Water | Resources
New Study Finds Toxic Ingredients in Nail Polish Can Leach Through Your Nails and Into Your Bloodstream
I’ve been saying for years that there are no safe nail polishes. And yet, still I find nail polishes that say they “don’t contain the big 5 toxic chemicals so they are OK.” I just heard this again over the weekend from a woman selling nail polish at a street fair.
But less toxic isn’t enough. A new study done by Duke University and the Environmental Working Group has found that not only is nail polish dangerous to breathe when you are applying it, but the toxic chemicals leach through your nails into your bloodstream.
The chemical found in the blood of women wearing nail polish was TPHP, known to cause changes in hormone regulation, metabolism, and reproductive systems.
Read more at:
- Environmental Working Group: Nailed
- Duke-EWG Study Finds Toxic Nail Polish Chemical In Women’s Bodies
- More Bad News About Nail Polish
Here are some links to posts claiming to have “natural and nontoxic” nail polishes. I’m just putting these here for future reference when I want a list of these brands and their ingredients for when I have time to write about how the ingredients are toxic.
Even though EWG wrote about only one endocrine disruptor, that it can move through the nail into the blood stream means that other toxic chemicals can move through the nail as well. In my opinion, this is evidence that NO NAIL POLISHES ARE SAFE.
Long-banned Chemicals Still in Paint, Contaminating Chicago’s Air
Hundreds of pounds of toxic PCBs, banned in the ’70s, taint Chicago’s air each year; sources include paints still sold on the market
October 21, 2015
By: Brian Bienkowski
Environmental Health News
More than 400 pounds of toxic PCBs are emitted to Chicago’s air each year and researchers warn that some of this load comes via a chemical reaction in paint still sold in hardware stores.
New research designed to inventory the chemicals in Chicago finds soils, sewage sludge and paint are major sources and current cleanup strategies may not be the most effective for protecting people’s health.
The chemicals were once widely used as electrical insulators and industrial lubricants but were banned in the late 1970s when researchers found them building up in people and linked them to health effects such as cancer, heart problems and impacts to brain development.
PCBs, short for polychlorinated biphenyls, now seem to be a byproduct of certain pigment production. In recent years researchers have found that some paints, clothing, newspapers and magazines contain forms of the chemicals, usually a specific compound called PCB-11.
“Architectural paint that we buy at hardware stores contributes to a significant amount of PCBs people are exposed to every day. That’s just crazy,” said Keri Hornbuckle, a professor at the University of Iowa’s department of civil and environmental engineering, who previously found more than 50 PCB compounds in 33 commercial paint pigments purchased from U.S. stores.
PCBs build up in the fat tissues of fish and some animals and eating such foods has long been considered the major exposure route for humans. But there is increasing evidence that inhaling airborne PCBs also plays a role in people’s toxic load and such exposures—small as they are—can result in disease.
“PCBs are dangerous chemicals … even low concentrations of PCBs in air constitute an important route of exposure and disease, especially if the exposure is prolonged,” wrote Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany-SUNY, in a report this year on airborne PCBs.
In the first comprehensive inventory of PCBs for a city, Hornbuckle and colleagues examined where the chemicals are and where airborne emissions come from in Chicago.
Paints—both on the exterior and interior of buildings—were just a sliver of the city’s PCBs load, but contributed 7 percent of total emissions.
They calculated paint emissions by looking at the annual volume of paint sold in the city estimated to have PCB-containing pigments, and past studies of how the chemicals are emitted from paint.
Some of the larger emissions sources were drying sewage sludge and contaminated soils.
City soils—which accounted for 31 percent of emissions—did not include Superfund sites or other areas know to be contaminated, said co-author Scott Spak, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning and engineering at the University of Iowa.
“These are soils across the city—parks, backyards, highway medians,” Spak said.
“This makes cleaning up urban soils across cities one of the harder sources to mitigate,” he said.
While all PCBs can escape from soils, PCB-11 is one of the most volatile forms of the chemical, the authors warn, saying it may be emitted to air within hours to days of applying the paint.
Sixty percent of 85 women from East Chicago, Indiana, and Columbus Junction, Iowa, had traces of PCB-11 in their blood, according to a 2013 study from Hornbuckle and colleagues.
Steve Sides—vice president of the American Coatings Association, which represents paint manufacturers—said in an email that they are aware of studies finding low levels of contaminants in paint materials but had “nothing to add” in regards to the Chicago study.
PCBs as a byproduct of pigment manufacturing remain exempt from the Toxic Control Substances Act, the federal law regulating chemicals because the amounts aren’t large enough to be significant.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which enforces chemical regulation, has requested that federal scientists from the National Toxicology Program investigate PCB-11’s potential to harm people, said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn in an email.
In addition, there are limits on the concentrations of such “inadvertently generated PCBs”, Milbourn said.
“Specifically an annual average of no more than 25 [parts per million] and a 50 [parts per million] maximum” in products manufactured or imported into the United States, she said.
Hornbuckle and Spak argue that, while the concentrations of PCBs in paint may be small, the EPA should consider that the chemicals are easily released into air.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Greensofas.com Seems Too Good to Be True
Question from Sarjan
Hi Debra,
Hello, Does anyone have experience with greensofas.com. The products and prices almosty look too good to be true. I am looking for a sofa made of natural materials and low to no toxicity. Any feedback appreciated as it is a big step to order a product from so far away.
Debra’s Answer
Don’t bother ordering. Their phone number is disconnected. I think someone failed to take this website down.
Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases
Today my guest is Julia Schopick, best-selling author of the book, HONEST MEDICINE: Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases. Through her writings and her blog, Julia’s
goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little-known but promising treatments their doctors may not know about. Julia’s writings on health and medical topics have been featured in American Medical News (AMA), Alternative & Complementary Therapies, the British Medical Journaland the Chicago Sun-Times. She also coaches patients in how to convince their doctors to prescribe a treatment they (i.e., the doctors) don’t know about. www.HonestMedicine.com.
Julia reminded me that about ten years ago SHE had interviewed ME. Listen to our interview at The Keeper: Interview with author/advocate Debra Lynn Dadd
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Effective, Time-tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-threatening Diseases
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Julia Schopick
Date of Broadcast: October 22, 2015
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.
It’s Tuesday, October 22, 2015, and I’m here in beautiful, sunny Clearwater, Florida.
We’re having a little technology thing going on today. The power company, my local power company sent out a crew of guys to take the tree branches off the wires. In the process of working on trimming my trees, they also trimmed my cable line. So I have no internet and no phone, and no television until the cable guys come.
So I’m doing this by cell phone today. Cell phone and iPad. iPhone and iPad. And it’s a little different for me because usually I have all the things available in my computer.
The show must go on.
Anyway, my guest today is – [inaudible 00:01:58] to that and now, I have to turn on my iPad because it turned itself off.
My guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s a bestselling author of the book, “Honest Medicine: Effective Time-Honored, Inexpensive
Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases.” Through her writings and her blog, Julia’s goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little known, but promising treatments that doctors may not know about.
And I would just toss in and say that in my opinion, one of the little known treatments that doctors don’t know about is toxic chemicals that patients are being exposed to, and rarely do doctors recommend that their patients find those toxic chemicals and eliminate them as a first step to being well.
I’ll also tell you that Julia reminded me that some years ago, I think it was about 10 years ago, Julia actually interviewed me. I was the guest and she was the host. And we had a lovely interview. And now, Julia is here with me.
Hi, Julia.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Hi, Debra. It’s so good to be with you today. I’m so glad to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m glad that you’re here too because I do remember that we had a wonderful interview. And you’re just an intelligent person to talk to.
JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s great. I really appreciate that. And I hope I’m as good a guest as you were.
DEBRA: I’m sure you will be.
So the first question that I always as people is how they got interested in doing this. And I know that you’ve been in public relations for 25 years. So what made you decide to become a patient advocate?
JULIA SCHOPICK: Well, it was, kind of, thrust upon me, Debra. A teeny bit of background is that my dad was a doctor, a general practitioner. And he actually warned me to stay away from the medical profession.
He did not like his fellow doctors, Debra, I have to tell you.
But then in 1990, when my husband was 40 years old, he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.
DEBRA: That’s so young.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. He was very, very young. And speaking of toxic chemicals – you know what? I’ll tell it right now. I believed that his brain tumor was caused exactly the way you were talking about.
Are you ready for this?
He grew up in Flint, Michigan.
Now, tell me.
DEBRA: Oh, my god.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. I know. But it gets better. It gets worse. Sometimes you use the word better when you mean worse, right? It gets worse. His parents were beauticians, and he lived in Flint, Michigan, the home of the automobile, above a beauty shop.
I know.
I’m quite sure I’m right that he developed a huge brain tumor. You said, it’s such a young age. And he was very, very young.
We had just been married for five years, as a matter of fact.
I know.
And you would have thought with my background, with a father who told me stay away from the medical system – well, I wouldn’t run away. I mean, it’s tumor with the size of an orange. So I couldn’t just run away.
But you would have thought that I would have started advocating, and I would have started researching right away.
It didn’t happen because what happens, Debra, when you are confronted – and this is one of the reasons why I’m out there even after my husband has gone, trying to help other people. What happens when you are confronted, when one is confronted with something like a cancerous brain tumor? I just froze. And so did my husband.
And we did – I’m embarrassed to say, we did just – well, I’m glad we did the surgery, for goodness’ sakes. And I questioned whether the chemo was a good idea, but we did do the chemo and the radiation. But I didn’t do one thing more for a few years. I was literally in the last step, literally terrified.
And then at around the third year mark, I began to get it because my husband, who was actually given only 18 months to three years to live, and he was outliving that already, he started to develop every side effect, every complication from the treatments. Not from the – yes. From the treatments, especially the radiation.
I mean, he got – are you ready for this? At 41, he had a radiation-caused stroke because radiation to the brain will do that. He also developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. And they had to operate again and put a shunt in.
It’s just was a disaster. And of course, it was many, many [inaudible 00:06:59]. It was a disaster.
And at that point, I began to get it that I’d better start researching. He was the love of my life, and if I wanted to keep him around – he was already doing a pretty good job of staying around anyway without my help. But I really decided to step into gear.
And I did.
And I found a nutritionist whose area was cancer and brain tumors in particular. That’s an interesting story in itself.
We cleaned up his diet, gave him lots of supplements that she picked out definitely for him. She tailor-made it. And he started to thrive.
DEBRA: The thing is, that I’ve learned after all of these years is that medicine and surgery is not really designed to create health. That what they’re designed to do is kill the illness.
JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s right.
DEBRA: Unfortunately, a lot of patients get killed in the process of killing the illness.
But you don’t get any kind of support on anything from a doctor that supports your health.
And so even if you are going to have radiation and chemo and all of that it’s very, very clear to me that at the same time, you should be doing all kinds of other things that are supporting your immune system or supporting your body against that toxic thing, that toxic treatment.
And my personal view is that if we would all live the right way, if we would do the treatment, do the natural treatment before we get sick – does that make sense?
JULIA SCHOPICK: It does, but I have one caveat. Go on.
DEBRA: [inaudible 00:08:53] finish my sentence.
What I formed was as I started looking at all these different illnesses after I was so ill from toxic chemical exposure, I saw that what I should be doing is living in this non-toxic way. I should be eating whole foods instead of processed foods. I should be living without toxic chemicals.
I should be drinking clean water, et cetera, et cetera.
But then as I started looking at the natural treatment for all different illnesses, it was all pretty much – everybody was saying, “Do exactly that.” And I came to this conclusion that if we would all live in a healthful way, we’d have a lot less illness to begin with.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Unbelievably correct.
DEBRA: Thank you.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I 100% agree with you. The reason I was going to butt in before was my poor husband couldn’t have avoided Flint, Michigan.
DEBRA: I know. I know. I grew up in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Oakland. I lived in Oakland for a long time, and Oakland is a pretty polluted place. And when my health finally fell apart, I was living in a condominium on the ground floor where they was a stop sign out the window and [inaudible 00:10:13] all day long.
The cars would come and stop right in front of my air supply.
Then they’d start up again and [inaudible 00:10:21].
I mean that’s how much I didn’t know. And I had just remodeled my condo – we need to go to break. But off the side, we had just remodeled my condo, so we were painting, and I had plastic shelf paper, and we [inaudible 00:10:39] all that stuff. And then I fell apart.
But when we come back, we’ll talk more and hear what Julia has to say about what we should be doing.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, and I will tell you more about her except that my iPad has turned off. But I do know by heart that her website is HonestMedicine.com, so you can find out more about her there.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick.
So Julia, tell us what happened to your husband? How long did he live?
JULIA SCHOPICK: It’s so interesting, Debra. He ended up living 15 years post-diagnosis. Now, remember I said that –
DEBRA: That’s great.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, I know. We both believed that it had mostly to do – yes, the doctors did their part, but it had a lot to do with the supplements, with the clean food, the change. And he was feeling so great.
What got me, and I hate to sound negative, but the doctors were not at all interested in anything we were doing.
DEBRA: Of course.
JULIA SCHOPICK: This hurt me because brain tumor patients just don’t usually live that long especially if they have the kind of tumor that my Tim, my husband had. And wouldn’t you think that the doctors would be interested in things – they fully acknowledged that he was their star patient. I want to make that clear.
They weren’t denying that he was outliving his prognosis. They were like, “Great.”
But they were not all interested. As a matter of fact, one time, Tim tried to tell one of his doctors, his main doctor – the doctors said which meds are you on, and Tim told them. And Tim then said, “I’m on a lot of supplements and good food too.”
And you know what the doctor said?
“Next question.”
DEBRA: I just want to say this, in defense of doctors. First of all, not all doctors are the same. I know some wonderful doctors that have completely changed their minds about things, and their medical doctors.
When I first was diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivities and was starting to heal my body from that onslaught of toxic chemicals, I went to a lovely doctor who was an MD, and he had completely given up his practice, his previous general practice, to only treat people who had chemical problems.
He was doing what he knew to do to help us, but it was, again, very doctor-ish. There are products called antigens, which you can go to a doctor and get, and they can immunize you against reacting to a toxic chemical.
But that doesn’t get the toxic chemical out of your life.
And so then I was talking to patients, and they were talking about how they were starting to remove toxic chemicals from their life, and I started doing that. And I told my doctor. And you know what he said? He said, “I’m going to send you to everybody’s house, each and every one of my patients, and have you analyze where their toxic chemical exposures are, and I want you to come back and tell me, so that I can know what they’re being exposed to.”
JULIA SCHOPICK: That is a wonderful doctor.
DEBRA: And that’s how I actually started doing what I do, was because that doctor asked me to go to his patients’ houses. And then I had to make up a list of products that they could use.
I was like, “What? Where am I going to find these? How am I going to figure this out?”
And that’s actually how I started. It was because of the doctor.
But most doctors are very entrenched in their paradigm. And so they say, “Well, I know what I know, and I’m going to do what I do.”
And that’s what they do.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m so glad to hear that, your story about the doctor who did that because that is so wonderful, so unusual, and in my book, in Honest Medicine, I do include stories, as you know, about doctors who are creative, who do look outside the box.
And although they are unusual, they must be heralded.
Just like you tell your doctor’s story, I tell these doctors’ stories because they are open, they are wonderful, and there are too few of them, and I’m hoping there are more and more of that.
DEBRA: I hope so too.
So before we get to the break in about three minutes, why don’t you tell us what made you decide to write your book? And then when we come back, let’s talk about the contents of your book.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Excellent. I think it was the next little incident. Not little. I shouldn’t minimize what happened.
Remember, I told you about the doctors not being interested. Well, in 2001 my husband, Tim, had a recurrence of the tumor, and that was the time when – because the skin had had trouble healing from the last surgery, and all the other results, I said, “This surgery is going to be problem.”
And I was right. It was a problem. His suture line would not heal.
I want to stress that usually the tumors come back before 10, 11 years. His didn’t because of the good care that we were doing.
In any case, the suture line would not heal, and the only thing the doctors know how to do was to do more surgeries, to try to get two pieces of skin that would heal. With each additional surgery, he got sicker and sicker and sicker. At the end of the eighth surgery, he was bed bound, he was incontinent, he was severely brain injured and nearly paralyzed.
All from the treatment. From the repeated surgeries.
And at this point, to a PR client – you mention that I’ve been doing for many years, through a PR client, I found out about a product called Silverlon. And Silverlon is pieces of material with silver ions impregnated, FDA-approved for all non-healing wounds.
So with my PR skills, I was able to get the doctor to agree to put it on. We put it on Tim’s head and he started to heal overnight.
And this is when the doctors, they came to me and they say said – one of them came to me and he said, “We don’t think it was what you found that healed your husband’s skin.”
And I was puzzled. I said, “What do you mean?”
And he said, “Well, we’ve been thinking. We think it was the vancomycin.”
And vancomycin, Debra, as you probably know, is an IV antibiotic. And Tim had been on the vancomycin for at least six weeks. So that’s what I said. I said, “But Doctor, he’s been on it for six weeks.”
And the doctor said, “Vancomycin is like that. It kicks in.”
I was stunned.
DEBRA: I know. I totally, totally understand. The things that you and I think are the right things to do make so much sense to me. And if I hadn’t changed what I was eating and the chemicals in my life, in my home, I don’t know that I would even be alive now.
My mother died of cancer when she was 51. And that is so young. And we didn’t have any of this information then. That was just right before
I started doing my work. I didn’t even know about any of these things. I was just starting to learn about it.
I was only 24. And she was just [inaudible 00:21:01].
It’s just incomprehensible to me. And I have a friend, she had cancer. When her [inaudible 00:21:12] cancer started, she was only like 30-something. She survived her cancer.
But we didn’t have any of that and this information.
We need to go to break. So we’ll be right back, and we’ll talk more with Julia Schopick. She is the author of Honest Medicine. And I don’t have the subtitle right here in front of me. But you can go to her website, HonestMedicine.com, and find out a whole lot more. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s the author of Honest Medicine. And we’re talking about what she learned that she thought was so important that she wanted to write a book about it.
So Julia, in addition to the Silverlon that we’ve already talked about, there are three other things that you talked about in Honest Medicine. I wanted to pick out the one that is most important to me to talk about first, then we’ll talk about the other two.
This isn’t your order, I know.
JULIA SCHOPICK: No, this is great. I’m glad. Go on.
DEBRA: So the first one I want to talk about the ketogenic diet.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I knew it.
DEBRA: The reason that I want to talk about that first is because it’s something that anybody can do. All of our listeners can just go immediately on a ketogenic diet if they want to. And the other two are drugs, which is okay. I’ve nothing against drugs if they don’t have toxic side effects and they’re actually helping.
So tell us about the ketogenic diet and why you think it’s so important.
JULIA SCHOPICK: The ketogenic diet is one of my – I agree with you. It’s a very, very important treatment. The reason I think it’s so important is that children with epilepsy, the doctors put them on drugs, and not only one drug, several kids are on – many, many kids are on three, four or five drugs at one time.
This is just terrible.
The ketogenic diet, which is a very high fat, low carb, low protein diet, was the standard of care from the 1920s on at places like the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins. And then with the advent of anti-seizure medications, I think it was 1938 that Dilantin was invented.
The pharmaceutical companies stepped in and started to do more and more anti-seizure medications.
And guess what fell out of favor? The diet.
And it was still being done.
DEBRA: I just want to say for a second that that was really care with everything. If you were to turn back the clock to 1900s, there were all these things that were natural, that people treated things at home. They made things at home.
And then it came along into the 40s and 50s, and World War II, and all this new technology. And all of those intelligent, natural things just went by the waste side in every area of life, and they were all replaced by drugs and plastics and all the things that are making us sick.
JULIA SCHOPICK: You got it. The ketogenic diet was no exception. I believe, and so many other people do too, that it would have died.
The diet would have died. It was still being done very sporadically at places like, as I said, Mayo and John Hopkins.
But if a little boy named Charlie Abrams had not started having intractable seizures, and if his father had not been Jim Abrams, and Jim Abrams was the Hollywood writer/director/producer of the movie, “Airplane” that is now considered a classic. Anyway, Jim, he did funny movies, as you can tell from Airplane.
And in 1994, something not so funny happened in the Abrams family. And that was that little Charlie, one year old, started to have what we call intractable seizures. That means when one seizure ends, the next one begins, the next ends, the next one begins, and on and on and on.
Little Charlie was having up to a hundred seizures a day. And Jim, he had money. He had prestige. He was able to go to the best of the best of the best. And they put him on more and more medications.
If you read in Honest Medicine, Jim’s introduction to his contribution, it quotes a doctor who says that this child, little Charlie, will be on more and more medications. That’s all we know that can help him, and perhaps, a brain surgery.
And Jim was frantic. He said, “We were crying all the time in our house because the seizure medications were not helping.”
That’s the first thing.
And so he went to the library. And he’s very cute, Debra. He says, “I didn’t go to the library the way people do today, when they go on the internet to find a solution.” He says, “My solution that I was trying to find is how is my family going to deal with a child who is not going to get better? And this is going to be our life.”
So that’s what he was really looking for. And what he found was something different. He found out about this diet, the ketogenic diet which had been around, as I said before, from the 20s, and he found studies, small studies from the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, all the way through the 90s.
He copied them. He took them to his doctor, to Charlie’s doctor, and he said, “Let’s try this.” The doctor said, “No, it won’t work. More drugs will.”
And Jim said – he said, “To my everlasting shame,” these are his words, “I listened.” He said, “And we let the doctors do a surgery on my baby’s brain.”
And right after the surgery, what do you think happened? He started having seizures again. And finally, Jim got it. He said, “That’s it. I’m taking little Charlie to John Hopkins.”
They took him to John Hopkins, he and his wife, put him on the diet. 48 hours later, he stopped having seizures. They never returned.
And Jim was so excited, and then he got pissed. He said, “Why did it take me so long to find the diet? And by the way, why did the doctors tried to discourage me? And by the way, why are people not being told about this diet?”
So remember I told you he was a Hollywood guy? One of his friends, Meryl Streep, did the promotional video to explain about the diet. Jim set up a website, CharlieFoundation.org. I’m not sure if he set up the website right away. But he did have this instructional video.
This is the wonderful thing, during the making of the instructional video, there was somebody on the staff of making the video who was also from Dateline MBC. His real job was Dateline MBC. He was freelancing to make Jim’s thing.
And he called his boss. He goes, “This is a great story about this child, this diet, this Hollywood producer.”
So it became two segments of Dateline MBC. And at that point, the diet took off because people started writing in, they started calling. And Jim had to take one of his rooms in his house to make it just for the letters he was getting.
And people are like, “I want to find out about this diet. My little baby has been seizing. My little child has been seizing.”
Long story short, he got Meryl Streep to do a movie – for TV, “First Do No Harm” and the diet really took off. And Jim, with his Charlie Foundation, hired a dietician whose job it is to go around the world, training hospitals about the diet.
Because you know what, Debra?
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful.
JULIA SCHOPICK: When there’s a child – yes, he’s one of my heroes, can you tell? Because one of the things – anyone who wants to use the ketogenic diet for exercise or for losing weight, they can do it on their own. But when you have such a serious condition as seizures, it does have to be started in the hospital.
DEBRA: I agree with that. Yes. I have a few things I want to say about this ketogenic diet, but I’ll say them after we go to break.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. She also has much more information on her website, HonestMedicine.com. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. And she’s at HonestMedicine.com.
So Julia, here’s what I would like to say about the ketogenic diet. First of all, I found out about it from a very good friend of mine who is surviving cancer on this ketogenic diet. She said it made a difference in the world for her.
Second of all, the thing that I think most people don’t know about this diet is that cancer feeds on sugar. And so if you’re eating a high carb diet, you’re just feeding cancer. That’s it. It’s that plain and simple.
Another thing is that when you eat high fat, your body operates in a different way, and so your body actually loses weight on a high fat diet.
In fact, that’s what you need.
And so this diet can help so many people that it can treat people who have illnesses like seizures and cancer. But people who don’t have those things yet, and they will if they continue to eat processed food, you can be making this kind of change in advance so that you’re not feeding your body in a way that cancer loves.
JULIA SCHOPICK: So are you reading my mind?
DEBRA: No.
JULIA SCHOPICK: The reason I’m saying that is – oh, my goodness.
DEBRA: This is one of those things – this is the whole point of your book, is that low carb – go ahead. I’ll let you say it.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m laughing because as I was hearing you say it, I had many windows open. I’m sorry that your computer is down, Debra. But I have many, many windows open. And one of them, which I’m working on writing something, perhaps, it’s an addendum to my – not addendum.
Long story short, the ketogenic diet is now being studied for many, many, many reasons. One of them is Dr. Thomas Seyfried. That’s what you’re talking about. He did the research on the ketogenic diet for cancer.
And of course, it makes sense. Cancer cells love sugar.
By the way, I believe that’s one of the reasons my Tim lived so long. I took sugar out of his diet, much to his chagrin, I must say. And when the doctors said he should drink Ensure. I said, “No way is he drinking Ensure.”
You know what I did in the hospital? I dumped it.
DEBRA: Good on you. They should just take sugar out of the hospital.
JULIA SCHOPICK: They’re never going to. They think of sugar as the main dietary – anyway that’s what they love.
Now, the ketogenic diet is being studied – are you ready for this? And I can send the link to anyone who wants it, if they write to me at Julia@HonestMedicine. It’s being studied for Parkinson’s, for cancer, with very good results, by the way, for brain injury, for diabetes, for all sorts of things.
It makes great sense because here is a diet that –
DEBRA: It does.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, it does. There is something, by the way, the Deanna Protocol is using the ketogenic diet plus another nutritional program for ALS. And as you know, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the ones that nobody has a treatment for, just nobody.
And Parkinson’s is pretty rough itself.
This ketogenic diet, I am in the process of figuring out how I’m going to use this information to get it out there. It can be used for lots of different things, and it’s being studied with great results.
So that’s why I said did you read my mind?
And by the way, I do know a –
DEBRA: We’re totally on the same page here.
JULIA SCHOPICK: And by the way, one of the people that Jim Abrams referred me to is a woman named Miriam Kalamian. Miriam is – are you ready for this, a consultant to people who want touse the ketogenic diet as part of their cancer protocol.
So this word is getting out there.
DEBRA: The word is getting out there, yes.
So our hour is almost up. [inaudible 00:43:20]
JULIA SCHOPICK: Where did it go?
DEBRA: I just want to make sure that we end with your basic message of your book, which is that there are these inexpensive, workable, much more effective things that you can do. Your doctor isn’t – I’ll give the subtitle again for Honest Medicine. It’s Effective, Time-Tested,
Inexpensive Treatment for the Life-Threatening Diseases.
And you talk about these different things that we don’t have time to talk about. But the ketogenic diet is just an example of one thing that people can do instead of getting medical care. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to the doctor.
But the thing is that we should also be looking at these other things as well, so that we can make an informed decision, and do things that support health. And by supporting health – I mean, this is what I’ve been doing for 30 years, supporting health.
And so I’m healthy.
I don’t know if you know, but I turned 60 this year, in June. And I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, because you’re living healthy.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right, and my body just gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and more healthy, and more energy, and sleeping better, and all of these things.
It takes time. It’s not like you’re just going to take a pill and get well immediately. The things that you do on an everyday basis, eating those good foods, the [inaudible 00:45:02] as well as the nutrition, and moving your body, so that your body can detox and build your muscle.
All these things that if you just do the simplest of things, then you might not even need a doctor.
JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s the aim.
DEBRA: That’s the aim.
So Julia, talk about your book more and the basic concept behind this.
JULIA SCHOPICK: The basic concept is that, as you sad, there are treatments out there. But there is a little bit of a negative thing. When you come to your doctor about these treatments, your doctor may very well [inaudible 00:45:45] them.
Your doctor may very well say, “No, the drug way is better.”
And you have to be very, very strong to know when you are interested in trying another treatment.
For instance, one that we don’t have time to discuss, it’s called low dose Naltrexone. Although it was developed from a drug and, indeed, is a low, low, low dose of a drug, it acts more like a supplement by raising endorphin levels. It makes the immune system act correctly.
It works for many, many autoimmune diseases. And your doctor will probably, unfortunately, only not have heard of it, but when you bring information, may not be open to it, which is why I’m doing consulting now, to try to teach people how to influence their doctors, how to talk with their doctors.
You obviously have –
DEBRA: That’s a really, really important thing. That’s really important to know because we’re indoctrinated in our society that what you do when you’re sick is you go to the doctor, and the doctor knows everything, and he’ll give you a pill, and you’ll go, “Wow.”
That’s what I was raised with. That’s what I was raised with until I started – and that’s what I did until I started finding out there’s a whole other world out here that isn’t the medical world, and it works a whole lot better than what I’ve seen.
No doctor would have ever made me well from toxic chemical exposure.
JULIA SCHOPICK: I think it’s amazing what you’ve done.
DEBRA: Thank you.
JULIA SCHOPICK: You are absolutely right. I’m trying to get patients – and actually, I’m having pretty good results. It’s not only me. It’s people out there like us, like you and like me, who are making patients realize that they have the power.
It may not feel that way when you’re confronted with your doctor. But you do have the power to suggest other treatments, if the doctor says, “No, no, no” to try to convince the doctor, and if not, to find a doctor who will do it.
DEBRA: And keep looking. I’ve been to doctors who dismissed me as a patient. I had a doctor yell at me once and tell me I was never going to get well because I would not follow his instructions.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Isn’t that awful?
DEBRA: Yes, he completely invalidated me.
JULIA SCHOPICK: You know how many people just listen to the doctor. You were a strong people.
DEBRA: I know. My father lying in bed in the hospital dying would not drink the fresh juice that I brought him. He said, “I’m going to do what my doctor tells me.”
JULIA SCHOPICK: That must have broken your heart.
DEBRA: It did. It did. He died very soon after. And it maybe that my juice would not have saved him, but it was that he wasn’t even open to even listening or trying. That the doctor knows this.
I’m not here to say that nobody should listen to their doctor, but it really is that patients need to really take their health in their own hands, and if the doctor is not helping you – I just have been to a doctor that I totally adore him as a person, but it got to a point where he wasn’t helping me.
And I said to myself, “I need to go to somebody who is going to help me.”
And it’s not that he didn’t want to help me, but what he has to offer me wasn’t helping.
JULIA SCHOPICK: So you have the presence of mind to know.
DEBRA: I did. I did have the presence of mind to know. I considered that I’m the one in charge of my health, and that any health care practitioner I go to, medical doctor or otherwise, they’re my team, but I’m running them. I’m not there to do what they tell me to do. I’m there to evaluate their advice and decide if that’s right for me.
And we need to go.
Thank you so much, Julia.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to my interview with Julia Schopick. Her website is Honest Medicine. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the other shows as well.
Be well.
JULIA SCHOPICK: Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you.
Tiny House — Toxic Free
My guest today is Corinne Segura, Writer of the blog My Chemical Free House, and consultant on chemical-free building, renovating and decorating. After developing MCS and mould illness, she built a home in which to heal—a non-toxic tiny house on wheels. The goal was to build a mould-resistant home as close to VOC-free as possible. She continues to stay up to date on new green materials and best practices for building mould-free in order to help others create the healthiest homes possible. She has a background in research and community development and holds an HBA from the University of Toronto. She’s got lots of information on how she build her toxic free home at www.mychemicalfreehouse.net
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Tiny House – Toxic Free
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Corinne Segura
Date of Broadcast: October 20, 2015
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.
It’s Tuesday, October 20th and today I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And this weekend, we actually had wind. We had cold wind here in Florida. And I just heard on the news as we were coming in that the first snowfall fell. I’m excited because I love this time of year and I love that winter is coming and we’re having Thanksgiving and Christmas and all those nice things to do.
Anyway, what we’re going to be talking about today is – my guest is a blogger who has built a tiny house, a toxic free tiny house and she has planned it all out from the beginning. It’s as nontoxic as it can be. And I am very interested in hearing about this. I’m intrigued by the whole subject of tiny houses.
I actually live in what some people might consider to be a big house, 1600 square feet in a suburban neighborhood with a little bit of land around it. It feels like a big house to me and I have been looking at these tiny houses and wondering if I could live in such a small space.
Anyway, we’re going to hear all about her tiny house and we’re going to hear about how she made her tiny house toxic free.
Her name is Corinne Segura and her blog is called My Chemical Free House. Hi Corinne.
CORINNE SEGURA: Hi. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
CORINNE SEGURA: I’m good.
DEBRA: So tell us how you came to be interested in toxics and things being toxic free. And then I want to hear how that turned into a tiny house.
CORINNE SEGURA: Well, I developed multiple chemical sensitivities and I was living in Toronto and I also had chronic fatigue syndrome, which I still have. So it was a little bit of a necessity for me to try and go as nontoxic as possible. That was pretty hard in a condo in a big city.
DEBRA: Yes.
CORINNE SEGURA: And so I decided I would live across the country and to a milder climate in BC. I’m on the West Coast. I thought I didn’t have enough money to buy land or to build a regular sized house. So it was a little bit of necessity and a little bit of I do love tiny houses.
DEBRA: What’s it like to live in a tiny house?
CORINNE SEGURA: I don’t mind it at all. To me, it feels quite spacious and a lot of people say that when they walk in because of the design. You could see on the blog it’s got a slanted shed roof, so it’s got a lot of space vertically. I don’t keep it cluttered. I keep it really nice and neat. So you can entertain a few people. To me, it’s normal.
DEBRA: You must not have very much stuff.
CORINNE SEGURA: I don’t have very much stuff. That’s one big adjustment that might not work for most people because I have everything digitized in terms of photos and paperwork and I don’t keep many belongings, I don’t keep many clothes and that’s my lifestyle.
That works well when you have MCS. I had very severe MCS, multiple chemical sensitivities when I moved in and it was a lot easier to keep a minimalist living environment.
DEBRA: How has living in this environment helped you recover?
CORINNE SEGURA: Almost immediately, I started sleeping better and then it’s been a slow progress and my sensitivities are way down.
Now, I can go to public gatherings and most normal places I can go to, maybe not a hair salon. It has really opened up in terms of I feel a lot more freedom of movement.
So I also have to say it was the house, but it was also detox and maybe we will talk about that more because I can’t just say it was only the house. I also did a lot of detox that got all those toxins out of me.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about the detox right now before we talk about the house. Tell us what you did.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. I did cholestyramine, which is a pretty very strong binder and that’s prescription. And I did some lighter binders. I won’t go into all of them, but the main ones are cholestyramine, ALA and glutathione. Glutathione and ALA, you can purchase from health food stores online.
Those have just made a huge, huge, huge difference. The brain fog was gone and I just started slowly getting back to the regular world where you can’t avoid everything.
DEBRA: Right. I’ve had myself a similar story to yours where I had multiple chemical sensitivities many, many years ago back in 1978 I think was the year that it started. And I figured out that I needed to remove the chemicals from my home and that would work too. I thought the chemicals are making me sick. Why not just get rid of them and my body should heal? And that happened.
So I was living in a condo at the time and I tried to make that okay. We didn’t know about tiny houses then, but eventually I went and got a little cottage in the woods. And I made it totally nontoxic and I started really getting better to a point where I could then go out. I even traveled to Europe and didn’t have any problems and things like that. So it really does make a difference what your environment is even if you only look at us as a study of two.
But I think that there are many other people who had similar experience. And then it wasn’t until many, many years later that I started detoxing. And though I used different products than you used, I had the same experience of things that you can detox your home all you want, but if the chemicals are still on your body, they’re still in your body and they’re still making you sick.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. They do accumulate in your body. They may not be coming out in the way that most people’s body would eliminate toxins.
DEBRA: Do you think that people who have multiple chemical sensitivities or other illnesses that come from chemical exposure, their detox systems might not be working so well?
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, it seems that way. And I’ve also seen a bunch of people that have tried detox in a not great environment and it hasn’t worked really or they’ve had bad reactions. So it seems like the key, from the people I have seen is that you have to do both, you have to try cleaning up your house as much as possible and then hopefully try whatever kinds of binders or antioxidants work for you or saunas and all these things.
DEBRA: That’s been my experience too. You have to do them both because if you’re trying to detox and you’re still putting toxic chemicals into your body from your environment it’s like trying to empty the bathtub while you’re putting water in it.
They really go hand in hand. I’ve seen it in my own life and I think you’ve seen it in your and I think other people have seen that when they do those two things, they get spectacular results.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, it really makes a difference. It really makes a difference. Let me tell my listeners that on my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I’ve posted Corinne’s video of her tiny house. It’s an 18 minute video and you can just go there. It will be on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com this week.
If you are listening in the future – here I am talking to people in the future – if you’re listening to the archive show in the future, it will be on that page. You’ve probably already seen it because you’ve gotten to the show from the page where the video is. And it’s about 18 minutes. It really shows everything about her house, all the different things in her tiny house and you can really get an idea of what that’s like. And there’s also a whole lot of information on her website at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net.
We’re coming up on the break now. But when we come back, let’s just start going through your house and you can tell us all about the different kinds of materials and how did you figure out what to use and questions like that. I recently started a new blog on my website called Shop With Debra because people wanted to know how I figured out what to buy. So I think we want to know how to too figure out what to use.
We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Corinne Segura. She’s the writer of the blog My Chemical Free House, which is at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. And she writes about her tiny house and how she made it toxic free. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Corinne Segura. She’s the writer of the blog My Chemical Free House, which is at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. She lives in her tiny house that she’s made toxic free.
So Corinne, where did you start? Once you’ve decided to do a tiny house and make it toxic free, what was the first thing you did?
CORINNE SEGURA: It was a lot of research in a very short amount of time because it’s a pretty quick build for a tiny house for about four months. And so I wanted to find everything VOC free if I could.
So I researched the materials. I looked at their safety data sheet. And as you know, safety data sheet does not even give you the information that it really should live VOCs. And some products have not even been properly tested. There are not enough regulations. But I did my best I could with the research and talking to other people that were sensitive and which materials worked for them.
And then I did some testing. I tested samples of materials I was really sensitive at the time. So I had a pretty good sense of whether that would be okay although it’s very hard when you’re sampling a four inch piece of drywall. You’re actually going to have it surrounding you.
So I think you have to use a few different methods. You have to use those three different methods in order to really be sure unless you sleep in a room, unless you bring so much in it and sleep in a room with it first. But that could be very difficult to do.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah. So what kind of places did you look to find out this information?
CORINNE SEGURA: I tried to look for studies that did testing. And if there weren’t any, I looked at the product’s website and see if they made claims that it’s VOC free and nontoxic. Sometimes you just have to send a lot of e-mails and ask them. “Have you done VOC testing?
Are you able to say that this is a nontoxic product?” And a lot of times, most of the times, you get an answer. So that’s another way too. It does take a lot of time to do this, to do all the research for every single material.
DEBRA: It does. I know. I’ve done it.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: I continue to do it and it takes a lot of time. And having done it over a 30-year period, I can see that now, there’s a lot more awareness and there are new products coming out. There are new things available today that weren’t available many years ago.
What year did you build your house? A year and a half ago?
CORINNE SEGURA: Two years ago, yeah.
DEBRA: Two years ago, yeah. I think that there are even some products available today that weren’t available then. So I see that people are starting to understand that there’s a growing market of interest for nontoxic products. So they do test the products, they know what the VOCs are, they know what their lead levels are and things like that so that we can then have that information to make our choices then.
So I see that we’re moving in the right direction. It’s not nontoxic world yet, but we’re moving in the right direction.
CORINNE SEGURA: And one more research is I heavily relied on the book, Prescriptions for a Healthy Home. And I know you have a good book too. So this can be really good resource because that person has already done all the e-mails and the interviews and you can quickly look for what might be the best product.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes, Prescriptions for a Healthy Home is a very good book. My books are not particularly about building. Mine are more about what goes on in the house, but I do have some information about building and I’ve done a lot of remodeling myself and consulted with people on doing their remodels with their buildings.
So let’s talk about some of the specific products that you have in your house. Where shall we start? How about the walls? The walls, let’s start with the walls.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yes.
DEBRA: How did you build your walls?
CORINNE SEGURA: The walls are magnesium oxide board, which is still going through some growing pains because it did crack on me. I haven’t quite figured out what people are doing to stop it from cracking, but it is a very nontoxic cement board instead of the gypsum board. Toxin-wise, it’s been really good.
I used wood framing. The metal framing is probably a lot better of an idea for a tiny house because it’s going to really hold up the mold over the long run and it’s going to be easier and it’s going to last longer in terms of the movement of the house when you relocate.
DEBRA: Oh, right.
CORINNE SEGURA: And what else did I use? I used a lot of wood, wood flooring and wood ceiling. I use a low odor wood just to be safe because I was so sensitive at the time. I thought, “What if I move in and cedars or pine is too much for me?”
DEBRA: So what wood did you use?
CORINNE SEGURA: I used poplar and maple is also a great one because it’s a hard wood.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s something that people need to watch out for. How strong is the wood odor? A lot of people who are sensitive react to those strong odors even to Christmas tree and some things like that.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: So there are many different kinds of woods and they have all these different characteristics. So wood is not just wood. That was good for people to know that. Yeah.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. Now that I have recovered quite a bit, I’m not sensitive to it, but when you’re moving into a new house, you want to do everything you can.
DEBRA: Yes. So you have that opportunity to do that.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: So then, what about your floors?
CORINNE SEGURA: Floors are wood. I used natural pigment stain from [Mill House?] Company and then I used hemp oil on all the wood as a finish, which is worth is.
DEBRA: Does it work well?
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, the hemp oil works well. It’s not as water-proof as the others. Now that I’m continuing my research, I am finding that there are some zero VOC wood stains that would give you a little more water-repellency. But the hemp oil is working well for me.
DEBRA: That’s good. I see you have some cabinets.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. I use solid wood cabinets, which is not always recommended in a kitchen because of the moisture and they might work with time. But so far two years, they work. There are not a lot of options for cabinet unless you go with metal cabinets if you want to be completely 100% safe on cabinets because a lot of them use the particle boards.
DEBRA: Right. I lived in two little [inaudible 00:21:00] in the woods and in my second [home?], it came with metal cabinet, just like out of the [series?] catalog or something. And they are pretty old metal cabinets. The thing about metal cabinets is that they rust. So if there’s any kind of moisture, you get rusted metal cabinets.
I took them out and put in custom-built wood cabinet, which is a whole other story. But it was a success. It was a success.
We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Corinne Segura. She writes the blog. My Chemical Free House, which is MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. And she lives in a tiny house that’s toxic free and we will find out more about it when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Corinne Segura. She writes the blog, My Chemical Free House at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. And we’re talking today about her tiny house that she built totally toxic free.
Okay, let’s see what else. We’ve talked about your cabinets. Did you have those custom made?
CORINNE SEGURA: They were, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, me too. I have never walked into a store and actually found a cabinet. I think there are some that you can order online, but I found that I had just in my little tiny local community where I live, there was a very nice cabinet maker and he was wanting to do exactly what I wanted. And the total cost came out less than if I had bought the same amount of cabinets at Home Depot. But people think that custom cabinets cost a lot, but they don’t necessarily.
CORINNE SEGURA: And in a tiny house, you really have to do almost everything custom because the size are not going to fit, but I did it for reasons of making it nontoxic as well. I know there are some companies that have certified low VOC cabinets, but those are very expensive and they are still not perfect. My goal was to see whether I could do it zero VOC.
DEBRA: That’s always my goal too.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: I just really want to live as toxic free as possible. So to make it not quite toxic free, I always want to go and do the extra mile and see if I can do it and that’s why I build my own cabinets and things like that.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: So then let’s see. What else do we have? Paints on the wall?
CORINNE SEGURA: Insulation.
DEBRA: Oh, okay.
CORINNE SEGURA: I use the clay plaster on the walls because…
DEBRA: Yay! Me too.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. It’s very calming and they say it gives off negative ions and it actually absorbs some toxins. But it just feels great. It makes it very comfortable.
DEBRA: I did my bathroom in clay plaster and I totally love it. It is tile and clay plaster. And as you said, it is very calming and it just feels very soft and it is a totally different feel. Even if you put no VOC paint on the wall, it’s still plastic.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: And to make the switch over to clay plaster is an entirely different feel in the room. And if I would have built a house right now today, I would use clay plaster or milk paint on the walls, depending on which or where I’m in.
Clay plaster has another advantage. If you put it in a bathroom where there’s a lot of moisture, it actually absorbs the moisture and then it puts it out into the room so that it can evaporate instead of having it sit on the wall.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: It is an amazing product. Good, good, I’m so happy you use that.
CORINNE SEGURA: Lime plaster is another good plaster too that’s very impervious to mold.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So insulation, what did you use for insulation?
CORINNE SEGURA: For insulation, there are a lot of good options. There’s wool now, there’s hemp. There are so many if you want to go with something completely natural. I actually made the decision to go with XPS, which is rigid foam, which is not what they can call a natural product. But they do say that they don’t off-gas.
It does contain flame retardants, which is the downside, but I use a barrier. I use a polyethylene barrier to prevent the migration of the flame retardants. So that was a little bit of a compromise. Not really a compromise for me, but it’s a little bit a move-away from zero VOC because I wanted that really high insulation value and I wanted something very mold-proof.
And there is a rigid foam now, Johns Manville makes a flame retardant free rigid foam. So if you really want to avoid the flame retardant that is a good idea, there is one that doesn’t have them. And there are other good options like I said.
DEBRA: When I lived in California out in the woods, I remodeled my kitchen when I took out those metal cabinets. And the kitchen actually was added onto the structure. The building was built in 1930 I think and then this was added on. And they didn’t use any sheet rock.
What they used was just pieces of plywood.
And so we just decided that we would take out the cabinets, take all that plywood off the walls and just do everything right. And as we pulled it off, they used for insulation newspapers. And so we had all these old newspapers from the 1930s stacked in the walls. But what we put in was wool. We used wool.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, wool is really great.
DEBRA: We just got wool batts and they weren’t even sold as insulation. We just got wool batts and stuffed it in the wall and we loved it.
We totally loved it.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. Wool is a really great option. And they do now solid. It’s a lot easier to find those kinds of things now.
DEBRA: Yes, it is. It is. This was 20 years ago when I did that. So let’s see. What else?
CORINNE SEGURA: Well, there are so many little things. We can’t go through them all, but now there are so many great glues and there are so many even nontoxic paints if you don’t use plaster and adhesives and stains that are…
DEBRA: Right. So it’s really getting better.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. I am not trying to rep any of these companies, but AFM does have a whole line of pretty much any glue that you might need. You need silicone. It’s pretty hard to do a bathroom without silicone. And now, there are really good options for all these little things that you might not realize you need until later in the build.
DEBRA: How do you heat your house?
CORINNE SEGURA: I use a heat pump. So it does AC and it does heat. It is electric. So I decided not to go with propane because you don’t want to be breathing in propane. Although some propane appliances, they do vent to the outside so you’re not going to be having the indoor fumes. You still have to deal with bringing in the canisters and refilling them. That can be really difficult when you have MCS.
DEBRA: Yeah.
CORINNE SEGURA: So I decided not to go with propane. But the benefit of propane is you can get a lot more off the grid or completely off the grid. But then you have a major difficulty with heating because the only off the grid heating is wood stoves or propane and those are both things you don’t want with the internal combustion.
DEBRA: So you’re not completely off the grid like living out in the middle of nowhere.
CORINNE SEGURA: No.
DEBRA: I’ve been just wandering around your video and your blog. I think you’re connected to somebody else’s, right?
CORINNE SEGURA: I’m connected to electricity and yeah, that’s what ties me to the grid, but my water and sewage is off the grid. So I have a composting toilet and a gray water recycling system, very basic.
DEBRA: Good. We need to go to break again, but when we come back, we’ll continue talking with Corinne Segura about her tiny house that’s toxic free. She writes her blog, My Chemical Free House and that’s at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Corinne Segura. She writes the blog, My Chemical Free House, which is at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net. We are talking about her tiny house that she built totally toxic free.
So I saw in the blog, Corinne that you have a bed that’s up against the window. Now, I know that windows are pretty toxic. Window frames have preservatives in them and things like that. So did you build a window totally from scratch?
CORINNE SEGURA: We used aluminum windows, which are I think the best option and then they are framed on the inside with the poplar to look like wooden windows and maybe that’s why you got the idea that maybe they are. So no, they’re not because wooden windows are treated, the ones that you buy are treated with chemicals.
The aluminum is almost as perfect as you can get. There’s a tiny little bit of rubber in between the glass in the middle, but it’s the best option I think.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. And I saw on your blog, did you build your own sofa?
CORINNE SEGURA: Yes. Well, it’s a small space.
DEBRA: Yeah. I just love looking at everything that you are doing because you really had to say, “Because of the space, I can’t buy all these things that I might usually buy.” And you came up with all these creative solutions and your creativity is magnificent.
CORINNE SEGURA: Thanks. Yeah, there was some creativity involved with the whole endeavor.
DEBRA: Tell us about your sofa that you built. This is a question that I get a lot because sofas are expensive and people are looking for something affordable. So tell us about your sofa.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, mine was the closest pretty out there compared to or it was comparable to some of the nontoxic sofas that are now available online, which is great that that’s now available. But I went with solid wood, solid maple. I chose the glue. I used [tape?] bond, which is a nontoxic glue.
DEBRA: It’s a nontoxic glue. Yes.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: [inaudible 00:41:08].
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, and latex, natural latex cushions. So I got to be totally in control of no flame retardants. There are definitely no flame retardants in the house.
And then I chose the fabric. I washed the fabric myself so that it doesn’t contain the formaldehyde types of residues that they put on those fabrics. And then a natural finish, it’s a German finish. You can’t buy it here, but it was a natural finish.
DEBRA: Yeah. I made a sofa also. I didn’t start from scratch. What I did was I bought an old sofa at an auction. It costs $50 and it was a funny story. It came in a set with a rug and a sofa. The price kept going up and up and up and the person right next to me was bidding against me and bidding against me. And I finally just gave up.
And then when they bought it, I asked them and it turned out they wanted the rug. They didn’t care about the sofa and all I wanted was the sofa. So they took my $50 and I had a sofa.
But the reason that I wanted that is because old sofas have spring cushions, cushion springs. So then, I wrapped them in wool and cotton and I had it upholstered in linen. It’s maybe 20 years ago now and I still have the same sofa and the same wing chair that I made out of old furniture pieces.
CORINNE SEGURA: Wow, that’s a really good idea.
DEBRA: And they still look perfect. They still look new. I was very happy with that.
CORINNE SEGURA: That’s a really good idea.
DEBRA: Yeah. So another thing that I see on your blog here is that you have a bunch of ideas for little prefab modular tiny homes for people who are chemically sensitive. There are so many options. Tell us about those.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. I was looking for inexpensive options for people because I keep hearing from some people that are really in bad housing crises. And the tiny house did cost me $75,000, which is very expensive and almost a cost of building small but regular sized house.
So for instance, metal yurts are a cute little option. Those start at 10K, but then you would need to add quite a bit to that, but it’s a lot more affordable than a tiny house and it’s something that you can also move around maybe as easily as something on wheels.
But if you have a backyard or a lot of land where you can put something like that, these are some of the other options. There’s another one called arched cabins on my website and I just go through how you could take these shells and then you go through the works and look at what I would then use for the insulation and the walls and you can just customize the interiors of these.
DEBRA: Wow, again, creativity. I can see that you had a need and you filled it and you really are thinking outside of the box here and coming up with all these ways that anybody could have a toxic free house.
When I was in California, I knew several people who had built an outdoor room. They lived in the woods, in the forest. So they built an outdoor room that was actually open to the forest. And then they put and they set up a whole bedroom there so that they could sleep in a bed, but protected out in their forest.
I had been thinking about this myself because I have enough room to put a bedroom sized something in my backyard and you could just go out there and you would have no electricity so you wouldn’t have the EMF stuff. You could have it be totally toxic free. And then even if the rest of your house wasn’t so good, anybody could do this for not a lot of money.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, and the sleep is the most important wherever you’re sleeping. You can recover so much at night and then you could go into your regular wherever you work during the day and just recoup out in your little tiny clean nontoxic house.
DEBRA: Tiny house in the backyard.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: Well, this has been extremely informative and you’ve given me a lot of ideas and directions that I haven’t even been thinking of.
So we only have a few minutes left now. Is there anything you’d like to say in closing?
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. I would just say be a little bit cautious with greenwashing and LEED certified, which is a great idea, but it doesn’t mean zero VOC in any way. And there’s a bunch of other types of greenwashing where they say it’s eco or those kinds of words.
You do need to do a little more research. And not just to plug myself, but it is a good idea to use a consultant that can save you hours and hours of research.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. You could call Corinne and you could call me and either of us could help you save a lot of money and a lot of time.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, exactly.
DEBRA: I’ve done consultations with people where they should have called me first because they now have a toxic home or toxic office or whatever. And if they would just call me and you can put together – I just did a consultation with a woman where she was having a remodel and I said, “Have your contractor write down all the materials so that I can review them.” And that’s not an expensive consultation, but it will save you.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah, exactly. You can go through a lot. You can go through a whole list with someone who has already done all the research.
DEBRA: Yeah. I’m just thrilled. I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re doing what you’re doing because it’s just so needed. And I just want to tell our listeners just a few things that are on your blog, the types of articles and things that you have done.
So you tested some things like grout and thin set and how to use ozone to clean up toxins, instructions on how to do that and why it works.
We’ve got nontoxic window coverings, natural wall systems, things like emergency housing, there are just so many things, wood with natural pigments. It’s just great.
So go to Corinne’s website, which is at MyChemicalFreeHouse.net and there’s just like almost anything that you would want to know about what to do safely for your house. Yeah.
CORINNE SEGURA: Thanks.
DEBRA: Yeah. Okay, thank you so much, Corinne.
CORINNE SEGURA: Yeah. Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, there are a lot more shows there. You can listen to this show again. You can listen to other shows. There are more than 200 shows. A lot of them have transcripts so you can read it.
Now, I have everything divided into categories. If you want to know all the food shows, you can just click on Food and I have some regular guests. You can look up those guests and see all their shows. It’s all getting really very, very, very well organized.
And also I think I mentioned earlier I have a new blog on my website called Shop With Debra. It came about because people wanted to know how I picked out these products and what I’m looking for. I have a lot of products listed on Debra’s List on my website that you can order online, but just [inaudible 00:49:52] shopping out in the real world and how to make some toxic free choices.
You’ve listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
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Listen to my interview with Melanie Ellison, who established Life-giving Linen |
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Listen to my interviews with Debbie Guardian, President of Opie & Dixie, LLC |
Nirvana Safe Haven
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