Water | Resources
Is Potassium Alum Aluminum-Free?
Question from Judy
I am trying to make up my mind about the different kinds of aluminum free deodorants on the market. Some say they are aluminum free when, in fact, they do contain potassium alum. Is this safe to use or is it, in fact, just another aluminum product worded differently? Thank you…
Debra’s Answer
When an antiperspirant claims to be “aluminum-free,” they are saying it does not contain aluminum chlorohydrate, aluminum chloride, aluminum hydroxybromide or aluminum zirconium—all forms of aluminum commonly used in antiperspirants and deodorants. To stop the flow of sweat to your skin’s surface, the aluminum plugs sweat ducts in the top layer of your skin stopping the the natural flow of sweat to your skin’s surface.
This aluminum can also be absorbed into your body where it can then build up as part of your body burden. Alzheimer’s disease and cancer are two illnesses known to be associated with aluminum exposure.
The aluminum in crystal deodorant stones is a different type of aluminum, called alum. The most common form is potassium alum, also known as potassium aluminum sulfate.
Potassium alum (and other alums) is a natural mineral salt made up of molecules that are too large to be absorbed by your skin. They form a protective layer on your skin that inhibits the growth of odor-causing bacteria. While this is a better alternative, it is not completely aluminum-free.
I haven’t used antiperspirant of any kind for decades. More than thirty years ago I started using baking soda as a deodorant, but have given up even that. Sweat is necessary for your body to detox (see Toxic Free Nutrition:Is Your Antiperspirant Preventing Your Body From Detoxing?) and a health body has a lovely smell, not a foul odor.
Antiperspirants and deodorants are an industrial consumer invention, not found in nature.
A Cup of Organic Tea
My guest is Chris Olsen, Marketing Director of Teatulia. They have a beautiful selection of “organic single garden teas”—black, green, and white—plus herbal infusions, sold loose leaf and in tea bags. They grow all of their teas in their single USDA-certified organic garden in northern Bangladesh, where they benefit from perfect growing conditions: The soil is developed with the use of organic cover crops and mulching, while the growing area is irrigated by rainwater. We’ll be talking about how tea is grown, different types of tea, and ways to enjoy organic tea. I myself drink iced green tea every day and love to explore combining it with various other flavors, so I’ll add my ideas too. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/teatulia
Chris gave us a lot of great information about the differences between non-organic and organic tea. Did you know that pesticides are sprayed on tea leaves right before they are plucked, and the first opportunity the leaves have to release this pesticide is in your teacup? I’ll never drink non-organic tea again. And we learned about different types of caffeine (they are not all alike) and how they can act differently in your body. And he spoke about the widespread environmental and social benefits of the Teatulia tea gardens, more than is on the website.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
A Cup of Organic Tea
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Chris Olsen
Date of Broadcast: July 11, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
Even though it can sometime seem that there are toxic chemicals all around us, there are many, many things that we can do to live in a less toxic way that is healthier for us. There are many organic and natural products, we can remove toxic chemicals from our body. There’s so much that’s known now about how to live in a toxic-free way. It’s just a matter of learning about it.
And that’s what this show is about, to introduce you to some new ideas that you can use in order to live toxic-free.
It’s Thursday, July 11th 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it’s overcast, so there may be some thunder and lightening, but we’ll see. We’re in thunderstorm season now and anything can happen. But if we get cut off, just hold on because I’ll be right back with some back-up power.
Today, we’re going to talk about tea. And beyond that, we’re going to talk about organic tea. My guest today is Chris Olsen. He is the director of marketing and product development for Teatulia. Teatulia is unique because they have a beautiful selection of organic, single garden teas.
Now, what’s that, a single garden tea? We’re going to find out from Chris. Hi, Chris.
CHRIS OLSEN: Hey, how are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?
CHRIS OLSEN: I’m doing well this morning. The sun is up here in Colorado, so I’m sorry to hear about the rain in Florida.
DEBRA: Oh, it’s okay because we need rain. And this is just the summer pattern. I’m used to it. I get wet every day. So tell us, how did Teatulia start? Who started it? How long has it been around? What was the idea behind it?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah! Well, there are some brothers that lived in Bangladesh that in 2001, with their father, they actually started the garden or planted the garden. It’s a hundred miles of Darjeeling and it’s right on the border of Bangladesh and India.
So as that grew that they created as a social enterprise basically to create jobs, but they realized the tea tasted really, really good. People really loved it. So they had a plant where they decided that they wanted to create their own brand and introduce it to either Europe or the U.S. and Canada.
So one of the brothers in Bangladesh, his name is Anis, he was friends with the CEO of Teatulia who’s Adam. They met in college in New York years ago. He happened to be out for a work trip staying with Adam and Linda and he basically asked Linda if she wanted to help consult on a tea company that he wanted to launch in the United States. So she did and she found out that there was a great opportunity here and a huge point of differentiation, so they decided that she wanted to be a part of the business.
So the branch launched very small at a farmer’s market. It was about 2006. And then it was accepted into Whole Foods in 2009. And now, just as of last month, we are in the shelves of Target nationally, which is pretty exciting.
DEBRA: Wow!
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes! so we’re definitely growing. Our message is resonating it seems to be at least with a lot of the retail buyers and consumers as well. So that’s pretty much the history of Teatulia and how it started.
DEBRA: That’s great. So I think that probably most people don’t know much about just how tea is grown in general. So you refer to it as a garden, rather than a farm or a ranch. Are all teas grown in garden?
CHRIS OLSEN: Well, the term is more marketing than anything. Other common terms are ‘single estate’ or ‘single source’. We’re just playing with ‘garden’, ‘single garden’ because the whole garden-to-table trend, which is extremely popular here in Colorado in the Pacific Northwest, that seems to really resonate with people a little more than ‘single source’. A lot of coffee companies, they talk about direct to source, single source, so I don’t know, we just kind of like the feelings that the word ‘garden’ evokes in people, so we’ve been using that.
But traditionally, tea, the tea plant – let’s say it’s a tree and they trim it down and it’s like plantation-grown. It can either be grown under the shade or it can be grown under the sun. It just depends on what style, what region, what variety.
We have one of the world’s largest organic gardens. It’s at 2000 acres and we can keep adding to it because where they decided to create this garden was in an area where there’s a lot of room, a lot of space to do that. So that’s how we have the ability to be a premium brand or a large brand and have single source. Other companies don’t. They have to source from different gardens and they blend it together in order to have enough inventory to fulfill the demand.
DEBRA: Yeah. So I would presume that one of the benefits of having a single source tea is that you could know what’s going on with how it’s grown and where it’s grown and not be wondering that. I know when I lived in California, I belong to what’s called a CSA (a community-supported agriculture) and I could go to the farm where my food was being grown, I could talk to the farmer, I could harvest the food myself if I wanted to, I could plant seedlings, whatever level of participation I wanted. I could actually really know how my food was being grown.
I think that that would be the case here with having your single source organic teas that I see in the description on your home page. It says, “The soil was developed with the use of organic cover crops and mulching and the growing area is irrigated by rain water.” That just sounds so lovely to me to know that the tea is being watered by the rain and not by industrial water that may have all kinds of chlorine and fluoride and all kinds of other things in it.
So that would be, I’m presuming, the advantage of having a single source tea. Any others?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely one of them. I think we could add to that just the purity of the flavor of single source. It’s like a single estate wine compared to a blend. It tastes better usually. Obviously, taste is subjective, but that’s what we think here.
One of the big things too is the overall global footprint. For other key brands, larger key brands that do blends, they go to tea auctions. And then they purchase tea. So it’s shipped around from warehouse to warehouse to warehouse until it’s finally blended and put into a teabag.
With ours, it’s direct. We order it from the garden. We have processes in place and it comes right to where we need to get it packed. And then it goes right to the consumer. So it’s a lower overall global footprint for sure. We’re utilizing way fewer resources.
It’s also fresher than a lot of the other teas out there because as it’s sold from different tea market to market and moved around, some tea can be a year to a year and a half to even older by the time it reaches your cup where most of our teas, it depends where you’re at, the velocities of selling, but it’s fresh – six months, four months, it could even be three months or so.
So I will definitely add those two components to just have – well, and the accountability like you mentioned. Yes, we can document what we’re doing in the garden, we can show videos. We could kind of make that connection. We’re organic, we’re Rainforest Alliance, we’re kosher, more direct trade. So we can prove all the money that’s coming in and that we’re giving back to help these people. We can show pictures and tell the stories, which well get into this later in the show just the impact that it’s actually having there.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I just have this sense as I’m looking at your website – it’s Teatulia.com and you can also find it on my website at DebrasList.com – you do have pictures and we can look and see and it’s like I’m seeing this hand harvesting the tea leaves and it’s like my own hand pulling the leaves off of an herb in my garden, my very own garden. So I really make a connection between your garden and my garden.
And we need to take a break, but we’ll be back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m talking with Chris Olsen from Teatulia. And when we come back, we’ll talk about what are the pesticides and things that are used in ordinary teas. So stay with us.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. So Chris, tell us something about how teas are ordinarily grown.
CHRIS OLSEN: Ordinarily grown? Well, most teas out there are non-organic. So obviously, they’re using pesticides in the growing process to keep infestations at bay. Tea gardens are large and what that kind of does to the land, you don’t really see many bugs, you don’t see animals or birds. I like to equate it a little bit to kind of this barren wasteland. I mean, sure, the plants look good, but there’s really nothing else kind of going on.
So traditionally – well, not traditionally, but recently, that’s how most tea out there has been grown. A lot of the really big brands that you’ll find at the big box retailers are not organic.
DEBRA: And are there any other toxic exposures that people might get from tea like teabags, bleach form teabags or anything like that?
CHRIS OLSEN: Well, it depends. I mean, yeah, there’s lots of different packaging out there. For teabags, we have two different formats. One, we use a pyramid teabag, which is also called fuso and it allows one to brew a whole leaf, like have the whole leaf tea brewing taste and experience, but the convenience of a teabag.
The only other option you have in that regard is brewing that loose. But people consider that to be a little messy.
So the teabag that we use, it’s corn based, so it’s fully compostable. But there’s some other brands out there that use plastic instead of this corn material we use, so obviously, when you’re brewing tea at temperatures in the hundreds of degrees and it’s plastic, it can definitely seep toxin. So I would say you definitely want to be aware of the large pyramid teabags.
As far as the common pillow packs, these are the ones you would find in a Lipton or a Celestial Seasonings. It’s the paper bag. I would definitely recommend doing unbleached just because the paper is not treated, less toxins in the paper as well.
The best to remove all toxins is really just to brew it loose, which was the way the tea was meant to be brewed. But other than that, I would say no. I mean, a lot of it I guess does depend on the water and how they irrigate things and what could be in the water and how that gets into the tea. As you mentioned earlier, we use rainwater and what-not, so it’s purer and cleaner.
But I would say that’s pretty much all of the toxins that you can get into really.
DEBRA: I brew my tea. I drink a lot of tea. I drink tea every day. I’m not particular a coffee drinker. I will occasionally drink coffee. But I drink tea every day. I usually drink green tea. I’m a big fan of green tea because it gives me a little bit of perk, but it doesn’t have a lot of caffeine in it and I like the flavor of it. I usually mix it with some other types of tea just so that I have a variety of flavors. Like today, I’m mixing my green tea with mint. And a few weeks ago, I was mixing it with a tea that had a lot of citrus in it.
But I always brew it just loose and my favorite way to do it is I have a French press coffee maker. I don’t know if everybody knows what that is. It’s a glass beaker and then it has a plunger on top and it presses the little screen down so the water goes through. But then, usually the coffee grinds would be at the bottom. But I use it for tea. And so my tea goes to the bottom and the rest of it stays on the top. It works better than anything I’ve ever used.
I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s a brilliant piece of food preparation item. To use it for tea I think is perfect.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular method for sure. We sell to a lot of restaurants and a lot of restaurants prefer to serve it in a French press as opposed to a teacup.
DEBRA: Good! I didn’t know that.
CHRIS OLSEN: Traditionally, when we think about tea, it’s been teacups and it’s been – I think a lot of people especially in this country are – you know, some people love it. They love that old aspect of it, but a lot of people are just brewing it differently and using different means to brew it as well. I’ve seen people brew it through coffee makers. That’s where they get their fix, fine restaurants and it tastes amazing.
And I’ve seen people pack it into their own handmade teabag and stuff too. It’s cool! It’s pretty amazing all the different methods of brewing tea and how people really, as we say, geek out over it.
DEBRA: The most unusual one I saw as in a restaurant recently where it had a container that the loose tea went in and the hot water. And then after it was brewed, they brought it to me and they’ve said, “Now, this needs to steep for three minutes. We’ll come back and tell you in three minutes.” And so, they came back.
And then what I was supposed to do as a customer is to squeeze a little handle and then the tea comes out the bottom. I ordered it as iced tea. So you don’t need a glass of ice. I squeezed the handle and the tea came out, the bottom of the tea thing into the ice and it was the perfect glass of iced tea. It was pretty amazing.
But there are a lot of other ways.
CHRIS OLSEN: There are. You bring up a really good point though. I mean, a very important note in brewing tea –and I think just in this country as tea is slowly emerging and becoming more and more popular – is one of the problems (and everybody has probably seen this or have done it themselves. I mean, I’m certainly guilty of this before I joined Teatulia), I would throw my teabag in to the cup. I would put hot water, I would brew it and I would just leave the teabag in. That is the absolutely worst mistake you can make if you’re drinking tea.
DEBRA: Why?
CHRIS OLSEN: …because when you over-steep tea, that’s when it gets really better. That’s when it gets really astringent and doesn’t take good. So that’s when people are throwing milk and sugar and stuff into it to sweeten it. I mean, sugar tastes good, but it’s necessarily the most healthiest thing for you when you’re pumping a couple of packets of that.
So there’s proper ways to brew tea. It’s important to be very cognizant of that. Three minutes, that’s good that they said that. Have a tea timer or whatever just to make sure you brew it correctly, so it tastes really good.
DEBRA: That’s a very good point and we’ll talk more about that after the break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Chris Olsen from Teatulia and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here today with Chris Olsen from Teatulia. Chris, I’m looking on the Teatulia website and there’s a whole page that talks about how your growing practices are more organic than organic and that you practice natural farming practices. Can you tell us about that?
CHRIS OLSEN: Ah, yeah. Well, I mean, this is just like using natural rainwater. I always had trouble in pronouncing his name.
DEBRA: [inaudible 00:27:27]
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes, I always – I can never. I don’t know. My tongue doesn’t go that way. But we really pull a lot from his teaching. And basically, that’s to do nothing gardening. You just kind of let it come about. This is like the natural kind of wild way of farming. We pull a lot from that. At first, we were 100%. But obviously, we need to weed a little bit. We kind of have to maximize growing potential and stuff too. So if we have the dry season, sometimes, we kind of have to help out a little bit, so we could ensure that we still have some tea.
But we’re not using irrigation. We’re not using sprinkler systems for water. All the water that we are using that we might have to pump over is rainwater that we’ve collected. So that’s essentially better than organic. It’s perfect for the environment.
We’re actually in the process of closing the loop, using like a biodiesel factory for how we’re processing the tea. And when I say ‘processing’, we’re not changing the chemical compound. It’s drying the tea. That’s how you get white to black. So we’re in the process and I think mid to next year, early to mid next year is when we plan to totally close that loop.
But also, the social side of things. We’re not just organic tea, but we’re a direct trade type of a tea. We’re not certified because the certification doesn’t exist in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries. I think it’s rated the second poorest country in the world and we’re kind of the armpit of the armpit, so to speak.
So we have a really strong mission on the social side of things. Traditionally, when the British came and they started growing and cultivating tea, they went up to India and they essentially would kidnap well-calved females from India, pop them down in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, other parts of India. And it was like indentured servitude. They wouldn’t pay them any money that they could spend outside of the plantation because you know, the plantation would have a general store, a bar, whatever. So that’s where they would go to get their essentials. They wouldn’t educate them. They wouldn’t give them shoes.
So I actually visited some of these garden that have been around for 150 to 200 years. It’s a depressing place. I mean, the energy is just sucked out and the people aren’t happy. We’re trying to make a difference. We created this garden to create jobs. We have a literacy program where every Thursday, the tea pluckers and members of their family, but only women because we really are trying to support females here, they go and they learn to read and write.
It’s kind of a cool story, but when we went to visit them, me, being the marketing director, we have this entourage of photographers and videographers, I had this idea. Let’s interview some of these ladies. It’ll be great content on YouTube, typical American thinking.
The first lady we interview. We had a translator, but I asked how do you feel about the literacy program and the response was, “I just learned how to count. I realized the men at the bazaar had been robbing me my entire life and now that’s not going to happen.” She was 33 years old. I mean, our jaws just dropped and it really put it into perspective what we’re doing over there. It’s quite amazing.
And then we also have this – if you know microlending. It’s an evolution of microlending. It’s our cattle lending program that we do over there. That’s just to create jobs and to create limited – not limited wealth, but wealth for a lot of the Bangladeshi people around there. That’s successful. Now, we’re ten years into it and a lot of their kids are still in school.
One family, their kids are in the University. So I can go on and on, but these are things that we consider more than just organic.
DEBRA: Yes, it definitely is. I can really see from all the things that you’re doing that you’re reallyconsidering this tea as part of not only the ecosystem, but the social system of the place. Part of natural farming is to leave the ecosystem intact and include protecting the wildlife and all of those kinds of things, so that there’s an ecosystem there and it’s not just clearing the land and planting the crop. I think it’s really beautiful the way your company has integrated everything.
And all of that is I think essentially there in a cup of tea when you drink it. It’s like it’s all there. You can see all that goodness. I mean, for me at least, I think about where everything comes from and the effects of everything. That is so present in what you’re doing.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah! isn’t that wonderful?
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, yeah, it actually is. You know, one other important note just so I don’t forget. I wanted to kind of just talk about organic and non-organic tea really quick if I have some time. Is that okay?
DEBRA: Okay, sure. Yeah.
CHRIS OLSEN: Okay! So one thing that we noticed when we were outside – I mean, you never really hear about this in the media. I haven’t. But when we visited the non-organic tea, we learned their growing process. The leaves are plucked basically every eight to ten days. It depends on the rains. But after the leaves are plucked, they spray it with a pesticide that in Bangladesh in this particular garden, it had an LD of five. LD stands for lethal dose and I was told that 10 is harmful to a human. I don’t know in what parts or what-not, but that’s what I was told.
So they spray the plant again right before plucking with the same level of LD and then they pluck the leaves and it goes right into processing. It’s cut up and it’s put into a teabag. So the first time the leaves are rinsed off the pesticides is when you infuse it in your cup.
DEBRA: Oh, my God!
CHRIS OLSEN: It’s disgusting. It’s shocked us.
DEBRA: I had no idea.
CHRIS OLSEN: So it’s really important. And it’s great to hear, we were at a function a couple of weeks ago and we heard the CEO of Honest Tea and he’s talking about that now. That makes us feel good because obviously, Coke bought them. It’s been kind of hush-hush I think within the industry, but it’s a scary thing. I will never drink non-organic tea.
With coffee, it’s kind of okay because they spray a cherry and the coffee bean comes out, so it doesn’t affect your body as literally. The same thing with fruit. You can peel fruit. But with tea, you have no option at all. The pesticides come right out in the cup.
So I definitely want to just bring that point up because it’s quite shocking for a lot of people.
DEBRA: I’m so glad that you did because I didn’t know about that. Wow! Well, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. We’ll be back in a moment and find out more about organic tea.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Chris Olsen from Teatulia. Chris, I’m still thinking about what you just about how non-organic tea is sprayed with pesticides right before it’s picked. It just made me – you know, there’s so much tea available. Some of it or most of the tea that I buy, I buy at the natural food store although I’m going to start ordering from you directly.
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, that sounds good.
DEBRA: Yeah! A lot of it is organic. It’s a natural food store. But also, there are these tea stores now in the mall and they have all these different flavors and they’re not always organic. In fact, most of them aren’t organic, but they’re so appealing.
And now, I’m thinking, “No, if I wanted to taste like mint, I think I need to grow mint in my backyard and put it in my green tea.” You just re-organized my thinking about tea because that’s horrible, what they’re doing.
CHRIS OLSEN: Usually, they cave.
DEBRA: Not something I want to drink. We have just this last segment left, so tell us about the difference between black, green and white tea.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, for sure. It’s quite interesting because a lot of people think that they’re just totally different teas or plants, but they’re not. They all come from the same plant. So if you’re called a tea or considered a tea, you come from the camellia sinensis plant. The difference between white and green and black and oolong and pu-erh, these are all types of tea, it’s all in the processing.
So when they pluck a leaf, for white tea, it’s minimally processed. Usually, it’s the white bud. That’s why they call it ‘white tea’, it has the white hairs on it. It’s before the leaf unfurls. So usually, they just pluck that, [inaudible 00:40:57] to let it sun dry and then that’s essentially what you’re drinking.
Studies that have come out that white teas contain the highest level of antioxidants and the least amount of caffeine.
For green tea, it’s processed a little differently. And there’s two different ways. The Asian – well, I guess Bangladesh is in Asia, but the Chinese or Japanese way is it’s plucked, it’s oxidized a little bit longer or sit out in the sun a little bit longer. And then they pan fry it and that’s why you get the toasty taste. They pan fry it just to break the rest of the membranes, so it doesn’t start to ferment or go back.
We steam. On the other side of the Himalayas, typically, it’s a steaming process here we steam it to dry out the rest of it. So the steaming has a little more of a grassy, earthy taste and the pan fried is a little more toasty.
Then for black tea, it’s fully oxidized. That’s where it’s set out in the sun for maybe a day or two or three. It just depends on weather conditions or what-not. That’s considered to have a high level of antioxidants as well and then the highest amount of caffeine.
But one more important note is that most Americans tend to classify caffeine as all being the same. And it’s not. Caffeine, there’s a lot of depending factors here. How does your body absorb it? Some people can drink coffee before they go to bed. Other people can’t. Same thing with tea. I can’t really drink green tea because it gets more wired than coffee. But I can drink black tea all day long and be fine.
So when I say like high levels of caffeine, low levels of caffeine, what does that really mean? The caffeine different. The caffeine that’s in coffee is different than the caffeine in tea, it’s different than the caffeine in chocolate.
I always find it fascinating when we in this country try to clump the caffeine conversation into, “This is exactly how it is and it’s black and white…”
DEBRA: I thought it was all exactly the same caffeine. I really did.
CHRIS OLSEN: No.
DEBRA: This is the first I’ve heard of this. Wow! I’m going to research that some more.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah. I mean, in chocolate, it’s the theobromine. I can get really technical here, but in tea, it’s the theophylline. I forget what the actual Latin term is for coffee, for the coffee bean, but yeah, it’s all different types and your body absorbs it differently. It’s quite fascinating once you start reading up on it.
DEBRA: Well, I’m certainly going to do that. Occasionally, I don’t want to be drinking lots of caffeine all day long, but it’s nice to have – I don’t want as much as in coffee, but I’ll have a little piece of chocolate or I’ll have a cup of green tea and I had no idea that there was any difference. Probably the caffeine in Coca-Cola is something different altogether.
CHRIS OLSEN: Oh, yes! And Redbull, it has that chlorine.
DEBRA: Industrialized caffeine.
CHRIS OLSEN: Yeah, Yerba Mate, it has mateine in it. And then you have like the coca plants that they do cocaine and stuff like that from. That has its own type of – so yeah, it’s quite interesting and fascinating. So that’s the primary differences between tea. You also have herbs.
DEBRA: Yes, tell us about that.
CHRIS OLSEN: The correct term is ‘herbal tisane’ or an ‘herbal infusion’, but it gets a little confusing here, just as tea is re-emerging, so a lot of people call it herbal tea. But those, like a chamomile does not come from the Camellia Sinensis plant. So therefore, it’s not a tea on account of the flower. They consider that an herbal tisane.
Rooibos or Yerba Mate, those are also considered herbals. Even though with Mate, there’s caffeine in it, it doesn’t come from the Caellia Sinensis tea plant, so it’s considered an herb. There are thousands of different types of herbs out there obviously as well. Some of my favorites are Mate and the Rooibus, the hibiscus.
DEBRA: I like those too. I like those too. So tell us, are there health benefits to tea?
CHRIS OLSEN: Yes, there are health benefits of tea, but we have to be a little careful because the FDA these days are really tracking down on certain health claims. So I guess my answer to that would just be yes, get online and kind of research what kind of benefits you’re looking for and you’ll find all the information that you probably want to make an educated decision online.
But yes, tea is a healthy alternative to drinking sodas, drinking a liquor or whatever every time. Everybody is different. It could be healthier than coffee for some people. It just depends on how your body absorbs things and what-not.
Yes, in a lot of studies – we haven’t had RT study just to preface that – but RTs in other regions of the world, it’s found to have really high levels of antioxidants, high level of other nutrients like l-theanine, magnesium, things like that. So yes, tea is definitely healthy.
And that’s one of the reasons I kind of got into tea. I used to be a big soda drink being a typical dude from Colorado. I hit a certain age and my metabolism has changed and I realized, “Hey, I don’t feel as good as I did when I was 22 drinking them out and do every day.” So that’s kind of how I migrated over to tea.
It feels good to preach the word of helping people just kind of migrate over to tea and just try to enhance their healthy eating habits.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I like about tea is that first of all, I think that it’s really important for people to drink water, but I think that tea is like a good step, the closest thing to water that has flavor because it’s mostly herbal kinds of things, it’s plants. The benefits of those plants are getting into the water and you’re drinking them, so there’s flavor, but there’s also as you mentioned the minerals and things that could be enhancing the water. It gives me a little flavor without giving anything – well, as long as it’s organic – without giving anything that’s negative that I can identify. It’s just so pleasant.
And also, I was thinking, I hadn’t thought about this until we actually started the interview, but there’s the whole thing about the tea ceremony, the Japanese tea ceremony. Such a beautiful thing of the whole ritual of making tea and putting attention on the drinking of tea and the benefit of tea. I think about that when I’m drinking tea. It just has so many positive things associated with it.
You can do things like make hot tea, make iced tea, add a little fruit juice. You don’t have to necessarily put white sugar in it. It’s great with honey. It’s great with any of the natural sweeteners. There’s so many infinite varieties of things that you can do with tea. It’s pretty amazing. It is a great alternative to soda, it really is.
CHRIS OLSEN: It feels great. You can create your own blends and your own flavors. That’s kind of what I do here, I handle the new product of [inaudible 00:48:56]. It’s a blast because you’re just mixing things together. Sometimes, it works and sometimes, it doesn’t.
So one other important note that I would just like to mention is going back to brewing tea. I know a lot of people like to cold steep and they like to sun tea. Just what I found is a lot of the herbs and stuff out there, not all companies treat their teas and so there will be microbes in them. I would always recommend brewing your tea hot and not making a sun tea or not cold steeping it especially if you have herbs in there because you just never know what could be lurking in those herbs that could get you sick. So it’s always smart and we always recommend people to always hot steep their teas.
DEBRA: And that’s a great way to end our time. Thank you so much for being with me, Chris. I learned so much about tea that I didn’t know. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And if you enjoyed this show, tell your friends.
Natural Solutions for Bugs
My guest Annie B. Bond has been researching and writing about safe DIY alternatives to toxic products for more that twenty years. On this show, Annie will bring her vast knowledge of how to control pests, including ticks, mosquitoes and other summertime bugs, and I’ll share my experience too. Annie and I have been kindred spirits since her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green (Ceres Press, 1990) . She is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). She has been the editor of a number of publications, including “The Green Guide.” Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Healthy Halloween
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Solutions for Bugs
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: July 10, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world because even though there are toxic chemicals all around us—in the air we breathe, in our consumer products—there are many things that we can do in order to remove toxic chemicals from our homes, remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and live a toxic-free, happy, healthy, organic, natural, wonderful, happy life without toxic chemicals that can affect us in so many ways.
It’s July 10th 2003. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And the thunderstorm report today is it’s starting to cloud up. So we may have a thunderstorm coming on, but I am just intending that we’ll have no thunderstorm and we will have power for the entire show.
My guest today is Annie Berthold Bond who I’ve known almost since we’ve been doing our respective work for almost the same period of time. Anyway, I would say that we’re kindred spirits in that we both have had our own story of how toxic chemicals have affected our health. We’ve both recovered. And we’ve both gone on to figure out the non-toxic alternatives in a different way.
Our work is very complementary where I’m mostly focused on what consumer products we can buy. Annie has been very focused on how we can make things ourselves that are less toxic alternatives—including cleaning products, pest controls and all kinds of do-it-yourself things around the house.
So, welcome, Annie. I’m very happy to have you on again.
ANNIE BOND: Well, thanks, Debra. Thanks so much for having me. I’m in upstate New York. And we have a massive thunderstorm coming soon.
DEBRA: [cross-talking 02:04]
Well, I guess it’s summer on the East Coast. And for those of you who don’t live on the East Coast, they’re not like working around thunderstorms every day.
But we had an absolutely stunning thunderstorm last night, Annie. I was driving west, and there was a thunderstorm over the Gulf of Mexico just offshore. And so I was just driving right in that direction. So I was watching it develop. It went right through the windshield in the direction that I was going. And it was at sunset too. So I had this big thunderhead with the colors of the sunset shining behind it. And then, there were these bright lightning bolts.
And by the time it got home, it had turned into such a thunderstorm just all churned up. There were flashes of lightning like every second.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: It was just flash, flash, flash and roaring thunder, thunder, thunder. And it was just absolutely gorgeous.
ANNIE BOND: Well, I’m glad you were all snug. Did you like race from your car to the house? How did you get in?
DEBRA: Well, it was still off in the distance. I could hear it, but it wasn’t raining right where I was. And so I didn’t have the rain, but I had the beautiful light show. And then I could continue to watch it through my windows at home. Nature can be so stunningly beautiful.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome! That sounds really great.
DEBRA: Sometimes, nature and the color, it’s just absolutely gorgeous. No artist could paint something that looks like that.
And it was just one of those moments where I just felt saturated with the colors. It needed to go into my memory. I just needed to remember what this looked like because there was no way you could take a photograph, there was no way you could paint it. It was just…
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly. It’s one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” kind of thing. So sometimes, the colors of nature is so spectacular.
DEBRA: It’s like the most gorgeous art there is, is of nature. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about.
ANNIE BOND: Yes! That sounds so fantastic. I mean I’m glad you look at it that way instead of in fear. You were like, “Oh, my gosh! This is gorgeous.”
DEBRA: Well, you know, when I was a little girl, my father, we lived in California where we don’t have—I didn’t grow up in thunderstorms like we have here in the East Coast in California. And usually, they would happen at night. It would be a big light show and lots of noise. And my father would come get me out of my bed and put me in front of the window. He’ll hold me on his lap so it was safe. He’ll have me look at the thunder and lightning.
And because he did that, I was never afraid of it. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, I was always in a safe place.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s awesome. What a wonderful thing for him to do. That’s great.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we’re here to talk about toxic chemicals. So I’ll just introduce Annie for a minute and say that she’s the author of Clean & Green which was full of—still, it’s still I would say a classic toxics alternatives book that belongs on everybody’s shelf. It’s still on my bookshelf.
ANNIE BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Then there was Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment. And most recently, her most recent book was True Food. And that was the winner of the Gourmand Awards’ Health & Nutrition Cookbook in the World.
What an honor!
ANNIE BOND: That was a great honor.
DEBRA: So, Annie has been around a long time. She’s got a lot of information. And I consult her books all the time.
So Annie, before we go on and actually start talking about our subject which is going to be natural solutions for bugs, especially summertime bugs (mosquitos and ticks and all those kinds of things), just tell us for a few minutes—you’ve been on the show before, and we’ve discussed your story. But just tell us in a few minutes how you came to be interested in the subject. What is your personal motivation?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I was sort of whacked over the head. I was leading a perfectly fine, normal life. Then back to back, I had a very powerful poisoning experience. I worked at a restaurant that had a gas leak. It sent 80 people to the hospital. And I got what the doctor said permanent central nervous system damage at that time.
And then, our apartment building—I didn’t yet know about the permanent central nervous system damage. Our apartment building was exterminated with a pesticide that’s been taken off the market because it was so neurotoxic.
So, that back to back exposure for me was very devastating. I was in the hospital for three months. It took about eight years to find a place to live. I finally got properly diagnosed, thank goodness, because this was 1981 by then, and there were very few environmental medicine doctors around. And just by the grace of whatever, I ended up with one in New Haven, Connecticut.
I learned bit by bit. I had to learn how to live without chemicals. And so I became a bit of a nomad. I’m very sensitive to pesticides. And where we move in upstate New York, there were a lot of pesticide drip from farms.
So, I became a nomad. We moved 10 times in four years. But in the process, I really learned how to live without chemicals.
And I finally got into a healthy home. And I was like a wilted plant that hadn’t been given water. Clean air was my water. And I just popped back so fast, it was unbelievable.
I got well enough. My doctor said I could have a baby. I had her in ’88. And after she was born, my concern sort of broadened from my own personal tragedy, really, and crisis in my life to wanting a better place for her and her world. And so, I started researching alternatives.
I stumbled upon your books, Non-Toxic & Natural. I was a complete, devoted fan. I’m from Northern New England. I just got interested in sort of the formula side of things. I just tapped into down-to-earth, down-home kind of instinct I had from my growing up. And so I just jumped right in and never looked back.
It’s been one of those greatest payments/the greatest gift kind of stories.
DEBRA: Yes. You know, I would like to also say that about my experience. People look at chemical poisoning as being a tragedy. But it was the greatest blessing in my life because it gave me an opportunity to take a look at things going on in my life and make my own choices.
We’re going to take a break right now. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Annie Bond. We’re going to be talking about how you can protect yourself from all those summertime bugs without toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Annie Bond who has been developing and collecting all kinds of natural do-it-yourself kinds of things to live a less toxic life for many, many years—decades in fact. I don’t want it to sound like an old lady.
ANNIE BOND: I just turned 60. I’m not proud.
DEBRA: Well, happy birthday!
ANNIE BOND: Thank you.
DEBRA: A wise woman… one of our people that we should be listening to.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s a graceful way to put it, thank you.
DEBRA: And just before the break, we were talking about how, for each of us, our experiences of being poisoned by toxic chemicals was a blessing in disguise because we each came out of it looking at our lives and the world in a different way and wanting to do something to make the world a better place.
Annie, for me, it put me in a position of choice. And I think that you’ve probably had that experience too, wouldn’t you say, where instead of just taking the world as it was, we started decided how we wanted our small world to be.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that’s a really interesting way of looking at it because, in a way, for me, it took me a long time to see that or learn that particular lesson. For me, that choice was taken away for a very long time, like, “I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do that.” And would I like to live any way differently than I live now? Not at all. I’m thrilled. And it’s been a wonderful thing to be able to provide such an incredible sanctuary to my family. What a gift that is to them!
And so, that’s a nice way of looking at it, Debra. Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Well, I think that we’re always at this point where we’re saying, “Well, what can I do? And what can’t I do?” And we can look at it as saying, “I can’t do this… I can’t do that.” I remember, in the beginning, I would say, “Well, I don’t want to give up my favorite lipstick. I’m just not going to do it.” But when I did, it actually made a huge difference in my life, just that one product. I’ve done everything except give up that one shade of red lipstick that it took me so long to find.
But there are so many choices that we have. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, the natural things that we can do, the safe things that we can do. And these are things that we can do. And once we do more and more of them, our lives become safer and safer.
So, what would you like to talk about first, Annie, in terms of some solutions for what to do about bugs?
ANNIE BOND: I think that something that I would love to talk about are ticks actually.
DEBRA: Okay.
ANNIE BOND: When you’re saying you got rid of your favorite lipstick, I have a new challenge. I mean I live in a non-toxic world as you know. I have dogs. And I don’t put Frontline and other chemicals on them—for their health as well as mine (I couldn’t have them in the house if I did that). I’ve suffered a number of cases of Lyme Disease. And I have a relatively new puppy.
I decided that I wouldn’t even care—I mean I care about not getting Lyme disease. But I really mostly care about being able to let her sleep on my bed. So I’m really waffling on that one—same for the lipstick—where I need to just say, “Okay, you can’t even be in my bedroom” because the dogs get ticks (of course, because they go in the woods where I live).
But I’ve spent a lot of time doing a lot of research about ticks and what to do about them, repellant for ticks. As I said, I won’t use Frontline. Actually, if you read the fine print on a lot of those kinds of chemicals, they’re incredible central nervous system depressants. Your dogs can get very depressed. And having had a pesticide exposure myself, I just can’t bring myself to give that to my dogs.
DEBRA: Right!
ANNIE BOND: When I was writing Better Basics for the Home, I really dug deep in herbalist books. I came across rose geranium as something that has been called—it used to be even called tick weed. It’s an essential oil that you can find in most health food stores. They have at least geranium. It’s a very, very powerful repellant for ticks.
So, what I’ll do is I’ll take a drop of it. And I’ll put a drop of it in my dog’s collars—a couple of drops. Dogs are incredibly sensitive to smell, so you can’t put too much on. But I found that to be very, very successful for repelling ticks (and probably, my number one go-to thing for repelling ticks).
But many of us don’t live in the cities. Most of us facing ticks don’t live in the cities anyway. We have lawns and strawberry and that sort of thing.
I’ve been reading. I don’t know how I missed this until more recently. But I’ve been reading a lot about sulfur and how the reason we have so many ticks maybe because of a sulfur imbalance in the environment. And the ticks hate sulfur. They’re really repelled by it.
And so, you can buy sulfur in a farm store kind of place. And you can get it in flakes and put it around on your lawn. It will significantly repel ticks.
But I also think that garlic is very, very heavy in sulfur. And it may be one reason why garlic has always been talked about as something to give to pets. And I think it may be because it increases the sulfur.
And I’ve been taking a lot of garlic just as a repellent, just eating it, because it helps me with my Lyme disease. I’ve actually been taking allicin. And that’s been extremely helpful too.
And so, I think there’s just a lot of [fronts] where one could work to protect oneself from Lyme disease and one’s pets from Lyme disease. But in terms of going outside, for me, the top thing is always rose geranium. In terms of holistic care, I’m increasingly moving towards and focus on sulfur.
DEBRA: I think there’s also a garlic spray. I think when I was researching mosquitoes—you can go online, I don’t remember the exact website—they have a garlic spray that you can spray around in your yard.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s interesting, absolutely. That sounds very interesting to me. I’ll have to look into that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE BOND: I was going to start taking a version of sulfur myself because I thought it might help further repel ticks from ever wanting to bite me to begin with.
DEBRA: Yes, yeah. I actually never had a tick bite. But I think that you live in a more wooded area than I do.
ANNIE BOND: I’m in an epicenter here. So there were no ticks until 1996. And then, they arrived. They’re just devastating.
Tick-borne disease can be devastating. Everybody I know has a family member who has it wherever. So that’s why it’s top of mind.
DEBRA: Yeah. Well, we’ll talk more about some other insects that we might encounter in the summertime and in other times of year after this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Annie Bond. We’ll be back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie Bond. We’re talking about insects, how to control them and how to repel them.
I just wanted to mention as long as we’re on this subject that, a few weeks ago, I had a guest on from a company called Greenway Formula 7. And it was a very interesting show because they had developed an insect repellant. And it also kills insects made entirely from essential oils. It’s extremely effective. And it also is unscented.
I mean it’s unscented in the sense that it has no fragrance added. But actually, one of their formulas has an essential oil in it that makes it not even smell like the essential oils that are in the formula.
So, this is a product that I use for insect repellant. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And at the top of the right-hand column, there’s a search box. You just type in Greenway Formula 7. And it will take you to my write-up about it. And you can find out all about it.
So, that’s a product you could buy that Annie has all kinds of suggestions about things that you can make at home, which I just love.
So, shall we talk about mosquitoes now?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I cracked open one of my books to mosquitoes because I figured that would be the next on the list.
DEBRA: What do you like for mosquitoes, Debra? One of my main things I just want to say is that it’s so important to remove any stagnant water anywhere near your house—old tires where water is accumulated or old flower pots, anything like that.
That’s just one of the key reasons too. Every time I get mosquitoes near my house even, I’m always like, “Oh, my gosh! Where is the stagnant water.” And so before we go into the specifics of some repellants, I just wanted to say that.
But I’d be curious to know what you—I remember something from somewhere back when where you had some great ideas about mosquitoes. I’d be curious.
DEBRA: I do because mosquitoes have been—that’s probably my single most prevalent pest problem, mosquitoes, because I really don’t like to be bitten. And I would totally agree with you. One of the things that I was just doing this morning—
Well, first of all, as you have all heard, Annie and I both live now in thunderstorm country which means that we’re always getting water every day. And anything that I have that is upright and holds water will hold water every day. And so I go around.
I have two wheelbarrows in my backyard. I have to turn them upside-down. I can’t just leave them there because, overnight—or even during our day—they’ll hold water. And the other containers, I make sure that—I have been known to put holes in the bottoms of things so that the water seeps through, and they don’t collect water. That is the most important thing.
Another thing about mosquitoes, especially indoors, you can have mosquito netting. I used to have mosquito netting over my bed. That works really, really well.
But the simplest thing, and something that I think works just so well, is vinegar. You can use any kind of vinegar. I use apple cider vinegar, the natural kind. And I just put it—you know those little shaker bottles they have in Italian restaurants for the oil and the vinegar? I bought a set of those, and I filled them with vinegar. And I have one sitting next to my bed and one sitting on the kitchen. And if I’m going outside, or if a mosquito gets in the house, I just shake the vinegar on my body, and it doesn’t bite me. And this is actually a surefire, inexpensive way to just not get bit.
And it occurs that you could even make garlic vinegar. And that would probably be even more effective. But you would smell like garlic.
ANNIE BOND: I know! Well, that’s the problem with taking all my garlic pills. I have to stop before important meetings or something. I can’t walk in there and be reeking of it.
Wow! What a great idea. That makes a lot of sense. So it’s like the incredible acid, mosquitoes don’t like that acid.
DEBRA: They don’t. And they also don’t like dark colors. So if you wear black, you’re less likely to be bit by a mosquito than if you wear white, certain colors. I actually wrote up this whole long list. I have to find it. I should find it and put it up on my website again because I have a list of all these things to do to protect yourself from mosquitoes.
So, you really do not need Deet or any other toxic pesticide.
ANNIE BOND: You totally don’t need Deet, I agree.
It’s interesting. I went to Southeast Asia out of a great generosity of a really great friend of mine. She took me and her daughter, her daughter’s best friend. We traveled, and there was a malaria outbreak in Cambodia when we were there. And I was very concerned because I’m so sensitive to chemical pesticides, I know that I would not be able to be near her or her friend—her daughter or her daughter’s friend—if they were using toxic pest killer on themselves. I knew that I certainly couldn’t.
This is a lot of responsibility, to ask people not to use a Deet-based spray because I didn’t want anybody to get malaria of course.
And so, I did a lot of research online. And I found a company that had done all the tests. And it was equally, if not more effective, than Deet. So I felt very confident in buying it and giving these bottles. I bought bottles for each one of the four of us.
And I just felt great about it. It was a very strong essential oil.
I think it was Buzzz Off. But it was a number of years, I can’t quite remember, I’m sorry. But I usually don’t need something so powerful around the house. So I haven’t bought it again.
DEBRA: Yeah. Here in Florida, we really have a lot of mosquitoes. It’s so hard to go out in the summertime and not get bit. So I do a combination of vinegar and also—I mean one or the other. I’ll use vinegar or I’ll use the Greenway Formula 7. I find it to be very effective. And also, it just smells like cloves. There’s no citronella or any of those kinds of things in it. So those are the two that I use, and I’m pretty mosquito-free.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that’s really great. You know, the list of herbs that I’ve researched have worked really well for mosquito repellants. They were essential oils. You could make your own or whatever.
One thing you want to do when you’re using essential oils, when you put them on yourself—as you know, Debra—you don’t want to put the essential oil straight on your skin because they can burn. So put about a tablespoon of whatever household oil you have, like olive oil, and then add like 10 drops or something to a tablespoon of the oil. And then you could dab the essential oil mixture onto your skin. And that’s a good way to do it.
But eucalyptus oil is a really good repellant, as is cloves actually. Did you say cloves?
DEBRA: Cloves, that’s the major one in Greenway Formula 7.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s definitely on my list. Geranium also works for mosquitoes. Peppermint, rosemary, lemon balm, or citronella, they’re good ones.
DEBRA: Great! So we need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with Annie Bond. And we’re talking about how to protect ourselves from summertime bugs. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Annie Bond. She’s the author of Clean & Green, Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment. And her most recent book is True Food.
All of Annie’s books, Clean & Green, Better Basics for the Home, Home Enlightenment, those are three great books to have on your bookshelf. Each one of them is full of do-it-yourself things that you can make at home that are natural alternatives to products that contain toxic chemicals. Her website is AnnieBBond.com.
So Annie, what else do you want to tell us about controlling or repelling pests?
ANNIE BOND: Well, what do you think? We’ve got ideas for mice, for ants, for head lice, whatever. What would you suggest?
DEBRA: Oh, I like ants.
ANNIE BOND: Okay!
DEBRA: I want to tell what I do for ants. You can tell me what you do for ants.
ANNIE BOND: Fabulous! So, why don’t you go first?
DEBRA: My tried and true thing is that I just—you know, ants come in in a line in looking for food. And so I just look for that line of ants. And in one hand, I have a damp sponge. And on the other hand, I have a bottle of Elmer’s white glue. And I just keep wiping them up with the sponge, and then you find a point where they’re coming in the house, and you just put some
Elmer’s white glue, and it fills up the hole.
And then, the next day, they’ll find another way to come in. And you do exactly the same thing.
And I find it doesn’t take more than three or four days in doing the same thing over and over—either I’ve gotten all the holes, or they just decided not to come in anymore. And this has solved every ant problem in every place I’ve ever lived.
And of course then it’s done. You never have ants again in your house because you filled up the holes.
ANNIE BOND: Well, that sounds great. That’s a very good overlay for mice too. I mean I’ve done everything under the sun for mice. And yes, I can repel them. But it’s not until you fill up the holes that you don’t get them back.
So that’s a really great solution, Debra, for ants. I like that.
I have a solution that is very fun if you’ve got kids around. And that is making a sugar ant hotel. This is one of my daughter’s main events in the spring.
DEBRA: Oh, that sounds like fun. Tell us about that.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, we would have fun. We’d bring a big bowl out on the counter, and I would mix half and half borax and sugar and mix it up—or we would. And then, meanwhile, all year, we accumulate the little—or marinated artichoke heart jars.
So they’re just about the right height for making your own sugar ant hotel. You’d get a hammer and a nail, and you punch holes on the top of the lid for that.
And so, you just scrunch up some toilet paper or use cotton balls and stick them in the bottom halfway up or so in the jars. And then, you fill it up about halfway with the borax and sugar mixture. Fill it with water up to about a quarter of an inch or half an inch to the top. Screw in the top. And then, put them around where you would normally put those ant hotels. And the ants just line up to get in. They just love it so much. It kills the ants, but it’s a great way to keep the sugar ants out.
This won’t get the queen. And so you do need to put borax around in some places that are safe from kids and pets. The worker ants will take the borax back to the queen.
Otherwise, it’s a great little project for a family to use, to make the sugar ant hotel.
DEBRA: That sounds like fun. When you say borax, are you talking about borax like 20 Mule Team Borax or boric acid?
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly, the kind that you buy in the laundry section of the supermarket.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that that would work [unclear 30:58]
ANNIE BOND: Well, it probably wouldn’t, but I just am super duper cautious, just to be able to say that. I can’t imagine any pet trying to lick it up.
DEBRA: No, no, no… I meant pests, not pets. I’m looking it up. I was wondering about using it to kill insects.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, I see. Yes! It’s definitely strong enough.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s what I wanted to know.
ANNIE BOND: What happens is the sugar attracts it, and then the borax kills. That’s the thing.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s something that works. Okay, good. It wasn’t that I had never heard of it before. It’s just I always thought when you think of controlling pests, you think of boric acid. So I wanted to make sure that our listeners are not confusing the two.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, exactly. That’s right. People always recommend boric acid for cockroaches. And not living in the city and not having cockroaches where I live, it’s not that easy to find. Because of that, I always use borax, and it works wonderfully. So
I never looked further. And it’s certainly easy to do. So that’s great.
You know, one of the other things…
DEBRA: Well, what about people who are living in the city and they need to control cockroaches?
ANNIE BOND: Well, I don’t know that there’s something much better than boric acid. I think that’s really what I understand.
That’s really the tried and true ingredient, right?
DEBRA: It is! So, we have here in Florida something called palmetto bugs which is like a giant cockroach. And they’re actually pretty scary. The first time I saw one, I thought, “Oh, my God! What’s this?” And everybody has them in their house.
But the way I ended up controlling them was the first thing that I did was, again, I looked for all the ways that they could possibly be getting in. And that reduced them greatly, just simply filling up the holes.
And that’s one of the basic ideas behind natural pest control, to fill up holes, put up screens. You want to put up barriers between…
ANNIE BOND: Actually, it’s just commonsense. That’s the heart of integrative pest management, using commonsense and thinking about it and not just saying, “Oh, I’m going to get something and spray.” Think a little bit, and then you solve it. I mean it’s an amazing thing.
DEBRA: Yeah! Well, I think that’s true for anything that you’re looking for a solution for. Instead of just having a spray or taking a pill or something, there’s something that you can actually do. There’s a reason that the problem is there. And if you take care of the reason, you won’t have a problem anymore.
So, we filled up all the holes where they were coming in.
And then, what else do we do? Oh, then you need to be looking and seeing do you have things like food sitting out or crumbs on the floor or dripping water because pests are looking for food, water and shelter. If you provide those, like papers stacked up—and it’s fine to stack them up to take them to recycling, but then take them to recycling. Don’t just leave them sitting there because they attract pests.
But what we finally ended up doing was—now, I didn’t actually do this, Larry did it. But he mixed boric acid and something into a little bowl (and I forgot what it was that he mixed it with). And then he just put it down in the bottom of the cabinets, so that they were inside and the cats wouldn’t find them. And I haven’t seen a palmetto bug since.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, that’s really great. Yeah, that’s really great.
DEBRA: Oh, I think it was cornstarch—cornstarch and [unclear 34:57] and water, yeah.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, that would make sense. It’s also unbelievably dehydrating for the bug.
DEBRA: Yeah!
ANNIE BOND: I also read here—in Better Basics, I didn’t remember. I’d put this in here—that chickens and geckos love to eat cockroaches. So there’s another option for you.
DEBRA: They do, they do. You know, for a while, I had chickens in my backyards. And we also have geckos. And we would collect the palmetto bugs and feed them to the chickens.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah! Yeah, totally. Well, guinea hens love to eat ticks. I think my dogs will eat the guinea hens, and so they wouldn’t last very long. But that’s another thing. A lot f people I know where I live have a lot of guinea hens around to just eat up the ticks.
There again, that’s one of those commonsense reaction to things.
You know, another thing that we might want to talk about would be fleas. Especially as we’re getting these heat spells, there tends to be a huge flea hatchings…
DEBRA: Well, I would love to talk about fleas, except that we’re almost out of time.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, we are, okay.
DEBRA: Time goes by really fast. So we’ve got about a minute and a half left. Do you have any final words you’d like to say about living non-toxic or about non-toxic pest control […]?
ANNIE BOND: I would just like to say to do it, just to do it. I mean that was the thing. I haven’t drycleaned my clothes for 30 years. I just had to learn how to do without, do it differently. And that’s my suggestion, especially with pesticides. It’s just simply to say, “Okay, turn the page, new chapter. I’m never going to use a synthetic pest control in my life again and search for alternatives.”
They work. They’re wonderful. And you’re not poisoning yourself, and the family, and the neighborhood and the pets and everything at the same time.
DEBRA: Yes, I completely agree. And that’s what Annie and I have been doing for all these many years, finding those alternatives, figuring out how to do it, and writing about how to do it, and talking about how to do it—and doing it ourselves.
So, all these answers are there. It’s just about you all learning how to do it. And together, we can make a tremendous difference in the world to make our own lives safer and the world a safer place for everybody to live.
Thank you so much for being with me, Annie, today.
ANNIE BOND: Oh, thanks for having me.
DEBRA: I’m sure we’ll have you on again.
ANNIE BOND: Yeah, thank you so much. Great to be here, Debra. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thanks, thanks. So for more information about how you can live a non-toxic free way, go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top, there’s a lot of links to go to the different parts of my website. And listen again tomorrow!
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
How Do I Get Rid of Carpenter Ants?
Question from Joy
Does anyone have a safe, successful way to get rid of carpenter ants? They are eating my window frame and the framing in the walls.
Debra’s Answer
Readers, and experience with this?
I had carpenter ants in my little cabin in the woods in California and I just vacuumed them out of the walls when I opened them up for remodeling, and that was it. They may have returned, I don’t know.
Being Beautiful Naturally
My guest Joy Wicks is a married mother of 3 who became committed to starting and running NaturalJoyBeauty.com after learning about the toxic ingredients in most makeup and body care products. During her transition to natural and organic products she found that health food stores didn’t really offer what she was looking for. Most of the products they had still contained ingredients she didn’t want to be using. After locating products that met her new ingredient criteria (from many hours of researching) the desire grew to have a store for people that offered them. We’ll be talking about toxic ingredients in makeup and body care products, and how to choose safe ones. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/natural-joy-beauty
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Being Beautiful Naturally
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Joy Wicks
Date of Broadcast: July 9, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Even though there are toxic chemicals all around us in all kinds of consumer products and in the environment, in the food we eat, the air we breathe, our personal care products—everywhere we look it seems.
There are many, many products that do not have toxic chemicals in them. There are ways we can remove toxic chemicals from our homes and our bodies. And that’s the kind of thing that we talk about on this show, how we can be happy, be healthy, be productive and do what we want in our lives without being hindered by toxic chemicals.
Today is Tuesday, July 9th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where the sun is shining. It looks like we may not have a thunderstorm until later in the day. So we shouldn’t be interrupted by that.
We’re going to be talking today about choosing organic and natural and toxic-free beauty products, personal care products, and cosmetics. But first, I want to give you a quote that came in my email this morning. This is from Peter F. Drucker who is a very successful businessman. He said:
“Start with what is right, rather than what is acceptable.”
And when I read that this morning, I thought, “Wow! We live in a society where it’s acceptable by many pp to have toxic chemicals in our products. But it’s not right. And there are many of us, including probably many of you (that’s why you’re listening to this show) that know that what is right is to have products and things and practices that we do at home that are contributing to sustaining health rather than damaging health.”
And so, I like that idea, that we should always be considering what’s right, what is contributing to our health, what is contributing to sustaining the planet, what is contributing to life and happiness and health rather than what might be acceptable by people who are not contributing to those things.
So, I’m happy to introduce my guest today, Joy Wicks who is a married mother of three, who became committed to starting and running her business, NaturalJoyBeauty.com, after learning about toxic ingredients in most make-up and body care products.
Thanks for being with me, Joy.
JOY WICKS: Thanks for having me, Debra.
DEBRA: So, why don’t you go ahead and tell your story instead of me telling it?
JOY WICKS: Okay, I appreciate that. Really, I think where it started for me was about five years ago. I was a stay-at-home mother at the time. And I started thinking a lot about the different things that I was using to clean my home.
For some reason, cleaning products and make-up and body care all kind of came together at once in my mind as far as being curious about the ingredients and what effects they may be having on myself and my family. Unlike some of the guests you have who have had health concerns or health issues that have caused them to have to make the changes, I can’t say that my story was really like that. It was more of a curiosity.
As a child, I remember standing in the shower and reading the shampoo labels and just thinking those words were kind of funny words you couldn’t pronounce, not knowing what exactly those ingredients were. And I think some of that kind of came back to me as an adult. I was right around the age of 30 or 31 at the time. And it just really started to make me wonder what we were doing to ourselves every day.
I’ve worn make-up pretty much every day since I was 13 or 14 years old. And I like to use powder make-up over the top of my foundation and things. And I started to wonder, “What am I inhaling? What am I doing to myself?” I was using things like scrubbing bubbles-type cleaners to clean my bathroom. You breathe those things in while you’re cleaning. And so, a lot of that just kind of made me wonder what are these things doing to me.
And as soon as I sat down at the computer and started googling, it was like opening Pandora’s box. There was so much information out there. And I was amazed to start learning about the thing.
And so, I spent literally hours of my time because I was able to do that researching and making a list of the ingredients and things I wanted to avoid.
And your website was one that I found very early on. It was a great resource for me as far as helping me changing dishes and things like that, my house cookware, all sorts of things, the cleaning products.
DEBRA: Thank you.
JOY WICKS: But then, the make-up thing—of course, because of my love of make-up (as I said, I’ve been wearing it since I was allowed to)—that’s where my focus went, with more on the make-up and the body care side of things.
And I was just amazed because I hadn’t shopped at health food stores. I was like the general public. The mass, I would go just to the mass stores. And I didn’t know a thing about it.
So, I assumed that if I walked into a health food store, they were going to have these products I was not learning about. They were going to not include those ingredients.
And I was astounded to go in with my little list in hand and find out that a lot of those products still contained synthetic fragrance and pthalates—well, usually, the pthalates are in the fragrances. Propylene glycol was still in a lot of the things at the health food store and just lots of different ingredients that I didn’t want to be using.
And so, I had to again spend lots of hours researching products. As a mom, I didn’t always have time to spend in the store for hours. So I would write down brand names and then take them home and try to find ingredients.
And then, I found a lot of companies try to hide their ingredient list online. They’re not really open about what’s in the products.
And that’s usually a good way for people to—it’s not always the case. But it’s a good way usually to judge a brand.
DEBRA: I agree.
JOY WICKS: If they don’t openly display their ingredients on their website, they’re usually hiding something.
DEBRA: I totally agree. And that’s one of the things that I look for too.
JOY WICKS: Yeah! And one of the little tricks I’ll use is I’ll put “key ingredients.” I’m sure you’ve seen that where, in the list, they have organic shea butter and all the great anti-aging benefits of it. Usually, the yucky stuff is at the end of the label anyway, down where the preservatives and fillers and things are. And so, that’s what I had found.
And even now, after having my business for five years—it’s been about nine years I’ve been in the natural products, but I’ve had the business now for a little over five—I’m still always researching products and finding out things. And sometimes, I even get disappointed to find out brands aren’t upfront about something in a product. We have to pull it and not sell that product anymore. It’s an ongoing process even for me to always educate myself because there’s always some ingredient I haven’t heard of or that new information comes out about.
And so research is a big part of it I think for the consumer. And I try to do as much of that for the consumer as I can. That’s the premise of our website—so that you can just come on there and trust what you’re buying that researched and assessed I can.
I do try to keep things updated and change if need be what we’re stocking and what we’re offering for people.
DEBRA: I would like to ask you particularly because you weren’t motivated by a health concern where you had some kind of chemical injury or had some other illness like cancer or something where it’s known that there’s a connection with toxic chemical exposure. What was it that motivated you as an average consumer? I heard you say that you’ve just always been interested in these things. But it’s so unusual for someone to do as much as you have that doesn’t have a reason, an urgent reason like “I need to get well.”
JOY WICKS: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I think, for me, I was concerned about my health and my family’s health even though we weren’t suffering from any particular illness or allergies or chemical sensitivities.
So, for me, I can’t say exactly what it was. It felt more intuitive maybe, that my body just wanted to know these things. And I’ve learned a lot more about that. Having gone more natural, you meet a lot of people that are into intuitive types of therapies and trainings and things.
And I really think it was just something that I felt led to do, for lack of a better way to put it. It was a natural path that my mind and my body and my spirit, however you want to put it, all kind of felt led to start following down.
And then, as I’ve said earlier, once I opened up Pandora’s box, it was like, “Wow!” I couldn’t stop.
I even got to a point where—I like to bring this up because I know a lot of my customers mentioned the same sort of issues—you can actually get to a bad place with that information, where you become depressed to think that everything is so toxic in the world and that there are no good products.
DEBRA: Right! But you solved that. We can’t say there are no good products because you found them.
We’re going to talk more about this after the break. My guest is Joy Wicks. She’s the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com where she reviews the toxic chemicals found in consumer beauty products and finds the safe ones so you don’t have to do that research.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Joy Wicks, the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com. And Joy was interested in make-up and concerned about toxics, so she started reading labels to find beauty products that did not contain toxic chemicals.
Joy, I’m looking on the home page of your website. And you have a list of what you won’t find in the products that you carry. So tell us something about the ingredients and their toxicity and what you think are some of the most important ingredients for people to avoid in personal care products.
JOY WICKS: Certainly! We have that list that’s right there on the home page that you’re talking about, a bulleted list that tells the things you won’t find.
We also have under the categories on the sidebar (on the left-hand side of our website), if you go down, there’s actually a little article thing on why natural, why it’s important, but there’s one that says The Ingredients to Avoid. We even recently updated it in the fall of 2012. And that will give a little more in-depth list for people and actually give some of the reasons behind why the ingredients are bad versus just listing them. It’ll give a little more detail for customers.
DEBRA: I just click them. I see that. This is a really good list. Let’s talk about a few of those because some people are listening and don’t have their computers in front of them.
But before we do, I just want to make the point that there are several ways that toxic chemicals can get into your body. And people usually think of, if you eat or drink something with toxic chemicals, that that’s the worst. But in fact, what you put on your skin is actually worse than if you were to drink something or eat something. When something goes into your body and goes in through your stomach and intestines, you’ve got fats and proteins and food that mix with it before it actually goes into your body, into your bloodstream. But with something that you put on your skin, it goes straight into your blood in seconds.
And so, I consider a toxic chemical going on your skin to be even more hazardous than any other way it can go in your body except for breathing. Well, I would say: skin, one; breathing, two; and ingestion, number three.
JOY WICKS: I would totally agree with you. I would totally agree.
DEBRA: Yeah, if people are concerned about what’s in their drinking water or food additives and you’re not paying attention to what you’re putting on your skin, pay attention to what you’re putting on your skin. This is so, so, so important. I can’t emphasize it enough.
So, tell us, Joy, some of the things. You’ve got a long list here, so pick out some that you think from your research are the most important.
JOY WICKS: Okay. I’m going to bring up some that are what I call “greenwashing” ones that you’ll see the most, the brand that claim to be natural.
DEBRA: Good idea!
JOY WICKS: The big thing right now is for brands to say they’re paraben-free. And a paraben is a chemical preservative, for those that don’t know this, that is a hormone disruptor. It’s linked to all sorts of toxicity issues in the human body. And it’s in most products—methylparaben, propylparaben. The word will just be a chemical name that ends with “paraben.”
And a lot of people are learning about that. So now you’re going to see all these brands coming out with paraben-free products. But what they’re doing is a lot of them are using things that are really not any better as a preservative. It’s just not a paraben.
And a couple of those things that you’re going to see, one is phenoxyethanol. That is in a lot of products. They use other names for it too like optiphen. There are different names they kind of trick you with in case you already are learning about phenoxyethanol. It’s really where a lot of these companies are hoping the consumer isn’t educated on the ingredients and won’t question what they’re doing.
But it is in natural products quite a bit. It is carcinogenic. It’s toxic. It may not mimic estrogen in the body, but it has other toxicity and carcinogenic properties to it. So you want to avoid phenoxyethanol.
The other one is germole or germaben. They will contain things like the phenoxyethanol or propylene glycol. Propylene glycol is a penetration enhancer. And that is in a lot of the deodorants, even the ones that claim to be natural. It’s in toothpaste, lotions. It’s in a ton of products. I mean there’s too many to name that have propylene glycol in it.
Japanese honeysuckle is the one that a lot of the popular brands right now that are touting themselves as natural are using as a preservative. And there have been studies out there showing that it does mimic hormones in the body much like parabens.
And so, if you’re putting it in there to replace parabens, you’re really not changing the product and making it any healthier for the consumer. And the customers don’t know that. You see something like Japanese honeysuckle on the label, and it just sounds sweet and natural and harmless. And it’s really sad that people just aren’t aware of it.
And then, fragrance is a big one for me because that’s one that a lot of brands sneak in. A lot of soapmakers—and sometimes, I don’t even know the people that handcrafts them. I don’t think they do it deliberately. I think sometimes, in their cases, they’re not even educated well about the difference between an actual scented oil…
DEBRA: I think that that’s a very important point to make. I think that it’s not that a lot of people are being malicious. It’s that they just don’t know.
JOY WICKS: That’s true. Sometimes, that does happen with companies just like with GMO’s and food and things where they’re deliberately not wanting to change things and hide information. But I do think a lot of the times too that some of the people that are making these products or selling these products are just not educated enough themselves to know the things that they’re putting in there.
And synthetic fragrance is a bad one because it can contain thousands of different chemicals, not just pthalates in it. And a lot of companies are using pthalate-free fragrance oils and thinking that that’s enough, thinking that that allows them to label their soap or their lotions as all natural. And in reality, that isn’t an all-natural product. They should be using essential oils and CO2’s and things like that to scent a product if they truly want it to be 100% natural.
So, in our shop, we don’t allow synthetic fragrance. All of our vendors that we purchase products from are claiming to use actual essential oils or some of them use organic flavor oils so that we can offer some fun flavors that you can’t find in an essential oil because there’s a company out there that provides those. And they’re USDA certified organic.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Joy Wicks who’s the owner of NaturalJoyBeauty.com. And she has done all the legwork of reading all the labels and finding out the toxic chemicals and finding the cosmetics and personal care and beauty products that are the least toxic that she can find. I was just looking at her site during the break, and she even has toxic-free nail polish.
And so, Joy, you’ve got so many products. Let’s talk about some of them.
JOY WICKS: Sure!
DEBRA: So, nail polish, there’s no toxic chemicals in it?
JOY WICKS: No. Now, on our website, we’ll tell people it’s not 100% natural because there isn’t a hundred percent natural nail polish. You still have to have some acrylic in it. But they have removed all of the things like toluene and the pthalates and the formaldehyde.
Now, one thing you’ll find too, out on the market, there’s a lot of nail polishes now claiming to be 3-free or 5-free. What they mean when they say that is that they don’t have those things that I just mentioned. They’re the three big ones. Some of them will even go as far as to remove five of the main chemicals that cause that horrible smell and toxicity to nail polishes.
But those 3- and 5-free nail polishes will still smell bad. They still have that polished solvents now. And they still contain a lot of chemicals in them, whereas the ones that we carry are all water-based. And the water-based polishes are a lot safer. They don’t contain any of those smelly products. They’re great for people with allergies and sensitivities to the scent. And really, the only unnatural ingredient in them is the acrylic that helps it to stick to your nail.
But the coloring used are all natural. They’re primarily water-based. And there’s a couple of different brands that we carry right now and offer for the consumer.
DEBRA: Yes, I am constantly looking at nail polish. And I think that you’ve done a great job at choosing the least toxic ones available for people who want to wear nail polish.
For myself, I still wouldn’t put acrylic on my nails. But I think that if somebody wants to wear nail polish, I think you’ve done a fabulous job at choosing one that removes the most toxic things.
JOY WICKS: Thank you. And that’s all you can really do when it comes to nail polish because, really, the only other option are some of those natural buffing kits that someone can use and try to buff and do the shine to their nails.
DEBRA: Right!
JOY WICKS: But other than that, really, the ones that we’ve chosen, the Environmental Working Group has their rating system. And for the most part, I usually agree with their ratings—not always on products. I still try to research above and beyond just using their website. But they’re a good starting point.
The Aquarella that we carry, that is the safest rated nail polish even with them, with the EWG. And then, also, like the Kiki brand that we carry—and there are some others that we don’t carry that are good too like HoneyBee Gardens and SunCoat Naturals. Those are a couple of other good water-based brands. And they rate just slightly higher than Aquarella. Aquarella was the cleanest. And the cleanest of the Aquarella would be the conditioner, the clear polish. If someone is extremely concerned, that would be the lowest as far as the ratings there on the toxicity scale with the EWG.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve done a good job on that.
So, tell us about, of all the beauty products and cosmetics, what do you think is the most important one or the most important few that people should be concerned about and find an alternative for besides nail polish. I would say nail polish is the most toxic one.
JOY WICKS: Yeah, it’s pretty toxic. But also, women cover their—not all women, but there’s a good chunk of women in our society that wear foundation. You’re covering your entire face with that all day long. If I had to pick out a make-up, mascara is probably going to be a little less on the scale because mascara, especially if you get it taken off at night before you go to bed so that it’s not sitting on your skin (the residue of it isn’t sitting there overnight), mascara is sitting on your lashes, for instance.
Even though I think it’s important to change, it’s not my top priority.
But foundations, the eye shadows, the things that lay on your skin for hours, those are the things that I worry about. Lotions are big because you’re covering a massive amount of your skin, your largest organ of your body, with it. And obviously, you do absorb those chemicals as we know because even the drug companies and things make medications that are absorbable—topical application medications—because they know that it will get into your skin.
DEBRA: …and patches.
JOY WICKS: Yeah, and the patches, exactly. It’s the same thing with putting lotion on. If it has bad ingredients in it, you’re going to absorb that over a really large part of your body.
And I think shampoos and things like that are really good too—and soap—because you’re covering yourself with those while you’re in the shower. And yes, you’re rinsing them off, but they’re on your body long enough. And most people shower everyday. So, those are things that, on a regular, you’re absorbing.
I think toothpaste is another one because we all pretty much brush our teeth two or three times a day—or should be. And there’s a lot of things in our toothpaste too. So it does go beyond just even the make-up. We have a lot of different body care products that are on our website.
He toothpaste we carry, you could honestly swallow it, and it wouldn’t even do any harm to your body because there’s just none of the toxic ingredients or the fluoride or any of those things in it.
DEBRA: Yeah, I was just looking at your homepage, and you have a video on your homepage right now. What’s the brand? It’s called Earth Paste, amazingly natural toothpaste. I didn’t try that actually yet, but it looks fabulous. It looks very natural.
JOY WICKS: It’s great. And their video is really funny. They’ve got a cute, little spoof of a video that they did to keep it light and to show humor, but also educate the consumer about the things that are in toothpaste.
That’s just one of those things a lot of people don’t think about. They don’t think twice about what they’re brushing their teeth with. And the dentists and everybody else are telling you you need the fluoride and you need these different brands.
You know, triclosan, that antibacterial agent, is one of the things that they’re putting in all the antibacterial soaps and things.
They’re now introducing that into a lot of the toothpaste like the Colgate Total thing.
DEBRA : Oh, my God!
JOY WICKS: And customers don’t realize that. When you see the commercials where they show how someone’s breath stayed fresh for 12 hours, it’s because they’re putting antibacterial agents in there. And so it’s not bad enough that we’re already absorbing it through our skin with all the hand soaps out at places or that people are bringing into their homes, but you’re also absorbing it through things like your toothpaste. They’ve put it in deodorants and things too.
Dateline had a report. We had it posted on our Facebook page and shared it with our customers. But they did a report where one of their producers actually did her blood test prior to doing her report to check for toxic chemicals in her body. And she did do some changes in how she heated up things in plastic containers and micowaves and stuff. But one of the things she did was she changed the make-up that she was wearing. And her levels were really high in BPA and pthalates and all sorts of chemicals. She changed her make-up and stopped heating things up in certain products. She then did her blood test, and her levels were down significantly just by making a few changes.
DEBRA: Yeah, BPA actually doesn’t stay in your body very long. And so if people have high BPA levels, it’s because they’re being continuously exposed. You just stop using it. And within a week or less, you won’t have some of the BPA in your body.
And that affects your endocrine system.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Joy Wicks from NaturalJoyBeauty.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be back after this message.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is Joy Wicks, owner of Natural Joy Beauty where she has done the leg work of looking at all the ingredients and studying which ones are toxic and not toxic and choosing the products that do not contain toxic chemicals. She has everything from cosmetics to facial care, hair care, an apothecary, baby and mom, coconut-free products, gluten-free products, vegan products, laundry and cleaning products.
There’s just so many things that you can use basically for household and personal care on her site where she’s already done the work to find the toxic chemicals and choose products that don’t have them.
Joy, this is our last segment. Is there anything that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t talked about?
JOY WICKS: Well, I just think a good thing that I want people to know—I brought it up earlier in the show—about how it can be really overwhelming once you do open up to educating yourself and to learn about things. It can be really scary trying to find products, and overwhelming.
And I like to tell people to take it a day at a time, a product at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to make the transition to where you just are in a panic mode. Understand that each thing you eliminate, each toxic product and ingredient that you eliminate out of your daily routine, is going to be beneficial for you, to realize that that’s all going to add up in the end, and that it’s okay if you can’t afford to change everything all at once. Baby steps works just fine.
If you can afford the luxury of just learning about things and changing all of your products, that’s great. Do it! But for a lot of people, that’s not practical. And I think they need to realize that.
Another thing we like to do on our particular website is we do carry samples of a lot of the products too, so that customers and can really try things before they buy the full size and make sure it’s the right fit for them, the right color for them.
DEBRA: That’s great, yeah.
JOY WICKS: In the case of all of those with chemical sensitivities and allergies, they can test for allergies and things with the product because even natural things, you can obviously be allergic to. You mentioned that we have coconut-free products.
That was one I was not aware, people with coconut allergies. There are people with that allergy, and they can’t use commercial products because those chemicals are coconut-based. But then, they go to the natural products, and they’re all containing coconut oil in the soaps and things.
So, we found vendors who make products that don’t contain any coconut oil for those people that need that.
DEBRA: Yes, you’ve got a lot of these things covered.
I agree with you that people should take just two things one by one because it can be overwhelming. I know in my particular case, once I discovered that toxic chemicals in my environment were making me sick, I just wanted to get rid of them all at once—and I did. I just went through my house and I took out everything that I could identify that was toxic which left me with kind of an empty house.
But then I had to find products. And when I was doing this back in 1978, it was very much, polyester was the most popular thing. We didn’t have all those natural products that we have now in 1978. And to even find something like a bar of soap, back then, people were using ivory soap because it was the purest stuff that existed, but Ivory is very highly scented with synthetic fragrance. But still, it was the most natural product you could find in 1978 when I started
So, we’ve come a long way. There are so many products that are available now that it’s not a matter of them not being available, but a matter of people choosing them and finding the ones that worked best for them.
There’s a lot of reasons why a lot of products need to exist, because everybody has their own individual preferences and sensitivities. But you’ve given a really good selection. And I think that a lot of people will be able to find exactly what it is they need on your site.
I can’t say enough good things about what you’ve done, Joy. You’ve done a really great job.
JOY WICKS: Well, thank you, Debra. I appreciate that. And you were, as I mentioned before, a big part of my journey in the beginning too. And throughout the years, your website has been a great resource. I always tell people about it because there’s so much valuable information on there that can help change the things that they’re using, not just in their bodies, but in their homes.
DEBRA: Thank you. So, I think the question that I would like to ask you personally is tell us about especially mineral make-ups. There’s a lot of new mineral make-ups on the market. Are there ingredients in the mineral make-ups that we should be watching out for?
JOY WICKS: There are. Bismuth oxychloride is one that a lot of people are sensitive to. It’s not necessarily toxic, but it is one that can cause sensitivities. It’s in the major brands (without naming names) that most people see on infomercials and in the mall. They use bismuth oxychloride; a lot of the popular brands do.
A lot of the ones you’re going to find at your drugstore, the traditional brands of make-up, have all come out with their own versions of mineral make-up. They’re putting parabens, they’re actually still using paraben preservatives which you don’t need in a dry mineral make-up, so I’m not sure why they’re putting it in there. And they’re using talc. That’s something that we avoid in the products we carry.
A lot of the other issue are the nano-particles. You may hear about that where the particles are so small that they’re getting into the bloodstream, and they’re easier to be inhaled and cause problems for the body. So we like to even offer options with that.
None of the products that we sell are nanoparticles or contain nanoparticles, I should say. But we do offer pressed and cream make-up and things like that for those that are just extremely concerned about inhaling any of the powder products. We do have options for them to help minimize inhalation or take it away by being a cream eye shadow or cream blush or cream foundation.
But the bismuth oxychloride is a big one. As I’ve said, those other companies are putting in lots of the same chemicals that they’re using in their regular liquid foundations and things. They’re just putting that in the mineral make-up for whatever reason.
And so, the other thing to watch out for is that, even if you get into a mineral make-up line—a lot of times, the powders may be fairly safe. But start looking when they have primers and mascaras and things that are cream or liquid-based.
Watch out for those things we talked about earlier like the phenoxyethanol and the Japanese honeysuckle extract, and synthetic fragrance, because a lot of times, they sneak those things into those products , and you don’t realize it. You just kind of buy into the line because it’s mineral make-up. And the primary products like the facial, make-up and blushes and things are safe—or fairly safe ingredient-wise. And you don’t realize that when you start buying the other thing from the brand, they may not be what you’re actually looking for.
DEBRA: Yeah! Once of the things that I’ve realized as I talk to manufacturers, but also I talk to people who are looking at regulations and various things. But there’s an awareness level that needs to change.
And you and I and others are all working on this because it needs to change on the consumer level, but it also needs to change on the manufacturing level and on the regulatory level because manufacturers, they aren’t a lot of manufacturers, who really understand the issues as well even say you and I understand them.
JOY WICKS: True!
DEBRA: Yet they are. We need to be really focusing on those manufacturers who do understand and are trying to do their best, and are producing the purest products, and then bring along the other manufacturers as well.
I can imagine from the viewpoint of a manufacturer that’s making a really toxic product, their entire income and their business are all based on producing toxic products. And maybe they didn’t know that they were toxic in the beginning (although a lot of toxic things have been known for decades, and people still use them).
But there needs to be a change. There needs to be a shift. And it needs to happen across the board where we all start learning what are the toxic chemicals and what are the non-toxic chemicals and be making the products out of those materials that are safe.
Most of the time, they’re not going to be man-made chemicals (although there are some synthetic chemicals that are not too toxic). But it’s going to be the small shift to turn around and start figuring out a new way to make things. And that needs to be supported by consumers. Consumers need to understand and want to buy the products that exist, so that we’ll continue to support that market. Wouldn’t you agree with that?
JOY WICKS: I would. And a lot of times, it’s cost because a lot of the chemicals are a lot cheaper to use than the natural, organic ingredients. But sadly, I don’t think these companies realize that consumers would gladly pay an extra dollar or two for a product if we’re going to be safer for them.
And that’s where there has to be more education. As you said, I don’t think that all of the companies are bad guys, per se, or doing it intentionally. But there are companies that are knowingly putting out toxic products just because of the cost, and so they make more money off of it.
And I think that there does have to be more awareness, more education, as you’ve said, with the companies themselves, with the consumers and consumer demand. As we’re seeing now, consumers are saying, “Hey, we want our food labeled whether or not it has GMO’s in it.” And I think the same thing is going to need to happen with the beauty industry.
Some of these companies actually produce safer products to sell in Europe and other countries, safer versions of baby washes and things like that, that they won’t sell to us in the US. And it’s all because of profit margins. And the consumers in the US don’t really understand and aren’t educated enough to ask for something different.
And so I really think that your show is a great platform for educated people. And that needs to happen.
DEBRA: Thank you. And here comes the music, and so that’s the end. Thank you so much, Joy, for being with us. Again, her website is NaturalJoyBeauty.com. If you’re looking for some beauty products, go over to Natural Joy Beauty and see what she has.
JOY WICKS: Thanks again, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Thanks for listening.
Bathroom Caulk
Question from Janice
Hi Debra- We had our bathroom gutted and redone about a year and a half ago and had 100% silicone caulk sealing the area where the tub meets the tile. I was very careful about the products used and although the silicone was very stinky for a couple of days it was fine once cured. The problem is it’s developed mildew stains and must be removed. Any ideas about what we can use? What do you think about EcoBond Kitchen Bath Plumbing. Thanks so much for your help.
Debra’s Answer
I don’t have any experience with this product, but the description looks very good.
Has anybody tried this?
Clean Soap from Vermont
My guest Larry Plesent is the Founder of Vermont Soap, which makes “100% natural and non-toxic alternatives to the chemical based personal care products now in general use, including; handmade bar soaps for sensitive skin, anti-aging products, 100% natural shower gels, castile liquid soaps and non-toxic cleaners. Most products made by Vermont Soap are certified to USDA organic standards.” We’ll be talking about Larry’s very nontoxic way of living in the Green Mountains of Vermont, toxic ingredients in soap products, and how they make their organic soap products. Larry is also a writer,philosopher, restaurateur and farmer. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/vermont-soap
If you have MCS, this is a great interview to listen to. Larry gives his story of how he became chemically injured, and how his own “reactive body” and lead him to making soap after he tried more than 70 bars of soap he couldn’t tolerate. Now he makes many soap-based products that are unscented, or scented with natural essential oils. If you’ve been unable to find bodycare products you tolerate, try these.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Clean Soap from Vermont
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Plesent
Date of Broadcast: July 08, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, even though sometimes it may seem like when you watch TV, or listen to the news, or read the newspaper, that everything is toxic.
One day, they’re talking about toxic this, and the next day, they’re talking about toxic that.
In reality, not everything in the world is toxic, and what we do on this show is talk about the natural, organic, non-toxic things that are out there that we can use, and things we can do, in order to create a non-toxic home, in order to remove toxic chemicals from our bodies, and have a happy and productive life.
Today is Monday, July 8, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to be talking about soap and personal care products. But before that, I just wanted to tell you that something I realized over the weekend.
I was shopping, and I picked up actually a box of cherries.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with cherries. But I looked at it, and I said, “Wait a minute. Do I need to buy this?” And even though I love cherries, and I really wanted to eat them, I thought, “Now, wait a minute. Is this necessary? Is this an essential thing for me to eat?”
And that was actually the first time I’d ever had that thought. Not that I hadn’t thought about the ide aof what’s really necessary, and what’s really important before, but I haven’t stopped myself from buying something before. I hadn’t put my hand on a product, and then said, “Wait, stop,” especially, something like cherries.
And I realized that what I really needed to do was pay attention first to buying the foods that were essential to my nutrition, and the health of my body, and cherries was not one of those. Certainly, cherries has nutrients, and they’re refreshing and delicious.
But it was more important for me to buy eggs, and pecans, and lettuce, and vegetable and proteins first. And then if I had money left over out of my food budget, then I could buy the cherries.
And just thinking about things like importance—of what’s the most important things that we’re spending our money on, and the most important things that we need to have in life, and buying things that are not toxic—I think, goes right at the top of the list.
And some of these products may cost a little more. I’m not even sure if the products we’re talking about today cost more, but I do know that sometimes people think about, “Well, it costs more to buy things that are non-toxic or organic.”
But it’s so worth it because the value that you get from that little extra that you’re spending is so much more. The benefit is so much more than the extra money that you’re spending.
And if you’re on a budget, like I am, just spend more on the good stuff and buy less. It’s really more important for me to buy organic soap, for example, even if I have to give up my cherries.
So keep that in mind, that there is a way for you to be purchasing the non-toxic products that you need.
Okay, so now, I’m going to introduce my guest, Larry Plesent, from Vermont Soap. He is an eclectic person. He’s a farmer, a philosopher, and the founder of Vermont Soap, and has his own experience with chemical injuries.
Hi, Larry. Are you there?
LARRY PLESENT: I’m here. Hi, Debra Lynn. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good.
LARRY PLESENT: And hello to everybody out there listening. Thanks for tuning in. Great, thank you. Thanks for this opportunity to speak with you.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us first about your own personal experience that led you to be interested in toxic issues.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, for me, I really didn’t have any choice for that matter. I was injured—and I don’t mean like I fell, but my insides were injured as a result of repeated chemical exposure in the workplace.
I was a window cleaner, and for seven years, I was the guy swinging from a rope, hanging off buildings, cleaning the windows. I thought my job was dangerous, but little did I know that my job was much safer than the cleaning chemicals I was using back then.
And so at least when I was hanging from a line—at least when I was hanging from a line, I had a safety line. If my main line should somehow get caught or compromised and cut, I had a safety backup. Everything was double back safety.
But when I was using the cleaning chemicals, there was no double back safety. So it was only the cleaning stuff.
And even back then, I was a bit of a chemist, and I made our mix of cleaning chemicals. And it was all things that I bought in the supermarket, as amazingly enough, as it was in. I’m happy to share, anybody who wants to make the stuff I made—of course, I was using a squeegee and special equipment.
But we started with water, and to that, we had a good, healthy squirt of Lemon Joy. It really works good on the windows. And then I put in a good sprinkle of Spic and Span, which is a powdered detergent—and al very powerful.
And then when it got a little colder, I would put windshield washer fluid in there, which is methanol.
Little did I know, methanol is incredibly poisonous, and not only that, but it’s linked with all of these other molecules, all these various detergent concoctions that I was cleaning the windows with. And I actually pulled it to my skin.
Even though I tried very hard to—I wore ski pants even in the summer to repel water, and all these things. They would get in my boots. And every night, my socks would be soaked.
And so literally, the source of over-absorption of detergent chemicals, and related chemicals that are found in our detergent concoctions, I absorbed them all, and along with this methanol, which created some liver damage.
So as a result, I became detergent-intolerant. And along with a host of other molecules that are just common things that we encounter all the time, common cleaning molecules, artificial colors, started irritating me. I couldn’t eat anything with artificial colors.
The list seemed to be growing.
And I had some trouble finding the words. We talked about this earlier in our pre-show discussion, as you will recall. What words do you use?
So first I started to say, “Well, I’m, kind of, sensitive. I really shouldn’t be using that.”
And they go, “Oh, he’s sensitive. That’s nice.”
I live in the country, and drive a pick-up truck. You can be tough and sensitive, but you’re not supposed to be wimpy sensitive.
So other than trying to overcome it with, say, a bigger truck, I had to figure this thing out.
And so I stopped saying I’m sensitive because it never got me anywhere. I go in a restaurant and I say, “Well, I’m a little sensitive. Could you tell me what’s in this?”
“Oh, he’s sensitive. Hey, Joe. He’s sensitive. Let me get the dishwasher out here. He’s sensitive too.”
So that didn’t get me anywhere.
And then I started saying, “Well, I’m chemically-sensitive.”
And that would either elicit this quizzical look—people look at you funny, or they’d say, “Oh, my god. Should I call 911? Should I get an ambulance waiting, so you don’t drop dead on my restaurant floor?”
So that didn’t work either.
Finally, after many years of this, I finally hit on a phrase that really, I think, described my condition and the condition of many other people, who have been injured by environmental exposure. And I called that having a reactive body.
And somehow when I say, “Sorry, I can’t be in the cleaner aisle in the supermarket because I have a reactive body,” and sometimes, people might look at you, “I’ve never heard that before.”
There’s none of the strangeness of the other two, and I don’t have to deal with my tough guy image being tarnished by being too sensitive to the cleaning products aisle, the toilet paper aisle.
DEBRA: Well, I think that reactive body actually is a good term because one’s body is reacting to the toxic chemical exposure, and so that’s very accurate, in terms of what’s going on.
LARRY PLESENT: Absolutely. And so my own journey, the first things, it started with, I said, “I must be allergic to these things.” I didn’t understand the mechanism—
DEBRA: But it’s not an allergy.
LARRY PLESENT: It’s not an allergy. Allergy is an antibody reaction to a protein invader. What’s this lovely music?
DEBRA: This lovely music is telling us that it’s time for a break, and that we’ll have to continue your story in a few minutes.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, stay tuned to hear the rest of this.
DEBRA: Stay tuned to hear the rest of the story, yes. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap. And we’ll be back after this. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Larry Plelsent from Vermont Soap. And we were talking before the break about how Larry became interested in toxic chemicals as a window cleaner, breathing toxic fumes.
And so Larry, tell us something about—what did you do? You then created your own non-toxic world in Vermont, yes?
LARRY PLESENT: Well, I did. And I had no choice for the matter. Just to back the journey up, the first thing I did is I went to a doctor. And I said I’m sensitive. And they just looked at me funny.
DEBRA: And you said, “But here’s my truck.”
LARRY PLESENT: Here’s my truck. That didn’t work. So then they did a bunch of scratch test, I think, 120 scratches on my back. And that’s a good way to tell if you’re allergic to something, and I found out something very useful. I found out that along with at least 40% of the population of this country, I am highly allergic to dust and dust mites.
That was very useful information. And it helps me every day to avoid dust and dust mites.
And I did learn that dust mites also—up here in Vermont, we go all summer when it’s nice and warm. We don’t fire up our heating systems, whatever they might be. But when they turn on in about mid-September or so, people have very strong skin reactions, and they get very irritated, and you can see that their faces are very rash-y.
And that’s because the dust mites are burning off the heating system.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that.
LARRY PLESENT: Now, whatever you use whether it’s a stove pipe with dust on it, whether it’s a heater, baseboard heater, or a heater that gets blown, blowing air around. Whatever you have, wipe it down with a damp rag, and get that dust off of it, and you’ll have a much easier time.
Also, I always recommend opening all the doors and windows, turning the heat on, and going out, and having something healthy. Do something healthy for yourself. And then come back and blow all that air out of there. And then you’ll have burned it off.
That’s a good tip, kids. So remember that when heating season comes around in about three or four months.
So that was the start of it. And then I came to realize that regardless of the mechanism, I had become intolerant to all detergent chemicals, and most colors, and artificial flavors. There’s a whole host of things. There were some preservatives I couldn’t quite prove that I had become sensitized to.
Some of this, it is very hard to figure out.
And so I became very depressed because I couldn’t use any bar soaps, I couldn’t use any liquid soaps, I couldn’t use any detergents, I couldn’t use any hand cleaner, I couldn’t use any laundry detergents, or any laundry products.
I get a pair of clothes, and I just wear them endlessly. My social life was in the gutter. No one wanted to hang around with me. I didn’t smell good because I couldn’t bathe regularly.
It was horrible. I’m telling you, I was almost suicidal, Debra Lynn.
And so that lasted about three days. And being that I’m an optimistic person, I said, “Well, if I can’t use these things, there must be other people like me out there. And since I’m an amateur chemist, I’m going to figure out what works, and how to do it, and I’ll make a business out of it. Maybe I could make sure, at the very least, that I’ll have what I need and maybe make enough money on the side as well, to at least feed myself and my family.”
And that was almost 21 years ago. Vermont Soap has grown. We’re not a giant, mega company, but we have two-dozen employees. And our mission is to replace yucky stuff with yummy stuffy.
And we go right through the catalog, replacing items as best we can.
So the first thing I did was—there was no soap of any kind I could use. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I tried, literally, over 70 bar soaps. And each one gave me a rash. It was pitiful.
One day, I picked up this bar of handmade soap, and it happened to have some goat’s milk in it. I was able to use it. And not only that, within a few days, my contact dermatitis of eight years cleared up.
And so I said, “Well, there’s either something miraculous about goat’s milk,” in which case, great, we’ll get some goats, or, “There’s something miraculous about farm soap,” as they called it because it was this bar that was made on the farm. And I said, “What kind of soap is this? It’s soft, and strange, and looks like cheese.”
And they said, “Well, it’s farm soap, and we put goat’s milk in it.”
So I knew right away that this is either an ingredient story—goat’s milk is magic, or it’s a process story—farm soap, the process of making soap the farm soap way is magic.
Well, it turned out that there was nothing magic about goat’s milk, and I was glad because I was smelling like goat.
Again, my social life was being affected by smelling like a goat. And I didn’t really like the way it felt.
But I did like the way the farm soap felt on me.
I said, “I know. I’m going to perfect this method of making ‘farm soap’” which we now call cold process or handmade soap. And this is before 14,000 little companies popped up, and people started making it.
We were, in fact, the third actual company—meaning, more than one person, in the United States, manufacturing this kind of product.
And I always got into it, not to make a few bars and sell it at the craft fair, but to really make, literally, a million bars a year.
And so we got going on that. In about seven or eight years into it, I started getting interested in liquid soap products. I have a family of vegetable oils—meaning, coconut oil, in particular, and other oils, turned into soap.
Sometimes that’s called castile soap, which is confusing because sometimes bar soaps are called castile soap. I can’t figure out why.
DEBRA: What does castile mean? I thought it meant that it was coconut, or that it’s Spanish or something.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, both are almost correct. So in the region of La Castilla-La Mancha—anybody who really speaks Spanish will know immediately that I’m faking it on my accent. But in that region of Central Spain, there were a lot of olive trees growing. And that region became very famous for a mild, liquid soap made primarily from olive oil with a little bit of coconut oil. I think it was about 15% coconut oil to harden the soap.
And this was the detergent. This was the liquid soap. This was the laundry soap. This is the hair shampoo. This is what those who could afford it, the very wealthy and privileged and royal Europe—this is what they used.
So it was very famous. It’s mild. Eventually, it was a bad year, and instead of making all out of olive oil, they started using mostly coconut oil, and a little olive oil. And that became what’s now known as castile liquid soap.
We turned that into a number of products. We learned to turn it into a thickened shower gel, or a spray for your surfaces, a pet shampoo, or a foaming hand soap. And that’s the basis of most of our foaming liquid products.
DEBRA: And I’m going to cut you off for the break before this note of music is expired. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking with Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap, and we will continue after the break.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap.
Larry, I’m looking at your website, and you have so much information here, so many products. Most of them, you say, are USDA organic-certified, which is great. I’d like to see all those organic ingredients.
I’m especially interested in what you’re saying about your soap and different skin types. As I’m looking at this, I’m thinking—well, I’ve heard of this before—skin types. I know that I have oily skin. But I think that my skin has changed over my lifetime. And now that I’m older, which is only a relative thing, I think my skin is drier, number one.
But how would I know which kind of soap to use on what kind of skin type?
LARRY PLESENT: Well, we have everything, hopefully, clearly marked out. And on our website, to help you do that, we have everything sorted by skin type in the shopping cart. Actually, we sort three different ways, which is like having three shopping carts in one, so you can sort by product type, product category or by skin type.
You’re absolutely right, Debra Lynn. Our bodies change so much, obviously, when we’re born, when we’re infants, we’re very different than when we we’re toddlers, very different than pre-teenagers or teenagers, young people, as we go through life, middle-aged, the various stage is there, and become, finally, respected elders in our community.
Our bodies change. And the products we need change.
So one of the main things to think about is the stringency, and the stringency is related to pore size. So people who have skin pores that are genetically very tiny will have less oily skin. People who have larger pores, like me from the Southern Mediterranean region, from my ancestry, and I have larger pores, darker skin, I tend to burn, I tend towards oily.
As I got older, that of course, faded away in my 20’s, and I began using products that were less astringent.
And so one way to adjust for stringency is essential oils. Some essential oils, like peppermint oil, very, very effective at closing down pores. So you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you need to cool down—peppermint oil soap will close those pores and dry you up.
But Debra, if you use that in, say, Vermont winter, where you’re taking that outside air and heating it up 50-degrees or more, and drying it out, you’ll find that a moisturizing bar, such as the butter bar for dry skin, is a really good way to go.
DEBRA: So it might depend on your environment, as well as on your skin type.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right. Your age, what is going on around you—
DEBRA: Anybody might want to have a variety of different types of soap for different environmental conditions.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right.
DEBRA: And that you would be aware of how your body is being affected by its environment.
LARRY PLESENT: That’s right. That’s exactly right. It’s part of your first aid kit, your non-toxic first aid kit for life’s little inconveniences.
DEBRA: I haven’t even really thought of that before, but I really like that and it makes sense that our bodies are interacting with the environment all the time, and the different things are going on, and that we’re usually not aware of it that people think that you buy one thing, and one product, and you figure it out, and that’s good forever.
But I can see that these different environmental conditions would cause your skin to need different kinds of buffers or different kinds of support. And I haven’t ever considered that.
As I’m saying that, I’m thinking, “Gee, that doesn’t sound very smart.” But I think it just has to do with—lack of education.
LARRY PLESENT: Well, mostly, they’re obvious once you see—it’s very obvious to you now. Now, you’re like, “How come I never saw that? I actually should have maybe something like a lemongrass for when I’m working outside, in that Florida weather.”
“But sometimes I feel dry or maybe I’m bathing a second time because I want to go out later. And I want something that’s not as astringent.”
And these are very simple. You’re not spending a lot of money. Vermont Soap products are incredibly inexpensive, plus we have a customer loyalty program. You can save 5% with every order. And we run specials.
We wanted to be affordable to live naturally. You shouldn’t have to be a Rockefeller to eat healthy and use healthy products. That just doesn’t make sense.
At Vermont Soap, we cut out the middleman, and you can go right to the factory.
DEBRA: It says that if you sign up for the newsletter that you can get specials for up to 50%. So it’s worth it to sign up for your newsletter, for people to sign up for your newsletter, and find out when they can get these specials.
The thing that I wanted to say is that in the past, until I just had this stroke of genius realization, what I would do is I would pick my soaps by what the ingredients were, like if they had goat’s milk in it, or something. But I’d also pick them on what kind of fragrance because It’s really wonderful for me to get up in the morning, and have a shot of peppermint in the soap.
And my favorite combination—
LARRY PLESENT: Well, you tend towards oily, so that makes perfect sense.
DEBRA: But I wasn’t doing it for oily skin. It was just that I like having peppermint.
LARRY PLESENT: But your body knows.
DEBRA: The body knows, yes.
LARRY PLESENT: Your body knows. So for example, let’s say I’m doing some demos or something like that, and I have different—say, we’re demoing bar soap products. And I go, “Well, I just want to show you, well, smell them.”
And I find that 9 out of 10 times, people are attracted to the scents that are proper for their skin type. And we’re talking about real essential oils. We’re not talking about fake-y fake scents.
DEBRA: So you’re putting real—I’m just assuming you’re putting real essential oils in your products.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, it takes a room full of lavender to make a gallon of lavender oil. So that’s very concentrated.
DEBRA: And you also have unscented, if you want unscented ones.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, that’s a big, big part of our business. And not only do we have unscented bar soaps, but we also have—our most popular liquid soap is unscented castile liquid soap. It’s very, very simple.
We also have a new zero VOC cleaner concentrate that’s coming up, I think, within two months, we’ll have it in the marketplace. We have the spray cleaner already, and the concentrate in gallon forms, coming up right behind it.
At Vermont Soap, we release new products about every three or four months, which is pretty unusual. It takes a lot to move a new product through the testing. Some products, we started working on nine, ten years ago, and now, they’re just now in the marketplace.
But we’ve moved into—as I’ve said, we started with bar soaps, and then liquid soap products, and many different kinds of liquid soap products. We also do organic oral care products, and some really very exciting anti-aging products—which my wife and I are using, by the way.
DEBRA: We’ll hear more about all these products when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
My guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap, and he’s at VermontSoap.com. You can go to their website, and see all of the different products that they have, which we’re going to hear more about after the break.
DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Larry Plesent from Vermont Soap. And we’ve been talking about all of his organic soap and personal care products.
Larry, tell us more about some products that you haven’t told us about yet because you’ve got so many things on your website.
LARRY PLESENT: I’m a compulsive formulator. I can’t not formulate just like you can’t stop writing books.
DEBRA: I can’t stop writing books.
LARRY PLESENT: I’m working on my fourth, but you’ve got me topped with six, except you publish yours, and I just collect mine. But the one I’m working on now is the Handbook for the Reactive Body. I’ve got a good dent in that. So stay tuned. Maybe sometime in the next year, a year and a half—
DEBRA: Well, you know, Larry, when you’re ready to publish, I’m learning all about self-publishing and how to do it easily and inexpensively. And I’m about to have a lot more books because it’s now the tools are there for people to create really high quality books, and have the distribution be easy.
LARRY PLESENT: But the editor is the key—having a good editor is absolutely key.
DEBRA: I’m a great editor. I’d love to edit your books.
LARRY PLESENT: You edit my books, and I’ll edit your books.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk.
LARRY PLESENT: But that’s another show. I was thinking during the break that it’s really important to pass on very useful tidbits that people can use right now. If you’re listening to this show, you probably have a reactive body, whatever you’ve called it.
And by the way, having a reactive body will make your emotions more reactive. So it’s really important to remember that when you have a reactive body, when you’re exposed to your triggers, it’s like having body asthma. It’s like a body has a reaction, and then it’s a flare-up.
And it’s important to stop and go, “Okay, I’m having a flare-up. I’m having a flare-up.”
And then you’ve got to reach in your toolkit. And it’s very important that you learn things all around you that help reduce your symptoms during a flare-up because it’s very dangerous to be walking around all flared up. You might end up acquiring new reactive triggers because you’re in such a hyper-reactive phase.
DEBRA: Tell us some of the things because I do know that a lot of people with reactive bodies are listening to this show. So tell us some of the things that you’ve done that were successful.
LARRY PLESENT: Let me count the ways. Rule #1, fresh air, fresh water, and lots of it. So very often, my triggers, I walk in, and somebody says, “Oh, look. I’ve got this whole new computer system. Isn’t it great?”
And they just pulled it out of the crate, and it’s off-gassing all the plastic, and the mold releases—when plastic is released from a mold, there are mold releasers that some of that is still on the outside.
And I’m breathing all of that stuff, and I feel my knees start to buckle.
So the first thing I do, and I learned this from my friend, Jimmy Brown. God, I love you, Jimmy. Thank you for this one. Jimmy works with toxic stuff all day long. I said, “How is it you’re still alive?”
He says, “I practice not breathing.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “As soon as the slightest, that first molecule of scent enters in my nose, I stop breathing.”
He said, “I know I’ve got about 30, 40 seconds.” I know what I’m doing, and I leave the room.
I said, “Okay.”
So I practiced not breathing. That gives you a few seconds, and then leave the room. So you need lots of fresh air, and you need lots of fresh water.
Just as with regular asthma, if you have this “body asthma,” if you have a reactive body, drinking lots and lots of water will reduce your symptoms every time, right away—fresh air, fresh water.
DEBRA: And it needs to be pure water, so you’re not drinking water pollutants.
LARRY PLESENT: Yes. Don’t drink plastic water. For example, if I’m feeling reactive and I drink bottled water, it makes it worse because I’m triggered from all petroleum products. Plastic, plastic water, that’s all bad stuff.
Now, if you have to drink plastic water, drink the less expensive stuff in the #2 milk jug plastic, the ones that come in those gallon jugs. It costs about a tenth as much as the fancy bottle. That’s what you want. Get that stuff because #2 plastic is—we’ll use your phraseology—less less toxic than #1 plastic.
From my perspective, #1 plastic is the one that should be banned, not the bisphenol #7 carbonate plastic, which is rarely used. Rarely used.
But the most commonly used plastic is #1, and that is PET, which is made of phthalates, P-T-H, phthalates with PTH. P-H-T-H-L-A-T-E-S. So phthalates.
And phthalates are estrogen mimickers. If you want to be filled up with estrogen, and then just keep on doing it.
DEBRA: For people who don’t know, you can look at the bottom of the bottle, and it will tell you what the number is—these numbers that Larry is talking about, you can just look on the bottom of the bottle.
LARRY PLESENT: And I’ll give you a real good tip that was taught to me by a Ph.D. biologist who runs a cancer research laboratory. And what she told me was the more flexible the plastic, and the clearer the plastic, the more off-gassing. And the amazing thing about that is they’ll off-gas into oily stuff like butter, or oil like olive oil or something that’s in a plastic container.
It’ll off-gas into alcohol, if you get cheap vodka in a plastic container.
DEBRA: So you really want to watch out. That is a very big thing to watch out for plastic containers.
Now, tell us about plastic containers because I don’t want to put you on the spot here, but you have some plastic containers.
LARRY PLESENT: I use PET containers because natural soap, especially with essential oils, does something which is called in the industry, paneling, which means they dent in. It looks like they belong in a dented can discount store.
And so we originally came out in #2 plastic, and no one bought our stuff because they all looked dented. So we came back in #1.
I’m very comfortable with that.
DEBRA: So tell us why because—
LARRY PLESENT: The phthalates are not going through your skin and poisoning you. What’s that?
DEBRA: Other soaps use PET as well, and people ask me about this. They say, “Well, should I buy soap in PET containers?”
LARRY PLESENT: Yes, you’re fine. You’re not drinking it.
DEBRA: Tell us why.
LARRY PLESENT: You’re just fine. We have seen zero evidence of any kind that buying soap or shampoo or any other external use product in your plastic bottle is going to hurt you far, far, far more important if they get it out of the food and water supply. Far beyond.
Once we’ve gotten there, and we’d figured out a way to put liquid soap in—you bring your glass bottle to the co-op and fill it up, that would be ideal. But first, get it out of your insides. That’s so much more important than what we’re talking about here.
So we’ve never seen anything to indicate that there’s anything to worry about.
Would I prefer selling it in glass? I would, but guess what? It’s soap and water and glass and naked people standing around in bare feet, not a healthy combination.
DEBRA: Let me ask you this, because I know people have their attention on this. So you use these products, and you have a reactive body, and you haven’t seen any problem using PET bottles.
LARRY PLESENT: Oh, gosh, no.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s what I wanted to know.
LARRY PLESENT: No, not at all. And we look at plastics very much. We were using a—here’s an example, which is called the drum liners. This is like a big plastic bag that sits inside a 55-gallon drum. And we were concerned that the soap might interact with the metals from where they welded up the drum.
And so we wanted to put in the plastic bag. And we wanted to buy a good plastic bag that was environmentally sound. So we bought one with recycled materials.
It turned out, the recycled bags had formaldehyde. So somebody tested our soaps and said, “Your soap isn’t clean. There’s something wrong with it.”
And I said, “What’s wrong?”
They said, “There’s formaldehyde in it.”
And we traced it back to the bags. Isn’t that crazy? That’s crazy. So that was LDHPE, a low density polyethylene.
So we switched to a bag that contained only virgin material—not recycled material. And we tested, and we tested without formaldehyde.
Unfortunately, we lost a client. We lost a client.
DEBRA: So the recycled LDHPE had formaldehyde, but the virgin LDHPE did not.
LARRY PLESENT: Did not. It might have been the brand we’ve got, whatever it was, but that’s how it tested with our soap. I don’t want to make a broad statement about every LDHPE with recycled material. But the one we got did.
And there’s no way of knowing until after the fact.
So the principle—really, I was thinking, on my drive into work today, I’m thinking about this phone call. I said, “What’s the one thing I really want our audience to walk away with?” What’s the one thing? Maybe besides my website…
DEBRA: Yes, this is the time to say the one thing because you’ve got about a minute left.
LARRY PLESENT: Okay, this is it. Here’s a handy tip from the soap man, and you can always learn more and read my blogs at www.VermontSoap.com, now on our 21st year. That’s the pitch. But what I want to leave you with is that have everything that goes onto your body and into your body must be must be medicine.
Not only is it non-toxic, it’s got to be healing and good for you, and especially if you have a reactive body. If you have a reactive body, everything has to be optimized. Everything. You can’t just eat an apple. You have to eat a super apple.
You don’t just need those phytonutrients, you need super ones.
DEBRA: I totally agree with what you’re saying because the music is going to start any second now. And I just want to reiterate what you said about the things that you use need to be not only non-toxic, but healing, because most people think there’s toxic, and there’s not toxic. But then there’s this other whole group of…
Thank you so much for being with me on this show today. It’s been a great show. You’ve been listening to Larry Plesent of Vermont Natural Soap. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Natural Clothing “Exclusive of Decoration” and the Toxicity of Dyes Used on Cotton
Update January, 2020: Read these more recent articles:
Bamboo Click-Lock Flooring
Question from SheriB
We are about to lay wood/bamboo flooring in an above ground section of the house that is a cement floor. It connects to other areas of the house that are over a full basement and have wood sub floor.
We will need to put down a 6 mil plastic vapor barrier over the concrete. We haven’t had any water come in, but want to have the preventative layer.
If we put in solid hardwood, the expense is very high because we would first have to lay a plywood sub floor about an inch high. It also would make the threshold into this area an inch or more higher than the rest of the flooring.
So we were looking into solid strand bamboo click lock flooring from US Floors. Resins are used in creating the solid strand bamboo. The flooring’s outer coating is baked in the factory the same as hardwoods. Have you had any experience with bamboo flooring?
I have severe MCS. We were opting against tile because the floor would be very cold in the winter.
Debra’s Answer
I have no personal experience with this flooring, but can’t recommend flooring made with unknown “resins.” See if you can get more information.
I understand ceramic or stone tile is cold in the winter, but it’s the safest flooring for someone with “severe MCS.”
Brand of Oven/Range that Outgasses the Least?
Question from Angelique
Any thoughts about the brand of oven/range combo that would off-gas the least and/or fastest?
Debra’s Answer
I purchased a new oven/range about five years ago. At that time, outgassing didn’t seem to be much of an issue. I purchased the one that had the best features for me.
I chose a Frigidaire gas range and have had no problems with it of any kind.
Readers, any suggestions?
