Art | Resources
All Natural Dog
“Luxurious dog beds inspired by nature.” Originally made for the owners dog, who began experimenting with natural fibers after her own dog became bald on her belley and neck from sleeping on synthetic dog beds. These beds are made with made of Natural Sense® pure 100% natural latex rubber, certified by Oeko-Tex, covered with beautiful organic fabrics. Comes in various style to meet various needs.
Eco-Ditty
Reusable sandwich and snack bags, made from 100% organic cotton, “even the tag is organic cotton!” Bright and beautiful on the outside, undyed organic cotton on the inside “No synthetic, plastics or chemicals touching your food.” Printed with low-impact inks and dyes. Wash by hand, washing machine, or dishwasher.
Green Polka Dot Box
This is a great one stop shop for the healthiest food, particularly if you don’t have access to good foods locally or you want to save money. It’s a whole foods buying club–test drive with a trial membership for $10 or jump into savings with a one-year membership for $50–either way you’ll save up to 60% off retail for natural, organic, grass-fed, raw and non-GMO foods. Spend $75 and get free shipping. They have everything you would find in a natural food store…even fresh produce: meat and poultry, seafood, dairy, prepared meals, frozen foods, top brand natural and organic packaged foods, household cleaners, personal care products, supplements, natural remedies, and more.
Great Glass Water Bottles
My guest is Laurel Herter, architectural glass artist, principal of Laurel Herter Design and founder of BottlesUp Glass. When Laurel became concerned about the leaching of chemicals from plastic water bottles after being diagnosed with breast cancer, she brought her own experience as a glass artist to design a solution. We’ll be talking about the chemical contamination of water from bottles, why glass is the best choice, and why it was important to Laurel that her bottles not only be toxic-free and functional, but beautiful. www.bottlesupglass.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Great Glass Water Bottles
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Laurel Herter
Date of Broadcast: April 29, 2013
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. There are lots of toxic chemicals out there, but we don’t have to get sick from them. We don’t have to have them in our homes or our bodies. That’s what we talk about here, how to do that.
It’s Monday, April 29th, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about water bottles, bottled water, pollutants in water and what you can do to always have clean water with you by having the proper kind of water bottle.
My guest today is Laurel Herter who has created the most beautiful water bottle I’ve ever seen. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.
But first, I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me over the weekend. Some friends invited me over to watch a video with them. It was a film called The Singing Revolution. And this inspired me so much. I want to tell you what happened.
All of these events that I’m about to tell you actually happened in my lifetime, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was so stunned to find out what I’m about to tell you.
If you’re near my age, you probably remember in the ’60s. There was a time when there was a Communist threat in America. I remember as a child, in school we all had to do air-raid drills in case the Communists attack.
In communist USSR, United Soviet – I forgot what it stands for. So United Soviet Socialist Republic, there –there is an area that is known as the Baltic state. And within the Baltic state is a country called Estonia. Estonia is a very small country, but part of its tradition was singing. Even though it’s such a small country, it has one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world.
Early in the 20th century, there were some conflicts where different countries were occupying Estonia. It went from being occupied by the Soviets to the Nazis, to the Soviets. There was a lot of destruction. In fact, Estonia has a whole history of being occupied by different countries.
This last time after World War II, they had been occupied by the USSR for 50 years. And they decided that they wanted their independence. What they did was they rediscovered their own music.
At the end of World War II, the Soviets went in and destroyed all the culture of Estonia and replaced it with Soviet culture. But inside the homes of Estonians, they were still singing their songs.
When they decided that they were going to – when things changed and there was [inaudible 00:04:16] and then they had free speech, they started not only talking, but singing.
When they decided that they wanted to declare their independence, they didn’t have any war or bloodshed. What they did was they found a legal loophole in which they could register themselves as citizens of their own independent country. And every adult in the country registered as a citizen of Estonia.
I’m making a very long story short. But there was a day when the Soviets sent in the tanks. They didn’t like this uprising about independence and freedom. They sent in the tanks. Estonian citizens walked up to the tanks in their street clothes with no guns. And they didn’t shoot.
That day, Estonia seceded from the union of the USSR. The following day, Russia, the entire country of Russia, seceded from the USSR. And the day after that, all the other countries seceded from the USSR. And there was no more USSR.
This big threat that I grew up with in my childhood just disappeared just like that. Well, not just like that, it took years, about a decade. But when it came down to it, it was people acting for their own independence, saying, “We’re going to assert ourselves as being a free people.” And by doing that, that idea was more powerful than guns and tanks.
I think that this moved me so much because what I’m working for on this show and in my work is freedom. It’s freedom from toxic chemicals.
That they were able to do this by asserting that they were free is something that I’m doing every day. There are some things that I’m encouraging all of you to do every day. Just make those choices to be free from exposure to toxic chemicals, to be free from having toxic chemicals in your body, to be free from having the negative health effects of toxic chemicals.
If a small country can bring down the USSR and make it dissolve without bloodshed, without war, we should be able to do the same thing with toxic chemicals. We should be able to have a toxic-free world.
Now, I’d like to introduce Laurel Herter, who is the founder of BottlesUp Glass and the principal of Laurel Herter Design in Bluffton, South Carolina.
I’m looking at the clock and I’m talking so much. There’s so much I want to say about Laurel. We probably won’t hear from here until after the break. But I want to tell you another story just because this is so special.
Laurel’s bottles are just so beautiful. I’m hoping that you all will go to her website and see her bottles at BottlesUpGlass.com.
The second that I saw them – I don’t really remember where I saw them – I wanted one. And I wrote about them on Debra’s List.
Unbeknownst to her, world didn’t know that I had done this. But on April 1st, she wrote to me and she said, “I’d like to introduce you to my bottles.” Somebody had told her that she must get in touch with me.
And then on the 15th of April, two weeks later. And I never received that e-mail. On the 15th, two weeks later, I just happened to be in Bluffton, South Carolina.
I had no plans to go there. I’ve lived in Florida. But we were just driving by and I said, “Let’s go to Bluffton.” The very first store that I went into – her bottles were sitting on the shelf.
There’s just – we talked. We finally connected. When I invited her to be on our radio show, we figured out what had happened.
So Laurel, I know you’re there. We say hello to you before the break.
LAUREL HERTER: Hi, there.
DEBRA: Hi. So we have a couple of minutes. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit about how you became interested in toxic chemicals in glass bottles, in plastic bottles?
LAUREL HERTER: I had worked for an environmental consulting company for about six years in the middle of my glass career. I’ve been doing glass, all kinds of art glass for the past 30 years ever since I’ve graduated from college.
And I just really paid attention to environmental issues and had grown up in a family that was very conscious of our wonderful planet and taking care of our environment.
And in 2007, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I just couldn’t believe it of course, but nobody can. And it really set me to wondering. What have I done wrong? At what point did this happen to me? How could I have prevented it? What can I change in my everyday life?
I had eaten very well. I had taken good care of myself. But in my business, there are lots of chemicals and solvents. There’s lead. There are other all kinds of petroleum-based chemicals.
I had been pretty careful, but I guess not careful enough because I really do believe that this was an environmental…
DEBRA: I have to interrupt you because it’s time for the station break. But we’ll continue your story when we come back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: We’re back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with Laurel Herter, glass artist, principal of Laurel Herter Design and founder of BottlesUp Glass in Bluffton, South Carolina.
So Laurel, continue on with your story.
LAUREL HERTER: After that, I just started looking at what was around me, what could I have done, what had I been eating, what I had been exposed to. Like I said, there were lots of chemicals and solvents.
I thought I’ll be taking this one step at a time. I worked with a nutritionist and I went to the best cancer center. I had an actually pretty enlightening experience through it all. I’m now six years clean from breast cancer.
DEBRA: How many years?
LAUREL HERTER: Six.
I worked with a nutritionist who didn’t really impart much more than “Watch out for what you’re eating and what you’re exposed to.” Since then at first, I’ve been careful to not be around chemicals that I had been and solvents. And then, I don’t do any of my own stained glass thing anymore.
But I was standing in my studio, in my glass studio, the wonderful pure clarity of glass. I was standing there with a plastic water bottle and realized that, “Well, this is one thing I can start with.”
I live in the south, and the water gets real hot in plastic bottles. And you keep hearing about BPAs and PVCs being leached into your water from plastic water bottles. This was five or six years ago.
I immediately said, “At least, I can drink out of mason jars.” So I drank out of mason jars for quite a while. I took many, many less boxes out to the recycling bin because I have been diligently buying bottled water. And I’m thinking that my tap water was bad.
I started with drinking from mason jars. And then I just started drawing some designs for a water bottle that would be better, easier to drink out of the exterior thread on a mason jar so that you can withdraw with it.
I knew that I wanted a wide mouth that I could put ice in and that you could clean. I also wanted to do something beautiful like the art glass that I had been designing for so long.
After drawing these designs, I then had molds made up in Seattle, wooden molds for a glass store here in Savannah, to do some preliminary bottles with. We went over there and spent weeks doing that.
We just couldn’t get it consistent inside diameter. We knew that they were going to be very expensive. But my idea here was that this is the art glass bottle. This isn’t just an alternative to plastic bottles.
This is the combination of my craft that I had been honing for so long. And this is the combination with good environmental sensibility and a wonderful aesthetic.
So I had the samples made and they just weren’t quite right. They weren’t consistent and they were wildly expensive.
I started working for a solo in Mexico where I was advising on a construction project and doing some stained glass down there.
Every time that I was coming to town, I would drive by this large glass blowing company. I knew that they supply the glass drinking, the glasses and Margarita glasses and shot glasses for Pier 1 Imports.
They had maybe 300 employees. I thought, “Maybe they can do something that’s a little bit more of a production item than fully hand-blown.”
So I went to see them and I dragged in my wooden molds. They humored me. I made some more samples and realized that they too were having the same problem. We couldn’t get a consistent inside diameter.
They referred to a company in Mexico City that has their own curbside recycling program. They use 75% recycled glass. And it turns out to be the same glass that we use in our bottles now as Don Julio Tequila and the Patrón Tequila.
It’s a beautiful hammered texture that looks like hand-blown. But it has all the technical parameters that we needed to be able to make the closure that was seal-tight.
We also had a commitment to not wanting to use any plastic at all in our products or packaging, which turned out to be a really tall order.
We looked at food grade silicone. And we looked and looked and looked. It was very hard to find a silicone manufacturer.
We wanted everything to be made in the United States, but the glass is impossible. We knew that because it’s only the large glass companies and fully automated companies that are able to make a consistent inside diameters to the bottles.
So we knew that we had the good thing going with the company in Mexico. And we started doing prototypes with a company out of Maine who makes a wonderful – they do a lot of scuba diving equipment and hospital grade silicone for medical use.
I went up there and talked to the fellow. He was intrigued by the idea.
And I worked with I think three different industrial designers to get the cap to fit just right on the bottles. We finally came up with eight different colors of food grade silicone and gripper rings around the outside that are interchangeable for identification and just for fun.
DEBRA: It’s such a beautiful bottle. Could you just talk to us for a minute about – we really have a minute until the next station break. Could you talk to us a little bit about silicone?
I know a lot of people are just unsure about it. It sounds like that you have some experience with it. So could you just tell us how toxic or non-toxic? I don’t have any problem with the silicone rings and the top on your bottle.
Could you just tell us what you know?
LAUREL HERTER: What I do know is food grade silicone is one of the cleanest of the – it does have plasticizers in it, but it is about as pure as we can get for any kind of closure that we could be using for a re-sealable bottle.
It’s not a petroleum-based product. A silicone is made from sand, the silicones.
It is even used in medical inserts. People get the silicone in their bodies, and it is all throughout the medical industry.
It can be heated to very hot temperatures. You can bake with it in the oven. So that’s made so that we’re able to use it over and over again in the dishwasher. And it doesn’t change color or stretch or change at all.
DEBRA: Good. We need to make another commercial break. When we come back, we’ll have more with Laurel Herter about water, water bottles and beauty.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: We’re back on Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Laurel Herter, founder of BottlesUp Glass and designer of the most beautiful water bottles I’ve ever seen.
Laurel, I want to make sure that we get in this question. Why is beauty important to you in this bottle?
You could have just made – I have so many glass bottles. They’re all pretty utilitarian, except for my favorite – my second favorite now because here is my favorite.
My second favorite until I saw you was just a regular glass bottle, but it had stars etched in the glass all over it. And I would drink my water out of those above all.
What I noticed about your bottle is that it has a quality to it that goes beyond utilitarian function that I actually experienced the beauty and the art of it. It enhances my experience of drinking the water.
It feels good in my hands. The bottle feels like it just belongs there.
The opening – it’s a wide-mouth bottle. Like you said earlier, you can put ice into it. It’s easy to drink out of.
It just overall is an aesthetic function – aesthetic and functional experience.
What was that – William Morris said something about that quote, “If it’s going to be functional, it should be beautiful” or something like that. I should look that up so I know what it is.
So tell us your thoughts about why it was important to you to make those a piece of art.
LAUREL HERTER: The idea of form-following function or function-following form has always been an age-old question. And it’s something that in our school, we discuss ad nauseam.
My mom is at 97 and still an incredible painter and fine artist. Then my father is – they were both naturalists. We’re outside all this time.
We had an appreciation for the natural world around us. In my career, that’s really what my focus has been, just making beautiful objects.
So much of the time, they do several functions. They are architectural. Everything I make. My mission to do was built into buildings. They serve no other function than that.
One of the things that appeals me about doing this is that it serves a utility. It was better for the environment than a plastic water bottle that I could use.
I saw it as a real challenge. I saw my health crisis as something right. A lot was almost revealed to me about how I can make this a beautiful thing and a beautiful alternative to the 38 billion plastic water bottles that were going into our landfills every year.
Maybe it helps to impart not only a sense of environmental stewardship, but to hone their own aesthetic and to see that this is a more beautiful bottle.
I also have a real commitment to glass and to just the beauty and sparkle of glass. And the glass packaging, it has a great slogan of “Glass is nothing.”
That’s part of what we see. Everyone else who is making a glass water bottle, they need to cover it because they’re using [inaudible 00:30:14] just utilitarian glass. It just serves the function of getting away from plastic.
But I wanted this to be beautiful. I wanted this to stand alone. We do have carrying bags, but certainly not bags that you want to leave on the bottom. This is something that you want to have next to your bed or in your office or in your car.
So it’s the statement that you have aesthetic awareness, as well as an environmental awareness.
DEBRA: One of the things that’s important to me – by the way, the quote from William Morris is, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” This bottle is both.
One of the things that has been important to me as a human being over the years is that many years ago when I first discovered that toxic chemicals were making my body sick, my only concern was to be in an environment that didn’t make me sick. Aesthetics just went out the window.
But as I was able to start to piece together a non-toxic life, what came back to me was that life is more than simply avoiding chemicals. I had gotten to a point where that was all my life was about. But now, it’s about having a life that’s free from exposure to toxic chemicals.
So I’ve been an artist in one kind or another all my life. I was a professional musician. And I keep up with my music now and my writing. And my house is an aesthetically pleasing place to be.
So it’s not just about a world with toxic chemicals and a world without toxic chemicals. The world without toxic chemicals has so many wonderful things in it that are enjoyable and soulful and healing in their own right because of their beauty.
I just really want to thank you for having all of these elements together in a truly unique piece.
I want to also make sure that we talk a little bit about why people should be carrying their own water, making their own water and having their own water bottles.
Do you want to tell us something about some of the, first of all, water pollutants that we need to be not drinking tap water and then pollutants in bottles that lead us to have glass being a better choice?
LAUREL HERTER: It’s too bad that you have to list them in orders of priority. But truly, bottled water I think is much more of a threat to our physical health and the environment than tap water is.
Tap water is regulated by the EPA much more strictly than the FDA regulates bottled water. One third of the bottled water that we buy in these terrible plastic water bottles that are very, very and frequently recycled is just tap water. Bottled waters are 2000 times more than tap water.
I think the horrible thing here really is the plastic water bottles, not only now they can be recycled – I think the only 20% or at the most, 30% of all the 38 billion single-used plastic water bottles are actually recycled.
It’s just the time it takes, the space it takes. To learn to filter our tap water, to learn what’s in our tap water, to learn what the actual source of our tap water is, is a really important responsibility that we all have.
A lot of us don’t even know where our city water comes from. So much of it is just fine. If you don’t like it or you don’t like the taste of it, leaving it in the refrigerator overnight where the chlorine is dissipated or using charcoal filters such as Kishu is wonderful.
Charcoal filters that we’re now selling through a woman in Denver, who is importing from Japan. It’s almost carbonized charcoal that absorbs most of the chemicals that you would find in any tap water.
So I really think that tap water really isn’t the problem. The plastic water bottles are the worst.
DEBRA: Okay, I hear you.
LAUREL HERTER: It’s too bad that we have to list them, that we have to number it that way. It’s not all just pure and clean water.
DEBRA: We’re going to take a break now. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be back in a moment.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here talking about water and water bottles with Laurel Herter of BottlesUpGlass.com.
We’re getting to the end of our hour, Laurel. I wanted to – I just, during the break, went to your website. I was looking at your Kishu charcoal, which looks like a very interesting product.
I just want to make sure that I understand and our listeners understand what it will remove and what it won’t remove. Water is pretty complex. So could you address that a little bit more?
LAUREL HERTER: I don’t have a label in front of me. It does say it on my website and on her website, which is KishuCharcoal.com.
It doesn’t of course remove heavy metals, but it does remove tastes. I wish I had the list from…
DEBRA: Yeah, I would think that it would remove chlorine and various other things that are absorbed by charcoal. This looks like a really, really good charcoal.
I’m seeing on your site that it’s made from special oak trees that are sustainably harvested then slowly fired in traditional kiln ovens over many days. And it’s very simple because you just place the charcoal in the bottle, and it starts absorbing impurities and pouring healthy minerals like calcium and potassium. That’s what it says.
LAUREL HERTER: It looks like just a stick. It’s a beautiful stick that, after six months, can be used as an air freshener either in your refrigerator, your shoes. Or it’s often used in Japanese flower arranging as a Feng shui to clear the energy in the room and keeping it clean.
DEBRA: I think that probably in Japan, when people started using this, it probably handled whatever impurities were in the water.
But I’m thinking it probably doesn’t remove things like fluoride or radiation or things like that.
LAUREL HERTER: No, it does remove lead, mercury, copper, cadmium, chlorine, and it really does make the water taste sweeter.
I would recommend it for something out of a stream in Bangladesh or something or someplace where…
DEBRA: My point being not to put down your filter because I’m sure it works very well for what it does. And it’s certainly very beautiful and natural and in line with your bottle.
I just want to make sure that – because our water pollution is so complex – those listening understand that it’s really important to know what is in your tap water, perhaps even have it tested so that you use the appropriate device to remove whatever pollutants you want to remove. This is where the pollutants need to be matched with the filter pretty correctly.
I just don’t want people to think that there’s one filter that can just remove everything. It needs to be pretty matched well. But I’m sure that it makes the water taste much sweeter.
LAUREL HERTER: It is much like so many of our filtration systems that we use, like a Brita filter. I’m pretty sure it’s the exact same stuff that’s just in a different form and it doesn’t come in a plastic package.
It doesn’t say toxic chemicals are out of your tap water. It’s pretty darn good for tap water.
DEBRA: Yes. I think that it does what it does, I think, very well.
It’s just that I want people to understand that if you really have seriously polluted tap water, you need to have a match for that. Yeah.
So we just have a few minutes left now. Is there anything else that you want to say that you haven’t yet said?
LAUREL HERTER: One of the things too that we’re going to be offering in the future, we’re researching more different filtration systems because we really believe the water that we need and can make great use of is all around us.
There are some amazing filters that are coming out now anywhere from a five dollar very simple stick of carbonized charcoal to some ultraviolet filters that are in hundreds of dollars. We’re looking into those and are going to be offering those on our website as time goes on and as we personally look into what their qualities are.
DEBRA: Yes. I think that you’re – I’m totally in agreement with what you’re doing. I think that every person needs to filter and take responsibility for and carry their own water with them.
I’ve been looking at water filters for 30 years. I’ve had several different kinds myself. Yes, I’m just studious about this at home. When I’m away, I haven’t always – I don’t drink tap water in a restaurant or something like that.
And refilling, I’ve just gotten to this point where I just don’t want to do that and that I’m much more willing to carry my water with me now. I go to a restaurant and look at that glass sitting there, and I don’t want to put it to my lips.
And I’m starting to carry your bottle into the restaurant.
LAUREL HERTER: Now, we have some bags. We’re planning on having lots of more choices of bags for exactly that because we have several friends here in Bluffton who have gotten used to using the bottles. They’re even using them on their road bikes.
We laugh that these bottles are sturdy. They’re really heavy like an old coke bottle and purposely so that they really can withstand the everyday stumble.
We get wonderful testimonials from people. “They rolled off the back of my car, under the pavement and it didn’t break.”
It can break. I’m not saying it won’t, but people just – you would have to make a change. You get used to it. And we have friends who are using them on their road bikes where the bottle weighs almost as much as their [inaudible 00:45:31].
DEBRA: Having you found that once you become aware of toxic issues and how much harm they can cause your body and how much better you can feel and how much more healthy you can be by taking these simple steps, doesn’t it make you feel like – obviously not only did you want to do them for yourselves or it made you go through everything that you did to design a whole product that goes into this category.
There’s an inspiration to actually do it when you see the benefits to compare.
LAUREL HERTER: It really was an inspiration. I felt like I was being groomed to come up with this idea that was then really just revealed to me. “I’ve got glasses. We’re talking about chemicals and I have a wonderful environmentalist background.” There it all is. I’m hoping to bring it together with the combination of form-following function and function-following form that they can really work together with a great aesthetic.
DEBRA: That’s really great. Really great. I’m so happy that you are with us today. Thank you for coming.
LAUREL HERTER: Thank you. It’s a wonderful coincidence that we met up.
DEBRA: I just want to give Laurel’s website again. It’s BottlesUp.com.
LAUREL HERTER: No, it’s actually BottlesUpGlass.com.
DEBRA: BottlesUpGlass.com. She has this beautiful glass. And then there are these rings that go around.
You can choose your color in little bottles, in little filters. And you’ll just be off set to walk into any restaurant of any kind. You’ll just be as elegant or as casual as you need to be.
It’s heavy, but not too heavy. And it’s just an all-around, wonderful product.
Thank you very much, Laurel.
LAUREL HERTER: Thank you. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Just to close, I just want to remind you of the resources that are available at my website. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top of that page, there’s a menu.
One of the things that’s available to you is my Q&A, which is totally free where you can post a question. I and my readers will give you answers about how to live without toxic chemicals from our own experiences.
I have more than 3000 questions posted there. More than 12,000 answers. And then if that isn’t enough, you can go over to Debra’s List, which is a directory of more than 500 websites that sell non-toxic products. BottlesUpGlass.com is on that list and as are many other non-toxic products.
If you have a personal question that you don’t want to ask in public or it’s a very specific thing you need help finding a specific problem or solving a specific toxic problem or looking for a product or trying to understand what it says on the material that you see in a few data sheets or any of those things, you can always call me up. Do a personal paid consultation with me. I’m available to answer your questions.
If you haven’t read my book Toxic Free yet, that’s a really good place to start because it explains what the problem is about toxics in consumer products and how they affect our health.
It gives you 50 suggestions of things that you can do to remove toxic products from your home and what to replace them with. It tells you how to remove toxic chemicals from your body. It tells you what kind of nutrition you need to help your body heal from our toxic exposures.
And on Fridays, you can call this show. It’s an open phone, so you can ask your questions.
That’s all for today. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Anti-Spot Treatment for Bath Fixtures?
Question from Debbie
I love your website and have turned to it often to help me survive this MCS.
I am having a new shower installed with polished chrome trim (where the water turns on and off), shower doors, and tile. I was told that if I put car wax on the polished chrome and the shower doors that it will not turn spotty with our hard water and will be easy to clean. Do you know of any kind of wax or something else that I could use for this application?
Thank you very much,
Debbie
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know of anything. Sounds like you are aware to not use the car wax. Readers, any suggestions?
The Petition Asking Top Ten Retailers to Stop Selling Products That Contain the "Hazardous 100" Chemicals
The man who started this campaign—Andy Igrejas, National Campaign Director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families—joins me to discuss their “Mind the Store” campaign. We’ll talk about the campaign, the results so far, why each of us as citizens and consumers need to be involved in changing what’s on the shelf in stores, and what we can do. As consumers we have power. Stores sell what we want to buy. We need to let them know we don’t want toxics. mindthestore.saferchemicals.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Petition Asking Top 10 Retailers to Stop Selling Products That Contain the “Hazardous 100” Chemicals
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Andy Igrejas
Date of Broadcast: April 25, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Even though there’s toxic chemicals all around, we can still be healthy, happy, productive and make the world a better place.
This is Thursday, April 25th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about the Mind the Store Campaign that’s being done by Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And they’re asking the top 10 retailers to remove from their shelves products, all products, that contain one or more of a list of a hundred hazardous chemicals.
My guest today will be Andy Igrejas. He’s the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And he’s running this campaign.
But before I introduce Andy, I want to tell you something that happened to me yesterday. I want to talk to you about choice—which has everything to do with what we’re talking about today and everything to do with toxic chemicals.
Yesterday, I received in the mail a letter telling me that I was part of a class action suit for a product that I had purchased during a certain time period which was found to be defective. And since I was one of the people who had purchased it, and my name was on a list of having purchased it, that I was now one of the people that was part of the class action suit.
And what was disturbing to me was that they didn’t write to me and say that there’s a class action suit, “Do you want to be part of it?” They wrote to me and said, “There’s a class action suit, and you’ve been named. And if you want to opt out of it, you can.” I read it, and I found that there was no financial compensation, that what I would get is this product again. And there was $830,000 of legal fees. And I wondered, “Well, if I’m somebody who would benefit from this, am I responsible for my portion of the $830,000 of legal fees?” I got about that far, and I decided I didn’t want to have any part of this. And so, I filled out that form.
Now, what it took for me to opt out of something that I never agreed to be part of in the first place was that I had to fill up the form, I had to copy it front and back—and I felt like I needed to make a two-sided copy so the second page where all the signature was would not get lost—and then, I had to address three envelopes, send it to three different attorney’s offices, all to say no to something that I didn’t agree to in the first place.
Now, this is also a tactic that’s used often where they say in some advertising, “Well, here, try this free for 30 days. We won’t charge your card until day 31, but you have to opt out.” And of course, if you forget to opt out, then your card gets charged, et cetera, et cetera.
So, what I would like to see is I would like to see that we all have a choice to opt in instead of being required to opt out. And it’s the same thing with toxics.
We live in a world where the default is to be exposed to toxic chemicals, yet there’s no form that I can fill out that says, “I’m opting out of this toxic world. I want to live in the clean, safe, healthy world.”
And what we need to do is be creating that world. We can create it within our home to a very large degree enough that we can restore our health. But there’s other things that we need to do for us to be opting in to a safe world. We need to be creating that world because, at the moment, it doesn’t exist.
So, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have Andy on today so that we can talk about something that we all can do to make a difference to get retailers to pay more attention to the kinds of products that are being sold in mass market stores.
Andy, welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio!
Andy Igrejas: Well, thank you very much for having me here. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Thanks for being here. Let me just tell my audience something about you. You’re the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And prior to that, you headed the Environmental Health Program at the National Environmental Trust for seven years. And you’ve helped chemical policy reform on the national agenda through work on the Kids Safe Chemical Act. And you’ve also worked on Chemical Security Right to Know Food Safety California initiatives and a list of a whole lot of things that are way too long. But I think everybody gets the idea that you have a lot of background and you’ve done a lot on the level of legislation and organizations to be working on that other retail and regulatory part (where I’ve been working for the past 30 years on helping consumers navigate the non-toxics from the toxic stuff when they’re making consumer product choices).
It’s become really clear to me recently that I think it’s just a new level of awareness on my part of the necessity of changing regulations and getting retailers to do a different thing. So that’s why I’m having you here today, because I want all my listeners to understand the importance of this as well.
But first, tell us how you personally became interested in working in this field.
Andy Igrejas: Well, that’s interesting. I haven’t been asked that in a while. I’ve always been interested in these issues and maybe it does get back to that agenda. I grew up in a very industrial neighborhood [unclear 06:24]. I really grew up right underneath Exit 148 […]
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm…
Andy Igrejas: There are a bunch of factories there. There was a tube plant, […], packaging plant, a pharmaceutical plant all humming with people. All of them has since closed. They’ve just gone to other things because you can make the same stuff more cheaply in developing countries unfortunately and not abide by the rules and regulations and pay people peanuts. I grew up there. And so I’ve always had an interest in the human health impacts of environmental issues.
I started a club in my high school to work to publicize the dangers of the incinerators that was planned for the nearby city of Newark. And when I dug into that as far back as high school, we found that, well, what makes the incinerator ash toxic. And it’s that there are toxic chemicals used in the packaging basically the products that people send to the incinerator. You release some of these chemicals when you burn them. And in other cases, you actually create compounds called combustion byproducts.
And that started for me my interest in “Gee, isn’t there”—part of the problem is what are these chemicals in the first place, what are things made of in the first place. And at different times, at different points in my career, I’ve worked on trying to move the concern from just the air and the water up to a more fundamental level of what do we make things from and how can we switch those things from being toxic things to being safer and healthier things.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s been my interest too from not as young an age as you. But when I was in my early 20’s, I became very ill from exposure to toxic chemicals in ordinary consumer products in my home. And my first question was: “Well, what are these chemicals? I have never had any attention on them at all.” And suddenly, I was wanting to know “Well, what’s in the toothpaste? What’s in the hair spray? What’s in the perfume? And how come they’re toxic? And how come they’re making me sick? And where can I find a product that doesn’t have this in it?”
And those questions where—I mean I couldn’t just go down to Wal-Mart, for example, and buy the non-toxic perfume. And this is what we’re dealing with in the world today—as I’ve said earlier in the show, choices. How do we have those choices? How do we know those choices?
So, now you’re with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Tell me about that organization.
Andy Igrejas: Sure! Well, we organized this a few years ago because we felt that there was a need to have a campaign from all the different groups who worked on this from different angles. Together, we were really trying to put chemical reform on the national agenda. And it required big, national environment groups working closely with the community-based groups, working closely with health organizations that don’t have an environmental focus, that are just focused on individual diseases like autism and breast cancer and other things and working with health professionals.
So that’s what Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is. It’s a coalition that came together to advocate for reforming the federal system so that it addresses these issues.
DEBRA: And we need to take a commercial break. I need to stop you because we need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio with Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Andy Igrejas. Did I say that right?
Andy Igrejas: Igrejas is fine.
DEBRA: Igrejas. He’s a national campaign director for Safer Chemical, Healthy Families. And we’re talking about their Mind the Store campaign.
I interrupted you as we went to the commercial break. Was there more you wanted to say about your coalition, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families?
Andy Igrejas: No, that’s fine. Just that this coalition is environmental and health groups. Health professionals and businesses came together and demand comprehensive overhaul for chemical policies so that we are ensuring that the products that end up on the shelves and that we take into our homes contain chemicals that have really been assessed for their safety and they’re being used safely and using the latest scientific recommendations that have been proposed the American Academy of Pediatrics, […]
There’s legislation to do that, the Safe Chemicals Act. And we’re fighting hard for that.
But at the same time, the chemical industry has really mastered the art of promoting gridlock in Washington, powerful companies. Exxon Mobile, a lot of people think of it as an oil company only, but it’s also one of the top two chemical producers in the country. Dow Chemical Dupont, they’ve really banded to block the reform.
And so, in the meantime, we created this Mind the Store campaign—people can see it at MindtheStore.org. sort of our world’s colliding, you and me—to try and take the power that consumers can have to make better decisions about the chemicals in there that are in the products we’re buying and to increase the power of that by focusing on the retailers.
It’s very hard for the average person to keep track of so many chemicals. But the retailers can! And so we’re asking let’s ask them to take a bigger bite out of this problem and promote broader health and safety goals than just BPA In baby bottles or phthalates in nail polish.
DEBRA: Consumers, I just want to underscore what you’ve just said about the power of consumers. Consumers have so much power. We don’t even know how much power we have. What stores wants to sell, what ends up on the shelf is what you are buying. And so whatever it is that we say that we want via our dollars, how we spend our dollars is what is going to end up on the shelf.
If we were to all say that we were not going to buy any toxic chemicals for a week, say—well, I don’t ever buy them. But if we could get enough people together so that Wal-Mart or Target or any of these stores were to have no sales of toxic chemicals for a week, that would make a big impression on them. And they would say—
I mean, we already see Wal-Mart is already having some less toxic products. Target is having less toxic products. In fact, if you go to MindtheStore.org, one of the things that they have is a list of the top 10 retailers in it. They tell you what these retailers have already done or haven’t done.
And so, over a 30 year period, I see that there has been a change. I see that there’s more and more non-toxic products as when there were 30 years ago, more choices for us. It’s not a shortage of products. It’s a shortage of awareness and commitment and of course having the opposition of the chemical companies that don’t want to give up their chemical production.
But we have the upper hand, we really do. And so if we can’t get the legislation pass because of what the chemicals are doing, we can’t get things changed in the stores by the choices that we make.
So, go on about your campaign.
Andy Igrejas: No, that’s exactly right. And I think it’s hard. The awareness of this issue for your activism and people like you around the country has increased, and it really has changed the marketplace. And in some places, it’s changed it fairly decisively. The markets for certain products, certain chemicals, have dried up fairly quickly.
The chemical industry fears that because you can buy off congressmen basically, but you can’t buy off everybody.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
Andy Igrejas: That costs too much money. And people, when it comes to sticking up for their own health, people don’t see these trade-offs between—most people don’t believe, and they’re right enough to believe it, that not having toxic chemicals means that we won’t have products, that things will grind to a halt.
At the same time, it’s hard to just use your individual purchasing power because a lot of the toxic chemical that are in things that they don’t associate with chemicals. It’s not just the cleaners and the perfumes. It’s the flame retardants that are in the polyurethane foam in your coach.
I’ve been working on these issues for a while. And I have to admit, when the flame retardant thing really started breaking, I realized, “Hey, I have one of these pillows. I’ve been sleeping on this thing that I thought was cool and modern Swedish foam pillow that fits my neck.” And it had this weird smell I remember when I got it. I was like, “Man, I’ve been working on this for a while. And I was bringing a flame retardant-laden pillow after doing this stuff during the day.”
So, we created this campaign to say—I also think people will look after their own families. But I think most people, good people, get the bigger picture and recognize that we need to take care of each other. And it shouldn’t just be “Well, I can afford it, I can go to the healthy products in aisle five. But some other poor slob can get the cheapest thing in aisle two.”
I think we recognize it, especially for some of the most dangerous chemicals we’ve known about for a long time. Nobody really should be exposed to them. And we should be driving it out of the marketplace.
DEBRA: I agree, we should.
Andy Igrejas: So, this is an attempt to do that. It’s to give you some tools by focusing on your retailers—and you can do it by email, you can do it when you go into the store and ask them what are they doing about this bigger list, this list of the Hazardous 100 we’re calling it. Ask the retailers.
I appreciate what you said about the website. We try to give them credit. Many of them have taken steps to address these things. But they’ve sort of done it after things have been in the press for a while, et cetera. And this says, “Well, what if we address a bigger group of chemicals and all the retailers do it at the same time? They could really make a very big difference.”
And they do care about what their customers are asking them to do.
So, we hope that it’s a way for people to not just look out for yourself by not buying this or that, but also to take a bigger action, help by focusing on the retailers that will protect broader groups of people from more chemicals.
DEBRA: Very good. So when we come back from the break, I’m going to ask you some questions about this list of the Hazardous 100 chemicals and how—well, I’ll wait and ask you the question when we come back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with Andy Igrejas from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And we’re talking about the Mind the Store campaign in which they’re asking the top 10 retailers to remove products from their shelves that contain some of a list of 100+ hazardous chemicals.
So Andy, let’s talk about these 100+ hazardous chemicals. Here’s my question. I’ve been looking at products for more than 30 years as you have. And the biggest problem that I have is disclosure. I can look at a label. And if they give me the names of the chemicals, I can look up those chemicals.
I used to look them up in a chemical dictionary and toxicology books. But now, you can just look them up online. You could type in “formaldehyde” and “BPA” and find out what the health effects are.
And yet, because of regulations, and because of trade secrets, and all kinds of other reasons, there can be toxic chemicals in products that are never going on the label. You can find them out in ways by looking at trade journals and things like that (which I’ve been doing all this time). But there are so many differences between formulas and materials that are used. And the labels are not accurate.
So, if I were a retailer, I could say, “Okay, I’m totally in agreement with you with your Mind the Store program. Let’s just get rid of the Hazardous 100 chemicals. How am I going to do that?”
Andy Igrejas: They have some experience with this already. So, Wal-Mart, when it first started getting involved in this issue, and I’ve talked with them—some directly, and then their colleagues have dealt with that more. And then there are some things they talk about freely and others I think that they’re proprietary about. They’re motivated partly to get in front of consumer preferences so they didn’t have another thing like they had with those BPA baby bottles where the market evaporated for it, and they had already bought next year’s baby bottles. They also had, from my understanding, some environmental compliance issues where, believe it or not, they were—and this makes sense as a bunch of your listeners do. They would get rid of some inventory as solid wastes. And some of it turned out to actually classify as toxic waste because of chemicals in it. And it made them think, “My God! How does this work? Who’s minding the store?” And they realized that they had to.
So, in terms of how they would do this, they’ve shown that, especially with the market power they have, but I think also for the other people on this list, they can actually say to their suppliers, “Hey, we need to know if you’re using any of these chemicals.”
And it’s a bulletin they can send out to all their suppliers, “Do any of the products that we buy from you have this list of chemicals? We need to know. And if they do, we’re going to ask you to stop using them by this date or we won’t want to sell your product.”
And they have done that kind of thing. A couple of years, it became publicized. They sent a note to their suppliers about a number of different flame retardant chemicals. And it leaked to the press. But it was basically issued in December and said, “By June, we don’t want any product that contains these chemicals in it.”
DEBRA: I love that that’s been happening at Wal-Mart. I know people who work at Wal-Mart, so I know that that’s been happening. Kudos to Wal-Mart for doing that.
But on the consumer end, when I walk into my Wal-Mart store—which is not that often, but I do occasionally go to Wal-Mart.
And if I do, I’m looking to see where are the non-toxic products and how would I know that?
And as a consumer…
Andy Igrejas: You wouldn’t.
DEBRA: I mean there’s no label on it that says “Wal-Mart has determined that these chemicals are not in here.”
I’m trying to see the connection between how we can—like you have a coalition of different organizations and interest groups and bringing them altogether around legislation. This is so interesting to me that you’re doing this because I really see that, in order for this really to change, there needs to be a cooperation between consumers, retailers, manufacturers and regulations.
Andy Igrejas: That’s right.
DEBRA: …and that there needs to be communication, that there needs to be a decision that we’re all going to come out of this together in a way that makes economic sense.
I’m certainly not trying to make Dupont go bankrupt. What I would love is for Dupont to start making non-toxic products. I would like everybody to see that if we’re going to be healthy, and if we’re going to have a planet that’s not destroyed, then this is the direction that we need to go—to have there be disclosure on labels, to have there be—
I don’t really want there to be a central organization that verifies. But if Wal-Mart has a program—and I see that they do—where they’re saying to manufacturers, “We don’t want products that have X, Y and Z chemicals on them,” then somewhere, you should be able to go to their website or something, and there should be a list or a shelf-talker or a sticker or something that says, “This is part of Wal-Mart’s Mind the Store program” or whatever they’re going to call it. “You can go online and find out we have verified that it doesn’t have this and this and this in it.
Now, it might not end up being perfect because one thing that I see is that I have my own list of hazardous thousand or more chemicals that I don’t want to see because I’m always assessing products and choosing ones that don’t have the chemicals I want to avoid.
So, I can see that a product might say, “Well, it doesn’t contain formaldehyde. But what else does it contain?”
So there’s many different levels. I’m just really interested in what if Target comes to you and says, “Okay, let’s take out all these chemicals” or some smaller retailer than Wal-Mart, what do you see is the process that they’re going to follow?
Andy Igrejas: That is a good question. And I think it’s a more sophisticated question. It makes sense for Toxic Free Talk Radio that you’ll be ahead on the curve on this. I think you’ve put your finger on a number of things.
I think one of them is consumers have a certain amount of power, but one of our themes for this campaign is with great market power comes great responsibility. People who buy huge quantities of things in bulk has market power. So it is the case with any one of this retailers. In their world, they really have the ability to get answers to the questions that they want if the penalty is that they won’t sell something.
What we would like to do is have each of them respond that they would like to work with us on how to implement this in ways that are achievable for them and are meaningful for the people that sell to them.
So, we’re hoping to have a meaningful process where we can work this through with them.
DEBRA: Good! After the break, let’s continue this […] because I’d like to hear if anybody has responded; and if so, what did they say?
But we’re going to take a break first. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You’re here with Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m talking with Andy Igrejas from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families about their Mind the Store campaign.
And before we go on with the interview, I just want to make sure that you know how to get more information about the campaign. You go MindtheStore.org. And if you want more information about Toxic Free Talk Radio, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And from there, you can also go to links for other parts of my website including Debra’s List that have more than 500 websites where you can buy non-toxic products (even though they’re not on the shelf at Wal-Mart). I have a huge Q&A with thousands of questions and even more thousands of answers. And you can call me for a consultation if you want. There’s lots of information on my website about how you can find, choose and purchase and toxic-free products.
So, Andy, in this last segment, tell us what the response has been from the retailers. Anybody responded?
Hello, Andy?
Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize, I hit the mute by mistake.
None of the retailers have responded officially yet except to say that they have the request and that they’re considering it. In our letter to them, we gave until June 1st. And we recognize that it’s a big request. It’s a leap from doing this for a handful of chemicals to doing it for over a hundred. And we wouldn’t want to get a negative response because it seems like we were asking them to do something impossible and let them absorb some of the materials and other things that we’ve provided that do show or suggest how to do this.
So, June 1st is when we’ll find out what people’s official responses are. And I’m hoping that they’ll be positive responses and that that’ll be the beginning of a process with us to develop a policy internally to identify where they have these chemicals in their supply chains and to move away from them.
But you raised a point before. You asked them what the response was. I just wanted to come back to it. It was the idea that, even if you get something that doesn’t just have formaldehyde, what does it have. On the website, you’ll see there’s a bullet called Resources for Retailers . It’s very much about this phenomenon. We don’t just want to move from known bad to unknowns. You want to move from known bad things to known good things.
DEBRA: Let me interrupt you for a second. Hold on, wait. I’m looking at your page right now at MindtheStore.org, and I don’t see that Resources for Retailers.
Andy Igrejas: It’s over on the right. There’s a list of The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100. Then it that it says Resources for Retailers.
DEBRA: Oh, mine says “Why Mind the Store?” I don’t have “Resources for Retailers”. I have The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100+, And Why Mind the Store?. I have A Letter to Retailers.
Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. If you click on any one of those, that becomes a choice for you. It’s not on the home page.
DEBRA: Oh, I see. So, listeners, what you need to do is click on any one of those three buttons. It’ll take you to another page.
And then, there’s a menu on the right that has The Top 10 Retailers, Hazardous 100+, Why Mind the Store Resources for Retailers, Methodology and Partners.
And so, there’s a lot more information inside once you click on something than there is on the home page.
Okay, thank you, Andy. Go ahead.
Andy Igrejas: Well, part of the reason we know this works is the most advanced experienced in this country anyway with this kind of thing has been with the healthcare sector, in particular, Kaiser Permanente and the Western States version of the Catholic HMO’s. They used to be called Catholic Healthcare West. Now it’s called [unclear 32:08].
And they, as part of their mission to reduce harm to their patients—first, do no harm—they put policies together to try and at first just identify the chemicals of concern that people were exposed to through medical devices like IV tubing and IV bags.
But they [unclear 32:30] to include the building materials in the facilities—the sheets, the fabrics, and now they’re even getting on to the food that they serve.
They sent these specifications that, basically, “We have all these purchasing power as Kaiser and as Catholic Healthcare West in this market. And we don’t want things that have these chemicals of concern.”
But also, when you don’t bring those things, you also want to make sure that what you’re replacing it with doesn’t have any of these characteristics.
And so, they set those specifications. And they specified what the standards were for what they substitute it with. And it was interesting. it had this ripple effect. It’s changed the marketplace and increased the market for safer building materials, flooring, carpeting, medical devices.
And so, in the Resources thing, you’ll see that there’s something from a group called the Business NGO Working Group (or Biz NGO for short). It’s a guide for how to implement this kind of policy. And it mostly comes from that healthcare experience.
And so, we’re trying to take something that has worked and some techniques that have worked, just some very practical things, and have the retailers use them in a broader way and apply them to a broader set of chemicals.
DEBRA: This is very good news. I really want our listeners to understand that, behind the scenes, there’s a whole lot going on to make the world a less toxic place to live. And what we mostly see in the mainstream media is sensational stories about BPA and phthalates and fire retardants and all those kinds of things because the mainstream media is pretty sensational.
But there really has been progress if you know where to look. We have things like Kaiser Permanente like Andy just described. And we have more non-toxic products to choose from. And there really is a trend.
Wouldn’t you say there’s a trend in the right direction?
Andy Igrejas: I do feel and believe there is a trend. It’s hard to measure if it is keeping up with the problem. In other words…
DEBRA: I understand what you’re saying.
Andy Igrejas: But I think there is a trend. I think part of this little letter that I wrote on this book that I called Why Mind the Store? is that I think we need to accelerate the trend. The thing you just described, which is a real difficult thing for activists when you’re being ethical. We want to educate the public about these threats, but kind of like you mentioned, it’s just another story about how there’s something bad in something. And it seem like you can’t do anything about it and the world is coming to an end. That’s very much not what we want.
We want to educate people so they’re aware of the problem and they can take meaningful action to help improve things.
I think a lot of these improvements hopefully do have to happen through policy changes because only the government can force the testing of those chemicals as a condition for them depending on the market.
But in the meantime, we have seen that these marketplace initiatives can really make a big difference. But they need to be more than just the chemical of the month. It can’t just be “Well, BPA is in the news. So okay, we’ll deal with BPA.”
So, that’s what we’d like to think. We’re making it easier for the retailers to basically go, “Oh, okay. Here’s this combined fire power of a lot of the non-profit community. They’re saying ‘focus on this group of chemicals’. They’re giving us credit for what we’ve already done. And we’re giving consumers a hook to also say, “Well, here’s a way to use the [unclear 36:20] as a consumer and focus on something bigger than the chemical of the month.”
And so, we’re hopeful that we can accelerate that trend you’ve described. We have a trend, but I think the trend, it needs to be accelerated to really match the scale of what is worth doubling back to that the scientists, the doctors keep telling us more and more that we’ve been they think understating the role that chemicals play in the chronic illness and the health problems that we have in this country.
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely! A few years ago when Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families first started, you published a really excellent report about how toxic chemicals are contributing to various health problems and the cost of how toxic chemicals are contributing to the cost of healthcare which I have been linking and linking and linking and linking to ever since.
Andy Igrejas: Thank you.
DEBRA: It’s so important for people to understand that. I think that—not to get off the subject—a lot of people still don’t even understand that there’s a problem.
But we only just have a couple of minutes left. So I want to encourage people to go to your website, MindtheStore.org. I encourage you to go on and look at the website for Safety Chemicals, Healthy Families is doing overall.
And as we finish up—we have a minute left I think, about a minute left—just tell us quickly what consumers can do in our every day lives. What can we do to help this?
Andy Igrejas: I think the basic thing is that we know make a difference for reducing your own chemical exposure are things you probably go over a lot in this show. There’s avoiding processed food because the packaging is a big source of chemical exposure; eating more whole foods (organic ones if you can get them easily and afford them).
There’s a certain big ticket things like the flame retardants. So, buying mattresses and furniture that don’t have these flame retardants in them, avoiding the chemical-intensive cleaners and cosmetics, those are things you can do to protect yourself.
There’s a bunch of resources. It sounds like you have the best catalog of anyone.
DEBRA: I think I do.
Andy Igrejas: But I think in the meantime…
DEBRA: [unclear 38:36] in the marketplace, in terms of the marketplace, helping retailers understand. You can go to MindtheStore.org. And right there, you can send a letter to the retailers. You can put in your first name, your last name, your email and your zip code. Just click the green arrow and send your letter.
Andy, thank you so much for being with us today. I’ve learned a lot about what you’re doing. I have more appreciation of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families as an organization. And I’ll talk to everybody tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we’re going to just have open phones. So I want to hear from all of you. I want you to call me and tell me what you’re concerned about, what your questions are.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Allergy to Hemp Fabric?
Question from Donna
Hi Debra, Have you ever heard of anyone being allergic to hemp fabric?
I had some organic hemp/tencel roman shades made for my son’s room, as he has asthma. The first night we installed the shades, he started wheezing. He slept in our room the next two nights and was fine. We put him back in his room, and he started wheezing again. The pediatrician said it’s the pollen (it’s pollen season here), but I think it’s the shades. The designer who made the shades said that they are completely organic and not treated with any chemical, but when the sun shines on them, I can smell a very faint, sweet odor.
Thank you! Donna
Debra’s Answer
Anyone can be allergic to anything, particularly if it is a natural material. And if you say that there is a faint sweet odor when the sun shines on it, it sounds like hemp to me.
Hemp used in fabric and marijuana the drug are both the same plant, but they are grown differently for their different purposes. Hemp grown for fabric and other product uses contains very little THC, the substance that makes you high in the drug marijuana.
The bottom line is, if the windowcoverings are making your son wheeze, take them down.
Why You Need a Water Filter and the Water Filter I Use in My Home
Because our bodies need pure water to eliminate toxic chemicals, we each need to have an effective water filter for good health. Igor Milevskiy runs Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters, a small, family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters which remove fluoride, radiation, and pharmaceuticals as well as chlorine, chloramine, lead, and other common pollutants…at an affordable price. We’ll be talking about pollutants in your tap water, how they can affect your health, and how to choose a water filter that will remove them. Even if you have a water filter, it may not be removing water pollutants as effectively as you think. Also find out how you can pay for your filter by selling these exceptional filters to others (and there’s no fee to join). www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/pureeffect-filters
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH IGOR MILEVSKIY
- The Best Water Filter Now Disinfects & Breaks Down Even Hard-to-Remove Pollutants
- The Best Water Filter Just Got Even Better
- Are You Drinking Enough Water for the Sweaty Days of Summer?
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Best Water Filter Just Got Even Better
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Igor Milevskiy
Date of Broadcast: March 19, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free because there’s so many toxic chemicals around in the world. We don’t have to become ill by them. We don’t have to be exposed to them. There are a lot of things that we can do to reduce our exposure and remove toxic chemicals from our body so that we can be healthy and happy and productive and enjoy life. And that’s why we do the show.
Today is Wednesday, March 19th 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining. There’s flowers outside my window. And today, we’re going to be talking about water filters, how to get pure water. It doesn’t come out of your tap.
My guest is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy. He’s the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. It’s a small family-owned company that makes exceptional water filters, which remove fluoride, radiation, pharmaceuticals as well as chlorine, chloramines, sled and other common pollutants. And the thing that’s amazing about this is not only does it do all that, but it’s an affordable filter. It doesn’t cause thousands and thousands of dollars.
This is such a good filter that I have one in my own house. I’ve had it for over a year. I love it. A lot of my readers have purchased them too. I get lots of emails from people telling me, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. This water is great.” You just need to change the cartridges about once a year and they are also affordable.
IGOR MELVSKIY just developed a new carbon cartridge, which is amazing. And so we’re going to be talking about that today, but we’re also just going to be talking about water filtration in general and the kinds of things that are effective and not effective. Hi, IGOR MELVSKIY.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Hi, Debra. Nice to talk with you again.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thanks for being on again. I know you’ve been on before, but tell us (because I know we probably have a lot of new listeners here) how you got interested in water.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Well, in my younger years, I was always interested in aquariums. I was an aquarium hobbyist. And with fish, they’re really sensitive to water changes. So I had to make sure that I really understood the chemistry of the water and kept it on top shape.
Many years of taking care of fish taught me about the need for proper water balance and chemistry in these particular animals. So with myself then, I began to realize, “Well, why am I not really looking at water that I’m drinking?” And so I started to research.
DEBRA: Yeah, good question.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah! I took care of the fish, but I wasn’t really drinking the water that was that clean myself. So I started to look into water filters and do a lot of research just like anybody else who comes to realize that something is wrong with tap water.
I’ve tested a lot of filters, I’ve gotten to the chemistry of it all and I realized there was not a solution in the marketplace that took care of all the contaminants I wanted to filter out. There was not an all-in-one filter that took care of fluoride, chloramines, chlorines, drug residues, radiation and also adjusted the pH to make the water more alkaline. So the idea was born to create something, like an all-in-one, high performance filter system.
DEBRA: And you did an excellent job at that.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Thank you.
DEBRA: Yeah, there’s so much that we can talk about. I’m just thinking where should we start. So let’s just talk about the different pollutants. Why don’t you give an overview of the different pollutants because I think that a lot of people understand that their tap water isn’t very pure, but they don’t know where to start in terms of getting a water filter that’s effective.
They see advertisements for inexpensive filters that you just put on your faucet or pitcher filters and they think that that’s enough. So would you give us the different pollutants and also, the different types and to divide into their different types?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Sure! Well first, I’d like to start by saying that the laws for cleaning water, for filtering water are outdated. So, the water treatment centers are legally not required to deal with the contaminants that are emerging now more and more often. For example, drug residues that have been found in over 40 million households in the United States.
So that’s the first problem. The laws are outdated and we’re already getting water that’s not fully clean as well as it should be.
But even if the laws were updated, you would have problems still because the water still needs to be disinfected before it reaches your home. As it passes through the plumbing and the pipes, it needs to contain some kind of a disinfectant so there’s no bacteria or mold or things like that.
So even if they cleaned it well at the treatment center, they would still add and introduce new chemicals after the treatment and those include chlorine, chloramines, which is a more persistent disinfectant that they’re using now. It’s a combination of chlorine and ammonia. It lasts a lot longer in the water system, but because of that, it’s a lot harder to remove. It doesn’t evaporate as quickly as chlorine.
They also introduced fluoride into the water, pH stabilizers, rust inhibitors to prevent pipes from rusting. There’s a lot of chemicals involved even in the treatment process itself that the best idea to deal with that is to filter the water right out of your faucet.
DEBRA: That really is necessary. I used to think many, many years ago, “Why don’t they just send us clean water?” And as you just explained, they can’t because it could be absolutely pristine when it leaves the water treatment plant, but by the time it goes through the whole system of pipes – and I don’t even know how many miles of pipe it is from the water treatment center to my house, but it’s a lot of pipe. All those pipes are already contaminated with other things. They may have bacteria in them. They may have all these different kinds of things.
Water is called the universal solvent because it will pick up whatever it passes by. And so if you were to send that very clean water through a pipe and have it pick up bacteria and rust and whatever else is in there, then it will be very polluted by the time it gets to your tap.
So really, every single house needs to have a water filter – every single house. There’s no way around it because you cannot get clean water from your tap period. You just can’t.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes.
DEBRA: Everybody has a refrigerator, everybody has a stove, everybody should just have a water filter.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, that’s the right thing to do if you care about your health and you don’t want to drink chlorinated water. I’m not a medical specialist, but I’ve read some studies that chlorine, because it kills bacteria (and also chloramines) could also interfere when you drink that water with the stomach balance of bacteria that is good for you like probiotic.
DEBRA: Right! All those bacteria, they are bacteria that are sensitive to chlorine and chloramines. And so in order to digest your food, you need to have all those probiotic bacteria there. People take probiotics and then they drink tap water…
IGOR MELVSKIY: …which kill bacteria.
DEBRA: …which kill the bacteria – not only does it kill the bacteria that is already just naturally in your gut, but it kills those expensive probiotics that you just took with that glass of water that has chlorine and chloramine in it.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes.
DEBRA: This is just really something that we really have to watch out for. And also, chlorine and chloramines can get absorbed through your skin when you take a shower and go into your body in the same way. So it’s more drinking. We really have to look at the total picture of our water quality and we can put water filters on our faucets.
Let’s just talk about the three styles. Go ahead and describe them. Otherwise, I’m just going to talk through the whole interview.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, you mean our bestselling Ultra filter that have the chambers?
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah, the countertop, under-sink and whole house.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Well, those are as I’ve mentioned earlier in the program the all-in-one high performance system that’s our bestselling unit, the Pure Effect Ultra. We also have an under-counter version, the Ultra-UC, which installs out of sight. And also, we have a whole house version that cleans the water to your whole home – shower, bath water. Even the water you use to garden can be cleaned.
Now, each of those systems has various stages of how it filters the water and they’re scientifically correct stages. The water gets treated properly. The first stage the water goes through is our newest innovation as you mentioned earlier. We’ve created a new carbon block, which is made out of two types of activated carbon. Your audience may know activated carbon is one of the best substances to absorb chemicals.
DEBRA: Actually, I need to interrupt you because you’re going to give us a long explanation here and we need to go to break. So let’s take the break and then you can come back and talk as much as you want.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy from Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. We’re talking about portable effective filters. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy, founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. Actually, what you should do is you should go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and in the right sidebar, there’s a little ad that says the water filter I use in my home. Click on that and that will be the easiest way for you to get to his website and see the filter that I use.
So IGOR MELVSKIY, before you go on, I want you to start over describing your filter, but I just want to give another example so that listeners can compare what you’re offering with what a lot of people are using. So let’s just talk about the regular pitcher type filter or the type that goes on a faucet and all that’s in there is carbon, regular carbon and not very much of it.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Right, very small amount.
DEBRA: Very small amount.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah.
DEBRA: What happens with carbon is that it will ‘adsorb’ – I know, people think that I’ve misspoken “It’s absorbed,” but no. It’s ‘adsorb’. It means that the pollutants, it will draw the pollutants in.
But what happens and what most people don’t realize is that when all the little pores in the carbon – that’s like a sponge, it’s like a hard sponge. There’s all these little pores that the water goes through and the pollutant molecules get caught. What happens is that when all of the little spaces are filled and the water comes through, it starts releasing the molecules of pollutants that it has gathered back into the water.
So if you only have a little bit of carbon or you don’t change your filters, you’ll start re-polluting your water. And so if you have just a little, tiny carbon filter like in a pitcher or on a faucet and you just leave it there for six months or something, you’re just making your water more and more polluted instead of removing the pollutants.
Now, that’s what those inexpensive filters are like. Now, listen to what IGOR MELVSKIY has put together.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Okay! So we packed all those concerns into our unit. The first chamber in our systems features a carbon block that’s about 10” in length. It actually combines two types of high-grade catalytic carbon. What ‘catalytic’ means is it decomposes chemicals in contact. It’s a much higher grade of carbon than just regular activated carbon you may get in pitcher filters and little faucet filters.
You need catalytic carbon to deal with, for example, chloramines. Regular filters are not going to remove that very well.
DEBRA: No. That’s why people should recognize that two different kinds of substances are being used. You either have chlorine or you have chloramines, which is the mixture of chlorine and ammonia. The carbon that removes chlorine is different from the carbon that removes chloramines. And so you need to make sure that you get the right one. I think yours removes both, right?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Exactly! It removes both. And because we’ve combined two types of activated carbon – as you know, carbon can be from coconut shell, wood-based or coal-based. We’ve combined two of the best types, which have different pore sizes, as you’ve mentioned earlier, for the adsorption. They have different pore structures and what we achieved was a wide range of pores from micro to meso to macropores, which capture a super wide range of different chemical molecules that can be found in the water.
DEBRA: That’s just amazing! I just love that.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah! Yeah, yeah. So that’s the first stages. It’s all a half a micron compression. So all these carbon is compressed into half a micro pore size as far as the granules of the carbon (we’re not talking about the micro pores of the carbon itself). So the block is half a micron, which is extremely fine. It also blocks microbial cysts like Giardia and Clyptospiridium, which survive the disinfection process. They have a hard shell, so it blocks those and sends the water on to the next stage for fluoride removal, which is another big one that a lot of mainstream companies don’t address like the Brita or Pure. I don’t believe they’ve removed these…
DEBRA: No, they don’t remove any fluoride. And even some of the other companies, I looked at a lot of water filters and I say, “Well, why don’t you remove fluoride?” and they say, “Oh, well that would make it too expensive.”
But I guarantee you that this is an affordable filter because I’ve looked at al of them.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, and you don’t have to replace the cartridges so soon with the little faucet filters. You have to replace them almost every two months.
DEBRA: Right, you do.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, and you’re not getting as good of a filtration.
DEBRA: No. Absolutely, you aren’t. Have you ever added up the cost of those little filters in comparison to yours? Probably yours is a little more expensive, I’m guessing, but it’s so much better.
IGOR MELVSKIY: It could be. Yeah, to be honest, I haven’t done that, but I’ve heard a lot of complaints from people – I have complaints myself when I use those filters. They clog very quickly because they’re so small. And number one, they don’t remove fluoride, especially the pitcher filters. They’re inconvenient because you have to wait for the water to filter. I have to wait for it to drop down. Whereas with our system, it’s virtually instant. Turn on the filter and you have water coming right out the spout.
DEBRA: Yes. So go on with the different cartridges you have.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Okay! So as I’ve mentioned, after the first dual carbon block, the water goes on to the fluoride stage where it removes the fluoride using an all-natural media. There’s not many companies that remove fluoride, the ones that do usually use aluminum-based media. We don’t. We use the carbon calcium base media as well that reacts with fluoride and safely takes it out of the water).
And as that happens, the water moves on to the third phase where we have a nuclear grade zeolite. What that means is that it’s especially processed mineral that has been shown to remove radiation infused by nuclear facilities worldwide. We also have that feature in the system. Especially if you’re living in the west coast or by a nuclear plant or by a weapons development facility or even if you’re on well water that may have naturally occurring plutonium or uranium, it’s a good idea to have this in a water filter if you’re drinking this water. And so we have that and as well as heavy metal removal media in that last stage.
So combining all these technologies, we also reduce the water flow to a certain rate so it’s not going through the system so quick. You get quite the pure effect.
DEBRA: Yes, you do. Sorry, I was laughing and I took this big breath of air. We need to go to break, but you did a very good job putting that right into that time period and getting all those points in.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Right.
DEBRA: So we’re going to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy, founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. If you want to go to his website, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page until you see the little ad that says the water filter I use in my home. You can click right there and get right to his website. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy. He is the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. He has some of the most amazing water filters that I’ve ever seen and I’ve been looking at water filters for over 30 years. He’s thought of some new things.
IGOR MELVSKIY, I want to talk about the alkalinity of the water because you’ve done some special things to adjust the pH of the water and there are some other units available where people are really stressing about drinking alkaline water that’s very, very alkaline.
I know myself, I put my water through an alkalizer for five or six years and I drank alkaline water. For me personally, it didn’t seem to do some of the things that were claimed to do, which is why I started drinking it in the first place. But I have just been drinking your water for over a year and my body likes it much better.
So tell us about what you do, but first explain what pH is because I think a lot of people don’t know.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Okay, yeah. pH is the power of hydrogen. It’s a measure of how acidic or alkaline the water is. In other words, how much minerals can be present in the water or be absent from the water as well.
In nature, generally, the pH of the water is alkaline. It’s not heavily alkaline, but it’s alkaline because the water contains minerals like electrolytes like sodium, potassium and calcium. What this does is it creates a buffer within the water structure, so the water is not reactive anymore. It’s not hungry anymore. If you take acidic water, it can corrode metal. If you take water that’s properly balanced that has an alkaline pH, it’s actually not going to be a corrosive agent anymore to such a degree.
As far as the body goes, you do need the minerals and drinking acidic water isn’t good. So this is why we have natural calcium in our system. What it does is it treats the water with trace amounts of calcium that help raise that pH naturally.
Those machines you mentioned, those other types of water ionizers, they do it artificially. They use electricity, which our system doesn’t. We don’t use electricity with our filters. And it uses metal plates to create an electrochemical reaction to generate those ions, which who knows the long-term effects of that type of water is.
We like to look at nature as our blueprint. In nature, we find natural minerals. And so we try to replicate that process as much as possible in our water filter.
I agree! And yes, the machine that I had in the past did have metal plates and the water was actually in contact with them and they put electrical charge into the water. I like your system much better. The water feels right in my body. From the very first glass that I drank, I thought, “Oh, this feels so much better.” My body just wants to drink it.
And you know, when my friends come over to my house, I give them a glass of water. And every single one, when they drink your water, they say, “Wow! What is this water?”
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes! And one of our customers actually started a little business that’s selling the water to people in an area. They’re filtering it for them and they’re selling it for them because they like it so much.
DEBRA: Oh, I should do that. I should do that.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah. In some cities, you can go and buy filtered water, but it’s usually reverse osmosis, which is lacking minerals. It takes the minerals out.
DEBRA: Wow! What a great idea. And probably anybody listening could buy a filter and set that up and it will pay for your filter or share it with your neighbors or whatever – your neighbors on side going on a filter. It’s just so worth it to have clean water. It really is, it really is.
IGOR MELVSKIY: I know! And an interesting thing that I noticed is that some of our customers who have pets like cats and dogs, they wrote a review for us for the filter and they noticed that even their animals are drinking more water after it’s been filtered more than the usual that they’ve been drinking.
So to me, that’s a sign because animals, they know that something’s right or not right. They have a sense.
DEBRA: They do.
IGOR MELVSKIY: That was a good sign for me to see that as well.
DEBRA: Well, I’ll tell you that everyone of my friends that has come to my house and drank my water has purchased a filer because they could really see the difference. I had friends who are like drinking bottled water out of plastic bottles and things like this. Now, I just go to my friend’s house and I look around and I see, “What are they doing for water?” I tell them that they should buy these filters. I have had not one complaint about your filters in all the filters that have been sold to people that I know or my readers in the last year, a little over a year – not one complaint.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Ah, that’s great to hear.
DEBRA: Yeah, you’re doing a great job. I can’t say often enough how thrilled I am with this.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Thank you, thank you. Quality is our main goal as well, to make sure that it’s a quality built system that is not going to fall apart on you. We don’t use any Chinese components or anything. All the parts are US made. So it’s a really high performance, high quality unit you can depend on.
DEBRA: Mine has had absolutely no problems at all. I also want ot say that it is easy to install and it also was easy to change the cartridges.
Some people who I’ve asked who – because I say I have a little write-up in my website and I make a big deal about how I like this filter so much, I was willing to drill a house in my granite countertops who have written to me and said –
I should say, the rest of that story was I was so skeptical about this filter when I got it that I didn’t want to drill a hole in my countertop because what if I didn’t like it and wanted to take it out? So I installed it out in the garage in my laundry sink, so that I could preserve my granite countertop. I got so tired of going out to the garage to get my water that I…
IGOR MELVSKIY: I remember that.
DEBRA: I just drove a hole in the countertop because I thought I want this filter to stay. I want it to be right here and I’m not going to take it out. I’m just going to drink this water and keep putting in the cartridges because it has such a beneficial effect in my body. And everybody else likes it too. It’s pretty amazing.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, yes. I’m glad I can present such a wonderful solution and you recognize the value of such a product and you’ve added it as a permanent fixture to your kitchen, so that’s a lot.
DEBRA: Well, what I want to say though is some people have said that they don’t want to drill a hole in their countertop, can they still have a filter. The answer is yes. The same components are in a countertop filter that you can put on your countertop and you don’t have to drill any holes in. You don’t have to install it. It just goes on the countertop.
And also, if you’re renting, you don’t need to damage the countertop or you can take it with you when you move. And if you have your own home, you can put in a whole house filter, which as IGOR MELVSKIY said before filters all the water in your house.
I have a whole house filter myself, but this filter does a better job and I’m going to swap it out and get one of IGOR MELVSKIY’s whole house filters. But I also have one on my drinking water and that’s the first one that I bought.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Wonderful!
DEBRA: We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy. He’s the founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is IGOR MELVSKIY Milevskiy, founder of Pure Effect Advanced Water Filters. They’re a small family-owned company that makes these water filters that we’ve been discussing. He’s not a large conglomerate. He doesn’t get his components from China.
I get this impression that you order these parts, IGOR MELVSKIY and you put them together by hand?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes, for the most part. Some of them already come pre-assembled. It depends on what part we’re talking about. But often, the case is yes, there’s a lot of involvement with these systems and they’re quality made.
So they’re in limited quantities. Sometimes, we’ll go out of stock like right now, we’re out of stock for a little bit until next week because it takes time and effort to make a quality system. You can’t rush it. So this is definitely something that we put a lot of attention into.
DEBRA: In years past, I used to start off my discussion of water filters by saying, “The first thing that you need to do is get your water tested so that you can find out what kind of filter you need because different types of pollutants are removed by different types of filters.”
And so heavy metal, for example, which is a particle requires something different than say chloramines, which is a gas. But would you say that your filter is universal like that somebody could pretty reliably just put it in their home, their faucet – and I don’t want to say ‘put it on their faucet’, but install it in their home – and it would remove whatever’s in their water?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Generally, yes. It’s designed to fit the widest range of different water types because it’s the media used and the amounts of media we use. It’s not a small system. It’s not overly large. It easily sits on a counter. But it’s bigger than the typical little faucet filter you look at or the pitcher filter. It’s a real machine.
DEBRA: It really is. And one of the things I don’t think we’ve said that I think listeners should understand is that you do need to have the effectiveness of the media. It has to do with contact time too. If the water is only in contact with a small amount of filter media for a short period of time, you’re not going to get as much removal of the pollutant as if there’s a longer contact time. This is a larger system than just the little half inch filter that’s on the faucet one or in a filter. And so the water is going down like through a foot of filtered media or so. Is that right?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Oh, yes. Yes, yes. And that’s just one chamber. We have three chambers of different media. We have three types of activated carbon in the system. It’s all U.S. made cartridges, so it’s very high quality controls on the media. We don’t source, like I mentioned before anything from China.
And we also have four regulator built into the system, which makes sure that if the water that’s going in too fast, it slows it down. So in addition to have enough media, we also slow the water flow down on purpose.
So you could fill a regular cup in about eight seconds. But most other filters on the market, probably four or five seconds, but the water is going through it much faster, which is not a good thing. And without a filter, you don’t get that.
DEBRA: Yeah, it is a little slower than tap water. I mean, the one that I have that is the under-sink one has that little auxiliary faucet that you put. That’s why you have to drill a hole in your countertop, to put in that little faucet. You just flip the little lever –
And actually, one of the things I like about yours, IGOR MELVSKIY is that you can swing the faucet around, so it can go into the sink or it can go over towards the countertop. And what I’ll do is I’ll just put my measuring pot or my teapot or whatever. I’ll just sit in the countertop and flip your little auxiliary faucet towards the countertops so that I don’t even have to hold it.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes, yes. It’s a makeshift [inaudible 00:43:23], exactly.
DEBRA: And that was very clever that you did that because I don’t think the other ones do that. I don’t remember that from the faucet.
IGOR MELVSKIY: It depends on the faucet that you’re using. We use very high-grade faucets that are well-designed. It’s all meant to really simplify your life and give you some good water.
DEBRA: Yup, yup. So I want to talk about minerals because minerals are important to our health and yet, most water filters remove minerals. And yours doesn’t.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, the common systems out there, the mainstream knowledge – you know, a lot of people get a reverse osmosis systems. Generally, reverse osmosis is designed to create ultra pure water that’s devoid of all the minerals for specific purposes like electronics, manufacturing and medical substance manufacturing where you cannot have any competing ions or minerals in the water. But somehow, that technology made its way into the drinking water.
DEBRA: But that’s industrial. That’s making industrial water, reverse osmosis.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, exactly. And you’re not factoring in the wholesome properties of water. You can’t barbarically treat water and remove just everything. You have to do it intelligently and make sure that the water is resembling something that is found in nature, something that we’ve evolved with – and that’s water with minerals and electrolytes.
We’ve always drank it, humans have drank it through all of history. There’s some information that if you’re drinking acidic water that doesn’t have inerals I it, that it could actually leech minerals out of the body. I’m not sure how.
DEBRA: I’ve seen that.
IGOR MELVSKIY: I’m not sure how accurate that is, but there is some research on that as well.
DEBRA: Well, that makes sense to me because as we said before, water is the universal solvent and so if it’s very, very pure in your body, then it can leech things.
Also, isn’t reverse osmosis water pretty acidic?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yes because it removes the minerals that has a membrane that just blocks just about everything, but the water molecule.
And also, it stores the water in a steel tank, which stales it. I don’t like to store water in stale materials because it creates a staler taste. And also, it rejects at least two gallons of water to filter one. Think about that, you’re doubling your water usage, your water waste because you have a reverse osmosis unit for example.
So there’s downsides to it. Our system doesn’t have any of those downsides. There’s no water waste, there’s no steel stale storage tanks to worry about. It’s very simple. It’s on demand. You flip the switch and you have clean water.
DEBRA: Amazing!
IGOR MELVSKIY: And another aspect is you save money. You don’t have to buy bottles anymore.
DEBRA: You know, I think – I haven’t figured this out, but I think that someone could save – like for the price of what they pay for bottled water for a year, they could probably buy your filter.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, if you’re using…
DEBRA: Have you ever worked that out?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Yeah, I forgot the calculation, but I think it comes out to like ¢119 a gallon with our system once you filter it. As far as reverse osmosis, the cost of the replacement cartridge, this comes out to about ¢19 a gallon to use our system as opposed to paying $1 or $2 a gallon for water in a plastic jug from a store that has petrochemicals potentially leeching phthalates and who knows what else that’s not been discovered yet coming off that plastic.
DEBRA: Yeah, all those things coming off the bottle, yeah. So if you want bottled water – I carry bottled water with me, but I put it on a glass bottle. I tie a bandana around it so that it doesn’t – like if I bang it against something, it has a little buffer to it. I just carry your water around in my own bottles, in my own glass bottles. And I think that’s much better than plastic bottles. People really don’t understand how much plastic is on the water. There really is –
Water, again, water is the universal solvent. And if you put water in plastic, it’s going to leech.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Especially if the company is putting it in plastics. Some of them use reverse osmosis water, which is water that’s so-called empty. It doesn’t have minerals. So it’s more reactive to absorb things into itself. So if you have water that’s reverse osmosis treated in a plastic bottle, it’s going to absorb more plastic.
DEBRA: It will. It will, it will, it will especially if it’s sitting out in the sun in front of a convenient store.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Oh, yeah, exactly. Have you had a drink of water from the car after you’ve left it in the bottle for a while?
DEBRA: Yes! It tastes terrible.
IGOR MELVSKIY: You can really taste that plastic especially on a summer day.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. IGOR MELVSKIY, we only have a couple of minutes left. Thank you so much for being with me today. Is there anything that you want to say that we haven’t covered?
IGOR MELVSKIY: Well, we offer free shipping within the U.S.A. on these systems. There’s also no sales tax if you’re not in New York. So the rest of the country has no sales tax. If you’re in New York, unfortunately, there is. We do also offer international shipping. We offer a 7% discount on the system for those orders. So if you’re from another country, you’re also welcome to order our products as well.
DEBRA: And I’d like to add that IGOR MELVSKIY does have an affiliate program, which costs nothing to join. So if you are in another country or if you’re some place that you’d like to make a little extra money, you can certainly sign up as an affiliate and particularly if you’re in another country where these filters are really, really needed, you can set up your own business selling them and help a lot of people. So that’s something to consider too.
IGOR MELVSKIY: Absolutely! It’s a good idea, yes.
DEBRA: Good. So again, the way to get to IGOR MELVSKIY’s website is you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page to where it says ‘The Water Filter I Use In My Home’. Click on that, you’ll get straight to the website. And then you can take a look at them and see if it’s something that you’d like for your home. And if you want to refer your friends to it, you can make a little commission.
So thank you for being with us today. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
The Best, Easiest, Most Affordable Body Detox
My guest is Eddie Stone, Founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. I’ve been using and recommending Touchstone Essentials’ zeolite detox products and wholefood supplements since the company began in February 2012. Eddie created Touchstone Essentials with the vision that only real farm-fresh food offers real improvement in body, mind and personal well-being. We’ll talk about why zeolite is the best choice for removing toxic chemicals of all kinds from your body, how to choose effective zeolite products, industrial supplements vs wholefood supplements, and how you can get your zeolite and supplements FREE (I do!) debralynndadd.mytouchstoneessentials.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH EDDIE STONE
- The Amazing Benefits of Doing Daily Detox With Liquid Zeolite
- How to Choose and Use Liquid Zeolite to Remove Toxic Chemicals From Your Body
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Best, Easiest, Most Affordable Way to Detox
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Eddie Stone
Date of Broadcast: September 02, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Even though there’s toxic chemicals all around them, we don’t have to be sick, we don’t have to have them in our house, we don’t have to have them in our lives and how to accomplish that is what this show is all about.
It’s Tuesday, April 23rd 2013 and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about how to remove toxic chemicals from our body and replace them with good nutrition. Both of these things are essential to health, ridding our bodies of toxic chemicals and have sufficient, not just sufficient nutrition, but enough nutrition for health and to repair our bodies from toxic exposure.
My guest today is Eddie Stone. He’s the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. But first, before we talk to Eddie, I had in my email this morning an email that was a newsletter and it was about letting go. I thought that that was very apropos subject for today’s show because there’s so many things that we do need to let go of in our world, in our lives and yet, letting go is a very difficult thing. I know I’ve had to let go of things in my life and there’s a sense of loss about that and a sense of unknown and what will things be like if we let go.
But we need to let go of toxic chemicals in our bodies, we need to let go of all these toxic products that are in our homes. I remember years and years ago, when I first working on removing toxic chemicals from my home, I knew that there were things that were toxic, but I didn’t want to give them up. I didn’t want to give up my perfume, for example. It was one by one, I had to say to myself, “Do I want to be poisoned by this or am I willing to let go and open the way for more health and more happiness?”
And the very last product that I wouldn’t give up was my red lipstick. It had taken me so long to find that shade of red and even though I knew it was toxic, I knew it had lead in it, I knew it was 100% petroleum that I was putting on my lips (crude oil) and that I was eating it as I was speaking and eating food.
I still didn’t want to give it up because I was so attached to the idea that I had to wear this red lipstick in order to be beautiful. And I gave it up, I let go. I’ll just tell you that every time I have let go of something that was harmful to me, something much more wonderful came in right away. There’s a whole wonderful world of products that we can chose from that are healthy and toxic-free and we don’t have to live with toxics in our homes.
So I want to introduce our guest now. Eddie, are you there?
EDDIE STONE: Yes, Debra. I’m here.
DEBRA: Hi! It’s so nice to have you on the show.
EDDIE STONE: What a pleasure it is to be able to speak with you and your audience today.
DEBRA: Thank you. I just would like to start by saying when I was writing my book, Toxic-free before your company was even founded and before we even met, I was working with my doctor as I was writing it and what I figured out was that in order to be healthy, the solution that I had to write about in this book was that people needed to remove toxic chemicals from their bodies and then they needed to have nutrition.
They needed to have really good nutrition because not only do we need a certain amount of nutrition just to make our bodies run, but we also need a tremendous amount of nutrition to repair the damage that has been caused by toxic chemicals.
And so it was quite a delight for me last year in February of 2012 to find out about Touchstone Essentials and meet you and find out that you had exactly the same idea.
So I’d like to know how did you come up with that idea and what was it that got you interested in health and producing supplements and zeolites in the first place?
EDDIE STONE: Well, that’s a big subject. What I’d like to do is maybe just tackle it just a little bit of a piece at a time because for me, it’s really a 20-year evolution in thinking.
Perhaps it’s somewhat like your description of the amount of time it took you to slowly sort of get everything out of the house. Then you had the lipstick. It was sort of the last piece to go. Perhaps that’s really my story as well and maybe many of your listeners are sort of thinking the same thing. I think all of us, we come to this information that we find enlightening, but yet we have these entrenched habits and things we think we can’t live without. It’s really difficult.
In my late twenties, I had exposure to nutritional products. I had been a little bit of an amateur athlete while I was in college and tried to pay attention to think a little bit. But as I got out of school away from that athletic environment into the work world, you know how it is, the work week. You wind up being Saturday and sometimes, as well as Sunday, you get away from some of your more healthy habits or you don’t make things like eating right and sleeping right and exercise a priority.
So I found myself headed down a wrong path. And unfortunately, it’s the path that if you look around that many people are on.
So I had this accidental introduction back to nutrition. And what I really saw was that I needed supplements because I just wasn’t going to have the discipline or the access to eat exactly right. They were a way for me to bridge the habit and the gaps between where I was with my daily nutritional intake and where I wanted to be. And it’s a simple idea, right? That’s really true for most people, don’t you think?
DEBRA: Yeah, I do think that it’s true for most people. And especially too, because the food that we’re eating today isn’t giving us – even if we could eat that much food, it isn’t giving us the amount of nutrition that we need. So I absolutely think that everybody need supplements.
EDDIE STONE: I do too. And I think even if we don’t intuitively realize that our body seems to have these cravings for things even if we can’t fully recognize them or realize what they are. And so that stated a journey for me that evolved over time to the point where I saw it not just on local scale or in my personal life, my family’s life, I saw that globally, not just that it’s a big industry, but it’s desperately needed if you look at some of the statistics out there.
But here’s the challenge. In the U.S., there’s probably $25 billion roughly, give or take a billion spent on health and nutrition products and yet most of them, if you look deeply into them are sourced from foreign lands where ingredients are unregulated. Many of the ingredients in the supplements sold today, even the very most expensive one are created chemical isolates, created from petroleum byproducts or GMO corn or whatever it is.
And so there is this real – I don’t want to call it corruption, but there’s this dichotomy between what people think they’re consuming versus what they’re consuming on this path toward health and enlightenment.
And for me, when I became aware of that, it was almost this cathartic moment where I felt like I had to throw myself against the gears of the machine and sort of stop the madness.
DEBRA: I understand that.
EDDIE STONE: So that’s how I arrived here.
Debbie: Well, I’m very glad that you did arrive here. So what was that you made you decide that you needed to – and we only just have less than a minute until the break, but what was it that made you decide that you just needed to break away and start your own company?
EDDIE STONE: Plain and simple, Debra, I could not find products like I felt we needed either on the Internet or food direct sales or at retail. I’ve got kids, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got family. And lacking a good solid source of pure, wholesome products, I felt compelled to do something.
DEBRA: Well, I’m glad you did and I totally understand that because I talk to other people who are making exceptional products in other fields as exceptional as yours. And that was what really did it for them too. And I know for myself that I’m doing this work because I got to a point where I was very sick and I needed to do something to get well and there just wasn’t any help out there. There were no books or anything.
So after our break, we’ll come back and we’ll start talking about these exceptional products that Eddie has made.
EDDIE STONE: Thank you.
DEBRA: Okay, let’s talk about products. These products are fabulous. I take them every day. I don’t mind saying that. There’s a lot of companies that are making a lot of – especially dietary supplement product. I look at them and I just haven’t been able to recommend them. But these, I recommend wholeheartedly and I take them everyday.
The first thing, I want everybody to understand that Touchstone Essentials has put together a collection of different supplements. They’re designed to work together in order to detox your body, remove toxic chemicals and then give you the kind of nutrition that your body needs in a form that is exceptionally compatible for your body to be able to absorb them and give you the nutrition that you need.
First, I want to talk about the detox part because that’s actually how I found out about these products. And what is used for detox in this collection of product is a substance called zeolite. My experience with zeolite was that I had spent 30 years thinking that if I just removed the toxic chemicals from my home, then my body would naturally restore its own health because it wasn’t being bombarded by toxic chemicals. And that was true. I went from being disabled to being functional.
But I still had a lot of things going on with my body that were not right and I still didn’t have that much energy and I wasn’t functioning as well as I wanted to. And then my nutritionist gave me some liquid zeolite. And within a few days, I felt so good, it was unbelievable. It was like, “Oh, my God! Why didn’t I take this before? Why didn’t I do something to help my body remove the toxic chemicals?”
Well, the reason that I didn’t do something before was because there are very few options. Zeolite isn’t the only one, but zeolite is certainly the easiest thing you can do, the most effective and the most affordable.
So Eddie, I want us to spend this segment talking about zeolite and we’ll spend the segment talking about the supplements because I really want to give you time to tell us everything we should know about zeolite.
EDDIE STONE: That’s fantastic. I was just in there thinking about what you were saying and there are a lot of choices. But for me, zeolite, its natural minerals, it’s the most elegant and frankly, nature’s genius because it’s natural property. It has a natural property of a negative charge. And so when you ingest it, when it’s milled down to a small enough size and it’s properly cleaned, so it’s bioavailable, when you do those things and it goes into your body, it just has this natural affinity for those positively charged heavy metals, volatile organic particulates that are bad for us.
And so what it does is it supports our approach, which is to pay attention to cellular health. There’s a lot of ways you can look at the body and this is going to take a complex process to make it simple. We look at the cells and we say to ourselves, “What can we do to keep them clean, to clean them out, then put the good stuff back in?” And so the zeolite serves that purpose.
We offer it in two very distinct ways because the body needs it in that manner. We mine our zeolite domestically. We do do a lot of testing and we do publish this on our website. We think the third-party validation is very important, so we’ve got this on the website.
We check its properties before and then we check it after going through essentially what is a cleansing process because the little tunnels and channels and chambers that you find naturally in this little mineral, they get dirty over time. So we clean it, make it bioavialable to the body and then we mill it.
And then the milling process that we utilized, it tries at every level to minimize the fracturing of the zeolite because you want to keep its cage intact especially because that’s where that negative charge is maintained.
It has really three ways that it works. One is it has these angstrom-sized channels and tunnels that have that negative charge that has got particulates in it. But also, when you mill it small enough, that charge that it has at its core can leak to the surface in something called [inaudible 00:18:40]. And so now, not only is it useful in taking things inside of itself, but also in attracting to its surface. Of course, if we can get enough of that in the body, there’s also a sandwich effect that has three ways that it can support the body.
And here’s the best thing for me, Debra. It’s an inert mineral that doesn’t remain in the body. So if a person has this normal renal function, it’s going to process out of the body in about a 4-6 hour period of time. And so it’s going to support a daily habit of cleansing and detoxing.
What we’ve seen very quickly is people respond with their energy levels and overall health. And so it’s in something that’s been very important for us for us to support that initial piece of our foundation of cellular health by cleansing and detoxing at the cellular level.
DEBRA: I think this thing that you just said about how the zeolite picks up the toxic chemicals and then removes them from the body, I mean, the zeolite particle itself along with the toxic chemicals that it has attracted, the whole thing leaves your body in 4-6 hours. This is so important from my viewpoint because when you use the word ‘detox’, it can mean a lot of different things.
A lot of times, people will say, “Well, I’m doing a detox” or, “I’m taking a product” and what that product is doing is supporting the function of the liver or supporting the function of the kidneys, so that they can do their job better. And those are fine things to do.
But if your kidneys or liver are really damaged or even partially damaged – and for most people, they have damaged livers and kidneys because those are the organs that process the toxic chemicals – if you have damage to them, why wait until they regenerate when you can take zeolite and it just bypasses all of that and goes into your bloodstream, goes into your cells and takes those chemicals away and in 4-6 hours, the whole thing is out of your body? It’s the fastest way that I know of in order to accomplish that.
And it’s so easy because all you need to do is just put some drops in water and drink it or spray a spray just right in your mouth four little squirts and you’ve taken it. You do it three or four times throughout the day, your body is having this continuous, gentle detox.
So once again – wow! These commercial breaks come up so fast. We’ll go to our commercial breaks and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about what Touchstone has to offer in the way of nutritious supplements.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here with my guest, Eddie Stone, founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials.
And before we go back to having Eddie and I talk, I want to give you the number where you can call it if you have any questions for us, 877-342-6673. That’s 877-342-6673.You can also go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. The number is there as well as in the future, there will be archived shows and information about who’s coming up as the guest and lots of other information.
So Eddie, let’s talk about the supplements. The first thing I want to say about supplements is that many years ago, I got the idea that when people started talking about, “You should eat more vegetables,” I thought that’s a good idea. It wasn’t that I was not eating vegetables at all like a lot of people, but I was not eating enough that I thought. I was eating a lot of cooked vegetables, hardly any raw vegetables. I went to the grocery store (this was before we had very many natural food store). I went to the grocery store and the quality of the produce was just so poor that I didn’t want to eat it.
And nowadays, the quality of produce is a lot better, but it’s expensive if you want to get organic. You need to learn how to make something that tastes good from it. And so I think it really is unrealistic for a lot of people to really get the nutrition that they need.
And one of the things that I like about Touchstone Essential supplements is that I know that I can get all those greens in my body, I can get all the phytonutrients that I need. And then, whether I eat the right foods or not – and I do try to eat the right foods, but whether I eat them or not, I’m still getting my nutrition. So thank you for these supplements.
EDDIE STONE: Oh, we’re happy to provide them. And you bring up an important issue there about food in our diet. We’re confined with what’s available. If we’re trying to eat fresh raw with what’s regionally available from different parts of the country and then seasonal, it’s never easy to eat the right way.
DEBRA: It isn’t. And particularly, when a lot of our produce is shipped in from other places – I used to live in California. A lot of produce here on the East Coast comes from California instead of being grown locally – as that produce travels across the country, it loses nutrients, it roses vitality. And then if it’s coming from hot houses in Chile and Brazil, by the time it gets to us, it’s just kind of dead leaves.
So tell us about Touchstone Essential supplements, what you do to make them and why they’re so special?
EDDIE STONE: Well, there’s a number of things that make them different. But fundamentally, when we think about supplements, very often, you see a label and you see vitamin C as ascorbic acid or vitamin E or vitamin D, whatever it happens to be. All of those labels – I mean, I’m really talking about everything you see out there. They’re listening fractionated nutrients. They’ve taken one component of what we find in food and there’s very little to support that that’s actually what we need.
I mean, here’s this big industry I talked about earlier, all these money being spent, but yet you’d really be hard-pressed to find a lot of strong evidence using supplements where we improve the person’s health outcome or addresses disease.
Now, we do hear that getting inadequate amount of citrus fruit or vitamin C or grains or things like that can be detrimental to our health. But we start looking at it and say, “Well, what if I then get it from a supplement.” There’s not a lot of good support there. And here I am in this industry, so it concerns me.
And so the first thing we do is we start with whole fruits and vegetables because we know the isolates don’t work. They just don’t accomplish the same thing. You can’t take vitamin C as ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is just the outer ring of the vitamin C molecule. There’s seven other things that are missing. You can’t just use that and think somehow the body is going to magically convert that into the same thing, a whole compound vitamin C.
And then, of course, that doesn’t even take into account the other hundreds of phytonutrients that are found in a natural food source vitamin C.
So we start with whole fruits and vegetables. We’re very careful to make sure that we’re getting our crops where they should regionally be grown. We’re not using farmhouses. And then we make sure that the soil where our things are grown is healthy soil. We’re making sure that our farmers have organic and sustainable practices, all of these things that we know grow a very rich fruit or vegetable.
And then we’re very careful on transportation. As often as we can, we actually try to process our fruits and vegetables field-side and never with a high heat. We don’t allow our fruits and vegetables to ever be a degree above 106° because we know at approximately 116°, the delicate phytonutrients and native enzymes to that fruit or vegetable begin to be denature and lose value.
And so we do all of this. When we’re done processing – and for us, processing means just simply removing the water and the cellulose material, so what remains is the powder – that that powder before it’s encapsulated is as potent as possible compared to that fresh fruit or vegetable.
And we actually use high-speed liquid chromatography to check our fruits and vegetables before and then check them after. And what we find is their antioxidant qualities and other nutritional components have no statistical deviation, which is exactly what we’re looking for so the value remains. When you’re consuming this stuff, you want all of it, right?
DEBRA: Right!
EDDIE STONE: And so that’s where we start and from there, we build our formulae thinking strategically about the right combination of fruits and vegetables to have that anti-oxidant product. And you spoke about essentials, right? Thirty-three fresh fruits and vegetables, 28 different sources. The grains products, Super Grains or Wellspring, which is for joint pains, stiffness and inflammation. So that process helps us put our recipes together.
DEBRA: Good! So when I was up there in Lallie the other day, a few weeks ago, we were tasting all the powders. They tasted so alive. It was really interesting because they really had the flavors in them that of the real foods and it wasn’t just a powder. It wasn’t just a powder. It wasn’t something that came out of the factory. It was like a food that you might have dehydrated in your dehydrator and then ground up. It had flavor like the spice has flavor.
The green tea extract was particularly terrible, we all agreed, which is why it’s good in a capsule. But the pomegranate was delicious. It’s so good to have those.
I know that there’s a lot of supplements nowadays that say that they’re whole foods. But when I read on the label, they have terminology like ascorbic acid that says – that is, I know means that it’s an artificial vitamin C.
So these supplements, all that’s listed on the label is the foods that they come in. That really shows me that it’s coming from food and not from a laboratory.
So when we come back from our break, we’re going to talk about how you can get these wonderful supplements for free actually. I get them every month without having to take any money out of my pocket and you can do that too.
You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: I see we have a caller from Pennsylvania. Laura, hello!
LAURA: Hi! How are you, Debra?
DEBRA: How are you today?
LAURA: I’m good.
DEBRA: Good! What’s your question?
LAURA: My question is how best do I explain to someone that they would be getting pretty much all that they need from the entire line? Like if you get the entire line of Touchstone Essential, then would they be getting pretty much anything they get from a multivitamin mineral?
DEBRA: Well, I’m going to let Eddie answer that first and then I’m going to answer it too. So Eddie, go ahead.
EDDIE STONE: Laura, thank you for the question. When I think about this, I really just pay attention to the advice that comes from the medical community.
Most people that would go to their physician, even their pediatrician would give the advice that they need to be eating say five to seven (or maybe five to nine or seven to nine depending on what your doctor’s thoughts are) servings of fresh fruits and vegetables per day. And if you do that, you’re going to get those nutrients that you need for good health or they may refer you to the updated food pyramid, which will show to balance the combination of carbohydrates and fats and proteins for meats and vegetables and good plant fats to get what you need.
You never really hear them talk about advice on taking a supplement because they realize most of those things are fractionated. They don’t remotely resemble what you find in a fresh fruit or vegetable.
So we pay attention to their advice. If someone is using our product, that’s exactly what they’re getting on multiple servings of fresh fruits and vegetables except in this case, we’ve made sure that they are grown in the right region, that they’re grown with organic practices, that they’re not heated, which is probably what you’re going to find when you prepare them in your oven or your stove.
So instead of being confused by these labels out there that show these fractionated supplements that are frankly meaningless, I tell folks to pay attention to the advice of their physician. And if they do, something like our Central Zen becomes an easy decision or someone because that’s the equivalent of 33 80g. servings of fresh fruits and vegetables – and 80g. is what they recommend at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website.
DEBRA: And you know, you couldn’t eat 33 servings of fruits and vegetables in a day nor probably could you afford it. How much money would that cost? Wasn’t it something like $12 or something? Eddie, you have the numbers? It was sort of the serving of Essentials was like a $1.28 or something?
EDDIE STONE: Yeah, it’s upwards.. it depends on what region of the country you live in. But the minimum we’ve calculated is $14. And in some places, say like New York City, you could spend $25 and still not get the same quality of fresh fruits and vegetables.
LAURA: Great!
DEBRA: Yes. So it’s quality and it’s very good value. What I’d like to add is I have come from a lifetime of having health problems largely due to toxic chemical exposure. And even though I’ve done a lot of things, I still have things that I’m working on to heal, particularly my endocrine system. And so my body actually needs more than what an average person would do.
So I take my Touchstone Essentials products knowing that I’m getting way more than what my daily needs are if I were a healthy person. And then I take very specific whole foods supplements. I take vitamin C that is made out of – oh, I forgot, amla I think it’s called, a gooseberry, Indian gooseberry, something like that because I need more vitamin C for my adrenal glands. But I’m always looking for a whole food supplement because in my whole food vitamin C, I’m getting the full C complex not just that vitamin C.
So before our hour is over – thank you for calling, Laura.
LAURA: Thank you for answering. Great answer.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Before our hour is over, I want to make sure that we talk about – now, people are probably saying, “Well, how am I going to afford these supplements?” They’re not the price that you’re going to buy at the drugstore, but I actually earn more money than my supplements cost because this is – yes, a network marketing company.
But I want to address that because I’ve had people say to me, “I don’t want to buy these products no matter how good they are because it’s network marketing.” I’ll just be honest and say, “That’s exactly what I said.” I had such a negative view of network marketing for all the reasons that people don’t like it, but I want to say that that hasn’t been my experience with Touchstone Essentials.
I think a lot of people, individual, don’t understand network marketing and I think network marketing companies are not doing a good job, but this one is. The beauty, for me, of network marketing that I’ve come to learn is that – network marketing companies can introduce products that are really special because they’re being sold by people talking to each other. It’s basically just word-of-mouth and selling the products through people talking to each other instead of having them be on a store shop.
And the other thing about it is it’s a way for you to be personally, financially free. It’s a way for you to have your own business with a structure there who’s doing production and manufacturing and marketing and payroll and all those things. And the only thing that you need to do is let people know about the products.
It’s the simplest way to get your own business going. You have freedom of your own time. You can do what you want. You don’t have to even work an eight-hour day. And people in this company I’ve seen, people I know personally have put their jobs are making – one person just made $1100 in the first week. I didn’t do that, but somebody else did. It just depends on how much you want to put into it.
It’s an excellent product that really helps people. So you’re selling something that helps make the world a better place and it improves people’s lives.
So Eddie, what would you like to say?
EDDIE STONE: Well, I know we don’t have a lot of time. And frankly, I’d love to have a couple of hours to talk about this subject because I’ve got strong opinions at it.
But at its simplest level, we chose this vehicle to get our products out to our consumer because the most effective thing we can do is use word-of-mouth. There’s no way we could slap these products up on a store shelf and have their unique quality. This opportunity for really effective products reveals itself to the public. All that noise in the retail space, the speed with which people make decisions with brands and products, it would just get lost.
And so here’s these great products that can do these great things and without a personal story or two, it’s very difficult for the public to see that. So that’s one aspect of it. But for me, the other side of it is we can maintain and control a freshness with our products by going directly to the consumer.
This is what it allows us to do that we couldn’t do otherwise for those that know the retail model. It’s very difficult. It depends upon what types of products you have, but sometimes, orders are placed for those products well over a year in advance. They get on a boat traveling in from a foreign country nine, ten, twelve months before they get to a store shelf.
And I’m talking about consumables as well as things like electronics. So I think it’s just more efficient. It provides us that word-of-mouth. And then the other side of this is we do think that people do need a vehicle to make a difference in their life financially, whether just earning back the products that they use.
We have a tremendous system. That means if you have just three people consuming what you consume, either customers or members, your products are free. And so for someone that see something they want, maybe has trouble accessing them, this gives them a vehicle to address that. But as you mentioned, this gentleman with no prior experience in his first earned $1100. And that’s not everybody’s story, but nor does that have to be everybody’s story for us to demonstrate the success of our company. There’s all kinds of stories here.
And here’s what I appreciate after my exposure to this industry. No matter where you’re starting from, it meets you where you’re at. Whether you have no experience or a lot of experience, it allows you a vehicle to help you gain that full measure of your own potential.
Who amongst us doesn’t want to have a chance to take that cap off, that lid off of what we can do in life? We want our own opportunity. I think we get that here.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I think so too. And another thing that I like about it is that these products really are essential to every person on earth. If we want to be alive and healthy and happy, we need to get the toxic chemicals out. We need our nutrition and anybody of any income or not can have access to these products because – well, you have to have a little money to start, but it’s very little money. Anybody could pick this up and say, “I’m going to start this business and get this money and pay for my supplements.” It makes it accessible to any person on earth without any kind of discrimination for what their financial condition is.
So, just to me, it’s the combination of the quality of the products and the opportunity to be able to make as much as you want helping people. Really, it’s a total package for me in a way that I’ve never seen in any other business, which is why I’m sitting here saying this, not because I want to get my commission, but because I really want people to know that there are ways that even in our economic times that we can be making money by doing good.
And so just once again, I’m just so appreciative of everything that you’ve done, Eddie and that you’ve given us all this opportunity to be healthy and happy and wealthy.
EDDIE STONE: Thank you, Debra very much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thanks for coming. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Indoor Plants Emit VOCs
Question from Jamie
Dear Debra,
I am getting mixed messages about my indoor plants. I recently purchased plants that were known for absorbing toxins in the home. One of the plants on the list was a Peace Lily. However, I just read online the Peace Lily emits’ VOC’s into the air and that the plastic containers the plants are coming in emit that as well? Have you heard of this and do you have any suggestions?
Thank you-
Debra’s Answer
Here’s more information about this study:
Study indicates need for further research to determine environmental, health impacts
Apparently plants do emit VOCs as well as absorb them, and they emit pesticides used in growing as well as from plastic pots.
So it makes sense that if you are going to have houseplants, that they be organically grown in clay pots.
It also kind of negates the idea of using plants as air filters because they apparently do not hold on to whatever VOCs they absorb from the air.
Well, good to know.
