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“Cold” foam in IKEA furniture?

Question from Suzanne Foster

Hi Debra,

Thanks again for your wonderful website, books and resources.

I am looking at an office chair at IKEA, the GREGOR swivel chair. The product description says the seat cushion is made of “high Resilient polyurethane foam ( Cold foam)”. Do you know what that is and is it safe?
Thank you

Debra’s Answer

Polyurethane foams come in a number of different types.

High Resiliency Cold Foaming process is the most widely used today in the manufacture of molded flexible foams.

It’s still polyurethane foam, which is made from toxic chemicals.

I love to shop at IKEA. Many chairs I would have liked to purchase, but I never purchase anything made from polyurethane foam.

Stem Cell Research Identifies Effects of Pollution on Human Health

A recent study published in the Journal of Environmental Sciences (JES) shows that embryonic stem cells could serve as a model to evaluate the physiological effects of environmental pollutants efficiently and cost-effectively.

The use of stem cells has found another facade. In the world we live in today, people are constantly exposed to artificial substances created by various industrial processes. Many of these materials, when exposed to humans, can cause acute or chronic diseases. As a consequence, validated toxicity tests to address the potential hazardousness of these pollutants have become an urgent need.

Although stem cells have been used before in the field of toxicology, researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences China, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), successfully detail the use of stem cells to gauge the neurotoxicity effects of the environmental pollutant Bisphenol A (BPA) in their study.

ENN: Stem Cell Research Identifies Effects of Pollution on Human Health

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Warning! Toxic Emergency Fuel Mislabeled Nontoxic

Question from Jenny

Hi Debra,

Hope all is well. And your having a nice summer 🙂

We are packing an emergency bin and I wanted to know if it was safe to store the following below with the other food. Or should I disregard all together:

Coghlan’s 0450 Camp Heat (that is still in cans)

Coghlan’s 0450 Camp Heat

Or is this one better?

Grabber Outdoors Solid Hexamine Fuel Tablets- High Performance

Debra’s Answer

The first one contains ethylene glycol, which is toxic enough to require a spot in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Emergency Response Safety and Health Database.

They say “Following absorption, 80% or more of ethylene glycol is chemically converted by the body into toxic compounds.” And much more

www.cdc.gov/niosh/ershdb/emergencyresponsecard_29750031.html

The second one contains hexamine which is listed on the New Jersey Department of Health Right to Know Hazardous Substances List.

www.nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/0996.pdf

I can’t believe these products are labeled nontoxic. They just aren’t.

Here in Florida we need to pack emergency rations for possible hurricanes. We only pack food that doesn’t require cooking, like nuts, dried fruits, jerky, etc.

But I also know that after a hurricane, rescue teams do rush in and provide everything. I know because I was on one of those teams after a hurricane.

Depends on the emergency what you might need.

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Toxic Free Hairbrush & Comb

Question from Lauren C

Hi Debra,

Thank you so much for all the info you provide–I have been able to find a lot of great information here and I so appreciate how you take the time to answer questions!

I have been looking for a while for a non-toxic hairbrush with no success.

I cannot find any information about what type of plastic is used in any plastic hairbrush, I have read that bamboo products sometimes use glues containing formaldehyde, and I have also read that sometimes boar hair can be treated with pesticides.

I found one solid wood brush that was finished with linseed oil (Widu brushes)—not sure if that’s ok?

Do you have any recommendations? Would love to find a safe hairbrush and a comb too!

Debra’s Answer

Well, first off, I have never considered that hairbrushes of any kind were so toxic that I needed to research this subject at all.

That said, I’m going through a phase now where I am looking at everything with new eyes and am systematically researching all products to find out materials used.

So I can’t answer your question immediately. It will require some research. But I’m posting it here to maybe get some help with that.

First I’ll say I use a wood handle brush with boar bristles and a wooden comb. I’ve had these for so long I don’t remember where I got them. I’ve never noticed any toxic effects from them.

If I were researching this I would call manufacturers and ask them the questions you have brought up about materials. If you like that Widu Brush, call and ask them more about the materials.

Common plastics used for hairbrush handles are ABS and polyacetal. Bristles are nylon. None of these plastics are particularly toxic.

The key here is not to rely on what you read, but to take what you read and start asking questions.

Anyone who wants to do some research can comment here and I will publish it.

Readers, any suggestions for hairbrushes and combs you use and like?

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An Investigative Reporter’s Take on Toxics

greg-gordonMy guest today is Greg Gordon, National Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau. As an investigative reporter, Greg has spent 38 years uncovering waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in Washington. I called him last week after his article about the FDA and mercury fillings was published and we had a great conversation about other stories he had done on toxics over the years. Today we’ll be talking about toxics from the viewpoint of an investigative reporter: why he writes about toxics and the investigative process. Greg has received so many awards I can’t fit them all in this space. Read more about Greg’s distinguished career at www.mcclatchydc.com/customer-service/contact-us/article24432826.html

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
An Investigative Reporter’s Take on Toxics

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Greg Gordon

Date of Broadcast: August 06, 2016

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It is Thursday, August 6th 2015, and apparently, we just had some technical difficulties with my microphone, but I think you can hear me now.

We’re going to be talking about something a little bit different today. Usually, we talk about toxic chemicals or we talk about products that don’t have toxic chemicals. We talk about detox, all kinds of things like that.

But today, for the first time, we’re going to be talking to an investigative reporter. We’ve never talked to an investigative reporter before, but I was very interested to talk to him. I’ve never even done this before either, which is I called up an investigative reporter after I read a really excellent article last week. We talked about this article last Wednesday.

I talked with Pamela Seefeld (my guest last Wednesday) about this article about the FDA warning dentists that if they can possibly help it, no patients of any kind should actually be having mercury fillings.

So today, we have the reporter who wrote that story, dug it up and put it all together. I’m just so excited to talk to him because I want to know all about how investigative reporters investigate and how do they find these stories and what do they do. It’s such detective work.

I know that, for myself, what I do is detective work in a way that’s finding those hidden toxic chemicals in the consumer products and then finding the products that work better. But this is a real investigative reporter.

His name is Greg Gordon. He’s a national correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau. He’s been an investigative reporter for 38 years covering waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in Washington.

Hi, Greg.

GREG GORDON: How are you, Debra? Thanks for having me.

DEBRA: I’m great. How are you doing?

GREG GORDON: Pretty well. Aside from a little emergency with my son’s eight month old Siberian Husky who bled all over the floor this morning. She probably punctured her digestive tract somehow. She’s in the hospital. We’re already at $1600 and just getting warmed up.

It’s been a stressful morning, but…

DEBRA: A little excitement today.

GREG GORDON: A little excitement. I hope it wasn’t a toxin that caused this. I don’t think so. I think it was more like eating a branch probably.

DEBRA: So tell us, how did you become interested in being an investigative reporter?

GREG GORDON: I guess that traces back to relatively early in my career. My career started at age five. That’s what my mother says anyway that I started putting out a penny newspaper in my neighborhood in a small town in Southern Minnesota.

I really shadowed my big brother into journalism because he worked on the student paper. So did I and that continued through college. In college, at the University of Minnesota (which has a very large student paper), the reading population at the University of Minnesota’s, the student paper, at the time was 70,000 or 80,000. So, I was really going to be a sports writer, but I got into digging.

And then, along came the Vietnam War and the sports just didn’t seem very important with what was going on on campus.

And so I decided that I wanted to try to be a regular news reporter, which was a big transition. Almost immediately, I wanted to dig deeper really when I was a young reporter, a wire service reporter in Minneapolis.

And really, investigative reporting, one of the definitions for investigative reporting is just finding out information that’s concealed from the public. And there’s what I call pure investigative reporting where you’re really doing original research. And then there’s leak investigative reporting, what the FBI investigation uncover and so forth.

I like the original research when I can. Really, I’d call the FDA story that I did a combination of both. But mostly, there wasn’t an ongoing investigation. I was trying to find out what an agency was doing and why. I only got part of the way frankly. I think there are more questions to be answered.

Just to recap, the story basically said that after all these decades of defending and allowing the use of what is known in the trade as amalgam fillings (we call them mercury fillings because nobody knows what amalgam is), the FDA finally, and really, in the face of a lot of people who have come forward and said that when they had the amalgam fillings taken out of their mouths, their health improved, in some cases, stunningly.

For example, some people had symptoms of and were diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis and it went away. It just went away. It’s astonishing.

Most of us probably (and certainly, older people like me), we know people who have died of multiple sclerosis. In fact, the wife of another journalist for one, the Houston Paper, just passed away this year that I know. She suffered horribly with multiple sclerosis. I’d like to know now how many mercury fillings she had in her mouth.

I don’t know if that’s the sole cause of multiple sclerosis symptoms. But in any event, I think that the FDA’s Director of Medical Devices and Radiological Health Division, which oversees, regulates these products, a guy named Jeffrey Shuren, whom I’ve never met, my impression is that he sided (whatever faction they had in his unit at the FDA) with those people in concluding that certain people are sensitive to mercury and vulnerable to significant, potentially disabling, even lethal health effects from mercury, either the vapors or the particles from when they chew gum and somehow break free some of the mercury.

Mercury is bound with other metals, silver particularly. That’s why we call them silver fillings. They’re often called silver fillings.

DEBRA: It sounds nicer than mercury fillings.

GREG GORDON: Yes, exactly. It was also a selling point. The dental profession calls them silver fillings.

In any event, apparently, Jeffrey Shuren sided with these folks (this is my speculation) and he got it through all the people.

And we had a big decision when we wrote this story about whether to mention that Margaret Hamburg (because there was a ruckus about her. She was the FDA commissioner at the time. She just left this March) had any role in this. And what I was told was no. And so ultimately, we took her out of the story.

And the reason I raised her is that upon joining the FDA, Margaret Hamburg, also known as Peggy, resigned her position as a member of the Board of Directors of the Henry Schein Company, which is the biggest distributor of mercury amalgam and a lot of other health care products. But in particular, they’re a distributor of mercury fillings, the components or the compounds, in the United States.

And their stock shot up in 2009 when the FDA decided not to do much of anything about mercury fillings and issued a rule that classified them in Class II, which are not the real dangerous products where the manufacturers are required to first prove that their product is safe before it goes on the market.

So Hamburg either recused herself, withdrew from any involvement in this or she said okay. She put her own perimeter on it and sent it on to HHS, Department of Health and Human Services.

To break this down, the FDA, its duty is solely to determine the safety and the effectiveness of the products that it regulates. The Department of Health and Human Services, they have the responsibility of doing cost benefit analyses.

And this is a process that really traces to the Reagan years when cost benefit analyses really became a big deal and there were a lot of environmental regulatory sites because sometimes, in fact, they would put a value on a human life and they tend to come down to $1 million. At the time, it’s okay to spend this much money on exposing this many people to this toxin or toxin, but not this much money.
They were heated. There have been, really, over the last 30 or 40 years, some heated arguments over class benefit analyses.

So what did HHS do? HHS did a cost benefit analysis and concluded that lower income people were going to be harmed by this regulation because it would raise the cost. The alternative fillings (principally, composite fillings. You can also use ceramics or even gold, gold being very expensive and ceramics being more expensive), composite fillings typically depends upon the dentist, of course. And a high end dentist, I’m sure, charges a lot more. But composite fillings typically cost maybe 100 bucks more.

So they concluded that low income people would then just let their teeth decay if the dentist said, “Look, I don’t want to put amalgam in your mouth because it could be poison you. It could harm you.”

DEBRA: It could poison you.

GREG GORDON: I neglected to mention one of the things that’s noted by the FDA is that mercury fillings constantly, continuously release very, very low levels of mercury vapor. I mentioned chewing gum, they found or if you grind your teeth at night.

I’m an older guy, so I have a few mercury fillings in my mouth. Not to get personal here, but I have to check out a few health issues that I have because they fit into the box of possible problems from exposure to mercury.

And of course, most of us eat fish. And there’s mercury in a lot of the fish especially sushi.

So bottom line is, the FDA was overruled and what really was troubling about this is that the FDA is overruled and here’s this public safety communication that they drafted at the end of 2011 and they had a little data on the top of it. We’ve now posted it on our website. It’s a link in the ‘stories’ if anybody wants to look. It says, XX12 (which is what’s the date in 2012) that they’re going to issue this public safety communication.

And here it is now, 2015. And finally, it becomes public, but not through the FDA but in a newspaper story. It was kept secret for three years and how many people had mercury amalgam implanted without knowing the potential risks in the interim?

The American Dental Association would go ballistic to listen to what I just said because they are as emphatic as you could be in citing what they say is definitive research demonstrating that mercury fillings are perfectly safe.

One of the issues, by the way, is that some people have mercury allergies. I think that showed up in some of the – we published on our website six case studies. I sent some more case studies. At McClatchy, it’s 29 papers. I did about 10 of them. A lot of these people said they had a mercury filling replaced. They would have an immediate reaction.

So you’re the dentist, 157,000 members of American Dental Association and the dentists are using these, especially in programs like Medicaid or the Veterans Administration, hospitals or facilities (I don’t know how much the VA does on dental, but I think they have some kind of coverage) and places where lower income people would have some sort of insurance coverage that only provides benefits if you use amalgam. And how many of these people didn’t get to know over those three years? Let alone, how long this battle inside the FDA has been going on because there are, pretty clearly, factions within the FDA?

Margaret Hamburg’s situation was fascinating because when she began the FDA commissioner, it was only about two months before the rule that classified mercury fillings as a Category II, not a III (not the most worrisome products). And that’s what the consumer lawyers have been fighting.

I didn’t mention the consumer lawyers who have been fighting this issue for 23 years, filing suits and challenging rules that are issued and trying to push the FDA towards something more protective of the public.

And the dentists are in an interesting position as I started to say before. Some people have mercury allergies. So, if the dentist says to the patient when you come in and say, “Well, I want to put a mercury filling in because it’s cheaper and it will last longer,” and they argue. The other side argues that composite now lasts just as long (I don’t know who’s right). But the dentists, are they going to say to the patients, “Well, I need to give you a test. I need to stick a needle in your arm” or whatever they’re going to need, “stick some mercury on your skin to see whether you have a mercury allergy,” how’s that going to go over?

DEBRA: The part that I don’t understand is (and this comes up not just in mercury fillings, but in every single product), when you go to the dentist, the dentist says –

Oh, wait! Before I say this, I want to say, you may be wondering where the commercials are. We’re having no commercials today and it’s because of a technical thing. They’re repairing the commercial machine. So we’re going to just talk right through.

So what I was going to say is that the thing that seems so odd to me is that in this country (and probably in most industrial countries in the world), there’s no information on the product. There are very, very few, relatively few products that have warnings on the product or even reveal what the ingredients are. So if your dentist says to you, “I want to put in a silver filling.” That doesn’t sound very dangerous. It’s the least expensive one.

Now, the patient has no reason to know unless they’re listening to this show or reading things I’ve written or other people have written or what you’ve written. The patient has no idea that there’s anything wrong with those silver fillings, and they go, “Well, composite is 100 more. I’ll go with this silver filling.” Because they don’t have information, they don’t have a choice.

And so if instead the dentists were required by law to say, “I want to put in a filling. Now, here are your choices. You can have the least expensive one, which has mercury in it. And it’s evaporating, vaporizing mercury in your mouth 24 hours a day. And mercury, by the way, is a toxic substance. And here is some information about the health effects of those toxic substances…”

I just had a funny thought. I was just thinking about all those commercials on television for drugs where they play the beautiful music and people walk through the meadow and they say, “And the side effects are death.”

GREG GORDON: The side effects are death. If you’re listening, the side effects on maybe these commercials are just jaw-dropping. They’re really saying this? Well, they have to. They don’t like it, but they have to tell you that because it’s on the label.

DEBRA: Because it’s a drug.

Now, we get to teeth and fillings, and they don’t have that requirement. Their dentist doesn’t have to say, “Here are the health effects of these mercury fillings.”

I think if any right-minded person were to have the choices laid out for them, “These are choices of your dental fillings” and they were to see the health effects of mercury and they were to see that it’s only $100 more to not have to be poisoned by mercury and have $100,000 worth of medical bills later on after you spent 20 years having mercury fillings, then I think that that would be a better choice.

GREG GORDON: Well, there’s that issue. There are a number of issues about amalgam. One of them is apparently, the – I just learned this recently. But apparently, the amalgam, the alloy that the mercury is bound to expands and contracts with cold and heat or whatever (I don’t know how much the temperature in the mouth changes). But in any event, these amalgams have been blamed for cracking teeth.

So how much is it going to cost to repair a cracked tooth? And when the tooth is cracked, what does that do for the life of the tooth?

Obviously, what happens when the tooth has to come out in the end, it’s extremely expensive because then you’re getting an implant, which can cost $5000 a piece, I guess, the number I’ve heard.

That doesn’t mention the cost to society because when they’re using the mercury in their offices, they may have to dispose of it. And if they dispose of it properly, that’s another expense.

So you have all of these downstream costs and you’re going to quibble over 100 bucks? Well, it seems suspect. And one of the questions, of course, that has to leap to anybody’s mind who is paying attention to this is, “What happened at the Department of Health and Human

Services? And was there more to it?”

And I am unable to get there yet. I’m going to try. It’s not an easy answer to find because I will tell you that I did search the lobbying records of all of the American Dental Associations lobbying team, I’ll call them, the outside lobbyists that they hire in Washington because everybody here has a lobbyist. They have several.

And I went through all the reports during the timeframe that this issue came up. I don’t know exactly what year the Department of Health and Human Services rejected this, but I’m assuming that it was a long process and it dragged out.

So I couldn’t find any reference. And that’s partly due to the limitations of the lobbying laws, the disclosure was. If you are a lobbyist and you only make, once a year, a big, big guy, a former house majority leader, some senior member of Congress or a guy who is a heavyweight lobbyist in D.C. who’s got connections, you saunter over to the Department of Health and Human Services and have a sit down with one of the senior people, and you make your arguments to get in the door because of who you are –

There’s illegal about this. What’s frustrating is that when the lobbyists make their disclosure reports – one if they only made one meeting, but they’re full-time lobbyists, they attended one meeting on this one subject, they technically don’t have to disclose it because there has to be a time threshold that you devoted to a particular subject before you have to disclose. That’s number one. And two, you can do it in a vague way.

So I don’t know, but I’d be surprised, really surprised given the stakes for the dentists who want –

And let me say that what the dentists’ stakes are for a moment if I can. The dentists face potential lawsuits. I know that we all signed these releases for procedures in medical offices. Next time, I go to my dentist, I’m going to read the one that I signed if I have to. I probably have a standing one that’s in the office there. But how many rights we’re giving away in terms of seeking recourse against the dentist if he hurts you? There are ways around that if you’ve got a good trial lawyer, but they’re hard to do.

So the dentists’ stakes or they might face lawsuits from patients in the past. But they certainly will be on notice that they better not use this stuff unless it’s the only way to repair a tooth, with amalgam. And apparently, there are certain situations where amalgam is clearly the better option.

One of the problems is everybody in the country has a unique health profile. We have a lot going on in our bodies. And when toxins are introduced by ingestion or inhalation (and in this case, it’s inhalation), when they’re introduced, they may or may not be disposed of, excreted by the body.

There’s a scientist that I wrote about in one of the stories in Colorado who is doing cutting edge research. He’s figured out a lot. He estimates that 20% of the people in the United States who have had mercury amalgams placed in their teeth have some sort of impairment, as a result, to their health. They’re under stress is the way he would put it. They may not have any symptoms, but they’re under stress. And then, he estimates that 5% to 10% of those people are seriously ill. That is a staggering statistic if accurate.

And what does he base that on? Well, one, he developed a test to determine – it’s called the tri-test. He tests hair, blood and urine to determine – let me back up a second.

He figured out a way to distinguish between inorganic mercury (which is the mercury in your teeth if you have these fillings) and organic mercury (which is the mercury known as metal mercury that’s in fish). And then, he developed this tri-test for hair, urine and blood. He’s able, he says, to see how much inorganic mercury you have in your blood, in your urine. And organic mercury, interestingly, excretes also in your hair. You never find inorganic mercury in your hair. Only the mercury from fish can get in your hair. It’s interesting.

DEBRA: That’s interesting. That’s interesting to know.

GREG GORDON: I have no idea why. But in any event, if he’s right…

DEBRA: I can see he’s been so thorough about it.

GREG GORDON: He’s taken blood tests of over 10,000 people. And so, his projection of the potential number of Americans who are impaired is based on a pretty large sample.

Now, it’s hard to know how many of those people came to him because they thought they had a mercury problem, which would skew the results. I pushed down on that point, but I didn’t really get any answer.

He’s not a scientist who is publishing research, so he is not subject to a peer review. He’s running a company. His name is Chris Shade, S-H-A-D-E. His company is known as Quicksilver Scientific. Quicksilver being another name for mercury [inaudible 00:29:23] over the decades or centuries even, probably.

So you have this issue of possibly pioneering research indicating a way to find out if you are being harmed or if your body is actually processing the mercury okay. And he says probably 80% of the population who have mercury fillings is okay.

Now, how big is that population? Well, the US Public Health Services stopped tallying figures, but they actually did up until 2004. How many Americans have mercury fillings and how many in their teeth? It was just pretty amazing. The last number was 181 million.

So what’s 5% to 10% of 181 million? Well, that could be up to 18 million people that he says could be seriously ill. Most of them don’t know that it’s mercury that’s doing the damage, mercury being perhaps the most toxic chemical on the planet or the most dangerous except for maybe plutonium, a non-radiation toxin.

So a lot more research needs to be done and it’s unclear. I haven’t explored how much funding the NIH is throwing at this, but a lot more research needs to be done.

DEBRA: Are you familiar with the precautionary principle? The precautionary principle, do you know that?

GREG GORDON: I may know it, but I don’t know the term.

DEBRA: It’s called the precautionary principle and it states that if something is known to be harmful that one should be cautious about using it. And people apply that as a principle in different sciences.

GREG GORDON: Common sense.

DEBRA: It’s just common sense. It just seems like that throughout the government and manufacturing and everything, we should be looking at these chemicals. It’s not a question that mercury is toxic. It’s just not a question.

But what I think is so difficult about this for regulators to make a decision or a manufacturer to make a decision – I mean, it’s easy for me to make a decision about what I’m going to allow in my body because I can do the research, I can look at an article like yours and say, “Mercury fillings cause all these illnesses. I think I’m not going to take a chance.”

But I think that other people who making decisions for the world at large or a country or something, they can look at this and they can say, “Well, here’s a population of people who may not be affected at all. And here’s a population of people who may be affected somewhat. And then there’s a smaller amount that are really going to be affected and get really, really sick.”

And instead of giving us information that says, “Okay, here are mercury fillings. Some of you are not going to be affected. And some are going to get really sick. And we know this,”why not give people that information so that there can be a choice?

I think that they’re looking at, “Well, this population over here isn’t going to get sick. And so that’s what we’re going to base it on” instead of looking into people who are going to get really sick.

GREG GORDON: And I neglected to mention that two FDA outside advisory panels were pushing the agency to do more. This is somewhat unusual to my wits and given that we’ve read so much and seen so much about how when the FDA appoints an advisory panel, it seems like a lot of folks on the panel, they have conflicts of interest or they either worked for or still work for one of the companies that has a big stake in the subject or they’ve done research at a university and have been funded by that company. That’s probably more likely.

I think the very, very direct conflicts of interest are avoided for obvious reasons. But what you find when you dig into it is that there are hidden conflicts of interest that come into play. Most of us know that the scientific world, it’s cut-throat.

Researchers are trying to get money from the NIH. They compete with each other. You really have to be in the 85th, I think, percentile (that’s what it currently is) to get any money. And if you don’t get money from the government, what’s your option? You’re going to have to turn to industry, to the pharmaceutical industry, to the chemical industry, maybe it’s the dental products industry that’s funding your research. You need to put bread on the table, so you’re going to do that.

And some people do it for other reasons. I’m not saying that it’s always driven by not being able to get government money. But the point is, these panels are typically – you see exposés in the paper about this panel or that panel for the FDA, an outside panel that’s loaded up with people who have hidden conflicts of interest.

Yet here you have an FDA advisory panel that votes 15 to 7 (I said 15 to 6 in my story. It was actually 15 to 7) that they want the FDA to do more. They don’t accept the FDA’s write-up, white paper, on analyzing the health effects of mercury fillings.

Here, the FDA, its research is being spurn by its own outside advisory panel. So, the panel, that was in 2006 and then 2010. The FDA really got pushed in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health turned it around and actually does something. And then it gets shut down by HSS.

It’s, to me, startling. I’ve been here in Washington for 38 years and I don’t remember seeing many developments like this one at the FDA.

DEBRA: It seems to me like the priority is financial and that we have an FDA who, as you said at the beginning of the show, that their job is to find out what’s safe and what’s not safe and protect us and they can come up with a decision like this and then have the financial, a different agency, say, “Well, we can’t do this.” And so it all comes down to money. It doesn’t come down to health.

And I don’t see how we can create a healthy world unless health and the sustaining of the environment and those kinds of things are first.

And then, we see how to handle the finances.

GREG GORDON: That would be the idea, wouldn’t it?

DEBRA: It would be a very different world, wouldn’t it? But that’s what I apply in my own life.

GREG GORDON: When I came to Washington in 1977, Debra, it was a pretty sleepy town. Now, it’s a habiting place. There are neighborhoods after neighborhoods with these multimillion dollar homes. But you look around for industry – well, Exxon was here, but headquartered out in the Virginia suburbs. But they’re leaving on, I think, January 1st of next year.

The biggest industry in town, in this area, that’s boomed to population of four, five million people, six million (I don’t know the current population of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area), I can just tell you that it has been transformed over the last nearly four decades since I came here.

The biggest one, the biggest industry is lobbying. And while lobbyists convey a lot of valuable information, especially if there are two competing sides, both have equal access, they can make the arguments to inform and educate the member of Congress or regulatory person that they’re lobbying, one, when they have access and the other side doesn’t even know what’s going on, then the process is very tilted.

And so when you talk about toxic chemicals and changing the world, you really can’t do so, in my view, without bringing that into the discussion.

DEBRA: The lobbying?

GREG GORDON: Just the influence of the moneyed interest that you’re talking about. And that’s the manifestation of the money is the lobbying.

And these lobbyists get paid so much money. Some of them, basically, are people who just usher somebody else in. All they’re paid for is to enable that party to have access.

Going back to the FDA, when I came here, the FDA had this pristine reputation as being the premier regulator of public health and safety with respect to drugs and food products and so forth in the world. And typically, when the FDA approves something, that meant it was going to be approved quickly around the world.

Now, you look and you see that Norway and Sweden and Denmark, I believe, have all banned mercury amalgam. And there’s an international treaty called the Minamata Convention. It’s named, by the way, for a public health catastrophe that happened in the 1950s and early 60s in Japan at Minamata Bay. Along the coastline of that bay was a big chemical company and they dumped mercury along with other chemicals into the water for years and years and years.

The fish were heavily exposed to the mercury and got loaded up with the mercury. The fish-eating population surrounding the bay ate the fish. More than 1700 people died.

And so they named this treaty to try to get the nations of the world to eliminate mercury from use and to protect people everywhere from this horrible toxin.

The United States was the first country to sign it. It has prodded some action. The EU now has recommendation, I was just told yesterday, I think, phase out amalgam mercury fillings. And United States, there’s no teeth to this treaty. That’s what’s wrong with the treaty. It doesn’t have a timetable. It just says, “We agreed that we should get rid of mercury. Get rid of mercury.”

And it’s interesting because the President of the United States, Barak Obama, was a very strong advocate of getting rid of mercury during his brief time in the Senate. I think he spoke about it early in his presidency, publicly, and said, “We got to get mercury away from our children” or something like that. But yet, the FDA isn’t able to do anything because the HHS is in the way.

DEBRA: Well, I think that we need a big overhaul. We need a big overhaul in everything. I really see what the obstacles, why we continue to have toxic chemicals. The obvious question is, “If we know it’s toxic, why is it still on the market?” So many people have said, “Well, they wouldn’t sell it if it was toxic.”

There was just an article in a New York paper (I think the New York Post or something) where a woman was saying, “These people who are talking about toxics, they don’t know anything. We have government agencies that are protecting us. It would not be on the shelf if it wasn’t safe for us to use.” She actually said that. This was printed in a New York paper a month. This is still a prevalent idea. And yet, it’s just not true. It’s just not true.

GREG GORDON: Speaking of outspoken women, one of those who I interviewed is a remarkable lady named Freya Cose. She lives in suburb Western Philadelphia. She is the one who had a mercury filling put in, if I recall, by a doctor in New York who used an old formula where he actually mixed up –

Now, they come sort of premixed. But the dental industry likes to say they’re encapsulated, the mercury is encapsulated, which is debatable, at least debatable.

She had this dentist use liquid mercury where he actually mixed it in with a little powder of other metals before he put it in her mouth.

Seven days later, her big hobby in her life was going to the ballet and taking ballet lessons. She was at the ballet performance at the University of Pennsylvania. She felt a little dizzy. She walked out to her car, climbed in her car and suddenly, she saw multiple images of everything. And she sat there stunned, not knowing what was happening to her.

And finally, she figured out that if she closed one eye, she could see, so she drove herself home.

Well, this began as sort of an odyssey for her over the next year where she, really, over the next days, at the beginning, where she went on the internet, determined to find out what was happening to her because doctors were almost immediately diagnosing her with either lupus or multiple sclerosis.

And ultimately, she said at 3:20 in the morning on the fifth day as she was scouring the internet, she finds a posting by a woman in England who had written that she got a mercury filling. She had a mercury filling implanted in one of her teeth and a few days later, she got double vision. She sat there, her draw dropped and said, “Oh, my God! It might have been my mercury filling that caused this problem.”

And then she connected with mercury-free groups, groups of former mercury patients, campaigning, joining with the consumer lawyers in trying to get mercury out of dentistry. She had hers taken out. And what do you know? Her multiple sclerosis went away. She’s 73 years old now.

But one of the thing that she did along the way (which reflects her determination to do something about this) is to persuade the Philadelphia City Council to pass an ordinance requiring informed consent for all dental patients in the city, so that any patients who goes into a dental office in Philadelphia is told about the risks of mercury fillings.

DEBRA: That is so wonderful. And see, listeners, we can all do things like that. When we have this information, we can do things to make other people know about them and give other people choices so they know we’re not just walking around inadvertently, unknowingly, being poisoned and having experiences like this

Just because the government is not protecting us from these toxic chemicals doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. The information is there and we can make those decisions ourselves.

We only have just a couple of minutes left. We’ve been talking for almost an hour.

GREG GORDON: I’ve been talking a lot.

DEBRA: Yes, you have a lot of interesting things to say. So do you want to just give us some final thoughts for a couple of minutes?

GREG GORDON: Well, my big thought is that I hope to do more on this. But I’m also, right now, covering the Clinton e-mails and writing the story about the 10th anniversary of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina for our 48th page package that our paper down in Biloxi, Mississippi, is putting out.

But I hope to do more, so I hope that your listeners will plug into McClatchyDC.com and type in my name and look for stories about mercury fillings. I think there is a lot more to be done here. Without trying to take sides, I just think it’s really interesting what evolved during this rule-making process. It leaps out, there’s a strong possibility that there was some sort of influence that was wielded to persuade the Department of Health and Human Services to do what they did.

It may have been a totally pure process of cost benefit analysis and a hard decision to protect the poor. But those sorts of things are unlikely to me.

DEBRA: It seems unlikely to me as well. There could be things that – well, first of all, I think a lot of people who are poor, unless I’m mistaken, are now being covered by ObamaCare and so then would be covered by insurance. Also, people can learn to take care…

GREG GORDON: Does ObamaCare include dental insurance?

DEBRA: Yes.

GREG GORDON: It does? Okay. I did not know.

DEBRA: Yes. In fact, I have some ObamaCare Insurance myself.

GREG GORDON: So you have it?

DEBRA: I have dental care.

GREG GORDON: That’s terrific.

DEBRA: I’m waiting until I use up my huge deductible and then they’ll pay for my dental work. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I think there are things that could be done to help the poor not be poisoned because all they can afford is mercury fillings.

Thank you so much. This has been so interesting for me. Please let me know when you have another article about mercury fillings or any other toxic chemicals.

GREG GORDON: I will endeavor to do that.

DEBRA: Thank you.

GREG GORDON: It’s been a pleasure to be on your show. Thanks very much.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well.

Detox Matters Part 1: How Detoxing Your Body Fosters Vibrant Health

susan-smith-jonesToday my guest is leading holistic health educator and author Susan Smith Jones, PhD. We’re doing two-part series about detox. Today we’ll be learning about how a toxic environment affects or health and vitality and how detox can help: how you can know your body needs a detox, how your detox system work, channels of elimination in the body, benefits of detox, and more. For over 35 years, Dr. Susan has relied on herbs, spices, foods, and a variety of natural remedies to detoxify, cleanse, and rejuvenate her body and maintain vibrant health and youthful vitality. She embraces her personal detox/rejuvenation programs at least 4 times a year, with each change of season, and teaches her clients worldwide how to do this, too. Because of her effective detox/rejuvenation regimen, Susan has never used prescription medicine nor had a cold or the flu in almost 30 years. In her books Recipes for Health Bliss (a full color cookbook), The Healing Power of NatureFoods, Health Bliss, Detoxify & Rejuvenate, and Walking on Air, she shows you exactly how to fully detoxify and rejuvenate your body so you can look and feel your very best, no matter your age. Susan’s 3 books incorporate her best-of-the- best health-enhancing secrets to reverse aging, glow with vitality, achieve high-level joy and balance, and live with gusto. SusanSmithJones.com

Coming August 11—Part 2: 12 Steps to an Easy Body Detox & Rejuvenation

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Detox Matters Part 1: How Detoxing Your Body Fosters Vibrant Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Susan Smith Jones, PhD

Date of Broadcast: August 05, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Wednesday, August 5, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where the sun is shining today after two weeks of almost solid rain, so I’m so happy to see the sun.

And today, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects. We talk a lot about toxic chemicals where they are in consumer products, how they affect your health and how to avoid them, how to eliminate toxic chemicals in your life, in your home, in your workplace. But the other side of that is to eliminate them from your body.

If you’re walking around today alive, you’ve probably had a lifetime of exposure to toxic chemicals. Unless you’ve done something to detox and done the right things to detox, then you probably are carrying around something that the Center for Disease Control calls body burden, which is a lot of toxic chemicals of different kinds. They’re they’re all in this toxic soup in your body and they’re interacting with each other. One of the things that chemicals do is they can combine and become even more toxic.

So it’s really important that we detox. I do all kinds of things to detox personally. And I didn’t do this for many years. I’ll tell you that I started out thinking that all I needed to do was avoid the chemicals and my body would recover.

How many years has it been now? Four or five years ago, I started doing detox things to remove toxic chemicals from my body and other body wastes from my body. I felt so much better almost immediately. I mean, not in the first second, but within a few days. I have been detoxing ever since.

I think it’s absolutely vital to detox if you want to be well in today’s world.

So my guest today has been – well, her bio says that she has over 35 years. She’s relied on herbs, spices, foods and a variety of natural remedies to detoxify, cleanse and rejuvenate her body and maintain vibrant health and youthful vitality.

I love that description because so often we’re just talking about, “Let’s just not be sick.” But how about if you had vibrant health and youthful vitality? Doesn’t that sound good? I love that.

So my guest today is holistic health educator and author, Susan Smith Jones. Hi, Susan.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Hi, Debra. How wonderful to be with you.

DEBRA: Thank you. It’s wonderful to have you too. So tell us, how did you get interested in all this stuff so long ago? I guess you started when you were three years old?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: No, I was a teenager though, not much longer after three years old. It’s amazing how the universe just gives you a course and a path to follow. I was lucky enough to have a wise grandmother.

So I’ll sort of bottomline it. When was a teenager, my dad unexpectedly died. And I didn’t handle it well. And so for about 14, 15 months after he died, I pretty much ate everything in sight. I was depressed (although on those days, we didn’t know it as depression). I gained about 45 to 50 pounds in almost 15 months.

And I also overdosed many months after he died. I developed, as a teenager, terrible acne, allergies, asthma and arthritis.

DEBRA: Wow!

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Yeah, I know! That’s what happens when you just eat and eat the wrong kinds of foods.

So my grandmother, I always thought of her as this kooky health nut. She took me under her wings. One day, she could see that I was very depressed and didn’t want to live anymore. And in those days (and now too), in those days, kids make fun of you. I was bullied for gaining so much weight and terrible acne.

And she took me to the doctor who gave her a pile of prescriptions to fill, which we didn’t do. She took me home to her home and had a heart to heart with me.

And she said that if I would live with her for 30 days, she promised me in 30 days that much of the extra weight would be gone, all those ailments that began with the letter a, acne, arthritis, asthma, allergies would be gone. And I would go from being negative to positive. So she had my attention.

I went to live with her. And little did I know, because I wasn’t interested in it in those days, but I learned that even though she was not a doctor, she was wise in the ways of living close to Mother Earth. People from her little area, her neighborhood and community would come to her and she would help them heal by using foods and herbs and fasting and spices and other lifestyle choices.

If someone came for depression, she’d have them take off their shoes and socks and walk in her beautiful garden. And she would just listen and let them talk. And their feet would be touching the grass and walking. And by the time they finished a 30-minute walk and she gave them chamomile tea, they left happy.

So in 30 days, all of my ailments went away. I had to follow her guidance 100%. I lost much of the weight. It took four more months after that to get almost 50 pounds off. And for the next seven years until she passed on, I lived with her a lot and watched what she did with all these people.

Debra, as a result of her wisdom, I have never taken any medication in my life, haven’t had a cold or flu and it’s now almost 31 years. Since the early 80s, I’ve had my private practice where I see people around the world or they come and see me and I teach them how to be vibrantly healthy, how to heal the body in the most natural way possible.

And this always includes keeping your body detoxified. Fritzie was her name. She was from Denmark. She always told me (and I followed this since I was a teenager) to take one day a week, three consecutive days monthly and 7 to 14 days with each change of season to embark on some type of detox program.

DEBRA: I know that you know what you’re talking about because the reason I’m having you on the show is because one of my readers and listeners had worked with you and she suggested, she says, “You absolutely have to have Susan on the show.”

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Well hi, Katherine.

DEBRA: You helped her so much. Hi, Katherine.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: That’s great to hear.

DEBRA: Well, tell us how toxic environments affect our health and vitality.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Well, I wish we had three hours. When I do workshops – I just got back from the UK where I did many, many workshops all about detoxing, looking younger and being vibrantly healthy. I tell people that there’s an epidemic that’s sweeping America, but not just America, but all the industrialized countries. I refer to it as an internal toxic pollution.

Many people suffer from chronic diseases and loss of health not only as a direct result of unhealthy conditions environmentally (we know that), but internally as well, within the body. There is so much evidence to demonstrate that health or sickness is a process that develops over a period of time, often years, right down to the cellular level.

And I’m sure you’ve talked about this a lot on your program.

DEBRA: We have.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: There are thousands of toxic chemicals all around, pesticides in the food, chemicals in the water, pollutants in the air, in our cosmetics. Like you said, a ‘toxic soup’.

And sadly, our level of toxic exposure far outstrips our body’s natural elimination mechanisms, which is why you want to help your body along when you can to help it remove the harmful and potentially deadly waste products.

You’ll know this about me as we work together down the road. But I’m one of the most positive people you’ll ever know. So I’d like to put things in a positive light. And one of the greatest health secrets is that you have control over the pollution in your body. If you keep your body balanced and clean, the environment internally, you won’t succumb to the toxic build-up so prevalent in most people’s bodies.

And those who cleanse regularly will look and feel younger, much healthier and live longer than those who ignore the need to internally cleanse.

DEBRA: And we need to go to break. When we come back, we’re going to hear from Susan about how our body’s detoxification systems work. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Susan Smith Jones. You can go to her website at SusanSmithJones.com. And she has a lot of information about detox. She has other interviews that you can listen to. She’s got some books. She’s got all kinds of information there at SusanSmithJones.com.

So Susan, tell us briefly how our body’s detoxification works.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: In a nutshell here, our bodies were designed by our Creator to do their own internal clean-up. So under normal conditions, the waste is released into the circulatory system. It’s neutralized in the blood. And then it’s safely passed out of the body in four channels of elimination – in the skin is sweat; in the lungs, it’s carbon dioxide; in the kidneys, it’s urine; and in the intestines is the fecal matter. We know this process is continuous. It’s happening right now just as you are sitting or lying down or standing, and breathing.

So creating energy is what drives our existence, but expunging all those waste products is just as crucial to sustaining life. And if anything goes wrong with our detoxification systems along the way, then toxins build up and can cause disease and death.

So I know many people are thinking, “Well, if my body already takes care of its own detox, why do I need to engage in any sort of detox program?”

Like I mentioned a few minutes ago, studies show that our level of toxic exposure far outstrips our body’s natural elimination mechanism. So I always say to people that if you want to stay strong and healthy in this chemical-ridden world, it’s essential to help the body increase its removal of harmful and potentially deadly waste products on a regular basis, not just the first month, or let’s say, January 1st through 7th, after all the heavy holiday eating. It’s good to do it as a preventative measure throughout the year, weekly, monthly and every season and at least every season.

DEBRA: I totally agree with all of that. I wanted to just make a comment here before we go on.

In the past few years, I’ve done a lot of research on detox, and particularly, about detoxing chemicals. And one of the things that I’ve learned is that some chemicals need to have very specific things to detox them. There are lots of examples.

But then there was also the detoxification of the body wastes that are in our cells and in our body. And even if we weren’t exposed to any toxic chemicals at all, our bodies are still having those wastes. And if our bodies are not functioning properly because things like toxic chemicals will harm the kidneys, toxic chemicals harm the liver, because they get exposed to so many toxic chemicals, these organs of detoxification are overstressed.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: You’re absolutely right.

DEBRA: And so anything that we can do, even if we’re not doing any of those specific detoxes for the chemicals, if we do the detoxes that support our kidneys and liver and helps our skin sweat and all those kinds of things, we’re going to be able to tolerate whatever we come in contact with better.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Yes, you’re so right, Debra.

DEBRA: Yes, I just wanted to just interject that there are these two kinds of detox and two purposes of detox. And so, they really work together. I used to think, “If helping my liver isn’t removing this specific chemical, why should I do that?”

But the answer is because your liver is overstressed and your liver is one of those organs that needs to be functioning tiptop in order to process all the toxic chemicals. And your intestines need to be working so that it’s your intestines that move those toxic chemicals out of the body that were processed by the liver.

So all these things need to be working or else you end up with a huge body burden and that’s when you get sick.

So now, I’ll let you talk about detox.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: No, I love that. That’s great, excellent, because I agree with everything you said. I think we’re kindred spirits now, Debra.

DEBRA: I think so too.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: I’ll talk a moment about diets because I believe our modern diets are to blame for many of our most common ailments. Debra, so many people are digging their graves with their knives and forks and are making life and death decisions every time they sit down to a meal or snack.

And disease often occurs as a result of unhealthy lifestyle, which then causes the body to become sluggish, congested, acidic and polluted.

And then you add into this equation the antibiotics, excess sugar, carbonated beverages, chemical food additives and over-the-counter drugs. All of that alters the acid/alkaline balance of the intestinal tract, which kills off those wonderful, beneficial bacteria and creates the perfect environment for harmful microbes to grow.

So without the good and friendly bacteria to keep them in check, the bad bacteria can eventually overrun the body and severely depress our immune system.

DEBRA: I totally agree with all of that too.

So how would somebody identify that they need to detox? Are there symptoms of toxic build-up in the body that we can easily notice?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Very good question. And we hope nobody is eating a meal while I describe these.

But they include – there are more than I’ll give you now, but some of the big symptoms of toxic build-up include constipation, chronic yeast infection, brittle fingernails and toenails, frequent colds, weight gain, acne, dry and pale skin, mood swings, depression, low sex drive, lack of concentration. And add to the mixture here poor short-term memory, sleeping problems, frequent headaches, chronic urinary tract infections, arthritic bone pains, rheumatism, allergies, gas, bloating, flatulence and, of course, feeling weak and lacking energy.

I bet many of the listeners went, “Oh, my goodness. How many of those have I already checked off?”

But those are just a few of the symptoms.

DEBRA: And another thing I want to say – and we need to go – let me see how many seconds do we have.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Take it away.

DEBRA: I just want to say quickly that there is a difference between what’s called acute illness and chronic illness. Acute illness is something like if you were to –

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Short-term.

DEBRA: Short-term. And like if you were to drink a gasoline accidentally, you’d immediately get sick. But the problem is that so many chemicals have a chronic effect, which means that you’re around them, maybe you’re around perfume or something and you don’t have any symptoms, but you’re on perfume over and over and over and days and days and years and months. And then you start getting sick.

And it’s not that these things are safe, it’s that you don’t see the chronic effect.

And we do need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Susan Smith Jones. She’s at SusanSmithJones.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Susan Smith Jones. She’s at SusanSmithJones.com. She has a lot of information about detox there, some interviews that you can listen to, some books.

There are so much more information than what we’re talking about today.

Today is just the beginning. We’re actually doing two parts here. The next part is coming up next Tuesday, August 11th, where she’s going to tell us about how to actually detox. Today, we’re talking about the basics of detox. You’ll want to make sure to tune in next Tuesday (I think it is August 11th) and listen to part 2.

So Susan, how do probiotics fit into the detox process?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Probiotics, remember, a moment ago, I said that often, if we don’t have the right acid/alkaline balance and we have a toxic colon and small intestine, it kills off the friendly bacteria.

And let me mention this too. Again, if you’re eating, stop eating right now. Especially if you eat a lot of dairy and grains, lots of mucus is formed in the lining of the colon. And then mucoid plaque is this slimy gel-like substance that covers the inner lining of the intestines and the bowel. And the plaque harbors toxins and it interferes with nutrient-absorption. The colon is known to hold up to 30 or more pounds of old matter that can be packed in with all these undigested foods and disease-promoting bacteria.

If that isn’t cleaned out, if you don’t have the good, friendly bacteria (and I’ll talk about probiotics in just one second. This is not pleasant but it’s important to know), then parasites can develop in the colon and they’re a toxic menace.

When you have faulty digestion, it keeps the food from being properly processed and sent out of the body, which means all these undigested food matters can remain in the colon and create fermentation and putrefaction. This can cause little parasites and the germ life to develop.

Parasites thrive in an unhealthy, unclean colon. I don’t know if anybody listening has ever seen any little tapeworms in the bathroom looking back up at them in the bowl because tapeworms can be microscopic organisms, the parasites or tapeworms up to 15 inches long. So it’s important to keep the colon clean with wonderful, fermented food like probiotics.

Debra, I recently wrote – in fact, two weeks ago, I posted it. If you look at the navigation bar on my website and you scroll down three, it says “Fermented Veggies: Healing with Probiotic Foods and Recipes.” I know our time is limited, so I’ll direct people to a couple of places to go to. Fermented vegetables, or miso or the Kombucha drink or other –

DEBRA: We’ve talked about these on the show before too.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: They’re all great to take on a regular basis. I think everyone should take a good probiotic. I like to get it in the fruit source.

DEBRA: Let me ask you. People can take probiotics in a capsule, but they can also get it from fermented foods. I think you’re going to say that you prefer the fermented foods than the probiotics in capsules.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: And I’ll tell you what though, I do take capsule as well because I’m on the road a lot and I can’t always get my fermented foods. However you get them in your body, you definitely want to take them because so much of our immune system is literally in the digestive tract.

DEBRA: It is, yes.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: You have to keep the colon as healthy as possible.

Have you ever talked about this? All these pleasant topics, I’m so sorry, but John Wayne, when he died, he had about 40 pounds of fecal matter left impacted in his colon. Elvis Presley had about 70 pounds. And he died on the toilet, by the way.

DEBRA: I didn’t know that.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: I don’t know if you know that.

So why am I saying all of this? Because it’s important to stay in the flow and have everything moving. And probiotics help you. You never want to be constipated.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. Now, let me just say this. Let me just say that – I said this earlier, but I want to say it again.

What happens with chemicals is most of the chemicals go into the liver. They’re either processed by the liver or strained out by the kidneys. But I think it’s the fat soluble ones that have to go into the liver and be processed. And then they go out through the colon. And if the colon isn’t moving, the toxic chemicals are not leaving your body, period.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: And they’re recirculating.

DEBRA: They’re recirculating because they’re sitting there in your colon, in the fecal matter, waiting to leave your body. If they’re not moving, they’re getting re-absorbed into your body.

I could just imagine Elvis Presley with all the drugs that he took and all those toxic chemicals, they couldn’t leave his body.

They couldn’t leave his body. The colon is the train out. If it’s not moving, you’re just recirculating everything with all the toxic chemicals.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Let me talk about transit time since we’re on these pleasant topic. We might as well finish with this. There’s a way to see how effective your colon, your digestive system, is working. You can go to the market. Buy an ear of corn and take the husks and the silk off. Keep it raw and cut off the corn kernels. And then take two tablespoons of them and chew as little as possible, almost like they’re little vitamin tablets, with a big glass of water.

You could do it with sesame seeds, but it’s easy with corn. You can see it a little bit better. You mark the time that you took the big glass of water with these two tablespoons of raw corn kernels. And then Debra, you note the time you see them looking back up at you again, that’s your transit time. You don’t need to go to a doctor to tell you.

So many people come to, and I always have everybody – they do it at home, obviously. And they tell me. I said, “I need to know your transit time.”

And even people that exercise a lot and eat a good diet, it shocks me to hear them sometimes say 48, 72 hours, 24 hours.

You want it to be about 12, 14 to 15 hours. Clearly, if it’s four hours, that’s too quick, things go through too quickly, you don’t have enough time to absorb everything. But that will tell you how efficient your digestive system is.

DEBRA: Wonderful tip. That’s a great tip.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: It’s cheap.

DEBRA: We need to go to break.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Susan Smith Jones. We’re obviously talking about detoxification and getting those everything that needs to be removed from the body out of the body. Her website is SusanSmithJones.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Susan Smith Jones. Her website is SusanSmithJones.com and you can find a lot more on her website about detoxification, which is the subject of today.

So Susan, what are the channels of elimination in the body? And once you’ve gone through all this cleaning, what are the benefits?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Excellent. The four channels of elimination are the bowel, lungs, kidneys and skin. And actually, each of these organs, ideally, should release two pounds of toxins per day. And our skin is responsible for getting rid of nearly, obviously, a fourth of our daily toxins every day.

If the skin is not doing its job, then the kidneys, lungs and bowels will have an extra load to deal with. That’s why I’m a big believer in dry skin brushing.

And Debra, let me just say really quickly that on my website, click on the free August newsletter. You’ll get lots of information about detox, health and weight loss. And then right there on the sidebar, there’s an exclusive monthly letter, uplifting letter.

Lots of it is about detox for this month of August.

The general public never sees it. So when you give me your e-mail address, you sign up, it takes 10 seconds (and I only send something out once a month. I don’t inundate you with e-mails), you get this wonderful letter with lots of photos. So the one this month focuses on summer detox.

My latest book is called “Walking on Air: Your 30-Day Inside and Out Rejuvenation Make-Over.” And on my homepage, if you scroll down, you’ll see a way to get an autographed copy of it with a bonus gift of my series of seven natural remedy booklets. So that’s all there.

So those are the four channels of elimination. And in my book, Walking on Air, I talk all about how to do dry skin brushing.

Maybe today or next time, we’ll have time to do that.

What can you expect when you cleanse is depending on how toxic your body may be. If you’ve never cleansed before, or if it’s really toxic, if you haven’t done one in a long time, you might feel a bit more tired than usual, which means you get more rest.

You might find that your skin breaks out with rashes because your skin is detoxifying. Your skin is your biggest eliminative organ. You might have slight fever or headaches. You might release lots of mucus in your throat and in the toilet bowl. You might have mood swings or depression.

Now, you’re all thinking, “Why would I want to do all of that?”

DEBRA: Because you feel so good after.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Exactly! Because at the end of the detox, you’ll feel lighter, more peaceful, more in control over your body and you’ll experience an increase in self-esteem and confidence.

Everyone tells me – some of the benefits are you’ll have a flatter abdominal area, you’ll have relief of gas and bloating, you’ll be thinking more clearly, greater sense of well-being, stronger immune system, younger skin, whiter eyes, the white part of the eyes and you’ll feel energetic and confident.

Simply put, internal cleansing can dramatically improve the quality of your overall health. And by the way, Debra, it’s also one of the best ways to break bad food habits you might have such as always salting foods, or being addicted to white sugar, white flour products.

Remember, we’ve been talking about colon and liver. When the colon and liver are clear of excess toxins and wastes, it frees up energy to be used by the rest of the body. And it helps the liver and intestinal tract to manufacture nutrients as well as absorb them from your food more efficiently.

And this supports the healing, repair and maintenance of your entire body, which is why you want to do it weekly, monthly and with each change of season.

DEBRA: When I first detoxed, it was a revelation for me. I think that it probably doesn’t matter what. There are so many different detox methods that it probably doesn’t matter which one you do as long as it leads to removing something from your body. And I happen to do a heavy metal detox. Excuse me today. My body giving off detox stuff.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: That’s good though.

DEBRA: It’s good. The first time I did it, after about 10 days, I went, “Oh, my God! I’ve never felt like this before.”

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Well, describe it better. I want to know exactly how you were feeling.

DEBRA: I felt ecstatic in terms of, I could think really clearly. And my body just felt better. Instead of my body feeling lack of energy, I had more energy. I felt happier. There was this clarity that I just felt in every way. My mind was clearer and my body just felt clearer. It was easier to function in life.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: It’s almost indescribable. You just feel blissful, joyful. You feel more in touch with everything around you. You live more mindfully. There are so many spiritual benefits to keeping your body detoxified.

DEBRA: But also, it was like I felt – let’s see. There is some phrase, I don’t remember exactly, where it’s like if you’re hitting your hand with a hammer, you don’t know how it feels unless you stop hitting your hand with that hammer? You remember that phrase?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: That’s right.

DEBRA: I remember it exactly.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: You get so used to living toxic…

DEBRA: You don’t know how good you can feel because you’re in a toxic state and you think that that toxic state is normal.

You don’t know how good you could feel until you get out of the toxic state.

It’s something you’ve never experienced before.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: I can’t agree with you more. And you can use the same example with sleep.

So many people are used to living in tremendous sleep death of four, five, six hours a night, and maybe even less than all of that. They think that’s all they need. But they don’t know how fantastic they will feel if they would get good sleep.

And while this will be for next Tuesday, I’ll give you a sneak preview and tell you that sleep is when your body renews, rebuilds, rejuvenates and detoxifies. So it’s got to be a non-negotiable habit.

DEBRA: Your body will not detox unless you sleep enough. That’s one of the main rules of detox, is you have to sleep.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: I wish we lived on the same block. We could have so much hanging out together. Can you imagine?

If you hiked with me in the morning here (because I can’t find anybody that will get up early enough to hike with me), you and I would have so much fun.

We’ll get you out here to visit in Brentwood, Santa Monica area. We’ll go hiking.

DEBRA: Okay, good.

So we only have about three minutes left. So why don’t you tell us whatever you’d like to say to wrap up?

SUSAN SMITH JONES: I’ll say this now because people always say, “What foods are good to help detox?”, if someone says, “Okay, I want to start today. I don’t want to wait until next Tuesday to hear all the rest of our discussion,” always put fresh lemon water in your water, lemon juice, in your water, your tea, your juices. You can never get enough lemon. It’s very detoxifying.

Leafy green vegetables are high in water content. My grandmother, Fritzie, always used to say, “When you’re green inside, you’re clean inside.”

DEBRA: I love that.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: And that’s because green means chlorophyll, chlorophyll detoxifies your body.

For 30 years, every day, and I remember, I haven’t had a cold or flu in all of this time. And it’s no coincidence. I take the spirulina that comes from the coast of Hawaii. I own no stock in any company. I do not get a commission. But if there’s something I take and I recommend, I mention it. You can read all about it on my website.

So I take that every day. It’s had over 500 scientific studies, many of them on how it detoxifies your body, your livers, your kidneys, your colon.

And then I also take these – by Michael’s Company, Michael’s Naturopathic Program. It’s called Ultimate Detox and Cleanse. I used to get them at Whole Foods years ago, but I know Michael, the owner of the company, in San Antonio, Texas. These are the most popular detox products in stores.

Go to my website. You can learn about this, but he has a 7-day and a 14-day. For example, the 14-day has 42 packets of four tablets. The tablets help with blood and liver detox, fat metabolism, fiber. And when I cleanse, I take these and he gives to anybody I want to give the code too, which is Vitality15, a 25% discount.

So I buy these by the case. I take them with me when I travel. This is what I use one day a week, three days a month and with each change of season, either 7 or 14-day, little kits. And it just helps the body’s natural elimination process.

And I like these things that are done for you. You don’t have to buy 20 bottles of detox products. It’s all in one little kit that has 42 packets. I pull out three a day and I take them three times a day and it’s simple and it’s done.

Even if you don’t want to do all the other stuff with detox, these tablets work. And truth be told, I take one tablet, on package of the four every day because it’s got good stuff in it. So I know – especially, when I travel.

DEBRA: I’m sorry to interrupt you, but we’ve only got 10 seconds left. So thank you so much, Susan.

SUSAN SMITH JONES: Thank you.

DEBRA: Susan’s going to be on again next Tuesday to tell us what to do to detox. That’s Tuesday, August 11th. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Healthy Home Detox With Ron & Lisa

ron-lisaMy guests today are Ron & Lisa Beres. As healthy home experts, building biologists, published authors, professional speakers and Telly Award Winning media personalities, this husband-and-wife team help busy people eliminate toxics from their home with simple solutions to improve their health. We’ll be talking about how to “Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days.” Lisa is also the author of the children’s book “My Body My House,” and the duo are co-authors of “Just GREEN It!“—simple swaps to save the planet and your health. Lisa and Ron’s TV appearances include “Dr. Oz,” “The Rachael Ray Show,” “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “TODAY,” “The Doctors” and “Fox & Friends.” www.ronandlisa.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Healthy Home Detox with Ron & Lisa

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ron & Lisa Beres

Date of Broadcast: August 04, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m fussing around at the moment with technical things. Okay! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

So it’s – I don’t have that page up. It is a date. It’s the 4th of August. Sometimes, I’ve just got all these technical stuff to do and I have to do it while I was coming. Oh, shoot! Okay, we’ll get this right.

So, it’s now the 4th of August and I know who my guests are. My guests are Ron and Lisa Beres. They are a wonderful couple. I’ve known them for a long time. They know so much about indoor air pollution. They now have become media personalities. They give webinars, they give trainings, they give consultations. They know so much about indoor air pollution. They are actually trained and certified in this area.

They’re building biologists.

Today, we’re going to talk about their healthy home detox. They’re about to do a program and it’s called Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. We’re going to be talking about that.

Ron and Lisa, I’m not usually this scattered. It’s just I’m having one of those mornings. Hi, Lisa.

LISA BERES: We all do.

DEBRA: Sometimes you have these days where all of a sudden, there are all these things that you have get done. And then, the phone rings and you have to talk to the person on the phone for half an hour. And then it’s noon and it’s time for the radio show.

LISA BERES: It should be Monday, but it’s Tuesday.

DEBRA: It is Tuesday.

Here’s what’s happening, listeners. Lisa and her husband, Ron are both guests on the show today, but Ron can’t make it until later on the show. So he’s going to be joining us. In the meantime, we have Lisa who knows everything. She can say everything.

So Lisa, why don’t you start by telling us how did you and Ron get interested in doing what you do?

LISA BERES: Well, we started this journey about over 13 years ago. Actually, I’d say it’s about 15 years ago at this point. Time flies!

Ironically, I was engaged to Ron about the time that this all happened. So it’s a really unique time for us.

I was working as an interior designer. That’s what I went to college for. I loved my job and I really thought I was living a healthy life.

I do like to share this story because I think a lot of people can relate to it.

I was working out, I was a vegetarian, I shopped at Whole Foods and thought that, “Hey, this is it! This is the end of the story, being healthy.”

DEBRA: Yes, a lot of people think that.

LISA BERES: A lot of people think that. And I am so happy, by the way, that you do what you do because you bring so much awareness on a bigger scale and really educating people about such an important topic.

A lot of people really do. The buck stops there with food. They think as long they’re eating healthy, that’s the end. As you and I know, there’s a whole another segue to being healthy and that’s obviously your environment.

So at that point, I had just moved in. I wanted to move closer to Ron, we were engaged. I found this little charming beach cottage not too far from him. It’s pretty close to the beach. It had just been newly remodeled. So I was so excited.

It had a brand new hardwood floor, brand new carpeting, fresh, new coat of paint. It had a new, cozy gas fireplace. It had new vinyl windows and sparkling white, new thermofoil kitchen cabinets. I was in heaven! I thought that I found the best place you could possibly move into.

So I was working from home at the time and I moved in there. And suddenly – it happened really quickly for me after being there because I was literally in this house almost 24/7. I started getting really severely sick. I could not get out of bed in the morning.

Prior to that, I’ve been pretty energetic. I’m working out even sometimes twice a day. I could not get out of bed in the morning.

And then my hormones started going crazy. I literally stopped having my period for a year. I’ll get into that in a minute. And then I was having chronic sinus issues. I was chronically fatigued. It was just a nightmare. This was supposed to be the happiest time of my life. I was engaged and planning this wedding. I just felt horrible all of the time. My stomach was bloated. I was just a wreck.

So I started researching and began researching. And that time, there really wasn’t the information that’s available now. So I had to really dig and I stumbled across building biology. And I started connecting the dots. I started realizing that my symptoms were directly linked to these chemicals that are in our home.

And every single thing I mentioned in the home was off gassing chemicals that I was being exposed to in a really high dose. I was severely having reactions to that.

So as I started connecting the dots, I ended up becoming a building biologist. I studied that for quite some time. But during this process, I was, little by little, changing my environment. So I would start with one thing, and then go to the next thing, and then [inaudible 00:06:43] water and then air and then bedding and all of this.

It took about a year. I forgot to mention this. This is extremely important. In this process, I visited at least a dozen doctors. I visited everyone from acupuncturists to chiropractors to MDs to naturopaths, you name it, endocronologist. I went to everyone and every kind of doctor because I wasn’t getting the answers.

So I’d go to one doctor and he’d try to load me up with prescriptions. This doctor wanted me on this. I was never getting better. No one could explain why these things were happening to me. Especially, with my period, they’d say, “Well, you just need to be on the pill. That will fix it all. Let’s just mask yours symptoms with more medications.”

I actually did do that for a year because I got so desperate. I felt horrible. So I did go back on the pill for a year. And guess what? My period stopped even on the pill. So I knew something was really wrong.

As I didn’t make the changes to my home – it literally took me about a year. But after that my health did a complete 180. I was healthier after all of that than I was when I started.

DEBRA: That’s my experience too.

LISA BERES: Is it? It’s amazing because I didn’t really know much about detoxing your body and how these chemicals could affect us.

And so as I cleaned up my environment and cleaned up myself (I did detoxification through this), I literally became a different person. Ron and I looked at each other and said, “Are you kidding me? We have to do something about this.” We have to create a business or something where we can help other people because people don’t realize that their environments are directly affecting their health. They’re just thinking about –

DEBRA: That’s my experience too. As I started getting well, I figured all this out. I was doing this even earlier than you. I was doing this in 1978.

LISA BERES: Wow! I wish we met earlier.

DEBRA: That’s when I started. It was in 1978. I had no information at all. There wasn’t building biology then or there wasn’t me. I couldn’t read my own books.

LISA BERES: You couldn’t time travel to the future.

DEBRA: I had to go and just sit in the library and look in industrial journals and things to find where the chemicals were. I had a clue it was the chemicals, but there was no information. And by the time I dug up all of this information and I started removing these chemicals from my life, my home, I felt so much better I said, “I have to tell people about this because nobody was talking about it. I had exactly the same response.

LISA BERES: Yes, they look at you like you’re crazy. Definitely, one doctor offered me anti-depressants because I cried in her office. I was so at the end of my rope with nowhere to turn. I felt so overwhelmed. I literally got a little weeping moment, nothing crazy. And she said she could prescribe me anti-depressants. And that made me cry even more.

DEBRA: Listeners, listen to how vibrant, alive and energetic she is right now. I’m sure this is not how you were at the time.

LISA BERES: No, not at all. And I don’t take anti-depressants.

It’s crazy. And I think that western medicine, that is the underlying theme. It’s, “Hey, let’s just give you a pill and make everything better.” No mention of side effects and no mention of how these medications are loaded with so many other things that can cause problems. At the end of the day, they’re just masking, so they’re never really curing anything anyway.

DEBRA: Wow! Great story1 Very much like a lot of other people, and aren’t we fortunate that we found this out because I think there’s a lot of people who are suffering from this and not knowing what it is. And of course, they go to the doctor and the doctor doesn’t know what it is either. So that’s why we talk about it here.

And we’re going to go to break. When we come back, Lisa’s going to tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that she found in her home and their health effects.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres. Her husband, Ron, is going to be on with us later. He’s off at another appointment at the moment. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres of Ron and Lisa Beres. And they are media personalities who go on TV and radio and speaking engagements, and tell the world about toxic chemicals in the home and how they can make you sick, and how you can get well by eliminating them from your life.

So Lisa, what are some of these toxic chemicals and what kinds of health effects do they cause for people?

LISA BERES: Oh, boy! I wish we had more than an hour. It’s not enough time to list them all. There are so many. I want to talk about some of the ones that are most prevalent inside of our homes and the ones that made the biggest difference for me.

Indoor air, in general, I like to call the umbrella of the home. Basically, if you can clean your air, you’re really covering a lot of the things that fall under it. So when we talk about toxins in flooring or carpeting or paint or bedding, well that’s all permeating into our indoor air. So if we can clean up our air, we’re addressing a lot of the problem.

Indoor air, it can have everything from biological contaminants like mold and pollen and pet dander to bacteria to chemicals. It can have flame retardants. It can have VOCs, volatile organic compounds. I know you know this.

DEBRA: No, you’re talking to the listeners. They need to know.

LISA BERES: I do like to say this because we hear the term VOCs a lot especially this paint, but people don’t really know what that is. So I’ll just give you a quick rundown.

So VOCs, they are volatile organic compounds. And at room temperature, they off gas, which means they vaporize into the air into a gaseous form. We breathe in these chemicals. So a lot of times, especially in our homes, we can’t smell these. We definitely can’t see them. But we are, in fact, breathing them in.

And that’s what happened to me. I didn’t know that I had all these chemicals I was breathing in in the home. VOCs can include really dangerous chemicals, many of which are carcinogens that cause cancer. Some of the chemicals are formaldehyde, xylene and toluene, benzene, trichloroethylene, ammonia, acetone and the list goes on and on and on. And so, our homes basically are a toxic brewery.

As the green building craze happens – that was a good thing for energy efficiency. It saved on our electric bills. But what happened is the homes became very tightly sealed and these chemicals really got trapped within our homes.

So back in the 1970s, the average air exchange in our home was once every hour. So we were getting a new fresh exchange of air once every hour. Today, it’s once every five hours. People aren’t opening their windows and they’re definitely not purifying their air like they should. So we’re literally breathing in and these chemicals are getting circulated through our HVAC systems.

DEBRA: Maybe if we didn’t have the whole energy thing happen, so that we tightened our homes, that these chemicals might not have ever concentrated to the degree, so that we wouldn’t have the whole field of what’s now called indoor air pollution.

It wasn’t called that. When I started, there was no such field.

LISA BERES: None of this existed.

I can’t even imagine your journey because I felt like doctors looked at me like I was crazy. So back in 1978, I’m sure they were like, “What is this person talking about?” It’s nice to know that there are so many amazing doctors now that do address this.

But yes, that’s a great point. The tightening of the building envelope has definitely addressed that. But you know what else? There are so many more chemicals on the market today. We’re talking about over 86,000 chemicals [inaudible 00:17:35]. And of those, less than 200 have ever been effectively tested for health. And that’s according to the president’s cancer panel.

I think people also don’t realize that. They think that if something is for sale at the store, then it must have been approved and gone through rigorous testing. There you go. It’s, in fact, safe for you to bring into your home. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Cleaning products, for instance, are largely unregulated. It is a multibillion-dollar industry, and they don’t, by law, have to tell us what’s in the product. So they can list a couple of the ingredients or none of the ingredients or all of the ingredients. And they’ll often the use the term “fragrance” to hide hundreds of chemicals.

So people really need to be educated and really need to learn how to understand labels and know what to look for and what to avoid because this is how we can get trapped into bringing chemicals to our lives and our families unknowingly.

DEBRA: One of the things that really astonished me when I started studying this was the labeling laws are so different for different types of products. And the ones that are most toxic, cleaning products and pesticides, are not required by law to list their ingredients. But they are required to give these signal words like “caution” and “poison”. It was supposed to give you some degree of how toxic they are.

But many, many years ago, I read a report that said that these aren’t even correctly applied. So the most toxic products we have have the worst labeling and the least opportunity for us to know what’s really in them. I don’t think that’s right. I think that needs to be changed.

LISA BERES: It so needs to be changed, Debra. I am so with you on that.

The Toxic Substance Control Act was actually formed in 1976. And this is the problem. 80,000 of the 86,000 or something crazy like that (maybe it was 60,000) chemicals are grandfathered in, which means they never went through any testing.

This law has literally not been updated since 1976. So I know so many people in the grassroots movement are trying to get this changed, but they’re going up against big corporations who don’t have the vested interested in doing this because they don’t want you to know what chemicals are in your products. They want to put them in there and confuse you.

In fact, I know you’re familiar with EWG, the Environmental Working Group. They created their Cleaners Database. They have actually over 2000 different brands of cleaning products.

For consumers and especially anybody listening who’s like, “Hmmm… I have this product. I wonder because they’re not listing all the ingredients,” you can actually plug in the name of your cleaning product and find out the toxicity rating. And they’ll tell you how hazardous it is and what’s in it.

But they also created what’s called the Hall of Shame. And these were the worst offenders of all in the cleaners. I got to tell you this because this blew my mind when I read it. Comet disinfectant powder, the green powder (and I actually used this growing up because I had to. I was doing my chores. It’s crazy), they literally found that it emitted 146 different chemicals in their testing. Some of the chemicals were thought to cause cancer, asthma and reproductive disorders. And the most toxic chemicals that they found were formaldehyde, benzene, chloroform and toluene. Some of those are carcinogens. And they were not listed on the label.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s just wrong.

LISA BERES: It’s wrong. And it’s shocking. I really want to stress that because these are name brand cleaners that people are using and trusting.

And then Febreze air effects. People spray this thinking they’re cleaning the air. Actually, they’re just contaminating their air with more chemicals. That was shown to release 89 air contaminants.

DEBRA: Wow!

We need to go to break but we’ll be right back. We’ll talk more with Lisa Beres and her husband, Ron, is coming up too. You’re listening to

Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres. And also her husband, Ron, will be here, I think, in the last segment. And we’re talking about healthy home detox.

Now, Lisa and Ron have a new program called Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. And you can go to their website. I’m going to read it to you, but it’s long. You can also just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and I’ve got the link there. You can just click right through.

You can go to TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp, and you can sign up there for a free webinar which will tell you more about it and give you some information about how you can clean up your home. And you can find out about how to sign up for their Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days.

I think it’s great, Lisa, that you’re doing because I know you. I know you’re an organized person and that you have all the information. Putting it all together in a program so that people, together, you can help each other make these changes in your life, I think, is absolutely great.

LISA BERES: Thank you. That was the goal. And I know you’ve done such a great job with your books doing that as well. Because we both were in a situation where we didn’t have tools to turn to, I thought, “Mine would be great.”

We made it 30 days, but you can take it as long as you want. But if you want to finish it in 30 days, you can. And it goes through 12 modules.

So it goes through pretty much every room of your home. And we covered kids, how to grow healthy kids, your kitchen, how to detox your kitchen, pets, your bedding, your air, your water. So many things that obviously, we aren’t going to be able to cover today.

We try to make it fun because this is really overwhelming and in depth, intricate topic. When we talk about our homes, there are so many elements that comprise our homes. So we go through each. It’s digestible bites of information and you’re not really overwhelmed. You go at your own pace. So that’s really the goal.

DEBRA: That’s very good. So tell us some of the things that people can do.And I just want to say that Lisa mentioned earlier that they’re really focused on indoor air pollution. I think that that really is like a basic thing. You could change the water that you drink, you could change the food you eat. But you still got this air going on 24 hours a day.

And so that’s a segment of life in and of itself that you need to handle. And there is so much that’s involved in it that it really is important to learn it and do it, and then be healthier.

So what are some of the things, give us some examples of tips that people can do or things that you’re going to be talking about in your course?

LISA BERES: Starting with indoor air, obviously, implementing an air purification system in your home, it’s literally essential today. I don’t even think it’s negotiable. You need to do that.

Opening your windows, really letting your home breathe like homes used to is great. We can’t always do that depending on where we live and the time of year. And now, it’s allergies. Over 60 million Americans have allergies today. So that’s not always an option. That’s why I’m a really big proponent of air purifiers.

If you’re on a budget, there are air purifiers that you can buy that aren’t going to break the bank. There’s really an air purifier in every price points.

I think, generally, you do get what you pay for when it comes to these air purifiers. Some of them are only going to filter up to 3000 square feet. Some of them will filter just a few hundreds. At a minimum, have one in your bedroom and your kid’s bedroom. Children, especially babies, definitely need to be breathing in good air.

In our program, we go through all the air purifiers and break them down and tell you which ones aren’t good. There’s actually some on the market that product ozone and that can actually be more toxic to your health. So knowing what to avoid and what to look for is super important.

And then, you know what? If you’re at a really tight budget, then you can actually get plants, certain plants. NASA did a study and found there were 50 indoor house plants that normally produce oxygen, but actually remove chemical vapors and toxic gases from the air we breathe. It’s fascinating.

DEBRA: That was really fascinating, they do. I don’t remember the numbers off hand, but I calculated out how many plants you would need and it was a huge number.

LISA BERES: It is a huge number. To effectively clean your air, it’s one every hundred square feet. So if you have a large home, you’re going to have a lot of plants.

It’s not going to replace your air purifier by any means. But these plants, what’s really fascinating is each plant was different, and some remove benzene, some remove formaldehyde, some remove the trichloroethylene, xylene, toluene, ammonia.

And so you can pick the plant based on what you need. Certain ones are better for your bathrooms, certain ones are good to have by your bed.

That’s great too in an office situation. If you’re in a cubicle and you can’t do anything about your air, you can put some plants at your desk and at least try to keep that area better, giving you good, clean oxygen and also absorbing some of those chemicals that are common in an office situation.

DEBRA: I totally agree with all that.

LISA BERES: There’s a lot we can do. Changing your furnace filter, that goes without saying. But yes, so many people are not doing that. 41% of homeowners are not doing that frequently enough. And so really getting in the habit of changing all of your filters, changing your air purifier, your furnace filter, your water filters.

You may have to get on a schedule of making sure you’re doing that because these can cause more harm when these start to get backed up with bacteria and things like that if you’re not changing them.

DEBRA: I totally agree. And I also think that indoor air pollution is such a big subject. And it’s so critical because of these gaseous chemicals that are in the air that just go right into your body so quickly.

The first thing I think people should do is get an air filter because it takes time to handle your carpets and your bed and all these different things that you need to change in order to reduce the indoor air pollution.

But just putting an air filter right from the start, you start protecting yourself right away.

LISA BERES: Exactly! I think that’s such a good point because we talk about you want to have organic bedding and you want to have organic sheets and you want to do all these great, expensive investments. But if you’ve got that air purifier that’s absorbing some of those VOCs and formaldehydes off the bat, you can actually weight and stagger these projects.

You’re probably familiar with this study that they did in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology where they found the average home has 400 chemicals. Some of the chemicals are toxic, some were untested. And so this is just what’s going on in America across our homes.

DEBRA: It is. I know it sounds fantastic or unbelievable to some people because you look around and you go, “Well, I don’t see anything” and you say, “I’m not sick.” But the thing that’s so key about this is it’s not about getting sick like being exposed to bacteria and getting a cold. These are chronic exposure chemicals. It’s like you can smoke cigarettes and not be sick and then suddenly, get cancer.

It’s that kind of chemical where they build up in your body. And as they build up and build up and build up, then somewhere down the road, you’re going to get an illness that’s really a major illness. And it’s changing your DNA and all these stuff. You can’t see it, but it’s there. And then one day, you get sick.

LISA BERES: That goes back to, you mentioned, the labels on the cleaning products, the warnings, the danger and the caution. Those are literally there just for the acute symptoms. Is the chemical going to burn your skin instantly or are you going to have a reaction right away?

But nobody labels products about the long-term health effects.

DEBRA: No, they don’t label them at all. Not at all, not at all.

We need to go to break. When we come back, I’m hoping Ron will be there with you.

LISA BERES: Yes, he’ll be here.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ron and Lisa Beres. You can go to their website, TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp and get more information about their program, Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ron and Lisa Beres. They are healthy home experts, building biologists, published authors, professional speakers, and Telly award-winning media personalities. Actually, we have an interesting topic here. So is Ron there now?

RON BERES: I am here, Debra. Yes, thank you for that intro. That was very nice.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thank you for being here. It’s nice to have both of you on.
So Ron, I don’t know if Lisa told you but we have a special topic for the two of you to discuss together.

LISA BERES: I did. I filled him in.

DEBRA: So listen, what we’re going to talk about now is about husbands and wives and toxic chemicals. I hear a lot from women, especially, “I want to clean up my house, but my husband doesn’t believe me. My husband doesn’t care about this. My husband thinks it’s all in my head.”

I want Lisa and Ron to talk about how they’re working together as a team to have a healthy home and to be supporting each other and reducing your toxic chemical exposure. So I’ll let you guys decide where you’re going to start.

RON BERES: Lisa, I’ll jump in because I know you’ve been speaking here. I do want to say, I was not that husband, but I was that fiancée.

I have absolutely been that.

I did not really know what was going on and I have to say I came from a very traditional background, worked in Corporate America, I met the girl of my dreams, Lisa, on the phone right now. And so we were very excited. We just started our relationship. She moved into a home that was really nearby where I lived. And that’s when things got a little bit weird.

I have to admit, I did not see what I see now. My eyes were wide shut, quite frankly, because through Lisa’s experience, she was feeling chronically fatigued (I think you guys went over this earlier)…

DEBRA: We did.

RON BERES: And so, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe Lisa, but it was frustrating because I wouldn’t fear, feel this or hear this. I really was that guy initially. But through the process of just – as Lisa was discovering things, and she was getting better, and things we’re making sense to me, I really changed my path there, and I can tell you, it does happen.

There usually will be a skeptical spouse at first because let’s face it, they can’t physically see what’s going on. And it’s multi-layered. Particularly, if there are a lot of things that can be bombarding or affecting your health (and in Lisa’s case, that was definitely true) from, you mentioned the air quality.

I’ll tell you a funny story. Our first few months of dating, one of the first things Lisa wanted because she just moved into her home was an air purifier. She started…

LISA BERES: For my birthday, yes.

RON BERES: For her birthday. And I was like, “Wow,” which is great. It could have been more expensive than that. So we got her an air purifier.

LISA BERES: Not a very romantic gift.

RON BERES: Yeah, first year relationship. Needless to say, it’s been quite a journey. And even some of the initial literature and things that

Lisa was reading to better educate herself and before we became building biologists, I didn’t really accept it at first. And ultimately, I’m living and breathing it now.

We are so inspired by how Lisa turned around with her health that at that time, we wanted to go to the rooftop and just preach and shout, “This is what happened. This is so great.” Especially me too, I didn’t initially know what was going on.

So we made it our mission to go out there and educate people. I know you’ve been doing this for a long time too, Debra. It’s great to speak to you again. We always admire the great work that you do.

DEBRA: Thank you.

RON BERES: So we did books, then TV, then speaking engagements. We even had a retail business. And so we really just absorbed ourselves in being the best we can be to not only help us but other people.

And fast forward to today, we are now working together in a business that is focused on healthy living, and it’s awesome. It’s great. We have learned through the years (and Lisa, you can attest to this), don’t want to totally hog the conversation here but how to work together effectively.

And so, we’re both partners here. I think the key to really working together effectively is to make sure that someone is heading a particular project or someone takes a leadership role in something else and the other person has a leadership role in another area. And then it blends together and gives someone that detail power and everyone feels comfortable. But it does take a little time to do this.

DEBRA: I totally agree with that because I know in my relationship, if he’s in charge of something like the garden for example, and I’m in charge of something else, like the home, then each of us gets to be in a leadership position instead of just having one person be the dominant thing. And then we trust each other, and we help each other and everything gets done because we’re both leaders. And I think that makes a huge difference in a relationship.

LISA BERES: Yes, I really do, trusting each other. We all have different talents too. So honoring the talents that each person has and letting really bring that to the table and shine. And I think the trust factor goes back to really even – anyone listening who is going through a situation where they’re sick and their spouse doesn’t believe it, which is usually the woman.

It’s usually the woman saying her husband doesn’t believe it because we have more body fat, we store toxins more. We’re more susceptible to these things. Plus, we’re in the home more as a general rule of thumb.

And really, really trusting that because Ron went with me to these doctor visits and had to hear the doctors say, “We don’t know. We don’t know. We believe you’re having these issues, but we can’t find the problem.” And so that makes you feel insecure when you’re going through it. And Ron really stood by and said, “We’re going to figure this out.”

I think as a spouse, you really need to do that. You need to have ultimate faith in what your spouse is saying.

We just did the Dr. Oz Show actually a couple of months ago. It’s the same, exact situation. They had mold in the home. The wife and the daughter were the ones with the most severe reactions. The husband was really skeptical. He didn’t believe it. And it caused them to divorce.

DEBRA: It does, I hear this.

LISA BERES: And so this can really destroy your relationship. So you really have to trust your partner – and not even your partner, any of your family members – and just believe that what they’re saying is true and really stand by them because they need support.

DEBRA: They do. They absolutely do.

Many years ago, I was engaged to a man that I didn’t marry. And this was when I was first learning about all of these things. I would go to his apartment. It was an apartment in a renovated big, old house. And so it had a lot of toxic things, especially the heater was a freestanding heater with an open flame. You could see the flame burning.

And so, I didn’t know what all the toxic chemicals were then. So, I would go there and I would get sick and I would get upset and we would argue. None of these things would happen when we weren’t in the apartment.

And so finally, we broke up. Several years later, he found me and he said, “I have to tell you that you were right all along about the apartment making us sick.” I kept saying, “There must be something going on in the apartment.” And he said because he got much sicker after that.

And this is before I knew anything.

I’ll tell you something because this is so horrible. It was the bathroom. They had put in a shower where they had just made a frame and then they had cemented the walls of the shower. And they didn’t put any tile. They painted it. And it was very small. And so every time I would take a shower, I’d get paint chips all over my body.

So finally, one day I said, “I’m going to take all this paint off.”

I took very toxic paint stripper, the most toxic paint stripper. I took off all my clothes and I got in the shower, this little tiny shower that you could barely stand in, no ventilation and I’ve got toxic paint stripper. I put it all over the walls to loosen up the pain and then I’m standing there with a razor blade scraping it off in this little box full of toxic fumes. People do this all the time.

LISA BERES: They do it all of the time.

DEBRA: I know. I look at things that I used to do and I’m just horrified.

LISA BERES: It’s amazing. Like you said earlier, I don’t know if you had exposure or symptoms at that time, and maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, but I have similar stories where there was a lot of toxic exposure. Maybe you didn’t get a symptom at that time, but this is about the long-term symptoms.

Just because you used the products that was toxic and you didn’t have any symptoms doesn’t mean it didn’t affect your body.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. And that’s what makes this so difficult. Over the years, I really found that what I need to do is objectively look at the data and say, “This causes cancer. This causes this. This causes that. And these are the chemicals I’m not going to have in my life.” I understand it that it’s these chronic exposures that build up and build up and build up. That’s why it’s so difficult to say this chemical led to this symptom.

LISA BERES: It’s still hard to pinpoint. That’s why it’s so hard for people to say. Out of sight, out of mind. “Oh, I know that has a carcinogen in it, but whatever.” They’ll use it anyway – from cosmetics to cleaning to home products. You name it! I guess you can’t emphasize it enough.

Even pregnant women you’ll see pregnant women remodeling their nursery. Babies today are being born with 287 chemicals already in their blood. We even had an advantage over that. We came in, I’m sure, with less chemicals. How about this new generation that’s already coming in with some many chemicals? How soon are they going to have the effects of exposures?

DEBRA: Well, we see it already that people are getting illnesses that they didn’t use to get until they were 60, they’re now getting when they’re 30.

Anyway, we’ve only got about 20 seconds left. So I just want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited about the work that you’re doing. Again, listeners, you can go to TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp to find out more about their new program which is Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. Thanks, Ron and Lisa. Bye.

RON BERES: Thank you, Debra.

LISA BERES: Thank you so much.

RON BERES: Thank you.

Children’s Art Table

Question from TA

Hi Debra,

Did you receive my submission to your Q&A page about this table? It has a Tuff Gloss UV finish (whatever that means!) and is Greenguard certified. Is this enough to give me assurance that it’s non-toxic? I contacted the company and found out they are formaldehyde-free. Anything else I should find out before purchasing?

Debra’s Answer

I have no first hand experience with these tables, but the description looks fine to me.

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Whole Foods’ “Responsibly Grown” Produce Ratings — Not “Good” Enough

PrintThis spring 17 certified organic farmers signed on to a letter to Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey asking him to withdraw the company’s “Responsibly Grown” produce labeling program, at least temporarily. The farmers, all of whom sell produce to the 400+-store high-end grocery chain, objected to having to pay for the grocer’s marketing program and to the fact that non-organic produce could qualify to be labeled “GOOD,” “BETTER,” or even “BEST” under the program.

Read the article at cornucopia.org

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Chemicals in Consumer Products and Breast Cancer

Here is an interesting article about the connection between toxic chemicals in household products and breast cancer.

The Silent Spring Institute is dedicated to finding the specific chemicals that cause breast cancer from among the thousands of chemicals women in our society are exposed to daily. And they’ve developed their own tools to find them.

Idaho Mountain Express: Are Household Products Killing Us?

Silent Spring Institute

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ARE TOXIC PRODUCTS HIDDEN IN YOUR HOME?

Toxic Products Don’t Always Have Warning Labels. Find Out About 3 Hidden Toxic Products That You Can Remove From Your Home Right Now.