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by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 26, 2014 | Debra's List, Natural Sleep Shops

Everything for your natural bed, including innerspring and latex mattresses, wood bed frames, mattress pads and toppers, sheets, duvet covers, pillows, blankets, comforters, dust mite barrier covers, and a knowledgeable staff to help you choose the bed that is “just right” for you. Buy six or more pieces at the same time and get 10% off everything.

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sleep number bed odor

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 25, 2014 | Q & A

Question from Bonnie

I have owned a sleep number bed for about 4 years. The volcanized rubber air chamber still puts off a very strong odor. I can not even turn my pillow over because it will smell to strong. My bed sheets have the odor. In the past you recommended a aluminum camping sheet to block odor from a chair. I tried this and it did not work. I have a medical problem and it is the only bed I can tolerate, traditionbal innerspring is bad for me.

I heard about charcoal absorbing bed blankets. I talked to MDE and they said they are unsafe. Do you have a suggestion. I want to try the charcoal.

Also due to an ankle problem the only shoe that helps me is New Balance. The odor is horrible and takes many months to leave. Can anything speed up the process?

Lastly, what do you use for handwashing dishes? Thank You

Debra’s Answer

It is very difficult to remove the odor from rubber whether in a bed or a shoe. Readers, any suggestions?

I see no reason why a carbon blanket would be unsafe. Many people with MCS use them successfully.

I wash my dishes with a variety of different products, as I am always trying new things. Currently I’m using BioKleen Natural Dish Liquid. It has a nice citrus smell that I like.

How Biological Dentistry Can Help More Than Your Teeth

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 23, 2014 | Body Care, Toxic Free Talk Radio, transcript

My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep, a Registered Dental Hygienist, Orofacial Myofunctional Therapist, and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. We’ll be talking about toxic exposures in conventional dentistry and now biological dentistry can improve both your teeth and the health of your entire body. Carol has served as a board member of the Academy of Minimally Invasive Biomimetic Dentistry (AMIBD) and is a founding member of the American Academy of Oral Systemic Health (AAOSH), and the Academy of Applied Myofunctional Sciences (AAMS). She is also a member of the American Academy of Physiological Medicine and Dentistry (AAPMD. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in dental hygiene from Baylor University and has taken courses in orofacial myology from two of the top experts in the United States. Carol is an advocate for change in dentistry. Given the current reality of healthcare costs and delivery in this country and the central role of oral conditions in general health, she works to bring together the philosophies of those who practice biological dentistry, minimally invasive/biomimetic dentistry, neurological dentistry, and those who understand the role the mouth plays in the web of inflammatory diseases, so dentistry can offer people a chance at higher levels of health. www.mouthmattersbook.com

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“How Biological Dentistry Can Help More Than Your Teeth”

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Carol Vander Stoep

DATE OF BROADCAST: October 23, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, October 23rd 2014. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida. We’re going to be talking about your teeth and your mouth and biological dentistry and a whole lot of things about how what’s going on in your mouth can affect your whole, entire body.

My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of the book Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. She’s got a lot to tell us. I think you’re going to be surprised with some of these.

Hi Carol, thanks for being here.

Carol Vander Stoep: Good morning, Debra.

DEBRA: Good morning! So there’s so much we could talk about. Could you just give us an overview to start with about some of the different ways that what’s going on with our teeth and gums and everything in our mouth can be affecting other parts of our bodies because I think that most people, first of all, think of dentistry as only teeth-oriented, maybe gums-oriented and not all the other things that you’re talking about?

Carol Vander Stoep: Yes, and I think I kind of started off with that premise when I first wrote the first edition of Mouth Matters. I was talking about how the microbes in your mouth particularly those that live slightly under the gums – a lot of people still don’t recognize that’s there a little collar of tissue that surrounds these two and that’s an imperfect casket, if you will, to keep microbes out because the lining of that tissue, of that collar is fairly permeable to the microbes that live in your body.

So whatever you allow to flourish there easily enters your bloodstream and could go to your heart and your joints and your brain and cause all kinds of problems depending upon on what kinds of microbes you have living in that pocket.

I think there’s becoming much more awareness of course now that gum disease and heart disease, they’re linked. Perhaps maybe one of the most viable germs in there or the most common is p. gingivalis. That one can have a hundred percent of the lining of all your arteries and so on and that could be as large as a tennis court.
That can really ramp up inflammation throughout your whole body. So in that way, what is living in your mouth definitely changes the inflammatory profile of what’s going on in your body.

But if you turn that around, you have to say, “Well, if you have a really good diet and a really good lifestyle and so on, you’re not going to be host to those microbes.” I’m sure most of your listeners are pretty aware of keeping a pretty healthy body.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. So before we go on, could you explain what an ‘orofacial myofunctional therapist’ is?

Carol Vander Stoep: That is a mouthful, isn’t it?

DEBRA: It certainly is. I had to practice saying that.

Carol Vander Stoep: I’m sorry?

DEBRA: I had to practice saying that, ‘orofacial myofunctional therapist’.

Carol Vander Stoep: I just say ‘myofunctional therapist’. Basically, I think that’s almost one of the most important things that I’ve covered in the last several years. I actually have a blog on it for people who want more detail. And actually, I think everybody needs to be up on it. It’s kind of dense, but every single sentence is important I think.

For instance, probably most of your listeners by now are alkalizing their diets by eating kale and spinach and raw and everything else. But the most overlooked part is breathing and developing an airway.

You can’t really stay in an appropriate neutral to slightly alkaline state without breathing correctly. That gets to be a little bit complicated, but what I think is the most important thing is that parents of children who are developing make sure that they are not mouth breathing.

A lot of times, they mouth breath due to allergies and so on in the nose and those have to be corrected because if you’re breathing through your mouth, you’re blowing off too much carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide (on page four of the blog), there’s probably 15-20 functions in your body. We’re taught that it’s a waste gas, but it’s anything but waste gas.

So what I like to do is encourage mothers who are breastfeeding as soon as the baby comes off the breast to just take their index finger and thumb and just lightly press the lips together just to give them a subtle clue that they should be nasal breathing and any time they see them with their lips open to do that.
But to go further than that, there are three main oral postures that we should all have. Our lips should be sealed. We should have our tongues completely glued front to the back to the roof of our mouth. And if that is happening, then we’re going to have a correct swallow.

I have links in my blog that’ll take you to what a correct swallow looks like and of course, explain that in more detail.

DEBRA: And is that blog at MouthMattersBook.com.

Carol Vander Stoep: It is, MouthMattersBook.com. A lot of people forget to put ‘book’ in there and then that’s not good. But yeah, it’s called ‘Facial Meltdown: Birth to Death’.

It’s really important for everyone to have these three correct oral facial postures. But for children through aged 12 whose faces are developing, it’s critical because crowded teeth are often a result of having incorrect oral posture, but even more, you’re not developing your face forward, giving yourself enough room for your tongue so that you have an airwave. There’s nothing more important than breathing.

In the United States, it looks fairly common to have a weak jaw [inaudible 00:07:23] mouth breathing and a lower tongue posture. Everyone in your audience is perhaps going, “Ha, I never thought about where my tongue is right now.”

DEBRA: Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m also thinking I go to a biological dentist and nobody ever said anything about this to me. They talk about straightening teeth, but they don’t talk about – and I’ve even been to chiropractors and massage therapists and all these kinds of people. This is the first time I’m ever hearing this. Of course, I saw it on your website and it’s in your book in Mouth Matters.

But particularly, I was looking at your Amazon page where people can order your book and you talk about children being able to grow up with a different facial structure, a proper facial structure by doing the right things. This is not something that we think about as even possible.

I know you’re probably familiar with Weston Price’s foundation. What Dr. Price talked about is how the food that you eat affects your bone structure. I’ve even seen pictures of different things that I’ve read where it shows pictures of people at different times in history where they ate differently than we eat now or people that live in a more less industrial way and that their facial structure is totally different.

Dr. Price who was a dentist found that they had dental problems because of the bone structure in their face. And yet this is something that I think most people, if they’re not familiar with what I’ve just said, it’s like, “I never thought of that until I saw these pictures, until I read Dr. Price’s work.”

There is a natural facial structure that comes from eating a proper diet. If you don’t do that, then everything starts being out of whack. And then all these things that you’re talking about affecting the other parts of the body because of the things that are going on in our mouth and in our head, it just is all like dominoes falling over.

Carol Vander Stoep: It is completely that. And I guess that’s why I like to talk about it because the one thing – you’re exactly right – nobody is talking about it.

DEBRA: Nobody is talking about this.

Carol Vander Stoep: We’re all looking too far down stream.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

Carol Vander Stoep: And I will say something about Weston Price. Now, he’s tried about all of that with the exception of vitamin A. There doesn’t seem to be as much correlation he thought. I’m not downgrading vitamin A, but I just want to say that that’s not really part of this equation.

However, if you think about it too, his studies were showing that once they started trading and getting the sugar and the grain products, that that deteriorates it. And that’s true, but if you also think about it, what are those products, but [inaudible 00:10:30]? You have to use your teeth. There’s almost everything in our culture where we don’t really have to chew and use our teeth that well.

DEBRA: Those muscles, yeah. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. You can go to her website at MouthMattersBook.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist and the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com.

Carol, it seems like you’ve put together a lot of very interesting information, but it’s not what people are generally talking about. How did you get interested in this?

Carol Vander Stoep: Well, you can’t be a hygienist I think paying attention and not see that all the inflammatory diseases are tied together. So I think after about ten years of taking care of people, you notice that heart disease, diabetes and gum disease all go together.

I also noticed people eating more and more and more at restaurants. Not to be crude, but everybody was bleeding like crazy in their gum. That is just largely a diet thing with sugar being the main culprit.

And I have to say it’s really nice being in biological offices where the people who come to you understand a little bit more about how to eat.

But it just grew. Like I said, I started off my book from a very traditional viewpoint, but the more research you do, the more your world just widens. Actually, that was a tool for me to meet some of the top dentists in the world doing crazy, good stuff.

So I just want to point people to my ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ movie on my website. That’s the other passion that I have. It’s all well and good to be a biological dentist, but a really important keystone to dentistry is diagnosing early and correctly.

I think most dentists are still depending on x-rays [inaudible 00:15:35] to diagnose. It’s just 50% accurate. There’s no other way to say it. You need a little bit more of an imaging device that can tell you. Particularly with fluoride (it’s so big on the scene), it changes the way x-rays scatter through the tooth.

We’re very late in catching up on decay. So people at with a great lifestyle, but who have teeth breaking down, it’s basically the same problem as having gum disease if you have a tooth that they need to root canal or an abscess.

Any of those things are incredibly damaging to your health. And so you really have to start in the beginning by correct, early diagnosis. And that ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ explains that in detail and with a lot of images that people can relate to. So that’s the other set of dentists that I’ve really started resonating with.

And then for those who have already suffered from traditional dentistry (and I have an interview with Mercola on that a couple of years ago that a lot of people have tuned in on), you can’t do minimally invasive dentistry on a tooth that’s already had traditional dental care. You need to look then for a biological dentist to know how the adhesive in dentistry really work. A lot of dentists are woefully behind on learning that.

So I kind of explain what’s important about that. So I would just like to point people to that because it’s pretty complicated to explain.

DEBRA: Yeah, there’s so much that we could be talking about. It’s impossible to go into each thing in great detail.

But I want to make sure that we cover just a few key items. We’re going to talk about biological dentistry in the next segment, but before we get there, I just want you to explain something about just regular dentistry and some of the toxic exposures that people may be exposed to and even the general philosophy behind it so that they can see when we talk about ‘biological dentistry’ what the difference is.

Carol Vander Stoep: Sure! Traditional dentistry is still kind of stuck in the 1850s. They’re using old materials, they’re using old techniques like drills. Drills fracture tooth apart, which is not really good. It sets it up for future failure. Fifty percent of dentists are still using mercury to fill teeth with (so the fill, drill and fill routine).
Dentistry is still based on amputation dentistry. It’s like repairing teeth after the fact when we could be doing it so much earlier or diagnosing so much earlier. I’m a big proponent of air abrasion and ozone.

I’m sorry, what was the other part of your question?

DEBRA: Well, I just wanted you just to give a picture of what traditional dentistry is like including toxic substances that are used within that industry (we’ll call it an industry), so that when you talk about biological dentistry later, people can see the difference.

Carol Vander Stoep: Okay! Well, there’s probably nothing that’s as biological as we would like in the dental industry, I want to say that. There seems to be an idea with people that there are some totally non-toxic things in dentistry that can be used. It’s really always about trade-off
But of course, crowns are an important part of traditional dentistry. Root canals are a part of traditional dentistry if a tooth has died. There’s not a lot of testing for what each person might have a sensitivity to as far as dental material. Fluoride is the big thing for remineralization. I think fluoride and mercury are two of the big things that traditional dentistry is using.

But then also, most of the resins also have BPAs in them. You can’t totally get away from toxicity. Most of the crowns are porcelain. They use a lot of metal and they don’t pay attention to the differing metals that are in the mouth, which create – it sets your mouth up as the battery so you have all kinds of little electronic impulses running through your mouth all the time that you may or may not be able to detect, but your brain sure understands it and your body sure understands it. Traditional dentists aren’t really clued in to the electrical part of the body so much.

DEBRA: Yes.

Carol Vander Stoep: So there’s not too much natural that’s going on in dentistry to be honest. The best dentistry is no dentistry.

DEBRA: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, when we think about going back to Dr. Price, he went to these pre-industrial cultures and he found that their teeth were in really good shape, that they had broad bones so that their teeth was not all jammed together and everything fit well. It was just in a very natural environment with very natural food.

We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Our guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. I have a copy of this book sitting in front of me here and it’s like 450 pages and every page has interesting information on it about dentistry and health. Well be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com.

Carol, I’m looking through. Every time we have a break, I’m continuing to look through your book. We were talking about pictures earlier of people who had good diet versus people that didn’t have good diet and how their facial structure is different.

And on page 207 of your book, you’re talking about the work that you do as a myofunctional therapist. It’s amazing the difference between you have a picture of a sister that had improper oral posture and developed whole facial balance and another sister had proper oral posture and developed good facial balance. The difference in the way they look and in our sense of beauty is amazing! It just is amazing.

I feel kind of the same way as when I looked at the Weston Price pictures. We really are designed by nature to be beautiful. And yet even in our faces, there are distortions that come from our lifestyle choices and just kind of living this skewed life that we live in the industrial world.

Carol Vander Stoep: We should have quite even facial thirds – you know, forehead, nose and then nose to chin. Mouth breathers develop a very long, narrow face. So absolutely! Aesthetically, it is not attractive. A weak jaw is never attractive.

We get used to it here. And when we see someone properly develop, I mean, those are our models. They’re beautiful, they have high cheek bones, they have sinuses, they have eyeball orbits that don’t need glasses because they’re not all squinched up. So yes, absolutely.

DEBRA: Ah, yes! Now hearing about this, I wish that my parents had known about this when I was a child. I don’t think that I have as much of a malformed face as a lot of people that I see, but I see the point. If the bones in your face are not in the proper place, then your breathing is going to be affected, your eating is going to be affected, your eyes, your vision’s going to be affected. It’s a huge thing.

Carol Vander Stoep: And apnea. I mean, it’s so rampant here. I think most people are not diagnosed because they have no idea they’re having issues – they’re choking on their tongues at night because there’s no space. And no, most doctors are not yet looking at that.

One of this might be a good point. The next thing I’m going to do is because so many people need a little help in this, I am actually going to make some myofunctional therapy companion tape, so people can kind of walk themselves through the therapy. Of course, they should see a myofunctional therapist for help, but these will be back-up tapes so people can see what these facial exercises are about.

We’re all very flaccid in our faces. Can you believe that in Brazil, actually they have 31 PhD programs in myofunctional therapy. They can even use it, women use it aesthetically for a facelift. Instead of pulling the skin up, they learn to use their muscles and it does amazing things. They get hollow cheeks. They get thicker lips. We just never think in terms of that.

DEBRA: So even adults who – this doesn’t need to be done correct when somebody is a child. Even an adult could reshape their face.

Carol Vander Stoep: They can’t totally. Your facial development is nearly completed by age 12. You really need to start on it early in order to have it forward. You can’t avoid the double jaw surgery if you want to develop airway space and so on, which has its own set of problems. But if you continue to mouth breath, at any point in time, your jaw continues to develop more vertically and your face does change.

Those who signed up for my newsletter, which is a pretty rare event, but at any rate can get some better pictures of what exactly happens there. I recommend anybody who wants to download those pictures and see what happens to a face over time if they continue to do that.

Many actors, it’s kind of painful now to watch movies and see who does and doesn’t have correct oral posture.

DEBRA: Interesting!

Carol Vander Stoep: Yes. I mean, everyone can benefit.

DEBRA: Interesting, very interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Carol Vander Stoep: People in yoga learn – oh, sorry.

DEBRA: Oh, go ahead. I was just saying how interesting it was. “People in yoga… people in yoga,” you started saying.

Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, in yoga, they teach you to put your tongue up. Why is that? They don’t mean just the tip of the tongue, they mean all the way up. When you swallow correctly, you push up on this whole string of bones that leads to the pituitary gland and milks the hormones from that such as – well, sex hormones, growth hormones.

So it doesn’t want all the hormones that come from the pituitary. It’s a natural, little milking process that happens if you swallow correctly.

For children, you’ve got a lot of stem cells that run right along the midline of the roof of the mouth. When you rub on those, it tells your mouth to widen so you don’t have a narrow face, so you can develop tongue space and so on. I mean, that’s just a couple of interesting points.

DEBRA: Wow. Wow! Wow, wow! That was very interesting. Okay, I want to make sure that before we get to the end of the show, let’s talk about biological dentistry as a field. Can you give us a general definition of what that is and what kind of services biological dentists offer that you wouldn’t find in a regular dentist office?

Carol Vander Stoep: Well, it’s a very broad term. It’s kind of like cosmetic dentistry. Everybody has got their own interpretation. I think the two main things that they understand is that mercury is very bad for us (as we all should know), but they know how to remove mercury safely and they also will help you with the protocol as to how to also eliminate it from your body.

They often call on other people to help them with that. I have a biological movie that I’ll post soon that also kind of gives you some guidelines. A lot of people do the DMPS and DMSA and so on, chelation to pull the heavy metal out of their body, but they don’t really understand that doesn’t really pull mercury from within a cell.
So it’s very difficult to get that mercury out of your body, but they’re very, very attuned to the whole mercury removal process, which is critical. So that’s one of the big things that the biological dentists would agree on.

The same thing for fluoride. Fluoride is damaging to our bodies in so many ways and I don’t think that that’s going to surprise any of your listeners.

Some other things that they don’t think about that, methylation. Autism is looking to be having a lot to do with methylation reactions in the body. Both mercury and fluoride are terrible with depressing that particular reaction. They’re aware of that. And it’s time for a break, isn’t it?

DEBRA: It’s time for a break, yes. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. You can go to her website at MouthMattersBook.com where she’s got a lot more information about the things we’re talking about. We’ll be right back..

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com. So if one went to a biological dentist – first of all, how would one find a biological dentist?

Carol Vander Stoep: Well, that’s what I’m saying. There’s a broad range of understanding. But most biological dentists, the mercury, the fluoride, they don’t believe much. I think more and more of them are understanding root canal toxicity, cavitation problem. They understand that our bodies are electrical entities, some of them will use cold plasma lasers, they’ll have negative ion generators in the office. They know what kind of estrogenizers and toxic chemicals are in most of the – actually, the products that we even buy from the store like Triclosan, these little polyethylene plastic bulbs and toothpaste and things like that.

Also, most f them offer dental material compatibility testing. They’ll test for DNA. If they take out a root canal tooth and find that if the person has been suffering from ill health, quite often, they’ll facilitate a DNA test to see what was actually in that, so a patient can kind of understand maybe what the ties to the general health were.

I have an article called I think ‘Root Canal Awareness Week with a Twist’ on my blog, but it’s basically a rerun of an article I did for Dr. Mercola on May 3rd called ‘Safer & Healthier Alternative to Root Canals’ where I talk about not only how to tell if a root canal that you have – it’s very hard to get out a tooth. It’s very hard to allow one to go. It’ll help you decide whether you really need to take it out or not (I would always say yes, but anyway), how it should be properly removed so that you don’t get these serious infection in the jaw bone called a cavitaiton. I go into some detail about those things.

It’s just kind of a conglomeration of what a lot of biological dentists are thinking. I even talk about implants.

DEBRA: The biological dentist would have more of an orientation towards fewer toxic chemicals, more about preventive things that you could do to keep your teeth in good shape and things like that, yes?

Carol Vander Stoep: For the most part, [inaudible 00:41:31].

DEBRA: But they would need to be different. I’m assuming they would need to be different because I don’t think that there’s probably a standard for biological dentists?

Carol Vander Stoep: There aren’t. There aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to say. There are no standards. It’s just that everybody kind of goes off on their own direction. Some are really wild and do wonderful things, wonderful, crazy things, but others are more traditional.

I tend to like the dentists with the IBDM because they seem to understand electrical, the body electric a little bit better. But I see that some of the other dental organizations that are biological are moving in that direction. So yes, the more we learn, the more we can change our practices for the better.

I don’t think it’s out of line for people to do a lot of study and bring stuff to their biological dentists and say, “But…” For instance, a lot of them are still using a lot of nitrous oxide because patients like that. Well, nitrous oxide has got a lot of problems with it. I try to explain to my patients that it’s not healthy for them.

But yes, in general, it’s all about using the least toxic and then being as careful with mercury amalgam removal as possible and then building up your immune system. Some are really good with nutrition, so yeah. So yeah, it’s just nothing like traditional dentistry.

DEBRA: Nothing like it. Yes, a biological dentist would be what you would look for if you were going to other alternative healing kind of people instead of a medical doctor. And then a biological dentist would have more of that kind of viewpoint. And again, that is a very wide spectrum of what that might be.
And even though there’s no standard (and I’m assuming there would be no certification for a biological dentist), but there are associations.

Carol Vander Stoep: They have their own certifications, yes, if you join them.

DEBRA: Oh, good. Oh, good.

Carol Vander Stoep: And what I’m trying to say too though (what I say all the time) is really wonderful where people come in and you can see the sigh of relief like, “Oh, I can talk about this stuff to someone.” You don’t have to hide what you’re thinking just in the hopes that you’ll get some kind of dental care.

DEBRA: Yes, I understand. I understand exactly what you’re saying. I have a very good doctor that I’ve been seeing for the past four years who understands exactly what I’m saying. I’m just so grateful to have him because it’s so often you go to the doctor and you have to stop being yourself and just talk to the doctor, do what the doctor talks and be willing to do what the doctor wants you to do.

I’ve had so many arguments with medical doctors who want to put me in all kinds of drugs and I say no. I had one doctor just kick me out after the first ten minutes.

Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, they don’t have time for you. These guys really love what they do. They understand the reasoning behind it. There’s nothing like having that relationship where you can talk about things. They may not agree with you, but you can have that discussion and hey! That’s worth everything as far as I’m concerned.

DEBRA: Yeah. It is. So I want to ask you the last question I want to ask you because we’re getting almost to the end. Going to the dentist (whether it’s a biological dentist or a regular dentist), I se two reasons to go to the dentists. One is that you’re having a problem with a tooth and the other is to be preventive like going to get your teeth cleaned and things like that.

What would be your basic advice to people about how they should care for their teeth so that they don’t have to go to the dentists, they wouldn’t end up with a problem, they wouldn’t need a root canal? What’s your basic toxic-free advice on how to care for your teeth?

DEBRA: Well, beyond diet and breathing right, which is huge (that’s the big piece of the puzzle), but brushing with baking soda particularly in the evening is a good thing because it’s got a pH of 9. And so if you want to work topically in the mouth, that’s a great thing. I love ozonated oil with picks. I’ve talked about that quite a bit in the past. And of course, flossing if you’re going to.

But basically, all things are good if you take care of your body. I think that’s what I’d want to say. I would encourage those people out there because a lot of biological dentists are not yet using the advanced imaging to detect decay. That’s really, really, really critical. I hope some of you share what you learn from ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ with your biological dentist because I think that’s one area where we could really grow that segment.

Doesn’t no drills sound wonderful? I mean air abrasion is just using particles to blow away the decay selectively, not a drill. I think that’s a really important part that biological dentistry should begin to embrace more. Those are the thing.

DEBRA: Do you think that people need to go to the dentist in order to have their teeth cleaned on a regular basis or can they clean them in home?

Carol Vander Stoep: Well, for my patients who are really, really leading a good, clean lifestyle, yes, I think they should go in once a year just to get everything checked over. I mean, I don’t like to call my visits a cleaning. They are preventive appointments. We talk about nutrition. We talk about their airway. I give them exercises.

DEBRA: Oh, good, yeah.

Carol Vander Stoep: I’m also kind of unusual, so…

DEBRA: Well, you are kind of unusual. I mean, my dental hygienist, I go to a biological hygienist and I don’t get any of that, all these things that you’re talking about. I don’t get any of that.

Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, so it’s like with dentists, they embrace whatever they’re going to embrace and sometimes they can’t talk about what they want to talk about because we’re working for someone else, so we’re very limited sometimes on what we can do. A lot of it really is self-study or self-advocacy for what you’ve learned and then say, “Well, I like this.”

But I have a lot of people who are in the healthcare field who are really walking the walk and they might come in after eight years and have a pristine mouth. And then I have some people who – oh, there’s a little something like, I don’t know, maybe their mouth breathing or maybe they’re mouth breathing at night. Who knows? It’s a multitude of things that could be going on. It does take a really knowledgeable hygienist/dentist, whoever to help them piece together what might be going on.

And also, you have to monitor the cracks in teeth and things like that. So it’s good to just be monitored even if you’re pristine clean by someone. It’s just unfortunate that it’s set up as a cleaning appointment, these preventive appointments because that’s what insurance pays for. In our heads, that’s what we’re looking for. We come to get them cleaned when really, for the most part, my clients, they do come in clean now. They’ve been listening to me for years on end and they’re good. But we do find other things to refine what’s good for their health. That’s the model I’d like to see, but…

DEBRA: Yeah, I’d like to see that too because one of the things that I recognize is the more education you have about your body and how it works and what you can do to keep it healthy, the more we can do those things and the less health care/illness care we need because if we actually get real healthcare, we don’t need so much illness care.

We’re getting to the end of the show. Thank you so much for being here. Carol, I learned a lot and I’m sure my listeners learned a lot too. There’s so much more in her book that you can learn Mouth Matters. You can go to her website, MouthMattersBook.com and take a look.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Carol Vander Stoep: Thank you, Debra.

DEBRA: Thank you.

hair dye

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 22, 2014 | Q & A

Question from mskleimo

Do you have any sources for non-toxic hair dyes or highlighters especially ones that can be used in foils which keeps it out of direct contact with my scalp? I have become sensitive to the ones I have used for years. I have tried Palette by Nature but it cant be used in foils. I just tried Naturtint but it still has peroxide and PPD which I would like to avoid. The Palette by Nature says its free of those 2 but is too runny to use in a foil. thanks!

Debra’s Answer

First, the least toxic hair dye is henna. It comes in many colors now. But I don’t think it can be used with foils.

Maybe it’s time to consider not using foils. Maybe try henna, or no hair dye at all.

Readers, any suggestions?

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You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 22, 2014 | Health, Pamela Seefeld, Toxic Free Talk Radio, transcript

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about what you can do to help your body lose weight. Pamela has been helping me with weight loss and I’ll talk about my story and success. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before”

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

DATE OF BROADCAST: October 22, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. Today is Wednesday, October 22nd 2014. The weather is beautiful here in Clearwater, Florida where I’m looking out my window.

Actually, as I’m sitting here doing the radio show every weekday at 12 Eastern, I’m sitting here looking out 17 ft. of windows into my backyard where there’s all these oak trees and birds. Sometimes I see cardinals and red-headed woodpeckers and all kinds of things. It’s just really lovely. It’s lovely to sit here and chat with you every day and to be with my guests in this beautiful, natural atmosphere. Anyway, that’s what I’m looking at when I’m talking to you.

Today, my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Pamela knows so much. She’s just incredible in terms of what she knows and her ability to help people to get well. She’s been working with me personally (we’re going to talk about that a little bit today) and also other people that I know here in Clearwater, Florida. She’s based here in Clearwater.

She’s a registered pharmacist and she educates physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She also studied a field called ‘pharmacognosy’. That’s the study of medicinal plants (in addition to studying drugs).

And so what she likes to do really is take people off prescription drugs instead of give them to them. She likes to help people with medicinal plants and other natural substances to handle whatever is going on with their bodies instead of going on drugs in the first place because the difference between drugs and medicinal plants is that drugs may control your symptoms, but medicinal plants and natural substances will actually heal your body.

She knows so much about this that I have her on every other Wednesday because we’re just going through all kinds of different physical problems and talking about what are the alternatives so that you don’t have to take drugs. I’m just thrilled to be bringing you this information.

Hi, Pamela!

Pamela Seefeld: Hey! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. So today, we’re going to talk about how you can lose weight even if you’ve been having difficulties losing weight like me. And especially, I know that a lot of people who have had chemicals damage their body (which is virtually everyone in the world today) that if you have endocrine problems or other kinds of problems like with your liver and you can’t detox or whatever, that a lot of times, you’re overweight not because you’re eating too much or that you’re a bad person, but that your body just isn’t functioning the way it’s supposed to function.

I know that you’ve been working with me for a couple of months on just all the things, all my unhandled physical conditions, which are all improving, but specifically…

Pamela Seefeld: That’s great!

DEBRA: Yes, they are. But specifically, since I’ve been working with you, I’ve lost 14 lbs. really kind of effortlessly.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s excellent!

DEBRA: Yes, yes. And part of it has been because something that you’ve done has changed the way my body interacts with food. And so I don’t have cravings for anything, I don’t have to use any willpower to eat the right foods because I have no desire to eat sugar or any of those things that I use to have to struggle with, that I knew what was the wrong thing to do, but my body was saying, “Give me that sugar!”
And so now, it’s just like I just eat my three meals a day. I even forget to eat my snack in the afternoon. I eat my three meals. I eat something before I go to bed and I’m never hungry in between. I have no cravings and my body is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller and my clothes are hanging on me. I’m just very happy.

Pamela Seefeld: I’m so happy for you.

DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. I’m so happy for me too! I got to a point the other day where I realized with a bang! kind of actually that I could put my attention on other things in my life instead of having to deal with my body problems. That was kind of funny because…
Pamela Seefeld: Good for you! You know what? I’m really, really touched. I’m really so happy and honored that I can help you and that you’re doing so well. I mean, I knew that this was just really what you needed.

DEBRA: Yes, you did. You gave me exactly the right thing. I was telling somebody about this yesterday and he said, “Well, what is she giving you?” and I said, “Well, it’s not about having just like a box of things that she gives to every person who has a weight problem. It’s very individual.” By you giving me the right things for my body, my body is saying, “Okay, I can release this weight.”

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So it’s about the individuality. But we’re going to talk today about different things, different ways that you can help people lose weight if they’re having trouble losing weight. I’m hoping that we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the drugs that people take to lose weight and why people shouldn’t take them and what they can do instead?

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: So why don’t you start wherever you’d like to start?

Pamela Seefeld: Okay! So the end game, we’re blaming people that they’re not eating the right food or that it’s somehow a moral dilemma that they’re not just able to control their hunger. That’s not really what it’s all about. It’s not necessarily calories in and calories out because we know the person that sticks thin and they eat all day long. So it’s not necessarily even though circumstances.

Okay, so there’s different things in the body that affect metabolism. The good way to look to see if you’re having insulin resistance and storing a lot of the calories as sugar is to look at your fasting glucose like if you go to the doctor and they do a blood panel on you. It’s called a CMP and it’s called ‘complete metabolic profile’. You can see all your electrolytes and your sugar.

And when people meet with me, there’s a free consultation. If you bring me your blood work or fax or email it to me, I’ll go over the numbers with you because it’s not about the range. The problem is looking at blood work and deciding whether somebody has metabolic syndrome or has some problems or some propensities to store excess sugar as fat.

It’s not about the range because that’s for the general population. One person, a fasting blood sugar at 95, they might be stick thin and another person, they’re already gaining a lot of weight. So it’s not necessarily about the range. But I tell people that if your fasting blood sugar should really reside between 75 and 85. That’s where most normal people are going to be.

So when you start getting up to the 90s (95 or 96 or close to 100), what I typically see when somebody comes in here – maybe they’re middle age, so they’re blaming it on menopause. That’s not necessarily always what’s happening. They’re starting to gain weight. They’re not eating very much. I look and their fasting blood sugar is in the 90s and they’re triglycerides are sky high, their cholesterol is sky high and they’re like, “Well, I don’t eat these kinds of foods.”

And so what’s happening is that they’re being blamed for this, but really, it’s insulin resistance. Sugar is turning it to fat.
So a good way to start is to say, “Okay, am I putting on weight and what’s my fasting blood sugar?” That’s something that the doctor can easily determine.

There’s some new studies too. And I know with fructose, when we think about high fructose corn syrup (and of course, we’re trying to avoid all that in general), if you look at what the study show, the amount of sugar that’s added to food if you’re in the United States between 1970 and 2000, the amount of added sugar in the food supply rose 25%.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s amazing. A friend of mine just went to see a film (I haven’t seen it yet), it’s called Fed Up. He said that it was about sugar in our foods and that on the back of the label, a food label, it has the nutrition facts and it has all these different things and it gives the percentage of the daily requirement or the daily allowance. Sugar is listed, the amount of sugar is listed, but it doesn’t give the percentage.
And he told me on the film, they said that the daily allowance for sugar is something like 6-9 teaspoons, 6-9 teaspoons a day.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s insane!

DEBRA: It is! And he said even at that being the allowance that if they were to put the percentage of the daily allowance that is the sugar in the product, it would be like 400% or something and that’s why they don’t put it on there because there’s just so much sugar in tehse processed foods and people just don’t understand.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s what’s happening. And not only that, even in healthy foods, you look at a lot of these soy milks and so forth, they’ll put rice bran syrup. It’s sugar.

DEBRA: It’s sugar, it’s sugar.

Pamela Seefeld: They re-label it as something else. ‘Organic cane juice’, it’s still sugar. So you have to look at that and what we see now is there’s a new study that was published in molecular metabolism and they were talking about how…

DEBRA: Before you tell us about that, wait, wait. Before you tell us, we have to go to break.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah.

DEBRA: I don’t want to interrupt you in the middle of you telling us about the study.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s okay. Sounds good.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’re talking about losing weight and well be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is a Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com.

Okay, Pamela, tell us about the study.

Pamela Seefeld: Okay! So what they’re finding is there’s a vulnerability and a variability to fructose. This is a brand new study that was published on the Journal of Molecular Metabolism. The New York Times’ was citing this on October 14th of this month. It was looking at what is exactly happening with fructose.

What we’re finding is that fructose, when you take it, say you have a piece of fruit and you don’t have any protein or fat with it like yoghurt or a piece of cheese or something, if you just have fructose by itself, what it does is instead of doing into the bloodstream, it goes immediately to the liver and it stimulates the production of triglycerides. So it increases cholesterol.

So this is a good example. When I see some of these women that come in, they’re very athletic and they work out a lot and they’re thin and they’re in great shape and they eat a lot of fruit, all of a sudden, they come back and they’re having cholesterol at sky high. This is what can happen.

Fructose, the sugar fructose is handled differently than glucose (which is like in regular table sugar). So if they’re going to have fruit and what they’re seeing is berries, they’re finding that there’s a growth factor. It’s called fibroblast growth factor 21. That’s not really important. But what they’re finding is that obese subjects have higher levels of this and it makes you store fat.

So it’s not that the person that’s heavy is eating improperly. It’s that there’s this other things going on with the hormones. And apparently, this hormone is much more effective with fructose than any sugar.

So what does this mean to you and I? I always tell this to my patient. You don’t want to be eating fruit that’s high in sugar by itself because you’re going to store it as fat. For example, watermelon and all these lemons because it’s kind of liquidy…

DEBRA: That was the first thing that came to mind, watermelon.

Pamela Seefeld: Yup! I mean, it’s not that these things are bad. It’s not like you can’t eat them, but you have to combine them with fat or protein to delay the gastric emptying. But if you’re eating lots of fruit that are basically water and sugar, you’re going to end up with these problems. You might be thin in the beginning, but eventually, you’re going to end up gaining a lot of weight.

DEBRA: Well, you know, I watch people eat or drink smoothies with a lot of fruit in them, just straight fruit and protein powder or something (although protein is probably good, that protein or fat). But that’s just a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar that’s going on.

I know that Whole Foods are good, but vegetables, most vegetables don’t have the same degree of sugar.

Pamela Seefeld: Exactly.

DEBRA: And I also know from my own research that different fruits have different amounts of sugar. I eat mostly berries and cherries because they’re on the low end of how much sugar they have in them. I eat them by themselves (I mean, separate from a meal) and I put cream on them, grass-fed cream.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s smart. That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: Yeah. Every night, I have my lovely bowl of mixed berries or cherries with grass-fed cream and I’m very happy.

Pamela Seefeld: Look at you! So you understand the physiology of it, that the sugar is really going and it’s creating all these lipid.

You have to know too that fructose is pro-inflammatory. It can cause inflammation. So somebody who has any kind of rheumatism or arthritis, they have no business eating tons of high sugar fruits. The same thing, it also alters body weight by altering the leptin sensitivity. Leptin is al about whether you’re storing fat and also, whether you’re feeling hungry or not.

So I’m not saying fruit is bad. But when they say “eat your fruits and vegetables,” I really would rather say, “Eat your vegetables.”

DEBRA: I totally agree with you.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s where I’m coming from.

DEBRA: And that’s my experience in my own body. The other thing that I can say is that I used to – now, I’ll say something that’s very embarrassing, but it’s true, it’s true. I think there are other people in this boat and so I want to say this so that people can see how far you can come.

I used to do things like eat a whole bag of cookies for dinner or I once ate a whole coconut cream pie.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I’m sure a lot of people have done that of course.

DEBRA: I used to eat a half a gallon of ice cream.

Pamela Seefeld: I’ve done that!

DEBRA: It’s interesting because I love to travel, but when I travel, it’s interesting just for me to see what different places consider to be food. When I went to San Francisco (I lived in San Francisco a few years ago for three months), I couldn’t find a sweet potato to save my life in a restaurant. I had to eat three meals a day in restaurants and to try to find something…

Pamela Seefeld: That’s funny.

DEBRA: And you know, you go to a restaurant for breakfast and everything is sugar and wheat. They even put flour in scrambled eggs in some places. You have to ask, “Is this 100% eggs?” It’s just kind of amazing to go out to eat and see what you’re being fed and how much sugar is anything.

I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. Just go to the Food Channel and watch Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and you’ll see how much sugar is in restaurant food. It’s in everything!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, because you see them cooking the food, right?

DEBRA: You see them cooking the food!

Pamela Seefeld: Exactly!

DEBRA: It’s in everything. They just toss it in. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dessert or not.

People don’t understand what sugar actually does to weight. I can tell you for a fact, I don’t eat white sugar. I mean, I eat white sugar maybe once a year if I’m out some place and I just have to eat that Godive chocolate cheesecake, you know? Gluten-free Godiva Chocolate Bars, I think not. I was like, “I don’t need them.”

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I don’t even have it in my house. It is a problem. If I have people over for coffee, like the family, I don’t have any of that there. I mean, look, we have coffee here, but I don’t have sugar in the house. I’m really sorry if that’s what you want.

DEBRA: Yeah, I have things like honey and coconut sugar, which are not so refined and stuff. But I’ll tell you that if I eat even coconut sugar, I stop losing weight. That’s the thing. And if I cut out the coconut sugar, I’ll lose weight again. It’s as simple as that.

But if I’m eating whole foods, if I’m eating my fruit with cream, if I’m not eating any kind of sweetener at all, refined or unrefined, just nothing, then I will lose weight.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, yeah. It’s because it’s altering the leptin sensitivity.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

Pamela Seefeld: Let me talk a little bit about green tea too. Let’s talk about some of the different supplements.

DEBRA: Okay, so you have 40 seconds.

Pamela Seefeld: Forty seconds? Okay. Green tea is great because it contains epigallocatechin and it can protect against cancer as well. It revs up your metabolism and it’s not going to make you jittery. I use this every day before I work out. I think it’s great.

DEBRA: I take it every day too. I take green tea extract and I also drink green tea that I grew. I love green tea.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I’m a big fan of the capsules themselves because if you do the tea itself, you’re doing water-soluble extract. You’re not going to get all the epigallocatechin. The best combination would be some of both.

DEBRA: Oh, good! Well, that’s good to know. So we need to go to break and then we’ll come back and talk more about how to lose weight even if you’ve had difficulty losing weight before. There are things that you can do and I’m living proof of that because after years of not being able to lose weight, I’ve lost actually 25 lbs. since January. I’m very proud of that.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dad and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK=

Pamela, you mentioned that you do free consultations on the phone. Why don’t you give people your phone number so after the show, they can call you?

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, that’s great. So you can reach me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 72-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, great! So I think you were going to tell us some things that people can take that will help their bodies.

Pamela Seefeld: Right! So the different supplements you can take, the green tea was the first one that I was just kind of talking about that works really good. There’s one also (and I’m not sure if your listeners have heard of this before), it’s called Nopal cactus.

DEBRA: I’ve never heard of that before.

Pamela Seefeld: Nopal cactus, I was looking up the studies – yes, it’s really interesting. It’s a cactus extract and what it does is it lowers postprandial glucose, which is the glucose after an hour (so after you eat, you take a blood measurement) by 25%. So this can be for people that are pre-diabetic or worried about diabetes or even if they’re eating sugar or sweets or fruits. It lowers the amount of sugar that reaches the blood stream. As a result, it stops the spiking of the sugar.

It’s pretty interesting. They use this a lot for people that are diabetics to keep blood sugar low. But it also has polyphenols, which have really strong antioxidant activity as well.

So this is a new supplement that’s up and coming. People might be interested in trying some of that. It’s not that expensive and it works really well.

DEBRA: Wow!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, Nopal cactus. So green tea and Nopal cactus are really good. There’s another supplement that I really like a lot. It’s made by Nature’s Plus and it’s called Synaptalean. Let me explain what Synaptalean is. This is why I like this.

DEBRA: Can you spell it first? Can you spell it first?

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s S-Y-N-A-P-T-A-L-E-A-N.

DEBRA: Okay.

Pamela Seefeld: So this product is called Synaptalean. It’s at the health food store. I use it quite a lot. What Synaptalean does is it has what’s called a neuro-synapse complex in it.

So this particular product originally, they were doing the testing to see if it had activity and they were going to use it as a happy pill. It has antidepressant activity because it works on dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitters that’s released when we’re eating something fattening, intoxication and that kind of thing. So dopamine is really important.

So sometimes when I have people that have some depression and I’m using maybe 5-HTP or omega-3 and I’m not sure if I’m getting the full result, I’m like, “Look, let’s try a neurotransmitter. Let’s try and work on dopamine.”

So I use this a lot for mental health, but what’s interesting is that they decided to market it as a weight loss product because they found that when people were taking it, this happy effect actually makes you not want to eat.

DEBRA: That’s interesting because I think that…

Pamela Seefeld: Isn’t that cool?

DEBRA: It is cool. I think that a lot of wanting to overeat gets triggered by wanting food for emotional comfort. And when you’re not eating emotionally – I would probably say the single, biggest change for me since I’ve been working with you or you’ve been working with me (we’ve been working together) is that this big shift from feeling like I need to eat or that I have to eat. It’s just my body is just calm all the time and I just go, “Okay, it’s breakfast time. It’s time to feed my body.” It’s not like, “I have to eat or I’m going to die” or “I’m upset, so I have to have a pizza.” All of that is just gone and I just feed myself healthy foods.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, that’s wonderful. That’s what it’s all about. It’s hard to detach yourself from that because a lot of times, we associate food with comfort.

DEBRA: Right!

Pamela Seefeld: So this is interesting because you can use this for depression especially if someone has refractory depression where the medicines really weren’t working for them and I’m using some supplements for them and I’m getting half results and I want to just kind of boost it up a little bit. But then the nice part about it is that weight loss tends to result from it as well.

So that’s a really good supplement. It has a lot of data on it that works really well. And just like I said, it’s available at the health food store. I use it a lot for mental health too, so that’s very good.

I don’t want to forget to talk about coconut oil because coconut oil is very important. We know that coconut oil lowers viruses in the body. It’s like a 75% reduction, so it has a lot of effects as far as for someone who has chronic fatigue, they worry about the cold and flu season.

But coconut oil, what the studies found is that when you’re using coconut oil and replacing that from other oils in your diet, oil makes you feel filled up. You’re not as hungry. This does not promote fat storage because coconut oil is made of medium chain triglycerides and MCT oils are burned up immediately in the blood stream. So when you take coconut oil, it’s actually used as energy right then. It cannot be stored as fat.

DEBRA: Wow. Wow! I didn’t know that. Hello?

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, you didn’t know that, yes! It can’t be stored.

DEBRA: I love coconut oil.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, it’s MCT oil. MCT oil is what we use in people with liver failure because people with liver failure can’t process fat. So they get special nutrition in cans that are MCT oils.

So what we’re finding is we’ll give this primarily as MCT oil and as a result of that, you get lots of energy. So people that are doing athletics, they want to just up their game as far as their energy levels during the day. They don’t want to be necessarily consuming lots of high caloric foods, coconut oil is a good, little trick.

DEBRA: Wow! We talked about coconut oil on the show that we did about colds and flu and helping your immune system because it boosts that as well.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: But I just want to say again that coconut oil is great for any kind of cooking. It hardens at a cold temperature, so you can’t make salad dressing and then store the salad dressing in the refrigerator, but you could use it for salad dressing if you make it up fresh and you’re oil is at the right temperature.

But also, there’s something called coconut manna or coconut butter (differentiate brands have different names). It’s coconut oil mixed with coconut meat. So it’s more of the whole coconut. I can just eat that stuff right out of the jar with a spoon. It is so delicious.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s very good for you.

DEBRA: Oh, delicious! So delicious, yes. So if coconut oil doesn’t seem appetizing to you, look for coconut manna. My favorite one is I think it’s Artisana, Artisan something is the brand. It’s just so good, coconut manna. That’s a really great way to get those.

Pamela Seefeld: So the MCT oils are important. That’s another way to lose weight. Studies show too that taking fish oil also helps to keep weight down. We’re talking more about natural supplements. I’ll talk a little bit about the drugs at the end. But taking Omega 3’s every day also helps a lot.

I’m a big fan of doing the detox. I know you’re on the Body Anew and I’ve been on it for 15 years. That pulls out the pesticides and the chemicals that are stored in the fat soluble tissues. So that’s the best way too because it actually starts dumping the fat. That can work with or without exercise.

DEBRA: I really feel that happening. It’s just like you go along days, days, days. And then all of a sudden, there’s a day that I wake up and I was like, “What happened to my body?” It just went whoosh and got smaller.

We have to go to break. So, we’ll talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist that dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She’s at BotanicalResource.com. We’ll talk more about losing weight when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. Pamela, give us your phone number again.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Good! And you can call her after the show. She’ll be happy to talk to you. She gives free consultation. I can vouch for the fact that she knows what she’s doing, not only with me, but I know other people who see her in Clearwater. My doctor, my medical doctor recommends her. She’s unlike anybody you’ve ever talked to, I’m sure.

Okay, so go on. This is the last segment. So you want to tell us about some of the drugs that people shouldn’t take.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct. So going back really quickly, the detox is really important because it starts taking all these stuff out of the body and that helps with the weight loss in itself. What they’re normally going to give you if you go to the doctor and you’re asking for weight loss, the most popular product that they’re using Phendimetrazine. It’s basically an amphetamine derivative and there’s a million of doctors around here in Clearwater (I’m sure all around the country) that you go there, you get a B12 shot every week, they give you these appetite suppressant and they put you on 600 calories a day.

Well, if you go 600 calories a day, you’re going to lose weight anyways. This is just so you don’t feel like you’re hungry. The problem with this medicine is that they can raise your blood pressure, they can cause heart problems. Remember when people were doing the Fen-Phen and they were ending up with all these heart problems? Those are pretty serious risks.

I can also tell you for a fact, some of my clients have done this kind of stuff where they want to drop a lot of weight before a reunion or something, they’ll come in and the one client was telling me that her blood work got completely messed up as a result of taking these medicines. And then when she brought it up to the doctor, he says, “That’s not my problem.” That’s for your regular doctor. I’m just your weight loss doctor.

I’m not saying you’re all going to be that way, but I was just shocked. I’m like, “No, he put you on these medicines and the blood work looks really bad now as a result. He’s responsible.” But they think to themselves, “Okay, you’re going to pay me cash, we’re just going to go ahead and give you the weight loss pills and we’ll move on from there.” That’s not how things work.

DEBRA: Wow!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I can’t make this up. I told him, I said, “No, you go back to him and tell him, ‘You’re the one that messed it up. You fix it.’” But they don’t want to manage anything with chronic management. You have to really take that into consideration when you decide to go and have to say, “Okay, I want to lose all these weight really fast and I’m going to go for these pills.”

And I can also tell you that I see this quite frequently of the clients that do decide to go do this against my wishes. I’m like, “Alright, you go do whatever you want.” They gain the weight back and more after they stop the program because it’s an artificial situation for your body. No one is going to stay on that low a calorie. And also too, you lose a lot of hair as a result of this.

So what happens is you’re eating such a low calorie diet. And if you completely cut fat out of your diet, what the study show is you’re eating these big salads, but if you’re just putting vinegar on it and you don’t have olive oil, you’re not absorbing any of the nutrients. So actually, the hair loss that these people are experiencing during these extreme diets is not necessarily because they’re not eating enough protein or enough calories. It’s because literally, the food they’re eating (especially the antioxidants), they’re not absorbing any of it.

DEBRA: That’s so important. There’s all these people who have been on low fat diets for so long and their bodies just don’t have that ability to absorb the nutrients because they’re not eating fat. It’s just been going on for so long.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: Please eat fat. Eat fat, eat fat, eat fat.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes! Because if you’re thinking yourself healthy, you’re eating all these vegetables and you make this huge, colorful salad (which I do every single night), if you don’t have some fat – I’m not saying douse the whole thing in tons of oil, but if you don’t have a few tablespoons of olive oil on the salad, you’re not absorbing any of the nutrients.

The whole idea behind eating healthy foods is that your body needs to have these things being bioavailable. And to make them bioavailable, there’s ways that you can stir it into the blood stream. Otherwise, it’s just providing fiber.

That’s where a lot of these people miss the point. It’s not about extreme calorie reduction. It’s about eating every three hours, using detox. Maybe you want to throw in some green tea or some Nopal cactus.

A lot of it is looking at your blood work and saying, “Is there something here that the doctor is not seeing that’s telling me why I’m putting on weight and I should be losing weight.” That’s a lot of it. Your numbers tell a lot about what’s going on inside your body. And I think that they’re commonly not looked at.

DEBRA: Well, I think if we look at – correct me if I’m wrong, but I think if we look at fat as a symptom, as an indicator that there’s something going on in your body instead of something that “you’re eating too much” – I mean certainly people in the world as a whole are eating incorrectly in ways that put on more weight. Like for me, I’ve been eating organic, natural, unprocessed food for years and I am still not losing weight. I couldn’t figure this out. It turned out that there was something wrong with my body, not something wrong with me.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: And I think that that’s where people need to look at this and say, “It’s not about the latest fad diet. If I’m gaining weight, if I can’t lose weight, that’s my body saying, ‘there’s something wrong here.’” Normal, healthy bodies are not overweight. And so it’s a symptom like having a headache or blowing your nose, runny nose and what-not.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, it is. It is a symptom and like in your case and in the case of a lot of other of my clients, if you have pre-diabetes or diabetes or if your fasting blood sugar is in the 90s, I tell people that we want to use some homeopathy, some medical homeopathy like Pericardium Triple Warmer to start bringing the sugar down.

Most of the time, these hints are coming in your blood work and they’re telling you that you’re going to be at risk for a certain thing especially diabetes and metabolic syndrome and I think that they’re often ignored. Most of the time, people do not hear any kind of word of caution out of their physician until they’re up in the 100.

DEBRA: Yes, yes.

Pamela Seefeld: …by the time you already need medicine. So it’s really wrong. We don’t want people to be on a bunch of medicine. We want people to be healthy and happy and prevent these ongoing problems.

I always tell people it’s kind of like you’re in front of a misty bridge. These things are all showing that something is coming. I would just tell you to approach it head-on and stop it at the pass. Going to the other side means medicine, getting sick and not being 100%. That’s what people really deserve.

DEBRA: They do! And you know, I really hear you talking about health and happiness and you’re not talking about how can the industry make more money. We’re talking about how can we be healthy?

Pamela! Right!

DEBRA: I mean, if you really look at – I mean, I know that doctors help people in various ways and I don’t want to be against the whole, entire medical profession, but really, if you take a look at it, their job is to sell drugs.

Pamela Seefeld: Right! And that’s what pharmacies does. I understand it because I still work as a pharmacist. I like pharmacy. I embrace both. But I see this in a lot of patients and I see this even as a clinical pharmacist that people, if they were given an opportunity a few years before to do a few, simple, inexpensive things, they wouldn’t need any of the medicine and they wouldn’t end up in the hospital where I have to dose their medicine.

And that’s what it’s all about. It’s preventing some of these things. And look at the healthcare costs! They’re out of control in the country. Some of these could really be prevented. But also, quality of life.

DEBRA: Right, right.

Pamela Seefeld: These people deserve to not be on all these diabetic medications. A lot of these weight gain is just a symbol that the sugar is not balanced. Using some homeopathy in your water every day pretty much reverse it and it’s inexpensive and it’s safe.

So I really encourage people if they think that there’s some kind of an imbalance with glucose metabolism especially in the way they handle fructose and fruit to give me a call and I can tell you some simple things that you can do.

DEBRA: Yes, please do that because it has made a huge difference in my life. And tell us some of the conditions that you end up with, other conditions besides overweight? If you’re overweight, what else happens in your body?

Pamela Seefeld: Well, you have excessive inflammation because it stimulates circulating cytokines. So people end up having pain and arthritis and maybe even leading to chronic fatigue. But also, it impairs memory. And this is what they know, that people that have excessive amounts of circulating sugar, it impairs hippocampal memory formation.

So that’s why you’re talking about people that you kind of get foggy when you’re eating too much sugar. Well, this is what happens. The sugar can overwhelm the body. And as a result of that, you’re not only gaining weight and your lipids are really high and you don’t feel good, but it can create an element where your cognitive function is impaired to some degree.

And this is really important because let’s face it, we all want to be on top of our game with our memory. This is something that excessive amounts of sugar can cause problems – don’t even mention the fact that kidney problems, eye problems and all those especially with diabetics.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. So this is really…

Pamela Seefeld: So those are all very, very important.

DEBRA: This is something that people can do. I mean, isn’t overweight one of the major health problems in America today?

Pamela Seefeld: Most definitely. Let’s face it, a lot of people’s problems are because they’re storing the sugar and they’re storing the calories that they consume in an excessive manner. And then a lot of times, they’ll chalk it up to, “Okay, it’s hormones… she’s big-boned.” I mean, I understand a lot of stuff, but really, it’s about why is your body storing it and is it really storing it because there’s this imbalance with the way that the insulin is taking sugar into the cell.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. And there’s something we can do about it.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, definitely.

DEBRA: Well, this has been so interesting. We only have a minute left. So anything you want to say for a minute that we haven’t said?

Pamela Seefeld: Also, I would tell you, sleep is very important. I mean, this sounds like really ordinary talk, but people getting eight hours of sleep or seven and a half hours of sleep, they know that sleep affects weight and it also affects your hunger levels. So people that do not sleep the appropriate amount of time, they’re definitely going to be more at risk for storing all their calories as fat.

Debra; I have found that too. And one other things that you gave me (we talked about this on the sleep show) is passion flower. That really helps me sleep. I wake up in the morning and my body has had the opportunity to do its fat-burning thing overnight and I feel better!
Anyway, we’ve got only about ten seconds. So thank you so much. Give your phone number again.

Pamela Seefeld: Okay, yes. Please call me. I would be very gratefully happy to help you at any circumstance. It’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Thank you so much.

Pamela Seefeld: Thank you.

DEBRA: Pamela is on every other Wednesday. So two weeks from today, she’ll be on again with more great information about how you can live healthy without drugs. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 21, 2014 | Body Care, Diana Kaye and James Hahn, Toxic Free Talk Radio, transcript

Today my guests Diana Kaye and James Hahn This husband-and-wife are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. We’ll be talking today about how organic personal care products are mislabeled in various ways and what to look for on a label to make sure you have a truly organic product. Diana and Jim own a small organic farm in lovely Middletown Valley, Maryland and have operated their organic herbal personal care products business there since 1996. Terressentials was originally started in Virginia in 1992. It grew out of their search for chemical-free products after Diana’s personal experience with cancer and chemotherapy in 1988. Prior to Diana’s cancer, they were involved in commercial architecture in Washington DC. Diana and James are proud to be an authentic USDA certified organic and Fair Made USA business. They are obsessive organic researchers and artisan handcrafters of more than one hundred USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products that they offer through their two organic stores in Frederick County, Maryland, through a network of select retail partners across the US, and to customers around the world via their informative web site. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/terressentials

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH DIANA KAYE & JAMES HAHN

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products”

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Diana Kaye and James Hahn

DATE OF BROADCAST: October 21, 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. Today, my guests are Diana Kaye and James Hahn. Oh, I should say it’s Tuesday, October 21^st 2014. It’s a beautiful in Clearwater, Florida. I love autumn. We can open the windows now instead of living in air conditioning.

But anyway, we’re going to talk with Diana Kaye and James Hahn who have been on the show before. They have a business called Terressentials where they make – I think they call it ‘gourmet personal care products’. I’m looking at the description for the show today. It’s ‘organic gourmet personal care products’.

They’re a USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products and they really are gourmet personal care products. They’re just really high quality. Their natural scents are just luscious. I use their products and I just enjoy them every day.

So what we’re talking about today is how to read a label on organic personal care products. There are some products that say they’re organic, but are they really certified? There are some companies that would like to mislead you. Other products are really good. How do you tell the difference? This is the main thing we’re going to talk about today.

I know from past experience that Diana and James have a lot to tell us, which is why I have them on the show every month. They have just a lot of information and experience. They were one of the first companies to make organic personal care products many, many years ago. They’ve been doing this just about as long as I’ve been doing what I do, a long time.

So we might hear anything today. That’s what I’m wanting to say. We might hear anything from them today that has to do with the organic products, organic personal care products in addition to how to read the label.

Hi, Diana and James.

DIANA KAYE: Hi, Debra. How is it going?

DEBRA: Good! Busy. I know you guys are busy too.

DIANA KAYE: It’s life!

DEBRA: Yeah, it is! I was just working on my newsletter this week, this morning, yesterday. There is so much going on in the world about toxics and not toxic products that I couldn’t even keep up with it. I’m already piling up information to put in next week’s newsletter because I just didn’t have the time to put it all in the newsletter.

I actually work a whole day. I work all day on Monday just doing the newsletter. There’s just so much going on.

DIANA KAYE: I know. Oh, I’m not surprised. I often find myself at three or four in the morning doing the same thing, keeping up with and trying to digest all the information. I may have perhaps a stronger constitution than most people and I can absorb this information without feeling totally overwhelmed. But I know so many other people, they have a really hard time with being bombarded with so much information and trying to protect themselves and their family.

DEBRA: There is so much information. And so that’s why I think it’s important that I do what I do because I’m getting all these newsletters and notices and stuff from all these different places and I can kind of digest it and put it in a little summary about what’s going on in the world of toxics.

And so if you’re interested in getting my newsletter, it comes out every Tuesday. I just sent one out. It announces all the radio shows for the week, but it also tells about other things that will be on my website.

And today, I also take things that I think that you really need to know from other websites. Like today, I was announcing about a new toxics act that is now being considered, how you can write to your senator. There’s tips on how to – in today’s episode, there’s tips on how you can have less toxic Halloween and things like that.

So just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You’ll see there’s a place to sign up on the right column of the page.

So Diana, is James not with us today?

DIANA KAYE: He is running behind. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to jump in. I’m sorry. I just learned myself this morning, so I apologize for that.

DEBRA: Totally fine! I know you have a busy, busy business and especially now, there’s so much going on.

So let’s just start talking about organic personal care products and how they’re labeled. I’m just going to let you start wherever you want to start.

DIANA KAYE: Okay. Well, as I was preparing for the show today – I’m still laughing at myself. You know there’s some people who collect salt & pepper shakers or they collect figurines, lots of stamps, et cetera. I collect bottles of body care products that are labeled. I have got boxes and boxes of these products because I collected them over the past 20 years. It’s overwhelming to me sometimes when I look at all these products. Many of them are being sold right now, today over the Internet. Some are still being sold in health food stores – yes, health food stores – all across the country. It just boggles the mind because…

DEBRA: Well, why don’t you just pick one? Okay, go ahead and finish your sentence, but I was going to suggest that you just pick one. Start picking them out and tell us what’s wrong with them. You don’t have to tell us the brand.

DIANA KAYE: No, I will not talk about company names. The only way that we can really distinguish what we’re doing (and this has been an issue for us since we started our business) is we have to talk about ingredients because that’s what distinguishes something that’s really natural and oh, my gosh! The word ‘natural’, if you see that word, run in the other direction.

We are talking about, for instance if you can bear with me for a second here, not just products that are labeled as ‘organic’ in the body care world, but we do have (and this is something that consumers would be pleased to hear about) a federal legislation called the National Organic Program, which assures people that if they buy a food product whether it was made in the U.S. or it was made in Europe that when it comes here to the United States and it has the word ‘organic’ on it, that that product has gone through a process of certification.

We now have what’s called a reciprocity agreement with the EU, so that if products are certified to the European Union standard, then those products are also considered to be organic here in the United States. They do have to go through an oversight procedure to make sure that they’re legitimately certified, but there is som assurance with that.

The problem is we don’t have that assurance (although we should) with personal care products and – hello, surprise, this is a whole other conversation – cotton products, anything made from cotton and/or hemp and linen, any truly natural fibers.

The original tent of Congress when they were composing what they called the Organic Food Production Act of 1990 [inaudible 00:09:07] discussion to rounding the creation of that act was that Congress wanted the word ‘organic’ – they wanted organics to grow and they wanted many different types of product.

In their discussions (I have copies of these early discussions), they wanted to encourage personal care products and clothing products to follow the rule so that we could create more demand for true agricultural ingredient.

So the reason I’m ‘mentioning all that is that we don’t have enforcement in the United States in the personal care department and we don’t have enforcement in the world of textiles.

DEBRA: Okay. So wait, I just want to ask you a question right there.

DIANA KAYE: Sure!

DEBRA: Because I think that people think organic is organic is organic and because of the National Organic Program and organic foods, if they see ‘organic’, they think that it’s all organic.

Now, so we have the USDA Program and the organic seal for food and that’s organic. In the textile realm, we have the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which is its own program and that’s different from the National Organic Program, but is there not – oh, I see that we need to go to break. So I’ll ask the question and you can answer when we get back.

DIANA KAYE: Okay.

DEBRA: Is there not some program that covers personal care products? We’ll go to break and we’ll find out when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. Her website is Terressentials.com. They make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products and she’s going to tell us what that means (among other things) when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. We’re talking about how to read the label on organic personal care products.

What I asked her before the break was we have the USDA organic standard for food and we have the Global Organic Textile Standards for textiles, but do we have any such organization with our standards and regulation and certification and all of that specifically for personal care products?

DIANA KAYE: Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned this GOTS standard. That is a standard that was created in Europe and is used for products that are – for instance, cotton. A lot of cotton is now grown in India. However, most people aren’t aware of this, but the USDA has made a policy scope statement and their statement said that if a product or textile product (and I’m just going to digress here a little bit) is labeled organic, it is supposed to be certified to the USDA organic standard not to an international standard.

This is another area though where they haven’t been enforcing their own guidance policy. And it’s strange because what a lot of manufacturers have claimed is that, “Well, personal care products aren’t food” and I beg to differ, but I’ll get back to that.

So if that’s their claim about why they think they can call products organic, but not be organic, well, let’s talk about cotton. It’s not a food product and contrary to what other people may think, cotton seed oil is not really something that humans should be eating. It has no history of human use for food.

DEBRA: And let’s just add right there that when you see cotton seed oil on a label, a food label that it comes from cotton, conventionally grown cotton (unless it saysorganic cotton seed oil), it comes from conventionally grown cotton and conventionally grown cotton I think uses more pesticides on crops than any other crop in the world I think. And so it has much more pesticide in it than food crops, ordinary food crops that have pesticides on it.

And so if you are eating cotton seed oil, you’re getting so much pesticides. It doesn’t say that on the label of course.

DIANA KAYE: No, it doesn’t. And the thing about oils (any kind of oil, I don’t care if it’s olive oil, sunflower oil, cotton seed oil, pick your favorite oil), when these crops are grown conventionally – and these goes back to our label and why some of these labels, we’re going to be talking about shouldn’t even be called ‘natural’, let alone having the product labeled as organic.

Many of the petrochemicals that are used in commercial, industrial, conventional agriculture are lipophilic, which means they are attracted to fat. So if a pesticide is applied at the base of the plant or the soil or even if it’s sprayed on the plant, it’s washed off into the soil, taken up by the roots and then it concentrates always in any oil portion of that plant.

And seed oils, this is a concern because you’re going to get all the concentrated pesticides or any other kind of petrochemically based growth regulators, fertilizers, herbicides and et cetera. So it’s really not a good idea to use any kind of oil product. I don’t care if it’s food or personal care that are not organic. ‘Natural’, as I’ve said, if you see the word, run the other direction.

DEBRA: Yes, because natural does not mean organic.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, my gosh!

DEBRA: You know, I’m looking at products all the time as you are. One of the questions that came up this week on my Q&A blog was somebody was looking for unscented aftershave. And so I started looking for an unscented aftershave [inaudible 00:18:10]. And so a product came up and it said that it was ‘natural’. It was a natural, unscented aftershave.

And so I looked at the ingredients list. To me, that’s something that’s natural. When I look at your ingredients listed house things on there like lavender essential oil where you can recognize there’s something lavender, there’s clay, there’s…

DIANA KAYE: Coco butter.

DEBRA: …unrecognizable – coco butter, yeah! Coconut oil or something like that. There were so many ingredients on this ingredients list that were just industrial chemical words and things that you= could not recognize and even I would need to go and look them up (and I know a lot of cosmetic ingredients). These are things that I have to go and look up.

To me, that’s not a natural ingredient if something is processed. If it goes through an industrial process, I don’t care if it starts as coconut oil or any other [inaudible 00:19:18] resource, it’s not natural anymore. It’s not.

And this is the problem. For me, most so-called ‘natural’ personal care products is that they take some renewable resource and they put through an industrial process, combining it with who knows what kind of industrial chemicals to make some ingredient and that’s not in its natural state in addition to the fact that it’s not organic.

DIANA KAYE: Absolutely, absolutely. And that is why we have tried to make the distinction about ‘organic’ versus non-organic products and talk about ingredients just exactly for that specific reason.

Again, I have these boxes and boxes of products. It overwhelms me because we are really a small family business. We try, Debra like you, but we aren’t as nationally based in terms of our education as you are to try to teach people, “Really what is in this stuff?”

It makes it so challenging when our voice is so small. You can go on the Internet at any time and use any search engine and if you plug in ‘organic body care’, you’re going to come up with hundreds of thousands ahead.

And what we’re seeing more and more (because the Internet has made commerce so equal or equalized it) that you will have products, something from another country and just compound the problem that are called organic, that don’t even have any kind of a certification to one of the industry standards over in Europe or wherever else, whatever country it is.

So in addition to the problem of having so many industry types of standards (not governmental standards) – uh-oh, I heard some music.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s time to go to break, but you can finish your sentence.

DIANA KAYE: Okay. For example, in the EU, they do have an organic governmental standard, but that standard was not ever written to include personal care products.

DEBRA: Yeah.

DIANA KAYE: So it’s another glitch that we have that we have the food coming over that says ‘EU certified’ and it says it’s organic and the USDA accept it, but if it’s personal care, they’re not accepting it.

DEBRA: Okay! So now, I need to cut you off. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. We’re talking about the labeling of organic personal care products. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye. She has a business, Terressentials, which she and her husband created and they make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products.

So we’re talking about how personal care products are labeled and their lack of enforcement structure, et cetera. Go on, Diana.

DIANA KAYE: Well, you had asked me to take out one of the products from my collection and to just dive in with a little bit about some of the examples to why these products aren’t organic (and I’m going to add, not even natural).

We have over the years compiled some educational articles. We’d invite anyone to check those out. Many of them are published on our websites. For people who have events or groups, we also have printed versions of many of those articles in kind of a brochure format so that people could help to educate their family, their friends, the groups that they participate with, et cetera.

I have products, a variety of products here – shampoos, products advertised as sunscreen, conditioners, body washes, you name it, cosmetics, colored cosmetics, et cetera that are boldly labeled as organic that are not certified organic to the USDA National Organic Program. Many of them have zero certification of any kind.

And when I say an industry standard, I’ve mentioned that previously that many of these products can’t even certify to industry standard.

Industry standards, if I can give you a brief definition of…

DEBRA: Sure!

DIANA KAYE: Here’s a group of manufacturers and maybe the suppliers of their chemical ingredients and maybe even some of the distributors of their product to distribute to – like, for example, a retail chain. These people get together and they decide they’re going to come up with what their definition of organic is.

And when they come up with these standards, everyone that I have seen is in conflict with what the USDA standard is for organic products. There are allowances for chemical processes, allowances for chemical ingredients used as catalyst and reactive agent to create these synthetic materials that they’re calling ‘natural’, which aren’t.

The problem here that’s adding to the confusion in this day of our Internet global marketplace is that we have several industry groups that got together in various countries just to thicken their soup. And so now we have industry standards created by manufacturers (not government, not the people, without consumer input) that come from different countries.

For example, if it comes from Europe, you might see the word BIO. That’s the phrase that they have used for many years over there to designate products that are organic. But again, it doesn’t mean that they’re certified to the EU standard, the government standard. It could be something that was certified to standards created by the manufacturers themselves to include all the different chemical ingredients that they use in their product.

And so we have a huge mess on our hands in the world of personal care right now with this labeling situation. I know, Debra, we were going to talk about categories of ingredients at a later date, but would you like for me to just give you a couple of examples of ingredients that are listed or maybe just read the ingredients from one product?

DEBRA: Well, here’s what I’d like you to do. Why don’t you just start with one product, tell us if it’s shampoo or whatever it is and tell us what is on the label like any claims.

DIANA KAYE: Sure.

DEBRA: You don’t have to read the whole ingredients list right at the start, but then explain to us what you’re seeing through your eyes why this is misleading or is not giving right information or is not organic or whatever because remember, we’re looking for truly organic products, so why is this one something we should watch out for?

DIANA KAYE: Okay. This product that I have, the company name includes the word ‘organic’. And in fact, the word ‘organic’, the company name is two words and the first word is ‘organic’.

So right at the top of the product, this particular one that I have is a conditioner, a hair conditioner. The first word at the top of that package is ‘organic’. It has a round circle on the front that says, “No SLS, parabens, synthetic fragrants or colorants’ and it makes the claim that it has two botanical extracts all on the front to smooth and rehydrate hair. That’s the claim.

What I’m seeing is that the main ingredient in this product is cetearyl alcohol, which is an oleochemical fatty acid. It’s a white fractionated, waxy substance. In some cases, it is not even derived from – we were talking about how some things are derived from coconut oil. We use the word “derive from”. We use that phrase in quote. But in this case, we don’t really even have any way of knowing what that cetearyl alcohol comes from because they’re not even –

A lot of companies do this. They’ll put in parenthesis ‘derived from coconut oil’, which technically, you’re not even supposed to do, but this company doesn’t even do that at all.

So the primary ingredient in this product is – well, first of all, water. That’s common. It’s just water. It doesn’t say spring water, distilled water or anything. It just says ‘water’. And then the second ingredient would be this cetearyl alcohol, which is commonly used.

DEBRA: I want to jump in for a second and say that when it says ‘water’ on the label, unless it says otherwise, it’s just tap water.

DIANA KAYE: Sure, it can be.

DEBRA: It could have all kinds of pollutants and fluorides and all those kinds of things in it, which are still there now in the product (it’s the main ingredient) and you have no idea. This is one of the reasons why we have to be paying attention to what the ingredients are and not just the claims on the front.

I also wanted to say that the word ‘organic’, if you look it up in the dictionary, it means – I can’t quote it exactly, but it means that it comes from organic matter, like from plants. But we have this other definition of ‘organic agriculture’, which means that there’s a certain way that those plants are grown without pesticides, et cetera. You can use the word ‘organic’ to say something is ‘organically’. “It happens organically” means that it happens like it would happen in nature.

And so I’m getting back to the name of this product, Organic whatever-it-is. If it’s made with plants – I’m asking you a question now and you can answer when we come back – if it’s made from plants, I think that they can get away from saying ‘organic’ because it’s got some plants in it. It doesn’t even have to be 100% plants, but it’s got plants in it. That doesn’t necessarily mean organically grown. This is very confusing.

So let’s talk about that when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. We were talking about the labeling of organic personal care products. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials and we’re talking about personal care products and how they’re labeled.

What were we talking about before the break?

DIANA KAYE: We were talking about the idea that – you know, that’s a really good question.

DEBRA: [laughing] I was talking about…

DIANA KAYE: I had been [inaudible 00:39:09]

DEBRA: You know, during the break, all these things happen, the phone rings…

DIANA KAYE: Oh, my goodness.

DEBRA: Okay! So I was talking about how the word ‘organic’ can be misused on a label. That was the question I wanted you to address, how it can be misused and not even mean organically grown.

DIANA KAYE: Actually, yes, that is the question. Gosh! You’re good at this. Say if a product claim to be organic, they are making a claim that that is an agriculture product because the word ‘organic’ in the widely accepted definition means that it is a product — and we’re setting organic chemistry aside, but…

DEBRA: And that is another definition of organic.

DIANA KAYE: Yes! That is the one that people misuse all the time. Take a look on the Internet for ‘organic dry cleaners’. That’s infuriating to me.

But the point here is that this is the USDA. This is their position. If your product is an agricultural product and you are using the word ‘organic’, then you are subject to following the organic rules and to enforcement.

However, what these manufacturers are trying to do by using the word ‘organic’ in their company names and on the labels is to give you the impression that that is an agricultural product because they talk about all the botanical ingredients. When they make those kinds of claims, that should trigger some kind of enforcement because they are clearly infringing on the organic certification name and the value that is inherent when a product actually is certified.

So that’s why I’m really troubled by this because again, when they make their claim, what they’re trying to convince consumers of is that these are botanical products, that they are products that are agricultural botanical products.

DEBRA: Yes. Now, this is false – I want to ask you a question, then I want to say something. Is thereany organic ingredients in it at all?

DIANA KAYE: Well, here’s the problem. Without a third party verification, we have no way of verifying that. They could claim…

DEBRA: Right! But if you looked on the ingredients list on the back, does it say like organic blah-blah-blah.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, they are making that claim, but there is no certification.

DEBRA: But there’s no certification.

DIANA KAYE: Third-party verification. So our company can simply lie. They can!

DEBRA: They can.

DIANA KAYE: They can just put the word ‘organic’ on there because nobody is policing this and that is a huge problem.

DEBRA: Well, not only is it a problem. Here’s what I want to say. It’s illegal.

DIANA KAYE: It should be.

DEBRA: It’s illegal.

DIANA KAYE: It should be.

DEBRA: It is illegal. The Federal Trade Commission, there’s something called the ‘Truth in Advertising’. It’s a law in America that you cannot claim something that is not true. You cannot do that.

All of these products, if somebody wanted to actually enforce this, all of these products could be sued and be demanded that they be taken off the market, relabeled, et cetera, et cetera because the law in America says that you cannot put something on a label that is not true.

Now, is that actually true? No, as we see right here and many, many, many other examples. There are manufacturers making claims unverified, unsubstantiated claims all the time. But there is a law. It’s illegal to do this.

DEBRA: Yes, Debra. That’s such an excellent point. I would say this. In my personal experience, what I have observed is the majority, the majority of the product being sold in the personal care marketplace that claim to be organic are absolutely not. That’s the scary thing.

And regarding the Federal Trade Commission, absolutely! We have made complaints to them and it’s very sad to me because the Federal Trade Commission has declined to oversee and do any enforcement in this particular area.

There was just a new article that just came out today that was an interview through PBS about the organic personal care situation and they mentioned in their article (and this is a quote), “The Federal Trade Commission normally investigates deceptive claims, but the agency demured in its Green Guides published in 2012.”

And then I’m going to add in quotes, “to investigate personal care organic claims because” they said, “enforcement of organic claims on non-food products could duplicate USDA duties.” So they’re not doing anything.

DEBRA: What?!

DIANA KAYE: I know!

DEBRA: The point is not that they need to enforce organic claims. The point is they need to enforce truth in advertising.

DIANA KAYE: Yes!

DEBRA: That is a different thing. We’re not asking the FTC to be an organic certification organization. We’re asking them to simply enforce truth in advertising.

DIANA KAYE: Exactly! And we have not been able to get them to do that. I mean, there are countless – you know about my collection. You’ve heard about it. I can’t even keep up with it because I have different searches that come in. They come in to my mailbox every single day, new product coming out, new companies because wow! They see that “If I can get away with it and nothing is going to happen, why not?”

I wouldn’t do that, Debra, you wouldn’t do that, but we’re not like all these other people.

DEBRA: Right. No, I know, I know.

DIANA KAYE: …who are looking to cash in. This is why I’m saying it’s such a scary thing for the consumer who isn’t even aware of this because they’re trusting that there are government laws and agencies in place to protect them and really, the reality is we don’t have that.

So that’s why the work you’re doing, Debra, it’s so important to try to get this message out there to folks that you cannot trust. This is so sad, but you cannot trust what is printed on 10,000 bottles.

DEBRA: I totally agree with you. I totally agree. And I mentioned earlier during research to find an unscented aftershave this week. Half of the products (like I just searched for ‘unscented aftershave’) and I got on forums where people were discussion shaving, shaving aficionados and people who are interested in that kind of thing.

Anyway, there actually were a post where people are talking about different brands of unscented aftershave. And so I made a list of them. There were probably a handful. They were being recommended over and over. There was only one that I could find an ingredients list for.

Now, I want to say that I commend that a lot of manufacturers now are putting their ingredients list on their website. So if you hear about a product, you can go check out what are the ingredients. But on these unscented aftershaves, I couldn’t find the ingredients. I would have to go buy the product some place, but they’re being sold with no ingredients list.

And so I would say if you’re buying something online, you look for the ingredients list. In fact, on Terressentials – I’m assuming you still have this. I haven’t looked for it in a while. But you have a whole glossary of cosmetic ingredients, right? You still have that? Yes, you’ve had that for a long time.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, we do.

DEBRA: Yes, you’ve had that for a long time.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, we do. And it needs to be expanded dramatically. So you mentioned the shaving product and you’re mentioning the unscented one. This is so interesting because this product that I was talking about earlier that makes the claim on the front “no SLS, parabens, synthetic fragrances or colorants” and yet on the back of the label, there’s an ingredient called phenoxyethanol. Phenoxyethanol is a preservative, but it also has a rose fragrance and has been known as ‘Rose Ether’.

DEBRA: Wow!

DIANA KAYE: It’s typically used in personal care products to give a rose-like effect because rose is so expensive. It’s so difficult to get a rose essential oil and extremely difficult to get one as organic.

We’re talking that if the public wanted to buy 16 ounces of rose oil, they would be paying probably $14,000 for 16 ounces.

So let me tell you, you can bet, you are not going to be getting real rose oil and a body care product that you’re washing down the train. I don’t care if you paid $10 a bottle or if you pay $30 a bottle, they’re not going to be giving you that in any kind of a shampoo, conditioner or body wash product because it’s too expensive.

So in this particular case, they’ve not only made their bold, organic claim as part of their company name, but they’re also saying “no fragrances, no synthetic fragrances” and yet there is one.

Actually, part of the other ingredient list, one of the other words on this ingredient list is ‘parfum’ and parfum is clearly…

DEBRA: Well, excuse me, that’s fragrance.

DIANA KAYE: Yes! Yes, exactly. So this label is a mess, the ingredients listing on this product and yet the word ‘organic’ is huge on the front. And then it makes these other claims.

So people today, there’s been a lot of hype surrounding sodium lauryl sulfate, which is only just one of 3500 different detergents that are out there. So here’s my thing, big deal! You got rid of sodium lauryl sulfate, what other thing did you put in there. And oh, yes, so you’re not using parabens? Well, what other even less tested, more toxic kinds of preservatives are you using in your product.

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we only have less than 30 seconds left.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, no!

DEBRA: So I want to have time to say thank you for being on the show. We’re going to have you on again. We’re going to keep talking about this because you just have so much experience and there’s so much to learn.

I’ll give you one second to say goodbye.

DIANA KAYE: Thank you! It’s been great and I appreciate the opportunity to help educate the public and teach people about what organic means.

DEBRA: That’s it! Thanks! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Bath Tub Mat

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 17, 2014 | Q & A

Question from Calico

I am still searching for a tolerable bathtub mat. You have an old discussion thread, and nothing new. Is there anything out there? Food grade silicone would be great but can’t find one. I just finished airing out a Heavea pure rubber bathtub mat. Once inside the bathroom I can smell it. Also in process of airing out the Vermont Country Store square/ perferated bathmat… After 2 months it is now the light scent of the rubber swim caps from the 1960’s. Have not brought it inside yet. Both of these had possiblities as they were not overwhelming straight out of the package. I even tried a silicone dot yoga towel but it would not stick to the tub. Anything new out there.

Debra’s Answer

Readers? Any suggestions?

Add Comment

Make Your Own Fermented Foods for Nature’s Probiotics

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 16, 2014 | Food, Toxic Free Talk Radio, transcript

My guest today is fermentation revivalist Sandor Ellix Katz. I became aware of him when I read his first book Wild Fermentation, which I consider to be the basic book on the subject that everyone should have. His books and the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” His latest book, The Art of Fermentation (2012), received a James Beard award. Sandor teaches fermentation workshops around the world. www.wildfermentation.com.

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“Make Your Own Fermented Foods for Nature’s Probiotics”

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Sandor Ellix Katz

DATE OF BROADCAST: October 16, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about – oh, you know what? I actually read this every time I get to the show and this morning, I forgot to put it out. There’s so much stuff going on this morning. Here we go. 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. There!

Okay, lots going on. But you know, there’s lots going on my life, there’s lots going on in the world. The first thing I’d like to say is that I’d like you to go to my website. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you’ll see that you can sign up for my newsletter.

I have this newsletter that goes out every Tuesday. And if you sign up for the newsletter, it will tell you all the shows that are coming up that week and it also tells you different things that I’ve been posting, new things that I post on my website.

I have a Q&A blog where people ask questions and I answer them. And also, I’m always posting new websites where you can buy toxic-free products. I’m particular saying this today because this morning, I have four or five really incredible things that I’m going to be posting next Tuesday in the newsletter about electromagnetic fields, about cellphones, about toxic chemical exposures.

There’s so much going on in the world. There’s new ways that people are labeling organic foods. And by subscribing to my newsletter – well, you hear about a lot of it from my guests. But if you subscribe to my newsletter, you can hear about a lot more things that I’m posting on different areas of my website and just keep up with all of these.

You can also sign up for my Facebook and Twitter and all those things. Just go to my website and find out what the other resources are in addition because I’m just so excited to be giving you all these new information. I’m really excited about what’s happening in the world and what other people are doing.

Anyway, we’ve got a great guest today. All the guests are great, but I just have to say that because every time we have a guest, I think that they’re a great guest. That’s why I chose them to be on the show.
It’s Thursday, October 16th 2014. We’re going to be talking today about making your own fermented foods. This is something that I do at home sometimes.

One of the reasons why I wanted my guest on today is because I want to find out more about how I can do this on a regular basis because I think it’s such a good idea and there’s so many benefits. I just get tripped up sometimes, so hopefully we’ll have some troubleshooting here as well as find out why you should make fermented foods and all their benefits and some fermented foods that you can make pretty easily.

My guest today is fermentation revivalist, Sandor Katz. I became aware of him a few years ago when I read his first book, Wild Fermentation. I consider this to be the basic book on the subject that everyone should have.

And if you’re listening to this show and you’re not fermenting foods, I highly recommend that you just go by Wild Fermentation and get going because you’re going to find out why you should be eating fermented foods today.

He also has another book called The Art of Fermentation, which received a James Beard Award. That looks at different types of fermentation throughout the world. I haven’t read that book yet, but it sounds very interesting and is the kind of thing that I would like to read.

So hello, Sandor. Thanks for being here.

SANDOR KATZ: Hi there, Debra. Thanks so much for having me on your show.

DEBRA: Well, tell us first, how did you get interested in fermentation? I mean, I consider you to be like the leader of fermented foods in the world.

SANDOR KATZ: Well, thank you.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. So I know being one of the leaders – well, I can actually call myself the leader of toxic-free products in the world because when I first started 30 years ago, nobody was writing about this or talking about it or thinking about it. I think that maybe you were in that position too of how did you, in a world where people aren’t talking about fermented foods, get to be interested in it?

SANDOR KATZ: Well, there were few stages of the development of my interest in it. I would say that really this isn’t a world where nobody was talking about fermented foods because probably everybody listening to this eats and drinks products of fermentation every day and they’re so thoroughly integrated into our food practices that we’ve just all eaten fermented foods for our whole lives whether we’ve been talking about it or not.

DEBRA: Oh, whether we’re aware of it or not.

SANDOR KATZ: Cheese is fermented, cured meats are fermented, condiments involve fermentation, coffee is fermented, chocolate is fermented, beer and wine are fermented. I mean, nobody really goes through their life (or really, not even their day) without encountering products of fermentation. But the question is one of awareness and practicing it.

DEBRA: Yes.

SANDOR KATZ: All aspects of food production, fermentation largely started disappearing from people’s home kitchens and communities increasingly over the course of the 20th century and it just got concentrated to basically factories and centralized production.

And at the same time as this was happening, we developed this amazing fear of bacteria.

DEBRA: Yes!

SANDOR KATZ: And so people began to project all of these fear on the process of fermentation. So not only was it not being done around them, but then they began to imagine that it’s something that’s really dangerous than technically demanding.
I got interested in there phases. First of all, in my youth, growing up in New York City, I loved sour pickles. It was just a favorite food of mine. Those are basically cucumbers fermented with garlic, dill and salt and nothing else. The acid is not acidic acid, the vinegar acid, but rather lactic acid that develops through fermentation. I’ve just always had been drawn to that flavor.

Nobody in my family was making it. We were able to buy in local delicatessens. We could buy beautiful pickles, but nobody in my family was making it.

Then in my twenties, I started just following a macrobiotic diet for a few years. And macrobiotic places a great emphasis on the digestive benefits of eating pickles and other kinds of live, cultured food.

And it was through macrobiotics that I first started thinking about the idea that there might be health benefits from the pickles that I grew up with and other kinds of live ferment and I started noticing that when I eat these foods (or really even if I just smell them), I could feel the salivary glands under my tongues squirting out saliva. And so I just started noticing in a really tangible way how these foods got my digestive juices flowing.

But what really got me making my own ferment was 21 years ago, I moved from New York City to rural Tennessee and I started keeping a garden. And that first season of gardening, I realized for the first time that in a garden, all of the cabbages are ready at the same time, all of the radishes are ready at the same time.

And so, just as a practical matter, what do I do with these cabbage, what do I do with these radishes? I learned how to ferment vegetables. I learned from the joy of cooking. It’s really a very, very straightforward and simple process.

And then from sauerkraut, I moved into yoghurt, making country wines out of blackberries and elderberries and such. And then, at some point, I just became sort of obsessed with all things fermented. That led me into teaching. That led me into writing books. And then that led me to more teaching. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since then.

It’s not only in the western diet. I mean, really, people in every part of the world incorporate fermentation into their food traditions. There’s a certain inevitability to microbial change to our food. And so our ancestors, without specifically knowing about bacteria or fungi, learned to work with these invisible life forces that are part of our food.

Basically, we all see microorganisms spoil our food and the beginnings of decomposition. So just as a practical matter to avoid that, people had to learn under what kind of storage condition would the food become more stable, more digestible, more delicious rather than just decomposing into an ugly mess that nobody will ever want to put into their mouth.

DEBRA: And you did that perfectly. We’re going right to the break. We’ll be right back to talk more about fermentation. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Sandor Katz. He’s the author of Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation. His website is wildfermentation.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is fermentation revivalist, Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation. His website is wildfermentation.com.
So Sandor, I have to tell you that I really do love, love, love Wild Fermentation, the book. People who have been listening to me for a while and reading me a while know that I have certain ways of looking at the world and you agree with me so much.
So I want to just read a little portion that I’ve put a big – I’ve circled this and put stars around it in the book. So you say:

“By fermenting foods and drinks with wild microorganisms present in your home environment, you become more interconnected with the life forces of the world around you. Your environment becomes you as you invite the microbial populations you share the earth with to enter your diet and your intestinal ecology.”

We’ve been talking about a book called Missing Microbes I think it’s called. I had that author of that book on. He was talking about how because of toxic chemical exposures like antimicrobials and antibiotics that we’re losing our microorganisms, particularly in our gut. Fermentation, wild fermentation specifically is restoring those microorganisms that are in your own natural environment that you live in as opposed to buying a probiotic that is made in a laboratory and put in a capsule.

SANDOR KATZ: Well, from my persective, the limiting factor with most probiotics is that they are billions of copies of one, single kind of bacteria or maybe two or three. But really, what I think of as our objective in probiotics therapy, eating bacterially rich foods is restoring biodiversity, rebuilding biodiversity.

DEBRA: Yes!

SANDOR KATZ: And so, traditional fermented foods, which are the embodiments of these broad communities of these bacteria simply have greater biodiversity than capsules with a billion copies of the same cell.

DEBRA: Right, right. It’s like probiotics in a capsule. I’m not trying to say that they’re a bad thing. They’re better than not having probiotics.

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah, I agree with that.

DEBRA: But probiotics in a capsule is like the industrial version of the natural world where industrial products tend to be all exactly the same and the natural world tends to be diverse.

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah, yeah. It’s a monoculture.

DEBRA: Right! It’s a monoculture. That’s exactly right. So probiotics is a good step away from just eating processed foods with no biotics at all. But the next step then is to be making your own fermented foods at home.

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah, or honestly, you can also buy foods that has been fermented. I think that the best thing to do is ferment your own, but there really are some very quality, local brands of fermented vegetables, fermented dairy products. It’s possible to get good quality, naturally fermented foods without making them yourself. But they’ll always be better if you make them yourself.

DEBRA: Well, I have to tell you that after reading your book, the first thing I made was pickles.

SANDOR KATZ: And were you happy with how they turned out?

DEBRA: I was ecstatic with how they turned out.

SANDOR KATZ: Oh, good.

DEBRA: I can’t hardly wait for summer to arrive, so that I can make the pickles. Let me just say that these are so easy to make. Anybody can make pickles. And if you can still get those little cucumbers at your farmer’s market or the store or wherever that are like pickle-sized cucumbers instead of huge cucumbers, then all you need to do is – well, you can correct me. I’m sure I’m not giving all the steps, but it’s pretty much as simple as putting the pickles in a jar with dill and garlic and water and salt. They sit there in the jar and three or four days later, you’ve got the most beautiful pickles you’ve ever eaten.

What did I leave out?

SANDOR KATZ: No, no. You got it perfectly. Yeah, in cooler weather (depending on where you live), it might take longer than that. In hot summer weather, it would probably really just be three, four, five days. But in cooler weather or in a cellar or something like that, it will take longer. The amount of time fermentation takes always depends upon the temperature. The metabolism of all these organisms goes faster when it’s warmer.

And you can really use the same method with other kinds of vegetables. I love to do it with string beans, with okra, with baby eggplants, with peppers. So if you want to leave vegetables whole or in big chunks, then you put them in a salt water medium. If you want to cut up the vegetables and expose surface area, then you don’t need to add any water and then you just dry salt the vegetables and let the salt pour water out.

DEBRA: Oh!

SANDOR KATZ: So that’s what I would call the sauerkraut method. You don’t add any water. You’re just using salt and a little bit of pounding or squeezing to get the juice out of the vegetables.

And the advantage of the dry salting method is you’re not diluting the flavor at all with water. You’re just getting the concentrated, full flavor of the vegetables themselves enhanced by the flavor of lactic acid, which develops over the course of the process.
Some people like it fermented for a long time, so they get a really strong, acidic flavor. Some people prefer a milder flavor and let it just ferment for a few days.

One of the things about fermentation is that there really are no right or wrong answers. It’s just figuring out how you like it.

And when people make these things for the first time at home, I definitely recommend that they start tasting it after a few days. Just taste it at intervals of every two days and just get a sense of the spectrum of flavors and figure out where they fit along that spectrum. And of course, that’s one of the great advantages of making anything yourself. You can figure out how you like it.

DEBRA: Absolutely! I remember when I was a kid, I’d come from a family where my mother was completely 100% Armenian. And so my grandparents on that side still cooked Armenian food and spoke Armenian and everything. And so, once we made Armenian pickles right out of the Armenian cookbook. We had to cut them all up and buy a crock to put them in and store them in the darkness and all the stuff. We had to wait a long time for these pickles.

But it was fun! It was fun. I should take that up. Of course, I don’t have a crock anymore, but I could get a crock and pick up that recipe and try those pickles too.

We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll continue to talk about fermented foods. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Sandor Katz, author of the book, Wild Fermentation. His website is wildfermentation.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is fermentation revivalist, Sandor Katz. I love that ‘fermentation revivalist’ because he is reviving fermentation.
My field is really about going beyond industrialism and getting away from those toxic chemicals. The way we get away from toxic chemical is to do these old things, these old life-affirming things that people have been doing forever. This is just like a toxic-free thing to do.

So it’s great that you’re reviving it. They’re everything from the past that works like those and is part of connecting humans to nature and utilizing the natural processing, bringing is back to that connection. It deserves to be revived. I’m just 100% with you.
So there’s so much information in this book. I just, again, really encourage everybody to read it. One of the things that you talk about is cultural homogenization, how everything becomes standardized and uniform and how fermentation is just the opposite of that. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that?

SANDOR KATZ: Well, sure. I mean, certainly, fermentation takes place in giant factories also. Anheuser-Busch is a fermentation corporation. Kraft does all kinds of fermentation.

So it’s not that fermentation cannot be industrialized because it certainly has. The nature of fermentation historically has just always been like every batch is a little different. And if you ever talk to a baker, they’ll tell you all about the reality – the humidity that change every day, the temperature. All these things affect the process of baking bread, so they have to be very adaptable.

You talk to cheese makers and they’ll tell you, “Sure. Every batch is a little bit different. And sometimes we understand exactly why and sometimes we don’t.” Making sauerkraut, making kombucha, all of these things, there’s so many variables.

Ultimately, it gets down to microbial communities. Microbial communities can be different in different places. There are generally broad patterns of similarity. It’s not a question of Russian roulette, what kind of bacteria are going to be on these vegetables.
As a matter of fact, lactic acid bacteria as a group are universally found on plants. The starter for vegetable ferment is always there, but yet the specifics of the community organisms that are going to be present is always a little bit different.

The environmental factors, which have so much influence over which of those organisms can grow and at what rate can they grow, those are always a little bit different.

So we’re really just entering into the realm of fermentation. Is departing from the world of things being very, very controlled and accepting a little bit of variability? It requires you to observe and sometimes shift your expectations as things proceed. You can’t necessarily predict what the temperature is going to be and the way these things will proceed at.

For me, I think that the practice of fermentation is almost like a meditation in like, “Okay, you can’t control everything.” You want to set things up as best you can for success, try to understand the conditions that you’re trying to create and then accept that you can’t control everything and see how it goes and keep on looking and thinking and adapting as necessary.

DEBRA: And being delighted with the surprising results!

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah! Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

DEBRA: So tell us, there’s so many things that you have in the book about that can be fermented vegetables [inaudible 00:31:18]. Just give us a little overview so that people can get an idea of the vast scope of fermentation.

SANDOR KATZ: Well, there’s nothing that you could eat that you couldn’t ferment. We shouldn’t say that every single food has a tradition of fermentation. For instance, I’ve never seen any information about a historical fermentation of avocados. It doesn’t mean that you couldn’t put avocados into your sauerkraut or your kimchi or that you couldn’t make a fermented guacamole because I’ve done all of those things with really pleasing results. But anything you can eat can be fermented.

So I always recommend that people start with the fermentation of vegetables mostly because you don’t need any special starter cultures. You could make kefir or you could make yoghurt. There’s lots of things you could make that you would need to find a starter culture. But with fermenting vegetables, everything you need is on the vegetables already.

It’s also just absolutely intrinsically safe. According to the USDA, there has never been a single documented case of food poisoning or any kind of illness arising from fermenting vegetables. So I think that’s another great reason to recommend it to beginners.
You don’t need any special equipments. I mean, you certainly might decide that you would like an elegant crock to work with, but you can just work with a jar that’s already sitting in your pantry. And you can enjoy your results relatively quickly. Certain ferments like if you want to make a miso, most varieties of miso will age for a year or longer. Certain ferments just take a long time. But fermenting vegetables, you can really enjoy your results within days.

So fermenting vegetables is where I generally recommend that people start. Obviously, milk products are something that people ferment. You can make yoghurt, kefir, other styles of fermented milk, cheese if you really got into it. Many of those recipes actually are quite straightforward as well. The only tricky part is you need to obtain your starter cultures.

You also can ferment grains.

DEBRA: Sourdough.

SANDOR KATZ: In many parts of the world, it’s just the tradition of using grains is you always soak them in water first. Now, grains and legumes are interesting because nobody is fermenting them to preserve them. In their dried form (the way they are when they’re mature), a dried grain of wheat or of rice just preserves beautifully; same with a dried bean.

It’s not that they don’t have microorganisms on them. It’s just that they’re so dry that the microorganisms are forced into dormancy because they like the water that they need to function. So as soon as you start to soak grains or legumes, you’re kind of initiating a fermentation process.

There really begins a process that I would describe as predigestion and can make the grains and the legumes much more digestible, remove some compounds that can be potentially toxic if they remain part of them. And that can be just as simple as soaking the grain overnight before you cook them or longer if you want a more pronounced flavor.

DEBRA: I have to interrupt you because we have to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is fermentation revivalist, Sandor Katz. He’s the author of Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation. His website is wildfermentation.com.

So Sandor, this is the last segment of the show so I have to ask you this now before we’re done and we don’t have time to talk about it. I have some limited experience with fermentation. While I think it is an incredible thing to do and every fermented food I’ve ever eaten, I love, it’s something that I haven’t quite gotten the hang of to be able to incorporate it into my life. I’m still learning it.

And so the kinds of things that I’m running into – first, let me tell you what I’ve made and the problems that I’ve had. I have no problems making pickles. Pickles, all I have to do is make sure I have the ingredients, put them in a jar and that’s it. They’re always perfect.

And I should add that once you get it, as Sandor said earlier, that you should taste. And once you get it to the point where it tastes right, you just put it on the refrigerator and it lasts and lasts and lasts and lasts. A lot of other food in your refrigerator may go bad, but the fermented ones, I’ve never kept a fermented one long enough for it to go bad.

I’ve also fermented beets by pretty much the same way. I’m just putting it in with some water…

SANDOR KATZ: Okay, so were you making a beet kvass?

DEBRA: I wasn’t trying to make kvass. I was making just pickled beets.

SANDOR KATZ: Okay, great.

DEBRA: So I cut up the beets. I put in some water and salt (same as the pickles) and they were delicious.

SANDOR KATZ: Great.

DEBRA: Absolutely delicious! I’ve also done kombucha. The problem that I have with kombucha is that it’s just kind of keeping track of the schedule of time because as you’ve said before, you never know what’s going to happen.
And so I have my kombucha starter. And so then I knew – I forgot how many days it is now, five days or something. And then it starts getting really vinegary, like you can’t even drink it.

The whole thing about kombucha, listeners (if you don’t know what this is) is that it makes a very wonderful drink that tastes delicious if you catch it right at the right time and it gets bubbly. It’s almost like drinking champagne or something, but it’s very good. It’s very good.

And yet if you let it go too long, then you just might as well put on your salad as vinegar. It’s not something that’s drinkable.

SANDOR KATZ: Yes.

DEBRA: It’s just that discipline you were talking about, fermenting being like a meditation. To me, it’s like getting the discipline in to be able to interact with your fermentation and get to know it and be able to give it attention because if you take that attention away, that’s when you have a problem.

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah. Well, it sounds like you know the answer, which is just that you have to begin tasting it sooner. I would give it a few days and then just start tasting it every day. Just a tiny taste, a spoonful will tell you whether it’s reached that point.
The acids that accumulate over time (same in pickles or sauerkraut as in kombucha), if you let sauerkraut go for months – I mean, that’s really the traditional way of eating it. It’s very, very sour. Some people prefer it more mild. But with kombucha, nobody really likes it when it goes to its logical conclusion. If you let it ferment for weeks and weeks, it starts to taste like vinegar. So people like it partially fermented.

And so how many days will depend a little bit on temperature because it’ll happen faster if it’s warmer, slower if it’s cooler. But ultimately, it just depends on how sharp a flavor you like, how sweet you like. And so the only way to determine that is to taste it frequently.

And you know, your consolation prize is not so bad. If you end up with some kombucha vinegar, then you can use that in salad dressings and other kinds of cooking project.

DEBRA: I find that it was – I’m just one person living by myself. I was making it faster than I could consume it.

SANDOR KATZ: Right. Well, you can make anything in any sized batch. I don’t know if you were doing a gallon-sized batch, but maybe you just need to do a quart-sized batch. But yeah, you can do it really small.

Let me talk a little bit SCOBY and the mother of kombucha. So the mother of kombucha as an example is a SCOBY, which is an acronym that stands for ‘symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast’. This is like a macro thing that we can see and hold. It looks something like a rubbery pancake. The residents of a community of bacteria and fungi that are what are fermenting the sweet tea into kombucha and it just floats at the top of your vessel.

Kombucha requires oxygen. Some of those organisms are aerobic organisms that require oxygen so a certain amount of the activity is right on the surface. That’s where the mother of kombucha floats.

But you could just peel layers off of it each batch. It gets thicker and thicker. You could peel layers off of it. You can cut pieces off of it. It’s very, very resilient. Some people have the idea that if you cut a kombucha mother in half or in quarters, you’ll kill it. That has not been my experience at all. They seem like they’re extremely resilient.

And they’re also easy to find. Everybody who makes kombucha ends up with more mothers than they know what to do with and people are very, very generous with their kombucha mothers. They’re also widely available for sale if you’re more comfortable buying them.

Kombucha can be really delicious. And generally, after the first fermentation, people will add a little bit more sugar or fruit juice or vegetable juice or herbal tea with a little bit of sugar, something and then fill it in a bottle and let that added sugar ferment for another day or so. That’s how you get that really nice carbonation. That’s also a way to just incorporate different kinds of interesting flavors.
A friend of mine swears by pineapple juice. He just likes to add a little bit of pineapple juice to the kombucha for the secondary fermentation. He consistently has beautiful, fizzy kombucha.

DEBRA: Well, I have had really good success with kombucha. For me, it’s just that as a regular, I’m working on having more control over my own production of food instead of – and I buy practically no prepared food. I’m always starting with original ingredients. But it’s a skill and it’s also not just about learning the skill of producing one more time at a time or one dish at a time, but also the management of time of all of these production.

SANDOR KATZ: I’m a big advocate of labeling using masking tape and a marker, labeling the date that you started things, the date that you think that they’ll be ready especially if you’re wont to have multiple projects going just having the information at hand to keep track of how old it is. You think when you make it that you’ll always remember which day you made it on, but as the days pass…
DEBRA: Oh no, you don’t. You don’t. I use post-it notes actually.

SANDOR KATZ: Great!

DEBRA: I have one of those beverage serving containers that’s got the little spigot on it.

SANDOR KATZ: Oh yeah, yeah. Those are great for kombucha.

DEBRA: Yeah! And I haven’t made kombucha in probably six months, but I have my SCOBY…

SANDOR KATZ: But with those, it won’t get very fizzy. It really gets fizzier if you seal it in a bottle and add a little bit more something sugary, fruit juice, sweetened herbal tea, sugar, honey, anything. Just adding a little bit of something sugary in the bottle and then sealing the bottle is how you trap carbon dioxide. Although you also have to be careful that the bottles don’t explode, which is another possibility that I address more at length in my second book, The Art of Fermentation.

DEBRA: Well, we’re almost at the end of the show. We only just have a couple of minutes left. Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?

SANDOR KATZ: Well, I would love to just mention my website, which is wildfermentation.com. Not only are my books available to my website, but we have a support form, links to all kinds of fermentation-related resources.

I guess I’d love to spend 30 seconds and just talk about the idea that even though we’ve all been indoctrinated to think of bacteria as bad and dangerous, right now, it’s a very exciting time in microbiology because we’re learning so much about bacteria and how important they are…

DEBRA: Yes, yes.

SANDOR KATZ: …and how the bacteria of our bodies outnumber our bodily cells 10 to 1 and they just give us so much of our functionality. Our immune system is mostly the work of bacteria. We’re learning a lot about how serotonin and other chemical compounds that determine how we think and how we feel are regulated by bacteria in our gut.

Just so many aspects of our physiology and functionality turns out relate to the health of microbial communities in our gut. So we really have to reject this war on bacteria thinking, the antibacterial soaps, the overuse of antibiotics, all the other chemical compounds that can kill bacteria and really embrace bacteria as just an important part of the matrix of all life, ourselves included.

DEBRA: I completely agree with that. I was just talking to a friend of mine last night about the yuck factor, that there are so many things that people just go, “Eww, that’s gross.” I think that bacteria is one of those things. We kind of have this cultural training about this. But yet, if you actually look at the role that microorganisms play in life, they’re fascinating and wonderful and amazing and something that we should all be admiring and encouraging. We should have more bacteria in our life, not less.

SANDOR KATZ: Yes.

DEBRA: And yet we live in a culture where just the constant messages, “Destroy that bacteria. It makes you sick. You have to spray toxic chemicals on it” and all those things. No, no, no. Prior to industrialization, people were exposed to bacteria in the world all the time.

And yes, there are contagious diseases, but contagious diseases, you get contagious diseases because your body fails to be able to handle those harmful bacteria.

SANDOR KATZ: Yeah, it’s a lot about communities out of balance, microbial communities out of balance.

DEBRA: Right! You know what? We have to go because we’re like way past the time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ve been talking to Sandor Katz. Thanks for being with us. Be well.

Eyeglass Lenses, Coatings and Frames

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 16, 2014 | Q & A

Question from Cindy

Hi Debra,

My husband and I both need to get glasses and are having a hard time finding the frames and lenses we believe would be non or least toxic. Please help!

Lenses

Regarding eyeglass lenses, in a 2008 post you said, “The thing to remember about polycarbonate is that the concern is not outgassing, but leaching into food and water from contact. Since our skin does not contact the eyeglass lens, I don’t believe there is a problem with toxicity during use.”

Wikipedia states that “CR-39 should not be confused with polycarbonate, a tough homopolymer usually made from bisphenol A.[3]” BPA? Wouldn’t wearing BPA be a concern even if there’s no skin contact?

Do you still believe that all of the following lens materials are relatively nontoxic: high Index plastic, Tribrid, Trivex and CR-39 plastic?

And or true of all eyeglass lenses since they’re not touching the skin? Do any outgass or pose other toxicity hazards?

I’ve listed below what I could find on the above materials in case you’re unfamiliar with them.

Tribrid. All about vision’s site says, “Tribrid lenses were created by merging elements of PPG’s lightweight, impact-resistant Trivex lens material with those of established high-index plastic lenses.”

Trivex. I’ve read that “Trivex lenses are composed of a newer plastic that has the same characteristics as polycarbonate lenses.” all about vision’s site says, “Trivex lenses, however, are composed of a urethane-based monomer and are made from a cast molding process similar to how regular plastic lenses are made…”

CR-39 Wikipedia says, “The abbreviation stands for “Columbia Resin #39… CR-39 is made by polymerization of diethyleneglycol bis allylcarbonate (ADC) in presence of diisopropyl peroxydicarbonate (IPP) initiator. The presence of the allyl groups allows the polymer to form cross-links; thus, it is a thermoset resin…

The polymerization schedule of ADC monomers using IPP is generally 20 hours long with a maximum temperature of 95°C. The elevated temperatures can be supplied using a water bath or a forced air oven.
Benzoyl peroxide (BPO) is an alternative organic peroxide that may be used to polymerize ADC. Pure benzoyl peroxide is crystalline and less volatile than diisopropyl peroxydicarbonate. Using BPO results in a polymer that has a higher yellowness index, and the peroxide takes longer to dissolve into ADC at room temperature than IPP.”

Coatings

Regarding RX eyeglass coatings UV protection, anti-glare and anti-scratch are widely recommended and seem sensible. Do you know if they are generally safe or which are more or less toxic?

Frames

Debra, after reading your 2008 post about eyeglass frames and looking further into them, I agree that zyl (zylonite, or cellulose acetate) or frames made from propionate, a nylon-based plastic seem like good choices.

But in terms of finding the styles we like and hopefully frames covered by our insurance plan, we’d like some additional options. What do you think of aluminum, titanium, nickel or stainless steel frames? Many are blends of these– any thoughts on blends?

Also, you said you wear metal frames, do you think they’re a less toxic choice than plastic? Any long term health concerns with EMFs from metal frames? We would be wearing our RX glasses most of the day.

Thank you. Anything you can do to allay our anxiety on picking out the least toxic glasses would be greatly appreciated!

Debra’s Answer

Lenses

OK. To start, I haven’t been able to find anything which states that BPA is a hazard from outgassing, only ingestion. Recommendations are to not eat canned food or beverages, or drinking water from polycarbonate bottles. Also don’t allow your dentists to apply dental sealants made from BPA (BADGE). But there are no warnings about not wearing polycarbonate glasses.

Polycarbonate is a very hard plastic, and these don’t outgas the way soft plastics do. So I have no reason to believe that you would have any exposure to BPA from wearing the glasses. That said, you would probably get some exposure to BPA from touching the glasses, so when cleaning them, touch them only with the cleaning cloth and not your bare fingers.

All of the plastics you mention are hard plastics, so they would not outgas much, if at all. I couldn’t get any more information that you got on the exact materials, but I would say they probably don’t contain BPA as polycarbonate does, so any one of them would be better in that regard.

Coatings

Like lenses, it’s difficult to find information on the materials used to make coatings.

I was abole to find that Teflon is use to make coatings that are scratch-resistant, anti-static, and reduced-glare.

Anti-reflective coatings may contain magnesium fluoride or fluoropolymers.

But whether or not the presence of these chemicals would result in an actual exposure, I don’t know. Teflon needs to be heated to cooking temperature to release it’s toxic gas. Fluoride is a particle that is likely bound up in the coating and would not offgas.

Regardless, these exposures would be extremely small, if any.

Frames

Metal vs plastic frames?

In 2008, when I wrote my last post on this subject, I preferred metal frames over plastic. But after researching the plastic used to make frames, and finding that it is usually plant based, I’ve been wearing plastic frames. As stated before, metal frames were giving my skin a rash at the points where they touched my face.

At the moment I am wearing my favorite glasses of all time, a pair of readers with bamboo temples that I got from Peepers. A number of companies are making them now. There’s quite a selection online.

Non toxic athletic shoe insole replacement

by Debra Lynn Dadd | Oct 16, 2014 | Q & A

Question from di

I’m looking for an athletic shoe insole replacement that doesn’t have anti-microbials in it.

Is there such a thing?

I need it for a Men’s New Balance athletic shoe.

thanks.

Debra’s Answer

Readers? Any suggestions?

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