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Health and Nutrition Coach on Diet and Detox
Today my guest is Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC, certified holistic health and nutrition coach and the founder, head writer and Chief Eating Officer of Liveto110.com. We’ll be talking about why the popular Paleo diet is not enough to achieve true health (I’ll be giving my comments about the Paleo diet too) and how heavy metals and chemicals are the underlying cause of disease. And we’ll talk a lot about detox. Wendy attended the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York. She is certified in Hair Mineral Analysis and is currently seeking her masters in clinical nutrition at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. Wendy’s interest in nutrition began with the death of her father from esophageal cancer. She vowed to find out what made him sick, what role his treatment and medications played in his demise, and how she could avoid the same fate. The more Wendy learned, the more she realized that all the answers to health do not lie in our medical system. Food, detoxication and natural healing modalities must be used to compliment the advances in modern medicine. Thus, Liveto110.com was born. Wendy’s site aims to inform readers about how to achieve optimum health, energy and vitality. Liveto110.com empowers readers to improve their health through the Modern Paleo diet, hair mineral analysis, detoxication and natural treatments for their health conditions. Wendy urges visitors to take responsibility for their health by learning about alternative treatments for their health conditions. Liveto110.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH WENDY MYERS
- Toxics in Your Body? Tests Can Tell You the Truth
- Tests You Won’t Find at Your Doctor’s Office
- Choosing and Using Home Saunas to Remove Toxic Chemicals From Your Body
- Deep Detox With Minerals
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“Health and Nutrition Coach on Diet and Detox”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC
DATE OF BROADCAST: August 26, 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. It’s Tuesday, August 26th 2014. I’m here in a sunny day in Colorado, Florida. I think it’s getting a little cooler now that it’s almost the end of summer and almost autumn.
Today, we’re going to be talking about diet and detox with a health and nutrition coach who is so in agreement with me I can’t believe it. Actually, she invited me to be on her podcast, which is how we met and we just found we had so much in common that I said, “Oh Wendy, come over here and be on my show too.”
So my guest is Wendy Myers, CHH NC. She’s a certified holistic health and nutrition coach and the founder, head writer and chief eating officer of Liveto110.com.
Hi, Wendy.
WENDY WYERS: Hello! Thank you so much for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. We had such a great time on your podcast. And actually, that podcast was recorded. It’s going to be played in the future, so all of you can listen to my podcast on Wendy’s website when it happens. You could go to her website at Liveto110.com, sign up for her newsletter and then you’ll find out when I’m going to be on her podcast.
So Wendy, first of all, tell us about the letters behind your name, CHHC and NC. What do those mean?
WENDY WYERS: Yes, it means I’m a ‘certified holistic health coach’. You basically get that designation when you attend the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It’s the largest nutrition school in the world. It’s really a wonderful program. It has some of the most amazing teachers there. It’s located in New York. And so it’s basically just a certification where you can help people eat healthier and live healthier lives.
DEBRA: And what’s the NC?
WENDY WYERS: Oh, the NC is ‘nutrition consultant’. I got that when I got certified in hair mineral analysis. So that is just a general name for someone who consult with others about nutrition, but I’m also getting my master’s in clinical nutrition right now as well.
DEBRA: Good! So you know a lot about nutrition.
WENDY WYERS: I sure do!
DEBRA: I know a lot about nutrition, but I don’t have letters after my name. So tell us how you got interested in this whole subject of nutrition, diet and detox.
WENDY WYERS: Well, it started when I got pregnant with my daughter. I’d always been kind of vaguely interested in nutrition meaning more in the lose weight. I was at this diet [inaudible 00:03:58]. But when I got pregnant, I really had to focus on nutrition because I was eating for two. I was sort of reading about it and I thought, “Why haven’t I read more about this before? It’s so fascinating.”
And then, unfortunately, my father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He passed away within six months of his diagnosis for his cancer treatment (not the cancer, mind you). It really was a wake-up call to me that I really needed to figure out how to not die like that. I just thought, “I’m not going to go out like that.”
So I started reading about what causes cancer and the true, underlying causes of it and natural treatments. I really have had so much faith in the western medical system. I loved reading about the latest drugs that were coming out. I had been reading about drugs and medicines since I was a teenager because I was just personally interested in it, but I saw how it failed my father.
I really felt that the 10 medications he was taking, that he had been on for about 10 years including statins and Metformin and many other medications all contributed to his demise. And then his cancer treatment, radiation and chemo finally failed him.
And so I just set out on a path to figure out how to live a healthier live and it led me to detox, the importance of detox and how it is critical in not becoming a statistic, one of the cancer statistics.
DEBRA: I went through a similar situation in my family where my mother died of cancer and both of my grandmothers. A doctor at the time when my mother died, it was the same period of time when I became very sensitive to chemicals and had immune system problems because of my chemical exposure, I talked to a doctor who said that because my mother and I both had the same exposures, he said that in me, it showed as an immune system problem and in her, it showed up as cancer. But it’s all the same thing. It all goes back the toxic chemicals and heavy metals and things that we’re exposed to in daily lives.
WENDY WYERS: Absolutely.
DEBRA: Yeah, I understand it. And I’m sure that a lot of our listeners too have had some kind of illness like that in their families, whether their parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. I’ve had three of my friends have cancer. Fortunately, two of them survived; only one died. Two of them had breast cancer.
And so when I was growing up, you didn’t know anybody who had cancer. And now, so many people have cancer.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, it’s frightening. It’s 1 in 2 men get cancer and 1 in 3 women. That’s a lot. I mean, that’s a big number.
DEBRA: That is a big number.
WENDY WYERS: It’s insane! And there’s a reason. All cancers and diseases have the same underlying cause. It’s nutrient deficiencies and heavy metal and chemical toxicity.
DEBRA: Totally agree!
WENDY WYERS: They just have different disease labels…
DEBRA: I totally agree.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah! They just have different disease labels. That’s it.
DEBRA: That’s right, that’s right. Many, many years ago when I started looking at, “Well, how can I be healthy?”, I realized that the things that you do to restore your health like getting good nutrition and not being exposed to toxic chemicals and things like that, those are the things that you can do before you get sick in order to be healthy in the first place.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah.
DEBRA: And that’s why I decided all those years ago that I was going to educate people, particularly about toxic chemicals because after I went through being made ill by toxic chemicals and had to recover from that, I said, “Wait a minute! If I just was not exposed to the toxic chemicals in the first place, then I wouldn’t have had to go through all these illness because removing the toxic chemicals handled the illness.”
WENDY WYERS: Yeah.
DEBRA: So we might as well just start out with good nutrition and a nice, clean life. And then we’ll all be healthy and happy.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, and that’s my main message to people. Don’t wait until you get sick to start attending to your health because by the time you manifest symptoms, the disease process has been going on in your body for many years. So don’t wait.
That’s why I do hair mineral analysis because it can show imbalances in the body years before you manifest symptoms. The mistake that a lot of my own friends make – I use a lot of my friends as guinea pigs. Like my friend says, “I’ll get there – live a healthy life, eat a healthy diet” and they feel good generally even though – everyone has a little bit of fatigue, which is the beginning of the disease process, but I’ll explain that later.
They do a hair test and some of them were really imbalanced. It’s a signal that there are so many things they can do to correct those imbalances on the hair test before they get sick and before they get one of those disease labels or start manifesting symptoms.
But a lot of people has this mentality, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That could not be further from the truth. We all have toxic chemicals in our body. The question is to what degree.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s absolutely true. We all have toxic chemicals in our bodies. We’re all going to get sick from them unless we do something to be less exposed to them in the first place and to remove them from our bodies and make sure that our bodies have proper nutrition and other things that we can do in order to support our good health.
WENDY WYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: So during this show, we’re going to be talking more about diet, more about detox. We’re coming up very shortly on the break, so I’m not going to ask Wendy another question. I’m just kind of adlibbing here until we get to the commercial.
You can go to Wendy’s website, Liveto110.com and find out more about her. She’s got a lot of the same type of information on her site as I do. We’re in complete agreement.
So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers, health and nutrition coach and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers. She’s a certified holistic health and nutrition coach. She has a great website called Liveto110.com. She has a lot of great information there that is totally in agreement with what I talk about. If you sign up for her newsletter, then you’ll find out when I’m going to be on her podcast.
So Wendy, let’s talk about diet. I know that you talk about the Paleo diet, but also say that it’s not enough. I’ve talked about the Paleo diet. I’ve had other people on the show that are proponents of the Paleo diet in different forms. But I’d the listeners to hear what you have to say about it. I also have some things I’d like to say about it, but you go first.
WENDY WYERS: Yes! Well, my version of Paleo is called Modern Paleo. And essentially, I believe it’s not about reenacting the caveman diet because the Paleo diet was the diet that Paleolithic men ate about – estimates are from 3.5 to 2.6 million years ago up until about a thousand years ago.
So it’s the diet that our bodies were evolutionary designed for. We evolved millions of years eating meats and vegetables and nuts and seeds and the fruits and vegetables. There’s a lot of evidence now that the Paleolithic men also ate a lot of [inaudible 00:15:17] depending on where he was from, so potatoes.
But it’s not about reenactment because you and I have survived as a species have we not adapted the new foods in our environment.
And so I believe that people can still eat legumes and grains and dairy and potatoes if they do a food elimination diet and find out which one of those new foods that appear on the horizon since agricultural times about 10,000 years ago and see if they work for them because dairy and legumes and potatoes are incredibly nutritious foods and there’s absolutely no reason to exclude them from the diet if you tolerate them because many people do.
So a lot of people, they eat a Paleo diet and it doesn’t work for them because they’re typically may not be getting enough carbohydrates in because they’re excluding grains and sugar and what-not and potatoes. So our main source of carbs will be fruits. So if we’re not eating fruits, they typically can suffer from low thyroid function and have other health issues related to not getting enough carbohydrates. This is, in fact, a nutrient that we need.
DEBRA: Yes. So I had an experience the last few weeks. Anyone who has read my food blog knows that earlier this year, I did a 30-day Paleo program that was pretty strict, just the basic meat, vegetables, fruits kind of thing. No dairy, no grains, cutting out everything. Just basically meat, vegetables and fruit and sweet potatoes. I eat sweet potatoes and butter. That was about it.
I lost I think it was 13 lbs. and my blood sugar went down. Over 30-day period, that’s what happened. I continued to stay on that diet, but I started doing things like eating other things that are typically allowed on the Paleo diet like chocolate.
WENDY WYERS: Mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: Good, organic chocolate with nice, organic sugar in it. I started eating more fat because I read about how your body can run on fat instead of running on carbs and I thought that was a great idea. And so I ate more fat, I ate chocolate and I started gaining weight. I gained back 6 lbs. I thought this is not going in the right direction, but look! This is a Paleo diet. I was basically eating what I was eating before plug more fat and chocolate.
WENDY WYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: And so then I kind of struggled with that. But what happened was that as much as I was struggling with it and wanting to lose weight again, I really was on this plateau after that where I was trying to do the right thing, but I wasn’t losing weight. And after I stopped eating so much fat, I wasn’t gaining weight either. I thought something was wrong here with this picture.
But then what happened was that I got a gout attack. I actually have a history of occasionally getting gout attacks, which is what happens when you have too much uric acid that builds up in your body. It happens when you eat a lot of meat.
And so for me to be on a diet where I’m basically eating three or four ounces of protein three times a day plus vegetables and that’s about it, that didn’t balance right with my body.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah.
DEBRA: I ended up having a gout attack for three weeks.
During that time, I didn’t eat any protein at all. It was just like I couldn’t even put an egg in my mouth. I couldn’t take a bite of egg. There was one day where I was making scrambled eggs. I was making two eggs a day in the morning for breakfast. I took a bite of the egg and I couldn’t eat it. I had to spit it out. It’s just like my body rejected it.
All I was eating was salad, lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and olive oil and salt. That’s what I ate because it was the only thing I could get down.
And I felt so good. I can’t tell you, my energy came up. I felt fabulous. I felt fabulous. I was sitting here with a gout attack, in pain, but the rest of my body was feeling great and I was eating practically nothing.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I’ll tell you what happened. You have to understand, you have to eat a diet that works for your health status at any given time.
DEBRA: Yes.
WENDY WYERS: When I have clients that are having liver issues or other kinds of health issues, I advise them to not eat meat and eggs because their livers can’t handle it for whatever reason.
And whenever people feel like they can’t eat meat or for you where you couldn’t get that egg down, you have to go with that because your body does not want that and it won’t taste good to you. Foods that your body need nutritionally will taste amazing to you.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve learned that.
WENDY WYERS: …because your body needs it, craving it. So for you, when you lost that initial weight (which is very common), when you don’t eat a lot of carbohydrate, you shed a lot of water weight. It may not be actual fat, but people shed a lot of water weight because carbohydrates need a lot of water.
DEBRA: I’m going to interrupt you right there because we need to go to break.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah.
DEBRA: I know you have lots more to say on this and so do I. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers, health and nutrition coach. We’re talking about the Paleo diet and the right diet for you. We’re going to talk about detox when we come back too. We’ll be right back.
WENDY WYERS: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers, health and nutrition coach. Before the break, we were talking about the Paleo diet and how it didn’t work for me.
I want to say that the conclusion that I came to was that we can look at these list of foods and ideas behind how we should choose these diets, but I think what I and others have gotten is that we just kind of say, “Well, here’s this recommend diet” and then we follow the diet when what we really need to be doing is figuring out what is the right diet for our own bodies and our own needs. It might not be the same diet from time to time in our lives.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah. And that’s the thing. Your diet does need to change from time to time. People develop food sensitivities and then other food sensitivities resolve and go away. People with cancer, they need to go to a vegetarian or vegan diet to treat that. So you really have to look at where you’re at and not blindly follow any kind of diet recommendation.
But I think that the Paleo template is the basis. It’s the basic template that people should begin with to design their own personalized diet because it is in line with our body’s physiological nutrient environment.
DEBRA: Well, what I really like about the Paleo diet is that I learned many, many years ago to look to nature for inspiration and information about how to be healthy and how to live because we have all these industrial ideas from living in an industrial consumer society and yet nature does things differently.
And so what I like about the Paleo diet is that it takes you out of eating all these processed foods and says just eat food as it is in nature. But I think that in some ways, it in some ways, it’s too restrictive and this is why I like your approach of saying, “Well, if your body tolerates them and it’s healthy and you’re okay with it, why not eat other whole foods, whole, nutritious foods that are not processed even if they’re not in the strict Paleo list?”
For example, I do really, really well with legumes – really, really well. They give me a lot of fiber. They help my blood sugar. I enjoy eating them. They taste great and I think that they’re a good source of protein. And so to completely eliminate legumes for me and then replace it with meat, which my body doesn’t handle as well, I don’t think that that was the right thing for me to do.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah! It doesn’t make sense.
DEBRA: It was fine for 30 days, but not in the long run.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah.
DEBRA: Once I’ve got past those 30 days, it just didn’t make sense to my body.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, and I have people do a 30-day Paleo reset as well. I talk about that, outline that in my upcoming book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide because I think people can do kind of a reset. It’s almost like doing a food elimination diet. You just take out all these stuff that people are potentially sensitive to. And then you can start reintroducing them one by one and it will work for you.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. For at least a week, all I ate was vegetables. I was not worse for not eating protein for that week. But then, the next thing that I wanted was I started kind of nibbling on chicken, but I didn’t eat three or four ounces of it, maybe an ounce. I just nibbled on these little pieces of roasted chicken. And then I was willing to eat a little chicken broth. It was kind of like coming off of fast or something.
There was one food that I ate, something that I was eating quite frequently, these wonderful pork sausages from my natural food store, naturally grown pork. You just think, “Well, here’s a healthy natural food store product,” but my body didn’t like it at all. It made me really tired and irritable and upset. It took me three or four days to recover from that.
And so some of these things, people are eating foods and just thinking, “Well, this is just kind of my baseline, how I feel,” but if you stop eating them, you might be really surprised to see how wonderful you feel.
Anyway, so let’s go to detox. Tell us why heavy metals and chemicals are the underlying cause of disease.
Hello? Wendy, are you there? Ah! Well, I need to let my producer know that we’ve lost Wendy. Yeah, okay. So we’re going to get her back on the line. But let’s see, what else can I tell you about the Paleo diet?
I do think the Paleo diet is a good place to start, but as I’ve said, don’t limit yourself to any one diet. You need to figure out what makes your body feel good.
So one way you can do that is just you can go on a fast. I’ve once went on a fast. And then I did an elimination diet and I found out what foods were making me not feel well and which foods did make me feel good.
Just recently, as I’ve said, I just ate salad for a week and I noticed that I felt really, really good. And so then I started saying, “Let me just try one food at a time.”
And try things like chicken or something that isn’t one of the big allergens like soy. Don’t try soy, corn or wheat. Just kind of stay off the grains and just see what kind of proteins you can add to – I’m sorry, I’m reading and talking at the same time. Okay, they’re continuing to try to get Wendy back on the line.
So you can just keep trying and seeing what kind of foods your body likes to eat.
And then what I do is that I just make a list of the foods. And it changes through my life. Whatever it is that is the foods that currently are right for me to eat, I make a list of them and then I say, “How can I make these foods delicious?” because taste is a big thing for me.
Yeah, there’s something called instinctive nutrition. Wendy was saying earlier that foods that are good for you taste good to you. You can look this up online, ‘instinctive nutrition’ where the whole premise is that your body, whatever is good for your body will taste good to you. And that only works if you’re eating whole foods. You can’t say, “Chocolate cake tastes good, so that’s good for me.” If you’re trying out whole foods (meats, vegetables, fruits), if they taste really good, your body probably needs them.
So what I do is that I make a list of the foods that I have eaten and tried and I know that they are doing well for me. And then I see how I can put them together or what kind of seasonings I can put on them, how I can cut them up in different ways, what I can do to prepare them to make an interesting and varied diet because I want things to taste good. If it doesn’t taste good to me, then I want to go and eat chocolate cake or whatever, ice cream.
If you make your healthy diet taste good, something that you look forward to eating, then you’ll enjoy eating it and every part of you will be happy.
We’re going to go to break. Hopefully, we’ll have Wendy when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers. Her website is Liveto110.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: Your’e listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Myers, health and nutrition coach. She has a website, Liveto110.com. That’s Liveto110.com. If you go there and sign up for her newsletter, you’ll get to find out when I’m going to be on her podcast.
But also, you’ll get some free gifts and one of them is a PDF about how to put together your own modern Paleo diet that we’ve just been talking about. All the information is right there and she has an upcoming on that subject. So you want to find out about that.
Wendy, let’s talk about detox. I know that you have some things to say about how heavy metals and chemicals are the underlying cause of disease.
WENDY WYERS: Yes, yes. Yeah, the more I learn about this, the more I’m completely convinced that nutrient deficiencies and heavy metal and chemical toxicities are the main cause of disease.
DEBRA: I agree.
WENDY WYERS: Of course, there’s genetics involved at some point. But really, the metals and chemicals will interplay with our genetics and express different diseases based on our genetic make-up. I think that comes more into play.
It’s something that when you get sick and you go to your doctor, they’re not looking at either of those things. There’s a myopia in modern medical care where they’re not looking at nutrition and they’re not looking at heavy metal and chemical toxicities unless they’re acute. They’re trained to look at acute metal toxicities, but not the chronic, low level heavy metal toxicities that most people are suffering from.
And also, it starts with nutrient deficiency. When you don’t have enough zinc for instance in your body (that’s what your body uses to repair your arteries and your skin and what-not), then your body is forced to retain cadmium, which is a very toxic heavy metal that causes kidney disease and cancer and it’s a pollutant in the environment from industrial dumping.
And when you don’t have enough zinc, your body is forced to retain that and to use that in enzymatic processes. The body uses it to repair the arteries and the skin and other areas of the body even though zinc is the preferred mineral. It’s the preferred patching of material for your arteries.
Over time, this is one of the biggest causes of heart disease and high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries. Cadmium is really brittle and it prevents the blood vessels from being able to expand and contract readily or as well as they would normally contract or what-not and that causes these diseases.
So that’s just one example of how a nutrient deficiency will cause us to accumulate heavy metals and over time, over many, many decades of nutrient deficient diets and accumulating heavy metals and the hundred thousand chemicals that are in our environment today, we eventually develop illness and symptoms and diseases.
And it starts with fatigue. When the adrenals become toxic and the thyroid becomes toxic and nutrient deprived, these are the glands that make our bodies energy. So when you start to become fatigued, it’s because those glands are toxic and your metabolism slows down. And then you haven’t even [inaudible 00:42:28] to detox heavy metals because detoxing takes energy.
DEBRA: Yeah.
WENDY WYERS: So if you don’t have enough energy, if you’re tired all the time and you’re craving sugar and coffee, that’s just because your body doesn’t have adequate energy supplies. And when it doesn’t have enough energy, you are accumulating metals and chemicals because your body doesn’t have that energy to detox them.
DEBRA: Yes! I actually just wrote a whole article about that.
WENDY WYERS: That’s actually the disease process over time. People get worse and worse and worse. Oh, yeah? I love it.
DEBRA: I recently wrote a whole article about toxic chemicals and adrenals.
WENDY WYERS: Mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: Yeah.
WENDY WYERS: It’s a huge problem. I think most people are in some stage of adrenal fatigue.
DEBRA: I think so too. And one thing that I’ll just say – go ahead.
WENDY WYERS: The only thing – yeah. Oh, I was just going to say that when you go to your doctor, the only remedy they give you is hormone replacement therapy, which does nothing to address the underlying cause of why you have adrenal fatigue in the first place.
DEBRA: I actually went through adrenal fatigue. I know what it feels like and I know how to recover from it. And one of the things that my nutritionist that I had at the time told me was that when your body is upright (when you’re standing up or sitting up), then it stresses your adrenals. And when you’re lying down, your adrenals can recover.
WENDY WYERS: Ah!
DEBRA: And so she told me to just simply lie down. She gave me a good excuse to just lie in bed all day.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, I say to the client, “Sit your butt down.”
DEBRA: Yeah, but if you’re tired – and most people don’t know that they have adrenal fatigue. But if you’re tired in the afternoon, say, instead of drinking coffee or eating chocolate or something, go lie down just for 15 or 20 minutes. Even that will help your adrenals.
WENDY WYERS: Absolutely! Yeah. I mean, take a nap. Don’t drink coffee and eat sugar.
DEBRA: Yeah.
WENDY WYERS: When people are craving these things, they’re craving them (which many of us do), our bodies are naturally trying to get the energy that it needs. So it’s not that people have low will power or what-not when they have voracious sugar and carbohydrate cravings, it’s just that they typically have adrenal fatigue and their body is just crying out for quick, easy energy sources.
DEBRA: But the thing about that particularly for adrenals is if you eat that sugar or you eat carbs, it actually makes your adrenal fatigue worse.
WENDY WYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: So it’s like this vicious cycle. This is one of the reasons why you want to do all these things that I’m talking about and that Wendy is talking about in order to improve your nutrition, get better food, supplements, if you need to take them, detox your body in whatever way you choose to do so because that’s the thing that’s really going to break the cycle and is going to get you back on track.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, and that’s what I do exactly with my Mineral Power Program that I designed. It uses a hair mineral analysis and I’m able to get a peek into your nutritional status and any heavy metal toxicities you have and design a program for you that gives you the supplements that you need for your body at that time and do diet and lifestyle changes.
You do that long enough, your body heals itself. It takes two to three years to detox the bulk of heavy metals from your body and to increase your mineral and nutrient status. But it does work.
The focus of the problem is healing your adrenals and thyroid and increasing your energy and your mental clarity and your ability to detox. People are realy blown away by what comes out of their body on the program.
DEBRA: Well, there’s a lot of junk we’re carrying around, yeah.
WENDY WYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: There’s so many different kinds of detoxes. It’s interesting to me how they kind of fit together. I know you and I were talking about taking Pure Body Zeolite, which is what I recommend to people. That will remove directly things immediately from your body. And there’s also a place to be doing a long-term program like yours as well.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah! I think Zeolite’s amazing. I think it’s a wonderful thing people can do to get really quick results. But that’s one thing that for a long-term detox, you really have to increase your nutrient status especially minerals. I like chelated minerals.
And once you start doing that, your body just naturally detoxes and starts pushing out these metals it doesn’t need any longer. It’s actually using these metals for certain processes in the body.
And so once people start increasing their minerals, they’ll naturally detox as well. But I think Zeolite is a wonderful addition to a detox program.
DEBRA: That’s so fascinating, what you said about the body is using cadmium when it doesn’t have zinc. There’s I’m sure other things like that going on in the body. It’s kind of like in the thyroid, something we’ve talked about before where if the body doesn’t have iodine, then it uses fluoride.
The thing that I think of when I hear these things is that nature has created our bodies in a way that it works, that we’re supposed to have iodine and we’re supposed to have zinc and we’re supposed to have all these nutrients. And then, when we don’t, then now we’re living in this world where our body, instead of being made out of zinc and iodine is made out of cadmium and fluoride. It just is like a mutation.
To think about that, like if I had a picture of my body where, “Here’s a little cadmium molecule and a fluoride molecule and this molecule and that molecule,” it’s a different body. It’s not the body that nature designed.
Are you there?
WENDY WYERS: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And these metals, they’re in the soil. They’ve been around – oh! Hi, can you hear me?
DEBRA: Yeah, I can hear you.
WENDY WYERS: Debra, can you hear me? Okay, fine. I’m sorry.
DEBRA: I can hear you. Can you hear me?
WENDY WYERS: Yes, I can hear you.
DEBRA: Okay.
WENDY WYERS: Yeah, so these metal have been in the environment since cavemen times. They’re in the soil. But the problem is with modern industry, we have drudged them up. All these metals in the environment, we drudge them up. We put them in computers. They’re in hydrogenated oils. Nickel is used as a catalyst to infuse hydrogenated oils. So many people that eat these hydrogenated oils have a lot of nickel toxicity.
There’s many, many examples that I can talk about, but it just goes to show you how we have so much…
DEBRA: But we’re at the end of the show.
WENDY WYERS: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: We’ve only got 20 seconds.
WENDY WYERS: Well, thank you so much for having me.
DEBRA: Thank you for being on the show. I’ll have you on again. Hopefully, we’ll have better transmission next time.
WENDY WYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: And we’ll be able to hear you better. But again, Wendy’s website is Liveto110.com. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Formaldehyde “Authoritatively Judged” To Be a Carcinogen
from Debra Lynn Dadd
Last week an article in the New York Times reported, “A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences found sufficient evidence from human studies to declare formaldehyde ‘a known human carcinogen’ that causes nasopharyngeal cancer, sinonasal cancer and myeloid leukemia. It also cited evidence from studies of animals and of carcinogenesis suggesting that formaldehyde may cause a much wider array of cancers than just those three.”
In 1981, the National Toxicology Program listed formaldehyde as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” In 2011, they upgraded the listing to “known to be a human carcinogen.” After opposition from industry, Congress had the National Academy of Science review the evidence. Their review determined that, indeed, formaldehyde does cause cancer in humans.
Source: New York Times: The Verdict on a Troublesome Carcingen
Formaldehyde in Paper Towels and Other Paper Products
from Debra Lynn Dadd
After making a comment in a recent post about not using paper towels because they contain formaldehyde, I received this shocked email from a long-time reader
Debra,
I can’t believe that I have been trying to be as toxic free as possible for many, many years and I am still using paper towels daily! Your website as had lots of information through the years about paper towels, including your comments regarding Cathy’s question on August 11 about non-toxic lining for drawers.
I contacted Bounty (Procter&Gamble) and this is the list of ingredients sent me. What do you think?
You can post that information if you think it would be beneficial to others in you Q&A section.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for contacting Bounty, Stephanie.
Below is the ingredients for the Bounty Towels & Napkins
| INGREDIENT LIST | MATERIAL FUNCTION |
| Processed Wood Pulp | Used to make paper from softwood trees (Pine & Spruce) and hardwood trees (Oak/maple.) |
| In NA we use virgin wood pulp. | Our products don’t contain recycled fibers |
| Wet Strength Polymer | Added to increase strength during wet use. |
| Adhesive | Hold pliestogether Present in trace amounts (special type of glue) |
| Ceteareth-10 Surfactant | emulsifier |
We do not intentionally add formaldehyde to our products, and we check that our raw materials do not contain any formaldehyde either.
Since we don’t add or use formaldehyde in the processing of the product, we don’t test for it in the finished product.
It may be helpful to know that formaldehyde is a naturally occurring substance, and can be detected in wood pulp at very low concentrations
Hope this helps.
Wendy
Bounty Team
Need to get back in touch? Please do not change the subject line, just hit reply. This makes sure we receive your message
At first glance this paper towel seems to not contain formaldehyde, however, it does contain “Wet Strength Polymer.”
What is that?
According to Paper Functional Chemicals- Wet Strength Resins, papers such as filter papers, hygienic papers, papers for bags, label papers, wallpapers, laminate base papers, and packaging papers for moist goods can only fulfill their function if they have adequate “wet strength” (the ability to hold together when exposed to water.
The way wet strength is achieved is by using wet-strenth resins (WSR).
“the most common WSR are urea formaldehyde resins (UF-resins) and melamine formaldehyde resins (MF-resins), These chemicals need acid pH conditions and the presence of alum in the papermaking process. For neutral pH conditions polyamide-epichlorohydrin resins (PAE-resins) are mainly used (e. g. for hygiene and laminate papers); polyethylenimine products are used for specialty papers such as industrial filter papers and shoe board.”
This article notes that urea-formaldehyde resins are the least expensive (so likely to be most common). They can be added to the wet mix, “but they can be also used via surface application in the paper machine.” That means the resin is lying right on the surface of the paper.
I don’t know enough about the chemistry of how this works to make an evaluation of how these chemicals interact with the cellulose. I do know that chemicals can react and turn into something else entirely, such as fat and lye make soap.
I also don’t know how much, if any, formaldehyde emissions come from paper, but they are well-known from urea-formaldehyde foam insulation and composite wood products. I first heard about formaldehyde in paper towels years ago from people with MCS who reacted to paper towels.
Click through to the article if you want to learn more about what is used to make paper. This is an industry website with lots of information.
Read more here about Toxins in Toilet Paper.
Waterproof mattress cover with Polyurethane backing
Question from TA
I am looking for a waterproof mattress protector to take along while traveling, to protect the bed from any leaks my toddler might have. It seems like the best options I’ve found so far are the “waterproof breathable” mattress covers, which are cotton terry with a polyurethane membrane:
SafeRest Queen Size Premium Hypoallergenic Waterproof Mattress Protector – Vinyl Free
The prices seem reasonable, and the SafeRest and Luna ones have over 3,000 reviews each, most of which are positive. I see a number of good things: made in the USA, free of PVC, not thick or crinkly, protects against dust mites and allergens, etc. But what I’d like to know is whether you think this polyurethane membrane is non-toxic and free of chemical smells. It appears to fold up like a sheet and would be easy to take when traveling (well, easier than a bulkier mattress pad, anyway!). I need to get something right away, but I’m holding back until I get more assurance about this PU membrane. It definitely seems better than PVC. What do you make of it?
The disposable options don’t seem like a great idea, and other smaller options tend to have plastics and PVC. Wool is pricey and thicker/heavier to haul along with all our other travel gear. Vinyl is a definite “no.” A folded-up towel isn’t super effective and smaller things like that also shift around while sleeping on them. So I keep coming back to a mattress cover like these I linked to above, but I’d just like to feel sure that they are free of toxicity.
Ughhh… Now that I looked more closely at the Q&A on the product pages for the Luna and the SafeRest covers, I see that customers asked what materials are used in the covers, and the answer is 80% cotton and 20% polyester. I had assumed that the cotton terry was 100% cotton. It appears that this one might be 100% cotton surface:
www.amazon.com/LinenSpa-Waterproof-Mattress-Protector-Eliminates-Warranty/dp/B00A2WEJY4
In all cases, I see reviews that say “my toddler (or dog) had an accident or diaper leak or spill on the bed and nothing got through to the mattress” and those that say “my toddler (or dog) had an accident/leak/spill on the bed and the mattress got soaked.” I don’t know why there would be such variability in user experiences. The reviews overall seem positive. There are also differing report about whether the covers make the users feel hot and sweaty. Along the same lines, I came across the Gotcha Covered mattress cover that uses organic cotton and a recycled PU backing; but the price is considerably higher (more than 3 times higher than some of the others), and out of 4 reviews, 2 of them are negative, saying “hot and sweaty” and “not waterproof.” Since it’s something I need just for travel, I’m not inclined to pay that much more for something that might not work very well.
I also see this Natural Mat product, which is not as large of a cover; it is designed for a crib mattress, but I believe it would lie flat on the bed. They also use PU, but it is apparently contained between the 2 layers of organic cotton.
I am aware that Naturepedic makes a safe cover, and I’ve actually had one. However, it is more expensive, fairly heavy, and it did not protect the new mattress it was used on from body oil. It wasn’t tested against urine, so I can’t speak to its effectiveness for that purpose.
Debra’s Answer
All of the mattress protectors you are describing are using the latest technology of a very thin layer of polyurethane fused to a fabric, so it can be waterproof without the sweatiness or noise of a vinyl mattress cover.
The difference between the different brands is the type of fabric used.
Because I’m familiar with the one sold by Naturepedic, I can tell you that the polyurethane film is completely nontoxic. I’ve seen and smelled samples of this film and there is no odor whatsoever.
And I’ve researched polyurethane. Polyurethane itself, as I’ve said many times before, is completely nontoxic. What makes polyurethane foam and polyurethane wood finish toxic is the additives. But this film is simply polyurethane. Though made from petroleum, it is nonetheless not toxic.
Naturepedic is so scrupulous about not using toxic materials that if Naturepedic uses a material, it can be trusted to be safe. In addition, they have their products tested by independent third parties that verify they meet nontoxic standards.
About their polyurethane film, Naturepedic says, “Drysleep uses a specially formulated polyurethane waterproof barrier that is proven to not leach harmful chemicals. It is made from the same grade material as is required for food contact applications. It also meets the highest standards for medical device biocompatibility (USP Class VI). It does not contain any fire retardants or antimicrobial treatments and is free of vinyl/PVC, phthalates and latex. It also easily passes the GREENGUARD “Gold” certification standards for chemical emissions. With a Naturepedic organic mattress pad, you never have to worry about harmful chemicals or allergenic materials.”
So this gives you something to compare to with the other brands.
As to whether or not this polyurethane film protects from urine or other liquids, I don’t know why it appeared to not work for some, but as you said, the majority of the reviews are positive. I see no reason not to use one of these mattress protectors.
Organic Mattress Encasement for Bed Bugs
Question from Patricia
Hi Debra,
I currently find myself living across a wall from a guy who found a bedbug.
His girlfriend who is there most of the time has a roommate who recently brought bedbugs back with her from NY. Their apartment has a full blown bedbug infestation.
I have a pretty pricey mattress that was a gift from my sister this last Christmas.
I have been unable to find a a safe mattress encasement anywhere. Where can I find one? Help!!!!!
Debra’s Answer
Patricia wrote back to me and said she found one at The Clean Bedroom and it’s on sale now for 20% off.
I just wanted to mention that I did some research on this before she called back, and I was erroneously told by one seller that a bed bug is smaller than a dust mite and so encasings made to keep dust mites out don’t work for bedbugs. That’s totally wrong. Dustmites are so small they are invisible, and you can see bed bugs, so any mattress encasing that completely encloses the mattress and is made to keep out dust mites would work for bed bugs.
Here’s a bit of info about dust mites and bed bugs.
The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
Today we’ll be learning about what it takes to get the USDA organic certification with my guests Diana Kaye and James Hahn. We’ll be talking about locating a certifier, preparing the organic system plan, compiling documentation, maintaining records, inspections, and everything else that must be done to get organic certification. This husband-and-wife are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. They 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
- GMOs in Personal Care Products
- Toxics in Essential Oils?
- How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
- How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products
- More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution
- What Organic Means — From the Experience of Being Organic Farmers
- Why One Couple Decided to Get an Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye and James Hahn
Date of Broadcast: August 20, 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, we’re going to be talking about one of the broadest toxic-free areas of products that you can choose from and one of the most regulated and that’s organic. Whether it’s organic food or fibers or personal care products, there are a lot of regulations for organic.
My guests today are from Terressentials, Diana Kaye and James Hahn and we’ll be talking about what they have to go through in order to be a USDA certified organic farm and make you USDA certified organic products.
Hi, Diana and James.
James Hahn: Hi, Debra.
Diana Kaye: Hi, Debra.
DEBRA: Nice to have you on again. And listeners, they’ve already been on twice talking about their experiences with what organic means and why they decided to get their organic farm and all kinds of things about organic we’ve already talked about.
So today, what we’re going to be talking about is the challenges of achieving their organic certification, what that’s like.
And so where would you like to start with that?
Diana Kaye: Well, first of all, perhaps I could clarify the types of certification that folks could get.
DEBRA: Yes, please do.
Diana Kaye: How about that?
DEBRA: Great, great.
Diana Kaye: So in our particular instance, although we do live on a farm and we’re situated here with our crafting studio operating in lovely Maryland, we actually have three separate operations going on here.
We do grow organic flowers. We’re not certified for the flowers however. The flowers are something that we sell in our retail store and we do also use our land here for doing experiments with herbs and flowers for research purposes, for things that we might consider using in our personal care products or other types of products down the road.
And so the types of certification that are available – oh, we also make our personal care products. That’s the second thing that we do. And the third thing that we do is that we own and operate two retail stores that feature our products and other fair trade handcrafts and some other organic certified and fair trade good.
DEBRA: Okay.
Diana Kaye: So the types of certification that are available to a business are the one that I think that most people are familiar with, which is a ‘certified organic processor or grower’. A grower would be someone who is a farmer who would grow either plants or raise livestock or even grow raw materials such as cotton or hemp that could be certified organic and then further processed into a textile.
There’s a third type of certification – I’m sorry, a second one, which would be called a ‘certified organic processor and/or handler’. What a processor is someone who takes those tomatoes that come from the farm or the cocoa butter that comes from the farm and processes the raw material into a usable, organic finished – let’s say they take the crops and then process that and make that into an organic raw material.
So for example, with cocoa butter, you can grow the cocoa beans, the pod and then those pods have to be dried (and sometimes they’re roasted) and then you have to separate the cocoa butter from the actual chocolate or cocoa nib. So that’s a whole other step.
The growers don’t process necessarily. Some growers do, but most farmers (which would be the first level or the first category), they simply grow the raw material and then cut the material/harvest it. And then they ship it off to the processor.
James Hahn: And the processor if you’re taking about cocoa butter, that whole process has to be according to organic principles, not just the growing of the planet. It’s like every step of the lifecycle of that cocoa to be certified in the end product has to be part of the certification loop.
DEBRA: I have a question. Diana, tell us what the third one is and then I’ll ask my question.
Diana Kaye: Okay, the third one isn’t very well known and it’s not something that’s required, which we think is a real big problem in the marketplace. The third category would be –
Let me back up. I said that first of all, the second category was a processor/handler. A processor is someone who would take that cocoa butter and make it into a body cream, mixing it and blending it with other oils and butters and then packaging that and reselling that. So that’s processing.
A handler is someone who, for example, might purchase cocoa beans – no, let’s say coffee beans and they get them in large 50 lb. bags. These are green coffee beans and perhaps they roast them. Maybe they already buy the roasted beans from somebody else.
If a person buys a finished raw material and all they do is just repackage it, they don’t do anything to it (so they’re buying roasted coffee beans in a 50 lb. or 100 lb. bag and they’re simply measuring it out and putting it into 1 lb. bag and then stapling those bags or sealing those bag some way and putting a label on them), that’s a handler, someone who doesn’t really process, something who doesn’t use a mixer or a blender.
So when we think of processor, we should think of processing tools, things that most of us are familiar with that we probably have in our own kitchen.
DEBRA: Like a food processor.
James Hahn: There’s one thing I want to quickly insert here and that is when Diana says you can have a handler who is certified, you could for example have a retailer where the store itself is certified.
Diana Kaye: Well, that’s the third category, Jim.
James Hahn: Okay.
Diana Kaye: So the third category – and this is the one that I mentioned gives us the bit of unsettling. The Federal National Organic Program law does not require the require the retailer to be certified to handle or present for sale certified organic products.
This is what bothers us. For example, we know of many different retail stores (some in, say, the health food category, some mass market groceries) where the stores might have – some might have an in-store deli where they actually produce and process food and then they put it out in their deli cases for sale.
And then there are other stories that don’t have a deli, but they may have a backroom where they’ll take that watermelon and slice it up into quarters and make it more convenient and wrap it for people or they may buy bulk. They may have a bulk area. A lot of health food stores have bulk bins where they’ll dump those 50 lb. or 25 lb. bags of nuts into the bin, so those people are in essentially, retail stores are essentially handling organic food.
But this is the part that bothers me. They’re not required to be certified.
James Hahn: The other thing, if you don’t mind my saying, which is related to this is you can have a store that announces to the world that they are certified as a handler. That can give the impression that all of the products they sell are organic. But that is not at all necessarily the case.
DEBRA: Yeah, I see the difference. So what is actually being certified is the farmer grower and a processor or handler can be certified. But are you saying that not only are the retailers not certified, but there’s no even any certification for the retail?
Diana Kaye: Well, good question. Actually, they can get certified, but the law does not require it. We think that that’s a big loophole that isn’t good in the National Organic Program Federal Regulations because for example, if you are a certified organic processor – which, by the way, that’s what we are. We’ll get into this a little more about why we have one certification, not the grower, but why we’re processors and not growers.
When you are a processor, there are very strict regulations about how you need to maintain your facility, logs that you have to keep for maintenance, pest control in addition to maintaining all the records for all of your raw materials.
In other words, for your raw materials, you have to maintain your purchase order, you have to maintain all of the certification paper work that comes with every single raw material every single time you purchase it and you’re required to keep all of these documents for five years.
DEBRA: I don’t want to interrupt you, but we have to go to break.
Diana Kaye: Sure, no problem.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. We’re talking about the organic certification process. We’ll be right back after this to find out more.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about the challenges of achieving organic certification with my guests, Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. You can go to their website where they have USDA certified personal care products, wonderful personal care products at Terressentials.com.
Okay, go on, Diana.
Diana Kaye: Ah, okay. So backing up to the retailer situation, for example, if you are a certified processor for which we are and also, another type of processor might be the person that makes the pasta sauce that you love that comes in a jar or the bread that you like, those people who make those kinds of products including personal care would be ‘certified organic processors’.
And then, for example, there is a really lovely coffee company over in New Jersey and many around the country who package coffee beans. Those people are certified organic handlers. There are some that might roast the beans and package them and then those people would be the certified organic processors/handler.
DEBRA: …because they’re doing something to it.
Diana Kaye: The issue with their – pardon me?
DEBRA: …because they’re doing something to it.
Diana Kaye: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
Diana Kaye: Well, the thing with retailers is a lot of them are doing something. Even if that means they are opening that bulk of bulk food and they’re putting it in the bin, here’s the question, what are they cleaning that bin with? If they are cutting that watermelon up into quarters and then wrapping it up with plastic wraps, what are they cleaning their countertop and their knives with?
James Hahn: And the reason Diana is asking that is if they’re doing it according to organic regulations, those dictate the types of cleaners that you can use.
Diana Kaye: Absolutely! There’s a list of approved products that you can and cannot use. So that’s a very important of the processing/handling. In our case, I’ve also seen many stores that in their deli cases, they label food that they’ve prepared whether it be macaroni salad or even a salad, but it’s ready to go and I’ve seen stores that label these products as organic because they use the materials, the raw materials from their produce section.
However, this is what bothers me. When they take the raw materials, be it cucumbers, tomatoes, whatever from their produce section and the macaroni off the shelf and boil it, but they take it back into the kitchen, are they processing that food according to the standard that is required for the tomato sauce in the jar or the body care product? If they are not certified, they’re not. No!
DEBRA: We don’t know. We don’t know if they’re cooking that macaroni in tap water with fluoride in it and chloramines and all kinds of things.
Diana Kaye: Yeah!
DEBRA: And when you were talking about the bins, when you’re talking about the bins, the first thing I thought of was, “Well, what if they had bugs around? What kind of pesticides are they spraying to get rid of the bugs?”
Diana Kaye: Bingo! Exactly, exactly.
DEBRA: So now, it’s not organic anymore.
Diana Kaye: Well, that’s our point. By the way, just to back up, we see this as another problem with the National Organic Program Regulation. The NOP (that’s the National Organic Program) allows people to use tap water in food whether it be…
James Hahn: …or for any purpose.
Diana Kaye: …for any purpose, rinsing vegetables. If you see a juice that says ‘from concentrate’ and they’re required to list the juice concentrate in the water, that doesn’t mean the water was even purified or distilled.
In our case, we’re uncomfortable with that. We don’t drink tap water. We use distilled water to make our products, but that is not a requirement under the NOP [inaudible 00:17:41]. We’re sad about that, but the NOP allows EPA standards for drinking water to be an acceptable quality of water to be used in food.
James Hahn: So that’s an area where we go beyond the requirements.
Diana Kaye: Right! So those are the basic levels of certification, but we thought it was really important to point out the retailer aspect because that’s it, that’s the last step where the food or the personal care products are before you take them home.
We really feel that if a retailer is handling, that they should be required to go through a retailer certification especially if they have a prepared food section so that people can feel assured that, like you said, they’re not using pesticides and a lot of grocery stores do, any kind of store. They might even have a regular contract with a pest control applicator.
But also, even going so far as what you clean your countertops with. That’s the level of detail that we have to go through.
DEBRA: Well, I would assume (and I think that a lot of people make this assumption) that if you’re buying something at a natural food store that they have prepared, that they’re using the cleaners that they’re selling on the shelf. That’s not necessarily the case.
Diana Kaye: No, ma’am.
DEBRA: We should not make that assumption.
James Hahn: Absolutely not.
DEBRA: I do see that a lot of times in stores, there are some people who are being employed at not very high wages that may not know how to do things…
Diana Kaye: Sure, sure.
James Hahn: Mm-hmmm…
DEBRA: …and that there may be a store policy that is not trickles down to somebody who’s working on the floor.
Diana Kaye: Absolutely!
DEBRA: Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying and I hadn’t even thought of that.
Diana Kaye: For us, it makes shopping very difficult for food because Debra, we’re like you, we’re trying to maintain our health. It’s very difficult and challenging in this world if you’re someone like you or us or some of your other listeners who are purists and who are recovering from an illness or trying not to get illness. We want to minimize the chemical residues. And so it becomes a challenge.
And that’s one of the reasons that we are certified organic as processors. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to make the distinction. We grow here and we have a few acres that we planted. But the certification process is so intense and there’s so much work that’s involved. We are a tiny company and two things.
Number one, we could not manage a certification for our farm and a certification for our processing. The important thing is we’re an experimental research. That’s the kind of growing we do. We couldn’t possibly grow all of the crops that we need for the raw materials to be able to make our line of products. So we have to depend on partnerships with other organic farms around the world to be able to supply us with the raw materials that we need to use to make our products.
So because the level of detail is so tremendous and the paper work that’s required, that’s all we can manage.
James Hahn: And the climate of course is not right.
DEBRA: I understand. We need to go to break.
James Hahn: Okay.
DEBRA: We need to go to break, so I’m going to stop you. But I’m going to ask my question first before we let you talk some more.
James Hahn: Surely.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking about organic certification and everything that goes into that with Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. Their website is Terressentials.com where they have lovely gourmet certified organic personal care products and we’re going to find out what that means. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials and we’re talking about organic certification.
Now, I just want to clarify one thing. When a consumer sees that USDA organic seal, I always think that that means that the ingredients themselves are organically certified, certified organic. So where does the processor certification come in. How will a consumer know that it’s processed organic or can that seal not be used unless it’s been processed by an organic processor?
Diana Kaye: That’s the second part. The company may not use the organic seal on their finished products unless the growing and the processing, both steps, are certified.
James Hahn: It’s like with food. Not only could they not use the seal, they would not be able to use the word ‘organic’ to describe the product legally.
DEBRA: Okay! So as long as everybody is being legal, then if we see organic on a label and we see the USDA organic seal, that means that it’s been grown and processed.
James Hahn: That’s correct. Every step of the process has been examined.
Diana Kaye: That’s the way it’s supposed to be and hopefully it is out there in the real world. I think we covered this another show where we have different certifications coming to the United States from other countries. Those certifications aren’t equal to the level of scrutiny and the detailed organizations that American companies – or let’s not say American, but just any company because a company in a foreign country could get certified to the USDA National Organic Program Regulations and they would also be allowed to use the USDA seal.
Truthfully, they would find it to their marketing advantage to use the USDA organic seal on the front label of the product because it means much. People recognize that globally because it was the first organic detailed standard that was composed and created with consumer input.
James Hahn: It’s still the best standard in the world.
DEBRA: Okay. So now, given that it is – I mean, I’ve had other on people talking about this and I’m pretty impressed with the standard. Why don’t you tell us about what it takes to actually get certified so that people can understand that it’s not just somebody walking in and saying, “Okay, you’re fine.”
Diana Kaye: Oh, my God, no.
James Hahn: Definitely not.
DEBRA: So tell us what it takes. What’s behind that seal?
Diana Kaye: Okay. The very first step is your application process, which is a many month-long process where you have to basically write a dissertation of what your whole process is, what your goals are describing the product that you’re going to produce. So this is truly an essay form.
And then you have to have supporting documentation for all of that. The supporting documentation, I kind of just washed over this a little earlier, which means that any time you order a raw material – and by the way, if you’re a small company, it’s sad, but you have much more work to do than a larger company because small companies tend to buy their raw materials on smaller quantities on a more frequent basis because small companies are not making products in 30,000 or 50,000 gallon tanks.
And that’s common, by the way, for personal care products. They’re made in these huge batch when large companies do it. Many small companies (and we are one), we make things in very small batches and we buy raw materials more frequently, which actually, I prefer because I know that in many cases, that means we’re getting fresher materials.
However, when it comes to documenting all of that, all of those many purchases, it’s extremely time-consuming because for every single purchase, you have to maintain the whole paperwork trail for every single purchase.
And in addition, we make ourselves – all of the extracts that are listed in our products, we actually make all of those here in-house as well. Many companies, they buy their extracts, their herbal extracts off the shelf from herbal extract companies. So they’re recording a purchase. In our case, now we get into production log. So we actually have to track all the raw materials for every single herbal extract that we make and I’m talking we have to track them down to fractions of an ounce and we have to be able to document that.
In fact, one of the aspects of the process – and I’m skipping ahead a little bit here – is the inspection. At that time, a certifier will select randomly a product and you have to be able to track back through all of your invoices and production logs and all of your records to be able to track every drop of every material, every ounce, very gram.
James Hahn: …and identify exactly which batch that drop came from.
Diana Kaye: So it’s extremely complicated to do that especially if you have multi-ingredient products and if you’re also the producer of some of those multi-ingredient products. So for example, an herbal extract is a multi-ingredient product because it requires two ingredients or more.
We’ll make a chamomile extract. That would be certified organic grape, alcohol or sugar alcohol. In our case, we tend to use sugar. Some people use the grain alcohols, but we prefer the sugar. It’s cleaner. And then you would have your certified organic herb material. So we have to track.
And again, we buy in small quantities. We’re not buying a hundred pounds and making a hundred gallons or fifty gallons at a time. We’re making smaller batches. We might make a gallon or two. So we have to track every bottle, every drop of each herbal extract that we make. And if we’ve got 25, those are almost – in fact they are. Those are individual product. So it’s not just our finished product, which a customer would see as the body lotion or body cream, but every single ingredient that’s an extract, that’s a compound, multi-ingredient, we have to track that as well.
So in addition to that, when we’re first composing our application called the Organic System Plan (and that’s part of the regulation), we have to document how we’re going to – and this is what we alluded to earlier when we’re talking about retailers. We have a chart and we have to break out every single method that we use to clean our facility. We have to list a mop, a broom, a vacuum. Whatever tool that we use, we’re required to list that.
And in addition that, we have to list every cleaning product that we use. In our case, we use our own organically made soap. We make our own organic sanitizer. We use baking soda, we use vinegar, we use our own organic essential oil. But again, we have to log every single thing. We have to actually have logs where we note when we clean, who cleaned. We have a separate log for maintenance when we clean our filters in our HVAC units. We have another log, which is strictly for mouse trap, fly paper. We have plug-in UV lights with sticky traps.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you…
Diana Kaye: Oh!
James Hahn: Okay.
DEBRA: …because the commercial is going to come on any second. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking about how to organic certification, what it takes to get that with Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. Okay, so you were giving us a list of all the things you have to keep lists of.
Diana Kaye: I know. That’s essentially a huge component of what we have to do, paperwork documentation.
James Hahn: Our stack of documentation, how tall would you say it is, Diana?
Diana Kaye: Oh, Debra, it’s the saddest white binder that we could find and it’s 4 ½ inch. That’s our organic application. We have to have for every raw material, we have to break out every single – so basically, every recipe for every product is included in there. We have to create what’s called a flowchart for every single product that’s in there where you actually have to use a bubble diagram. So you outline each step of your process for every single product. You do that graphically with a bubble diagram.
The paperwork, I have to say is tedious. Sometimes, it feels like it’s overwhelming. And again, I say for a small company, it feels like it can be more challenging because larger companies – and I’ve used this comparison, they may make products once or three times a year and they buy raw materials in metric tons where we may be buying –
Like when we buy certified organic lavender organic, we may buy 5 kilos or 10 kilos at a time. They’re buying it in 55-gallon drums and they made that by a palette of drums, which is 455-gallon barrels to make their products. So their paper workload is significantly less than it would be. And it’s a shame, but it’s the same that the documentation process works.
James Hahn: But it is the same standard that applies to all food producers so that if you see a food and it has the USDA seal on it or uses the word ‘organic’, they are required to have gone through that entire process.
Now, one thing I want to point out to your listeners is that if you’re talking about personal care products, only the 1% of the “organic personal care products” on the market have gone through that process. Most do not.
Diana Kaye: And that’s kind of sad.
DEBRA: Okay, so just give us a little summary about what people would be reading on a label if they see organic. Actually, after your last show, one of my listeners wrote an email to me and he asked me about a particular organic personal care product – I’m going to sneeze in about a second. Anyway, so he said it contains organic ingredients. [Sneezing] Excuse me. Wow! That’s the first time I’ve sneezed on the air.
Diana Kaye: Blessings! Blessings!
DEBRA: Thank you. So anyway, I said to him, “Well, is the product itself certified organic or is the ingredients certified organic” and he said it didn’t say on the website. He said, “Well, I’m going to write to them and find out.” And so they sent him back a very nice email saying, “We’re working on getting that certification.”
So what exactly should people be looking for to indicate that it is a certified organic product?
Diana Kaye: Well, this is pretty important. And this is sad. In the personal care world, the enforcement is not just there. The first thing that we can tell people to say to look for is the USDA seal on organic.
The ‘made with organic’ category kind of gets tricky. I’m going to just dive into that real quick. For instance, we have our hair wash. A large component of that product is clay. And that clay is permitted. It’s on the national list of approved materials. Clay benzonites are used in many different kinds of products. We use them in our deodorants as well. They are allowed, but you cannot certify salt minerals.
So any mineral (calcium, salt or clay), they would be allowed if they’re not irradiated or chemically treated, but they’re not alive. They don’t grow. You can use them in products.
So in our case, all of our other ingredients in our hair wash are certified organic products – herbal extracts and essential oils. And that’s it. We don’t use anything else. However, because of the percentage, the product can’t use the USDA seal, but it’s been processed by us in our certified organic facility according to that organic system plan (that’s 4 ½ inches high of paper work and documentation), but we can’t use the USDA seal on the back of the label.
DEBRA: Yeah. Go on, go on. I’m going to say something.
Diana Kaye: The tricky part is if you are a certified company, you’re required to list that who you are certified organic by. Now, what we’ve seen many companies do (and this is where it makes it so difficult for consumers), companies that are not certified that are personal care products, they will list – like maybe they’re buying three ingredients that are certified organic. And they’ll actually list those certifier’s name on the back of the label. And so a consumer thinks that that means that product is a certified product when that is not the case.
The consumer should ask to see the company’s organic certificate that shows that the company that makes the personal care product is a certified organic processor.
DEBRA: Well, I think that the companies should be posting that kind of information on their website.
Diana Kaye: Well, I agree. They should also be posting their list of ingredients for their products. But unfortunately, most don’t.
DEBRA: Exactly! It’s like all that information should be there. That’s something that I’m working on, wanting people to do that and encouraging people to do that and asking more questions of companies.
I think one of the biggest problems that we have in the whole industry, all of consumerism, the whole marketplace is simply not knowing what’s in the product.
Diana Kaye: Yes.
DEBRA: And then another thing I wanted to say about the organic certification is that it gets confusing to the consumer when the product itself – like you were talking about, the clay portion of your hairwash is not an agricultural product, so it can’t be certified organic, that ingredient.
James Hahn: Right.
DEBRA: But there’s nothing toxic about your clay.
James Hahn: Nothing at all.
Diana Kaye: That’s a great little…
DEBRA: Yeah, but I didn’t finish my sentence. And then I want to hear what you have to say.
Diana Kaye: No, I love it.
DEBRA: And so I actually had somebody say to me recently that their product was 100% organic because it was certified organic.
Diana Kaye: Argh!
James Hahn: No, it doesn’t mean…
DEBRA: And I said, “No, your product isn’t 100% organic because it’s got other things in it and you can’t say that.” I actually called up somebody and said, “You can’t run your ad.”
Diana Kaye: But they do, Debra and that’s the sad part.
DEBRA: I know. I know they do. I know. So the point is as good as the organic certification is, it’s misleading in ways here. And the way I think that it’s misleading is that your product is totally non-toxic, but you can’t say that it’s 100% organic because it isn’t.
Diana Kaye: And the shame of all that is – and this is just from our perspective, but it’s really important. For consumers who are like us, again, we’re competing with literally hundreds of other companies who have synthetic, chemical detergents like in their shampoo, for example and maybe they have a drop of three organic ingredients and they call the product organic and they’ll list a couple of certifiers names on the back of their label, the consumer sees all of that and thinks that that is an organic product and yet it’s got a man-made, synthetic chemical detergent, it likely has chemical preservatives like ethanol.
People panic about parabens, but all of the replacement preservatives have very little documentation for long-term safety. So it’s like you’re just throwing the baby out with the bathwater and you’re trading one thing for something that’s unknown.
We deal with that and it’s so hard to communicate to consumers all these because it is confusing. And that’s why oh, Debra, your show is so helpful because you’re helping to get people to understand the complexities of the labeling situations. And honestly, it would be so wonderful if we could have more enforcement in the personal care marketplace.
James Hahn: …instead of none.
Diana Kaye: But honestly, it’s like personal care products are orphans. We’re an afterthought, almost as if they didn’t even anticipate that people would want to have a truly 100% certified organic body cream, you know?
DEBRA: Well, yeah. I agree with you. But also (I think we’ve talked about this before), we’ve both been working in this field for 30 years and we both see that there’s progress.
Diana Kaye: Yeah, there is.
James Hahn: For sure.
DEBRA: And there still needs to be even more progress. We’re not there yet 100%, but it’s so much better than it used to be. And the more talk about this, the more people listen to the show, the more people write articles, the more people are educated and then they can go and ask these questions and know what to look for and things like that, the more it’s all going to kind of settle out I think. I think we have a ways to go.
We only have less than a minute now. So I want to make sure…
Diana Kaye: It always flies by so fast.
DEBRA: I know. It does, it does. You’ve given us so much great information. I’m going to have Diana and James on on a regular basis, about once a month. We’ll be doing more shows talking about organic, so that everybody can learn and listen.
Thank you so much for sharing with us today. Thank you for your wonderful products. I’ll give you 15 seconds to say goodbye.
Diana Kaye: Well, Debra, I would just want to say once again that Jim and I are so delighted that you have taken up the cause here to educate consumers about what organic means and to help peel back the layers of this onion so that people can see and learn how to read the labels and to know what questions to ask of the personal care product.
DEBRA: I’m going to stop you right there because that’s the end of the show. Thank you, Diana and James from Terressentials.
James Hahn: Okay, thank you.
Diana Kaye: Thank you.
DEBRA: They’re at Terressentials.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
The Healthy Home Project: Affordable Toxic Free Remodeling
Today my guest is Erin S. Ihde, MA, CCRP, founder of The Healthy Home Project. We’ll be talking about how she transformed a house project- by-project, using healthier, “green” materials, “all on a peanut-butter-and-jelly budget.” The Healthy Home Project blog follows the remodeling a 107-year old historic home in need of much TLC. Each posts features resources based upon a single theme, from healthier paints to safer disposal of household hazards. Resource links within the post are provided for more comprehensive information on each topic. Erin believes creating healthy spaces is one of the most important things we can do for the kids in our lives. She is a hospital-based project manager in environmental health, specializing in pediatric research and education. Erin has an MA in Environmental Education from New York University, where she received a fellowship from the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and a BA in English from the Honors Program at The College of New Jersey. She is a Certified Clinical Research Professional through SoCRA. Most importantly, she is mom to two amazing kids. thehealthyhomeproject.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Healthy Home Project: Affordable Toxic-Free Remodeling
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Erin S. Ihde
Date of Broadcast: August 19, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic-free. It’s a beautiful summer day here in Clearwater, Florida, on Tuesday, August 19, 2014.
Today, we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is remodeling, remodeling in a way that’s not toxic.
My guest today has remodeled a house. I guess, she’s in the process of remodeling a house. And she’s doing it in a non-toxic way. She’s blogging about. And she’s especially doing it for her kids because she’s a single mom and she wants to make sure that her kids have the least toxic, most healthy environment available. And we’re going to be talking about why that’s important, as well as what she’s doing.
My guest is Erin Ihde. She is a, in addition to all those things, I’m just looking at my notes here. She’s going to tell us about herself.
Hi, Erin. Hello. Erin? I can’t hear her. My technician is coming on. We just lost her. They’re calling her back.
So, I’m going to tell you more about her. She’s a hospital-based project manager in environmental health, specializing in pediatric research and education. She has an MA in environmental education from New York University where she received a fellowship from the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education.
She’s back now. Hi, Erin!
ERIN IHDE: Hi.
DEBRA: Hi! I have a little technical problem here, so just hold on a second. Actually, start telling us about how you came to do your healthy home project, and I’m going to just type to the technician here for a second.
ERIN IHDE: Well, I moved into this house just over a year ago. My children and I were living in an apartment at the time that
I found this house. We basically needed something very affordable, and needed a more long-term housing solution than where we were. And when I found this place, it was actually abandoned. There was nobody living here.
DEBRA: Oh, my God!
ERIN IHDE: So, it was in pretty bad shape. It needed pretty much everything done to it, so we weren’t able to live in it right away. I just figured why not make this a project where I can really use some sustainable materials and healthy paints, and basically, everything from start to finish. So it’s really been quite a journey.
DEBRA: What was it that made you be interested in doing it in a non-toxic way?
ERIN IHDE: Well, I’ve always been interested in environmental topics and non-toxic living pretty much since I was in high school. I was part of the environmental club. So, I proceeded from that time onward. I got my masters in environmental education, like you said. And I’m a hospital-based environmental health researcher, so I have that background to begin with.
It was really kind of a natural fit.
DEBRA: So, tell us why it’s so important for children—I totally agree with you, by the way, about this. I can see in my own body, as an adult, what an effect toxic chemicals had on me, and what a beneficial effect it had for me to remove toxic chemicals in our homes. But there are specific reasons why we have to be even more concerned about children. So tell us about those.
ERIN IHDE: Well, children have greater exposures to environmental toxins than adults do in three main ways. The first is pound-per-pound of body weight. Children drink more water, eat more food, and breathe more air than adults. They respirate at a quicker rate, and they take in more water and more food than we do. So their exposure is different in that sense.
They also have frequent hand-to-mouth behavior, which gives them more opportunity to ingest toxins.
And then the third way, especially true with small children, is they tend to stay close to the ground where toxins often settle.
DEBRA: And also, another thing about them playing close to the ground, especially like kids sitting on the floor in homes, that when we are walking around with our shoes on outside, and then we come in the house, we start tracking all those toxic chemicals on the floor. And so this is one of the reasons to take off your shoes before you come in the house because otherwise, anything that you’ve stepped in outside is now on your floor. Kids are playing on the floor. They get it on their hands, they put it in their mouth.
ERIN IHDE: I’m so glad you said that because that’s one of the rules we have in our house as well. We have a spot by the front door and one by the back door where everybody leaves their shoes. It’s just an automatic thing now. But it is so important to take off their shoes when you come in the house.
DEBRA: It really is.
ERIN IHDE: Especially now it being the summer with pesticides on people’s lawns.
DEBRA: Yes. So what about rapid cell division, children having rapid cell division?
ERIN IHDE: During two different time periods that children go through, that being the infant developmental period and the adolescent years, those are times of very rapid cell division in kids. So these are critical windows of development. And compared to an adult, there’s also a greater timeframe from an environmental exposure to when a disease or health condition might manifest.
So those are just some other ways and some other reasons why environmental exposures in children are very different than those in adults.
Kids aren’t little adults. They’re unique and they’re uniquely vulnerable. So as adults, we need to do all we can to protect them.
DEBRA: I completely agree. I think you’re doing a fabulous job as a mom to be concerned about this and taking care of your kids. And I think that all mothers need to do this—and fathers too, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles. We all need to be watching out for kids.
There’s just so much evidence about children having illnesses now at earlier and earlier ages, things that we didn’t see before like when you and I were kids. We were much healthier than kids are now. And we really see it. And it’s something that we really need to pay attention to.
So, can you tell us more about indoor air pollution that motivated you to do this project?
ERIN IHDE: Well, I think of a house or a home, it’s like a bubble. Everything that’s inside the home, including all the toxins, becomes part of the environment for everybody who is in that home. According to the EPA, the indoor air is two to a hundred times more polluted than outdoor air. And most of us spend up to 90% of our time indoors. So, there’s a really large timeframe there for exposures to anything that’s inside the home.
Another thing to keep in mind is that older homes tend to breathe more than newer construction homes which are usually built to be energy-efficient and, therefore, more air tight.
DEBRA: And so, it’s important for the newer homes particularly. I always live in older homes for that reason. But the point is that if you have a lot of toxic things in a newer home, they won’t evaporate it out in the same way as they will in an older home.
In times past, we didn’t have so many toxic things, and we had what’s called a leaky house. Nowadays, new houses are tighter and we have more toxic things in them. So when you’re doing a construction project, it’s really important to be thinking about how toxic the paints in the walls and the floors, and everything that you put in the house. It’s really, really, really important to be considering these things.
Well, we need to go to break, but when we come back, we’re going to learn more about what Erin has done in her home, and you can go to her website which is TheHealthyHomeProject.org. She’s documented everything that she’s done in her blog.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Erin Ihde. She’s the founder of The Healthy Home Project, and what she’s doing is, as a single mom, she’s remodeling a house that needed everything to be done, as she says, on a peanut butter and jelly budget.
So Erin, let’s just back up a minute and tell us, I want to hear more about your process of deciding that you need to have a home and finding your home, and how you decided to make it non-toxic because I think that what you’ve just gone through in doing this is a journey that everybody needs to do. And many people are saying, “I wish I had a healthy home, but I can’t afford it.”
But you made it happen, and I want to hear more about how that happened for you.
ERIN IHDE: Well, as I mentioned before, the home that I found was not being lived in. It has been vacated some time before. When there was somebody living here, it had gone through a decline over several decades. It is an older home built in 1907. So it’s on the National Historic Registry.
DEBRA: How did you find this home?
ERIN IHDE: I found it online. I decided to go on the real estate listing, the main real estate listing website from my area, and it was late one night, and I thought, “I need to get out where I am. This isn’t a permanent solution, where we are.”
And I just don’t think I can afford anything. And I went online, and there was this house. And I decided to look at it a couple of days later. And the moment I saw it, I knew this was going to be something. It took my heart right away, I guess you could say, because the [bones] of it were beautiful. I could see that just looking past the crumbling walls and the holes and the ceiling and things like that.
DEBRA: Now, you had no experience doing any kind of remodeling before. Is that correct?
ERIN IHDE: Well, I have lived in two houses years ago, and I had done some remodeling in those houses, but not to the extent that this needed. So this was a whole different ball game, and I was also doing it by myself, so I was coming from a different perspective at this time.
It was beyond the scope of my imagination, really, what needed to be done.
DEBRA: So you went ahead and took this leap of faith, and bought the house, and you said before that you couldn’t live in it right away. So what was the first thing that you did in order to start doing the remodeling project?
ERIN IHDE: The day I closed on the house, I came in and I tore down a couple of ceilings. There were drop ceilings throughout most of the house, and in some places, there were even two drop ceilings, so I took down one, and I found another above that. And then I took that down, and I found a huge hole in the original ceilings. So that was the first phase, it’s really seeing what was behind some of what had been done over the years.
DEBRA: I’ve done quite a bit of remodeling and buying houses progressively that I’ve lived in, where I would buy a house, and then remodel it while I was living in it in a non-toxic way. And my ex-husband was very good at building. And so it was a good project for us to do as a couple.
And I remember one house that we bought as an investment house, everything had been covered up. It was an old house from the 20’s or something. But in the 60’s or some time like that, somebody decided to remodel. And so they covered up all the beautiful architecture.
When we went in there, it had this drop ceiling in the kitchen. And we just started ripping things out. There was this one point where I said, “You know, it would be really nice to have arch over this opening. Couldn’t we put in an arch?”
And we just started ripping it up. And there was an arch there already.
I love old houses, and I love taking down all that stuff.
So then, have you done all this work yourself, or did you hire people? How did you make it on a budget?
ERIN IHDE: Well, the first phase was just to get it in the shape that it needed to be for us to move in. So I wanted to make sure, especially having kids, that there is no peeling paint, that everything was clean. There was old carpeting here probably from the 60’s or 70’s. So all of that carpeting was taken out, the floors were refinished.
And something I mentioned on the blog is the carpeting I was able to recycle through a local carpet recycling company. And then the floors, I refinished using a whey, non-toxic, it’s made from whey, and actually the company that makes it, I think, is Vermont Naturals. And I think that gentleman was on your show.
DEBRA: He was on my show, and I use that product. It’s one of my favorite ones.
ERIN IHDE: So all the floors were refinished with that, the downstairs. So basically, that first phase was just getting it ready to move in, so not everything was done. But I did hire a contractor to help with some of the really heavy stuff, and an electrician, and a plumber.
For the technical stuff, I definitely hired people.
DEBRA: But you did a lot of the work yourself.
ERIN IHDE: I did. I came first in the morning to check on everything, and to get everyone organized for the day, and go over what needed to be done. And then when I could, I would come during my lunch break and check on things. Inevitably, there would be surprises that were found during the morning as things were uncovered and progress was made.
So that was a troubleshooting time.
And then I would come after work, and check on things again, and then do some work myself.
DEBRA: Yes, when we come back from the break, we’ll talk a little more about how you put it together because you did it, I think, on a project-by-project basis, which is how I do my remodeling too, instead of looking at it and saying, “Well, it’s going to be $100,000 to remodel this house.” We just go, “Well, how can we do this one little piece of it?” And that makes it a lot more affordable.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Erin Ihde. We’re talking about her healthy home project, where she’s remodeled a house herself to be non-toxic, and her website is TheHealthyHomeProject.org.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Erin Ihde. She’s the founder of The Healthy Home Project. They’re at TheHealthyHomeProject.org.
Erin, once you made this decision that you needed to do things in a non-toxic way, how did you find out about what was toxic and what wasn’t? I love to watch those home-decoratig shows on TV, but they’re always talking about paint and you do these different things, but they never look at what the health effects are. There’s just so much of what happens on TV is toxic.
So how did you find out what to do?
ERIN IHDE: Exactly. I watch all the different home shows, and I love it. I love seeing what other people do, but I did have that issue that what I see on TV isn’t necessarily something I want to replicate in my own home, just because I don’t know what products they’re using, and they’re not non-toxic.
So I have been getting your newsletter for a while. So I got a lot of great ideas from that. And also, I like to buy things locally, so I’ve tried to support as many things as possible from the area. And just from doing research, really, it’s how I found a lot of the things that I’ve used here.
DEBRA: That’s very good. I’m glad that you did a lot of your own research. I just want to make a comment about TV and about toxic things. I sometimes think, “Oh, I would love to have a home-decorating show where I could just tell people how to remodel their homes non-toxically, and to have an organic cooking show,” and all these things. I notice that they don’t have those on TV. And I think that the reason that they don’t have that on TV is because if they were to have a show, one show, like at the Food Channel for example, we’re to have a show about cooking organically, then that makes all their other shows wrong. It makes all their advertisers wrong.
And so it will be interesting to see what happens without getting this kind of information on TV because it’s one thing to have it, for me to be on a segment on the Today Show or something like that, or for Dr. Oz to say something about it, but to have a whole show where this is the lifestyle, where this is what we’re talking about, it just makes everything else wrong. And it is wrong. I have to say it. It is wrong.
And yet, we’re watching these shows. There’s so much in the media that is promoting the toxic lifestyle, the unhealthy lifestyle. It’s difficult sometimes to get a foot in the door. And that’s what I like so much about the internet is that I can say whatever I want to say on my website.
I’ll just have to start my own television channel on my website.
So Erin, what are some of the toxic chemicals you were concerned about?
ERIN IHDE: Well, there are about five main ones that are very common during the remodeling process, and also just in homes in general. One of those things is VOCs. That stands for volatile organic compounds, and they’re in hundreds of building products from paint to adhesives. They’re linked to cancer and respiratory issues, in addition to some other adverse health outcomes.
So it’s really important to choose a paint with no VOCs. And paint is something that we all use so often. A lot of paints claim to be no VOCs, but the claim actually refers to the base, and then in the coloring, it’s put in. It’s not no VOC.
DEBRA: That’s right. So when you’re choosing a paint, you need to make sure that there are no VOCs in the paint and no VOCs in the coloring. And that’s something you need to ask. It doesn’t say that on the label.
So which paint did you choose?
ERIN IHDE: I chose a product called Ivy Coating, and it’s made pretty local to me in Brooklyn.
DEBRA: I’ve never heard of them.
ERIN IHDE: I had never heard of it either actually, until a few years ago. I know the man who actually was involved with creating it, and it’s sold at a store called Green Depot, and there are a couple of those home improvement stores around the country, and it’s also on the internet. So that’s actually where I got it from.
DEBRA: Is that IV like the ivy vine? I-V-Y?
ERIN IHDE: Exactly.
DEBRA: I’m going to look that up. So what’s another chemical besides VOCs that you watch out for?
ERIN IHDE: Another one is lead just because this is an older house. So proper testing is the way to really know whether there’s a hazard present or not. So on my blog, I covered a little bit about lead testing I had. For example, one of the floors upstairs was painted, and before it could be sanded, we needed to test the paint to see if it contained led. And thankfully, it didn’t, so we could go ahead and sand the floor.
DEBRA: What other chemicals?
ERIN IHDE: Flame retardants are a big one right now. It’s a really hot topic in the media. The Chicago Tribune came out with a whole series in 2012. That really put the issue on the map. So many home furnishings from mattresses to sofas are manufactured to meet the California Flammability Standard, which is called TB117. And even though it’s just a law in California, it’s been used as a standard across the country.
Thankfully, that standard has just recently changed as of January 2014, but there’s still a phase-in period.
DEBRA: I need to do a whole show just on that because there are some things about that new standard that aren’t quite exactly right. And I don’t want to be mysterious about this, so I’ll just simply say that the way the new standard is worded, it actually makes it illegal to just use a natural fiber because of the way it’s now a smolder test. And there are all kinds of technicalities.
And so, whereas before, you could just have a natural fiber covering, or make something out of a natural fiber, and it would pass the test—now, it doesn’t. Not because it’s flammable, it’s just the way they test it.
And so now, it’s opened the door for the way they test to have things that are very flammable materials, not require fire retardants.
I don’t want to get into that whole thing, but it’s just to know. It’s a step forward in California to not require fire retardants, but there are still problems with it.
We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Erin Ihde.
And she’s the founder of The Healthy Home Project at TheHealthyHomeProject.org. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Erin Ihde. She’s the founder of The Healthy Home Project at TheHealthyHomeProject.org.
Erin, right now, your summertime project is to remodel the bathroom. Tell us how that’s going.
ERIN IHDE: Well, it’s still a work in progress. I can tell you what I’ve done so far. One of the first things was to remove the old, vinyl floor tiles because vinyl is such an issue, especially in older homes. I first had them tested to see if they contain asbestos because older vinyl tiles sometimes do. And thankfully they tested negative, as well as the mastic, which is the adhesive underneath the tile.
So once that was done, I [fold] those up, and we put down a recycled content porcelain tile, which has 40% pre-consumer-recycled material in it. And it’s also made in the USA, so I was very glad to find that resource.
DEBRA: Good choice.
ERIN IHDE: One of the other steps was to tear down the 1970 paneling which is made from MDF, or medium-density fiberboards. The reason I wanted to take that down is because MDF, especially the older kind, contains formaldehyde, which is in the glue that bind the shredded wood together to make the paneling.
So, even though I knew the paneling had the majority of the off-gassing completed many years ago, I just wanted to remove it because it doesn’t really work in a high moisture environment as well.
DEBRA: No, it really doesn’t. And this is one of the problems with MDF and those similar kind of compressed boards, is that even if the off-gassing is done, if any water gets in there, and I know they’re using it on the outside sheathing of houses now, again, by new subdivisions, and you can see that board just right there. And it’s just sitting there out in the rain, and there’s nothing to protect it. And it just falls apart. The resin doesn’t hold it together.
And so that’s not a good thing to have in your bathroom. You’re absolutely, totally correct about that.
ERIN IHDE: I’ve seen that in new construction, and my neighborhood as well. It’s very surprising to see that used in the exterior. It does fall apart. It doesn’t hold up.
So after the paneling came down, the walls were severely damaged. So they were patched and skin-coated, and sanded, and then I used Ivy Coating primer, and Ivy Coating paint to fill everything up and make them look like new.
I also found two light fixtures at a store called Green Demolition, which is a store that sells fixtures and other home remodeling, everything from cabinets, everything you possibly need for remodeling. And it’s taken some other construction projects.
So it’s basically used things that are for resale, and all the proceeds go to charity which makes it really great, win/win situation.
DEBRA: I’ve gotten a lot of things. Another term for this, if somebody run into find one locally, listeners, you just look under architectural salvages is what it’s called in the yellow pages, architectural salvage. And when I was in California, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and there were so many old houses they were taking apart all the time. And I got so many beautiful doors and windows and marble, marble for $5 a foot, square-foot, and things like that.
And here, we don’t have so many where I live now in Florida, we don’t have so many old houses that are being demolished.
But Habitat for Humanity has a chain of stores called Renew, I think it is. And so they’re always looking for materials that are left over on construction projects. This is one of the ways that you can do things that are inexpensive. You have to use your discretion about looking at the materials of these used items to make sure that they’re non-toxic.
But people are just pulling out whole kitchens full of cabinets, and all these things that just cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. And you can go to architectural salvage and get it for nothing. It’s pretty amazing.
ERIN IHDE: Exactly. So many of these things I got for this house, I bought that way, and I paid just a fraction of what it would have been in a home retail.
DEBRA: And it goes with the style of your 1907 house.
ERIN IHDE: Exactly.
DEBRA: That’s so great. So what part of the bathroom are you working on now?
ERIN IHDE: Well, the part that I’m doing now is, I have an old cast iron enamel bathtub, and I had read one or two articles about these old tubs possibly containing led in the glaze. And so I thought, “Well, let me just test mine and see.” And lo and behold, it came up positive. And I was really surprised.
So what I’m going to do now is re-glaze it. The other option would be to replace it entirely, but I don’t want to create more waste in the landfill, so I’d rather just re-glaze it, and then I’ll use some recycled tile around the tub around. So that’s the last step.
DEBRA: Good. So then when you finish the tub, it’s just there. You don’t have a shower in the bathroom. It’s just the tub?
ERIN IHDE: it is. There’s a shower there too.
DEBRA: Okay, so it’s a separate shower?
ERIN IHDE: It’s the same. It’s actually all the same. So It’s a tub with the shower right there.
DEBRA: Oh, I see. Good. So what else do you have left then to do for the bathroom? So then that would be it?
ERIN IHDE: Yes, that’s pretty much it. Just the one light fixture needs to go up. I took out all the molding, the old molding, so I need to put up some new molding. And that’s pretty much it, once the tub area is done.
DEBRA: Can I ask you how much did it cost you to remodel your bathroom because if you were to go to a contractor or watch a TV show, it’s like $35,000 or $50,000 or something like that?
ERIN IHDE: I would say, one bill is still pending, but I can probably just a rough ballpark would be no more than $3000.
DEBRA: Yes, so I want everybody to hear this. You can remodel your bathroom in a non-toxic way for $3000.
ERIN IHDE: I don’t even think it was that much.
DEBRA: Yeah. I know, I know. I understand. When my husband I were remodeling, we remodeled a whole bathroom. We ended up having a mold problem, and we had to remodel the whole bathroom. We tore it all out down to the studs. But you know, we had a little insurance check that didn’t cover it, but we spent the insurance check on the plumber, and the technical kind of people, because they had to put in new pipes and things like that.
But in terms of the work, the walls, the tiling and all those things, we were just buying a can of paint and saying, “Okay, this weekend, we’re going to paint this.” And then we would just paint it. And then we would figure out, “Well, how much money can we spend on tile now?” We did it as a series of weekend projects.
ERIN IHDE: That’s exactly how I’ve done this. It’s been about three months, so it definitely wasn’t done in a week or anything like that. It’s been step-by-step, figuring out what I need to do next, then what I need to purchase next. And then, just going out and doing that piece.
DEBRA: So this is something that anybody can do. I just really want to get this point across that you can do a lot of the labor yourself, even if you’ve never done it before, or you go to some place like Lowes or Home Depot. Those are do-it-yourself places. Everything is arranged so that you can take those materials home and do it. They have instructions. They have workshops. They have instructions online. A lot of stuff can be done, if you need to hire somebody, you can hire a handyman, instead of a contractor. I just want everybody to think that they can do this. If you need a new home, if you need to remodel something, you can do it in a toxic-free way. You can do it in an affordable way, that it’s absolutely possible to do that.
So we’ve got about one minute left. Any last words you’d like to give?
ERIN IHDE: I would just like to echo exactly what you just said that that’s really why I made the blog and the website, is to empower other people to be able to make these same changes in their homes whether they’re just painting a wall or redoing an entire house. It’s absolutely doable and I hope that the resources that I have on the site and some of the stories I tell help other people to do the same thing.
DEBRA: Well, you’ve done an excellent job. I can see that you’ve done your homework, and I think this is a great resource and an inspiration for people. Again, her website is TheHealthyHomeProject.org. And you can see everything that she’s done and see how you can apply that to your own home. I know that sometimes it seems a little scary to look at doing home improvements, but they can be done. They can even be done by single moms. They can be done by couples. It’s easier than you think, that’s what I’ll say.
Thank you so much for being with us, Erin. Again, her website is TheHealthyHomeProject.org. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
ERIN IHDE: Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
What’s Really in This Faux Wood?
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I purchased an outdoor table made of a “PE faux wood resin.” I have tried researching what exactly could be in this material, and I have come across some sites where the resin could be composed of PE/PP/PVC. Of course the PVC concerns me…I contacted the company a couple times, and one rep responded that the table was simply made of polyethylene, while another rep thought it might contain PVC, but was looking into it and hasn’t gotten back to me yet. Do you think I can trust that this table is only PE, or would you not trust it…Do they have to disclose that the table contains PVC, even if it is a smaller amount than the PE? Just wondering what you would do! I love the table and think it’s great for seaside, but would rather my family be safe!
Thanks so much!
Debra’s Answer
There are many labeling laws, but the overarching one is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “Truth in Advertising” law.
This says that “ads must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”
This applies to labels too.
So per this law, if the label says PE it should contain PE and if it says PVC it should contain PVC.
I would assume that it is 100% PE and the first rep was right. But now that there has been a question about it from the other rep, I would follow through and get a confirmation.
Water-Resistant Coating on Shoes
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I purchased a pair of moccasins thinking they would be safer since they are made of suede, sheepskin, EVA/Poron cushioning, but I see they are also “water-resistant.” I contacted UGG Australia and a rep informed me that the shoes are treated with a protectant or coating to make them water-resistant. Would you return these, or is the coating harmless in a shoe?
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
Actually water-resistant coatings can be pretty toxic. It’s better to get shoes that don’t have them.
I personally would return these shoes and look for others without the coating.
Wellness Within Your Walls—Outgassing and Indoor Air Quality
My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke, founder of Wellness Within Your Walls. We’ll be talking about how to connect the global family with healthy, eco-sensitive products, that result in beautiful, sustainable, non-toxic environments. WWYW® addresses the “Tight Box Syndrome”- which has become an issue with poorly ventilated buildings that have placed energy efficiency above health. These buildings can’t breathe and harmful toxins are trapped in the interior environment with no way of escaping the living environment. WWYW® strives to educate the builder, manufacturer, architect, designer and consumer on how to take control of reducing toxins in the interior environment and how to off-gas toxic chemicals from products responsibly (we’re going to talk about off-gassing in particular). Jillian is also the founder of DES-SYN, an interior design firm that was established in 1991. She is known as a premier eco-interior designer and creates interiors that are beautiful and healthy for the client and kind to the earth. With more than 30 years of experience in cities including New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, she has become well known to many in in the residential, commercial and hospitality design industry. Jillian has authored numerous articles that specifically deal with reducing harmful toxins in the interior environment. She has been featured on CNN, Martha Stewart Radio and her design have been published by Veranda magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Professional Builder and Builder Magazines and numerous other publications nationally and globally. www.wellnesswithinyourwalls.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Wellness Within Your Walls—Outgassing & Indoor Air Quality
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Jillian Pritchard Cooke
Date of Broadcast: August 14, 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 and talk about how we can make things right.
I love this song. This is why I chose it as my theme song about being points of light and about knowing what the right thing is to do and doing it in our own lives and doing it in the world and making the world a better place.
And that’s really why I do this radio show. It’s because I want to give you the information so that you can tell what is the right thing to do with regards to toxics, how we can identify toxic chemicals that are making everybody sick and what we can do so that we can all be healthier, happier, think more clearly, just have more productive lives because we are not being harmed by toxic chemicals.
Today we’re going to be talking about indoor air quality. My guest is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s a founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She specializes in addressing the tight box syndrome.
Now, I haven’t talked about this in a long time, this idea. I remember when I first started doing this work that there was a time when our walls, the walls of our houses were built to be leaky (I guess is a good word). They weren’t built tight, and so there was air-exchange between the outside and the inside.
And then, back in the 70s we had the energy crisis. And so suddenly, it became an issue to save energy on home heating.
Everybody started coughing and closing up those little spaces.
And so, what happened was, suddenly, all those toxic things that were in our homes which had been leaking out suddenly became an issue. We came up with the phrase “indoor air pollution” at that point.
So, Jillian is an interior designer. I want to make sure I get that right. She’ll correct me if I was wrong because there is an interior decorator and an interior designer. They’re two different things. She is specializing in looking at what is outgassing from home interior products. So now that we’re in this tight box of the way our buildings are now, they’re building up, and how can we reduce the amount of out gassing, how can we be aware about gassing, how can we choose products don’t outgas.
She does some other things too, but that’s the one that’s of most interest to me on this show today. But we’ll talk about lots of other things that have to do with them, with decorating as well.
Hi Jillian!
JILLIAN COOKE: Good morning, Debra! How are you?
DEBRA: I’m very good. How are you?
JILLIAN COOKE: Very good, thank you.
DEBRA: First, I want to say I love Wellness within Your Walls. I love that as a name. I just immediately gravitated to that when I saw it.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, we took some time to really think through when we were naming our standard. And it really says it all. So…
DEBRA: It does, it really does.
JILLIAN COOKE: I’m thrilled that you liked it.
DEBRA: Thank you! So, tell us, how did you get interested in this subject?
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, for me it was very organic. I was involved in sustainability. I really didn’t have a firm understanding of “wellness within your walls” as it relates to everybody’s homes.
But the organic nature of this, I was very involved with sustainability in the last 20 years. And about 10 years ago—a little less than 10 years ago—I was invited to participate in the first LEED-certified home in the United States.
We have been around for a while as a commercial program, a commercial certification. And a real dear friend of mine, Laura Turner Seydel, and her husband Rutherford Seydel, decided that they wanted to participate not only in this program, but have their home be somewhat of a show house to the public in different organizations to help educate on sustainability.
And the three of us approached it from three different directions. But my direction initially was to find a sustainability with Laura, and her husband Rutherford approached it from the standpoint of energy efficiency.
And while I was involved in the project, unfortunately, I was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer. And I realized that as I shared that with Laura, she would do what friends do. She would’ve said, “Oh, you need not to be involved in this. Step back and take care of yourself.” So, I chose not to tell her and I stayed involved. My entire focus on the entire project shifted from sustainability and energy efficiency to health.
My first question when I was diagnosed with the cancer was, “Where did it come from?” And as an interior designer, I have been involved in projects for, at that time, over 25 years. I was required by my contract to be on a site during times when they were most toxic. I really did not pay much attention to that.
So, knowing the toxins I was exposed to and the type of rare cancer that I had, it became very much a mission to figure out how we could reduce the toxins in that first LEED-certified house.
And LEED does a great job especially on the gold and platinum levels. But most programs about there at that time didn’t really pay much attention to the wellness side of it. There was education placed about what lead was doing as it related to paint in old homes, and we have really addressed the asbestos problem. But there were so many other problems that have not yet been revealed.
But with the right kind of research and working with the many different groups in the United States that have become part of this wellness movement, Wellness Within Your Walls was established more as a partner to other entities in the industry with the main focus being on wellness.
So, the genesis, if you will, for the Wellness within Your Walls standard really came from that one particular project. So, my cancer was—as crazy as it sounds—a blessing in disguise.
DEBRA: Well, I always say that too. I didn’t have cancer, but I started doing my work because I became extremely chemically sensitive. People didn’t even know what that was back in 1978. It’s a difficult thing.
A lot of people have a very difficult time with it. And it certainly defined my life since then, but in a very good way that it led me to, as with you, to be able to see that there are things that are dangerous and toxic in the world and that we can do something about it once we become aware that they are there and that they are affecting us and that we have alternatives.
So we have a similar path.
Could you, just for a second, explain for our listeners how sustainability—I’m very familiar with sustainability too. It’s a bigger picture, but it doesn’t always contain being concerned about health because other issues are—go ahead and tell us your experience with that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, the word sustainability is a fantastic word. And it is overused. But most of the words that are attached to the green building movement or the wellness movement are overused. And in many cases, there is the conversation of greenwash (which I know you’ve featured from time to time on your radio show).
But sustainability as it relates to health, unfortunately, you can be very sustainable in regards to how you harvest wood for manufacturing of homes and furniture. But if you don’t finish the process with paints and stains that are no VOC or low VOC using a positive gassing-off method, then really the conversation of sustainability is just a one-sided conversation.
It’s just that. You’ve done right by the trees, and you’ve done right by Mother Nature to a certain degree. If you don’t carry all the way through—as a cradle to cradle refers to it—like a life cycle, then really, you’re mitigating the good work you started by finishing the product with something that is actually, in the end of the day, maybe not as harmful to the atmosphere because of the gassing-off and the time it takes. It is harmful in many respective or in many, many months or years. But to the human body, it’s instant exposure to those chemicals on a sustainable piece can start the change of your cells going from a healthy cell to a pre-cancer cell, for example, to finally a cancer cell.
So, this conversation of sustainability, it needs to be had at the same time as the conversation of wellness and health and off-gassing and vapors and fumes and chemicals, harmful chemicals.
DEBRA: I totally agree. We need to go to break. And I just want to say that, for me, having studied sustainability and applied a lot of it, I came back to focus on toxics because I think that’s the first step to sustainability. And we can talk about that more too.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. 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 Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She’s at WellnesswithinYourWalls.com.
Jillian, before we go on, I just want to say again what I said before the break about toxicity being non-toxic. Addressing toxic issues is the first step to sustainability because I think that everything else that sustainability encompasses—energy efficiency, sustainable resource management, all those things—they’re all just as important.
But to me, I actually was including sustainability in my own standards for many years. And then, I decided I really needed to focus on toxics because so many people working on the field of sustainability don’t include that. They’re looking at the environmental effects, but not the human within the environment. I think that we’re all part of life, and that we need to be looking at all of that.
And every time we use toxic chemical, it goes into the environment as well. So, that’s where I start. And then, once things are not toxic, then it’s great for them to be sustainable in other ways as well.
JILLIAN COOKE: I thoroughly agree, I thoroughly agree. And I think that so much of this is a dialogue, and being able to make available to the consumer at large the concept that they do have choices.
They may not be seeing those choices everyday as it relates to labeling (which is a huge issue in the country), but if they could identify what the harmful chemicals are through different organizations throughout the United States, then they can be part of the dialogue and they can be part of the choice.
And at the end of the day, it’s tried and true that we really do vote with our pocket book, don’t we? If we start making these choices to stay away from products that are toxic and that can cause harm to every age group, and specifically the young—which is one of the age groups that just concerns me the most because they cannot speak for themselves. Their parents are being sold through marketing campaigns, all kinds of things that are not healthy for children that are, in many cases, under the age of even eight years of age, 15 years of age depending on what things brought into the home.
So, I think that the dialogue that goes along with what you’re saying about is more than sustainability. It is health. We have to be able to channel the information to the public at large so that they can not only make the right choices, but be part of the dialogue.
I used the farm to table example more often in our credit courses that we offer to ASIDNAIA. It’s pretty simple at the end of the day. When you look back 10 years ago on the farm to table concept, people were sort of getting it, sort of talking about it. And now, all of a sudden, it’s in mainstream America. They’re paying their hat on the fact that they are farm to table.
And I do think that that’s what the wellness movement is really starting to stir not just in this country but internationally.
Everybody’s got that concern of why is cancer on their lives, why is autism on their lives, and a number of other known diseases. And more often than not, it does go back to the toxins.
And of course genetics comes into play. But the toxins more and more are becoming identified as being responsible for so much of what medical industry is dealing with.
DEBRA: Yes, that is absolutely true. That’s been my experience as well.
So, you’ve mentioned that you have a standard for Wellness within Your Walls. Tell us about that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, actually, it’s pretty simple. There are seven folks that are part of the Wellness within Your Walls team. And we really kept coming back to the concept that certification can be complicated. And often, certification can be not real. Folks can come up with just about any kind of certification based on any set of criteria.
So, we wanted to make it simple and useable. The three categories we identified was natural, sustainable and responsible.
Not all natural is good. Formaldehyde is a natural product and chemical. It’s good in certain cases—our bodies produce formaldehyde—but it’s bad in certain cases when it’s used in adhesives and in many building products when it gets to a certain level.
So, our program defines the word natural and the good that’s from natural. Water is a chemical, and it’s natural. It’s a good thing especially if it’s purified. Air is natural, and it’s a good thing. But radon is natural, and it’s not a good thing. Same thing can be said for lead and asbestos and a number of other products that are out there.
We wanted to make sure that when we created that part of the category, that dialogue was going to exist, so that we can identify that many years ago, people did not know lead was bad for you. Now, lead is not in paint. So, let’s take that concept and look at all the things that are out there that might be natural that are not good for you. And let’s have the conversation.
Let’s have the dialogue. Let’s lead our way through the information and make the column to the left what is not good for you versus what is good for you that’s natural instead of just looking at the word natural on packaging and assuming that “it’s natural, it’s good for you.”
Sustainability is not all—recycling and reusing is a fantastic concept, but not all that you recycle is good. If it was bad the first time, why on earth would we recycle it the second time? So, that’s the sustainable category. It speaks to responsibly taking plant life as in trees or bamboo, not clear-cutting and having an understanding of what the outcome is when you clear cut as far as just bamboo.
Bamboo is the latest, greatest product that’s being pushed in the furniture industry, and also in the textile industry. And if it’s done responsibly through plantation growth, then I’m all for bamboo. But if you’re going to clear cut a forest and take the animals away from their habitat, then that’s not exactly sustainable. It’s not a sustainable product. It becomes a non-sustainable product if that happens.
And then the category that I like the most, that I had the hardest time wrapping my hands around is the responsible category.
DEBRA: Okay, we need to take a break. We need to go to break, so when we come back, we’ll talk about that. I know you want to talk about that, and I want to talk about that too.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. Her website is WellnessWithinYourWalls.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 Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She’s at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com.
Jillian, before the break, we were talking about your three categories. The third one is responsibility, controlling toxins responsibly through accountability. So, tell us about that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, that’s the one I had the most trouble with when we were creating it because, originally, we just didn’t wanted to discuss toxins. We were like ostriches with our head in the sand.
And then, I realized with the help of our fabulous group that that’s a huge mistake. Because we live in a toxic world, we no longer can say that there’s a place on this planet that’s not affected by toxins in some way. And then, the weather is a perfect conversation (though obvious, it’s a separate conversation).
So, we created this level of the standard, this category to say, “Okay, yes! There are toxins. You are going to encounter toxins all day every day. You could potentially be encountering toxins during the eight hours of sleep at night depending on what your mattress is made of.”
So, let’s have a really strong dialogue about what those toxins are and how you can mitigate them if they are in your life. A simple example of that is you might be ordering something off the internet, you open up the box when it arrives at your home, and you’re just overcome by some level of vapor that might have to do with the textile finishing process, it might have to do with the paint that was used, the steel that was used, the fire retardant that might be on them.
And so, what do you do at that point? Do you send it back? Do you seal it? Do you take it and put it in the garage for a certain number of days with windows open and off-gas it?
That became the real focus for our team as it relates to everyday living and the accountability all the way with the beginning of the food chain with the manufacturers to the end of the food chain with the consumer and the purchasing.
DEBRA: This is a really the interesting part of it for me that you’re doing because it’s a little different from my approach, and yet, I think is a complimentary one because as I’m always saying, “How can we find things that have no off0gassing, no toxic chemicals?” and yet, we are faced with—I get these questions all the time, “I bought this” or “I bought that” and “How do I get rid of the odor?”
And so, let’s just start our discussion of off-gassing by having you explain what it is.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, off-gassing even can take place with natural products that do not involve man-made chemicals.
For example, I ordered for a client recently a mattress from a reputable mattress company that claims everything to be organic. I had that mattress show up into our warehouse, we unwrapped it and it smelled like a barnyard.
DEBRA: I get people write to me and they say, “Oh, I bought this organic thing and it has an odor to it.” And it’s not necessarily a toxic odor, but it’s something—like, example, for myself, I can’t use anything that’s made out of latex. It could be a 100% natural organic latex and I can’t tolerate the odor. Even though it’s not toxic, I just can’t tolerate the odor of latex.
So I can understand that. I have no problem buying organic cotton which has a little stronger smell than non-organic cotton that has been processed more. But some people don’t like that, so they don’t want it. And so go ahead.
JILLIAN COOKE: So, we’re just so much a part of the dialogue. That’s why when you identify the category of natural within the standard, it feeds in the category of sustainable, which feeds into the category responsible.
So, even responsibility isn’t necessarily always related to harmful toxins, the conversation responsibility is related to the big picture as we see it—not just natural, but also those products that are man-made.
We’d be really kidding ourselves if we thought that we could live without man-made materials that involve toxins. At this moment, I do not know of an adhesive that is in certain sealants that have to withstand certain levels of traffic and maintenance specifically in institutions like hospitals and schools unless you use these toxins.
And the reason is because there hasn’t been something produced to date—not that the scientist aren’t working on it.
Recently, we’ve been involved in a summit put on by UL Industries. I was fascinated by the direction that the green sciences they’re going in. And not until recently, they didn’t even offer green science in colleges. Now, it’s become a new department—and thankfully so. That, in itself, is going to help us deal with the accountability as it relates to being responsible through the manufacturing process.
So, it would be great to say that we could all just suck the rubber out of the tree and that would glue everything together, the natural gassing off or the natural rubber is a lot less than a lot of the adhesives that are coming out of the chemical industry.
But there lies in the middle probably something that hasn’t been created yet.
The paint industry, they just really took the bull by the horn. Seven years ago, eight years ago we worked on Echo Manor.
We used no VOCs and low VOCs mainly because of the maintenance. And three years later, Benjamin Moore jumped on board with “We’ve got to get these VOCs out.” And then, right next to them, big names like Sherwin Williams. You can now go to some of the biggest building shows in America and you can find no VOC products. There’s another company, Imperial Paint, that’s found a way to have it be the best it can be for hospitals and for institutions like schools that are no VOC.
So, the good news in this—and why I now find the responsible category to be probably my most favorite category—is the onus is being put back on the manufacturer. It’s being put back on the retailers, those that are bringing it into their homes, the consumer, the end-user. They’re all having a dialogue. And that happened because the green sciences got together with the manufacturers and said, “Hey, we got to figure this out!” And they are.
DEBRA: And they are. I see that. I do see that that’s going on in the world today, that we have many more possibilities than we’ve ever had before and that’s the direction we’re going.
We need to go to a break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s founder of Wellness within Your Walls at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com. We’ll be right back.
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DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s founder of Wellness within Your Walls. You can visit her website at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com.
So Jillian, now given that we have these products—and in in particular, you’re addressing interior home products—given that we have these products that are out gassing, what can we do about it, about the out-gassing?
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, really, that is what we need to do, understand the time that each of these chemicals need to off-gas.
And it’s extremely complicated because you can have more than one chemical off-gassing at a time. One harmful chemical might take 10 days, and another harmful chemical might take two years. So, when we talk about off-gassing, it’s not that simple.
So the best thing to do—we’re working on putting together a guide to help maneuver through the minefield of harmful chemicals and exactly what the timing is. But the best thing to do is anything that you bring into your environment, you just make sure that you can trust your nose often. You just need to get it into a space that is very well ventilated and that children aren’t around, and animals aren’t around, and let it off-gas.
Mattresses are a perfect example. There are number of mattress companies out there that promotes the best night’s sleep ever, but there’s a reason for that. When your body hits this mattress with these foams, they mold themselves to your body.
And as you move, they remold themselves to your body. Well, it takes a lot of technology and a lot of man-made chemicals to make that process happen during your eight hours of sleep.
So, I would say you start with make the choices not to bring those products into your home. But if you have, then—a return mattress policy is non-existent unless it’s defective in some way. The laws are such that you own that mattress. So, really, you’re not bringing it into the home.
But that really relates back to pesticides on your lawn, right? You don’t really want your children playing on pesticides and bringing them into your carpets or your animals bringing them in and then spider-jumping into your two-year old’s bed. Your 2 year old’s petting the dog, and the pesticides are getting everywhere. The whole idea of off-gassing directly links back to the dialogue, and it directly links back to the choices.
So, my preference is that you would not have to off-gas. But if there are chemicals written in, you can ask for a safety data sheet. Most folks don’t realize you can go anywhere in the United States to a retailer and you can ask the question, “What is this made of?” And you can request the safety data sheet. But no one totes that or promotes that.
DEBRA: I do, I do.
JILLIAN COOKE: The average individual, Debra. You’re not average.
DEBRA: I know, but I’ve been telling people in my books for years to look for the material safety data sheet. And on my website, when people ask me questions, I often are quoting the material safety data sheet.
So they are available. Yes, I agree with you. And people should look at them. But they don’t always tell 100% of what’s there.
The reason I use material safety data sheets if you see a toxic chemical on it, then you know it’s there. What it doesn’t do is guarantee that there are no toxic chemicals in it because not all the toxic chemicals are on the lists of what needs to be recorded.
JILLIAN COOKE: No, they’re not. They’re not. And they can rewrite the names of them just on a whim. You take a little of this chemical, a little of that chemical and put it together. You might think that you’ve gotten to the end of finding out what this harmful chemical is going to do. And then all of a sudden, it pops up in a new name and a new entity.
It’s very, very difficult to stay ahead of the curve. It’s not unlike the pharmaceutical industry in that way. But that’s how they make their money. We are very much in a capitalist society, so really, they’re not breaking any laws as they are at this time.
You have to be ahead of the game and making the decision to first go with the non-toxic approach. Wherever possible, make that non-toxic decision.
If you cross that line, that’s when the off-gassing comes in, that’s when you reduce the living in a tight box. Find ways to really ventilate your home. Stay on top of what is coming out of industries like the HVAC, the air and heating industry. They are making tremendous steps to the right direction. They see it as being a big issue with closing these houses up.
DEBRA: So, I would just add in there that if you have some kind of product that is giving off some vapors, one thing that you could do is, as Jillian said, you could put it in the garage or someplace where it has time for those vapors to emit and dissipate before you bring it in the house.
The other thing you can do is seal it in some way. There are some sealants that do—you could put a sealant for formaldehyde on particle board and it will seal in the formaldehyde and it won’t out gas.
I also want to give a suggestion. If you just look up—type into your favorite search engine “NASA out-gassing”, N.A.S.A., National Aeronautics Space Administration, N.A.S.A. If you type in N.A.S.A. out gassing, you’ll get a lot of links to various sites that talk about—it’s the N.A.S.A. data for how materials out-gas.
And the reason that N.A.S.A has done this is because they are concerned about toxic chemicals in space ships. And so, whatever they put inside the spaceship, they need to know what the out-gassing data is.
And so you can look up on these sites and see what N.A.S.A. has to say about how long it takes for a material to out gas.
It’s very fascinating reading if this is something—
I mean, I often am not concerned about this because I’m buying things that don’t out gas and I know that they don’t out gas because I’ve done a research. But if there’s any question about whether or not some chemical that you know of out-gasses, you can look it up on the N.A.S.A. site and you’ll find out all about the out gassing.
JILLIAN COOKE: That’s a wonderful resource.
DEBRA: Yeah, it is. It is. They’ve been researching it as long as I’ve been writing for many years. I think they started doing it when they first started making rockets—when I was seven years old or something like that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Another option is if you’re moving into a new home, take a warehouse and have all your furniture go to a warehouse first—with carpeting as well. I think that some of the big carpet industry folks up in Dalton, Georgia are jumping on the bandwagon where they are making available for large project spaces where they can have the carpet rolled out.
That’s a big culprit. I’m all for where you are, hardwood everywhere. But unfortunately, especially in a commercial world with tenant finish, that’s not a first choice.
So, I think we’re going to see more of those types of businesses pop up where you can have off-gassing take place in a controlled environment.
DEBRA: I think that sounds like a great idea. I would prefer—and I know, I think that we’re moving in a direction, particularly with green chemistry, where we’re going to be reducing the amount of toxic chemicals at the source more and more and more. That’s going to become the standard. I can really see that happening. And particularly, the amount of products that are available now versus when I started 30 years ago is amazing. We’re really going in a direction.
And I think that we will get to a point where we won’t have to be concerned about this.
But something like a paint or finish, it has these chemicals in it so that you can spread the finish on and then it evaporates off. And then you have a finish that you just have the particle part, not the vapor part. And so that can be not very toxic at all.
After paint has dried, after paint has cured, it’s not a toxic exposure. It’s the stuff that makes paint liquid that is the VOC.
The key thing here is if that’s the way the product works, you need to have that out-gassing time. And often, what happens is that you’ll buy a piece of furniture or something where the off-gassing time has not occurred. And that’s why it’s toxic to the user.
So, not only do we need to be looking at how can we use less toxic materials, but also, if there is out-gassing involved, to make sure the manufacturer puts in that time or there’s some interim place to put the item, so that by the time it ends up to the consumer, it isn’t toxic.
JILLIAN COOKE: Yeah, it could be as simple as a labeling that has the word “cured” with the date on it. Just like labeling on our products that are in our refrigerator, things that we eat, we know when our milk should be no longer good to drink, it should be the reverse concept when it was cured on this date, manufactured on this date, cured on this date. And that alone will start a dialogue, “Oh, if you wait a few extra months, you get better curing.”
DEBRA: I love that, I love that. I hope that people will start doing that and that consumers will start asking about that.
Particularly with furniture, you don’t know how old the piece of furniture is, so you don’t know how long it’s been curing.
JILLIAN COOKE: And I think it’s folks like the Sustainable Furnishing Council (which is a great group) and NAHD who represents all of the building entities in the United States, I think if they could adopt something as simple as that along with their data sheet, I think we’d be in a much better place as it relates to toxins and in the environment.
DEBRA: I think so too. I think so too. Well, we only have 10 seconds left, so thank you Jillian so much. This has been very interesting. My guest is—oh, we got to go! She’s in Wellness within Your Walls. Be well.
JILLIAN COOKE: Thank you so much. Take care, Debra. Bye.
DEBRA: Bye.
