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Toxic Free Superstar: Pia Zadora
Today my guest is the iconic Pia Zadora—Golden Globe winner, Grammy nominee, ShowWest winner, accomplished singer, film star, and a mom who has been living toxic free for years. I first met Pia in…I think it was 2000…when she called and asked me to fly down to her Beverly Hills home and inspect it for toxic exposures. We’ll be talking about how Pia got interested in toxics, why eliminating toxics from her home is important to her, and how she lives toxic free at home. piazadora.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Superstar: Pia Zadora
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pia Zadora
Date of Broadcast: December 11, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is – what is the date today? It is Thursday, December 11th 2014 and it’s a nice, chilly day here in Florida, 69°. I know it’s much colder every place else.
But it’s winter time. It’s coming to be the holidays and I’m actually going to take a vacation for three weeks. But there are many, many, many shows that you can listen to. It’s in the archives. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, see what you might be interested in and I’m hoping that you’ll listen to lots of archives while I’m taking a little vacation.
But I’ll be back with live shows in January. In fact, I already have many guests booked for the month of January and we’ll just continue after the holiday.
My guest today is Pia Zadora, actress, singer. She’s had a long career – well, she’s been a Golden Globe winner, a Grammy nominee, an accomplished singer, film star, broadway baby. She was a child star. She has been in broadway shows.
But she’s also a mom and she’s very interested in toxics. I’ve known PIa for many years. I was trying to figure out when I met her. I think it was in the year 2000 when she called me and asked me to come down to her home in Beverly Hills and check it out for toxic exposures. So we’re going to let Pia talk about how she lives toxic-free.
Hi, Pia!
PIA ZADORA: Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m great. How are you?
PIA ZADORA: I’m good. I think you’re right with the year 2000 because my youngest son had just been born. He’s 17 now. He’s about two or three at the time when I started detecting toxins in my environment for some weird reason – maybe hormonal me. I was like, “Uh-oh, something’s going on here.”
But I think the interesting thing is as time goes on, it seems more evident or more prevalent. When I started using paint for Jordan when he was born, painting the nursery and doing all that stuff and redoing the bathrooms and then trying to keep everything clean with the wrong solution like Lysol and all that other stuff, it’ll kill you before it kills the germs and I started smelling and sensing and protecting thinking, “Well, this is just not right.”
And that’s when I called you because I’ve seen some of your stuff and I said, “Wow! It’s probably a big issue and I need my guru…”—because you were my guru at that time.
DEBRA: Thank you.
PIA ZADORA: And you still are. I mean, I’m in constant touch with you to explore every new direction I go in terms of solutions and paints and pools with chlorine and all that kind of stuff.
DEBRA: That’s right. I actually get a lot of emails from Pia.
PIA ZADORA: Yes!
DEBRA: Over the years, over all these years, I continue to get emails from Pia. When she wants to do something new, she contacts me and finds out how to do something non-toxic.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, yeah. And it’s very important. The good thing is that place are much more aware of it. I mean, when I used to – for instance, I had a house in Malibu. I think it was the time that you were with me. It was brand new and it just reeked of all these toxins and the plaster and all that, the bad baths, the coverings. I was like, “Oh, my God!” When I went into this house, I feel like I’m going to faint or something. It was overwhelming.
And so we checked it out and I was told to bake it. You bake a house!
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s exactly right.
PIA ZADORA: I know! But people thought I was nuts. I’m like, “No, we can’t go to Malibu this weekend because I’m baking the house.” “Really? Well…”
And then I had my meter, my electromagnetic meter when I would go to buy cars. I come in with the meters. I have to sit on this seat with the car on when you look at the meter how high it registers. People really thought I was nuts at the time.
But now, people are accepting and understanding in a much different, more progressive way because I think that a lot of people are getting sick and they’re realizing that they’re getting sick because of the stuff in their environment.
DEBRA: Yes, that definitely is happening that I really see in the last few years that major television shows are talking about this. Whereas when I started back in 1982, I self-published my first book. And then in 1984, my first book was published. At that time, they didn’t know where to put it on the shelf on the bookstores. Nobody had ever heard about any of these things before.
But now, there’s all these organizations. They’re working on toxics. There’s legislation, there’s all these businesses. I have more than 500 websites on Debra’s list at DebrasList.com that are selling toxic-free products and it’s just all changed from where it was even it’s changed since the year 2000 when you and I first met. There’s so much more awareness than there ever was before. And I think that’s great.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, true. Yeah, it’s a relief.
DEBRA: It is a relief. It is a relief.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah.
DEBRA: So why is this important to you? Why is it important to you to live toxic-free.
PIA ZADORA: I think it’s important because it’s healthy and it keeps you feeling confident and upbeat and the whole vibe of it, you just feel difference. When you stop eating organic and you’ve stopped using VSD paint and you use all-natural vitamins and all these, you just feel the difference.
And it’s important on many levels. It’s important spiritually, it’s important physically and you know that you’re doing what’s best for yourself and for your kid (as you’ve said, I’m a mother). So it’s really important for me to be there as long as I can and to be as healthy as I can.
And my daughter, which is amazing, she’s 27 or 28 now. She is more, almost more aware. She sends me new stuff every time, “Oh, Mom, try this. Put butter in your coffee in the morning. And it has to be pasteurized butter. Go on this website and get all these cheese.” She cooks organic food for her little Pomeranian with vegetables in it and all kinds of stuff. I’m very proud of her, that she’s so aware. She’s completely gluten-free and all that.
So I think I brought that awareness to her and she kind of ran with it. She’s the next generation, which is great because that means her kid will be healthier and she will take better care of them in so many ways.
And then there’s medication and all that other stuff that we do now to keep ourselves the way we want to keep ourselves – peaceful, tranquil, healthy, happy, more positive, all those things that we do.
DEBRA: Well, are there specific chemicals that you’re concerned about more than others?
PIA ZADORA: Well, I’m concerned obviously with the dust bed. The thing that’s hardest for me because I’m performing now is make-up. It’s really hard to find a make-up that will be – you know, you’ll go on a set or you’ll go on stage and will look right and is not going to bleed if you know what it mean.
There’s so many preservatives and parabens and [inaudible 00:09:16], all that crap that you know is not good for you. I’m concerned about those.
And I’m also concerned about eating out because my lifestyle is eating out a lot especially since I’ve had my accident, I can’t really get around and cook that much. And I enjoy going out and relaxing. It’s hard to know – well, obviously, you know that not everything is healthy and organic, that you’re eating in a restaurant. You don’t know what they’re cleaning the dishes with. You don’t know all the other stuff that you’re ingesting and the pesticides that they’re using in the kitchen.
It’s kind of scary. But I guess you just have to protect your own environment and not be overly conscious because then you’ll be a recluse, you become a hermit.
DEBRA: Well, I found over the years that if I can do it more than fifty percent – I think I probably am more conscious and take more actions than most people, but if you can do something more than 50%, then you actually can make some progress.
So we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back and talk more with Pia Zadora about living toxic-free.
DEBRA: Okay, this is Debra Lynn Dadd. I think you can hear me. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Sorry, I have a little microphone thing going on there. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pia Zadora, accomplished singer/actress. She’s been in the entertainment business since she was in a child. She was on Broadway. And now, she’s still an entertainer, but also a mom and she’s been living toxic-free as I’ve said, as we’ve both said since the year 2000. So she has a lot of experience with this subject that we cover on this radio show.
So Pia, before the break, you were talking about eating out. One of the things that I find is that there are certain restaurants that you just can’t find out any information, but if you go to better restaurants, then a lot of restaurants are now serving organic ingredients. At least they’ll tell you what’s in it and that they have some knowledge about the ingredients. Other restaurants, they’re just taking some frozen thing that was prepared at some other place and putting it in a microwave and it’s not fresh food at all.
But what do you find when you go to a restaurant? Do you find that it’s easier or difficult to get organic and to find things out?
PIA ZADORA: Well, there’s just a few restaurants that I go to because I know that they will disclose and I know that their standards are higher than your average restaurant. If they’ll have wild fish, they’ll tell you what’s wild, what isn’t. They’ll have some organic vegetables or salad or green. They’ll have free range if not organic, but usually like in [inaudible 00:17:09] Ranch, they cook something like that.
You just have to trust and know that you’re going to go to is going to be honest and then you’re okay! If I’m traveling, driving from Vegas to L.A. or something and get hungry and you have to go into one of the chain restaurants…
DEBRA: I know!
PIA ZADORA: Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! You can just taste the difference and the sugar that they put in and everything. It’s just mind-boggling. And if you’re hungry, you’re hungry. Either take something in the car or have something that you know is not okay.
DEBRA: I know that that really is – I’ve done a fair amount of driving myself especially on highways like that. It’s just the food is so few and far between.
I remember when I was moving from California to Florida, my husband and I, we would decide that we would stop along the way and have breakfast. When we left in the morning, we didn’t eat at the hotel or some place just so that we’d have like a goal for, “Let’s have a rest and have breakfast.”
And when we got to Florida, we stayed in [inaudible 00:18:33]. I can’t even remember how to say that. And then we have to drive down to the Tampa area where I live in Clearwater. We drove and drove and drove and drove through the Florida jungle and drove and drove and drove. The only food that there was for miles and miles was boiled peanuts and I was never so happy in my life to say Denny’s.
PIA ZADORA: Oh, I know, I know.
DEBRA: But I don’t want this to sound like I eat at Denny’s all the time because I don’t. But if you are in a situation like that and that’s all the food there is, really, your choice is are you going to eat it or you’re just not going to eat.
PIA ZADORA: Exactly!
DEBRA: And so I know that for myself, as much as I love to enjoy some small, locally-owned restaurant, they’re not always there.
PIA ZADORA: Right!
DEBRA: I know for myself if I go on a trip, I’ve always got snacks on the car, so that I can choose if I’m going to eat at Denny’s or not, that I have a choice. That I think is an important thing to do.
I used to eat in places like that and now, it’s just like I don’t want to even eat them, eat those things. I’ll tell you that one thing that I read about on my food blog recently was that I started being able to get just pork belly, which is what bacon is made out of. I love bacon. I think everybody loves bacon. Even a lot of diets like the Paleo diet, they recommend eating bacon – and low carbs diet. Everybody is eating bacon.
But the thing about bacon is that in addition to the fact that virtually all bacon has sugar on it of one sort or another, it’s also smoked. And so all those chemicals, those combustion byproduct chemicals from the smoke actually get into the meat. And so that’s a reason that I stopped eating bacon a long time ago because of that.
But recently now, I’ve been getting pork bellies and they don’t have any of that stuff on it. It’s just the meat. It’s just the meat and it’s really good quality pork too. It tastes so delicious.
And then the other day, there was some bacon and I thought, “Well, you know, I’ll just eat this little bit of bacon” and it actually didn’t taste good to me anymore because I’m so accustomed to not eating smoked and sugar and all those things and just have the raw meat. It was a really interesting experience.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah. But to get back to the Denny’s thing and traveling on the road, the scary part is that 90% of America just eats that stuff and thinks it’s okay on a regular basis.
DEBRA: Yeah, we’re on the next break already. That went quick. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, my guest today is Pia Zadora and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pia Zadora, Golden Globe winner, Grammy nominee, film star, singer. She’s been around a long time, since she was a child. She was a child star and has been around as long as I can remember.
So Pia, did you find that your children, being raised in a toxic-free way, did you find that they had less health problems than other children?
PIA ZADORA: Yes, my first two were not really raised in a toxic-free world because I wasn’t aware of it. I first became aware of it 15 years ago when you and I hooked up. But I still think that each year increases.
Everything, it worsens in terms of chemicals and additives and foods and paints and everything.
So I think it’s more important to do it now more than ever. But I do think my younger, my baby is better. He’s clearer, he’s calmer, his skin is better. You know, they go out once they turn teenagers. You can’t stop them from having soda or eating Dorito’s with the other kids when they go out, but I think the important time is when you’re younger and they’re eating, when they’re babies, when they’re three, four, five years old. There’s more neuroplasticity and they’re more vulnerable. And I think at that time, if you feed them organically and you surround them with healthy things –
And toys, these pleasant toys! When he was a baby, there were all kinds of Lego stuff going on and people were being that plastic and Legos and from China. It’s horrible when you really think that kids, small kids, innocent, vulnerable kids are being poisoned by their toys.
DEBRA: I just think that that’s unbelievable. We should be able to live in a pure world where the environment isn’t attacking us all the time. Fortunately, we can create our own homes to be that way. But still, when we go out on the world, we’re still being exposed to those toxic chemicals in places like pesticides on public lawns and when kids go to school.
Even schools now, there’s some movement towards removing most toxic chemicals from schools. But most schools still are toxic and children go into toxic schools and they’re fed non-organic lunches.
There’s been so much progress over the last 30 years since I’ve been doing this, but there’s still much more to be done. Still so much more.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, there’s not enough. There’s not enough progress.
DEBRA: Yeah. It needs to go faster and there needs to be more. I think about this every day, how can I get more information faster and change more lives because we really now need to be considering about everybody in the world and be looking at the regulations and why isn’t everybody aware of this and why isn’t everybody making the choices that you and I are making because it just is common sense, wouldn’t you think?
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, absolutely. But the awareness is just not enough right now – it’s better, but it’s not enough.
DEBRA: I agree. Well, we’re contributing to that today. We’re bringing more awareness to more people. We’ll just keep pushing it forward because we need to have a toxic-free world for everyone.
So what is the most difficult thing you found in order to change?
PIA ZADORA: Well, the more and more you get into it, the more you look at under microscope, you realize that – first, thing it’s just like a food, it’s just a cleaning solution, then you realize it’s the varnishes on the furniture. I’m like, “Oh, my God! What am I going to do? I’m just decorating a new house?” “Oh, no. You can’t use any of that.” At first, it’s scary.
And then I got all organic furniture. And at that time, there weren’t that many choices in terms of colors, so I have to use the all-natural fabric. Now, there are more choices and prints and all that good stuff coming that you can find through certain websites. But who would’ve thought that your furniture is poisoning you or your rug? I mean, you think, “Okay, maybe the carpet painter,” but you don’t think that. That was very hard for me in the beginning.
DEBRA: Especially at that time. I remember in 2000 when we were working on your house, I remember working with your interior decorator to get your furniture to be non-toxic.
PIA ZADORA: Yes, Michael Smith. And he actually decorated the White House after that.
DEBRA: Really?
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, he’s an amazing decorator. There’s wonderful stuff that he didn’t understand, I mean what we were talking about. He thought I was off the wall.
DEBRA: Yeah, but we did end up with some pretty nice pieces for you, but it was very limiting what we had to choose from at the time. Whereas now today, there’s many more places to get furniture. But still, I would say that one of the things that’s so different now is that we have more awareness than we’ve ever had before in terms of I can produce more studies about what’s toxic than I could years ago.
When I first started, there were no studies that said that carpet was toxic. I could just smell it and I knew that people were getting sick. But now, they’ve measured it and studied the chemicals in it. And you can get studies that show all the list of chemicals in carpets. It’s in the Chicago Tribute about fire retardants in sofas. There’s all these people with fire retardant sofas that now understand that they’re being exposed to fire retardants every time they sit on their sofa.
PIA ZADORA: And how about fire retardants in babies’ pajamas.
DEBRA: I know! I mean, that’s just ridiculous. I’m sorry, it’s just not a good thing. Fire retardants, babies? I mean, there’s all these attention on fire retardants so that there’s not a fire, but babies are not smoking cigarettes. Maybe they have to be protected from their parents or visitors who are smoking cigarettes that might draw the ashes on their bed. It’s so toxic and babies are so vulnerable.
It just boggles my mind that the people who are making these decisions don’t understand this and that we as consumers need to be watching for it.
So we need to go to break again. We’ll listen more of Pia singing. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pia Zadora. We’re talking about her toxic-free life. Pia, I know that one of the things that I noticed about living in a toxic-free way is that the products themselves are so much more enjoyable to use.
One of the first things I noticed was that it was so much more comfortable to wear cotton than polyester and there was one Christmas when I ate an organic orange for the first time and I was stunned that it didn’t taste like what I thought an orange tested like (like fungicide) and that it actually tasted like an orange. I gave everybody oranges for Christmas because I was so excited that I wanted them to taste a real orange.
So my question is what are some of your favorite products that are toxic-free?
PIA ZADORA: I’m very much into aromatherapy. I love home sprayed with lavender and I love creams, body lotions with essential oils. It just feels so good and it’s such a difference. When I was traveling and I ran out of my cream and I had used something that was in the hotel, I mean it smelled awful and it felt awful. I just couldn’t use it. You get used to this stuff and it becomes a part of you. It just feels so pure. You feel happy, your body feels happy. it really, really sound silly, but it’s true.
DEBRA: Well, I think our bodies feel happy when we use something like aromatherapy – and these are real, honest to goodness natural essential oils from plants. The difference is because the natural plant essences are actually alive and healing and compatible with our bodies whereas those other fragrances that aren’t are made from petrochemicals and they’re just artificial and there’s nothing there that actually heals your body.
And so many times, when we’re not using these natural produces and are instead using these synthetic ones, our bodies aren’t being nourished. It’s like taking a drug for symptoms. A prescription drug for symptoms might alleviate your symptom, but taking something like a natural, homeopathic remedy will actually heal your body. And so when we’re using these products, there’s actual healing nature to them.
PIA ZADORA: Right, right. And you don’t feel invaded. I mean, with toxic stuff, you feel like there’s an invasive element going on. It doesn’t feel, smell and taste right.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. And yeah, there is like a right-ness to it. Yeah, I feel that too. So what other natural products do you like?
PIA ZADORA: I like everything! The interesting this is we had a leak in the house and I had these sustainable, beautiful wooden floors put in, all-natural and all that, it just came with a little vinegar and a little warm water and it just – I love baking soda and I like to clean vegetables, wash my vegetables with vinegars. You can just see all the grind and the dirt coming out from them. It’s like the really natural things are fun.
Tea tree oil as a cleanser. I’m a little bit of a germophobe, so I carry my wipes and my tea tree and everything. Because I live in Vegas and I work in Vegas, I’m always opening a door or doing gas and all that. That’s a great way to just carry germs and get sick and get cold and all kinds of stuff.
So I actually have these little plastic food handling gloves that I keep in my purse. I dispose of them when I open a door or something. A gazillion people in every hotel I go to opens those doors and they have colds, they sneeze or whatever, so I use my tea tree wipes when I sit down to eat and after eating or touching something or on a plane. I’m wiping the arm rest or the tray table with the tea tree wipes. So that’s a fun thing for me too.
DEBRA: That’s a really good idea. A lot of people use – I forgot what that’s called, those products that you wipe your hands on to kill the germs. There’s a word for this, I’m just not thinking of it.
PIA ZADORA: You mean Purell?
DEBRA: Stuff like that. And those are alcohol-based. That alcohol is just made from crude oil. There’s nothing natural about it. It’s just alcohol-based. So to use something like tea tree oil actually has natural anti-bacterial properties to it, so you’re using exactly the right thing. And I think that for somebody like you who’s out there in public spaces all the time, that’s a really wise thing to do to protect yourself from germs. Somebody like me who’s in my house all the time, that’s probably not as necessary.
PIA ZADORA: Yeah, because you’re not vulnerable.
DEBRA: But you, you’re doing exactly the right thing. You’re doing exactly the right thing, yeah.
PIA ZADORA: And I’mshaking hands with people all the time. You just have to keep yourself clean.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. Good idea, good idea. So let’s see, things like clothing. Do you wear natural fiber clothing?
PIA ZADORA: I have all my pajamas made from organic cotton. I buy them from different websites like[inaudible 00:45:10] or I have them made from stuff that I order from Genesis and all that stuff. But you know, my every day stuff, I can’t because I just need it to be – or the sweats, I do organic and natural. But my show clothing and all that other stuff, I can’t. But I do send them to organic cleaners, to non-toxic cleaners. I use non-toxic cleaning. I switched to them and all that. And I always wash or clean them after I buy them to get that initial chemical stuff. You can just smell it off of them.
DEBRA: Yes, yes.
PIA ZADORA: But it’s important to use non-toxic cleaners. My God, I mean that’s very…
DEBRA: So how do you clean your house? What kind of cleaners would you use to clean your house?
PIA ZADORA: Well, I use Planet Solution from Whole Food for different things. I use natural, organic vodka and I use vinegar as I told you and the organic Dr. Bronner’s soaps and all that stuff and just all-natural products. You can smell them. Some of the natural products aren’t that natural. You smell them right away and it’s like, “Uh-uh, this is not the best,” so you switch to the next.
It’s pretty much at Whole Foods and those places because that’s really the only resource that we have for that kind of stuff. I’m not as evolved as you, which is why I call you and email you and ask you about all the different products and things like about the – what was it about the glass that they said that there was – what was it in the glass?
DEBRA: Oh, lead in the glass?
PIA ZADORA: Lead in the glass – I mean, at the craziest places. They’re like, “Well, these glasses have lead” but crystal glasses actually have some lead. You’re, “How do you get lead-free glass?” It’s like, “Oh, God! I got to call Debra or email Debra.”
DEBRA: Well, that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m here. But I think you’re doing a pretty good job from what I know, from the questions that you’re asking, that you’re looking to see at every turn, that you’re wanting to make sure that if there’s a toxic exposure that you’re aware of it. And as you become aware of it, you try to find out the answer and try to do the best you can. I think that that’s a really, really good thing to do.
Over time, all these different things come up and we all just make changes and we become less and less toxic.
PIA ZADORA: Yup,yup.
DEBRA: Well, thank you so much for being on, Pia. It was a pleasure. We’re at the end of the show. I wish you very well in continuing to have a toxic-free home. I know you have a question to me about swimming pools that I need to answer. I will do that and I’ll also put it on my website so everybody can see what the answer is.
Swimming pools, there’s a lot of new things out and I want to take time to explain what the differences are because I went through all that with my pool as well.
So thank you so much. Have a wonderful holiday!
PIA ZADORA: Thank you, Debra. You too. Have fun! And I’ll talk to you soon.
DEBRA: Okay, thanks. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m going to be taking a break for the next three weeks and I’ll be on Tuesday, January 6th. And so during the interim, please go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to as many of the past archive shows as you’d like. There are so many interesting shows.
And I’m also now working on transcribing all the shows, which is really important to me because there’s so much information in these shows. I know that it’s a lot easier to just scan through a transcript and find that nugget that you’re looking for especially if you’re listening to something and you hear something that you’re really interested in. You can go to the transcript and look. I’m trying to get all the links to different websites that we’ve mentioned in the transcripts so they’re really ending up being a valuable resource on into the future.
There’s so much to learn and what I’m working on is getting as many knowledgeable experts on as I can and people who are making toxic-free products. We’ll just continue on 2015 after the holiday.
Thank you so much for listening. Again, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to the archives during the holiday. We’ll be back in 2015. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
Today my guest is Diana Kaye. She and husband James Hahn are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. They’ve been on this show together many times, but today Diana is here to talk about their highly recommended Hair Wash, and how most hair care products damage your hair with toxic chemicals. I’ve been using this product for several months and what a difference! We’ll talk about your “virgin hair” and how to get your hair back to it’s natural state. Diana and Jim own a small organic farm in lovely Middletown Valley, Maryland and have operated their organic herbal personal care products business there since 1996. Terressentials was originally started in Virginia in 1992. It grew out of their search for chemical-free products after Diana’s personal experience with cancer and chemotherapy in 1988. Prior to Diana’s cancer, they were involved in commercial architecture in Washington DC. Diana and James are proud to be an authentic USDA certified organic and Fair Made USA business. They are obsessive organic researchers and artisan handcrafters of more than one hundred USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products that they offer through their two organic stores in Frederick County, Maryland, through a network of select retail partners across the US, and to customers around the world via their informative web site. Terressentials Organic Hair Care | Terressentials Pure Earth Hair Wash: Instructions and FAQs | Terressentials Hair Help Resource Guide
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH DIANA KAYE & JAMES HAHN
- GMOs in Personal Care Products
- Toxics in Essential Oils?
- How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products
- More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution
- The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
- What Organic Means — From the Experience of Being Organic Farmers
- Why One Couple Decided to Get an Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye
Date of Broadcast: December 10, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, December 10th 2014 and I have a little tickly in my throat today, but the show must go one. You’ll excuse me please if I cough or sneeze, but I’m here and I’m going to be talking to my guest.
Today, it’s Diana Kaye. She’s been on before. She’s one of the co-founders along with her husband, James Hahn of their USDA certified organic business – yes, this is a certified organic business, which is Terressentials. We’ve had her on in the past talking about different aspects of what it means to be organic.
But today, we’re going to do a different kind of show with her. We’re going to talk about their award-winning – well, I think it’s an award-winning. Anyway, it’s highly recommended hair products. It’s been featured on television and written up in the Washington Post and all kinds of other places. I’ve actually been using it on my hair for the last three months.
But the thing about it is that not only is it completely natural and I think mostly organic (Diana will tell us this), but it also is completely different than most hair products in that it actually restores your hair to what she calls “virgin hair”, your virgin state of hair before the hair is damaged by all the toxic hair care products that we used.
So we’re going to hear about that today and hear about her product. And let me tell you, my hair looks very different and very much more soft and lovely and beautiful.
Hello, Diana.
DIANA KAYE: Well, hi there.
DEBRA: How are you doing?
DIANA KAYE: I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling well.
DEBRA: Well, I’m sorry too. But you know what? I’m not really sick. I did a lot of singing in my Dickens costume this weekend for Christmas and parties and just not quite enough rest. I’m not really sick. I’m just kind of on the edge of having a tickle in my throat.
DIANA KAYE: Ah! Oh, I see.
DEBRA: So I might [coughing], but I’ll try to not cough in the microphone.
DIANA KAYE: You wore your voice out.
DEBRA: I’m otherwise in good spirits and otherwise feeling well. It’s just my throat.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, that’s good. That’s better news.
DEBRA: Yeah, I’m sitting here sipping herbal tea.
DIANA KAYE: Me too!
DEBRA: Good! So let’s talk about hair.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, that’s a very interesting topic.
DEBRA: And a very big topic.
DIANA KAYE: It is.
DEBRA: So first I want to say let’s just start out and give your website. It’s Terressentials.com. It’s probably easier to just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page and look for today’s show because I’ve put links to pages on Diana’s website that gives you in writing the things that we’re going to be talking about today. So if you are scribbling madly and would just like to see the webpage, it’s right there at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I included a link there for you.
So why don’t we start with talking about what’s wrong with hair care products.
DIANA KAYE: Okay, that’s a whole other giant can of worms.
DEBRA: I know.
DIANA KAYE: The problem is we live in a very plastic world today and people, they actually wrap their bodies in plastic. For example, people today wear clothing that is polyester, nylon, acetate, any acrylics, the many members of different types of synthetic petroleum-based fibers.
People also live in environments and work in environment where they’re walking on synthetic petroleum-based fiber carpets. They sit in an office chair that has a plastic upholstery material covering it. They often use purses made of plastic, hair brushes made of plastic.
What happens as a result of living with all of these plastic is that there is a lot of friction that’s generated due to constant walking on plastics, wearing shoes with plastic soles, rubbing your plastic-wrapped bum on your plastic-covered upholstery. And so how this affects people in regards to hair is that it generates a lot of static electricity.
What a lot of people are unaware of is that many of the new or newer surfactants that has been engineered by industrial chemical engineers, they actually have inherent anti-static properties built into this chemical product in order to accommodate this world of synthetic static electricity that we live in.
DEBRA: Before you go on, I’d just like to say something about static electricity and synthetics and that is when I started doing research, this is why you have fabric softener, to reduce the static electricity. And so I was looking into what would be a natural fabric softener. And what I discovered was that if you wear natural fibers, you don’t need fabric softener at all period because there’s no static electricity. I thought that was very interesting.
DIANA KAYE: Yes, it’s absolutely…
DEBRA: So it’s only the synthetics that require having some kind of anti-static. I remember the days when I used to wear synthetic clothing, you take it out of the dryer and it all sticks together because of the static electricity.
DIANA KAYE: Correct.
DEBRA: And with natural fibers, it doesn’t do that at all. So there’s just no need for hair conditioners and fabric softeners and all those things that are in our products today to counteract the static electricity from these synthetics.
DIANA KAYE: And that’s exactly what we try to educate people. When you look at the big picture – and Debra, you know by this time I believe that we are about the big picture. We try to encourage people to understand what we’re talking about and start replacing these chemical fibers that they are literally enrobing themselves with on a daily basis even if it’s one thing at a time because over a year, two years or three years, you can replace most of the synthetics in your life.
And one of the things that we want people to start with is the things that are closest to your body. And thus, our hairwash, which as you mentioned is completely different from conventional, bubbly, surfactant shampoo product. It’s not a surfactant. It doesn’t have any inherent anti-static properties. It’s not something that when it gets into our water supply or gets into a septic field can disrupt the microflora and fauna of our soil ecosystem or of our water ways. It’s a completely different approach to cleansing the hair.
And so we want to tell people that when you look at our hair wash and want to try it, you can’t think of it as a shampoo because it doesn’t work like that.
DEBRA: No, it’s not. It’s not a shampoo, but it is a hairwash.
DIANA KAYE: Yeah.
DEBRA: I remember I first tried this many years ago like 20 years ago – you’ve been making this for a long time.
DIANA KAYE: A long time.
DEBRA: A long time. I remember that I was very accustomed to shampoo and I liked it to bubble up and wanted it to bubble up and – ooh, we’ve been talking instead of watching the clock. So we’re coming up on the break, but I’ll finish my sentence.
I remember writing in one of my books about washing your hair with baking soda to get rid of dandruff and that was totally different. And so when I got to your hair wash (I’m not even going to call it ‘shampoo’), it isn’t bubbly, it doesn’t leave your hair squeaky clean, but it removes the things that needs to be removed.
It was such a different experience that I just couldn’t even fathom using this or figure out or anything and so I ended up not using it. I went back at least a natural shampoo.
We’ll pick up this thread of thought when we get back from the break because there’s so much more to say. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kay from Terressentials. We’re talking about how to restore your virgin hair, how to get your hair back to it was when you were born. Isn’t that an amazing thing to think of? But I’m well on my way to doing that. We’ll talk more about that when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I just noticed that there’s a broken link one of your – I was just going to all the pages that we’ve put up here and there’s a broken link on one of those that I’ll fix in the next commercial. So if you’ve already gone to Toxic Free Talk Radio and you’re checking out the links to Diana’s site, never fear, I will fix this in the next break.
And again, the website is Terressentials.com. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for this show and there is a number of links that you can just go there – once I fixed the link, haha. Okay, it’s been a busy few days.
DIANA KAYE: You poor woman.
DEBRA: So we were talking about how different the shampoo is. It was like I just gave up on it, but I came back to it because it all started making sense to me 20 years later as I continued to research and research shampoo. Even organic shampoos, they have organic versions of still the same types of things that are damaging to your hair. They’re designed in the wrong way.
So Diana, would you tell us more about what are the kinds of ingredients that are damaging your hair and why we should be using hair washes instead?
DIANA KAYE: Well, the number one thing that damages the hair – and I’ve said this over and over again to women – is the perming, the relaxing, the highlighting, bleaching and dying. Those are the primary degraders of your hair and they’re very toxic for the environment.
And so the number one thing that we try to do is get women to understand what exactly they’re doing to themselves when they use these kinds of products and hopefully, switch folks over to lemon juice and sunlight or henna for darker colors so that we can preemptively stop this major degradation and attack to the hair.
The second big, big issue for everyone are these surfactants, the foamy, bubbly substances that most folks alive today has been using on their hair nearly every day (if not, every other day) to supposedly clean their hair. The actual surfactant, a.k.a. detergent attack the hair.
If you can envision a cleaner for your garage floor, which is going to attack oil and grease, the surfactants works in the same way. They not only break the surface tension of the water as a castile, a traditional castile soap can do, they go a step further where they actually attack the hair shaft, which is a similar version of a substance called keratin, which also makes up our nails, but the hair is a much finer, more delicate version of what our nails are.
So when you wash your hair every day with a substance that is literally attacking your hair, what happens over time is that the hair shaft becomes pitted, it can look like – and I’ll use this to contrast, a point of reference.
When you look at a baby’s hair, an infant under a high powered microscope, what you’re going to see is something that looks like a smooth rod of glass. It’s shiny because it’s smooth. And because it’s smooth and hard, it reflects light. So can look lighter than it actually is because of the refraction with the natural light and it feels softer because the hair hasn’t been attacked and it’s not rough.
Now if you contrast take a piece of hair from someone who has been – and let’s just take the worst case scenario – someone who has been chemically altering their hair with one of the substances we talked about (dying, coloring, perming, relaxing) and also on a daily basis using a conventional and yes, even a so-called ‘natural’ shampoo product and you look at that hair, what you’re going to see is something that looks like a piece of hickory twig or hickory wood.
The surface is pitted, the exterior layers are actually peeling and curling up. What happens ultimately with the worst types of attacking for people who do very regular chemical treatments, the hair starts to look like swiss cheese. It breaks easily, it’s difficult to grow past a particular length because of all the damage.
What many companies do is they create products for, let’s say – and everyone has heard of this – colored treated hair or special hair conditioning treatment for people who perm or relax their hair. These products have a high percentage of glue, of polymers, acrylate, PVP copolymers, which stands for polyvinylpyrrolidone.
There are various silicones, dimethicones in these products including so-called natural biopolymers, which would be seen on the label as wheat protein, p-protein, o-protein, et cetera. Not only do these polymers thickens thin products, but they are designed to actually glue the hair and hold it together.
DEBRA: Oh, my God!
DIANA KAYE: It glues down those curling, rough edges in an attempt to make the hair look like it is not so damaged.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. We’ll continue after the break and talk about what your hair wash does to heal this instead of continuing to damage the hair. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Diana Kay. Her website is Terressentials.com. But I suggest that you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look for this show and see the links to specific hair pages on her site. We’ll be right back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kay. She and her husband, James Hahn are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business, Terressentials. They’ve been making organic, personal care products for almost as long as I’ve been writing about them. So they have much experience. They’re very organic. It’s worth going and checking out their website, Terressentials.com.
Today, we’re talking about their hair wash product. Diana has been telling us all the reasons why all the commercial kind of hair products are bad for our hair and how it damages our hair. So Diana, tell us now about your hair wash and what it’s made from and why it’s so wonderful?
DIANA KAYE: Yes, we’re going to move away from the gloomy aspect.
DEBRA: Yes.
DIANA KAYE: So our hair wash is very, very different. It doesn’t contain any soap, surfactants or coating agent like any of the plastics or silicones that we had talked about and it cleans in a very different way.
Our hair wash is a clay-based product that we have blended with organic herbal extract that we make all ourselves or a blend of organic essential oils if it’s one of the aromatic versions of our hairwash and that’s it.
Many, many years ago, we first tried to offer this product in its raw state, which was literally rocks. People were not very receptive to the idea they have to grind a rock with a mortar and pestle.
DEBRA: Maybe that’s the one I used.
DIANA KAYE: So that didn’t slide. The second way we tried to offer it after that wasn’t very successful was as a ground-up version that you would mix yourself at home and people weren’t very receptive to that either because it was time-consuming and you could only make enough that you could use that day or the next day.
So we went back to the drawing board and we said, “Okay, we’re going go to do a pre-mixed version that at least is going to resemble a liquid or a semi-liquid kind of a product that hopefully people might be more receptive to. And as it turned out, people were more receptive a version that was in a bottle that they could squeeze out, so we were able to reach more people.
So the product works very simply. Instead of attacking your hair to try to eat away or dissolve oils and grease and then by surface tension reactions remove other kinds of articles from your hair, our hair wash, which is a clay-based product works by absorbing.
It grabs a hold of excess oils, dirt particles, hydrocarbon particulate matter that’s both in the air or any other kind of petrochemical particulate. And this is what’s so fantastic about this amazing of Mother Earth, it grabs all of these particles to its limit of absorption, pulls it into the clay itself and holds it there forever.
So when you apply it to your hair, there’s no foaming action, no bubbles. And admittedly, Debra, I think as you’ve found out, it’s very different because we had been – even me, I was conditioned from the time I was a baby that the day you wash your hair is to expect lots of foams and bubbles. And so we don’t have that with this product. So psychologically, it’s a pretty dramatic feel on your hair.
DEBRA: It is, it is.
DIANA KAYE: And for a lot of people, they find it hard to accept, but if someone is really committed to moving away from chemical treatments, chemical detergents and all the plastics and chemical preservatives, chemical fragrances that are associated with conventional, so-called natural and even the so-called organic types of shampoos, this is the product where you can move away from all of that once you’ve made a personal decision that that’s something that you’re committed to doing.
When you use the hair wash, there’s a transition period. It does take some time because the hair washes is very gently to try to remove all of these plastics and other residues that has been deposited and actually impregnated into your hair from all your previous washing and conditioning. We advice people straight up that you need to approach using this product in a different fashion.
And we actually have an entire blog, very detailed, that explains how to use it, how to answer questions, what to expect, how you can speed it what we call the ‘detox transition period’. But once you read that and understand how to use it over a period of a week to two or three weeks (which really depends on how think your hair is, how long your hair is and its state of damage or health), once folks understand that and go through the transition, over time, as the old damaged hair is replaced with new virgin hair, people can experience essentially a rebirth of their hair in their head because they can feel as the new hair grows in what does real hair feels like.
And depending upon how quickly someone’s hair grows and how frequently they wash their hair, the time period varies. But generally, within six months, most people who don’t have really long hair are going to have this enlightening experience where they finally get to see what their real hair is like. Most people find their hair become softer, more manageable. It has a natural, healthier shine to it.
I think personally that one of the best things is you have this peace of mind knowing that you’re engaging actively with Mother Earth and you’re not contributing to water waste, pollution and air pollution by supporting industrial chemical factories that manufacture all of the conventional shampoo ingredients.
DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about this when we come back. I have a comment I want to make. I always want to make comments I guess.
DIANA KAYE: Yes! That’s good.
DEBRA: But I could wait until after the break so that I won’t have to cut myself off. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is Diana Kay. She’s from Terressentials.com. But also, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, scroll down, find today’s show and see all the links that I’ve posted (which are now there and live and correct) to her pages about hair care. We’ll talk more about this when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dian Kay. We’re talking about how to restore your virgin hair both by allowing your hair to grow out and damage it, but also to detox and heal the damaged hair that you have.
And I just want to make this statement because this is one of those big picture statements. In our industrial society, we’re so accustomed to using industrial products and so we think in terms of there’s the toxic industrial product and then there’s the natural products, which actually aren’t natural.
The ingredients originally came from renewable resources, but they’ve all gone through industrial processes in order for those ingredients to go into the shampoo. And then you have the organic ones, which are the same thing. Even though they tend to be more whole ingredients, there’s a lot of these ingredients that started out as something organic, but again, went through an industrial process in order to turn into that we know of and love.
And then what Diana is doing is she’s making something that is more of ingredients in their natural state. That’s the point that I wanted to make and that is what we call natural or organic isn’t in its natural state when you’re looking at an industrial product.
And then that the hair that she’s talking about when she’s talking about “virgin hair”, it’s getting our hair, allowing our own natural hair to grow out and not be damaged. And so what we have is actually natural hair, which most people never experienced if what you’re using is typical hair care products.
DIANA KAYE: Excellent point really.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I’ve been using your hair wash for a few months. At first, it took quite a while for me to – I mean, my hair didn’t look good. But I was at a place where it didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t being on television or something like that and I just decided I was just going to have my hair look the way it looks.
And so then, finally, I talked to Diana, she said, “Well, use apple cider vinegar rinse” and that helped tremendously. And then she suggested that I wash with her body wash. And that. I liked that even more.
And so now I’m using a combination of the hair wash and the body wash because I still want to have the detox effect of the clay and the healing effect of it on my hair, but I also want my hair to look better. Since I’ve been using those two products and using the apple cider vinegar mixed with water after using each one, my hair looks better than it’s ever looked in my life.
It’s soft and it’s thicker and it has more body to it, so I can brush it and it stays in place without hair spray or anything. I look in the mirror and I think, “I look beautiful. My hair looks beautiful.”
DIANA KAYE: Yehey!
DEBRA: It’s not flying up in the air from the static electricity and it’s not all flat. I tend to have oil hair, but it doesn’t look oil or greasy or anything. I just am so happy with my hair. I’m really looking forward to having all my old, damaged hair grow out and really just having my natural hair and using Diana’s natural, totally natural (in their natural state) products in order to keep mine in its natural state heart.
And that’s a totally, totally different thing. it’s like going into a different realm of nature as it is instead of industrial natural.
DIANA KAYE: Yeah, we’re going back to our roots.
DEBRA: Literally.
DIANA KAYE: We existed or co-existed with the planet that we walk on every day and how humans evolved over thousands and millions of years. People, before the invention of all these industrial chemicals, they only had plant extracts and oils from plants and animals and natural clays and minerals and salt to take care of their bodies. And here’s the amazing part. Somehow, humans managed to evolve and flourish without industrial chemicals.
DEBRA: Yes! And they were a lot healthier and they didn’t have health care systems and they survived.
DIANA KAYE: Yes!
DEBRA: So I see over and over again that in our culture, we have this industrial system where products are being made that are damaging to hair or body or skin or whatever, internal organs. And then we have to do things to counteract the effects.
We can just skip all that and just maintain our bodies in a natural way, in a natural state as close to nature as possible. And that’s an entirely different experience. This product and this way of thinking is part of that being in our natural state.
It’s funny that there’s even an English word that I’ve been able to find that means being in one’s natural state. But I guess when language developed, I think that probably people didn’t think, “Oh, there’s going to be a time in the future when everybody is damaged by industrial products…”
DIANA KAYE: We need these chemicals every day.
DEBRA: “…and we’re going to have to distinguish.”
DIANA KAYE: It is bizarre.
DEBRA: It is, but that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening and we just need to be aware of it and make decisions to find these products and find these ways of being and have this be our standard to say, “We want to be in our natural state.” I mean, I think that’s the best way I can think of to say it.
DIANA KAYE: Yes. What we’ve always espoused is living as close to the earth as possible.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally agree.
DIANA KAYE: One of the best images that I have in mind that I absolutely love is on our baby line of products where we found this beautiful photograph of a toddler totally bare bum, naked to the world and totally filled with innocence. This toddler is bending over right in the surf, the ocean surf with his feet in the water and his hands touching the earth.
DEBRA: Oh, I’m going to have to look for that.
DIANA KAYE: That image just really to me espouses everything that we are trying to communicate to the world, to our friends and customers about how we feel about how we need to care for our bodies and be respectful of the earth because let’s face it, this is it. In our lifetimes, it’s doubtful that we’re going to find another beautiful planet that we could live on. So we have to take better care of the planet that we have.
And what I wanted to mention before we close for today is some folks also have very curly hair, very thick, coarse hair. Sometimes, during your transition period, a little oil helps them to soften their very rough pores and damaged hair.
Our hair help resource guide that we have online talks about the different oils and butters that we have that folks unlike me (I have very fine, thin and straight hair) who might need a little extra help, we have completely organic, USDA certified products that they can feel completely comfortable using to help condition their dry or irritated scalps or their coarse, wiry, very thick or curly or kinky or damaged hair during their transition period to the natural hair, truly natural hair.
DEBRA: Yeah, I’m so looking forward to that. I really am. It’s something that I haven’t even thought about because you grow up with things being the way they are. Most people alive today, most people listening to this show probably grew up in the industrial age – well, of course, in the industrial age because that started way back in the 1800s. But even especially since the fifties (like I was born in 11955 and yes, I’m that old)…
DIANA KAYE: You survived!
DEBRA: I did! I survived all those chemicals. Better living through chemistry.
DIANA KAYE: Exactly!
DEBRA: But it was really in the mid-fifties after World War II that there were so many chemicals and so many new technology came out, that’s when plastic was developed and all those things and we’re really – like my generation was the first generation that has lived with that many toxic chemicals. And we find that children being born today have illnesses that previous generations didn’t see it, very early ages. And so we’re really seeing that the toxic chemicals are having an effect even in very few generations.
Anyway, we’re coming right up on the end of the show. We’ve only got 30 seconds left.
DIANA KAYE: Once again, we talked to the end.
DEBRA: So I just want to mention that if you order from Terressentials during the Christmas season, if you order more than $50, you get chocolates – very delicious, organic chocolates.
DIANA KAYE: And fair trade.
DEBRA: And fair trade.
DIANA KAYE: Yes.
DEBRA: Delicious, organic, fair-trade chocolates, so it’s a great time to order. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for all these links that I’ve put there to Terressentials. Thank you for listening. Be well. We’ll be back tomorrow.
DIANA KAYE: Thanks, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you, Diana.
All Organic Lubricant for Women
My guest today is Rinaldo S. Brutoco, Founder and Chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch. We’ll be talking about all-organic Aloe Cadabra®, the USA’s first FDA-cleared organic vaginal lubricant and daily moisturizer, and toxic chemicals found in lubricants that can easily be absorbed through the skin. Rinaldo is a successful entrepreneur, executive, author, and futurist and the Founding President of the World Business Academy. His work includes clean energy; climate change analysis and mitigation; sustainable business strategy; values-driven leadership; global reconstruction; organic products; and financial products for Sustainable Responsible Impact Investment. Certified organic for more than fifteen years, Seven Oaks Ranch grows and distributes organic produce such as tomatoes, Aloe vera, Meyer lemons, Hass avocados, and garlic. More than seven years ago SOR opened its certified organic kitchen and production facility, where great care is taken to handcraft each of its products. What began as an eleventh-grade economics-class project for young Orion Brutoco and his classmates at Oak Grove School, the project quickly grew into something more: a real business manufacturing a variety of organic and natural products with nationwide distribution. The first product was Garlic Gold®. In 2011 SOR created an organic cosmetics division and proudly announced the nationwide release of its first all-organic cosmetic product Aloe Cadabra. Rinaldo and his wife of 34 years reside in Santa Barbara, where he is also a very active father of four grown children and three grandchildren. www.aloecadabra.com | www.garlicgold.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
All Organic Lubricant for Women
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Rinaldo Brutoco
Date of Broadcast: December 11, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. And if I sound a little different today, it’s because I don’t have much voice.
Actually, I do other things besides talk about toxics. One of the things that I do is at Christmas time, I sing with a group. We get all dressed up in Dickens costumes and sing Christmas songs at various places. We had our first performance over the weekend and I think too many parties. Too much singing, too many parties, so I have a little bit of laryngitis this morning, but the show must go on and we’re going to have a really good show today.
We have good shows every day. And if you haven’t listened to all the shoes (I think there’s more than 200 of them now), you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can listen to all the shows we’ve ever done except number one. We didn’t get number one recorded.
But also, I’m working on the shows transcribed. And so we’re transcribing all the current shows, but also, as quickly as I can get them done, the past shows too. So I can read about them. You can listen to these shows. There’s so much great information and we’re going to have more great information today.
It’s Tuesday, December 9th 2014 and we’re going to talk about something that I think a lot of women (and men too) would be interested in and that is a lubrication for women over a certain age who needs such a thing. We’re going to talk about that because it’s something that people need and want, but many of the commercial products are full of toxic chemicals (which we’re going to find out). But there are natural and organic products available to use instead.
My guest today is Rinaldo Brutoco. He’s the founder and chairman of Seven Oaks Ranch and we’ll be talking about one of the many products that they produce called Aloe Cadabra. It’s the USA’s first FDA-cleared organic vaginal lubricant and daily moisturizer and there are no toxic chemicals.
This is so important because toxic chemicals in lubricants such as this can easily be absorbed through the skin and especially mucous membranes in those sensitive parts of the body.
So let’s get right to it! Hi, Rinaldo.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Hello, Debra Lynn. Thanks for having me on the show.
DEBRA: Thank you so much for being on. I originally wanted you to be on because of Aloe Cadabra, but I see from your bio that you do so many different things. Tell us how you became interested in making natural products.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Sure! I’ve been an organic customer for over 35 years. It’s always been something to keep toxics out of my diet and in a constant [inaudible 00:03:55] that way. And when I moved to Ojai, California (about almost 20 years ago now), I decided to take a chemical ranch and prove that you can turn it into a vibrant, organic property. It was only about 12 ½ acre, which is fairly small for a ranch, but there was enough for me to do. We opened up Seven Oaks Ranch as an organic facility with three years of transition of course. And then I got it certified. It remains certified to this day. I sold it almost five years ago now.
And when I was there, I had started growing products. My first product was garlic. And then I started adding all kinds of other organic products. Every week, were at a farmer’s market. The garlic became an indicator for me of how to improve my yield as a farmer, move further up the food chain so to speak and become a producer, a manufacturer. That’s where I thought the profits were.
I wanted to make this something permanent, so we launched a product line called Garlic Gold, which is 100% organic. All of our products are 100% organic including the lubricant. And so what we did is we launched Garlic Gold. There are only two ingredients in Garlic Gold, extra virgin organic olive oil and organic garlic. It says in the label that’s all. There are no monosyllabic words on my label.
DEBRA: That’s good.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: So we started making that product. That’s now become a line of 15 different SKU’s. And then about three or four years ago, we decided to launch an organic cosmetics division because I became increasingly aware of the toxicity in cosmetics. It troubled me greatly because I’ve been very much in love with my wife for 35 years and I did not want her to continue to be subjected to what I thought as a toxic stew when we were both being so careful of what we ate.
And so we created that division called Live Well Brands, by the way, which is the division that sells Aloe Cadabra and we launched the Aloe Cadabra product. It went nation-wide almost immediately. It’s in every CVS in America. It’s in a whole ton of Walgreens. It’s in Whole Foods and most places. It’s in a variety of other outlets, plus of course, it’s always available on our website, which is always the best price you’ll get, from our website with typically free shipping and stuff like that.
So we’re happy to support retail chains to put an alternative on the shelf, which is non-toxic and which is extraordinarily pleasurable and so we launched the product.
And by the way, you mentioned in the opening, it’s true, vaginal dryness affects about 85% of all women in peri- and post-menopause. But it also turns out that we’ve got a customer market in young women who had just given birth. I could show you testimonials from young women who really found their marriages on the rocks because they just could not return to their normal, naturally lubricated state after giving birth. It was terribly challenging for them and their significant others.
We also discovered that it’s phenomenally well-regarded in the LGBT community (although we never thought of that at the time). I now know that about 40% to 45% of our customers are men and I’m really proud of that because men who care enough about the women or the other men in their life to use something non-toxic is a mark of a good man.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. I do have your product and I’ve tried it and I do think that it is remarkably pleasurable. It really makes a big difference. I mean, it feels really nice. It really feels nice and it doesn’t feel like you’re using something artificial at all…
RINALDO BRUTOCO: …which we’re not.
DEBRA: No, you’re not! It’s just as natural. I think it says on your website something like, “It’s as natural as nature. It’s as natural as you are.” It feels natural.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah, and the reason is we actually went into some trouble to create it, so it mimics natural feminine muscosity, so it actually feels like the normal, real thing that your body used to produce.
DEBRA: It does, it does.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: And it also totally matches vaginal pH, which is really important because drying or osmolality has now been identified by the Whole Health Organization as one of the leading contributing factors of the transmission of sexually-transmitted disease or STD. So if you don’t want to increase your vulnerability, you don’t want to have a high osmolality rating and things like K-Y and Astroglide are off the blooming charts. I mean, the Whole Health Organization could never distribute them. They’ve asked for us for samples of our product because our osmolality is the lowest known to any lubricant.
DEBRA: What is osmolality?
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Osmolality is drying factor. So when you use something – and particularly, we sell our product both as a vaginal moisturizer. Most women tend to moisturize their skin, faces and what-not at least once or twice a day and they forget that the part of their body which becomes most adversely affected by their hormonal changes is their female organ. They become very, very dry.
And not to get too graphic for your audience, but if you look at the skin in that area under a microscope, you could literally see the cells have cracks between them very similar to a dry lake bed. It’s through those little cracks that infection and vaginal yeast infections, urinary tract infections, that’s where they enter. That’s why they’re so common today.
Well, osmolality rating is how much more drying a product is that you use. And in that category, the only product that is dramatically below the maximum that the UN recommends is Aloe Cadabra.
I’ll just give you an example. You’ll find this fascinating. If you look at the osmolality rating of K-Y – and I can refer you to a website that has all these. I’m trying to see if I can find it for you quickly. Sexual Wellness News will tell you all about osmolality. The reality is that the amount of drying that occurs from almost every conceivable lubricant is way off the charts or is actually below its maximum [inaudible 00:10:43] by World Health Organization.
DEBRA: We can talk about this more after the break. We need to go to break for the commercial. Otherwise, the commercial will start playing right over you. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Rinaldo Brutoco. He is the founder and chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch that makes and sells Aloe Cadabra, a wonderful organic lubricant for women. You could go to his website AloeCadabra.com and you can enter coupon code DEBRA20 – check it out – to get a 20% discount on this product through the month of December, so try it. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rinaldo Brutoco. He’s the founder and chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch and we’re talking about his product, Aloe Cadabra. That’s the U.S.A.’s first FDA-cleared organic vaginal lubricant and daily moisturizer.
Rinaldo, you did a great job on your website. I’m going to actually go there right now. You did a great job on your website. You have a page called ‘Why?’
RINALDO BRUTOCO: ‘Why?’ Everybody loves that page.
DEBRA: I love that page. Let’s talk about the ‘Why?’ page. Go ahead and tell us about it.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Well, first of all, you were asking, “Who needs this?” And of course, the reason to have it, not just the menopause or age, stress, childbirth, allergies, chemotherapy, vaginal dryness is a major cause –
And our product is natural plant-based, which is really key because it means it’s safe with condoms and toys and all that sort of things as it should be. But it’s also a very powerful way to moisturize.
What we decided to do under the ‘Why?’ page is we showed people what the other products contain. So for example, if you look at K-Y, which is the most popular – the two most popular in the country are K-Y and Astroglide, they both contain propylene glycol. We have a chart that you can see that. We, of course, don’t. Proplylene glycol is the thickening agent used in Anti-freeze. It’s literally used in Anti-freeze.
DEBRA: Yeah, it is.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Talk about a drying agent!
Then petroleum or synthetic-based products. Both K-Y and Astroglide use petroleum-based products that are used traditionally in industrial application. Benzoic acid is a food preservative. We don’t use it.
By the way, all of our products, although we’re not saying that people should use them orally, all of our products are made to food-grade organic standards. So everything we make is 100% edible and toxic-free organic and FDA-cleared.
But then, things I found out like K-Y has hydroxyethylene cellulose, which is using in cleaning solvent, that’s in the product. And then, polyquaternium-15 is used to create body in shampoo and Astroglide uses that as their thickening agent. These are things you would not want to do to a friend, let alone to yourself.
DEBRA: Or to your loved one.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah, particularly where it’s the most sensitive, absorbent part of your female anatomy. And for the LGBT community, they have a similar issue. If they use it in other parts of the anatomy, which are extremely sensitive to absorption.
So the point is if you’re going to watch what you put in your mouth, that’s not only the orifice in your body, please be careful and don’t put highly toxic chemicals that are extraordinarily drying, which will cause you, by the way, to get an undue number of urinary tract infection, et cetera, et cetera.
In fact, I invented the product originally because that’s what my wife was going through. She was like on this yo-yo of going constantly back and forth to the store and having to buy the next cure for what happened. We didn’t know why until –
I’m a bit of a frustrated inventor/scientist and so I started looking into it and oh, my goodness, what’s the oldest healing plant known to human? Well, aloe vera. I looked at 440 strains of aloe vera and only one of them is known to be the healing agent. That’s Barbadensis.
So I started studying Barbadensis, I find it antibacterial and antifungal by nature. I go this is the building block for a great product. About 95.7% of our product is basically organic aloe vera, which has never been heated.
DEBRA: I mean, there’s nothing more healing than that.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Nothing, no.
DEBRA: And so what better product to use in that area of the body. You just got it exactly right.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah. And because it’s natural in every way, there is no clean-up. It will, over time, absorb into your body. You won’t experience any staining of sheets or any of the normal things that can happen because it’s totally natural. Your human body just loves it.
In fact, I tell people, if they haven’t used it before, they should put it on at least once just to get their skin more moisturized before they use it for any intimacy because it will be that much more pleasurable and soothing. We have people write us and say it was sort of like putting water at dry sand at first because it was so absorptive. They loved it. There’s all kinds of wonderful letters.
I just heard Joy Behar on the radio the other with Howard Stern and she was telling the whole audience – this is like last week that she has basically given up sex with her husband because of vaginal dryness and there’s nothing that she can do because she didn’t a single product. So if anybody listening knows Joy Behar, tell her an emergency care package is on its way to her agent for her.
DEBRA: Well, I really can’t say enough about how nice it feels. I mean, even if you just rub it on your hand, it feels nice. And so there are other things that you have besides the aloe. So tell us what else is mixed with it, with the aloe to make it be the texture that it is?
After using it, I thought, “Well, let’s just try…” – I also have just plain aloe vera. I thought, “Let’s just try some aloe vera and see if it’s the same” and it’s not. You’ve definitely made something made its own thing based on the aloe base.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah, it took a while because this product is shelf stable for two years. We don’t use any non-organic ingredient that are not, as I’ve said earlier, food-grade. So it’s not even that I used organic ingredients that you could use in a skin cosmetic preparation. I require everything to be made – we’re the first organic kitchen in Ventura County. We used our organic kitchen as a place where we make our organic products like aloe vera because I want it made literally to that standard.
DEBRA: Right.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: This is for my wife and my friends and as she says to the “sisterhood”, she wants it to be pure. We put things in it like natural vitamin E oil, which we find helps add some lubricity. We like the nourishing quality of vitamin E also as a soothing agent. We do use a little Xanthan, which thickens it up a little bit. It stands up a little stronger than it would if it was just the gel itself.
We do use a very small amount of citric acid from fruits and vegetables. It sounds like that may be stingy, but it’s not. We use a so small amount. That’s how I balance the pH identical to vaginal pH as normally found. In other words, we want vaginal pH to be absolutely identical, so that nothing we’re doing throws the woman’s body off its rhythm.
DEBRA: We need to go to break again, but we’ll be right back and we’ll continue on talking on this subject. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rinaldo Brutoco. He’s the founder and chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch. We’re talking about his product, all organic Aloe Cadabra. Now, again, you can go to AloeCadabra.com like “Abra Cadabra,” like the magic of oil, the magic you’ll feel when you use it and you can get 20% off by entering DEBRA20 at checkout. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rinaldo Brutoco. He’s the founder and chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch. They make all-organic Aloe Cadabra, organic lubricant for women. You can go to their website, AloeCadabra.com and for the month of December, you can get 20% discount if you enter the coupon code, DEBRA20.
Rinaldo, let’s just talk about how Aloe Cadabra is different from other lubricants. You have a very good FAQ page on your website. Let’s start by talking about how is Aloe Cadabra different from other organic and natural lubricants because you’re not the only one in the market, but you were the first and you are unique.
Hello? Are you there?
RINALDO BRUTOCO: I’m right here, Debra. Thank you. I was going to say – I would like to just finish up. I’m going to make an offer also to your listeners. There’s this great doctor. Her name is Dr. Laurie Steelsmith. You may have heard of her. She’s a naturopathic position. She’s literally an MD as well. She’s an acupuncturist. And she’s a huge fan of our product and recommends it in her practice.
She did an article. It’s called ‘Could Certain Lubricants Increase YOUR Risk of Sexually-Transmitted Infections’. We will send a copy – it’s two pages long. We’ll send it electronically to anybody who writes us at info@aloecadabra.com.
And on this second page, I want people to refer to the personal lubricant osmolality chart I was referring to a moment ago. We looked at 15 other products in the marketplace. Now, an osmolality rating for a woman should be close to 260/kg. That’s natural. We come in at 172, which means we are a moisturizer, not a drying agent. We come it 172. Two hundred sixty is the maximum you should hit according to the World Health Organization. K-Y warming jelly is over 10,000.
DEBRA: Whoa!
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Astroglide is over 8000. So what this is telling you – and there’s 15 of them here. Wet Original Gel is over 4000. Even Liquid Silk is over 3000. So I want you to look at that chart because when I say it’s bad for you – I’m literally quoting Dr. Steelsmith. I’d be happy to send you that two-page article. That’s a very extremely well-regarded practitioner. It’s not me writing. It’s her. I urge people to look at it.
The other thing I was going to complete before the commercial came on, you asked us about our ingredients and I wanted to just let people know we do make flavored ingredients. We make Tahitian Vanilla, which is the flavor. It’s delicious. It’s very creamy. It’s delicious. And we flavor it with, for example, organic Stevia just to keep with our organic theme and we only use organic vanilla.
We have French Lavender, which is a scent. The scent is quite delightful. Again, essential oil made from organic lavender. We also make – we started last holiday, we’ve kept it around all year now – Peppermint Tingle, which as you can imagine has a peppermint flavor and adds a certain tingle.
So we have these different flavors. We have Piña Colada, which people really seem to love. We have these flavors as well. All of them including the natural aloe are 100% food grade.
But to go to the FAQ page you asked about –
DEBRA: Wait! Before we go there, I wanted to ask you. You have one that’s unscented, unflavored?
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yes. Yeah, that’s the original, Natural Aloe Cadabra.
DEBRA: Good, good because I know some people who are listening just want things to be very plain and even if it’s essential oils. The lavender is lovely and the French Vanilla. I haven’t tried all the different flavors, but they certainly are enjoyable. You’ve done a really good job.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Thank you. And I’m the chief formulator, so it’s kind of fun. I have to eat my mistakes as well as the staff. If I ended up liking it, that’s what I put on the market. But the point is that the things you’ll find that’s really delightful is our commitment to 100% non-toxicity. That’s what makes us unusual. We were the first organic lubricant in the market. We’re the only one that was cleared by the FDA as well until I think recently (there might be a second one now). But we are very committed to 100% organic.
And many of the good products out there refuse to go to the point of being organic. So for example I like the company Good Clean Living. I think it’s a shame that they don’t get an organic certification. I think I know why they don’t. They don’t apply for it. So they put on their product, on their advertising “uses organic ingredient.” I’m sorry, that’s not good enough. Anybody could use inorganic ingredients. We only use organic ingredient.
DEBRA: And that’s a big difference.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: So the point is we are organically certified.
DEBRA: That is a big difference. We’ve talked about this on other shows, talking about different personal care products, other shampoos and lotions and things like this. There really is a lot of people who put ‘organic’ on the label, but it’s not totally organic and it’s also often not certified.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah. And they’re using the word because they know it attracts people. But let me tell you one of the reasons people do that just so you’ll know. In order to get that, you have to meet a standard, which most people just won’t meet including in my kitchen – I make it in the kitchen, not a factory. I want people to know that. I’m an organically-certified kitchen. That’s the quality level I commit because this was something I wanted to make for my wife. I didn’t care what it took to get it perfect. Not everybody comes to that level of dedication and they tend to go what’s it going to cost before they figure out how they’re going to make it.
But in our kitchen, we are audited on what cleaning solutions we use so there are no toxic residuals on any of our cleaned utensils. You got to go a long way to get that certificate.
DEBRA: I understand. Yeah, we’ve talked about this too about how people, sometimes when you go to a natural food store, for example, the store itself will not be certified organic, but they’re making things like salad bars and deli items and things. They’re making them using organic ingredients, but theoretically, they could be cleaning their kitchen with something toxic. And so you’re not always getting the whole picture of being organic.
So this is one of the reasons, listeners why this is so important, what he’s done because everything is certified throughout. It’s certified ingredients. He’s making it in a certified facility. It’s just organic, organic, organic and not all the products are that way.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: And I think we should demand that of everybody.
Debra; I do too.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: You know why? Because it costs money. I hate to say it because I’m a businessperson. But I think we make decisions. We sort of short shift our customers because we think, “Gee, we can’t afford to do it exactly right, so we’ll do a close to right.” And I’m really impressed by what the great retailers – Neiman Marcus was founded by a guy named Stanley Marcus. He had this quote, “No one ever went broke giving the customer a good deal.”
I think if you’re willing to spend the extra money, yes, you’ll get less money for margin and you’ve got less for advertising. But at the end of the day, people will talk about it and they’ll go, “Wait a second. I don’t want to settle for second best or almost okay. I want toxic-free.”
Plant-based is huge! Everybody should be plant-based. What are we doing in an oil drum making up lubricant?
DEBRA: They shouldn’t even be there. They just should not even be on the planet. We need to go to break again. When we come back, we’ll continue with my guest, Rinaldo Brutoco. I think that we can talk about some other things besides what we’re talking about. I want to talk about your Garlic Gold because I really like it.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Oh, sure.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Rinaldo Butoco. He’s the founder and chairman for Seven Oaks Ranch. We’re talking about his all-organic Aloe Cadabra organic lubricant for women. Would you give your email address again and tell people what they can get from you, the article?
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Sure, it’s info@aloecadabra.com. We’ll be glad to send you the Dr. Laurie Steelsmith article on the risk of sexually-transmitted infections from using other lubricant.
DEBRA: Good. Thank you. I’m interested in seeing that. I’m going to send you my email address, so you can send one to me. I wanted you to particularly mention, on your FAQ page, you’re talking about how a plant-based lubricant like Aloe Cadabra differs from a water-based or an oil-based lubricant. And specifically, you made a point about oil-based lubricants running the risk of damaging condoms.
I think that that’s really important. If people are using condoms to – you know, what they use them for. I can’t think of a word today.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Prophylactic.
DEBRA: Prophylactic! Thank you. If they’re using condoms so they don’t get pregnant, if they then use a lubricant, that interferes with the effectiveness of the condom, that’s a big deal.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah, I know. And many, many times, it’s like 200% more likely to break if it’s oil-based. In fact, it says on the box. I’m very proud of something I want to share with you. We made a contribution at the request of the local Planned Parenthood of Ventura County and they asked us for $50,000 worth of our products, so they could give some to each young woman coming in who receives condoms to avoid pregnancy. The reason they asked for it was no. 1, they wanted something non-toxic and no. 2, they wanted to use something that wouldn’t break the condom.
So we’ve done that. we’ve actually delivered right now close to $30,000 of that already. I think we’ve still got over $20,000 in the pipeline because we have it in our warehouse and they pull it out as they need it. It’s all brand new product. None of that is dated. None of that is stuff we were going to throw. And we did that because we want these young women to be able to avoid pregnancy. That’s why they went to Planned Parenthood. We were grateful that they were smart enough to ask us for the product. We’re happy to supply it.
So yes, it’s a very big problem. And you know, silicon itself, which is not good for your body, it stain sheets and everything else, it can also be damaging or less desirable for use with condom. So a plant-based natural product is always the best whether you’re LGBT, female, whether you’re just a nice guy and cares about the other man/woman in your life that you’re interacting with. Let’s be kind to each other and let’s not in pursuit of something, which is normal and healthy like either sexual relationships or self-pleasuring, let’s not introduce toxicity into our lives when we don’t need to. Let’s not do that.
DEBRA: I totally agree, totally, totally agree. Well, I do want to make sure that we talk about Garlic Gold because we only have a few minutes left of the show.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Darn! I enjoyed it. Let’s do it again. I love sharing the good news.
DEBRA: Thank you. And this has been a great show.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah, good.
DEBRA: This has been a great show. You sent me some samples of your Garlic Golden and what I got was these little nuggets of organic garlic that are crunchy (and I sprinkle them all over my salad and they’re gone now because they’re so good and the come in different flavors), you said you had 15 different products? So tell us a little bit about your products.
I also want to mention that his whole business here started because you were doing a class project with your son. Tell us about that too.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yeah. Well, my son was in the 11th grade. He and some buddies of his used to come to me for kind of just advanced economics like how do you apply theoretical economics that you learn in high school to the real world of business. And so I was challenged one day. And my son yelled at me while I was in the kitchen, he said, “Dad, why don’t you make a product out of that garlic thing?”
Now, what he was referring to is I used to do what you now know as Garlic Gold Nuggets. I used to put them on broccoli or string beans or extra virgin olive oil and people would invite themselves to dinner. When we invited them, they’d say, “By the way, would you mind doing that garlic thing when we come.” It got to be a little thing around town.
And so my son and three of his friends decided they wanted to learn how you would create a product out of thin air, so to speak.
We started. They each had a lab notebook. I said, “Well, if I’m going to do this not for five or six or eight people, if I’m going to do it ten gallons or a hundred gallons at a time, we’re going to have to figure out a whole lot of chemistry, we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to call it, we have to figure out what people would be willing to pay for it.” I mean, this is an entrepreneurial exercise.
And these young men stayed with me all the way through the product launch at the farmer’s market. The reception was so overwhelming, we were kind of like flabbergasted. We decided to keep going and we developed a permanent label and we ramped up the whole situation. At that point, we already had an organic kitchen, so we just made more of it.
Long story short, my son who went through college and did several other things, just about two months ago returned to the company and is now the brand manager for Garlic Gold.
The Garlic Gold, the original product are those crunchy nuggets which stay crunch indefinitely in a bottle, that’s in the bottle we sell you with extra virgin olive oil. They have no after bite or bitterness. Many of our customers would…
DEBRA: That’s right, they don’t.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: None whatsoever. Everything I do is organic of course. So it’s delicious. And what I like it for is because I was looking for a product also that would have no salt in it, but still be full of flavor. So we do have the sea salt nuggets blend that we do, which you’re more than welcome to buy, it’s very popular. But for those people who are like myself, in their late sixties, we make it also with imported parmesan cheese.
DEBRA: Oh, that sounds delicious.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: I was asked years ago, “Why don’t you get domestic parmesan cheese?” and I said, “Because it isn’t as good.” And so I just like to do that to my customers. You sprinkle it on and it’s just phenomenal. And then we make Sea Salt Nuggets, Parmesan Nuggest.
We make a tremendous blend called Italian Herb Nuggets with organic herbs. And if you use that while you’re cooking, it’s just phenomenal. You put it into some tomato sauce, all of a sudden, you’ve got an Italian pizza sauce or you’ve got a great lasagna or whatever, spaghetti.
And we also have Southwest Nuggets, which have that southwest, Hispanic flavor. And then we have Nuggets de Provence, we call it – French nugget. We have several others in the waiting line that we’ll introduce eventually. Please go to our site. It’s called GarlicGold.com. The reason for the name is it looks like little flakes of garlic when it’s floating in the oil. It looks like miner’s gold.
DEBRA: Yes, it does look like that. It does. It’s so delicious. I mean, do you just dehydrate them. How do you get them crunchy like that?
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Well, first of all, I should point out. We’re the only company allowed in the world to sell that product in California. Many states have real strict standards. California is the strictest. You cannot use garlic and olive oil together because normally, they create a bacillus. Many people die here actually. It’s a very strict standard.
DEBRA: Hmmm… I didn’t know that.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: It took us over a year to clear multiple hurdles with state government including we had to submit everything we do in – I think it was 10-second increments of the manufacturing process before we got approved. We are 100% legal in every state, in every country in the world because to your point, we toast the garlic to a point where it has no moisture left. We do it with a flash toasting process. So when you do that, because it has no moisture, the bacillus can’t live. It requires moisture.
So once you’ve done that, you’ve got a crunchy little nugget. Once you’ve got the crunchy nugget, you could put them in the olive oil and it’ll float around, but it’s not going to absorb the olive oil because there’s no water in olive oil. And so we get the benefit of this extra virgin olive oil case.
I really recommend the original product, which is the olive oil and the nuggets together. If you just spoon a couple of tablespoons over any vegetable, particularly broccoli, green beans, you name it, people will go, “Wow! That’s amazing!”
In fact, what I often tell people, “Cook the most expensive dinner you can for your best friend,” like really expensive steaks or lobsters or whatever it is you like (and hopefully, you’re getting sustainable seafood and grass-fed beef), “cook the most expensive dinner you can and then serve that either on your garlic smashed potatoes or your vegetable bowl” and the thing they will talk about after you just spent $10 or $15 a person on raw ingredients, what they’ll talk about is the ¢25 to ¢35 of garlic you put on their vegetable or the potato. They’ll go, “Wow! That was amazing.”
DEBRA: That sounds really delicious.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Yes, they’re crunchy.
DEBRA: They sound so delicious. Anyway, we’re at the end of our time together. I just want to make sure that everybody knows that they can go to either of your websites and get 20% off their purchase whatever people buy for the month of December. And so the websites are AloeCadabra.com and GarlicGold.com. You just enter the coupon code, DEBRA20 to checkout. And if you forget the names, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look at the description of the show and those websites are right there linked. You just click on the websites and the information about the 20% discount is there well.
And this show will be transcribed and available next Tuesday. Thank you so much for being on the show. I think you’re doing wonderful things. I really admire how organic you’re being.
RINALDO BRUTOCO: Thank you very much for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
Bisphenol A (BPA) Causes 100x More Harm Than Previously Imagined
From Debra Lynn Dadd
A new study shows that Bisphenol A—and the “BPA-free” bisphenol replacements are at least 100x more toxic than was previously thought.
Research: Bisphenol A (BPA) Causes 100x More Harm Than Previously Imagined
100% wool baby mattress
Question from Terry
Hi Debra, congratulations on the work that you do to make our environment a safer place.
I’m hoping you can give me your opinion. I’ve researched a lot about baby mattresses as we have twins due in 2 weeks.
I am leaning towards a 100% organic wool mattress in an organic cotton cover. I’m worried it will be too soft for newborns as we are continually told the most important thing is firmness. Australian SIDSANDKIDS here still recommend a firm foam mattress and advise against natural fibres like cotton and wool cores as they believe they are too soft.
I spoke with them about this today. They have no belief in the toxic gas theory. So it’s really frustrating.
I have been tossing up between an organic cotton futon and the organic wool futon. I have read that cotton futons can hold too much moisture and will harbour more bacteria and dust mites. Do you think this is likely? The only thing that worries me about wool is it may be too soft, baby could possibly be allergic to wool, and also Dr Sprott from cotlife2000 in NZ has a bedding analysis on his website which shows wool containing high phosphorous levels. He seems to recommend mattress wrapping for all mattresses whether organic or not.
Do you have any concerns about a 100% cotton futon or 100% wool futon, and which would you recommend the most? Thanks for taking the time to read my email, as I’m sure you get hundreds.
I really appreciate your advice as I really need to decide to ease my wifes pregnant mind:). Thanks Debra.
regards,
Terry (from australia)
Debra’s Answer
My best recommendation is a Naturepedic baby mattress. It is just the right firmness and organic cotton. They do not use wool because babies may have allergies to wool.
If you can’t have a Naturepedic mattress shipped to Australia, and your only choices are organic cotton or organic wool…firmness IS very important for babies. I would probably follow Dr. Sprott’s recommendation and get the firm mattress that is available and wrap it to reduce toxic gases.
PEVA vs EVA and more!
Question from Wendi
Debra, just a note from a newbie in your peanut gallery:
I am more-often-than-not challenged in comprehending facts that help me make decisions, yet found your explanation of PEVA vs EVA (in shower curtain liners…) EZ to understand. Thanks for that!
NOW I wanna know – where can I find a heavy weight PEVA (8g or more), or even EVA, that measures at least 72″ X 72″???…(a few inches wider is even better). So far, everything heavy AND large AND PEVA/EVA is not quite wide enough for the tub/shower in the condo I’ve rented for a year…
Care to help??…w.
Debra’s Answer
Try a local TAP Plastics store. They do sell plastic sheeting cut to size. Don’t see PEVA on their website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have it in the store and they may be able to order it for you.
Celebrating Winter Solstice
My guest today is Teresa Villegas, author of How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. I’ve been celebrating Winter Solstice since 1987, when my discovery of toxic chemicals in consumer products lead me to search for a celebration beyond 
toxic consumer gift exchange. I did learn that I could give gifts made from toxic free materials, but in the process found in Winter Solstice a celebration of reconnection with Nature and intention for the coming year. Teresa shares my viewpoint that Winter Solstice can be a celebration for everyone—of every religion and viewpoint—because it’s a celebration of the return of the light of the Sun that supports all life on Earth. Join us as we talk about what Winter Solstice means to each of us, why and ways we celebrate, and how you can celebrate Winter Solstice too. www.heartandmindpress.com
Another book Teresa likes, and I like too, is How To Celebrate The WInter Solstice: A Rational Approach to Celebrating the Season Without Religion by Thomas Harrop.
Solstice Cake
I have two girlfriends with whom I celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. We usually get together and eat seasonal foods, some from our gardens depending on time of year, and we do various things appropriate to celebrating the season.
This year we had our gathering on Solstice eve, the night before Solstice. Linda read something about having a birthday party for the Sun, to bake a cake with an image of a Sun on it, and sing Happy Birthday to welcome the rebirth of the Sun in the new year. She asked me to bake and decorate a cake for the occasion.
I thought about this cake for days in advance and considered many different options. What cake to bake? How do I get an image of the sun on top? I considered using yellow icing to pipe or paint a sun, and creating a sun with careful placement of golden raisins. But everything I thought of didn’t seem quite right.
Then on the very day that the cake was needed, the perfect cake just came to me. I knew exactly what to do, what elements to bring together that would be exactly right in every way. I made a gluten-free almond cake, topped it with mascarpone cheese* instead of sugary frosting, then “painted” a sun on top with ginger-orange marmalade fruit spread (sweetened with grape juice concentrate). The translucent marmalade caught the light and made the Sun “shine”. For a final festive garnish, I sprinkled the top with curls of lemon zest, from a lemon I picked off the tree in my backyard. I gave the Sun eight points with a beeswax candle at each point to represent infinity and the infinite continuation of the return of the Sun year after year.
It was a truly stunningly beautiful cake, and amazingly delicious too. With the fresh lemon zest, the cake just smelled like winter in Florida, where citrus trees are everywhere, in almost every backyard.
I was happy that this cake captured the spirit of the Solstice, in the place where I live. Everyone loved it.
Here’s the recipe for my cake.
SOLSTICE CAKE
makes one 9-inch layer, 8 servings
- 6 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
- 3/4 cup sifted powdered unrefined cane sugar (sold as “organic” powdered sugar)
- 4 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
- 1 1/2 cups almond flour (or almonds processed to a fine powder)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 8 ounces mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
- 1/2 jar ginger-orange marmalade fruit spread (or plain orange marmalade)
the zest of one lemon
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
- Line a 9-inch round cake pan with a piece of parchment paper.
- Whip butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy, then add powdered sugar and continue to beat until well incorporated.
- Add the eggs, one at a time, beating and scraping the sides of the bowl after each addition.
- Add the almond extract.
- Stir the almond flour into the batter along with the salt.
- Pour batter into the pan and bake 35 to 40 minutes, or until the cake is lightly browned on top and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
- Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes.
- Invert cake onto a cooling rack and allow it to cool completely.
- Spread the soft mascarpone cheese onto the cooled cake. Then put the cake in the refrigerator for about an hour to allow the mascarpone to firm up.
- To make the sun, put a heaping tablespoon of marmalade in the center of the cake. Then fill a teaspoon with marmalade. Starting from the center circle, place the marmalage in the teaspoon on the cake, and pull the marmalage out towards the edge, making the sunbeam narrower and narrower as you go. I starting pulling with the back of a teaspoon and then tipped the spoon as I want to make the line narrower.
- Top with lemon zest curls and a candle at each point.
* Mascaropone is a soft Italian cheese similar to our cream cheese but more delicate. It is usually sold in gourmet supermarkets and natural food stores, or in the speciality cheese section of supermarkets. If you can’t find it where you live, you can use whipped cream cheese or buttercream frosting.
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Sunshine Through the Year
I “accidentally” found this very cool website a couple of years ago and it’s one of my favorites.
Gaisma.com has very comprehensive data about the amount of sunshine for every place in the world. “Gaisma” is a Latvian word, meaning “light”.
Why would you want to know this? For gardening, for calculating potential solar energy, but for me, it very clearly shows the increase and decrease of day length (making it easy to find the longest days and longest nights), in beautiful graphs.
Here is my graph for Clearwater, Florida, for today, 5 January 2013.
Today is the day after the Summer Solstice, the so-called “longest day”. See, the day length is 13 hours 55 minutes. But tomorrow is 13 hours 55 minutes also, and if you could scroll this back, you would see that the prior three days were 13 hours 55 minutes. It takes a week here for the daylight to be one minute less.
Then this information is placed on a beautiful graph that shows the hours of sunlight over the course of the year. There’s a grey line near the middle that is today.
Then there is the sun path diagram. The sun path is the seasonal-and-hourly positional changes of the sun as the Earth rotates and orbits around the sun, so you can see where the sun will be at different times of year. This is useful to orient a house or garden to the sun. You can print your sun path diagram on an overhead transparency or tracing paper and overlay it on your house or garden plans.
In addition there is all kinds of meteoroligical information for your place like temperature, wind speed, and precipitation. And if you don’t know where you are in the world, it tells your longitude and latitude, too, local time zone and even your altitude.
It’s a great tool to play with. I had fun looking at the sunshine hours graph for different places in the world. Compare the graph for your location with my Clearwater graph. Quite a difference in the sun patterns!
Even if you have no other use for this, go find your location and see what your local sun patterns are. And next time a solstice nears, here’s where you can find your own “longest day” and “longest night.”
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Celebrating Winter Solstice
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Teresa Villegas
Date of Broadcast: December 4, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is Thursday, December 4th 2014. Today, we’re going to talk about celebrating winter solstice.
Now, what does this have to do with toxic chemicals? It has to do with toxics because many, many years ago when I first became aware of toxic chemicals and how they were making me sick and I started my recovery from that, one of the things that happened was that I got to Christmas and saw that Christmas was basically a big exchange of toxic products.
It doesn’t have to be that, but at the time, 30 years plus ago when I was first becoming aware of toxic chemicals, that’s exactly what it was (and it still is today for many families) and I couldn’t give or receive toxic Christmas presents.
This started me thinking about the whole idea of commercial consumer-oriented Christmas and looking for something that had more meaning and I found winter solstice.
Now, if you think that winter solstice is like some strange thing that strange people do, actually, for me (and my guest who’s coming up), it’s something that I think that everyone can celebrate regardless of what your religion is or your personal beliefs. It really goes back to having it be a time of reconnecting with nature, making intentions for what is going to happen in the coming year. There’s a whole tradition behind this that is very human and natural. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
And also, a part of it is that eventually, I did end up giving holiday presents again, but I gave presents for winter solstice. They were natural and toxic-free and in alignment with the whole idea of celebrating nature and are part of it at this time of year.
So I’d like to welcome my guest. Her name is Teresa Villegas. She’s the author of a very charming little book called How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. Hi, Teresa.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Hi, thank you for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So first tell us a little bit about yourself. I actually realized that I didn’t put a bio here and a description on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Tell us just a little bit about yourself and then how you came to be interested in celebrating winter solstice.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Okay. Well, in my history, I’m an artist and an illustrator and a designer. And over the last ten years I was in [inaudible 00:03:58], I’ve taken that role on at pretty much [inaudible 00:04:02] and then illustrating and designing and then painting while I have my children. Of course, anybody who has a family, their career changes. And so mine changed quite a bit.
So now, my career has been influenced of course and inspired by my children. And part of that is getting back to more illustrating for these books. I used to draw a long time ago. So now I’m doing it more now after I’ve had children. I know what they liked and what they looked for and then realizing there’s a need for different types of book.
Anyway, one of the books, this recent book that I’ve illustrated…
DEBRA: Teresa, I need to interrupt you for a second.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yes.
DEBRA: Could you speak louder or closer because we’re not hearing you very well.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Sure! Oh, I’m sorry. And also, we have a bad connection. We had rains for the first time in a long time. So forgive me for that. I will speak up, yes.
DEBRA: Isn’t that wonderful? But you sound better now, you sound better now, so thank you.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Basically, my kids, we celebrate winter solstice. My kids came home one day from school and they said, “Mom, we’re the only family that celebrates winter solstice. Our teachers would like you to come and talk to our class about it.” And so I said sure.
So for the last few years since I’ve been talking about it to my children’s class, I said, “I should just illustrate this book because they keep asking again and again.” And for the last couple of years, I finally illustrated the book and had it published this year.
Winter solstice has played a part in our family for years. Having this book, other families that we’ve talked with said, “How do you do that? We’d like to take part of that.” And so we just basically told everybody about it and then I illustrated [inaudible 00:05:45].
DEBRA: I’m so happy you did.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Everybody has a little guidebook now.
DEBRA: Yes. I’m so happy you did because I have been celebrating it since 1987, a long time. And when I first started, there was very little information. I mean, there was a lot of information that was more of a religious nature for religions that practice winter solstice, but I didn’t want to practice that religion.
What I wanted to do was find what the essence of winter solstice was. It was like going back in time and saying, “Well, if I didn’t live in this culture, if I lived in a culture where my life was all about living in an ecosystem and living in nature, why would I be celebrating winter solstice and how would I be celebrating winter solstice?” So I was trying to go back to the essence of it, not the way it has come forward.
And I really found when you sent me your book, I said, “Oh, yeah. She’s got it.” We agreed because you’ve stripped away all the other stuff that’s been attached to it over time and really got back to the same essence that I found in it. I think the way that you’ve put together your little book in such an artistic way and such a simple way to understand it really captures the spirit of celebrating the season.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Oh, thank you.
DEBRA: Yeah, you’ve done a really great job. So let’s explain what is a solstice?
TERESA VILLEGAS: Well, the solstice is an actual astronomical event that happens. The sun has reached its furthest point along the elliptical path of the earth. And so that’s why our days are the shortest and our nights are longer.
So as everybody knows in the winter time in the northern hemisphere, our winter times, our nights are darker. That’s why we have so much more light as far as decorations and all that as part of the celebration.
And so in our family, we celebrate that because it is an actual astronomical event. This is something that I’ve celebrated as you did in the eighties when I was in college because of the fact that my friends and I, we wanted to look for something to celebrate as well that wasn’t religious, but yet we made it to the earth and we appreciate that.
I was celebrating that alone. And now, my husband and I celebrated that too. But now that we have the children and our family, we wanted it to be something to celebrate the actual event.
My husband as atheist and I’m Buddhist, we both come from a Christian culture, but we wanted to do something different for our family. And so therefore, my husband was onboard because he said, “Well, that’s an actual event, so that’s something that would be really…” – and it’s really a matter of awe and inspiration from our planet earth and how we celebrate and how we relate to that.
And so that’s where it all started, when our kids were young and we’re forming our own family tradition.
Ever since then, it’s about the sun, about the return of the light and about our connection with earth and about our connection inside of ourselves and what do we want. This is the winter and the earth that is in the winter months, the season of winter and the animals are hibernating and going into a stage of quiet and silence and recollection and thinking about what’s happened in the past year. And at the same time, connecting and thinking about what we want coming in the New Year, in the coming year, the sense of renewal that we talked about in this season.
DEBRA: I think for people in the past, one of the things that struck me as I was doing my research on winter solstice is that virtually every culture around the world, if you go back far enough, has a winter celebration that is about the returning of the light. And the reason that this was so important to people that they had this big celebration about it is because there were no supermarkets then, there were no stores, there was nothing. And so everything that people had then came from their ability to go in their surrounding natural environment, into their ecosystem and gather materials and food.
During the winter season, lots of places were very barren and so the winter solstice, they’ve watched for this moment when the days started becoming longer, when it got to that point where this is the last darkness and now, the days are going to start getting longer. That meant that food supply was going to come back and that was a very, very, very important thing.
We need to go to break. We were going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Teresa Villegas. She’s the author of How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. Her website is HeartandMindPress.com. where you can go see her book and buy a copy if you’d like. We’d be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re talking about celebrating winter solstice today with my guest, Teresa – Teresa, would you say your last name so we get it right.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Villegas, Villegas. The double L’s are Y. It sounds like a Y, Villegas.
DEBRA: Villegas, yes. She’s the author of – I have the page right here. I want to get the title right too –How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. I guess I wasn’t on the right page because during the break, I was looking up when exactly is winter solstice.
This is a very important thing because if you’re going to celebrate an astronomical event, then you need to have the right moment when it’s occurring. It happens at a moment and our calendar doesn’t line up with what’s happening in the sky.
This was one of the first thing that I had to understand when I started understanding nature, was that things that happen in our industrial world are very standardized, but what’s happening in our nature happens according to nature. And so we celebrate what’s called the first day of winter on December 21st, but winter solstice is neither the first day nor December 21st. Winter solstice marks the middle. In old culture, it’s called mid-Winter and that’s the point where the sun turns around. And this year, it happens to fall on December 21st.
I’m looking at a chart here in my timezone. It happens at 19:03. So that’s in 24-hour timezone. What is it? So if 12 noon is 12, then how many – let’s see. It’s 7:03 p.m. But it will happen at a different time in your time zone because the sun is doing what it’s doing – is this making any sense at all?
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yes, so it’ll be five o’clock in my time, in the Mountain time district.
DEBRA: Right, right. And so you can figure it out there from there. But here’s the thing that I find out and that is – well, I was wondering which one is the longest night? Is it the night before like if it happens at 7:03? Which one’s the longest night?
In trying to answer that question, what I found out was that the word solstice, ‘sun stands still’. And so it’s standing still on the horizon. Stonehenge, if you’re familiar with Stonehenge, it’s built around, so that the sun will line up to shine between two stones when it rises on a winter solstice. That’s part of how they oriented themselves to the year at that time.
But the sun actually rises at that point on the horizon more than one day. I found out that depending where you are on the planet, the longest night can happen – it can be two nights, it could be 16 nights depending on where you are.
And there’s a wonderful website (SEE BELOW). I have to look it up. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for this show. I’ll up the link to this website there because I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I’ll find it. It will show you the length of days on any day of the year at any point in the planet. And so you can look up wherever it is that you lived and it will tell you the number of days of the solstice.
One year, my husband made me a candle holder, like a menorah where people in the Jewish culture light a candle for every night of Hannukah. We made a menorah, like a menorah and lit a candle for every longest night of winter solstice. I really liked doing that that year.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Oh, that’s beautiful.
DEBRA: Yeah, because it really – one of the things, one of my favorite parts of winter solstice traditional celebrations is the Yule log, which actually is about carrying the light through the darkest night. And that’s why they stay up all night and that’s why they burn the log and that’s why they have a big log and they decorate it and everything because there’s this point where this is like the darkest, darkest, darkest point in the year and the celebration is for then the people to carry the light of the sun through this darkest point until the sun rises the next morning.
And so for us to then say, “Well, our darkest night is…” – I think it was nine days at that time or something. We lit a candle every night to say, “Okay, this is the darkest time. We’re going to carry the light.” I just think that’s such a beautiful thing to do.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yes, that’s a really beautiful part. That’s the part in the book that we have. We basically just wrote about how we celebrate it and part of our celebration is candle lighting. Some years, we’ll make homemade candles for the celebration.
DEBRA: Ooh…
TERESA VILLEGAS: I know.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah, I love doing that. Well, we’re coming up to break again in a couple of minutes, but start to tell us about some of the things that your family does to celebrate (and we’ll talk more when we come back from the break) because I think that people who aren’t familiar with winter solstice think that the celebrations might be very different from Christmas, but in fact, a lot of our Christmas traditions come from winter solstice.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right, right. In fact, it was the winter solstice. So we do have all of the same things. So when we celebrate, I think it’s more of an attitude that you want to take and more of a metaphorical way that people can look at it who have actually been looking at it before religions had actually taken it and used the symbols and the imagery and all the intentions from the winter solstice from the pagans.
This is not in our book. We’re not any kind of pagan celebration. We’re just using a kind of relationship to our natural earth, honoring the earth and the changes.
So the light do come in with it, with the candles and the light and then using that as a representation of our light within. And our kids, of course, when we light the candles – we have one candle that everybody has [inaudible 00:20:24] and around the table we go.
And this lasts a really short period of time because we have little kids. So they take a little light from their candle, a wick. Actually, it’s like a long match that we have that they light from the big candle and you put on their candle [inaudible 00:20:44].
DEBRA: Oh, how beautiful.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Then they pass it to the next one. Of course, kids, they like anything with fire. So that was one thing that they enjoyed. I mean, they enjoy everything. I asked this morning.
And the other thing is we decorate the tree. We have a tree and so we decorate a tree. We have lights to light up the night and to remind us of our inner light. We also have decorations and we make food, we make special food. Every family has a different food that they like to cook.
DEBRA: And I want to hear all about this after the break.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Okay.
DEBRA: …and I have some things to share too.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Okay.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about celebrating the winter solstice as an alternative to consumer Christmas that doesn’t conflict with anything. It’s just something that everybody can celebrate and still have your normal traditions that you do. So we’ll be right back and give you some more ideas about that.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Teresa Villegas. She’s the author of How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. I cannot tell you how charming this book is. It’s just a delight. The illustrations are just stunningly beautiful.
And I just wanted to share a couple of pages with you here. I’m going to go back to the previous page, hold on. So here’s one of the pages that gives you some suggestions on what you can do on winter solstice. It has awesome snowflakes on it and feet, different feet of family members and their different kinds of shoes in different parts of the world – some very interesting shoes.
Anyway, so it says, “Step outside or take a walk. Experience the longest, darkest night of the year. Feel the crisp air. Hear the quiet sounds of the night. See the light of the moon and the stars. Smell the fragrance of the trees. Taste the falling snow on your tongue. Inhale and breathe the whole experience.” Wow! I think that’s just beautiful.
And then the next page has a beautiful picture of different family members showing the breath – you know how you’d see your breath when it gets so cold. They all have breath coming out and the stars spell out ‘silent night’.
And then there’s a little tag on the side that says, “Do you know that the word ‘silent’ has the same letters as ‘listen’.” The whole book is like this. It just is so peaceful. It’s a peaceful book. It’s like it just feels like you feel on winter solstice. I just think that you just captured that so well.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Thank you. Well, what I wanted to mention is placing the emphasis on winter solstice as an emphasis on nature and science and personal growth.
DEBRA: Yes.
TERESA VILLEGAS: …and the light and the connection that between the earth and us and what’s happening at the same time simultaneously, looking to our outer world and looking to our inner world.
DEBRA: Yes, exactly. It’s like at that time, all of life on the planet is down under ground, that seed. It’s about seeds and that we can also go within and be looking at what’s going on with ourselves and planting our own seeds of what we want to be creating in the coming year. It just all fits together. That’s exactly the celebration. And it’s a celebration that people had been doing around the world in many cultures since – I don’t even know how long. It’s just an ancient, ancient thing to do.
One thing I wanted to talk about was the Christmas tree or the solstice tree. I call mine the solstice tree and about the fact that it’s an evergreen. There’s a significance of decking the halls – actually, that song, “deck the halls with bells and holly, tra-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la,” that solstice song, all the things about decorating your house with greens, anything that has to do with decorating your house with evergreens, the significance behind that is that the whole celebration is about carrying light through the barren winter.
And so as opposed to a deciduous tree where it just has bare branches, the evergreens carry life through their eternal. And so just like burning the Yule log through the night, decorating your house with evergreens says, “I’m agreeing with carrying life through until the sun comes back again.” I just think that’s such a wonderful…
TERESA VILLEGAS: I think that’s wonderful.
DEBRA: Yeah…
TERESA VILLEGAS: That’s so beautiful. I didn’t know that that song was particularly for winter solstice though.
DEBRA: It is! It is! It’s totally about that. The celebrations really are that at winter solstice, people come together and they have a festival and they burn fires and they have a feast and they wish each other well. The Wassail Song like, “Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green.” A-waissal is a bowl of punch. And the word ‘wassail’ is the toast. It means “have health.”
And then after the winter solstice party, they would take whatever was left of the punch and they would take it outside the following day and dump it on the apple trees. It’s actually called ‘wassailing the tree’. They have songs that people used to sing. These are some of my favorite songs of all times. They’re songs that people would sing to the trees to tell them to bear.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Wow!
DEBRA: Yes! So there’s this huge thing – and this is just in cultures I saw all over the world. There’s this huge thing about at this time of year, people praying or intending (or whatever it is that they did), participating in the growth of nature, that they felt it was their responsibility.
The aborigines in Australia, they do this thing where they walk around the borders of their land. I forgot, there’s a name for this. They walk around the borders of their land on New Year’s Day I think. So it’s the same kind of thing and they sing their land into existence. They sing it together.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Ah, that’s beautiful.
DEBRA: The tribes sings their land into existence. And these are the traditions that we’re not doing anymore.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right! In fact, I was speaking with a woman a couple of weeks ago and she was from the Middle Eastern countries. She said, “Oh, the pomegranate tree is what we really honor and celebrate quite a bit during this time of year.” The pomegranate, of course, is a fruit that has many implications of life because of all the seeds within, life and the metaphor of this pomegranate and all of that.
DEBRA: Right! And it’s about abundance.
TERESA VILLEGAS: So that was really nice to hear. I love hearing these stories and how everybody celebrates it differently. And that’s what’s so wonderful about it because every family can adapt it to what they need.
DEBRA: That’s exactly it.
TERESA VILLEGAS: I mean, Bernard and I, my husband and I, we celebrated before we had kids. We didn’t need to have so much of the gifts or the tree. Because we just had each other, we celebrate. But with the kids, we want to place the emphasis on the tree and nature and getting back in touch with nature. That’s why we’d go for a hike. We’d go for a night walk. We experience the nature in this time of the season and the light and the stars.
And something I just heard the other day was that when the earth is on the axle that gives us the seasons, the 23.5° axle tilt that gives us the season of our earth, actually the top of it points to the star Polaris. So the axial tilt is always pointing to the star Polaris. I didn’t even know that. Have you heard that before?
DEBRA: Yes, I did. That’s the northern star. That’s the northern star.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yeah. Well, thank you very much.
DEBRA: That’s the line. And so that star, that one star is always on the same place. And if I’m understanding this correctly (an astronomer can write in and correct me if I’m not), if I’m understanding it correctly, it’s all the stars in the sky revolve around that point.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right! I heard that, but I made the connection. And so I was actually working on this book about the tilt and this and that and winter solstice. I’m like, “Oh, my gosh! Now it all comes together for me.”
DEBRA: It all makes sense, yeah. Yeah! We need to go to break again. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with Teresa Villegas, author of How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. We’re talking about how to celebrate winter solstice. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Teresa Villegas. She’s the author of How to Celebrate Winter Solstice. You can go to her website, which is HeartandMindPress.com. and get the book. It’s so charming. I’m looking at another page here where she’s talking about staying up late and being together and playing and having fun. I know I have with my friends stayed up all night. We sing winter solstice songs, which I’ve written the words to and play games and talk about the work we’ll be doing next year and read winter solstice stories and eat food.
Teresa, in her book, she says, “At the first sign of the morning’s light as the new sun rises in the east, it’s time to give and receive gifts.” She’s got this wonderful drawing of a family, each one snuggled in their sleeping bag all sleeping in a circle around the solstice tree with the presents underneath and snowflake lights on the tree. When I look at this picture, I just thought about the camaraderie and the closeness and the togetherness of a family and how that same togetherness exists between us and nature if we would just participate in it.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right, right. And we actually do that. We get our sleeping bags. We all put it around the tree. And that’s one of the things I ask my kids as I was going to do this interview. Every year, we’re always asking, we say, “What’s your favorite part? What’s your favorite part?” and they said, “Staying up all night.”
And when I go to the schools and talk to the schools about this, that’s when all of the kids say, “Oh, I wish we could stay up all night long.” But of course, you know, the kids crash pretty early.
DEBRA: Yeah, they do. But it’s just this idea that they don’t have to go to bed.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right! I think you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. It is fun. And it’s really fun to talk about the things that happened in the past and what we want to change in the year. We try to turn off all of the electronics. And then we play games and just play more games and hang out and converse and talk.
DEBRA: Right! And it’s a good time to do that. It’s a really good time to reconnect with each other on a human level.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right!
DEBRA: Another point I wanted to make was that for me, it was really important that I create my own celebration. Part of that was not to just repeat what somebody has created, but to use my own creativity.
When I thought about that, I thought, well, there was a point in time when people were developing the idea of celebrating winter solstice and they created a celebration that was about their place and time. And so I wanted to create a celebration that was about me and my relationship to nature in this place and time. I think that that’s part of it, to really be free to take whatever traditions you want to take and not use any traditions you don’t want to take. It’s really about you and your relationship with nature and marking that time when life is starting again and be able to say, “How do I want my life to start again?”
Can you tell I love this holiday?
TERESA VILLEGAS: I do too. We do too. You told me that you would write things down?
DEBRA: Yes. Yes, I do. I do. I write things down all the time, but especially on winter solstice. It’s a really good time to have that quiet time that night when you’re staying up all night to have some quiet time and take stock of your life and envision how you want your life to be different and if there’s something that you’re wishing for like if you’re wanting a new boyfriend or something. This is really the time to say, “Okay, this is what I want” because what we think about, what we say we want are the things that we get. And if your life isn’t going the way you want it to go, this is a time, a really good time to just focus on that and draw pictures or write it down or whatever it is that you do.
I’m interesting in what you all eat. Tell us more about what are your winter solstice foods.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Well, we like to cook a lot in our family. My husband likes to cook. For the sweets, he likes to make the cinnamon rolls for the morning. The kids get involved in that. And then also, in the evening, we like to have – I guess he spent a lot of time in Europe. He said that they had a lot of seafood. I guess it was in Italy he’s had a lot of seafood.
DEBRA: Oh, yeah. They have a thing where it’s like the seven seafoods or something.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Oh, right.
DEBRA: Yeah.
TERESA VILLEGAS: So we kind of did our little southwestern pozole, seafood pozole. So that’s a big thing where we have green chili and then we have shrimp and we have scallops. So we make a green seafood pozole. Typically, pozole is made from red chillis and pork. But we use green chillis and seafood.
DEBRA: Yeah!
TERESA VILLEGAS: So that was how we adapted it for our family. What about you?
DEBRA: Well, I’m always looking at what other foods of the season. So one thing that I really like to make is fruitcake. People are going to roll their eyes and say, “Oh, that tough, sugary thing?” Well, no. My fruitcake is not like that because I actually make cake with natural sweeteners and almond flour and things like that. So it’s gluten-free and it’s sugar free.
And then I take dried fruits, organic dried fruits instead of those sugary candy fruits. So it’s like a fruit in that cake. It’s really delicious.
I’ll make it in November. I put a little brandy and stuff on it. The alcohol evaporates, but you still have that whole – it’s like this whole ritual of making the cake and the approach to winter solstice. And then you eat it.
And then I make cookies. I always make some kind of gluten-free cookies in star shapes and I go a lot of star cookies. And then we just kind of have whatever wintery foods we want to eat that particular night.
And over the years, I’ve just developed a lot of naturally sweet recipes of things that are close to the kinds of things that you might eat at Christmas time like fudge and cookies and stuff like that. So we have those, but we have them in their natural, healthy state.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Oh, that sounds delicious. I mean, I’ve never said that about one of those fruitcakes, “Oh, that sounds delicious,” but it does sound delicious. I mean, you’re right!
DEBRA: Well, neither did I.
TERESA VILLEGAS: That icky stuff is just disgusting, that sticky fake fruit. I guess it’s not fake.
DEBRA: It is. It’s candied fruit, it’s sugared fruit. [inaudible 00:46:22]
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yeah, yeah, [inaudible 00:46:22].
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. But mine is very good. It’s very, very good. So it’s just I loved hearing about your family cooking together. And so again, a thing about winter solstice is that there’s an ancient tradition called ‘A Day Out of Time’ I think it’s called where the year actually, they only had 364 days. The 365th day was out of time because that was the winter solstice. It was out of time.
And so it’s a good day to just say, “Well, I’m going to take this day off from my normal life and do something like cook a wonderful dinner and spend time with my family and take time for myself.” And so for me, that’s what winter solstice is about. It’s just like, “I’m not doing my normal life. It’s different. It’s a day out of time.”
TERESA VILLEGAS: Right! And that’s what makes it nice. You can do something exceptionally different than the way everybody else is doing. That’s another reason why winter solstice is just so particular to your family.
We do like to go for a hike. And there’s one particular hike that we do only on winter solstice, so that’s kind of nice too, out of the ordinary.
DEBRA: That’s nice. Wow! I like that. I love everything you said. So we only have less than two minutes left, is there anything quick you want to say that we haven’t talked about?
TERESA VILLEGAS: Just happy winter solstice however you celebrate the holidays. We send you love. Have a wonderful holidays!
DEBRA: Thank you. You too. I will. I’m going to put more information. Each one of the shows has its own post on the archive blog. I’ll put more information about winter solstice on the page for this show.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Maybe one of your recipes.
DEBRA: Oh, I could probably put a recipe, yes.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Yes! Your fruitcake.
DEBRA: You know, we have transcripts. So there’s going to be a transcript within the beginning of next week. I’ll put a recipe. Yeah, I’ll put a link to the website where you can find out how many days of winter solstice there is. I’ll just kind of fill up that page with some interesting stuff.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Oh, thank you.
DEBRA: Yeah. We’ll just have a virtual celebration like that. Again, Teresa’s website is HeartandMindPress.com. You can go there. She has a blog. She’s got pictures of her family celebrating winter solstice. You can order your books there.
And she also has winter solstice cards that you can send to your friends. They’re very charming. Whether you’re new to winter solstice or you’ve been celebrating winter solstice for a long time, it’s just a place where you can go and just find out more about winter solstice, being inspire and introduce your friends and family to winter solstice with a very lovely book that is not religion-oriented. It’s only nature-oriented.
So, thank you so much, Teresa.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Thank you.
DEBRA: You have a happy winter solstice. I’m sure you will.
TERESA VILLEGAS: Thank you very much.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Have a great holiday season and be well.
Solstice Cake
I have two girlfriends with whom I celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. We usually get together and eat seasonal foods, some from our gardens depending on time of year, and we do various things appropriate to celebrating the season.
This year we had our gathering on Solstice eve, the night before Solstice. Linda read something about having a birthday party for the Sun, to bake a cake with an image of a Sun on it, and sing Happy Birthday to welcome the rebirth of the Sun in the new year. She asked me to bake and decorate a cake for the occasion.
I thought about this cake for days in advance and considered many different options. What cake to bake? How do I get an image of the sun on top? I considered using yellow icing to pipe or paint a sun, and creating a sun with careful placement of golden raisins. But everything I thought of didn’t seem quite right.
Then on the very day that the cake was needed, the perfect cake just came to me. I knew exactly what to do, what elements to bring together that would be exactly right in every way. I made a gluten-free almond cake, topped it with mascarpone cheese* instead of sugary frosting, then “painted” a sun on top with ginger-orange marmalade fruit spread (sweetened with grape juice concentrate). The translucent marmalade caught the light and made the Sun “shine”. For a final festive garnish, I sprinkled the top with curls of lemon zest, from a lemon I picked off the tree in my backyard. I gave the Sun eight points with a beeswax candle at each point to represent infinity and the infinite continuation of the return of the Sun year after year.
It was a truly stunningly beautiful cake, and amazingly delicious too. With the fresh lemon zest, the cake just smelled like winter in Florida, where citrus trees are everywhere, in almost every backyard.
I was happy that this cake captured the spirit of the Solstice, in the place where I live. Everyone loved it.
Here’s the recipe for my cake.
SOLSTICE CAKE
makes one 9-inch layer, 8 servings
- 6 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
- 3/4 cup sifted powdered unrefined cane sugar (sold as “organic” powdered sugar)
- 4 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
- 1 1/2 cups almond flour (or almonds processed to a fine powder)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 8 ounces mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
- 1/2 jar ginger-orange marmalade fruit spread (or plain orange marmalade)
the zest of one lemon
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
- Line a 9-inch round cake pan with a piece of parchment paper.
- Whip butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy, then add powdered sugar and continue to beat until well incorporated.
- Add the eggs, one at a time, beating and scraping the sides of the bowl after each addition.
- Add the almond extract.
- Stir the almond flour into the batter along with the salt.
- Pour batter into the pan and bake 35 to 40 minutes, or until the cake is lightly browned on top and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
- Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes.
- Invert cake onto a cooling rack and allow it to cool completely.
- Spread the soft mascarpone cheese onto the cooled cake. Then put the cake in the refrigerator for about an hour to allow the mascarpone to firm up.
- To make the sun, put a heaping tablespoon of marmalade in the center of the cake. Then fill a teaspoon with marmalade. Starting from the center circle, place the marmalage in the teaspoon on the cake, and pull the marmalage out towards the edge, making the sunbeam narrower and narrower as you go. I starting pulling with the back of a teaspoon and then tipped the spoon as I want to make the line narrower.
- Top with lemon zest curls and a candle at each point.
* Mascaropone is a soft Italian cheese similar to our cream cheese but more delicate. It is usually sold in gourmet supermarkets and natural food stores, or in the speciality cheese section of supermarkets. If you can’t find it where you live, you can use whipped cream cheese or buttercream frosting.
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Sunshine Through the Year
I “accidentally” found this very cool website a couple of years ago and it’s one of my favorites.
Gaisma.com has very comprehensive data about the amount of sunshine for every place in the world. “Gaisma” is a Latvian word, meaning “light”.
Why would you want to know this? For gardening, for calculating potential solar energy, but for me, it very clearly shows the increase and decrease of day length (making it easy to find the longest days and longest nights), in beautiful graphs.
Here is my graph for Clearwater, Florida, for today, 5 January 2013.
Today is the day after the Summer Solstice, the so-called “longest day”. See, the day length is 13 hours 55 minutes. But tomorrow is 13 hours 55 minutes also, and if you could scroll this back, you would see that the prior three days were 13 hours 55 minutes. It takes a week here for the daylight to be one minute less.
Then this information is placed on a beautiful graph that shows the hours of sunlight over the course of the year. There’s a grey line near the middle that is today.
Then there is the sun path diagram. The sun path is the seasonal-and-hourly positional changes of the sun as the Earth rotates and orbits around the sun, so you can see where the sun will be at different times of year. This is useful to orient a house or garden to the sun. You can print your sun path diagram on an overhead transparency or tracing paper and overlay it on your house or garden plans.
In addition there is all kinds of meteoroligical information for your place like temperature, wind speed, and precipitation. And if you don’t know where you are in the world, it tells your longitude and latitude, too, local time zone and even your altitude.
It’s a great tool to play with. I had fun looking at the sunshine hours graph for different places in the world. Compare the graph for your location with my Clearwater graph. Quite a difference in the sun patterns!
Even if you have no other use for this, go find your location and see what your local sun patterns are. And next time a solstice nears, here’s where you can find your own “longest day” and “longest night.”
Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about insomnia and natural things you can do at home to get enough sleep. According to National Geographic, less than one-third of our population in the USA get enough sleep. Since sleep affects our mental state, the aging process, our immune system, and our body’s ability do detox toxic chemicals, it’s very important to get enough sleep. Pamela will tell us about phases of sleep, sleep hygiene, dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs and how they lead to psychiatric problems, plus natural substances to help you sleep that target similar areas of the brain without the side effects. . Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com
The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD
- Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
- Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
- Seven Deadly Drugs
- The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
- What We Can Do About Cancer
- The Power of pH
- How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
- Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
- Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
- How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
- How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
- How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
- Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
- See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
- Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
- Different Types of Detox
- Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
- How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
- Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
- How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
- You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
- Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
- It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
- How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
- Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
- Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
- Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld PhD
Date of Broadcast: December 3, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, December 3rd 2014. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs.
I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information about the negative health effects of taking prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs and so much information about simple, natural things that we can do to help our health that I just want her to tell you everything that she knows. I learn from her every time I talk to her.
So today, we are going to be talking about insomnia. Are you having trouble sleeping? Well, it’s winter time, there’s hibernates, so I thought we should talk about sleep since this is a natural time for us to be getting more sleep and rejuvenating our bodies and that you absolutely need to sleep in order for your body to detox toxic chemicals. This is an extremely important subject today and so let’s just get started.
Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. It’s always great to have you. So what did you tell me about National Geographic said one-third, less than one-third of our population in the United States get enough sleep?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And they just had a special on that just this last Sunday talking about the dangers of sleep deprivation and how the majority of the people are really driving around with insufficient sleep and as a result of it, are basically impaired.
And we see this quite a bit. If you look at the rate of car accidents and the rate of just accidents in general, it’s highly associated with lack of sleep. Most adults are going to need between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. The majority of the people in this country are probably getting six or less.
DEBRA: I think that that’s probably true. So what would sleep deprivation look like?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it can go in different phases. Chronic sleep deprivation will definitely age the person for one thing. Inattentiveness, these people tend to compensate by trying to drink lots of caffeine and coffee. And also, if you look at the very severe side effects of it, if someone goes several days without sleep, psychosis can set in and can really make this person end up in a hospital.
Sleep deprivation tend to really cause hallucinations. A lot of different things that are psychiatric symptoms that maybe if they’re people that see a psychiatrist as a result of sleep deprivation that’s been severe enough for a long enough period of time, these people might be misdiagnosed with depression and then placed on medication as a result of it.
So it’s really important to say that the brain needs this time to basically mop up and clean out the remnants of the day and get started fresh for the next day.
And what we also find is that people who have had chronic sleep deprivation – it doesn’t really have to be like you haven’t slept two days in a row. It can be six hours of sleep and that’s not what your body needs.
What we see is that it’s kind of like the brain is on fire and putting this in terminology, ‘inflammation markers’ in the circulation go up. And that’s why we know that weight gain is associated with not sufficient sleep. We find that this actually can have effects in memory and cognition and a lot of it is related to circulating cytokines that come in and out of the brain.
So it has some very, very serious health effects by not having decent sleep.
DEBRA: Great! Well, tell us about what are the different phases of sleep.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So most people know a little bit about some of this. I’ll kind of go over some basic things. There are two types of sleep. There’s non-rapid eye movement and there’s rapid eye movement, which is REM sleep. REM sleep is known as ‘active sleep’ or ‘paradoxical sleep’. So this is the time when your eyes are actually moving underneath your eyelids.
So at the beginning of sleep, you’re kind of relatively awake and alert. The brain produces beta waves. But as the brain slows down, slower waves called alpha waves are produced. You’re not quite asleep at this time, but this is when you can have vivid hallucinations and ‘myclonic jerks’ where all of a sudden, you feel like your muscles move or your legs move suddenly. That’s what’s happening during that phase. That’s to be expected. We actually have a lot of that going on at night, but we only remember it maybe once in a while.
So stage one sleep is the beginning of the theta wave. And then stage two lasts about 20 minutes and then the brain activity called ‘sleep spindles’ and body temperature and heart rate slows. So this is asleep. Stage there is delta waves and deep sleep. And stage four is dreaming or REM sleeping brain activity.
What I thought was very interesting is that you actually go through this pattern where you start in stage one, you go to stage two and three, then you go back to two and then you go to REM and this gets repeated four to five cycles per night – and then the average REM time is 90 minutes.
So this is pretty interesting. When you have to go through these different phases, setting an alarm – I know a lot of people have to wake up by an alarm, but if you think about it, you’re kind of jolting yourself out of sleep, right?
DEBRA: Yeah, right.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So depending on where you were at that time, what I see in most people is they can try and get themselves to a point where the alarm isn’t suddenly waking them, where they’re actually getting to bed at a reasonable time so that if they need to have an alarm to get up for work, that it goes off and they’re really through most of their sleep cycle, that makes a huge difference.
But if you think about most people, they go to bed late, they procrastinate, then they set their alarm and they get up really early, they’re not going through all these phases of sleep. And then they get in the car and drive. And also, a lot of these people end up taking prescription hypnotics. We’ll talk a little bit about that, how this really changes the chemistry of the brain in an unfavorable way.
DEBRA: I know for myself when I used to go to school when I was a child, my mother would set the alarm and I’d have to be forced to be awakened every morning so that I could get to school by 7:30. I hated that. I just didn’t like that all.
And so now, it’s really important to me that I allow myself to fall asleep when I want to fall asleep. And then I wake up when I want to wake up. I think that that makes a huge amount of difference in terms of just allowing your body to do what it needs to do.
Sometimes, I think I should get up and work and then I think, “No. You know what? I’m just going to let myself sleep” and having that extra hour of sleep or whatever, just going back to sleep in the morning. It just makes a huge difference in how well I’m able to function for the rest of the day. You think, “Oh, I’m going to get an extra hour of work done if I get up early,” but I actually get more done if I sleep.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, correct because what happens is the consolidation of memory – well, we want to just use simplistic terms, the mopping up of the brain. But basically, what the brain is doing during this sleep process – and you think about the rest of your body too. In the beginning, you were introducing about cleaning up toxic chemicals. The body during sleep basically gets ready for the next day. This is preparatory work that takes place in our sleep cycles. It’s cleaning up the brains. It’s getting rid of remnants of things from the day time that really are non-consequential.
And basically, what the brain is doing during this time is categorizing whether they need to save something or not. So all these little memories and things that we had – that’s why I think when people are studying for a test, studying just before you go to bed and really making an imprint on that will enhance your studying capacity when you take your exam in the morning.
So there’s a reason for studying just before you go to sleep because the consolidation, the memories, it’s going to start putting these memories, which are made of acetylcholine, it’s going to start compartmentalizing them in the brain. And the things that are non-consequential and not important is going to clear that out.
Also, if we’re talking about this from a detoxification point, the kidney start removing all of these excess remnants of metabolism from the day time. And that’s why when you go to sleep at night, you keep going to the bathroom. People get up and go to the bathroom when their bladder is full. The reason why is your center of gravity when you’re lying down changes. So during the day, your center of gravity is at a different location. It’s more central. But when you sleep at night, the center of gravity changes to the back of the kidneys.And this was designed intentionally so that the fluids of the body that are containing waste products will go to the kidneys during that time and leave.
So actually, when you think about it, your first void in the morning really contains all these things that have accumulated during the day that really were not processed at the time that you actually were drinking water and going to the restroom then.
So it’s really amazing the way the body decides that this is a time to restore, re-nourish and clean up things that can lead to diabetes, intellectual problems or cognitive delays. All these kinds of things are basically mopped up during this process.
DEBRA: Wow! I haven’t thought about it quite that way, but I think that you described it really well, that it really is not about being lazy or anything like that. It just really is that time for us to rejuvenate, for our bodies to rejuvenate and to have that rest.
We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep and natural ways to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
She has very successfully gotten people off drugs. She helps people replace drugs that they’ve been taking with natural substances that can do the same thing. But the thing that really seems most important to me (having been somebody who has taken prescription drugs and also natural things) is that when you take prescription drugs, it might alleviate your symptoms, but they’re not healing your body. Pamela can replace those drugs with substances, natural substances that actually are repairing and healing your body. To me, that’s a huge, huge, huge difference. It costs less too and you end up with a better result.
So Pamela, I know that you are happy to talk to anybody on the phone about what they’re taking and what they could take instead. So what’s your phone number?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I would be very happy to help any of you, even your children if they have any issues as far as medications or any behavioral issues. You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s Botanical Resource.
And I really do everything all-encompassing. So cholesterol, blood pressure, mental health. I do a lot of mental health. So if you want to get off these prescription medications or you want to know some alternatives for depression or anxiety, for sleeping, I would be most honored to help you and your family.
DEBRA: And she’s really wonderful. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I am and I found out about her and invited her to be a guest on my show because she has such a great reputation here. Everybody loves here. Medical doctors recommend her. My medical doctor, when I told him that I was taking some things that she had given me said, “Oh, just take whatever Pamela tells you to take.”And that was the end of the conversation.
So I completely trust her. I have had wonderful results from what she’s advised me to do. If you’re having any kind of health concerns, I hope that you will call her and get some help too.
Alright! So as long as we’re talking about prescription drugs and getting off of them, why don’t you tell us next about the dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs for sleeping pills?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Great, great. Great subject. So what happens is that someone will go to the doctor, they’re having some sleep disturbance and insomnia, maybe some stress going on in their lives and the doctors, the first thing that they’re going to normally prescribe for a lot of people is then benzodiazepines. That’s a class of drugs that includes Xanas, Ativan, Valium.
These medications have two problems with them. They have addiction; they have tolerance and dependence basically.
Tolerance means you need more medication to get the same effect. And dependence means, of course, that you’re dependent on it. And the dependence with these medicines is physical and it’s psychological, which is bad. It’s both aspects.
So when people go on these medicines, they need more medicine over time to get the same effect. And then when they try and take it away, they can have panic attacks, severe anxiety. And people are on long term benzos, it’s really very problematic. And most of these people, I’m sure given the opportunity, would have chosen not to be placed on them.
A good example of a hypnotic that’s been used forever really (probably, I don’t know, 34 years) is Restoril, which is Temazepam. It’s an old benzo drug. And if you look at these drugs – and I still see people coming in on those – the studies show after about threeweeks, it doesn’t work anymore. So say somebody that’s on 15 mg…
DEBRA: Only three weeks?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah! It doesn’t work. So they need more medicine and it’s that quick. In fact, they’d tell somebody that’s even using a benzo on a part-time basis or short period of time for an anxiety disorder, you’ve got a window of maybe nine to twelve days of taking it consistently, then after that, you can’t really be without it. It’s pretty quick.
So I don’t think people realize that tolerance and dependence show up rather fast. I don’t know if they’re necessarily warned about that.
And you have to be careful too because when you take these prescriptions, there’s cognitiveproblem associated with this – and memory. Remember we were talking about memory consolidation, this kind of messes with your head.
So people that have these and take these prescription hypnotics, there can be some hang over sedation. And especially with Ambien, which is a very common prescription hypnotic, when someone is given Ambien, there are lots of cases where people are sleep walking, they get up in the morning and they don’t remember the commute to work. There’s a lot of problems with memory and cognitive impairment as a result of taking Ambien.
And what scares more than anything is that you have a large of population in this country that are taking these every night and then they get up and drive a car to work. This is really frightening if you think about.
Now, the benzos are kind of going out of favor because of the tolerance and dependence, but I still see quite a lot of people that are on Ativan and Xanax for sleep especially older people where they’ve been put on that a long time ago and basically, now,they don’t have a choice, but to be on that.
So really, just kind of to regroup, there’s different drug classes of these anxiolytics, but they can be use for insomnia, for hypnotics. Taking these drugs definitely has some other aspects as well especially even looking at elderly people.
And we should really focus on that because we have a lot of elderly people that have sleep disturbances. Our sleep changes as we get older. It’s a more lighter sleep. And not only that, when you think about you and I, we run around all day, so when we go to bed, we’re tired. But the older people, they’re more sedentary.
DEBRA: Yes.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Right? So when I go to sleep, I fall into bed. They probably because they’re doing activities of daily living, they’re doing some shopping, they’re watching TV. I mean, they’re not really doing a whole lot.
So I think, my theory really, I think most people need to be tired to sleep.
DEBRA: Well, I think so too. I mean, I had noticed that recently (like maybe in the last month or so) that I had been a lot more physically active, that I’ve been doing things where I’m walking more, I’m not sitting at my desk so much, I’m not thinking so much, as much as I am out doing things. I noticed that. And I’m also working longer hours. So I have activities in the evening as well as during the day.
And by the time it gets to be 10 o’clock, I am just physically tired whereas I know before, there had been time in my life where if I wasn’t working long hours or I wasn’t intensely getting a lot of things done in the time period that I have, that I wasn’t as physically tired and it was harder to sleep. But now, it’s just like, “Oh, thank you. It’s bed time!”
I mean, we live here in Florida. Wesee a lot of older people and…
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.
DEBRA: They just sit around all day. I don’t want to say all older people sit around all day because we certainly have active seniors, but a lot of old people just sit or watch TV all day or they talk to each other or they play checkers or whatever it is that they’re doing. They’re not physically engaged in life to the degree that younger people are.
We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep, sleeping pills and what we can do naturally to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
So Pamela, let’s talk about some things that people can do to sleep better. First, I wanted to say that many, many years ago when I started researching toxic chemicals, one of my first, most exciting discoveries was that formaldehyde causes insomnia.
At the time, I really had insomnia. It was excruciating for me to go to bed at night because I would not sleep and I would just toss and turn for hours. It turns out that formaldehyde is the major chemical in permanent press finish and that if you have permanent press sheets on your bed as you’re lying there at night, you’re going to be sleeping in a cloud of formaldehyde, particularly if you just take the sheets out of the package and put it on the bed.
But even after you’ve been washing and sleeping, there still is formaldehyde. It’s lessening amounts, but still, for a very long time, the sheets are still emitting formaldehyde.
I had to put that together. Nobody had put it in a book yet that I had see. I had to find out in one book that formaldehyde caused insomnia and find out in another book that formaldehyde is in permanent press resin on bed sheets. And when I put those two things together, I said, “Oh, my God!” I went right down and found the only – at that time, there was only one brand of untreated cotton sheets. I managed to find it, put those sheets in my bed and I slept. I slept.
It was just like so wonderful to sleep after all those nights, months, years of not sleeping well because of the formaldehyde on the bed sheets. And now, for the past 30 years, I have only slept on cotton flannel sheets every night – not that there aren’t other types of cotton sheets, but I just love cotton flannel sheets. And even though I live in Florida, I would think it’s too hot for flannel sheets, but it’s not. It’s very comfortable to sleep on them year around.
So that’s my two cents worth on how we can sleep better, change your sheets.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. Chemicals affect a lot of what is going on in our lives. Let’s face it, people have those artificial candles burning in their houses. It reaches your eyes, your eyes water. Formaldehyde coming offof the mattress, coming off of the sheets, coming off of the carpeting, you are exposed to these things continuously. And that’s why when people, you go into a store to buy, that new mattress, no that’s formaldehyde offgassing.
So it’s pretty prevalent. A lot of people are very sensitive to it. And this can explain a lot of people’s sleep disturbances. Environmentally, their room is just not equipped for them to get a restful sleep. So that can even be part of sleephygiene.
Sleep hygiene, really, the study show a dark, cold room. You don’t have a lot of ambient light coming in from outside. You want to have comfortable clothes, comfortable sheets. Sometimes, they believe that protein or a carbohydrate snack. Make sure you have some food in your stomach. I’m not talking about a meal, but if you go to bed with your stomach hungry and it’s growling all night, you’re not going to really have some decent sleep. So you shouldn’t be hungry when you go to bed, you shouldn’t be full either. And then limiting alcohol consumption just before you fall asleep.
And screen time. A lot of people know that looking at the screen – and I tell a lot of people too, get your cell phone out of the bedroom because there’s constantly little emails and dings and those noises wake you up.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So really, it’s important to look at that. And the formaldehyde issue, I think that most people aren’t really cognizant of it. You and I know about this sort of thing. But remember, we weretalking about the kidneys and the mopping up of the body, what happens during that process is if you’re exposing yourself to these chemicals while you’re sleeping, you’re not really realizing why it’s interfering with the way you feel and function.
DEBRA: Well, you know, it’s – I forgot what I was going to say.Okay, go ahead.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Even the mattress, I know for myself, the mattress that I have at my house – I mean, I bought this quite a while ago. It’s an organic mattress and it’s made with wool or organic latex…
DEBRA: I have a wool mattress too, Pamela. Another common…
PAMELA SEEFELD: I know! The whole frame is not made with any varnishes. I love it! It’s green sleep. I’ve had it for – I don’t know, probably ten years. That’s the best thing I ever bought. And it’s just completely chemical free.
DEBRA: Yeah, I have a wool mattress and it’s the best thingI ever bought. I just love it. I just love my wool mattress.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Look at us. Look at this, the two ofus. People who are probably listening to this thing, “Oh, they planned this.” I mean, I didn’t know she does what she has done.
DEBRA: No, we didn’t.
PAMELA SEEFELD: And here I am, I had to order from Canada. It came down from Canada. It came down from Canada. I had to custom order and it came from Canada.
DEBRA: Yeah.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s really a great investment in your sleep and your comfort.
But I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the medication and the fact that when people are having sleep disturbances, they need to realize that perhaps stress an anxiety during the day are affecting your sleep too.
So let’s look at it from a mental health perspective. We address the chemicals and the comfort and the dangers of some of the prescription (and we can talk about the dangers of the prescriptions for hours), but I want people to realize that when you go to sleep and you’ve done all the sleep hygiene things, but if you have a lot of stress in your life and a lot of people really, you have overwhelming stress –
This is what I find in my business, that the people come and the first thing if I say, “Are you stressed?”, they just lose it. They’re like, “Yeah.” It’s just that a lot of people work full-time and they have to take care of their home, they have children, maybe they have elderly parents. The stresses of life perhaps have gotten more extreme I think in recent years for a lot of people especially with the economy in some places.
So I’m a big advocate of using calming fish oil to calm the brain and some of the racing thinking that’s associated with not being able to turn the brain off. So there’s a product by Nordic Naturals, it’s called ProDHA. They have two of them, their professional line, ProDHA and ProDHA 1000, which is the higher octave of that and is much stronger.
ProDHA, I take that myself, has a calming effect on the brain, but it’s not making you sleepy. So what it does is it turns off a lot of that subconscious worry that people have. “I need to add something to the list of things to do,” you know what I’m talking about, these constant thinking in the back of your head.
I also noticed with the higher docosahexaenoic acid that are in those products, you have a lot more vivid dreams. You can remember your dreams. And I really put this together because DHA is very active in the brain. Customers, I remember, were coming back to me after they’ve taken it and saying, “Does this make you dream vivid dreams?” and I said, “Well, DHA has a lot of activity in the brain and it would make sense that that would be the case” and then I started noticing myself when I switched to that product as well.
So if people has sleep disturbances and they’ve done all these other things or cause from stress, you would want to be on omega 3’s anyway, customizing your product that would be specifically towards more restful and relaxing sleep, but also that you’re not kind of being spontaneously upset about things during your daily life, during the day. I’ve noticed that this has really taken the edge of being stuck on traffic, things don’t go your way. Things that normally could be aggravating for most people, I think that this would be highly helpful.
DEBRA: Yes, it’s so interesting about how you can take natural substances and have them affect how you think and how you feel and your ability to do those two things. When I see that from taking a supplement, I start thinking about how – oh, I hear the music, so we have to go to break. I’ll finish my sentence. Sometimes, I get so interested in what we’re saying, I don’t even look at the clock.
Anyway, let’s go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.
I mentioned before, Pamela that you talk to people on the phone and can help people get off their prescription drugs and also recommend natural substances to people for virtually any conditions, so why don’t you give your phone number again.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So you can reach me at my pharmacy here. I’ll be glad to help you with any particular need you have about a supplement or a question about the drugs you’re taking or to remove those medicines from your life.
The number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very happy to help you or any loved one in your family or even a friend, anybody you know. My business is really word-of-mouth. I’ve been doing this for 20 years probably. It’s really very positive and I think you’ll find your results to be very good.
DEBRA: Very good. And just give your number just one more time.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So it’s 727-442-4955. And as I’ve said previously, I would really be honored and happy to help you or your loved one.
DEBRA: Great! So tell us about natural substances that people can take that will help them sleep better.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Alright, good. So there’s lots of different products in the market and I’m going to talk about some of the ones that actually can work.
So a lot of people use theonine. There is limited data on that as a hypnotic and sleep. I personally don’t use it. So I’m going to go through the pros and cons of the products I like. I don’t really think that that works as well. It does work for some people, but not for the vast majority.
Now Valerian is very popular. Valerian does have components that put you into deep sleep, but it has a really nasty smell. And if you’ve ever smelled it, it smells like dirty, old socks.
DEBRA: I’ve never smelled it.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it does, it does. It smells like dirty, old socks and I’m not kidding you. If you buy a bottle and you open it up, you’ll know exactly what I mean. So some people can’t get past the olfactory problems associated with that product.
My personal favorite is passion flower. The reason why I like passion flower is that it works like the benzodiazepines receptor products – the Xanax, the Ativan, the Valium – but it’s a partial agonist to the receptors. So when you take these benzodiazepines, the agonist has an affinity towards the receptor. The receptors are proteins and cells and that’s how drugs work.
So when you take Xanax, which a prescription that has addiction and tolerance, it binds to the receptor and it changes the chemistry and the cell and that’s how you get calm or that’s how you sleep. What the passion flower does is it has partial activity. So it goes on the receptor, it goes off the receptor. It goes on the receptor, it comes off the receptor. And when you’re doing this, you have some pharmacological advantages because you don’t have tolerance and dependence, but you have a highly effective product because it really binds right to the receptor pretty reproducibly.
I use that to get people off the medicine. By using that and few other little supplements, we can kick the drug off and the body is kind of faked off. It doesn’t know if the drugs are on or the supplements are on. So if someone really has pretty bad insomnia, passion flower is going to be the strongest product that you’ll probably be using in the natural realm.
DEBRA: I was taking passion flower. You gave me some passion flower and it worked very, very well. And then there was a day – I took it for about a month or so. I still have a bottle of passion flower in my nightstand.
After about a month, I thought, “Well, let me just see what happens without it.” And since then, I just haven’t even needed to take it because I still get my seven to eight hours of sleep every night. It got me through a period of time when I wasn’t sleeping very well. And then I know that I have it right there in my nightstand. If I’m not sleeping, I can just take some.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah. That’s the best way to use that. I mean, somebody that has chronic insomnia and they’re not responding – and you’re on a few supplements too that we were just balancing the chemistry of the body. So the sleep disturbance would eventually go away. That’s what we would expect. But the good part is that we’re looking at trying to use the chemistry of the body and what we know about pharmacology to use these products in a responsible manner so that you’re not having these tolerance and dependence and these addiction properties.
And so passion flower is really a liberating product because you can use it for a certain period of time and like in your situation, sleep eventually started to come on a normal cycle and was much more reproducible and much more serene so to speak. You got better sleep, so you didn’t need it anymore, whereas if you had gone to the doctor and he had given you a benzodiazepine, you wouldn’t be able to stop it.
And that’s the beauty of using herbal products that work in a pharmacological basis. When you decide to target things based on the receptor on the brain and you’re trying to get a therapeutic outcome using the drugs, you might get an outcome, but you’re also going to have a negative outcome in the fact that you’re eventually going to need it to sleep every single night. And that’s not what we want for people. We want people to be able to make a choice.
DEBRA: Right, right. Absolutely.
PAMELA SEEFELD: So also too, there’s a product called Perfect Sleep that I like a lot. It’s a liquid tincture. So sometimes, people don’t want to swallow a capsule, they want to hold it underneath their tongue. That’s by DesBio. That works really, really well.
And that has some things that also help our hormones as well especially if someone has menopausal issues or so forth or depression, it has some other serotonergic activity as well. It might help for the person that maybe has sleep disturbances as a result of depression. So that product works really well.
There’s a homeopathic product (especially for children and for adults too). It’s called Neurexan. It’s from Heel. It’s a German company. Neurexan has a lot of data behind it. And what’s nice about Neurexan, it says clearly in the label it’s for overactive minds.
It really probably can be used in tandem with the Pro DHA for people that are having this obsessive thinking, worrying about the day, all these pressures that are on people today. The idea that we have to just fall into bed and turn everything off is very difficult for most people. They really can’t do it. So that’s a really good tool.
I want to mention one more thing and we’re going to talk a little bit more some of the natural stuff quickly. But there’s a higher incidence with elderly people using prescription for sleeping, hypnotics that they have a higher co-morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance for a severe fall or fracture. And when we know when elderly people have fall and fractures, there’s a lot of co-morbidities that is caused, problems that all of a sudden, they end up with an infection, they’re in rehab, they’re not doing well and then they die.
So if you’re young or even if you’re older, if you want to try and preserve your health and your quality of life, reaching for the prescription hypnotics first before you tried some of the natural products and used the correct dose – because sometimes people, I’ll say, “Try this passion flower” and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve tried that, it didn’t work.” Well, it depends what product you’re using, what dose you’re using. And Debra, that’s really what it’s about. I select that for you for free. I tell you what to take. You’re not just going to randomly grab something.
DEBRA: No. I really want to really emphasize this point because you can go to a natural food store and look on the shelf and buy passion flower or whatever, but the difference is Pamela understands about dose because she’s a trained pharmacist and she has all these decades of experience. And so she can tell you exactly how much to take. She understands exactly how dosing works in a way that we who are not trained don’t understand this at all.
You can’t just look on the back of a bottle and say, “Take one pill.” She knows exactly how much you should take, she compare you with exactly the right product. And the products that she carries in her pharmacy are products that she personally has been using with her clients for years and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She can help you make that decision instead of spending hundreds of dollars on products that you won’t know whether they work or not just because you’re trying them because you read them on a magazine article.
She really will give you a very precise recommendation based on her knowledge and experience. That’s one of the reasons why she’s just so incredible.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. And that’s important to realize. I really respect people’s time and money…
DEBRA: And she really does.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really want the best for everybody. It’s not about, “Okay, I want to mail you something.” It’s not about that. The things that I suggest like the passion flower product that I ended up deciding on ultimately, I probably used five different ones with different people and I just kind of decided to looking at what is actually in there, how it’s standardized, how many milligrams, what’s actually working as far as feedback.
I’ve been doing this long enough. I know if people are coming back and saying, “It’s not working,” a particular product, “I just don’t want to use it anymore,” I move on to something else. There’s a lot of products that are very popular, that there’s a lot of advertising around, but I found that they just don’t work very well for people and they’re expensive and I just don’t carry them here.
So it’s really about selecting something that’s appropriate for the person. Especially if they’re drug naïve or not drug naïve and they haven’t had anxiolytic prescriptions, but especially the person that’s tittering on the edge and needing to have prescription therapy and the doctor or the practitioner is pushing for it, you really need to look and see if there’s some other things you can do instead.
And this encompasses not just the sleep that we’re talking today, but your blood pressure, your cholesterol, all these different things. Depression, anxiety, ADD, ADDHD, OCD, all these things can be helped very effectively with the right supplements, the right dose and just a few simple things.
DEBRA: Yes, they can. Now, we only have less than a minute actually, so I just want to slip one more thing in here and that is to say that being a registered pharmacist, Pamela can order and sell natural supplements at professional prescription grade that they cannot sell in the natural food store.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.
DEBRA: And so you’re getting a completely different kind of supplement when you go to her than if you’ve been in a natural food store.
Okay, so we’ve got 15 seconds left, so give your phone number again.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. It’s 727-442-4955 and as I’ve said previously, let me help you with any of your questions. I would be glad to answer those. I’m here full service for you.
DEBRA: Okay, great. And Pamela will be onagain in two weeks and every two weeks after that for an undetermined period of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
CozyPure Latex and Wool Products
Question from SARA
Debra,
As you well know, I have a great amount of respect for your expertise and opinion.
I am on the hunt for new bedding, including a latex mattress, organic cotton sheets, and wool topper & comforter.
I have perused your list of recommended vendors, but I happened across a local company that manufactures latex mattresses, organic cotton sheets, and wool toppers, comforters, and pillows. It just so happens that the company, CozyPure, based in Norfolk, VA is not on your list.
Have you heard of this company and do what is your opinion about the quality?
Their list of certifications include GOTS.
www.cozypure.com/certificates-and-memberships
www.cozypure.com/why-choose-cozypure
www.cozypure.com/natural-components
Debra’s Answer
The description looks good, but I can’t speak to the quality as I have no experience with this company.
Readers, anyone know about CozyPure?
Lead in Bathtub
Question from Hannah
Question about my bathtub…
I had my house spot-tested for lead today in preparation for a possible remodel next year.
The thing that tested highest for lead was the bathtub.
I knew this was a possibility but had not had it really on my radar until recently.
The lead inspector said that it was not an issue at all – that the lead from bathtubs does not leach and poses no danger to my kids.
But I was a bit skeptical as I have a 5.5 year old and a 1.5 year old who bathe in the tub nightly. so far their blood lead levels have always been
Do you consider the lead from a tub to be a hazard?
If so my options are to avoid that bathtub entirely and just have them shower in the newer bathroom upstairs that only has a shower stall.
Or I could refinish the bathtub.
My understanding is that the refinishing would be highly toxic and we would have to leave the house for it. But for how long would it be toxic? More than a week? Do you know how long the porcelain glaze takes to fully outgas?
Would love your thoughts as always. Thanks 🙂
Hannah
Debra’s Answer
I wrote about lead in bathtubs in Home Safe Home in 2004. It was first reported in 1995 on the television show Good Morning America.
Tests showed that hands ribbed along the side of the tub, bath water allowed to sit in the tub, and washcloths soaked in bath water and rubbed on the bottom of the rub all tested positive for lead.
But here’s the interesting thing. I recently learned that lead is not absorbed through the skin. What happens is that lead gets on hands and then children put their hands in their mouths, or children and adults pick up food and it gets on the food and that’s how lead gets in the body.
That said, keep in mind there is no safe level for lead.It’s something to be very careful with. Personally I wouldn’t allow my children to soak their bodies in a tub leaching any amount of lead.
Lead is a heavy metal, so if you are concerned about lead exposure, PureBody Liquid Zeolite detox drops will remove any lead that is accumulated in your body or your children’s.
If you want to refinish your bathtub, you would probably need to leave the house for it. If I remember correctly, they use lamps to cure the porcelain glaze. Call a company and find out the details. Once cured, porcelain glaze is totally nontoxic.
