clapboard or stucco or brick or something like this) is that environments have humidity in them either outside if you’re in the south or inside in the winter if you’re in the north where there’s lots of living activities generating water.
And this material with the water, actually, in our structure, it has to be prevented from getting into the walls because, as it moves through the wall, which wasn’t designed to do that, it’s eventually getting to a surface that’s cold.
In the winter time, the outdoor surfaces are cold, the water condenses in that particular space. Usually, the sheathing on the outside of the house, the stuff that’s on the outside of these studs, it condenses. And that condensation begins to cause mold growth and can have great damage to the structure. And we’ve spent a lot of effort to try and figure out how to stop the water from getting into the walls.
And the flipside to that is to build a structure that allows the water to actually enter the walls, go through the walls and exit to the outside without causing a problem.
DEBRA: And what would a wall like that look like?
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, it could be there’s a lot of straw clay in […] construction where they have a wall cavity that’s usually thicker than maybe 8 inches or 10 inches. And they make sure a strong clay is put into that cavity, and it becomes your wall. It has the ability to take on and give up moisture and to pass it through to the outside and release it as long as you don’t put any kinds of vapor barriers…
DEBRA: Vapor barriers, yes.
LAWRENCE GUST: …which are used heavily in our current construction techniques. This is a house which is much easier to control the temperature because the wall has mass to it and it can take on and store heat or it can take on and store cold, and then re-transit that to the inside of the house in different parts of the day/night cycle. T
These are construction techniques that have been used for thousands of years. If we go to Europe and we look at the Black
Forest, we can find houses. And I’ve been in them! I’ve visited them. They’re over 300 years old. And they were built with this technique, and they’re still standing and they’re still functioning quite well.
DEBRA: But this is not something—I just want to make sure the listeners understand this. This is not something that you can retrofit to a modern home.
LAWRENCE GUST: No.
DEBRA: You need to decide you’re going to have this kind of house and build it from the ground up.
LAWRENCE GUST: You do, Debra.
DEBRA: You can’t just go to a contractor and say, “Oh, put some straw bales in my walls.”
LAWRENCE GUST: Right! And there’s also issues with our building codes. Building codes prescribe pretty narrowly what can be built. And normally, you have quite a job to educate the building departments about new types of structures. And this has been done in some areas. We have architects in this country that build these kinds of dwellings and they’ve been doing it for probably 20 years now. They’ve done the missionary work in some areas to get the building codes change to accept this sort of structure.
DEBRA: This just brings up one of my pet things that I like to say a lot. And that is that our building codes, and indeed our city ordinances and a lot of our government regulations, are not oriented towards healthy and sustainable practices. I think that we need to be looking at the regulatory structure as well as what our personal choices are because there are so many things that we could be doing, and then we find that there’s a regulation that says we can’t. Like I had chickens in my backyard and the police came and took them away. I’d love to build a straw bale house, but I’m sure they won’t let me in Clearwater, Florida.
So, we need to be working on the individual level as well as on the regulatory level so that our government structures are actually supportive of sustainable practices instead of hindering them.
As long as we’re talking about walls, there’s something else going in our worlds that are affecting us—and that’s the wiring.
Can you tell us about that?
LAWRENCE GUST: I’d be happy to. Besides indoor quality, I’d say 20 or 30 years ago, the wiring was the single biggest issue that I found going into people’s homes. It was an issue for two reasons. If you take a short course in electricity, what’s the installation of wiring which is in the house to take electricity to the point at which you need to use it? You have two things. You have a voltage on the wire which pushes the electricity through the wire. And you have a current which is electrons that are moving in the wire and going through the appliance and the light bulb to make it work.
Those two phenomenon, the flowing or movement of electrons called current and the voltage or the force that’s pushing these electrons to the wire, you get two phenomenon, you get something called electric field which is an energy that exists in the space around the wiring. You can’t feel it, see it, smell it, touch it. And you get a magnetic field which are also another type of energy that is in space surrounding the wires.
Research over the years have shown that these magnetic fields are injurious to health and they also prevent healing. So we need to pay attention to doing something about that, Debra, especially in a sleeping area.
DEBRA: We’ll talk more about that after the break. And yes, I agree with that. I used to think that if you didn’t—it’s kind of funny because I tell people who are not reacting to toxic chemicals they need to handle them anyway. And I wasn’t paying attention to electromagnetic fields because they don’t apparently bother me until I learned from another guest that exposure to an electromagnetic fields can make your exposure to toxic chemicals worse.
But we’re going to go to the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with Larry Gust from Gust Environmental. And he’s an electrical engineer and certified Bau biologist. He helps people make healthier homes.
And we were talking about the electromagnetic fields coming from the wiring in your walls. Larry, what kind of symptoms do people have as a result of the problems with wiring in their walls?
LAWRENCE GUST: Debra, I know that most people do not have symptoms from these things. People who are described as being electrically sensitive—and I don’t know that because maybe that’s 18% of the population. I’m just guessing at that, something like 10% to 20%, something like that range—they can have all kinds of different physical effects from being exposed to these sorts of things—headaches and so on and so forth.
However, for most folks, the thing that they’re going to notice the most if they’re observant is how they sleep because the electric fields I was speaking about before the break which are given off by wires because they have a voltage on them, pushing electricity through or waiting to push electricity through the wires, those electric fields are not received gladly by the body. They cause poor sleeping patterns in people (although people may not know that). They may chalk it up to something they ate or stress or tension in the workplace and so on and so forth. But you’ll find that it keeps you from sleeping deeply. You wake up quickly. It causes you to have frequent trips to the john during the evening, during the night. And you can have muscle cramping, heart palpitations caused by these fields.
And the most important thing that a person can do is to create a sleeping room which is very, very low in stress—toxic-free as you would say.
DEBRA: Yes.
LAWRENCE GUST: It should be free of chemicals, free of mold, free of dust, synthetic materials, And it should be free of electric and magnetic fields. And the way you would have to go about doing that is they would shut the power off to their sleeping area at night, something that I do every night. And when I shut that off, these electric fields disappear, and then you’re able to rest and heal much more effectively than you would before.
DEBRA: Yes! And nighttime, when you’re sleeping, is when your body restores itself and repairs itself and detoxes.
And so, I actually did sleep in a room once where—I haven’t made any of these electromagnetic changes on my house. The thing that I’ve done is I got rid of my cordless phone which when the Bau Biology inspection was done, they identified two things—the cordless phone and the electrical backup generator which was sitting under my desk, and I was sitting right on top of every day as I worked.
So, those two things went! But I’m far away from my refrigerator and things like that.
But I did sleep in the home of a bau biologist who had handled all these things in her house. And I could see the difference. I could actually feel the difference. As you said, most people don’t notice because we’re so accustomed to our electromagnetic environments and our toxic environments. It’s like you don’t know how good it feels until you stop hitting your head with a hammer.
LAWRENCE GUST: Yes.
DEBRA: You won’t even know that there’s a problem until you stop doing it. And I say that over and over about toxic chemicals, but the same applies to electromagnetic fields when I went and I slept in that room and there were no electromagnetic fields. I slept differently. A
And so, what I’m really interested in is would you explain to us what we need to do to be able to turn off the power. Do you just set your breakers differently or something?
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, before you go to bed, and you’re ready to go to sleep, you got to turn off certain breakers that are affecting the areas around the sleeping room. The easiest thing to do is you’d turn off the circuits that shut down the lights that are in the bedroom, for the plugs that are around the bed—anything that would be on the other side of the wall from you or another part of the house or would be under the floor if you have things that are actually below you, if you’re on the second floor.
You’d turn those off. There’s equipment. You can get to measure these things. But you could just do these things I’m telling you right now and see how you feel when you’re sleeping—do you fall asleep more rapidly, do you sleep better and so on and so forth.
DEBRA: So, I need to find out which breakers are the ones—my bedroom lights and things.
LAWRENCE GUST: That’s right. And so you’ve got the lamps plugged in and all these things. You have a second person helping you. Somebody is at the circuit breaker box. And you just keep turning things on and off until the lamps go out.
I use little color stickers. I put a little color sticker next to that circuit breaker so you know you can turn that off at night.
There’s other control systems you can buy later on if you find this. It’s really terrific. If you don’t want to go outside to do this, down in the basement, depending on where your circuit breakers are, you can have an automated system put in. But you don’t have to have it. And you can make big changes in your sleeping environment just by doing this.
DEBRA: That seems like a really simple thing that everybody listening could do.
LAWRENCE GUST: Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: I mean it depends on where their breakers are. My breakers happen to be in the house. So I don’t have to go climb under the house to turn them on and off. But that’s certainly something that I could try. And I think that it’s worth finding out where your breakers are and where things are connected to which breakers so that you can turn them on and off and reduce your exposure.
I want to make sure that we talk about cellphones. And I do want to mention, I want to give your website. It’s GustEnviro.com.
You have a lot of really helpful and interesting articles that are easy to read and understand on your website about all these opics that we’ve been talking about today.
LAWRENCE GUST: And speaking of cellphones, Debra, there is a new page I put up on the latest development by Pong.
DEBRA: I was just going to ask you about that. I am on that very page because I’m familiar with that product. I have a Pong case on my cellphone and on my iPad. And in fact, I’m arranging to have somebody from Pong come be a guest on the show.
LAWRENCE GUST: Yes, yeah.
DEBRA: And so I was very pleased to see that you recommend it. So tell us more about Pong and why you think people should have a Pong case.
LAWRENCE GUST: Well, the good thing about Pong is it actually went to an independent laboratory that tests cellphones—a very expensive testing regime. And they proved that their case reduces the radiation out the front of the phone to a third of the regular level without reducing the signal that’s coming from the phone and going to the cellphone tower. And that’s a true breakthrough.
As I say in my write-up on my website, that’s not sufficient. We really do not know what power level causes brain difficulties on cellphones. So I’m not advocating you buy a Pong case and talk forever on your cellphone. I still think that you need to be cautious about this whole thing.
Texting is far better than talking on the cellphone because texting doesn’t put that energy near your head and the energy that’s coming out is only momentary compared to all the time when you’re talking on your cellphone.
And you saw there were some other products I’m…
DEBRA: I do! There’s some other interesting products here that I am not familiar with.
LAWRENCE GUST: Yeah. People should look at that because it’s too complicated to describe that in the time we have left.
DEBRA: Right!
LAWRENCE GUST: But the efficacy of the other product that I was referring to in my website—and I’m not selling these. You just go wherever I’m telling you, and you get it from the people who are producing it. I’m just doing this because I’d like people to be healthier. That would be also a benefit to people.
DEBRA: I’d like to add about the cellphones that just simple things, once you start becoming aware—like when I decided that I was going to pay attention to this cellphone thing, one of the reason was because I had a friend who’s like a super sales kind of person, and he had been on his cellphone incessantly. I would say he had it wired to his ear. And he got a brain tumor! He really did get a brain tumor. And I thought, “You know what? I need to take this seriously,” and I got a Pong case.
But also, I now do not ever put my cellphone to my ear. I just use the speaker phone and I hold it about two feet away.
LAWRENCE GUST: Yes, that’s very effective.
DEBRA: And I also use my—a lot of people have stopped using their landline corded phones. And the only time I use my cellphone is when I’m away from home and I need to use it on some emergency basis.
LAWRENCE GUST: I couldn’t agree with you more. Stay with your landlines. It’s the safest thing to do.
And there are two other things before we have to finish the interview, Debra. People need to get rid of wireless devices from their house. No WiFi!
DEBRA: I agree. I have no WiFi in my house.
LAWRENCE GUST: And no cordless telephones. Those are just so injurious to people. We don’t even have the time to talk about the research behind what I’m saying here. But just take it from me. Those are no good for you and your family. Find a way to do without them.
DEBRA: I totally agree. So, is there anything else you’d like to quickly say in the last 20 seconds?
LAWRENCE GUST: I think we’ve really done a really good job of covering the important aspects of this. Clean up your bedroom and the bedroom for your children. Bedrooms are sleeping areas. They’re not entertainment centers. They’re not playrooms. They should be set up for sleeping.
There’s information about bedrooms on my website if you would like to look at that and find out more details about what you can do.
DEBRA: And again, his website is GustEnviro.com. But you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and his link is there. You can go visit the blog of the past guests, find out all about the show and more information. And I will post the link to My Bau Biology Inspection: How You Can Find an Environmental Bau Biology Inspector and how you can get a Pong case for your cellphone.
I’ll post that all on his blog page about this particular show!
Thanks for joining me on Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends!
Metal Shelves with Bonded Epoxy Finish
Question from Cecilia
Dear Debra, I am thinking about buying some metal shelving for closets. The description says “epoxy-bonded steel construction”. I would really appreciate your opinion about this product. Thanks! www.containerstore.com/elfa/index.htm
Debra’s Answer
It’s fine. Epoxy-bonded steel is epoxy bonded to steel with heat. The toxic fumes from the epoxy get burned off during the heat treatment, leaving a very durable finish that does not offgas.
Grovia Disposable Diapers
Question from Cristi
Hi Debra! I’ve been researching cloth diapers and everyone I’ve talked to loves the Grovia Diapers. They offer organic cotton inserts and this is what they had to say about the shell:
Thank you for contacting us! Our shells are non-toxic. We are one of just a couple other companies that use TPU versus PUL. TPU and PUL are comprised of two layers. A knit polyester layer and a “plastic” layer that is affixed to the knit layer. TPU and PUL essentially function the say way. However, TPU uses heat to affix those layers instead of chemical solvents like PUL.
I honestly don’t really know what that means and if it’s safe for the baby. I have tried some non toxic disposables and don’t like them at all. I am also planning on using organic fitted diapers with wool covers for overnights, but they are not very convenient during the day for our busy on-the-go family. Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
I’ve already written a lot about PUL, which you can read at Google: Debra Lynn Dadd PUL
I’ve also already written about TPU at (Q&A: TPU ThermoPlastic urethane).
Heat sounds better than solvents but both are basically plastics made from petroleum.
I don’t have a baby, so don’t have personal experience with this, but strictly from a materials viewpoint, the best is organic diapers with wool covers.
Nontoxic Fitness/Exersice/Birthing Ball
Question from HG
Do you or any of your readers know of a non-PVC medicine ball (the large exercise and birthing balls)?
Debra’s Answer
The box says “Latex,PVC,Phthalates, and Chloride Free”. Plus there is a review on this page from someone with MCS who ordered it and says “to my complete and utter amazement NO SMELL whatsoever! I mean not even a HINT of something! It’s fabulous!”
