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Why Women (and Men!) of Childbearing Age Need to Detox Their Bodies Before Having Babies
My guest Vicki Latham is a board certified physician assistant, who has been working, primarily in Woman’s Health for over 30 years, delivering babies during 10 of those years. She is semi-retired and currently works in a internal medicine/family health practice, at Associates of Medicine in Stillwater, OK. Vicki has great concern about protecting the health of the pre-born, who are especially vulnerable to the effects of toxins because of their rapid development and immature functioning of their detoxification pathways while in utero. It is her passion to encourage all women of childbearing age to detoxify their body before and during pregnancy and lactation. When not spending time with the families of her 4 children, and 8 grandchildren, Vicki travels extensively throughout the U.S. and Canada, educating people on the benefits of detoxification, and healthy living choices. Vicki can be reached at 405-614-0079 or toxinclear@gmail.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Why Women (and Men!) of Childbearing Age Need to Detox Their Bodies Before Having Babies
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Vicki Latham
Date of Broadcast: May 07, 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 a lot of toxic chemicals around in all kinds of products, we don’t have to get sick from them, we don’t have to live with them, we don’t have to have them in our bodies. And that’s what we talk about on this show.
Today is Tuesday, May 7, 2013. I’m live here in Clearwater, Florida. Well, I’m live but you might be listening to the archive. And today, we’re going to talk about why you should detox your body if you’re a woman or a man of child-bearing age.
But first, I want to tell you about something that came in my e-mail. I think it was yesterday. This is why I do what I do. It was a special report from Environmental Health News. It says, “Chemicals of high concern found in thousands of children’s products.”
And what happened was a new law went into effect last September in the State of Washington that allows consumers access to a searchable online database that shows which companies reported chemicals of high concern in products made or marketed for children.
Now, this new law opened up the right to know because there are so many laws that make it possible for manufacturers to put things in products and not tell us. And so this law, which was passed a few years ago, was put into effect last September. And now, some questionnaires were sent out to various companies, manufacturers and retailers, asking them what toxic chemicals are in their products that aren’t necessarily on the label.
And now, there’s a database that has all this information.
This is a result of the Children’s Safe Product Act which shows 66 chemicals that have been linked to cancer or reproductive developmental or neurological effects in animals or people. And you can get the link to this. You can go online to my website. Actually, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and then across the top, there is a menu. And in the menu, near the left, it says, “Q&A.” And just click on “Q&A.” And today is item is right at the top of the page, Chemicals of High Concern Found in Thousands of Children’s Products. And you can read the entire article about this and the results that they found in the chemicals that they found, and how prevalent this is.
Virtually, if you’re not specifically choosing children’s toys, beds and clothing, and everything that a child uses, personal care products, if you’re not specifically choosing these to be free of toxic chemicals, there are toxic chemicals in these products that cause cancer, reproductive development and neurological effects in animals and people.
So please go take a look at that.
Now, our guest today is Vicki Latham. And Vicki Latham is a board-certified physician assistant, who has been working primarily in Woman’s Health for over 30 years, delivering babies for the past 10 years. She is semi-retired and currently works in an internal medicine family health practice in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
She’s also a grandmother and she has four children of her own, and I think, eight grandchildren; eight grandchildren, yes.
And she has discovered from her observation and study that toxic chemicals, just the ordinary toxic chemicals that we’re being exposed to every day and on these products, are greatly affecting the health of children, even before they are conceived.
And I’m going to let you explain all of this. Vicki will explain all of this to you because she has the medical training and has some research that we really need to be concerned about or conscious of. If you want to have a baby, you need to grow that baby in a clean body, and the sperm and the egg that come together to make that baby, need to not be toxic; and that it really does. I’ve read these studies too. It really does affect the health of your child throughout their lives if they are born starting with a toxic beginning.
So welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio, Vicki. I’m very, very…
VICKI LATHAM: Thanks.
DEBRA: …happy that you are here. And the first question that I have for you is, just tell us how you became interested in toxic chemical exposure, and what you observed, as a medical professional, that made you passionate about detoxing child-bearing women and men.
VICKI LATHAM: Thanks. And how I actually developed my passion for woman in childbirth began when I was pregnant with my very first daughter, Dana, back in 1971. And now, she has three precious children of her own, Marin and [McQuay], who are two and four, who are both geniuses. I’m a proud grandma.
When I was pregnant with Dana, I went to childbirth classes and I decided then that I didn’t want any unnecessary interventions or chemicals put in my body during that process. And so I had her and all four of my children without any pain medications or other medications.
Well, they were so impressed by my birth and her 10 Apgar score, which is really rare in the [inaudible 00:07:27]
DEBRA: What is an Apgar score?
VICKI LATHAM: Apgar scores are a scoring that you give to babies at one minute and five minutes that assess five different things that determine how well the baby is doing; it’s color, it’s respiration, it’s reflexes. And these things are very important in how aggressive you want to be with determining how healthy that baby is doing right from the get-go.
So 10 Apgar is your highest score than you can get. And it’s very rare in high altitudes that children can be born completely pink at one minute because of the lack of oxygen. But she was.
So they were so impressed that they asked me if I would come and teach the nurses at the hospital where I gave birth how we assist women in having unmedicated births.
And that was the beginning of my journey. And then for the past 40 years, I taught Childbirth Education classes, I counseled women on breastfeeding, then I was a licensed midwife in New Mexico for 10 years and had my own birthing center, and really worked to emphasize the importance of healthy living and nutrition to my patients. And then I went to PA School in 1990. And since then, I have been working in internal medicine, the emergency medicine, woman’s health, and also, for nine years, the Woman’s Health Practitioner at a major university, working with adolescent women as they were beginning to make very serious decisions about their sexual healthy.
And then for the past few years, I’ve been working in an internal medicine practice, helping people, they are older in life, and mostly working with one of my other fashion, which is diabetes.
And so in the course all of my experience, what I’ve come to believe is that detoxification is your first step on your journey to optimal health.
DEBRA: I agree.
VICKI LATHAM: And if we do not detoxify our young women and our future mothers before and during pregnancy, I really have a fear about this future of human beings on this planet.
So this is my passion and it’s my purpose to take this message about Environmental Toxicity and the benefits of effective, safe, easy detoxification to everyone, but especially women of child-bearing age.
DEBRA: Well, what was it that happened that made you make this switch to be so interested in toxics?
VICKI LATHAM: Well, I was actually looking for something that I was antiviral that would be natural. That’s when I discovered [inaudible 00:10:21] and it benefits in that way.
And then from that I gave the product to all of my family members and I saw such incredible, remarkable results in all of them, especially in my grandson, who had severe asthma. He has been hospitalized five times with asthma attacks, had rashes on his body. And within three weeks of taking that he was completely clear. His skin was clear, the rashes were gone, and he hasn’t had an asthma attack since then.
DEBRA: We need to go to commercial break, so we’ll be right back and talk more about that. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
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DEBRA: We’re back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with midwife, Vicki Latham. And we’re talking about why women and men of child-bearing age need to detox their bodies before they conceive and having babies.
And Vicki that was exactly the way I became interested in detox too. I took Zeolite detox products, and the result was so remarkable for me and people around me that I said, “What a minute. Why are walking around with all these toxic chemicals?”
But before we talk about what people can do to remove toxic chemicals from their bodies, tell us what specifically is the problem about environmental toxic chemicals for pregnant women, and why it’s important that they remove what’s in their body prior to conceiving.
VICKI LATHAM: Well, the one thing that we absolutely won’t inherit from our mothers are her toxin. Unless you do something to change that you are going to see those results in your babies. And when you’re pregnant, most women are worried about everything, and while some of these news might be distressing, it is also very empowering because I want to alert people to the problems but I also want to help them get a new vision for how they can have a toxin clear pregnancy and give birth to a child born clear without that inheritance of your toxin.
The CDC says that in 2001, they did a study checking the body burden. The body burden of toxin is those toxins that are left in our body after our body does its normal processes through our liver and our kidneys, and our bowel and our breath and our skin. We normally get these things out. Our bodies are very good at detoxing. But when the amount of toxins we’re exposed to becomes too high, our body stores them. And it stores them in the most inert tissue it can find, usually fat and bones.
And so they tested this in 2001, and they said the average American had about 27 toxins.
They re-tested it in 2009, and they found that it was 212. CDC also says that 10 per cent of women have mercury levels high enough to cause fetal damage.
So this is a very new and emerging issue. There are over 80,000 chemicals out there, only about 200 have ever been tested for effects on pregnancy and fetal development. And 71% of the chemicals that are on the ETA list of the 7,000 worst chemicals were only created in the past 10 years.
This is really, truly an emerging problem. And then the Environmental Working Group did a study showing that the umbilical cord blood of newborns have over 200 toxic chemicals in them; things like Teflon and flame retardant, and heavy metals and insecticides; all kinds of toxic environmental chemicals. And this study has been repeated in Europe and in other places as well.
So awareness of these issues for the general public, I think, really came about in August of 2012. I call this the tipping point for toxins.
And that was when Johnson & Johnson, and I do want to applaud them for having at least the courage for being the first, huge, multinational corporation to this, that they announced that they were going to take their endocrine-disrupting chemicals out of their baby care products. Because believe it or not, they admit it, that in things that we’ve come to accept as really part of our baby culture, the smell of baby powder that their physician representative stated that in this powder, and in the baby creams and the shampoos are chemicals that can contribute to an increased risk of premature puberty in girls, the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in boys, it can increase their risk for obesity, diabetes and behavioral issues.
They admitted this and they said that they were going to take these chemicals out of these products by 2013.
Another reason that people would like to see, on Bill Moyers & Company, in the last Saturday in April, you can watch this on CBS, there was a very articulate woman who talked about these issues. And you can go online and observe this if you’d like because really want you to become aware of this. The information about this is everywhere.
But most people live under the illusion that the industry and government is working to keep us safe. And there are many people in industry and government who do care about these issues. Our Tax Dollars at Work, there are two websites that you can check out. One is called Tox Town. Just Google that. Another is PubMed.gov. This is the Library of Congress for Medicine. And you can go in and put in anything you’re concerned about and all the medical studies will come up. And you can research this for ourselves.
But if you are pregnant, you can’t wait for years for the government to regulate these changes or for corporations to step up and begin to do the right thing regarding their toxic input that they are getting to your body. You need to have a toxin-clear lifestyle now because toxins go where the water flows and the wind blows. And you just can’t say no to toxins. They’re in what you eat, what you breathe and what you drink. And so we got to get them out of our body so that we won’t pass them to the next generation.
DEBRA: I completely agree. Now, you’ve talked to me before about epigenetics. Could you explain what that is?
VICKI LATHAM: Yes. This is a fascinating and emerging science that really does a great job in explaining the biological complexity of life. And when they did the National Genome Project, they expected that we would have millions of genes. They found out that we actually have less than 25,000 genes, but every gene has thousands of epigenetic expression. Because what distinguishes ourselves is not their gene, but it’s how the genes are switched on or switched off by epigenetics.
And I think this is a good example of how this kind of information takes a long time to get to the general public. Because I know when people first hear this, I call it a “deer and the headlights” look. People look at you like, “Are you kidding me?”
But it takes a really long time for this kind of information to come in to the general public.
There was a benchmark study at the University of Washington in 2005, showing that these epigenetic changes are passed four generations. And then there was another program in October of 2007, and a Time Magazine cover story in January 2012.
So from research in 2005 until 2012, before the general public was even aware of it, about epigenetics and what it’s doing.
DEBRA: We need to take another break, so we’ll talk about more about this after the commercial break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
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DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here today with midwife, Vicki Latham. And we’re talking about why women and men of child-bearing age need to detox their bodies before they conceive children.
Now, we were talking about genetics, Vicki, before the break. And I had a question for you. We were talking about epigenetics, which is about genes turning on and off various characteristics. I got that, right?
So I read another book. The title escapes me at the moment, but it was about food. And the author was talking about the same thing, where the environmental conditions make the genes turn on and off various things, and that you could actually improve your genes by getting proper nutrition.
And I remember when I was reading that I thought, “Well, if food can turn things on and off in your genetic make-up, then chemicals certainly could do that.” And that how many things that we think, although it’s genetic, are simply inadequate nutrition or environmental chemicals.
And I think it’s fascinating because I think that we could actually change our health overall and our bodies; the way our faces work, and how we feel, what we think, just by the things that we’re exposed to and how that affects our genes.
VICKI LATHAM: Yes, absolutely. The activity of the genetics expressions of these proteins can be disrupted by many things, and the most common things are heavy metal, industrial toxins, viruses, funguses, some medication and malnutrition. So the good news is that these codes can be switched back on or switched back off because our body wants to be healthy. It wants to function at its maximum potential if it can. And so many of these things that we used to think were genetic such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and behavioral issues, we now think they are not genetic; that they are epigenetic. And that is great news because while genetics can’t be changed, epigenes can.
DEBRA: Yes, I’m very excited about this
So tell us some things that women and men can do before, during and after conception. Well, obviously, men can’t do anything after conception to change their bodies. They can but it won’t affect the child. But what women can do before, during and after conception to clear toxic stuff out of their bodies and keep toxic chemicals out of the bodies of their developing children?
VICKI LATHAM: Well, before pregnancy, of course, you want to detoxify and you want to maximize your nutritional status. Then during pregnancy, you want to detoxify and how you do that safely, I’m going to talk about next. And then, of course, you want to maximize your nutrition with whole, unadulterated food because it will hopefully have some life in them.
A friend of mine says, “It’s not the food in your life that matters. It’s the life in your food that matters.”
And so you want to eat food that’s been alive recently. You’re building a live baby in there and you want to have healthy foods. And so Raw Food Movement has really done a lot to bring about awareness of the benefits of that.
And also that the supplements that you take be made out of food and not out of chemicals.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about that for a minute. I’d just like to talk about that for a minute because I think that most people aren’t aware, really, because they think they’re taking natural vitamins. They’re not aware that most of the actual nutrients are made from petroleum. Dead dinosaurs. And there’s a big difference between feeding your body and feeding your baby dead dinosaurs. And feeding them live nutrients that are formed by plants, from sunshine and oxygen and rain, and all of those things that make up plants.
And it’s just such a difference and so important that when you’re choosing a dietary supplement to get the best supplements that you can that are made out of whole foods.
VICKI LATHAM: Absolutely. These things all work better logistically; the enzymes have to be in tact as the catalyst to cause the chemical reaction to be correct. And things like folic acid. We all know that folic acid is important for a pregnant woman because it has been shown to reduce, virtually eliminate the risk of neural tube defects and things such as spinal bifida and cleft palate. But not as a chemical folic acid that’s made in a lab, but as folic acid naturally, as it occurs synergistically a part of the B complex.
And so eating high sources of food, primarily, green, leafy vegetables are about our best source of folic acids, mixed with the synergy of all the other b vitamins that are there. Because they all have to be present; that’s why they call it a complex. They all have to be present for them to work correctly.
So it’s very important.
And then after pregnancy, it’s just a miracle to me that we not only grow our children, and after they’re born, we continue to grow them by feeding them with our breast milk. And unfortunately, though, our breast milk is subject to toxins just like anything else.
There was a study done a few years ago where they tested the breast milk of women before and after flying in an airplane. And after the milk was tested, it has flame-retardant. She has fuel present in the milk.
So again detoxification is critical so that you don’t pass on toxins in your breast milk.
DEBRA: And it’s not just a one-time thing. It’s ongoing because we’re exposed to these chemicals, as you just said. Flying in an airplane, it changed the chemical composition of the breast milk because it had new toxic chemicals in it.
So it’s not just about doing once, it’s every day that our body naturally is detoxing itself every day. But we need to continue to help them every day because we have such a huge amount of toxic chemicals in the environment.
VICKI LATHAM: Yes, and I’m totally convinced that breast milk is still absolutely the optimal way to feed a newborn because if our milk has toxins, you can imagine the toxins that are in cow’s milk, milk that is not raised organically, it has been pasteurized for the enzymes. They’re necessary for the body to use the nutrients. And cow’s milk was designed to baby cows, not baby humans. The breast milk for each creature has been uniquely created for each of us mammals.
And so I don’t want, in any way, discourage women from breastfeeding. But you do need to detoxify your milk while you are breastfeeding.
DEBRA: Well, as you’re talking, I’m thinking that the one thing that we have the most control over is our own body. And if we’re choosing breast milk, we have more control over the quality of our breast milk than we do over any cow or any goats or any other animals. And we can do things such as eat the proper nutrition and detox our bodies so that we can produce the best breast milk possible.
And we need to take another break but we’ll be right back, and we’ll continue to talk on this subject. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
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DEBRA: We’re back on Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is midwife, Vicki Latham. And we’re talking about what women and men of child-bearing age can do to detox their bodies before conceiving a child.
And before we get back to that session, I just want to mention, at the top of the hour, I was talking about this new collection of information gathered about toxic chemicals that are found in children’s products. And these same toxic chemicals that are in these children’s products, and shouldn’t be there, are also in our bodies. Everyone else, unless we’ve done something, like Vicki and I have, to remove them from our bodies.
You’re walking around with the same toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer, reproductive development, neurological effects and everything else.
When I was writing my most recent book, Toxic Free, I found that toxic chemicals are now associated with every single symptom and illness. And so we don’t have much control over what the manufacturers were doing. But we can sure take those toxic chemicals out of our own bodies and not house them onto our children.
So Vicki, tell us what you found to be the most effective way to do this.
VICKI LATHAM: Yes, Debra. You really hit on something. When I went to medical school as a physician assistant, there was virtually no education at all about toxins. And now, it is on my list, my differential diagnosis list, with every patient I’m looking for. What could be a toxin that could be contributing to this?
But when we think about detoxification, most people, the first thing that pops into the head is a colon cleanse that can aid their liver in doing a better job of detoxification or they might think of things like fasting or [inaudible 00:40:43], things that will help you to get the toxins out.
But what these things do is they actually stimulate the body to release the toxins from where they’ve been stored in the body (usually in fat and bones, but can be on receptors [inaudible 00:40:58] tissue). And then it requires the body to actively do the work of detoxifying. And we do not want the body doing this kind of act of detoxification in pregnancy. We don’t want to stimulate your toxins to be released back into your bloodstream because then it can travel into the fetal circulation.
And fetuses do not have active detoxification pathways like we do. Their liver doesn’t function, until after they’re born, to do this kind of work.
So we don’t want these toxins going into their active circulation where it could affect neurologically or another way.
So what I have found is this incredible mineral, which you’ve been talking about, called clinoptilolite. And it works so different but completely safely. It’s a natural, negatively-charged mineral with a cage-like molecular structure, and the clinoptilolite goes into the bloodstream where it’s a toxin trap. It draws into and unto itself, positively-charged bad things, and so you just swallow a clean cage and you excrete a dirty one. And this process has nothing that it requires the body to do except to pump the blood around the body. But the clinoptilolite vacuums up the toxins as it travel. It creates no stress for your body, no hassle for you, and no risk to your baby.
The thing that’s really the most amazing about this is that it also is selective. It doesn’t have an affinity for healthy things like potassium or calcium, calcium particularly. Your baby is growing these bones. If you don’t’ want that to be removed from the body, you just want the mercury and the lead and the bisphenol and the phthalates and the benzene, that’s what you want out. And it really has no attraction for those things. And so it just takes out the trash and you just put it in the dump the next time you urinate or have a bowel movement. It’s 100 per cent excreted, six to eight hours after you take it, which is why it is completely safe for pregnancy.
Here’s a couple of examples of how this works. Now, we know that eating fish, women who eat more fish in pregnancy have children who has higher IQ. But we also know that our fish supply is full of mercury.
So what’s a woman to do? Well, if you have this clinoptilolite traveling into your blood because you either sprayed it into your mouth or you dropped it in water and ingested it, this is traveling in your blood. Any mercury that was in that fish is going to be trapped by the cages and urinated out your next trip to the bathroom.
Another thing is that we all have lead stored in our bones and it likes to displace calcium. So when a pregnant woman needs calcium for her baby, which she does, then as the body goes and breaks down that calcium to give to the baby, it also breaks down and releases the lead back into her bloodstream where it can travel into the baby, potentially causing neurotoxicity, or you can have the little cages floating in your blood that are going to not attract the calcium but will trap the lead. And so the baby never gets the lead, the baby is healthier, and mama gets the lead out.
So you see how safe and practical, and really, I think, revolutionary this is.
DEBRA: I think it is too because it actually makes it; people, I think, have a viewpoint that they have to be concerned about what they put into their body, especially when you’re pregnant. You’re not supposed to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or things like that. But we don’t really have this sense that there are things in our body that need to come out.
And that’s where, I think, that it’s hard for some people to grasp the idea of doing a detox because we don’t have the awareness that there are these chemicals and that they’re interfering with natural processes.
But the way you described it, I can completely understand. If I was pregnant, well, I’m not pregnant, but I’m still doing exactly what you recommend. I do it because there’s no point in having these toxic chemicals sitting around in my body, building up a point where they could be making me sick. And eventually, they will if we don’t do something about it. And it makes it possible to do the beneficial things, like eat fish, because this is a way to not have mercury in our body, or to get the calcium, as you said.
I just wanted to tell everybody who are listening that I call it Zeolite because I can’t pronounce clinoptilolite. I think it’s easier to remember Zeolite.
But I want to tell people where they can get this. I resell it. You can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.Ccom, and there’s a button, a little ad on the right that looks like a magnet. And it says Zeolite in big letters. And you can just click on there.
You can buy it from Vicki, if you want. She doesn’t have her own personal website but she has website where you can buy the clinoptilolite. I’m going to learn how to say that.
You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and it has a phone number where you can reach her, and also has e-mail where you can reach her. So you can buy it from either one of us. And there are distributors throughout the country. The brand that she and I both like is Pure Body, which is made by Touchstone Essentials. And I had Eddie Stone on the show, who is the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials.
Vicki, tell us more why people should buy this clinoptilolite, am I getting it right?
VICKI LATHAM: The reason that I like to say clinoptilolite is there is about 50 different Zeolites. And this is one of those 50, and it’s the one that’s the most studied. You can put that in. You can type in clinoptilolite on PubMed. You can see over 30 studies including animal studies, studies of the breast milk of animals.
So we know that this isn’t something that we’re just making up. This is stuff that has real science behind it.
But when you’re choosing your clinoptilolite products, which does have [inaudible 00:48:06] status from the FDA meaning that it is safe to be taken in pregnancy and by anyone of any age, including pregnant women, it has four really critical factors. You want to look at purity, particle size, activation and third party validation.
Clinoptilolite, this occurs in nature, but the Zeolites are dirty already. They’ve been doing what it is their nature they do and trapping toxins into their cages. And so you want to go with the company that can prove that they’ve completely purified the molecule. So you’re putting clean cages in that’s going to attract your toxins.
Particle size matters because if it’s not been sized down, so that it can get into the bloodstream where it can do a good job in your GI tract, it really doesn’t get into the bloodstream. And in pregnancy that’s where we want this traveling. We want it traveling through your bloodstream, trapping and capturing any toxins that your body happens to break down, or any toxins that are present in what you eat, drink or breathe. We want those things captured so that they won’t go into the baby.
The other is activation. You want to make sure that the processing hasn’t damaged the negative charge because it’s that negative charge that attracts the positively-charged, heavy metals and industrial toxins and insecticides and all these terrible things that we don’t want in our body, especially when we’re pregnant.
And then the final thing is third party validation. And this is the only company, Touchstone Essentials, that I know that will provide you complete transparency and third party independent research. There is a few that do it in-house, but to me that’s [inaudible 00:49:51] in-house. I want independent people telling me that the product I’m putting in my body, and especially, the body of my daughters when they’re pregnant, which they have been using this, and of course that’s why I have such outstanding grandchildren.
DEBRA: I’m sorry to cut you off, but the radio station will cut us off if we don’t stop talking. So [cross-talking]. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can read more about Vicki and more about what we’ve been talking about.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com
“Chemicals of High Concern” Found in Thousands of Children’s Products
25 Years of Toxic Free Remodeling
My guest is Larry Redalia–artist, woodworker, builder, tree man, gardner, and all-around handyman. Larry has been remodeling with me without toxic building products for more than 25 years. We’ll be talking about our remodeling projects, including kichen and bathroom, and specifically about our experience with paints, laying tile, and laying hardwood flooring. Learn from our experience and successes.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
25 Years of Toxic Remodeling
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Redalia
Date of Broadcast: May 06, 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, and we may not be able to do anything about those, but there’s a lot we can do about the toxic chemicals in our home, workspaces and our bodies, so that we can be healthy instead of sick.
Today is Monday—what is it today? It’s Monday, May 6th. That’s right! Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. And it’s 2013. Okay, let’s get the date. May 6, 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida.
Today we’re going to be talking about 25 years of toxic-free remodeling. My guest is Larry Redalia, who’s an artist, a woodworker, builder, tree man, gardener, and all around handyman. And he’s been doing all my toxic-free remodeling with me for 25 years.
Before I bring him on the phone, I just want to give you my thought for today having to do with having someone to help you when you’re wanting to do something different.
I know that Larry has been by my side. I’ll just tell you something here. Larry and I have been married twice and divorced twice, but we’re still the best of friends. And we’re not even going to go into marriage or any of that stuff. What we’re going to talk about is helping each other through life and having someone there by your side who’s in agreement with what’s going on with you.
I’ve been fortunate to have that regardless of what might be going on in our relationship otherwise. Larry has been extremely steadfast in our commitment to living toxic-free for 25 years.
And prior to that, I had my father being very much a support in that as well.
It makes it so much easier. I can’t tell you how many times I get calls from people, particularly women saying, “Well, I want to take the toxic chemicals out of my house, but my husband won’t let me,” or, “My husband is not in agreement,” or, “My family thinks that I’m crazy.”
And I just want people to know that throughout my life, one of the things that has been the most important to me is to be myself, be honestly myself.
When Larry met me, I was living in a non-toxic way. And prior to that, I dated other men. I was living in a non-toxic way, and I always said, “Well, if you’re interested in a relationship with me, you need to live the way I live. And that’s just it. I’m not going to live toxic to be with you.”
And with that viewpoint, the men that really belonged in my life stayed in my life. And they were willing to live the way I want.
And Larry just made it so possible in so many ways for me to have the non-toxic environment that I have.
He’s remodeled, he’s built things, he’s figured out solutions to toxic problems with me.
And so I just want to acknowledge that and let you know that as my guest here today, he’s extremely knowledgeable and well-trained by me.
So Larry, are you there on the phone?
LARRY REDALIA: Yes, I’m here. Hi.
DEBRA: Good! Hi. So we’ve been remodeling together for more than 25 years. And later on in the show, we’re going to be talking about our kitchen remodel, our bathroom remodel, and specifically about our experience with paint, laying tile and laying hardwood floor.
But first, Larry, why don’t you tell me how you became interested in toxic chemicals, and how you like living in a non-toxic way?
LARRY REDALIA: Actually, my interest in toxic chemical dates back to when I was in high school, and I was on the debate team. We were debating the pros and cons of smoking, of all things. And I did some research on this and found that smoking was very, very bad, and quite toxic. And our family, soon after thatm moved to Los Angeles, which was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for everyone there.
So that sparked my interest in this subject actually.
DEBRA: Yes, I guess, living in Los Angeles.
So then, you met me. And what happened?
LARRY REDALIA: That’s right. Well, my then girlfriend at the time, actually, took me to see a lecture by you. And I was very, very impressed with your knowledge and expertise in this area. And I thought, “Wow, what a good idea, to live less toxically.”
It didn’t occur to me that this would be possible other than stopping smoking and maybe leaving Los Angeles. You presented the information in such a way that I was like, “Wow, anyone can do this. This is great.”
And it very much impressed me. And I thought this is a good thing. This woman could use some help. I could help this woman live a less toxic life. And I thought that would be a fine thing to do.
It would be good for everyone else too for that matter.
DEBRA: And so you did. What’s it like for you to living non-toxic?
LARRY REDALIA: Well, I like it, actually. I like it a lot. I don’t have to wrinkle my nose when I walk past a laundry room or something because of the drier sheets and the toxic laundry stuff. We just used soap and there’s no awful smell about it at all.
I like actually living without toxics. During the time I was a small child, I had a carpet dust allergy, which I finally traced down when I was about 13. And I don’t miss the carpet at all. I think it’s a fine idea to live without carpet all over the house.
DEBRA: Me too.
LARRY REDALIA: They hide stuff.
DEBRA: What would you say to some husbands who are reluctant to make changes in the home to make it less toxic?
LARRY REDALIA: I would ask them, if you saw a two-year-old playing with a bottle of insecticide, would you take it out […]?
I would!
DEBRA: Good point.
LARRY REDALIA: Yes. Or if you saw anyone playing with an insecticide or putting it in drinking glasses or something, you go, “Hey, this is not the right thing to do, folks. Come on!”
DEBRA: That’s right. Have you noticed any improvement in your own health?
LARRY REDALIA: Yes, I have. Actually, I used to get colds and flu probably four times a year, four or five times a year. And it would last for a couple of weeks. And this was devastating to my work and school and stuff. And I rarely get colds now. I maybe get once every year or two, get a cold, or something like that. And they go away quicker too.
So yes, I’ve noticed a big improvement in my health.
DEBRA: I have too, 25 years of […]
Before we go to the first commercial break, I just would like you to tell your story about taking Pure Body Liquid Zeolite because I’m advertising that a lot and recommending that a lot.
You had quite a dramatic result from taking it, so would you tell us about that?
LARRY REDALIA: Through my previous work, I was exposed to fair amount of toxic chemicals, during remodeling and stuff in a toxic way, and using gasoline and stuff. So I got exposed to toxins more than most people probably.
I think on the third day of taking the zeolite, I was thinking, “This is nothing. It doesn’t taste like anything. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”
After about the third day, I was like, “Oh, I get it. I feel better. I have more energy. I sleep less.” I was working 8, 10, 12-hour days, and out in the Florida sun, working outside.
This is not something I would even consider was possible. And I was doing it day after day after day, often seven days a week. And I was like, “Wow, this is a really great product.” I love it.
DEBRA: It made a huge difference, didn’t it?
LARRY REDALIA: It sure did.
DEBRA: I was watching all this, and it was just like, night and day, to see the difference in his energy level, and just his cheerfulness. Not that he was depressed or unhappy before, but I could just see a whole new man emerging because his body wasn’t being suppressed by the toxic chemicals that had been accumulated.
We’re going to take a commercial break here, and we’ll be back in a minute.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I have one more commercial for you.
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Larry, let’s talk about our bathroom remodel. What happened was that we had a leak in a pipe behind the wall. And so we didn’t even know it until the tiles started falling off from around the bath tub. And there was tremendous amount of damage when the mold inspector came. We had to remove everything from the bathroom, down to the studs.
And then they had to do a big mold remediation, and we decided that we were going to make the bathroom water-tight, not only non-toxic, but also water-tight.
Larry, do you want to talk a little more about this, about what was the strategy behind our bathroom?
LARRY REDALIA: Yes, we decided we didn’t like the mold, so we had them take out all the molds, and we had them take out the flooring, and we had them take out the walls, anything that was damaged. We took out everything—the bathtub. We had to take everything out.
We basically started it again from the studs which were treated with the stuff that killed molds and […] So we had this nice, empty slate to work with.
DEBRA: I just like to interject that I’ve forgotten the name of the products that we used. Anybody who wants to know it, just send me an e-mail, and I’ll look it up for you. But the product that killed the mold, which needed to be applied by, according to the mold inspector, was a water-based coating, like a water-based paint that had silver in it, as the active mold killer.
So it didn’t have anything that was toxic that would release into the air. It was just silver that was toxic to the mold, but not harmful for us to breathe because it was encapsulated in the paint.;
So go on.
LARRY REDALIA: That was interesting to see them doing that, just that process was interesting. I’ve never heard of that particular product before. And that was a fine way to kill the mold.
DEBRA: Me too.
LARRY REDALIA: Then we put down the plywood, and sealed that. We put down [HardieBacker] board, I believe it was, all over the walls. We put it all the way up to the ceiling actually, the HardieBacker board. And then we put ceramic tiles all over the whole room, up to about seven-feet. I think it was a nine-foot ceiling. So we put them up to about seven-feet, white subway tiles, with some decorative ones, of course.
And then we built a large shower enclosure ourselves using tile, with a PVC liner. I think it was the only thing we used that was actually non-toxic. But it’s under the tile, so it’s not—
DEBRA: It’s under the tile. So the points of all of this was to make an absolutely water-tight space.
LARRY REDALIA: Yes. We didn’t want the water getting under there, creating more mold problems.
DEBRA: And it turned out that typically, bathrooms are built in a pretty cheap way, and after some number of years, 10 years or something, then you’ve got all these leaks and water under the edge of tiles, and around the edge of pipes and things. And then you start getting mold growing in your walls.
We did not want that to happen.
So Larry researched it, and took very careful precautions to make sure that our bathroom was water-tight.
So first we have this tile on the floor, ceramic tile on the floor. And then there’s ceramic tile up the walls. And where they meet, we have marble baseboards down there at the bottom.
And there are no edges where you have a wall. The tile goes all the way around the room continuously for seven-feet up.
And we even have ceramic crown moldings up the top of the tile. And then our shower space is one corner of that.
So it’s continuous tile all the way around.
So go ahead and tell them more, Larry.
LARRY REDALIA: Well, just the shower enclosure, and the step up, here in Florida, they use marble window sill material.
You can buy it in five or six-foot length, just about six-inches wide. And we just saw no reason not to use that for our sills that we step over this marble thing, and all the baseboards were marble. And of course, I had to learn how to cut marble, cut it with a table saw—a tile saw, I mean—and even double the edges of the [sillly] thing. It looks really nice.
I think the bathroom wound up in a magazine actually.
DEBRA: It did, it did, a couple of magazines.
LARRY REDALIA: So that was a fun project. And we have glass shower doors, so we don’t have the problem of the mold growing on the shower curtains, or having PVC shower curtains. We don’t have that. We just had glass doors. And that works very well. I’m quite happy with it.
DEBRA: Me too. And we have a skylight right over the shower.
LARRY REDALIA: We wanted to have a more natural light in the room, so we put a large skylight over the entire shower area. And that way, if there was a leak in the skylight, it’s right over the shower area, which was all sealed, so that’s not a problem.
DEBRA: Do you want to say anything about laying the tile?
LARRY REDALIA: I basically just used standard tile-laying stuff. I didn’t use mastic. I used […] and grout without a lot of toxic chemicals added into it. And it work very well. I mean, I was in Europe a few years back and saw some of the tile work the Romans did. And 2000 years later, it still looked good. I was like, “Okay, that’s a good way to go.”
DEBRA: The most toxic thing about tile is the grout sealer, and we used one that was totally non-toxic by a company called AFM.
We’re here with another commercial break, so we’ll be right back and talk more about our remodeling projects.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, I’m here with my guest, Larry Redalia, artist, woodworker, builder, tree man, gardener, all around handyman, and the man who’s been doing all my toxic-free remodeling for the past 25 years.
We’re talking about our remodeling projects, and toxic-free building materials.
Larry, next, I’d like to talk about paint. And you and I have tried a lot of different paints. Why don’t you tell me which is your favorite paint?
LARRY REDALIA: My favorite paint, I think, is milk-based paint we used in the office we redid.
DEBRA: And why did you like it?
LARRY REDALIA: It didn’t smell toxic at all. There are other low VOC paints, they don’t smell bad. This one smelled like milk.
DEBRA: It does. It smelled like warm glass of milk.
LARRY REDALIA: Yes. And painting a room, and it just smelled like milk. I was like, “This is wonderful.” I could paint and not have to have a respirator and turn the fan on and everything. This is great.
DEBRA: That’s right.
LARRY REDALIA: I had no problems […] I actually loved painting with that stuff.
DEBRA: Also, one of the things that I love about it is that it has very soft finish, as opposed to the acrylic paints or the latex paints. And you mix it yourself. And so we had fun doing that, coming up with the color. And it’s a beautiful color. It’s so soft and gentle.
But it’s a creative, artistic kind of thing, as well as being a toxic-free thing because it’s just so beautiful, and it’s so hands-on.
You get involved in it. It’s not a plastic thing that you go to the store and they mix up the color for you, and you bring in a swatch. You just create it right on the spot.
Speaking of colors created on the spot, when we did our bathroom, we used colored plaster. So tell us about that, Larry.
LARRY REDALIA: That was a fun project. We didn’t paint above the tiles and the ceiling. We used a colored plaster. You mix the white plaster with some blue powdered stuff, and troweled it on the wall.
First, you put a primer up, which had a little bit of sand in it, so it sticks better. And on top of that primer, just trowel the blue plaster on. It went on and dried, and I was like, “This is interesting stuff.” And it stayed here, and it looks good.
The thing about this is it’s not a sealant. It doesn’t seal out the water. The water can go into it, and it dries right away, and it’s not a problem. It’s actually very good to use in areas that may get a little splash from the shower or sink or such.
We were very happy with that. I love that color too. Of course, we mixed it ourselves.
DEBRA: Well, it’s a sky blue. And so between having the sky outside the skylight, and then having the sky blue on the ceiling, and it’s the color of water. And so it feels like a very watery room.
One of the things that I like about it is that it does seem to control the mold because, as Larry said, it absorbs the moisture in the room even fixing the air. And then it releases the moisture back out into the room. So there’s no condensation running down the walls, and there’s no black mold growing on anything, or any other kind of molds.
It’s a very natural way to have that little breathing going on, the exchange of the moisture with the wall and the room.
Also, you know how sometimes you need to have a little touch-up, and then there’s a little discolored place on the wall. With this, you just mix more of the plaster and put it on, and it looks like it’s been there all the time.
So I think that if I were to just be starting out with a house, and I was building it, or I was remodeling the whole thing and I had to do all the rooms, they would all be colored plaster or milk paint. And I think that in the future when I paint, it’s going to be one of those because the difference is so great to be using those natural materials.
LARRY REDALIA: Yes, it’s a joy to work with it. You don’t wrinkle your nose while you’re using it at all.
DEBRA: You don’t have to turn on the heater to dry the paint. None of that. It just is the least toxic paint, the paint and finishes that I can think of.
Well, so when we got to the kitchen then, we applied some things that we learned from the bathroom. And we did the same thing, putting down a ceramic tile floor, and then we used the marble baseboards. And we put the white subway tile up seven-feet with the crown molding.
And I really believe having done this that this is the way to go for any bathroom or kitchen because both of those rooms involve water and sanitation, and you can just take a sponge, lots of water all over the walls and floors, and whatever kind of disinfectant that you want to use, a natural non-toxic one, of course, and you can clean those rooms with no leaking at all.
It’s just no problem with water.
I just can’t say enough about that.
LARRY REDALIA: I think we went to, it was Hemingway’s house in the Florida Keys.
DEBRA: That’s right.
LARRY REDALIA: We had his kitchen done that way, and there’s white subway tile that’s fairly high. And I thought, “What a good way to go.”
DEBRA: And also, the Gamble house in Pasadena had the same thing in their kitchen. High walls, the whole thing was just walls of subway tile. And I think it’s old fashion. It must have some old fashion reason for being that way.
Some people think that tile is very expensive. We used to think it was expensive until we discovered that you can go to a place like Home Depot or Lowes one of those discount places, and you can buy subway tile very inexpensively. And it looks great. Go to any kitchen or bath design magazine, and you always find subway tile.
And what we do is we use a lot of subway tile, and then we go to the fancy tile store, and pay a couple of hundred-dollars for accent tiles.
And so, it ends up looking like you have a designer kitchen, but it actually costs very little.
LARRY REDALIA: I wanted to say something else about the bathroom. A lot of times, in the bathroom and in the kitchen, to build the walls, they use a green boards which is like a sheetrock but it’s specially made to use in areas that might get wet.
The problem with that is if your grout isn’t exactly water-tight after a number of years, water will get in there, and it will leak, and your tiles will fall off.
I don’t use those anymore when I’m remodeling in a bathroom or kitchen, or an area that might get wet. I just use the HardieBacker board. I don’t use the green board or sheetrock board on areas that might get wet because it’s just a mold trap waiting to happen.
DEBRA: Not only that but they’re also toxic to install. The HardieBacker board is basically cement.
LARRY REDALIA: Yes, cement with some fiber in it.
DEBRA: With some fibers, yes. It’s not a big danger once it’s been applied because the tile will block any fumes that might be coming from it. But you’re putting those toxic chemicals in your home while you’re going through installation.
Larry is doing all this work. And I don’t want him to be affected by toxic chemicals. So we’ll talk more about this when we come back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here with my guest today, Larry Redalia, who has been remodeling with me for 25 years.
What else do we have to talk about, Larry? […] hardwood flooring, laying hardwood floors. So tell us how we lay hardwood floors.
LARRY REDALIA: Well, first of all, we rough up the surface […] a little bit if it’s a sound surface. And then we put Titebond wood glue, and lay the hardwood floor on top of that. It doesn’t have a problem with it coming up or anything.
DEBRA: And this is pre-finished hardwood floors, not engineered, not laminate, but pre-finished, solid wood, hardwood floors. And they come in what’s called Tongue and Groove. They just fit together, and you pour the glue down. This is non-toxic glue.
You pour the glue down in a big puddle, and then you spread it around with a mortar spreader. You’ve probably seen this. It looks like a piece of metal with notches on the side, and a handle. Spread it around nice and even. And then you just lay your wood tiles, or planks in.
You really can’t get it off the floor. It’s water-proof glue, so even if you spill water on it, it’s not going to come up.
I don’t suggest you take a bucket of water, pour it on and mop your hardwood floors. But if you just spill a glass of wine or something, it’s not going to harm it.
I think that this is the way to go. Hardwood floors are extremely non-toxic. What happens with the finish is that they bake it on in the factory, so you don’t have outgassing, like if you were to put down bare floors, and then put a finish on it.
It’s relatively inexpensive, depending on where you buy your hardwood floors, and which style that you choose. We’ve gotten a lot of hardwood floors for $1 to $2 per square-foot. And then we lay them ourselves. We get down on our hands and knees. We don’t pay labor for it because it’s so easy to do the installations.
And we’ve always been very happy. We’ve done this in several houses. I’ve been recommending this to my clients for years.
That’s how easy it is to have a non-toxic floor.
LARRY REDALIA: The only tricky part about is you have to cut the tiles in the edge and if there’s a doorway or a wall or something.
DEBRA: Oh, yes. Well, that’s why I have Larry. He does all the cutting. I do the laying of the tiles in the middle of the room where it’s easy.
LARRY REDALIA: Of course.
DEBRA: And I let him do the hard part. But if you don’t have Larry, you could hire any handyman to do that kind of cut. And again, it’s a creative, artistic kind of thing that you can do in your own home. Anybody could do it. Do it yourself. And you have the pride of having done it, as well as removing whatever toxic flooring that you’ve had.
LARRY REDALIA: Don’t let somebody use a toxic glue to put this down. You don’t need to do that. It’s just Titebond wood glue is the best stuff we’ve found.
At one point, we were just using white glue, and then we had a leak, and the water got on the floor, and […] I was like, “We need something a little more tenacious than that.” And we found the Titebond. It works very, very well […] at all.
DEBRA: Well, Larry, we’re almost coming to the end of our hour. It goes by so fast. Is there anything else that you’d like to say?
LARRY REDALIA: Yes. If you’re looking to remodel something, you can do it non-toxically and often cheaper than using the toxic stuff. And you’ll be doing much better for the environment and your own health too, and the health of the people who live there.
If you love your family, then why remodel toxically? You have a choice. It’s up to you. Each decision you make, to remodel non-toxically, that’s the whole world.
DEBRA: That’s nice. And I agree with that. One of the reasons why I decided to have this subject today is because last Friday, I got a call from the Jennifer Parker Foundation. And what they do, JenniferParkerFoundation.org, is that they help people with extreme chemical injury find or build non-toxic housing that they can manage to live in.
And as we were talking, I realized that, it’s not just people with chemical injury that can’t find toxic-free housing. It’s everybody who can’t find toxic-free housing. And as I was thinking about this, I really saw that over the last 30 or so years that I’ve been wanting to live in a non-toxic house that I could not go into the housing market and find one, even one.
And that in the last 25 years, we’ve moved several times, and each time, we still cannot find one house that is toxic-free.
That says something to me about the state of our housing supply.
LARRY REDALIA: You need to go with the least toxic ones, and improve it from there.
DEBRA: And that’s what we did over and over. And so what I want to say to you is that if you’re living in an ordinary house, there’s probably something toxic about it. And there’s never been a problem that we found in a house that we couldn’t fix.
And so it’s entirely possible for anybody who’s living in any house to fix it, to make the house itself to be toxic-free.
A lot of times, we talk about things like cleaning products or pesticides or beauty products or clothing, those are all consumer products. But what we’re talking about now is the building [show]. We’re talking about the wall, the floors, the cabinets, and all of those kinds of things that come with the house when you get it.
One of the things that I do is, as a consultant, I go to people’s houses that they’re considering buying or renting. And I can tell you where all the toxic things are in these houses. And I’m available to go any place in the world that you might want me to come look at your home and tell you if it’s toxic or not, and what you can do about it.
With our 25 years of experience of remodeling, anything that’s a problem, we can fix.
I’ve worked with a lot of builders. I’ve worked with a lot of architects. I’ve worked with a lot of designers, interior decorators.
And there are toxic-free solutions for any toxic problem. It’s just a matter of knowing what they are.
So that’s a service that’s available to you. And when you call me to help you with a building problem, Larry is available to answer the building aspects of it. Even though I’m not experienced as a builder as much as Larry is, he knows what to do. I can bring the non-toxic aspect to it.
So I just want everyone to know that that’s a service that is available that collectively, we can turn all this whole housing supply into a world of toxic-free houses, instead of a world of toxic houses. And then everybody, regardless of their state of health can all have a safe place to live.
LARRY REDALIA: That sounds like a fine plan to me.
DEBRA: It sounds like a fine plan to me too. Well, we have a few minutes left, Larry. What else do you think we should talk about?
LARRY REDALIA: It just occurred to me the organization, the Habitat for Humanity.
DEBRA: I was just thinking that too. Go ahead.
LARRY REDALIA: Well, they do excellent work in getting lower income people houses that they can live in. But they’re not particularly non-toxic, and I thought, “Maybe they can have a branch that would be non-toxic housing.”
DEBRA: I think we should talk to Habitat for Humanity because I know that they are concerned about things like recycling and making the houses energy-efficient, and those environmental things. But this is something that happens over and over where people get interested in “the environment.” And there’s a set of things that they think are included in that or the definition of green being that is energy-efficient or resource-efficient.
And often, the toxic aspect is left out. And so a lot of people get confused about this. They’ll say, “Well, about this green product, but green does not mean non-toxic.” Non-toxic or toxic-free means non-toxic.
LARRY REDALIA: Right. It could be energy-efficient and toxic as heck.
DEBRA: Well, we know now that compact fluorescent light bulbs are very toxic. They’re toxic to use, not just to drop. And as people have been using them, there’s a whole movement of various agencies and organizations that want compact fluorescent light bulbs to be the only light bulbs used. Yet, if you look at the research, we find that while they’re energy-efficient, they are making people sick.
And what’s really needed is a much larger view that encompasses the health effects, as well as the environmental effects because if you do something that’s safe for health, you’re also doing something that’s safe for the environment because you’re reducing hazardous ways in manufacture and in the disposal of those things.
Every time you throw a compact fluorescent light bulb, you really should be taking it to the household hazardous waste disposal site because it puts toxic mercury into the environment.
LARRY REDALIA: I would hazard a guess that probably 90% of those bulbs are not taken to the hazardous waste area either. They just put it in the regular trash.
DEBRA: I would guess that. I saw somebody just throw it in the waste basket, and I’m not referring to you. We don’t have any compact fluorescent bulbs in my house, but I have seen people just toss them in the waste basket.
And when I point it out to them that it needs to go to the household hazardous waste, they just shrug. But these are the things that we need to be learning as a community, as a nation, as a group, to keep not only our lives safe, but also our future generation safe.
Thank you so much for being with me, Larry. It’s been a great interview. Thanks.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Getting a Good Night’s Sleep on a Natural Bed
My guest is Marlon Pando, President and Owner of White Lotus Home. We’ll take an “under the covers” look at how natural mattresses and bedding are made, discuss materials, and best choices for various sleeping needs. Marlon worked in his family business until he purchased White Lotus Home, a company that has been making natural and organic bedding in the USA for 32 years. www.whitelotushome.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Getting a Good Night’s Sleep on a Natural Bed
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Marlon Pando
Date of Broadcast: May 02, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Even if you’ve got toxic chemicals all around you, you can still be well, happy and productive, and not be affected by them if you know what to do.
It is Thursday, May 2nd. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we’re going to talk about natural beds and bedding, natural mattresses and how you can get a good night’s sleep.
But first, I want to tell you about a news item that I came across this week, Apples Counteract Chemicals That Cause Cancer. I’m always saying that we’re living in toxic world and we can’t, at this particular point in time, eliminate every single exposure that we have to toxic chemicals. There’s a lot of we can do, particularly at home and then our workplaces, but we can’t eliminate all of our exposures. And so we need to do things that counteract those exposures that we really can’t do anything about.
And one of the things that we can do is just eat apples. But you need to make sure that you eat apples with the peel on because this wonderful ingredient that counteracts the cancer chemicals is in the peel of apples.
And this is the top story on my Toxic Free Nutrition blog today. You can go here and watch the video that explains all the science behind this. And it actually shows the study where they took cancer cells and then they took apple peels and – I don’t remember, mix them with water or something. And then they drop this apple concentrate on the cancer cells and you’ll see the change in the cancer cells.
So this is something that all of us can do. Enjoy apples, but it’s not a glass of apple juice, it’s not a peeled apple, it’s not dried apples without the peels. It’s the apple peel that does it.
Our guest today is Marlon Pando, president and owner of White Lotus Home. We’re going to take an under the covers look at how natural mattresses and bedding is made, discussing materials and best choices for various sleeping needs.
Marlon worked in his family business until he purchased White Lotus Home, a company that has been making natural and organic bedding in the USA for 32 years. And you can go to his website at WhiteLotus.net.
Hi, Marlon. How are you today?
MARLON PANDO: Fine, Debra. Thank you. Thank you for the welcome.
DEBRA: Well, thank you for being on. I just want to tell my listeners that I’ve known Marlon since, I think, he purchased White Lotus Home, and I don’t even remember how long that’s been now because it’s been long enough that I can’t count anymore. And a couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of going to his store in Highland Park where they also make the mattresses and I can tell you that it’s a charming, little town, and he’s got his business in a nice, old, brick building that’s completely non-toxic and they’re making all these mattresses in a very clean space with no perfume, no cigarettes. They’re all handmade. And it’s actually a beautiful process to watch the tufting of these mattresses.
In fact, he’s got a video on the website that shows exactly somebody making the mattresses. It’s like a beautiful dance.
So it’s a very high quality product that that they’re turning out and I think that not only is it high quality, but it’s also some of the most affordable mattress and bedding that you can get at this quality and this purity.
So Marlon, I’m always starting by asking people how did you become interested in doing what you’re doing. What led you to be interested in making a natural, sustainable product, and then why also did you choose mattresses and bedding?
MARLON PANDO: Well sure, Debra. I’ll definitely try to touch on both of those points. Well, basically, I was born in Peru in South America. And there, being green, recycling is a part of life. It’s not even something that’s of a major effort. So coming to the States 30-some years ago, in America you have all these great things and all these great stuff, but I wasn’t too aware of where all this extra stuff, this waste, was going.
And I got my MBA, I started working in Corporate America. I wanted to dig in more and more to see how where everything was going, all the waste. And once I started doing some more digging, I came to the realization that we actually have a big problem in America with all these extra products that we like and get and use and not reuse.
Eventually, the last thing, the trigger was I took a trip to Arizona once and I developed a very high allergy. I actually didn’t think I had allergies. I just got it. And from there on, I started doing more research and digging.
I guess the stars aligned and I had the opportunity to become the general manager of White Lotus Home. And I fell in love with the whole idea of taking this local, green, organic, bedding product and giving them, I guess, another life, if I may say, where we are turning these fibers into natural, sleeping surfaces. I thought it was just a great and wonderful idea that needed to be further exploited.
I guess the last thing, also the whole handcrafting, going back to where I first started in this country, my family owned neckwear factories. I used to work doing that. I actually [inaudible 00:07:54] my first handmade necktie factory when I was 18 years old.
So the whole combination, everything came together very nicely.
DEBRA: Good. Sometimes it just works out that way. As you said, the stars aligned and everything flows and you end up doing everything. And I really believe that you are doing the right thing because I see in you your joy of what you’re doing and the quality of products that you put up.
What are some reasons why people should be sleeping on a natural bed?
MARLON PANDO: Well, I think what’s becoming more apparent to people, without any medical conditions, just people becoming more aware that there are just so many toxic things in our homes. Of course, I get to hear from the folks that are discussing their furniture and their bedding. The first thing that comes to mind when they ask me, “So what is it with my traditional mattress?” And unfortunately, there are laws out there that allow manufacturers of bedding and mattresses to include dozens of many different harmful chemicals.
Of course, the idea is to help them pass some codes and things like that [inaudible 00:09:28] because all these harmful chemicals that were going to cause cancer and allergies, et cetera. But I think that’s the main thing. Once folks find out what is in their current mattresses or bedding now, is when they run towards us.
DEBRA: The most surprising thing for me when I was doing research 20 years ago, when I was first doing the research, was actually insomnia was one of my major symptoms that I had that I was trying to solve. And I wouldn’t sleep all night and then I’d be exhausted all day. And I know there must be millions of people who are having the same experience because isn’t sleeping pills a billion dollar industry, multibillion dollar industry?
So what I found out, quite to my surprise, when I took a little detective work to get this was that – oh, have a commercial break, so I’m going to have to tell you after this commercial.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here today with Marlon Pando, president and owner of White Lotus Home where they make natural fiber bed and bedding right here in New Jersey, USA in a very clean facility, I might add.
Before the break, we were talking about the most surprising thing that I found early in my research about beds and insomnia, and that is if you have just a regular cotton sheet that is treated to be no iron or permanent pressed, or if you have any polyester cotton sheets, it’s treated with a resin that contains formaldehyde. And as you sleep and as you continue to wash your bedding, it continues to release formaldehyde. And so you’re actually sleeping in this cloud of formaldehyde.
Now, it starts off when you have a new sheet with more formaldehyde emissions. And then as it wears, there’s of course less and less and less, but this could go on for years. And one of the symptoms known to be the results of formaldehyde exposure is insomnia.
So I just have this picture of all these people across the country and around the world taking sleeping pills when all they need to do is change their sheets. And not only that but even if you change your sheets, then you go beyond and look at the mattress, some of the toxic chemicals that you find there are polyurethane foam and particularly, fire-retardants, which are required by law so that when you’re smoking and you’re in bed and drop your cigarette, so your bed doesn’t catch on fire. And your bed will catch on fire if you drop cigarette ash or you knock over a candle.
But for all the rest of us who not smoking in bed and have the intelligence to not be knocking over candles in the middle of the night, we’re still being exposed to all those toxic chemicals. And the solution to not being exposed to them is to go to other places that sell natural fiber mattresses and bedding that don’t have these chemicals on them.
So Marlon, tell us. Typically, l know that you have a number of different mattresses that you make from different materials. And we have time today to talk about all of them. So why don’t you tell me and tell our listeners which one you think is – just describe the ones in any order that you’d like.
MARLON PANDO: Sorry, Debra. Do you want me to go over the options we have right now?
DEBRA: Tell us what options you have right now for mattresses.
MARLON PANDO: Well, basically, just to add a little bit to that is that White Lotus Home has been around since 1981. I did take over the company going on eight years now. And since I took over, I saw urgency for offering more than just a couple of type of green or organic mattresses. So after a lot of survey and a lot of feedbacks from our customers, we have come up with, right now, I want to say six different main options. And the reason there is, we want to make sure that we hope that everyone in America is able to afford a green and organic mattress.
Sometimes it gets misinterpreted, but basically, if you wanted a handmade, 100% chemical free mattress, it’s made in the US, we have that for you. If you want that in a firmer, softer, thicker or thinner size, we have that for you.
So while it is a lot to absorb and a lot to research and gain, we wanted to go and become a leader in the green bedding industry. I believe that all the options, again, while I know it can be [inaudible 00:18:18] has been helpful in getting us there.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about them one by one. So let’s start with the one that is most green and describe what that is. What are the materials of them? And anything you want to tell us about. Did you have any difficulties putting that together? Just tell us about that top of the line one.
MARLON PANDO: Sure. Well, if I had my choice, I will have everyone just buy our 100% organic, USDA, organic-certified mattresses. And what happens there is because we all want the best, of course, for ourselves, the only way that we can guarantee – and I’m going to say we at White Lotus (I can’t talk for everyone in the industry), I know everyone is trying to do the right thing. The only way we can guarantee that, what you’re getting is 100% chemical-free, chemical fire-retardant free is by going 100% USDA-certified.
And basically, those mattresses, we hand make them by using 100% USDA-certified organic cotton. We get the layers of cottons on top of each. And if you guys could imagine, each layer is about two inches thick. We pile up 10 to 12 layers on top of each other. Then we compress this cotton with our hands to come up with a mattress that would start at six inches in thickness. We already would make all our mattresses up to nine inches in thickness and we can add our toppers to make the sleeping surface even thicker.
So that would be the ideal when money is not a problem, when just full, healthy, solid sleep is the goal of the customer. That’s what we offer them.
So increased comfort level in 100% organic mattress, we also add things like our evergreen foam, which is a foam that is not petroleum-based, rather special oil-based. We have natural latex also to increase comfort level. We include a layer of wool. Now, what’s new for us, which is great, is that we are able now to get the wool USDA-certified organic as well.
DEBRA: That’s great.
MARLON PANDO: Yes, Debra. I’m sure that’s actually news to you. .
DEBRA: It is.
MARLON PANDO: Surely, we’ve got it and we’re very comfortable with it. It had the testing. It’s been great to be able to offer that.
DEBRA: Okay, we need to take another commercial break. But we’ll hear more about it after the break.
You’re listening to Debra Lynn Dadd on Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. This is Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re here today with Marlon Pando, president and owner of White Lotus Home. We’re talking about natural mattresses and bedding, and you can visit his website at WhiteLotus.net. You can visit my website at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Marlon, so we were talking about how you put together a non-toxic, natural, organic mattress. And I think we were in the middle of a list of things that you can add to the basic, organic, cotton mattress to give it various different characteristics and different levels in comfort for different needs.
So why don’t you go on with that list.
MARLON PANDO: Sure, Debra. Thank you. Just to go back a little bit, we were talking about the best organic mattress and what we recommend would be the 100% USDA-certified organic mattress that we handcraft in New Jersey.
So basically, we layer about 10 to 12 layers of cotton bedding on top of each other. And we put them in a 100% organic casing. And it’s all hand-tested, handmade and it would take anywhere from one to four hours to hand make a mattress, though my guys are pretty great at doing this. And we make our mattresses so they can end up about six inches in thickness and we can make all the mattresses be up to nine inches in thickness.
That would produce a semi-firm supported mattress. It’s something that is recommended by back doctors. And we can add toppers and all those fillers to try and meet our customers’ goals and preferred comfort level.
DEBRA: I want to ask you. One your 100% cotton mattresses, well, first I want to say, these aren’t mattresses with springs on them, right? They are what people think as futon. They’re just the fiber and the casing, correct?
MARLON PANDO: They are just pure filling in the case, yes.
DEBRA: Right, and there are no springs in them. So I know in the past that some people, including myself, think of cotton futons, obviously it’s a mattress, we’re not talking about a traditional Japanese futon that’s very thin. But I had a cotton mattress many years ago. The first mattress that I bought was cotton mattress. It was so hard and I just laid it on the floor. It was so hard, I couldn’t sleep on it. So I’d like you to address that because anybody that has that idea that we’re now in 2013 and that’s not the way they are today. So talk about that a little bit.
MARLON PANDO: And I’m glad you touched that actually, Debra, because it is the idea of futon. It’s something that we all remember back in college where [inaudible 00:29:55] place to sleep. But yes, the look of it is that, but it’s certainly not the feel. The way we make our mattresses –
Well, let me go back. Traditional futons are made where they just open a big case and a machine just blows a bunch of polyester and very highly infested fibers in it. Most futons that are sold, that are made, after a few nights of sleep, even maybe a month, it loses everything. It loses the give, it loses the comfort level.
Again, the way we make our products is so that it can last seven, and some folks own our mattresses for over 20 years. And again, the idea is that it has no springs but there are ways for us to get there. And primarily, what we do when we do our pre-organic bedding consultations is we talk to folks and we try to get their moan goal. So just to throw it in there, we do have a toll free which is 877-HANDMADE. And that’s where folks can call and get their free consultations.
What happens is we try to find out what the preferred customer’s comfort level is and also preferred chemical, if any, exposure is allowed. Because if we know that the customer is not going to tolerate any latex, any foam, no matter how green it could be, we do our best not to touch that, not to consider that in our suggestions. This way we are trying to make a perfect match-up which happens about 99% of the time. There are some folks out there that still can’t find a match sometimes. But 99% of our customers had been satisfied since I took over.
DEBRA: It’s really good that you offer that service because I think the people really do need a consultation from somebody who understands the options to get them what they want. That it can be confusing to look at all the different possibilities and know how to match it up with their needs. And you probably would get a better match if you talk to somebody who understands that rather than just trying to buy a mattress of the storeroom floor.
MARLON PANDO: Right, exactly. You mentioned something, insomnia, and actually, my girlfriend (I know she’s listening), whenever she’s over, she just falls asleep. She really falls into death, deep sleep. And I think that on top of everything, we go through our days, to come home to a place that it’s like sleeping in the middle of nature, it’s such a great feeling. I feel like natural bedding can actually help us cleanse our bodies while we breathe all night long. And I think that’s what people are missing.
DEBRA: Well, one of the aspects of detox is that you need to be able to sleep. You need to be able to sleep all through the night in order for your body’s detox system to kick in. So when people are not sleeping or they’re only sleeping a short period, toxic chemicals are building up in their bodies because they’re not getting a good night’s sleep. And I really noticed, I’ve been sleeping on a natural bed for almost 30 years now. And I noticed that when I go away and sleep in a hotel bed or say you’re by somebody’s house that doesn’t have a natural bed, it only takes one night. I just want to say, I love being wherever it is I am but I really want to sleep in my own bed. And when I come back home, I was just away for five nights, and I came back home, and I just felt, “Oh, I love my bed. I love my bed.”
And I just always want to come home. And at the end of the day, when I’m tired, I just go, “Oh, I’m so happy I have a natural bed.”
MARLON PANDO: That’s great! I can relate, you don’t know. I used to love, love traveling. I love traveling. Because of my green consciousness and all, I haven’t been traveling a lot, but those are the one thing I regret. Wherever I can, I drive because I can bring a pillow or more bedding easily. And it just becomes such a hassle.
Yes, I totally agree and relate that when we sleep is the best chances that we have to actually get rid of any toxins. Can you imagine you’re doing this and then you go and sleep on a bed with chemicals? I can see how that could be a big problem.
DEBRA: We’re going to go to another commercial break. And we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Marlon Pando, president and owner of White Lotus Home. We’re talking about mattresses. You can visit his website at WhiteLotus.net, where you’ll find affordable, good quality, made in the USA, natural bedding
Marlon, I would just like to, since this is our last segment and we only have a few minutes left, I would like to just describe for our listeners what are the components of a natural bed. And you’re making a mattress that is not the traditional kind of mattress box spring combination. Those are available. But I really like myself, I prefer what you’re doing because there’s no metal and I don’t want to go into the whole story about electromagnetic fields. But suffice to say that some people think that even lying in bed with the coils of the bed that can increase your exposure to electromagnetic fields. I, myself, have a wool mattress that is like the ones that you make, which I purchased before I even knew you. I’ve had it a very long time. And I have it on a wood slat frame which allows it to breathe. And then I also have, you mentioned toppers a couple of times. I just want to explain because people don’t know what a topper is. It’s a big pillow, or like a mattress, but it’s very thin.
How thick is this topper? A couple of inches?
MARLON PANDO: Yes. They start about an inch-and-a-half up to three inches in thickness.
DEBRA: I like to say that if you can’t replace your whole entire bed now, the thing to start with is a topper. How many are your toppers, like wool toppers? A couple of hundred dollars? A hundred dollars?
MARLON PANDO: They start at early 200s actually for a twin size.
DEBRA: So I have the experience a few years ago of needing to be in San Francisco for three months. I rented a furnished studio apartment which came with a regular toxic bed. And it was extremely uncomfortable even though I brought my cotton flannel sheet. I could still feel the bed, the synthetic bed, underneath the sheets.
And so I just went to a local natural bed store in San Francisco and got myself a wool topper. I put it right down on the synthetic bed and it made all the difference in comfort. I had my topper, I had my flannel sheets, I had brought my wool pillow with me and I slept really well.
So a good way to get started is to just get a topper, get a natural pillow, and get the natural sheets. And if you just start buying those pieces one by one as you can afford them, then you can always use them on your natural mattress when you get to that point.
You need to have a frame, and you need to have a mattress, and then a topper. I will actually admit I had three toppers on my bed. And I like having the layers because rather than getting a thicker mattress, I don’t know how thick my mattress is. I think it’s six inches. And then I had three toppers. And then I can take the bed apart and take it and put all the pieces out in the sun or shake the dust powder whenever I want. And then I have my cotton flannel sheets, and then I have my wool pillows.
Those are basically the parts of the natural bed.
MARLON PANDO: Yes. Those are all the main parts. Unless, you have a few more than [inaudible 00:42:57], I can understand why.
DEBRA: Is there anything that you particularly would like to talk about in these final few minutes that we haven’t already covered?
MARLON PANDO: I think we covered a lot. I guess because we have to wrap it up, I understand. But the idea of going green, of course, ideally, you just [inaudible 00:43:27] and you are able to pick and choose and to start from scratch. But I am with you that a topper it’s a great, great step up. There are also ways to take your current mattress or bedding, maybe [inaudible 00:43:42]. As you know, we also sell organic barrier cloth, which can be used now. Either way, that fabric is tight-woven and it doesn’t let anything get in and out. So it’s great for dust mites, allergies, and things like that.
We’re starting to see a peak in sales in all our barrier cloth products. People are taking their current mattresses and just buying big covers for them and things like that.
Again, I agree with you that a topper is a great step-up. Folks, of course, we would like to start from scratch. But when you can’t, it just doesn’t make it an offense to do that. A topper on top of your mattress is great. You can always just cover your mattress with something, again, like to cover up the moss from anyone that would sell you an organic or natural cover. Just add in a topper.
And we do have four different types now from all wool, organic, cotton. We do the natural latex topper. We do evergreen foam toppers.
So there are many options. When you mentioned traveling and things like that, Debra, we also have now our guest bed that you roll them up. It’s still 15, 20 pounds or more [inaudible 00:45:02]. But it’s something that you can definitely put in a trunk or maybe, if possible, have it mailed to you. It would be so costly to ship it back if you’re going long-term…
DEBRA: What a good idea! I didn’t know you have all these things. You keep adding all these products.
MARLON PANDO: Yes, we’ve been pretty busy. I mean, I think God that since I took over White Lotus, we were two small stores in Jersey and now, we have over a hundred stores that carry our products all over the country via online and actual brick and mortar stores. So there’s a [inaudible 00:45:36] locations of people that carry White Lotus Home products all over the country.
And with that expansion came new products. The great thing about our market, Debra, that it’s so new that we are able to test the waters first before we bring a product fully on. Once we get a certain amount of request for something, we try to see how we can make it in a nice, cost-friendly way.
And the guest bed has been one that – we call them stow-aways. If you look at them on our site, it’s something you can roll up, put in a closet or even just tuck under a bed. And some folks actually do. They buy double bags or whatever from us and they keep them in their car when they’re traveling.
So it’s a nice way to be able to take your natural bed with you so you get a nice, green, clean place to sleep on.
DEBRA: You also sell furniture like wood slat beds, but you also sell furniture so that you can convert your mattresses to things like sofas and things like that.
MARLON PANDO: Right. Definitely! I’d definitely touch up on that. But I just want to touch a little bit. Folks that are not able to come to one of the stores so they can test things out, I just want to let them know that, again, we have a store locator online. We also offer free fiber samples. And I know this is [inaudible 00:47:00], especially probably your listeners, Debra. I just want to thank you. A lot of folks do call us, come to us, mention your name and we are very grateful for you. I’m just letting you know.
DEBRA: Thank you. I appreciate that.
MARLON PANDO: Sure, sure. I saw what you’re doing. It’s wonderful. We do offer them free fiber samples. We mail it so they can have it tested or [inaudible 00:47:27] doctors.
We also offer samples of our mattresses that people can buy online and [inaudible 00:47:35] with their purchase of the original mattress. We are looking up ways to get the word out and get the items out to folks as much as possible.
DEBRA: I do see that and especially I have known you over time and so I can see your consistency and your dedication that you really are there to serve the customers. And you even do custom work. And people can buy your materials from you and make their own if they want. So you really are giving the full spectrum of every possible thing that I can think of that one might need in a supplier of natural materials and natural mattresses.
MARLON PANDO: Yes, yes. Thank you. Definitely! Selling the fiber has been great. People are doing their own projects. Great! I mean, I’m already content where were are with this company. My family is too. They got my back all the way. I always have to thank my sister, Elizabeth, who’s always there, and my nephew, [inaudible 00:48:36]. If you can see pictures, they’re always up on the web. We take pictures of them and use them as our models.
But we’re at a place that we want everyone to hopefully that more and more people will be able to sleep naturally and organically without major cost and major hassle. You never know. One day, there may be a White Lotus store in every city in the United States. That will be great.
DEBRA: That would be great. Okay, we’ve come to the end of our time. Thank you so much for being with us. And I want everybody to just go to WhiteLotus.net website and take a look at what they have. And particularly, look for the video of the tufting of the mattress.
I actually saw someone doing that in person in the store. It’s just a beautiful sight. I think of that, not only are they great materials, but it’s all handmade and not an industrial process, but a human process.
So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and there are information about other shows. There are archives. You can find out about other things on my website. And tune in again. ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Removing Build-up from Unfinished Wood
Question from Paula Bond
Please help, I am a housekeeper for over 10 years and my clients are always amazed with my work. However I just recently started on this house with all unfinished wood (meaning) no polyurethane was applied. Now there is so much build up I need to know what I can do to get rid of build up. I know your not suppose to use water base, but I don’t have a sander ….please help me
Debra’s Answer
Readers? Any experience with this?
Black Rubber Parts from China
Question from Sara
When we buy products from China that contain black rubber parts, they have a strong odor. Two sink stoppers smelled up my kitchen. Leaving them in the sun to gas off did not help. Soaking them in baking soda and water did not help. I don’t know why these and other items with black rubber parts have such a strong odor. Is it a safe odor or is there reason for concern?
Debra’s Answer
I don’t know exactly what they are, but am assuming their composition is something like rubber tires, which contain a lot of toxic chemicals.
The Many Ways Toxic Chemicals Affect Your Health and What You Can Do
My guest is Dr. Doris Rapp, one of the first medical doctors who began to associate toxic chemical exposures with the symptoms of her pediatric patients. A board-certified environmental medical specialist, pediatric allergist, and homeopath, Dr. Rapp served as Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo until January 1996. Dr. Rapp practiced traditional allergy medicine for 18 years. After learning about environmental medicine in 1975, Dr. Rapp began to incorporate the principles of environmental medicine into her pediatric allergy practice. Dr. Rapp is a past President of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. She is also the author of the bestselling books, Is this Your Child and Is this Your Child’s World, which help identify and provide practical methods of treatment to eliminate substances which can cause illness and behavioral changes in both children and adults. Her book Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call tells how chemicals damage your body, brain behavior and sex. www.drrapp.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Many Ways Toxic Chemicals Affect Your Health and What You Can Do
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Doris Rapp
Date of Broadcast: May 01, 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 around, we don’t have to let them make us sick. We don’t have to have them in our homes. We don’t need to have them in our bodies. And we can live toxic-free, healthy, happy, productive. It can be a great life and a great world.
It’s Wednesday, May 1st 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we are going to talk with one of our most knowledgeable doctors about exposure to toxic chemicals and what they can do to your body and what we can do to be happy.
My guest is Dr. Doris Rapp and she was one of the first MDs to learn and use environmental medicine. She treat her pediatric patients way back in 1975. I first learned about toxic chemicals and products and their health effects in 1978. And so Dr. Rapp and I have known each other for many years and have been both working in parallel in our respective fields to be handling problems with toxic chemicals with her clients and patients and me with consumers.
I’m just going to get right to the phone. Dr. Rapp, welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Doris; Oh, it’s a pleasure to hear your voice and talk to you ear-to-ear. I’ve read your many books and I can’t get over how much practical, sensible information that you give people, to get it down to the nitty-gritty and you tell them what they need to do and then, it’s up to them. You can lead them to water, you can’t make them drink. But most of them are going to drink because they have fate in what you say and the suggestions are practical and will definitely improve their health if they listen.
DEBRA: Thank you. Yesterday, my guest told me that when she became ill with toxic chemical exposure that she got one of my books and she followed it to the letter religiously and she recovered from just doing what I outlined in my book.
That was an old book. We know so much more today that I just really feel that it’s not a question of information. It’s just a question of getting people to understand that there is a problem with toxics and there’s something they can do about it.
I want to ask you to tell us your story of how you got interested in this? But first, let me just give the little bio that I failed to give, so that you don’t have to talk about how you were a board certified environmental medical specialist, podiatric allergist and homeopath, you served as a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo until January 1996.
Dr. Rapp practiced traditional allergy medicine for 18 years. And then after learning about environmental medicine in 1975, Dr. Rapp began to incorporate the principles of environmental medicine into her pediatric allergy practice.
She’s the past president of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, the author of the bestselling books Is This Your Child?, Is This Your Child’s World?, Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call and several other books. You can find out all about everything that she does and everything that she’s written and everything that she has to offer at her website, DrRapp.com. If you go to her website and you subscribe to her newsletter, she will send you all kinds of free information about toxic chemicals in your house.
So all that said, now tell us about those point in your life where you discovered environmental medicine and how you began to observe what was going on with your patients?
DR. DORIS RAPP: I was practicing allergy just like everybody else until 1975. And then fortunately, I went to a medical meeting and the man there said that he could put a drop of an allergy extract in your arm and produce your symptoms and that different drops cause different symptoms and that they could be treated by giving them a dilution of whatever made them sick.
I was really irate because I’ve been trained that you couldn’t treat food allergies and that this wasn’t possible. And yet this man claimed that he could do this. So I said to me at the meeting, I said, “Show me” and he brought in five people, five patients and he caused asthma and he caused their bellies to swell up and he caused all kinds of symptoms right in front of our eyes. I said, “I can’t figured out how he’s fooling me, but this can’t be for real.”
I decided to go to various offices of environmental medical specialist and see if they could really do what they said they could do and I was really astounded. If you had problems with your belly after eating a food, they put a drop of that food in your arm and immediately, in eight minutes, you had the bellyache. And then they give you different dilutions.
Our bodies are so smart, so much smarter than the doctors that one drop of a substance in your arm can mess up your whole body – your pulse will go up, your blood pressure will go up, your breathing will become worse, your belly, you can’t walk, you can’t talk sometimes, you don’t act appropriately. All this happens from one drop of an allergy extract.
And then the second amazing thing is that a dilution of that drop, a 1:5 or 1:25 or 1:125, one drop of the right dilusion and in eight minutes, the whole body goes back to normal. It sounds too good to be true. It sounded so good that I didn’t believe it.
And then I went back to my office, I tried it, I found I could do it and it meant that the next 20 years, I had someone hired in my office who do nothing, but photograph what was going on because the reactions were so dramatic that nobody would believe them.
The disappointment to me is that it’s now 2013 and most doctors and most patients and most people with severe allergies do not know that it can be turned on and off like a switch using provocation, neutralization allergy testing.
With provocation, you put a drop of something into the arm and you see if you can provoke. The provocation test is to provoke symptoms so you might produce slight asthma or difficulty walking, talking, thinking, an area of your brain to be affected (any area of your body could be affected). And then you would turn it off with a fivefold weaker dilution of that same substance that caused the problem.
You say, “Well, how could it be that a drop of milk would enable you to drink milk without difficulty if you put a drop of diluted milk solution in the mouth” and all I can say is the body is an awful lot smarter than we are because we don’t have the answers.
There are some theories as to why it might work that explain it, but the bottomline is if you have a food allergy, it can be treated. It you’re allergic to dust, mold and pollen and chemicals, most of those can also be effectively treated with the right dilutions of an allergy extract.
If you want to find a doctor that knows the method that I’ve just talk about, you call the AAEM, that’s the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. 316-684-5500. That number again, 316-684-5500.
It’s just astounding to me and unquestionably, the best thing I ever did my whole life was to go to that one medical meeting because it opened up a whole new world and the result was that patients I’ve help that I never believed in a million years that I could help.
I can remember one woman that had severe herpes and cancer – herpes, shingles. She was walking up the driveway to my office at that time. I looked out the window and I said, “Doris, how do you think that you could possibly help this patient? You’ve never seen a patient like this and you just think you can do it by using a dilution of flu vaccine?”
I said, “Well, it’s what I learned and I’m going to try it.” Sure enough, I tested the patient. I treated them and the herpes didn’t spread to the eye, which could cause blindness and the pain was gone and the patient was better. It was just a whole new world of medicine. I had no idea that people could be treated so effectively. And if you combine the allergy testing and treatment with good nutrition and a proper diet and you did make some [inaudible 00:10:46] to get rid of the toxic chemicals and things stored in your body, which is called natural detoxification, there’s no doubt in my mind that most people will improve and some people will become entirely well.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we have to go to station break. But we’ll continue talking with Dr. Doris Rapp after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with Dr. Doris Rapp. We’re talking about allergies and chemicals and all kinds of things.
Dr. Rapp, you and I started in the same place although I started with provocative neutralization testing, but I was on the patient end of it. That really proved to me that there was something going on my body that it could be turned on and off by being exposed to a toxic chemical.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Did they diagnose you with having a psychiatric problem because you have this illness that affected any area of the body?
DEBRA: No because I didn’t go to any other doctors. The first doctor I went to was a clinical ecologist. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was having all kinds of symptoms that seemed to be not related to each other. It was actually my father that went.
My mother was dying of Cancer. My father took her to a doctor practicing environmental medicine because he was the only one that would give her intravenous vitamin C as a treatment. He’s sitting there waiting in the office for my mother watching the technician perform provocative neutralization testing and watching these symptoms turn on and off as a result of drops for food and pollens and toxic chemicals. He’s looking at this and going, “That’s what’s wrong with my daughter” because I would just start crying at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason.
And so he wanted me to go in. He told me about it. He wanted me to go in. I said no, I wouldn’t go because at that particular time, one of my symptoms that I didn’t recognize as a symptom was depression and not being willing to do things to help myself.
He was being aware that I needed to do something to help myself. He just went into the office and listened and watched and found out that if somebody was having a reaction, that they could take Alka Seltzer in a gold package and it would stop.
So one night while I was having a reaction, he got some Alka Seltzer in a gold package. He had gotten it just for this very moment. He had put it in the glass and he said, “Here, drink this.” I took the glass and I said, “I am not going to drink this” and threw the glass against the wall, smashed it.
He had to go make another glass of Alka Seltzer gold, wrestle me to the floor, hold my nose, opened my mouth and poured it down my throat.
After about two seconds, suddenly, it was like I had woken up from a dream like, “Where am I? What just happened?” I had completely come out of the reaction from whatever it was I was reacting to in about two seconds, very fast.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Absolutely amazing!
DEBRA: He knows.
DR. DORIS RAPP: But if you don’t have Alka Seltzer gold, any of the people that are listening can take a quarter to a half of teaspoon of baking soda and a half a glass of water or enough water so they can swallow and they can stop a food allergic reaction in about 10-15 minutes. And if the baking soda relieves it, you know you’ve got a food allergy. And once you know what’s causing it, you can either get treated for that food or stop eating it or try eating it only at a 4-day interval.
DEBRA: I did all of that. I went on a rotation diet. We identified what my food allergies were. I went on a rotation diet. I was on that diet for a year. And at the end of that year, I wasn’t allergic to any of those foods.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Isn’t it amazing that help is there for everybody that’s listening if they have food allergies?
DEBRA: It is.
DR. DORIS RAPP: If they find somebody that knows environmental medicine, you can be treated or you can treat it with just a diet of eating individual foods every four days rather than in sequence every day.
DEBRA: Well, here’s the most amazing thing that I found. After I saw how well this worked, I went to work for the doctor administering the provocative neutralization testing.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Who was the doctor?
DEBRA: What was his name? I don’t remember the first one. But then I went to work for Dr. McGovern. You know McGovern?
DR. DORIS RAPP: Oh, yes. Dr. McGovern was an absolutely wonderful doctor.
DEBRA: Oh, absolutely! And then I went to work for Dr. Allen Lavine. I’m sure you know him too.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Yes. And he’s more a research doctor than he is a clinical doctor I think, but he’s absolutely brilliant.
DEBRA: Yes, he is. Absolutely. So I had all this time observing people while I’m giving provocative neutralizing testing. Dr. McGovern got me started doing consulting by sending me off to the patients’ home to find out what toxic chemicals they were being exposed to.
The most amazing thing that I included from my observation was that one day, one of my patients went on vacation for two weeks. She came back and she said, “I can eat all my foods I’m allergic to.” What we figured out was that it was the toxic chemical overload that was making it impossible for her to eat the foods. It was too much on her body to have both chemical exposure and the food exposures. And when we went in and took the chemicals out of her house, her food allergies just went away.
DR. DORIS RAPP: It’s amazing. It really is like a barrel. If your barrel is overflowing, you’re having symptoms. If the things that fill up barrel are dust, mold, pollen, foods and chemicals, you can’t get rid of everything, but you can get an air purifier, a water purifier, eat organic foods. Just that would make you better because you’re going to have less in your barrel. And the more that you can decrease the number of allergenic things that you’re getting into, the more [inaudible 00:19:48] you are, the emptier that barrel, enough that you can get into things that previously caused trouble, you will not have difficulty.
DEBRA: That’s right. It’s just an overload. Wouldn’t you say? It’s just an overload.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Absolutely! An overload. So you don’t have to change everything. I hate to say this, but you don’t have to do everything that the doctor asked you to do. But once you got their barrel lowered below the tap, it won’t overflow and your symptoms will not come back. But if you binge –
Many times, for example, I have people that can’t eat a certain food and at Christmas, they’d like to celebrate, I might tell, “Go ahead and eat” the food they haven’t been able to eat if it doesn’t cause a really bad reaction and sure enough, they can eat it.
But if they binged every single day, they’d soon find that they were sensitive to it again. You have to use…
DEBRA: That’s what I found for myself too. We’re coming up on another commercial break in about 10 seconds, so I don’t want to ask you another question until we come back. I’ll just announce again, Dr. Rap’s website is DrRapp.com. If you go to her website…
DR. DORIS RAPP: And let me add this. They don’t have to buy my book. Go to the library for all the books. They have my book, Is This Your Child?. It came out 20 years ago, but it was a bestseller for good reasons. Read it and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it helped you.
DEBRA: I’m sure. Anyone who has a child should read this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’ll be back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re here today with Dr. Doris Rapp. One of her books is Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call. Chemicals damage your body, brain, behavior and sex. I’m sitting here with this book right in front of me on my desk.
Dr. Rapp, let’s talk about the poisoning aspects of this. Certainly, people can get help as you’ve described in the first part of the show. A lot of people think, “Well, I don’t have allergies” or “I don’t have symptoms,” so they’re not motivated to do anything by the fact that they’re sick. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not being poisoned.
So can you tell us about some of these toxic chemicals and what they’re doing to our bodies?
DR. DORIS RAPP: Well, if a man sprays the lawn next door with toxic chemicals and he decides to conceive a baby, he’ll have trouble. His sperm will be damaged for at least a month or two. If a woman gets into toxic chemicals the first 90 days of her pregnancy, the first three months, she has a 70% chance of having a miscarriage, a stillborn or birth defect of the baby.
I think one of the thing that we have to do is test young couples that if they would like to reproduce, both the male and the female have to spend a few months getting their body in shape. They have to get rid of toxic chemicals. They have to stop the chemicals from going into their body and they have to get rid of all the toxic chemicals that they can and build up their nutrition. If they’re not willing to do that, then they shouldn’t be conceiving a child and putting them in our polluted world.
The average newborn baby now floats in 287 toxic chemicals. This means that baby is marinated for nine months in uterine fluid that is not good for it. It’s amazing to me that the baby is withstanding it as well as they are. There is no doubt that these chemicals cause birth defect, causes sterility (the male sperm count goes way down, the females also are less fertile), it causes problems in their immune system.
Many of these exposure to chemicals puts stresses in the body and allergies become evident that weren’t evident before. These chemicals can cause diabetes and thyroid disease and I believe that it contributes to Alzheimer’s and autism. Everone says, “What can we do about this cancer epidemic?”
My question is, “Why the hell are we doing it? We know what causes cancer and yet, we are doing as a country or as a nation or as a world, we are not doing what needs to be done so obviously to cut down on the known causes of cancer.
If you buy yourself a new synthetic mattress or carpet, the smells of toxic chemicals and paint with toxic paint and put all kinds of toxic furniture in your house, you will not be well. And if you get cancer, you may get better after the treatment, but you go back into that house and sleep on the same bed mattress and you breathe the air from the same bed, don’t be surprised if it comes back again.
Your body is precious. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, this is it! This is the best it’s going to be. Take care of your body. It is so precious. Clean it out, get rid of the chemicals, get on organic food, get a water purifier, get an air purifier and you’ll find that you’ll feel much better, you’re going to live longer.
There’s no sense in living longer in a line-up of other people in a wheelchair and a wet diaper. You have got to live longer, but feel better and you can do that, but you simply must take care of your precious little body by giving it the right nutrients, by giving it organic foods, by not eating processed foods and canned foods, by breathing good air and good water.
You’ve got more than a fighting chance to stay healthy. And if your children learn how to have a healthy baby, you’ll be much happier as grandparents.
DEBRA: I couldn’t have said that better. I frequently see advertisements and get emails for people wanting donations for cancer research and research for this disease and that disease. I just look at that and I say, “Instead of asking for money for research, why not just reduce toxic chemicals?”
We know! We know! There’s no question. There’s study after study after study these chemicals cause these diseases. And yet people continue to say, “Oh, I’m going to live my normal, toxic life and it must be caused by something else.”
We need to understand this as a nation, as a world. We need to really understand that toxic chemicals are what is making us sick. They’re the primary, underlying cause of virtually every illness and symptom. That is the thing that needs – we don’t even need research dollars. We just need people to stop using toxic chemicals. Wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you agree with that?
DR. DORIS RAPP: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We already have the answer and the big question is why haven’t we as a nation or as a world decided that we’ve got to put an end to it. How much worse does it have to get before we say, “Enough already”? When are we going to say stop using 24D on the lawn? We know it causes lymphomas. Why is it banned in many countries, but not banned in this country? How are we allowing the corporations to hire the lobbyists who then affects the politicians who pass the laws that allow increased pollution of our air, food, water and genetically engineered foods.
We have got to find when we vote for somebody what their opinion is of the environment and how important is it to clean it up. If they’re not interested in the environment, they’ve never passed any bills that shows that they want to protect and help our air, food and water stay pure, they’re not the right man to vote for.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And again, we’re coming up on the commercial break. So I’ll announce again that Dr. Rapp’s website is DrRapp.com. She’s got a lot of information. Go to her website, see her books, see what else she has to offer and sign up to be on her mailing list and she will you lots of information about toxic chemicals and allergies and how to be healthy. It’s just a lot.
Also, you can go to my website. An easy way to get there is by just going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And across the top of the page, there’s a menu that will take you to different parts of my website. One is enormous Q&A where you can write in and ask a question and I and my readers will answer. We’ve got over 3000 questions and more than 2000 answers. I’ve got a director with more than 500 websites that are selling non-toxic products. So there really is no reason why everybody in the world can’t live in a totally non-toxic way. We have all the information. It’s just everybody making the choice.
So we’ll be back after this station break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be back with Dr. Doris Rapp on Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Doris Rapp, pioneering medical doctor in the field of environmental medicine and author of many books on toxic chemicals and how they affect our body including Is This Your Child?, Is This Your Child’s World? and Our Toxic World: A Wake-up Call.
Dr. Rapp, give us some of the dramatic cases that you had where you saw really amazing kind of damage from chemical exposure and then amazing recoveries.
DR. DORIS RAPP: One of the most impressive things is the air purifier. I can remember one mother that put the air purifier in her infant’s bedroom and in about an hour later, she went rushing in the room thinking the baby had died. It was the first time the baby was breathing quietly. She didn’t realize that babies don’t make noise when they breathe at night. That was pretty dramatic.
I was seeing hundreds and hundreds of children that diet and just tried to diet in my book, I never saw them. It’s the book, Is This Your Child?. They tried to diet within five to seven days, the children changed and one mother said, “My bananas kid is gone. In the past, he would take a hose from the basement and slide all over the basement in the water that is spread around.”
I had so many children who wanted to commit suicide who had put their heads, broken every window in the house, broke every mirror and piece of glass in the house. They were just violent and the mothers were desperate, in tears, absolutely frantic. They put the child on the diet and in five to seven days, the child was better.
If it’s dust, mold, pollen and chemicals, the air purifier may have a miraculous effect. You can buy one purifier, put it on wheels and put it in the various rooms in your house for two to four hours on high and the air in that room will be clean. The sickest person in the house should put it in their bedroom four hours before bed, shut the door, turn it on high and then close and open the door when they go to bed and you’ll find that that air in that room will be so good, then they sleep better than they ever slept.
So the sometimes, the answers are easy – one day with an air purifier. If it doesn’t work in a month, you can get most of your money back and you can check on that by calling 480-905-9195. You can get a discount on the air purifier. That’s 480-905-9195.
The diet is right on my website. You don’t have to go any place to get it. You can try it. Also exclude any food that you absolutely crave. For example , if you’re sunflower seed-aholic or a [inaudible 00:42:09]-holid or any kind of a –holic. Whatever it is that you crave that you can’t live without, if you have a food allergy, that would be the substance. If you write your two favorite foods and two favorite beverages and you’ve got a food sensitivity, stop those for a week and you’ll probably see you’re better in five to seven days and then add them back one at a time, find out which one causes trouble. And if it’s approved, baking soda is very effective in stopping allergic reactions. As little as an eighth or a quarter of a teaspoon in a glass of water will stop many allergic reactions in 15 minutes. It’s a good thing to have in your person if you have allergies because it helps right away.
And there’s a whole book on it called the pH Miracle. Dr. Robert Young who wrote the book feels that it prevents cancer. There’s a lot of evidence that if you can keep your urine alkaline by using a pH stick checking it, if your urine stays alkaline, you will be much more well than you would otherwise. There are even claims that you don’t develop cancer if you can keep your body alkaline.
DEBRA: And toxic chemicals actually make your body acid.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Oh, yes.
DEBRA: So that’s another reason to not be drinking tap water and have toxic chemicals in your home because it all makes your body more acid.
Which air filter do you recommend?
DR. DORIS RAPP: I use the Austin because it’s the only that I know that takes 3000 chemicals out of the air and therefore, I like that one.
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm… good…
DR. DORIS RAPP: They all take out 99.6% of dust and mold and pollen and particulates and all those things, but you have to have one that takes off the chemicals because the chemicals…
DEBRA: Right, that’s exactly right.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Every place, from every place, you’ve got to take it. And if you do that, everyone in your family will be better. If you don’t do it, then they will be more prone to become sick.
DEBRA: Also, I just want to – because an air filter can be a really powerful thing as you’ve described in order to show the difference between living with chemicals and living without and protecting yourself. So I just want to make sure that everybody understands when Dr. Rapp says air filter, she’s not talking about a little, tiny air filter that you might find at a discount store.
DR. DORIS RAPP: Right! It’s a machine that’s going to cost $250 to $700. It really purifies the air. You put it in a room and go in an hour later, you’ll smell the difference.
DEBRA: You will smell the difference. When I was first dealing with my own environmental illness, the first thing that I did was I got an air filter. And not I only got an air filter for my home, I got one for my car. There was a period of time when I had to go work as a temp in an office and I thought, “How am I going to sit in this office? I have to make some money.”
I got a tabletop filter as opposed to a whole room filter and I brought – but this tabletop filter, this big, round canister that was about a foot across and about three feet high. I just put it on my desk in a big, open room and people would come have their break at my desk. They couldn’t quite put their finger on it, but they knew that they felt better when they were standing around my desk. So air filters can make an enormous difference.
DR. DORIS RAPP: It can change your life. I have parents buy them for the classrooms. The problem is at the end of the year, the teachers notice that if you put one in your child’s classroom, the infections goes way down. That’s because it takes dust, mold and pollen and chemicals out of the air, which cause the nose to get swollen and so you have more allergies and infections in your sinuses and your ears.
They notice that everybody, they had less illness in the classroom, the academic performance went up in the classroom. And when the child was leaving for that year and went into the next classroom, the teachers almost always bought an air purifiers themselves for the classroom because they saw that it was so effective.
And of course, ideally, in a wonderful world, the school systems would put in ventilation systems that purified the air and cleaned the air, so that the children aren’t sick with infections and allergies needlessly. That will come in a new world when it gets there.
DEBRA: The new world that we’re creating.
DR. DORIS RAPP: As far as I’m concerned, we really have to buckle down right now and decide we want to save this planet because we cannot do what we are presently doing and think for a second that we’ll make it to the end of the century.
You can’t kill off all the bees with chemicals. You’re not going to have any bee-pollinated food or crops. You can’t spray the ground with toxic chemicals so that the foods aren’t able to be eaten for several years. We cannot genetically-engineer everything in sight. Read the book Genetic Roulette by Jeffrey Smith and Seeds of Deception. When you read these books, you’ll understand that you absolutely have to read the labels and make sure they say that they’re not genetically-engineered.
And of course, the people that are in the chemical industry are trying to pay the government to forbid from putting any signs on the labels saying that something is genetically-engineered or not genetically-engineered because if you can’t find out, it’s not written on the label, you’re going to buy the product anyhow.
DEBRA: Well, this has been a wonderful hour with you, Dr. Rapp. I’m sure that everybody is listening is inspired to make some changes. I just feel very privileged that you came on the show. We’ll certainly have you on again.
DR. DORIS RAPP: I just want to say something if I can…
DEBRA: Sure!
DR. DORIS RAPP: …and that is if we could clone people like you, the world would be a much better place. You’ve spent your whole life trying to educate people with fast, easy, inexpensive ways of coping with environmental challenges. And so I want to pay a tribute to you right now because you’ve done so much – probably eight books. If you haven’t read the book, you don’t know how much work it is to get it right. It means that you’ve spent much more time than the average individual trying to contribute to our world and that’s a real tribute to you.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. Well, we’re at the end of our time. Let me give Dr. Rapp’s website again. It’s DrRapp.com. You can go there and sign up for her newsletter, her mailing list and she’ll send you lots of information. You can also go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can sign up for my newsletter too. There’s lots of free information on both of my sites. We are united in our passion for making this a toxic-free world and you can help, each one of you can help. We can achieve this.
That’s all for today . This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
Decontaminating Home from Sewer Gas Smell?
Question from Mike
Our home recently had a sewer backup and now my wife has been experiencing some nausea and headaches since, due to a smell she senses, but I do not. She is able to smell it everywhere in our home and on our clothes. Our home tested positive for benzoic acid, but I do not have a baseline result prior to the backup event. What are some good ways to decontaminate her to alleviate her reactions as well as decontaminating the home? We are trying to leave the windows open as much as possible and have purchased two air purifiers. Additionally I changed out the filters in the furnace and had the air ducts scraped and cleaned. It has been almost six weeks since the event and this does not seem to be going away or mitigating itself. My wife feels better when we leave the house, but when she gets a scent off her clothes, she gets a nausea feeling.
Debra’s Answer
I have no personal experience with this. Readers?
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