Water | Swimming Pools
Safe Gloves for Food Prep
Question from Alison
Hi Debra,
Thank you for your website and for all that you do!
My cook wants to wear gloves while working with raw meat. I was wondering if you know whether nitrile medical gloves are safe (ie don’t leach anything into the food), or do you know of a safe glove to use? Maybe natural latex?
The gloves won’t be used for anything heat related, just things like cutting meat, and making meatballs.
Thanks so much!
Alison
Debra’s Answer
The use of gloves for food prep is common—it’s done in every restaurant.
I just took a peek at disposable gloves regarding your leaching question, and I’ll just summarize by saying that all the materials leach, and this is addressed during a step in processing. But it appears that different brands of gloves may be leached for different periods of time. I have no way of creating a reccommendation to evaluate which might be the best gloves because of this.
The main materials used to make disposable gloves are
- Vinyl / Poly (PVC)
- Nitrile
- Latex
But if you look at all the choices for gloves, it quickly becomes apparent that there may be other additives for various functions.
I would avoid the PVC gloves for toxicity.
Nitrile is a synthetic rubber made from acrylonitrile and butadiene. Acrylonitrile is a suspected human carcinogen, considered toxic, and know to release ions of cyanide. It also cannot be legally released into the environment because it is considered hazardous.
Latex would be OK if you are not latex sensitive.
It’s a tough decision. What is the reason your cook wants to wear gloves? Is it cross-contamination? I handle raw meat with my bare hands and then wash them with soap and hot water before I handle any other foods. And if I am making a salad, for example, I’ll handle the raw vegetables BEFORE handling the raw meat. I also use a separate cutting board and run my knife under the hottest water after using it to cut meat. I’ve never had any cross-contamination problems.
Stain remover for Laundry
Question from Cecilia
Dear Debra,
I would like your opinion about these two stain removers:
www.yoreganics.com/collections/all-products/products/stain-remover
us.ecover.com/products/stain-remover/
I tried the first one, and I think it works pretty well, but every time I use it I would cough and sneeze.
I haven’t tried the second one, but I would like your opinion because it has a bad rating on the EWG website.
In your website I found some old comments about Oxyclean and similar products. Would you still think they are safe to use?
Thank you very much!
Debra’s Answer
The Yoreganics stain remover is totally organic and nontoxic. If you are coughing and sneezing it is likely that you are individually sensitive to one or more of the natural ingredients. This is one of the dilemmas: organic products do not contain toxic chemicals but they can contain potential allergens, whereas petroleum products contain no allergens but may be toxic.
I can see why the Ecover product got a bad rating from EWG. It contains a number of synthetic ingredients, including synthetic fragrances and preservatives.
Another difference is the Yoreganics product is made from whole natural ingredients such as oils, aloe vera, and functional essential oils. The Ecover product contains ingredients that start with renewable resources, but are processed into industrial ingredients.
Oxyclean is made from oxygen bleach (sodium percarbonate) and hydrogen peroxide. Those are the active ingredients. Who knows what else may be in it. You can buy other stain removers with these active ingredients online. Or even just use them alone. Dilute the hydrogen peroxide so it doesn’t bleach your clothes on contact.
It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about your immune system: how it works and the best things to do to protect yourself from catching colds and flu this season—without a flu shot. 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
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 Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
- 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?
- 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
It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld
Date of Broadcast: September 24, 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 September 24th 2014 and it’s a beautiful early – well, I was going to say ‘early autumn day’, but it’s not early autumn anymore because yesterday was the autumn equinox, so we’re officially in the middle of autumn. Here where I live in Clearwater, Florida, that means that instead of it being 90° higher day and night, it’s now 80°. And it was 70° overnight. So I’m very happy it’s getting cooler.
My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants rather than drugs and she’s telling us – I have her on every other Wednesday and we’re doing a whole series on how you can use plants to heal your body. And if you’re taking any prescription or over-the-counter drugs, how you can get off of those drugs and use plants instead.
Today, we’re going to be talking about why you shouldn’t get a flu shot and how you can support your immune system during cold and flu season so that you won’ t get sick or if you do, then it’s less of a problem.
Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! Great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you! Great to have you here. So first, before we talk about colds and flus and shots and all of those things, I want to talk about me.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good.
DEBRA: I want to talk about the work that you and I have been doing and particularly, a couple of weeks ago, I stopped taking insulin.
Now, the reason that I have been taking insulin is because obviously, for blood sugar, but I only started taking it as an emergency. I was doing well controlling my blood sugar with diet and exercise. And even though it wasn’t normal, it was good enough for me.
But then last summer (not this year, but the summer of 2013), my blood sugar went way up into a dangerous area and nothing I did could bring it down. And so I started taking insulin as an emergency life-saving kind of thing at the insistence of my medical doctor. But then I kept doing things to heal my body. Was it really necessary to continue to take insulin?
Some of you know that earlier this year, I went on a Paleo diet for 30 days and during that time, I reduced the amount of insulin I was taking by half. And then after I started working with Pamela a couple of months ago (it’s been a couple of months now), but I think it’s just been about a month where it was time to buy another bottle of insulin for $200. And I said, “Pamela, isn’t there something else I can do?” and she said, “Of course, there is!”
PAMELA SEEFELD: And I said yes!
DEBRA: So tell us what you told me to do.
PAMELA SEEFELD: This is what I told her to do, Debra and this is what we normally do with people that are transitioning off of insulin or especially oral hypoglycemic like metformin and glyburide and some of these popular drugs.
What you have is type II diabetes. Someone that has type I diabetes has been a diabetic since they were a little kid. That’s a different situation. The pancreas just never really worked correctly. In your case, what happened is you get insulin resistance and the insulin is just not working correctly in the body and the pancreas is not producing correctly after a while because it’s kind of overtaxed at one point.
So what we’re doing is we gave you homeopathic medicine, pericardium triple warmer. These particular brands of homeopathy that I use, that particular company only sells to pharmacists and doctors. It’s not at the health food store. It has to be prescribed.
What this does is it actually starts making your beta cells and your pancreas to start working again. I use this with countless patients. They’re off their medicines, they’re doing great. And what we do is we’re offering – the way I approach things, I want a cure. I don’t want to just give you something to replace what you already did.
And when we were discussing that, $200 is a lot of money to put towards the insulin. We are already trying to transition you off. It’s like, “Okay, look, we can just up the dose of this particular product and do a circulating enhancer to get them into the beta cells and it’s working great. “
DEBRA: It is working great. I mean, it isn’t costing me $200, but it is costing me over a hundred dollars to buy that amount in order to do that for the same period of time as I would have had to pay $200. But here’s the big thing. All insulin does is control your symptom. It’s just there to make your blood sugar not so high. It’s not doing a thing to help heal your body. And so now, what I’m spending my money on is something that is actually healing my pancreas.
And in all these years, nobody had ever given me anything to heal my pancreas. All they were trying to do was control my symptoms.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And the other thing I want to tell you too is that you won’t eventually be using two to three bottles a month. After a while, the pancreas is going to kick – it’s kicking in gradually and you’re going to see huge declining of blood sugar.
DEBRA: Well, I’m expecting that. But what I’m happy about right now today after two weeks (or maybe it’s been three weeks, something like that) is that without my insulin taking what Pamela gave me to take, my blood sugar is the same as it was on insulin.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yehey!
DEBRA: I was a little afraid. When I went to her, I said, “Well, I don’t want to buy my insulin. What could we do?” and she says, “Well, let’s just try this because you can always go buy your bottle of insulin if your blood sugar just goes crazy.” And what happened was that for the first couple of days, it just like went up and went down and went up and went down. And then, it evened out just right where it is. And every day, it’s just right at that level. And even though it’s not going down yet, I know that I’m just waiting for my pancreas to heal and then it’s going to down. And then I’m going to be taking less. And then I’ll be taking nothing. I’ll be able to have a normal pancreas.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s going to come. The thing is with these cells – I mean, in most cases, most people, they never regenerate at all. But in your case, we’re giving homeopathic products that actually open up the meridians in those areas and actually target those cells completely instead of just doing just some general cleanse and that kind of thing.
This product is specifically for the little assignment I gave it. That works exactly like that. I’ve seen it very reproducibly work in a lot of patients.
DEBRA: I think this is just wonderful. And this is only just an example of what Pamela does. I just wanted to tell all of you that it’s possible to actually heal your body and it’s not about taking drugs or even natural remedies to control your symptoms. What we want to go for here is healing, regeneration of the damage that toxic chemicals and toxic foods and all those things are doing to your body that you want to detox, stop being exposed to and regenerate.
And now, I’m starting to regenerate. It makes me so happy. It just makes me so happy.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s wonderful. I’m very happy for you. You’re doing great.
DEBRA: Thank you.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m glad I could help… I am.
DEBRA: So I do want to say right off right now that you can call Pamela if you have health issues you want to talk to her about, if you’re on some drugs you want to get off of, if you have loved ones with health issues or drugs that they should be getting off of. You can call her on the phone and she will talk to you for free and advise you about what you can take instead. You want to give them the number?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the number is here to my pharmacy, Botanical Resource. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I highly recommend her especially if you have – like I know in my body, I’ve had a lot of difficult situations especially from all the toxic poisoning that I have had in my life and my body not functioning in all its wonders because of that. A lot of things that I’ve tried to do hasn’t worked over the years and everything that she’s given me is working. It’s just like night and day especially if you’re a difficult case.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I’m very proud of what I do here. I’m very happy I can help you. I’ve been doing this over 20 years. I teach this.
I’m a really good chemist. I look at the products, I look at the ingredients and I decide what I’m going to use them for. So it’s much more than like me taking a class and someone old me that “Do this for that.” As a pharmacist, that’s how we learn, “These drugs go for certain things.” You have to sometimes think out of the box and look and see what’s really happening in a person’s body and target the exact ingredient to go to where you want it to go.
DEBRA: And she just does that very well. So when we come back from the break (because we’re already through the first segment), we’re going to talk about flu shots, why you shouldn’t take them and how your immune system works and what you can do to support your immune system as we go into the cold and flu season.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses medical plants – and there’s a word for that. It’s a pharmacognosist. I love that one. So 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. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. And today, we’re talking about what you can do so that you don’t have the flu.
So let’s start. I saw something, I get a lot of newsletter from different places, but one came last week that talked about how Dr. Oz had a show where he was talking about mercury in flu shot. Mercury is certainly something that we don’t want to be putting into our bodies. I think that there are some other reasons why not to take flu shots. Could you talk about that first because I know every place I go, they’re saying, “Have you had your flu shot?”
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s true, that’s true. They do ask that quite a bit. Well, this is the thing with the flu shot. We’ll just kind of backtrack for one second. We’ll talk about the immune system, okay?
DEBRA: Okay.
PAMELA SEEFELD: How do you keep your immune system working really well so you don’t even need the flu shot or even considering it? If your immune system is depressed, you’re going to be at risk for not only the flu, but a host of other colds and things that come around during the winter time. And we’re going to start going into cold and flu. That’s called cold and flu. It’s the two of them.
Your immune system acts on certain different things. There’s cellular and humoral and mediated immune system. The humoral is these things called chemotactic factors. They’re little signals that bring the immune system to the area. It’s kind of like a little signal like little beacons, “Come over here and take care of this.”
The immune system that goes after just in general any kind of cell (it can be a bacterial or a fungus or a virus) are called leukocytes. When people are sick and their immune system is trying to launch a response, you get these huge increases of leukocytes. And leukocytes are kind of cool because they don’t actually have an assignment. They just go everywhere. They look around for the tissue. These little factors bring it to the tissues. So how can we enhance these first line defenses so that no matter what you get in contact with, you’re not going to get sick?
A big thing is, believe it or not, diet. We have found – and I just downloaded some different studies here – that the t-cells, the t-lymphocytes, which is what’s affected in AIDS patients, when their immune system goes really low and they’re able to be infected with AIDS, we know that vegetables and fruits regulate and up-regulate t-cell activity to go to find viruses.
So when we want to prevent getting sick in the first place (because let’s face it, we know we don’t want to do the flu shot altogether), let’s get the immune system working better so you don’t need to have it.
The preservatives that are in – that’s pretty easy step. We always talk about diet, but there’s actually proof now that shows that these t-cells are up-regulated specifically by what you eat.
DEBRA: Oh!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Another thing too is stress control. Now, people that are stressed out, they have increases in cortisol in their blood stream and it suppresses the immune system, an increase of inflammation.
I’ll give you an example. If I go in a room and there’s like 20 people there and one person has the flu, will everybody get the flu, Debra?
DEBRA: No.
PAMELA SEEFELD: No. Right! That’s the trick. You’re saying, “No, I’m not going to get the flu.” What Dr. Oz is saying and commenting on those things is that when you have a flu shot, you’re launching an immune response. That’s what it does.
A flu shot and vaccines are kind of like homeopathy, but they’re not. I don’t want to confuse people. You’re getting a small amount of a causative agent to try and elicit an immune response. So what happens those little cells that were called in, they come to the area and they make antibodies. And so supposedly, supposedly, when you come in contact with the virus, you’re not going to get it.
You know what percentage of people still end up with the flu even with the flu shot?
DEBRA: I don’t know, but…
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s over 50%.
DEBRA: So over 50%? It doesn’t work.
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s pretty high, yeah. They still end up with the flu. So when we look at it, we have to say, “Okay, the flu shot is bad.
We really shouldn’t get it.” But really, what we need to do is make our immune system work like it should work, so that if I’m sitting next to you and you’re sneezing and coughing, you have the flu, I don’t get it.
DEBRA: That’s right. So how do we do that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the trick, to prevent it. If we want to prevent it, there’s some simple things you can do. What you’re eating is very important. If you’re going to eat fruits and vegetables, especially vegetables that have – you know, we’ve always talk about all these bioflavinoids and these immune system enhancement. You need to have oil, some kind of fat present on the vegetables to be absorbed.
Otherwise, you’re not going to be getting the benefit of bioflavinoid.
And taking a good multivitamin is also important. I would really like to comment that fish oil has an excellent immune response. It increase the immune system and lowers inflammations consistently and that’s an easy thing to take. If you don’t want to take fish oil capsules, you can even take sardines. If you have sardines a few times a week, that’s very preventative as well.
The immune system, the biggest depressant of the immune system is stress. It sounds crazy because people are talking about stress and anxiety. But if you’re really stressed out and you are not sleeping correctly, a lot of that is going to affect your immune system, right?
DEBRA: Yes.
PAMELA SEEFELD: And we know that glucocorticoids, which is cortisol that’s released from the adrenal gland – like people get adrenal fatigue where the cortisol is just released and released constantly. We know that excessive amounts of glucocorticoids in the blood stream can really depress the immune system. So stress control is really important.
If you take calming fish oil or passion flower or maybe do some yoga or some breathing techniques, you try and control your reactions to stress in everyday life, things like that. If you look at most people, when they end up getting the flu, it’s through at a point where they’re underslept and they’re anxious, so they have a lot of stress going on in their life.
DEBRA: Right! And you know, I’ve really noticed that most of the time, I can handle a normal amount of stress and even an extraordinary amount of stress. But when my adrenal glands go out, then I can’t handle any stress at all.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!
DEBRA: And so I would say that if people are finding that they can’t handle stress and that they fly up the handle or that any little thing bothers them or if something goes wrong and they just got upset about it and they can’t do anything about it, that is a sure sign that the adrenals are being stressed and that you should do something to strengthen your adrenals.
So would it be a correct assumption to say if you have adrenal problems that your immune system is going to be less functional because of the stress?
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Yes, that’s exactly right. This sounds crazy because this sounds like elementary advice. But if you, like you’re saying, flying off the handle at little things, can’t keep your stress under control, that’s a big part of your immune system. It basically shuts everything down.
I’ll give you an example. When you have an immune response and the doctors are trying to control, say, an allergy or a rash, they give you prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid, it’s a glucocorticoid. You make cortisol in your body from your adrenals. It’s the same thing. That’s why they give you that, because your adrenals aren’t working correctly. You’re not preventing a severe immune response, so that’s why they’re giving it to you in a pill.
What I tell people is that you need to make sure that your adrenals are working correctly to make sure that you can launch a stress response.
DEBRA: Interesting. Well, we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants that’s called a pharmacognosist. I’m still loving that word. I love it because it means drug cog- as intelligence. So you’re dispensing intelligent plants that have drug-like effects I guess. So 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. We’re talking about what you can do for your immune system now that it’s getting to be cold and flu season so that your body will just fight off those bacteria and viruses and germs and you won’t get sick because that’s what your immune system is supposed to do.
I just want to interject that there are many toxic chemicals. The way that I got interested in this in the first place is because my immune system was damaged by toxic chemicals. There’s so many toxic chemicals that harm the immune system that there’s a whole class of chemicals called immunotoxicants, which destroy your immune system.
We’re all being exposed to them day in and day out unless we do something to not be exposed to those immunotoxicant. What I found was in order to heal my own immune system so that I wasn’t just reacting to everything all day long – it was like I couldn’t even wear a cotton share without reacting to it. Even things that people aren’t allergic to, my body would react to because my immune system was damaged by these toxic chemicals.
The thing that I really want to emphasize is that if your immune system is damaged, it leaves you wide open to catching anything that’s an infectious disease. So it’s not just cold and flu. Another thing in the headlines of newsletters I get is ebola virus. In Africa, there’s a big problem with it. Well, what if it came over here and we started having an epidemic of ebola? If your immune system is not in good shape, you’re going to be one of the first ones. This is just what happens.
And so our immune system is – everything in the body is important, but I can’t imagine life without a functioning immune system. You would just be open to everything.
Do you remember many years of ago, there was a movie I think with John Travolta called the ‘Boy in the Plastic Bubble?’
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.
DEBRA: Remember that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yep.
DEBRA: Well, that’s somebody who doesn’t have an immune system.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.
DEBRA: That’s what it would be like. So I can’t stress how important this is.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, your immune system is like a little army. Like I said, it’s a front, right, front and center looking to see. There’s all these different cells. Some of them are little beacons and say where the problem is and others actually go and just keep combing the area to find where they can go and activate so that they can engulf – kind of like amoeba, they engulf the different viruses and bacteria.
What I’ll say too is that I just looked at a new position statement on exercise. People that do intense exercise, they’re just like kind of the Weekend Warriors, they’ll go out and do too much, it actually suppresses your immune system.
But moderate exercise actually increases your immune system. When you do moderate exercise, it actually increases these neutrophils and lymphocytes and these different cells that go after it. It’s a transient increase and so it actually activates your immune system to go after infections. So I’m talking about walking, biking and things like that, not running a marathon, which can actually be counterproductive for some people. So exercise is important.
But I’m going to talk a little bit about supplements too.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Go ahead.
PAMELA SEEFELD: This is probably what most people are interested in. So we talked about we got to protect stress, we got to help the immune system.
If we looked at a product called andrographis (it’s an herb), an andrographis is very, very great as far as the immune response. I call this an herbal antibiotic. Now technically, it’s not an antibiotic, but it’s one of these things that you can use if somebody has an infection brewing or say that they’ve – a lot of times, when people have the cold or flu, they go to the doctor and they give them a Cipro or a Z-Pak and they really don’t have a bacterial infection. They give them antibiotics just to make them happy.
So now, when we do this, if someone comes to me and said, “I don’t want to take these prescription” or “I’ve been on all these different prescriptions and it’s not working,” andrographis is where they might go to. That increases the white blood cells, increases the lymphocytes, the neutrophils and all these different cells that have really specific assignments to go in the immune system and to take care of bacteria and viruses. It elevates that tremendously. It’s inexpensive and it works great.
You can get it at a health food store. I use a medical version of it, but I know that the health food stores sell it too. So, andrographis is great.
DEBRA: Could you spell that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, andrographis. So it’s A-N-D-R-O-G-R-A-P-H-I-S.
DEBRA: Good. Thank you. I’m sure some people will go get that.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Andrographis is great. Now, there’s a product from Heel. I’m not affiliated with the company, but Heel is a German company that does homeopathic products (a great, great company) and they have a product called Engestrol. Engestrol, you can get that even off of the Internet. It’ll say right there for flu. I’m sure it’s going to be prominently displayed on any website. Engestrol is what they’re using in Germany in place of flu shots.
DEBRA: Oh!
PAMELA SEEFELD: And this goes after viruses. It’s an increase in the lymphocyte activity, the lymphocytes that go after viruses by 95%.
You can give this to children and babies and adult. So I use this a lot. People, I tell them, “Just keep it in your purse. You put them underneath your tongue. You can do one or two a day as needed.”
Say you have a little child in childcare and you’re worried about cold and flu (you know, little kids pass these things back and forth to each other), you might want to use this. When you give them to infants and you use any kind of homeopathic pills, you want to crash it between two spoons and then put a little water and make a paste and put it on the gums of the baby. That works very good too.
DEBRA: Hmmm… so can you take that as a preventive like if you’re going out and you don’t want to get something, you just take that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yup, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. When people are traveling, I tell them to take it as a preventive. If you’re feeling you’re getting sick, you can take even more. I feel it’s perfectly safe even if you take up to eight tablets a day of that product.
So Engestrol is the real go-to because like I said, in Europe, they’re using that on the frontline instead of using the flu vaccines.
DEBRA: Okay, spell that one too. Spell that one too.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, let’s see, Engestrol. E-N-G-E-S-T-R-O-L.
DEBRA: Okay, good.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Engestrol. That would be really an excellent product to have around, kind of a go-to product in your house for your children, for yourself. There’s a lot of excellent data on that. It’s very, very effective.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about coconut oil.
DEBRA: Good!
PAMELA SEEFELD: Coconut oil is probably one of the most underutilized supplement for viruses. Most people think about cognitive issues and of course, there’s data with dementia. A lot of people are using it for that, for prevention or for stopping some of the advancement of dementia in elderly patient. But coconut oil is a great product especially for children and for adults, but especially for little kids.
When I see someone come in and they have a little child getting colds and flu and viruses and things like that because the immune system is really low, the coconut oil, what it does is it’s medium chain triglycerides. So it’s not actually fat. You don’t actually store it. So it’s kind of like a free calorie. Coconut oil, with MCT oil, it contains lauric acid. And lauric acid has the effect of lowering viral activity probably up to 75%. So it can stop shedding and activity in the bloodstream.
I use this a lot where someone comes to me and says, “I’m using the Engestrol. I’m really concerned. All the kids at the preschool have this cold or flu” or whatever they’re trying to prevent, coconut oil in the kids’ food. It works great.
DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that at all and it’s so easy and so inexpensive. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who uses, as you’ve been hearing, medicinal plants and foods in order to handle all kinds of body conditions. We’ll hear more about what you can do for your immune system in the cold and flu season when we come back.
DEBRA: 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 uses medicinal plants and foods and other natural things in order to make people’s bodies heal, actually heal. She doesn’t just get rid of symptoms. She actually wants to make the body well.
That’s what I think is one of the big differences. A drug is just about symptoms, a lot of natural remedies are just about symptoms, but she actually does something that’s healing.
Pamela, can you tell us, just you mentioned coconut oil fighting viruses and flu. Can you tell us a couple of ways that people can use coconut oil if they’re unfamiliar with it and how they can use it for their food?
DEBRA: Yeah, great question. Okay! So coconut oil comes in capsules and it comes in solid. Sometimes, people, if I tell them, “I want you to put a tablespoon of coconut oil” and it looks like a clear fat. It has no coconut taste. Some of them do have a coconut taste. If it’s unrefined, it’s going to have a little bit of coconut taste. Most of the ones you’re going to get don’t have coconut taste. If you don’t like coconut, you don’t have to worry. It’s not going to taste strong coconut.
And what I normally recommend that I know for myself, what I do if I feel like my throat is getting sore, if I have my lymph glad swollen a little bit, if I’m feeling kind of run down, I like to put it on a cracker. I make my own organic crackers and just spread a little bit of almond. I eat a cracker before I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, all the swelling in my neck have gone.
DEBRA: Wow!
PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s quick and easy and it works great. I use it a lot too for mono. I see a lot of mono where kids in highschool have mono and the parents come to me and like, “She’s on the basketball team” or, “She’s on the tennis team. She needs to get back to where she was. She can’t be laying on the coach.” I see a lot of that where young people come to me, teenagers and we have to get them back in shape within a few weeks instead of them lingering on with this.
Coconut oil is quick. It’s within a few days and the person turns the corner. So if you’re looking for a quick result, but especially for children. What I recommend for the little kids is just mix it with their food. Pretty much, at room temperature, let’s say your house is – like if you’re in Florida, it can be like 80° depending on what time of the year it is, it’ll be like a semi-solid. If you put it in the refrigerator, it will be solid.
And if you have it in your cupboard, depending on the temperature of your house, if it’s in the low 70° or in the 60°, it probably will be solid.
If it’s in the 80°, you and I might leave the air conditioning off during the day and come back later on, it might be liquid. So it just depends.
You can literally mix it into food. You can melt it a little bit if you want to to to put it on things. I like it on popcorn really. I think it tastes great.
DEBRA: I was going to say that. I was going to say that because what I found is that if you make your own popcorn at home, which you should and not buy it in a bag (you can make your own organic popcorn at home), you have the issue of heating up bat enough to be able to make the popcorn pop. And I think the coconut oil is the perfect oil to pop corn in because you can heat it up and put in the popcorn and it just pops right up.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely!
DEBRA: It doesn’t taste like butter, but it has its own pleasant taste I think. I mean, I’m somebody who likes coconut, so what I like to eat is coconut manna or coconut butter, which is coconut oil with some coconut meat in it.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.
DEBRA: I just think that that’s delicious. If it gets kind of melty so that you can pour it, what I do is that I put it in just on a baking sheet. I put little globs of it on a baking sheet and put it on the freezer. It actually turns into something like a candy. It has its own sweetness and you can put a little mint flavoring or whatever and it’s just like eating white chocolate. That’s what it tastes like, white chocolate. There’s no sugar in it or anything, but those coconut manna, frozen tastes like white chocolate.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re exactly right. I’ll tell you, coconut is great for the family to just cook their food in it. You could throw vegetables in it. And what’s good about coconut oil instead of good butter and olive oil, the burning point where it starts to smoke and smolder is much lower in coconut oil. Coconut oil, you’d have to put it in the calorimeter. You cannot reach that temperature in normal cooking conditions in your home. So it will never burn, it will never smoke. You can walk away from it, come back to there if you’re throwing vegetables in it and chopping it up. So it’s very versatile. You can just mix it in with the food.
So the coconut oil is great. I’m going to talk a little about too about astragalus. Astragalus works on the t4 lymphocyte, the cell that’s affected in AIDS patients, but can affect for our immune system and for viruses. Astragalus is an inexpensive herb. You can take that to enhance the immune system as well.
So really obvious things, you can be cooking with coconut oil and the engestrol, maybe you have that sitting around for your kids and either the andrographis or the astragalus could be a back up product if you really wanted to do that.
Now, I wanted to talk about one thing really quickly about the stress effect. I found something. Do you know – and this is really interesting.
I did a full MedLine search, the National Library of Medicine last night to look at different things that affect the immune system.
This was just published and archived to toxicology this year, 2014, September 12th. It’s called the The Role of Oxidative Stress and Carbon Nanotube-generated Health Effects. I was not really aware of this and I thought this was very interesting that I’d like to tell your listeners.
Carbon nanotubules are a type of nanotechnology that is ubiquitous. It’s all over the place. It’s in semiconductors. It’s in radios. It’s in our phone. It’s in car parts and in electronics. What they found is that these nanotubules, because it’s nano technology, they could come on to our body and we can breathe them in.
And what they have found now, some of these toxicologists is that exposure to these carbon nanotubules is associated with depletion of antioxidants, increasing reactive oxygen species, cellular damage, inflammation signaling is impaired. So the immune system can be impaired from the electronics.
I’m not saying you’re going to throw away your phone. I’m just saying that we need to just be aware of this. The scientists are even questioning some of the safety of the nanotubules. It damages DNA. Now, I’ll let you ask some questions. What do you think of that?
DEBRA: I think we shouldn’t be using nanotechnology at all. More and more, I read these kinds of things or hear them from you. My first question is what do we do to counteract that?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Well yeah, this is really important. I could be maybe far-guessing in this, but I will tell you that homeopathy would probably be your best bet because homeopathic medicine kind of goes where it needs to go and it has a very generalized assignment in the body other than specifically targeted herbs, vitamins or medicine.
But I didn’t realize that these nanotubules are coming onto people and they’re breathing them in. I thought that was pretty upsetting. I don’t really want to change the tone of the conversation, but I wanted to make sure that people were aware that there’s a lot of other things going on that are affecting our immune system – some, we can control and some, we can’t.
But in all realism, you really need to be taking some of these supplements to counteract some of the things that are going to be affecting your immune system. You have to do what you can about the things that you have control over.
DEBRA: Do what you can. That’s exactly what I was going to say. Do what you can about the things that you have control over because there’s so many things we don’t have control over that we need to give our bodies the best chance we can.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, most definitely. So the exercise, the healthy food. You’ve all heard these things before. I will tell you to have the coconut oil at the house and Engestrol is a really good product. I’m still really a bit fan of Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox product that I use because that actually elevates humoral and cellular immunity. It works on both parts of the immune system.
I’ve been doing it consistently for 15 years. You don’t have to do it every single day, but it does basically scan the body and remove out things that aren’t supposed to be there (bacteria and viruses). Your immune system works in a much better level as far as the cellular level and effectivity level.
DEBRA: And I’ll tell you, I have seen Pamela. You can look at her picture, but she’s one of the healthiest people I’ve ever met. She really is. Her skin glows and she’s very happy and energetic and just all the things that you would want to be.
And so I see the results of what she talks about in her and I see the results of what she’s giving me. I see these same kind of results starting to happen. I can’t say enough.
So we only have two minutes left. Do you want to give your phone number again?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, most definitely. So if there’s any questions, they can call me at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be glad to help you with any condition you might have for yourself, for your pet. I treat pretty much everything. And also, I get people off of medications if they’re interested in that as well. I really appreciate everything.
DEBRA: And she really loves to get people off mental medications especially.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Specifically, correct. Mental health is a specialty that I’m very good at. I’ve done this for a long time. So anybody that’s on psychiatric medicines that wants to look for something other than that that actually works, I can talk you through it. It’s pretty easy and pretty inexpensive to do.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I’m just always impressed when I hear some stories about what she’s doing. We only just have less than a minute left, so do you want to tell us a really quick story about somebody that you treated that had a big surprise this week?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, yeah. Actually, we’re talking about the immune system, I had a lady come to me last week and her little child was in daycare and had been constantly getting sick, constantly getting sick, constantly at the doctor – ear infections, throat infections, all these sort of stuff. She works full-time. She’s just a professional lady.
She’s very upset about the whole thing. She goes, “I don’t have time to keep taking my child at a daycare.” I said, “Look, the coconut oil.
Use the coconut oil.” She looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “Look, just put the coconut oil in the baby’s food in the little baby jar. Put it in there, warm it up, half a teaspoon twice a day.
She called me not even 48 hours later and said, “You know what? She’s better.” She’s not coughing anymore. All the drippiness stopped.
Anyway, it was a significant change within a short period of time.
You would be surprised. Natural products work very well, and I’ll tell you, especially about psychiatric products. I get people off of medicines every single day especially anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicine and even narcotics.
DEBRA: And I would stop you because the music is going to come on. So thank you so much.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, thank you so much.
DEBRA: Pamela will be on again two weeks from today. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Living By Nature’s Ways
Today my guest is Lierre Keith. She is the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” We’re doing Part 2 of a discussion we began last week on The Vegetarian Myth: Why A Vegetarian Diet Might Not Be Best for Health or the Environment. While The Vegetarian Myth does address the vegetarian diet, it does so by comparing the diet to the natural processes of life itself. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today: how life works and how different the natural world is from the industrial world. Lierre and I will each share our experiences of becoming aware of life beyond industrialism, and we’ll discuss some key points that relate to eating. Lierre a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of six books and coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. www.lierrekeith.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Living by Nature’s Way
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lierre Keith
Date of Broadcast: April 23, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.
Today’s show is going to be a little different. We’re going to be talking about not so much what we’re doing in our daily lives, although this show with that. But we’re going to be talking about a big shift in the way we think about ourselves as human beings in the larger scheme of life.
Today is Tuesday, September 23, 2014, and it’s the autumn equinox. Now, some of you may have seen in your calendars a few days ago on the 21st, the first day of autumn, well, actually, what the autumn equinox is, is the midpoint between the longest day of the year on summer solstice, and the shortest day of the year, on winter solstice. It happens on a very particular day when the sun is at a particular point in the sky and that is determined by the position of the sun, not by a date on the calendar.
And there’s this whole way that time operates in nature, which is determined by the sun and the moon. And then we have this calendar, which is all about standardizing everything, making what’s called a civil calendar. It has nothing to do with the time that’s going on in the natural world.
I bring this up today because it happens to be, well, I chose to do this show on this day. But it shows the difference between our industrial, civil life and the world of nature. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re going to be talking about that difference and how we can get ourselves re-aligned in why that’s important.
My guest today is Lierre Keith. She was on last Tuesday. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability, which has been called the most important ecological book of this generation. And last week, we talked about The Vegetarian Diet. But this week, we’re going to be talking about some of those concepts that made her book the most important ecological book of this generation.
There’s so much to talk about. Hi, Lierre. Let’s say hello.
LIERRE KEITH: Hi, Deb. Thanks for having me back.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So what I want to start with is I know in my life that there was a certain set of things that happened, and I want to tell my story about how I became aware that I was part of the natural world, in addition to being part of the industrial world. I think it’s more basic and fundamental that we are all part of the natural world. I’m imagining from reading your book that you have some kind of similar story. So would you tell us about that moment that this shift occurred for you?
LIERRE KEITH: I think for me it started when I was a really young child. I grew up outside of Philadelphia and we would make journeys north to go see my grandmother in Connecticut and the other place that we went regularly down the shore with the New Jersey coastline. To get to either place, you had to drive along these absolutely horrible highways that are surrounded by these vast, ugly, toxifying machines. It just goes on from miles and miles and miles, this industrial wasteland.
And to my three, four, five-year-old mind, it was just the most horrifying thing. And I learned to just brace myself every time we were going in one of those trips because an hour or two of just driving through – eventually, I read The Lord of the Rings, and it was Mordor. To me, that’s just what it was. I knew that at the end of the journey, we’d be some place really beautiful. So we get to view the ocean or we’d be at my grandmother’s. She lived across the street from this beautiful little river. And we were allowed to just play down the river all day. And to me this was the most magical thing in the world, especially growing up in a more urban environment. They actually have running water and snakes and fish and water fowl and trees. It was just as magical as they could get. But you first had to go through hell to get there.
And I could not understand how it is that human beings had done this to the place that they live. And I think one of the most motivating things in my life was to try to understand that. Why would people do this, to take this place that has obviously been so beautiful once and turn it into this industrial hell?
So that was, I think, just absolutely formative in my early years. I was at this juncture between the beauty of the wild places that was a tiny bit wild that at least I had access to as a young kid and what was being done all around. And that was encroaching, encroaching, encroaching every year.
Now, there were less trees and there are less wilderness. At the beach, there were fewer sand dunes. You can watch the life to just shrink. And I felt the emergency in that.
So I think that was just very formative in my life. And I have now, as an adult, seen other small children have those kinds of reactions as well. So I know it’s not just me. I think there’s something in us as human beings, as actual animals who need a home, who love this place to see the destruction.
Now, of course, we’re really up against the wall in terms of that destruction. But I think we do respond to that. We just learn to shut it off.
DEBRA: I think so too. I just want to add, coming from California, it’s very different in California. So I think people listening in different places may not have a picture of what you’ve been describing because I know that I was shocked and horrified when I first came to the East Coast, driving along a highway and seeing that industrial, miles and miles and miles of factories and smoke stacks and just really ugly industrialism just right there on the highway. It is all in the northeast very much so.
I didn’t have that in California. That’s not the way the highways look. So I can imagine how you felt as a child.
My story is that I had a different thing that happened to me when I was an adult. And I woke up in the morning. I was living in San Francisco, in the city, in a studio apartment. I woke up one morning and I said, “I need to leave the city.” I just knew inside of myself I needed to leave the city.
And I went and I lived out in a forest about an hour north of San Francisco just on the other side of a hill from the Pacific Ocean. It had huge fir trees. It was a world community. So I lived on a little street. We’re all surrounded by trees but otherwise, there were a few other little cabins like mine and animals. The different wild flowers came out at different times of the year. I could go out my front door in the summertime and pick wild blackberries. It was very real close to nature kind of existence.
And because that was so different from the experience of growing up in suburbia and then living in the city (I lived in San Francisco for quite a while), I lived there for two years and there was just profound shift for me when I started seeing the ecosystem. When we live in a city, when we live in suburbia, there’s no ecosystem anymore. But when you go actually out and live in a forest, you start to understand that there are animals and a change of season. I had a skylight over my bed and so the moonlight would come in.
It was just so, so different that I started experiencing for myself that nature existed because I was living in it. Going camping for a weekend isn’t enough. Going away for two weeks to Girl Scout camp wasn’t enough. When I lived there in the forest for two years, it made a profound difference for me. And at the end of those two years, I looked at this beautiful ecosystem and I looked at suburbia and the city, and I said, “Wait a minute! There’s something very, very wrong here.” We are just living this industrial life of having everything come from a factory or in a store, and yet, if you’re actually in the ecosystem, you see that nature is sustaining life in a way that sustains life. And we humans have forgotten what that is.
And so the first shift, the first thing is just, we’re going to talk about some other things but the first thing is just to understand that you live in an industrial world, but there’s this other world of nature and we live within that too. All the resources for every product we use all come from that. It operates in a different way. And if we want to be sustainable, we need to find out what that is. And you and I have both done a lot in that regard.
And we’re going to talk about that one when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lierre Keith. We’re talking about nature and how the natural world is different from the industrial world.
One of the things I wanted to say that I forgot to say when telling my story before is that the reason that I went out to live in the forest was because I was trying to escape toxic chemicals. I had been living in suburbia and especially in the city where there were a lot of toxic chemicals not only in my home, but in the environment. And I thought, “Where is the cleanest place I can go?” And I went to live in a forest.
But what I found, even though I was just looking for clean air, what I found was that there was this whole natural world there. It’s just like you stepped out of industrialism into this other world. And that’s what we’re talking about today, this other world of nature. The industrial world is within it, but as we put all our attention on the industrial world, we forget that nature is out there. And it has its own rules. And in order for all of our whole culture and everything to survive, all of life to survive, we as human beings need to start understanding what those are.
So the first thing I want to talk about, we mentioned it a little bit last week in talking with Lierre, is the fact that every lifeform survives by eating other lifeforms.
Lierre, why don’t you tell us something about that?
LIERRE KEITH: I am reminded of a quote by Charlotte Perkin Gilman, who was a feminist in the early 20th century and she had this great quote where she said something like, “The Buddha looked out at the world and he said in horror, ‘My god, they’re all eating each other.'” But I look out the world and I changed one word, and I say, “They’re all feeding each other and it’s good.”
And that to me is the exact problem with things like veganism or the separation that we have right now living in an industrial world. We don’t see those cycles. We don’t understand how life physically works on this planet. And that’s exactly it.
First, there’s growth and then there’s death and degeneration. And then at the end of that, there is regeneration. So everything that we are is recycled back into this process called life. So we are broken down into every last little molecule of carbon, whatever. It’s all going to get recycled, taken out by other lifeforms and life will continue.
That is what life is, it’s that cycle. There’s not really any way out of it unless you want to decide that you don’t want to live anymore. But your body will still be recycled even if you decide to knock it off. There’s no way out. That is just what happens on this planet. And you can decide it’s a terrible thing or you can decide that this is an incredible gift.
I decided that I would rather see it as a gift. Maybe that’s a discussion that’s got a more spiritual base to it. But your body is a piece of the universe that you’ve been given. And that’s an amazing thing to have.
DEBRA: It is an amazing thing to have. And also, our bodies – here’s another thing that we don’t see in the industrial world. When our bodies die, then what happens is that they get preserved with formaldehyde and get put in a box and sit in a cemetery. If we were living out in the wild or look at a native culture, it’s not industrial. What happen is that the bodies would get buried or the people would just – I know some Native American cultures or native cultures around the world, when people get to the end of their lives, they just leave their tribe and they go walk out into the woods or wherever, and they lay their bodies down, and their bodies just biodegrade like anything else. And it goes back into the ecosystem. Then the ecosystem feeds us and then our bodies feed the ecosystem.
But there is something else I want to mention about this too. There’s a wonderful little book called Furtive Fauna. And it’s all about our bodies being an ecosystem to other organisms. And when I read this book, there are so many things, little microorganisms that are living with us in our bodies. There is a little microorganism that cleans the little stuff that gets caught in our eyelashes. It actually helps us survive. And the whole microorganism that we talked about, the flora and fauna, in our guts, all those probiotics and everything, that’s a whole culture of being, little cells, that are not our bodies. They’re co-existing with us to help us digest our food.
There are all kinds of creatures in our bodies helping us exist. We’re an ecosystem. Our bodies are an ecosystem to other living things.
And so it’s all about this interconnection.
LIERRE KEITH: About 10 pounds of our body are organisms that are not us. That’s a lot. That’s by weight, but if you do find numbers, there may be as many as nine times more non-human creatures in the human body than there are cells of you. So you can lie there at night going, “Wow, what actually am I?”
And most of them are very friendly. Sometimes the bad ones take over and you end up in a bad way. But most of them are doing things for us and we provide them with a home. Like you said, we’re a habitat essentially. And they do all kinds of fun things for us. They help us digest our food, and they keep us healthy, and they’re part of our immune system, and they keep our skin clean on and on. We can’t see them and we wouldn’t even know they were there. But that is the case. We do provide a home for these other creatures. And now, we have this symbiotic relationship.
DEBRA: And that happens in layer after layer. It’s all kind of nested in nature, these symbiotic relationships as the systems get bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s one other thing I want to mention with regard to this too. And that is, I know that a lot of people don’t want to do harm and that motivates a lot of decisions. For me, the greatest thing if you don’t want to do harm and I don’t want to do harm, but I’m always looking to see what is the thing that can do the greatest good for life.
And that’s why I am so adamant about not using toxic chemicals because to me, the greatest thing that causes the greatest harm in across the greatest amount of life, is to use toxic chemicals. And I think that that’s a much bigger concern when you actually look at the harm being down than to be concerned about that we shouldn’t feed our own lives because we’re taking the life of something else.
Plants have feelings too. Plants know when they’re being eaten. Plants have been hooked up to machines that measure their emotional response.
We’re getting to break. So we’ll be right back and we’ll talk more about this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re talking about nature.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability, which has a lot about the vegetarian diet but it’s all based on the kinds of things that we’re talking about today. She really has this understanding of how life works and how what we eat from an industrial viewpoint is so out of whack with nature. And she explains all this in the book. It’s very interesting. You can go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and you’ll find her book there. You can click on it and order it. You can also go to her website.
So the next thing I want us to talk about is when I read Lierre’s book when it first came out. I think it was in 2009. And it’s full of scribbles, underlines, post-it notes, and turning down pages, but when I opened it, a couple of weeks ago, when I invited her to be on the show, I had written one thing on the inside of the front cover. And that is life produces food.
And it’s absolutely true. We don’t need supermarkets, we don’t need agriculture, we can just go outside and into the ecosystem and ecosystem will always produce food to support all the living things that are in that ecosystem. It produces food for plants, it produces food for animals, it produces food for humans. That’s what life does.
And here in Florida, I live in an area that has fairly old houses. My house was built in 1940. But every single person has old citrus trees. That’s what people did then. What they did was they planted citrus trees and we all have so much grapefruits, oranges, tangerines and everything, we can’t even eat them. We can’t even give them to each other because we all have trees.
And it’s just wonderful. And nowadays, people plant ornamental plants instead of planting food. But as recently as 1940, what they were doing was planting foods and fruit tree gardens and all these things.
So Lierre, talk to us about life-producing food.
LIERRE KEITH: So pretty much in nature, every action that every creature takes is going to provide food eventually for somebody else. And that’s why it’s really an interconnected web. It’s not a series of hierarchical relationships where we’re exploiting each other. It’s actually just a system of mutual feeding.
For instance, I live in Northern California now and we still have some salmon run. So the salmons come up the streams to spawn and that’s how they’re continuing their species. But in the meantime, the bears and the eagles and all these, what I call the apex predators, will feed on the fish. And by doing that they actually take the nutrients from deep in the ocean that are in the salmon’s bodies, and they keep themselves alive, they keep their babies alive, but they also distribute an incredible amount of resources, minerals and what-not back into the forest.
This is what this giant pump essentially of nutrients that go from ocean, up the rivers in the fish, and that out into the forest with the bears, and the foxes, and the eagles, and keeps the forest healthy. Without those nutrients, the forest will eventually die. And this is just inevitable because there’s nothing else to feed [inaudible 00:30:06]. They need nutrients from the salmon. And it’s the salmon that do that. But every step along the way, every creature involved is doing what it needs to survive, doing what it needs to feed its babies, and in the act of doing that, it’s feeding the entire community.
And that’s the beauty of this, is that we are all in this interlocking, mutual, symbiotic relationships. If you step outside of it, you don’t understand that. You think, “Oh, those terrible bears! They’re killing fish!” And that’s not what’s really going on. On a small level, yes, but by doing that they’re not just increasing their own species, feeding their babies, but they’re feeding forests.
And because there’s a forest, there are bears. And because there is a forest, there is actually a river that fish can live in, because without those trees, the rivers are dead.
So in fact, by the fish feeding the bears, feeding the forest that feeds the river, which makes the salmon possible. So the salmon are feeding themselves.
And you can look in any biological community and you will see exactly that cycle, that flow of life to life to life to life around back. So it actually helps you to be part of the cycle.
And a lot of us, we don’t see it, we don’t live in it, we don’t understand it. Our culture doesn’t teach us about it. And we’re left on our own as adults to try to figure out where has this all gone so wrong because we lack that basic understanding that life is always feeding life.
DEBRA: I think that’s exactly right. That our culture is not teaching us. I know that for myself. I had to go find this information. It’s out there but nobody told me to go find it. Nobody suggested that it was there. It was just me waking up one day and saying, “I have to get out of the city and go live out in nature.” I didn’t know why I was doing that. I just knew deep inside of me that that’s what I needed to do. And there I just looked around and I said, “Wait a minute. Here’s the model for life. It’s not in the city. This is where we’ve gone wrong, is not understanding the basic fundamentals of life.”
And so what we do is we go and we cut down the trees and we make paper towels. And then the trees aren’t there and there’s not a river and then there’s not a salmon.
I’ve seen the salmon jump. I used to live in Northern California. I could just go. I lived in the San Geronimo Valley and there’s a place there where they come up in January and you can just stand there on this little bridge and watch them jump up over the rocks. It’s a very cool thing to have right there where you live and have your community celebrate that.
And that’s not what I get in the city. That’s not what I get in suburbia. But that’s how we all should be living. That reconnects us as human beings to nature.
LIERRE KEITH: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. The other thing is the more disconnected we are as a culture, the more we lose sight of what’s being lost every day. The descriptions of what the salmon runs were like here, you can hear them coming for 24 hours. It sounded like a thunder rolling. That’s how much noise the fish made. That’s how many fish there were. And I’ve heard this description of rivers, the world over. And once upon a time, the rivers would be black and boiling with fish. It was so dense with fish, you could walk across the river on the back of the fish. There’s a description like that.
So from everywhere, that’s how dense life was. And in a very short period of time, we’re reducing it all to desert. And I don’t know what we think we’re going to eat in 50 years or 100 years. The soil is gone, the trees are gone, the animals are gone.
The planet is skinned alive by agriculture and people need to start feeling the emergency of it while we still have time to turn it around.
DEBRA: I think so too. I totally agree with that. if you read these accounts of what nature was like earlier on, even a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago, and you think about the immensity of how long this planet is in here, and the difference, how much we’ve lost. And there are so many things that we can do. We just need to decide to do those things.
And when we come back from the break, Lierre and I are both going to talk about some things that we do in our own lives in this direction to consider nature and how to restore it better than damaging it.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and order her book, and also go to her website, which is there as well.
So Lierre, knowing what you know about nature, what are some of the things that you do in your life to apply that?
LIERRE KEITH: There are two levels. One is that I really encourage people to get politically involved and whatever ways they’re comfortable doing because honestly, we are up against some really vast, global and very brutal systems of power that aren’t going to give up without a fight.
So not everybody has to be a frontline activist. A lot of people don’t have the personality for it or they’ve got too much going on in their own lives. We’ve got children, we’ve got elderly parents. It’s just not going to work. But there are plenty of ways to get involved, to help the people who can be on the frontlines doing those kinds of direct confrontations of powers.
And then behind the scenes, we really need to be creating an entirely new culture. And that’s going to take everybody getting involved. We have to believe that democracy is possible. We have to believe that we can take our place again on this planet as animals who need a home, rather than destroyers of the planet.
So it’s pretty much every institutions from the top one down, we have to redo and we have to redo them, putting the earth first, putting those cycles of life before everything because without them, we’re all dead. And that has to be the center of our spiritual practices, of our interactions with each other, of the way that we make political decisions, all of that has to come first.
We don’t have a world that does that. What we have is a world that puts profit before anything else. And we also have a world that believes in those kinds of social hierarchies that are creating a lot of these problems.
So we need to believe that a better world is possible and then get engaged. And then in a more personal level, there are things that we are all called to do that just express who we are as unique individuals. And for some people that’s teaching children, and for other people, perhaps that means making music or writing books or stories. We’re all going to have the things we do that just make us happy.
So whatever those things are for you, try to center this idea that the earth matters and that we are dependent upon all of those relationships that have a biophilic a world view that loves life and understands that, if the center of whatever it is you’re called to do.
And so one of the things that is really important to me is just food and local food system. And the reason that that’s so important is it addresses so many multipronged problems all at once. So I know that when I’m buying from one of my local farmers who is engaged in what’s called pasture-raised farming, so the cows are out on grass all the time, and the chickens follow the cows, and the ducks follow the cows. All the animals are in rotation and they’re moved very quickly off the grass. This is basically the way that you build topsoil. And by building topsoil, this is important because it’s the number one way to sequester carbon.
We all think of global warming as starting with the beginning of the industrial age, when people started burning fossil fuel. That’s not actually true. Global warming started when people started doing agriculture because all of that carbon was in the ground, and when you do, in the soil, in fact. And so when do you agriculture, in fact, you’re destroying all that soil. And that means it’s coming to pieces and turning back into carbon being released into the air.
And it’s true that industrialization has been an incredible accelerant for this destructive process. But the beginning of it is actually agriculture.
This is a lot of information to pack into two minutes here but to have farming that’s based on actually using grass, using pasture lands, is the reverse of that because you are, in fact, repairing that ecosystem by leaving the perennial cover in place, so the grasses are always in place. And they’re sucking carbon out of the air. That’s what they do when they do photosynthesis. And it’s all getting stored in the ground.
In fact, a lot of the figures show that if we were to do this appropriately around the world, we could actually sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age in about 15 years.
And to me, that’s really the only the help that we’ve got. That’s it. We have to repair those grasslands. And what’s destroyed those grasslands is agriculture.
So that’s the primary wound. That’s where people went off the rails was when they took over entire biotic communities, destroyed the perennial cover, took down the trees, cloud up the prairie and then just used them for human use. So you’re sending all those other species into extinction because they’ve got nowhere to live. You’re destroying all the local waterways because all the soil just runs off into the water. Now, the fish have nowhere to go either. They’re all getting killed. You’re sucking up water from the water table underneath, and ultimately, turning what’s left of the soil into salt. That’s the salinization that you see everywhere around the planet. That’s inevitable with agriculture. And ultimately, all that carbon is being released.
So this is the destructive process from beginning to end. And when I was a vegan, I thought I was eating the right food, but I had no idea that agriculture was, in fact, this inherently destructive process. So by reversing that, by replanting those perennial species and repairing the grasslands and the prairies, and then you can eat food from inside in actual living community.
So rather than imposing ourselves across it and just growing corn or wheat or soy, you’re actually participating in the life on that land. So carbon is being sequestered, topsoil is growing every year instead of being destroyed, all those plants now have a place to live again and in a functioning prairie, one square meter should have about 25 different plants. So all that biodiversity comes back. You will instantly see birds, butterflies, insects, small mammals, amphibians. It creates little, tiny, mini wetlands everywhere if you do this right.
So all this life comes back instantly. I’ve seen places where it’s been a hundred years since they had birds. And all of a sudden, within a few years, there are birds nesting everywhere. Nobody has seen literally over a century because it was destroyed by agriculture. They had nowhere to live. And the moment you give them a place to come back to, they will because they want to live.
And you can be part of that repair by simply supporting the farmers who are doing this as well.
Most of my food comes from those kinds of farms. So I’m helping repair the planet, I’m helping a whole bunch of animals have really great life, the amphibians, all the way up to, if they do it well, they can live with the large predators as well. So everybody gets to come home again. You get to repair the water, you get to restore the water table, you get to sequester the carbon and you’re also helping one of your neighbors be able to earn a living.
This is important. So instead of giving all your money to these corporate robber-barons who are essentially gutting the planet for their profit, you’re actually giving money to a local person who needs to repair the roofs and send kids to college and do all that. Now, you’re circulating your money in a local economy. So you’re helping to rebuild a sort of relationship with humans that are way more based on justice rather than exploitation as well.
You can do all of that by simply buying local food from grass-based farms. And on top of it. It’s good for humans. This meets the amino acid profile that we need, the fatty acid profile that we need. It’s really perfect food. And if you think about it, that makes sense because we evolved from the Savannas from Africa eating exactly that. We’re large, grass-fed herbivores. So this is, in fact, the perfect food for humans as well.
So you can do all of that by something really simple, which is just buying food from local grass-based farmers.
The best website for this is run by Jill Robinson and it’s called EatWild.com.
DEBRA: Wonderful website.
LIERRE KEITH: He has a directory and you can find all the farms in your area that are doing this right. You may have to travel a little bit, but it’s worth it and you get a big freezer or you learn how to smoke and dry it, whatever you’re going to do. But you can find it actually quite pretty easily. Encourage your local co-op, your local food store to carry this stuff. That’s another political step you can take. And they get involved with other people in your area who also believe in this kind of local, sustainable, humane and appropriate human nutrition like the Weston A. Price Foundation. That’s a great group. There are other groups as well. This is just something I really care about because with one seemingly small act, you’re actually affecting all of this stuff.
And honestly, I think the most important thing is like what you’re doing by having a radio show, you’re getting the word out to other people.
DEBRA: Thank you.
LIERRE KEITH: Talking to everyone in your life, teaching your children a better set of values, talking to anybody else on your street, your neighbors, your friends, why this is so important and conveying the emergency of the situation because we don’t actually have a lot of time left before we reach those tipping points on the planet.
And if you love anything, it’s really time to step up to the plate and do what you can to save it.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And one of the things that I think is most fundamental that I like about your approach is that it’s very restorative. Everything you were talking about is not about saying, “I’m not going to do this.” You’re not saying, “I’m going to boycott factory farming so I’m not going to eat meat.” You’re saying, “How can I do the thing that is the best thing to restore life as a whole?”
And when that’s the question that is asked, then you come up with all these kinds of creative restorative things to do. You see what the solution is. And that’s always been at the basis of my work as well. Certainly, I’m telling people, don’t use toxic chemicals but that’s not the end of the story. The other part of it is to instead of using toxic chemicals, that you do the thing that’s restorative. And so always in my work, I have been talking about, here’s a less toxic product that you could use, an industrial product. But I’m certainly reaching out into the realm of artisans making things in their local ecosystems because that’s the sustainable model that is going to save everything.
Lierre is talking about it with food. I’m talking about it with products. Lots of people in the world are understanding this more and more. And that’s really the direction that we need to go.
That’s the end of the show. We’ve only got 15 seconds left. So thank you so much, Lierre.
LIERRE KEITH: Thank you for all your work.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thank you for all your work. We’ll just admire each other.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to all the past shows. You can listen to this one again. We’ve got to go. Be well. Bye.
False and Misleading Formaldehyde Label
From Debra Lynn Dadd
Yesterday I was in Micheal’s, a national chain craft store, and saw these giant clothespins sitting in a bin as I was waiting in line.
I looked on the label (lower clothespin in photo) to see what they were made of. Since it didn’t give the material, I slipped the packaging open to feel it, and it felt like wood, so I bought two. Purple is my favorite color.
When I got home and opened the package, there was another label inside that was not at all visible with the packaging. It was hidden under the other label!
This label very clearly states the product is made from MDF (medium density fiberboard) and is meets the Phase 2 California standards. I happen to know this is a “low emissions” standard, which is a clue that it is emitting formaldehyde, a carcinogen.
Even after all my years of examining products, I’ve never seen one like this, where the material is hidden and you can only see the material label after you buy the product. I wonder if this is illegal.
Non-toxic eye liner make-up
Question from Cypress
I am doing a big detox program and am more aware than ever of what I put on my skin.
I have not found an eye liner that does not sting or burn, either at the time of use, or later. I got one that was said to be made entirely of fruits and vegetables, though I did wonder how they made it black. It burned my eyes, both when I put it on and, particularly, later.
Does anyone know of an eye liner that really is friendly? I am not now looking for what SOUNDS good, but for actual experience as well.
Debra’s Answer
Well, this really is very individual, but readers, do you have a suggestion?
You might like this. Here’s a recipe to make your own eyeliner, from coconut oil, aloe vera, and charcoal.
This recipe is from a kindle book called All Natural Living: 75 Non-Toxic Recipes For Home & Beauty, which also has a recipe for making your own mascara as well as other beauty products and cleaning products. A deal at only $2.99
Problem with leather in newer car
Question from Jill
I have MCS . My old (and well tolerated) car was totaled in an accident. I finally got so desperate for a car (I live in mountains and have a child), that I bought a 2011 Subaru that had no detailing prior. I thought it might be old enough to be off gassed. I bought it from out of town and unfortunately didn’t have a long enough test time.
My former car (2003) had leather seats and I did fine with them – liked that they were so easy to clean if stuff got on them, especially scents.
Unfortunately, after spending enough time in the new car, I’m reacting terribly to the leather seats and leather steering wheel. After researching, I’m learning that it might actually be “fake” leather made from vinyl and some leather treated with chemicals, painted, and then impregnated with a “leather” scent. Either way – the leather – real or not – is causing terrible reactions. I saw online that even people without MCS have reactions to newer leather in cars, too.
I’m trying everything (super cleaned with baking soda, vinegar, safe cleaners, baked out in sun) and just bought seat covers in the hopes that will help. But the reactions are pretty severe. I’m wondering if anyone has ideas. I’m a but cautious to try ozone. Not sure if that has worked for others.
I did test out a lot of cars prior and didn’t do well in any. Mold issues are also a problem so older cars often have those. Not sure if I should try selling the car and search yet again for another, knowing none will be perfect, or keep working at this, and if so, how.
Thanks!
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any suggestions?
Nontoxic Antiseptic Cleaner for “Industrial” Setting
Question from ellen f
Can anyone suggest a non-toxic cleaner that would satisfy the antiseptic requirements for use in an “industrial” setting?
My husband goes to a health club where they use something so strong and nasty-smelling to clean the weight machines, it’s gotten to the point where when he comes home I can’t be around him even if he changes his clothes.
Emphasizing that the products pose a threat to everyone at the club, I finally got him to talk to someone there about it, and amazingly, the manager was concerned and told my husband that he would try to find something less toxic. He would like to know what I might recommend.
The replacement product has to be a germicide and must not degrade the vinyl on the machine seats.
Debra’s Answer
Hmmm…well here are some suggestions. I haven’t used these products so I can’t vouch for them. They probably want a commercial product and won’t go for something like an essential oil that has disinfectant properties.
One commercial product that says it is a nontoxic disinfectant is Shaklee’s Basic G, which you can get from a local Shaklee distributor. I’ve linked to this particular distributor not because I know her (I don’t) but because she wrote a very informative blog post about the product. It kills 99% of bacteria and lasts 3 days after application.
The other lead I have is from a children’s play center called Leaping Lizards. They say they use a non-toxic, 7 day germicide that keeps all of their inflatables and play areas clean and smelling fresh.
I couldn’t get them on the phone, so I don’t know what the product is, but since they are using it in a public space your manager might go for it.
Those were the best leads I could come up with for a public space.
Readers, any other suggestions?
Lubricating strips on razor blades
Question from SVE
Hi Debra,
How toxic are the lubricating strips on razor blades? This website describes them and lists polyurethane oxide – www.google.com/patents/US6993846. I do know I had a internal body reaction, not a skin reaction to the Gillette Sensor Excel razor blade.
I have ordered a steel razor holder and double edge razors (platinum) to use, at least temporarily. Do you have any suggestions here that would be best for avoiding reactions to toxins in razor blades? Thanks for all you do, Debra!
Debra’s Answer
I’ve never had this question before!
But good you asked it.
The plastic strip exudes a lubricant generally made from polyethylene oxide (not polyurethane oxide as you wrote).
Polyethylene oxide is another name for polyethylene glycol (PEG). A manufacturer says it is nontoxic and “approved by the FDA for use as excipients or as a carrier in different pharmaceutical formulations, foods, and cosmetics.” However, the MSDS says “After contact with skin, wash immediately with plenty of water” and “Not for use in Food, Drugs or Cosmetics” and “May cause skin irritation, May be harmful if absorbed through the skin.”
And here’s an article about PEG contaminated with 1,4-dioxane.
So I can see where your body might react to it.
How toxic is it? Personally I would use a razor without lubricating strips.
They Grow, Weave, Knit, and Sew Pure Clothes (and More)
My guests today are Klaus Wallner and Thammarath “Touch” Jamikorn, cofounders of Rawganique. When I first wrote about Rawganique many years ago, I called it “organic fiber paradise,” and it still is. Since 1999, the co-founders, with the help of a team of artisans, manufacture unique sweatshop-free organic clothing, footwear, bed, bath, and home products from start to finish. All done in-house with 50 artisans with many lifetimes of experience and passion. State of the art modern equipment. Ancient traditional practices. Grow – weave – knit – sew, they do it all. Small scale but full scale comprehensive. If it can be made with organic fibers, they can make it. Designed for and by chemically-sensitive and -averse folks. www.rawganique.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
They Grow, Weave, Knit and Sew Pure Clothes (and More)
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Klaus Wallner and Thammarath “Touch” Jamikorn
Date of Broadcast: September 18, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.
It’s a beautiful day today here in Clearwater, Cali – I used to live in California until twelve years ago. We’re in Clearwater, Florida. It’s Thursday, September 18th 2014. And today, we’re going to have a very special show. Well, I like to say that, but then I always say, “But all the shows are special” because all the shows are special in their own way.
This is a unique show. It’s even more unique than most of our unique things because we’re going to be talking about clothing and other household goods, but it’s all made in a very special way. There is choices, they grow, weaving it and so the purest clothing and household goods that I’ve ever seen.
It’s all done by a group of artisans and it is just a whole different way of producing goods. We’re going to hear all about that today and I’m just so interested to hear all about how they do this.
My guests are Klauss Wallner and – I’m not quite sure how to pronounce Tham Jamikorn. Is that how you say your name?
THAM JAMIKORN: Tham Jamikorn is good.
DEBRA: Tham Jamikorn.
THAM JAMIKORN: You can just say Tham.
DEBRA: Okay, great. I’ll do that. So we have Klauss and Tham.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Yes, hi!
DEBRA: Hi! They have a business called Rawganique like ‘raw’ and ‘organic’ put together and –que on the end like a boutique.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Or unique, yeah.
DEBRA: Or unique. Raw, organic, unique, if you put all those together, you have Rawganique. And if you can’t figure out how to spell this so that you can go to their website, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you’ll see the description of today’s how and you can just click on the link and go straight to Rawganique.
So tell us just to start with what happened in your life that led you from being in the standard industrial mindset to even thinking of doing this and tell us what it is that you’re doing. How did you even get to think about it and actually make this happen over a period of years because you’ve been doing this since 1999? That’s amazing.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Yup!
DEBRA: So tell us your story.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, there were a few factors really. One of them was that my mother passed away from liver cancer and prior to that, since college, I’ve been very interested in organic clothing and there wasn’t a lot at that time, and organic foods. I longed to grow my own food because I was reading Scott Nearing’s book, Back to the Land and all that.
DEBRA: Yes, I do too.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, it was so inspirational. Klauss also happened to be going to some festivals, which was in its nascent stages, the Raw Food Festival and stuff like that. So all of that came together and we decided to leave the city and go back to the land, grow your own food year round and homestead off-the-grid on solar panels and all that. People really started writing about our lives and how we are trying to live without chemicals in our lives.
Lots of feedback came in. People stated asking, “Where can you get this? Where can you get that?” and I’ve been doing that for so many years, I knew all the things. So we started offering a few things here and there starting with organic towels, bed sheet, shoes, socks, t-shirts and all that. And then it just grew from there in response to people’s demand.
KLAUSS WALLNER: So basically, there was…
DEBRA: And then how did you – yeah, go ahead, Klauss. Tell us about how did you got interested in this.
KLAUSS WALLNER: I slowly grew into the lifestyle of using all-organic clothing. I read the books, became more aware of things that I wanted to exclude from my life. And then I started searching around. It turned out that a lot of the items just don’t really exist like clothing. In the eighties, you could find some t-shirts and socks if you’re lucky, organic cotton, but they weren’t of the greatest quality and things like for weddings or for office attire or proper shoes, proper wear or in casual, yoga, martial arts wear. That just didn’t exist.
So we made it our project to find out where the quality items were. And what didn’t exist, we just thought about how we can make them. And that’s how this whole project was started.
DEBRA: I’ve been recommending your website for I think at least ten years.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Thank you.
DEBRA: …when I first found out about it. And what I wrote on my website was that this was organic fiber paradise because you had so many things that I couldn’t find any place else. They’re just beautiful designed and they appear to be of excellent quality.
It’s just a place that I think people can go and breathe a sigh of relief, that all the things that they’ve been looking for that they can’t find any place are here like shoes made out of hemp with natural rubber soles. I mean, it’s just your whole viewpoint of how you put things together and your underlying assumptions about life are different from almost any place else you look.
THAM JAMIKORN: Well, thank you very much for saying that. We quite appreciate it. One of the reasons we started was us being chemically sensitive. And so we had to find alternatives for ourselves. A lot of the product was a response to customer feedback and request and needs because we’ve noticed a trend of chemically sensitive people. The number of chemically sensitive people are on the rise. And so all of that came together, which motivated us to even go more and more into production and chemical-free everything.
KLAUSS WALLNER: It’s important I think that our work, Rawganique isn’t a top-down project where we come up with ideas and then try to educate others to it. It’s really a groundswell where we’re constantly learning from the needs of others whose lives with chemical sensitivity or asthma and things like that are just so restricted and they talk to us what products they won’t be able to use and challenge us to make those. That’s a wonderful creative process that we’re involved in.
DEBRA: It is! It really is. I would like to say again – because I come from that same background, I became interested in toxic chemicals because I was chemically sensitive and I couldn’t tolerate anything and I had to find out where were the toxic chemicals and then what products could I use. When I started in 1980 – well, I actually started looking for things in 1978 (that’s how far backwhen I first understood that toxic chemicals were making me sick) – there were so few things especially with clothing. it was just like if I wanted to wear even cotton, I mean organic cotton didn’t even exist in 1978. If I wanted to wear cotton at all, all I can wear is a t-shirt and jeans. That’s all that existed.
And so what made such an impression on me is that coming from this background that you’ve described where you and others that you’re serving where the primary concern is, “How pure? Can I find something pure enough and without chemicals so that I can actually wear it?”, but you’re also going that next step and making it so beautiful.
And so I just look at things on your website and I go, “Yeah, I could fill my house with this. I could wear this clothes and that anybody else, even if you’re not chemically sensitive, any person on the planet would be happy to wear your things.”
THAM JAMIKORN: That’s so nice. Thank you again very much. It’s wonderful! It’s amazing that you started so long ago to think about these things. That wasn’t even the mainstream topic of the day.
DEBRA: No, it wasn’t.
THAM JAMIKORN: [Inaudible 00:09:57] was really inspired by Silent Spring. It reached me and made a huge impression on me. So we just started looking at ways of doing things like going back 200 years. Well, how did they make socks? How did they make shirts and skirts and pants without machines and chemicals and all that stuff? That’s what informs our whole perspective. We started collecting heritage things in Europe and all over the world and then examining, “Well, how did they do this? By hand.” So that’s a huge thing for us.
DEBRA: We need to go to break, but I’ll just say that was exactly the process I did is that I started looking into history. So this is very interesting that you did too. We’ll go to break and then we’ll come back and talk about this some more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Klauss Wallner and Tham Jamikorn from Rawganique. You can go see their website at Rawganique.com or just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can click on the link because it’s easier than spelling it. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Klauss Wallner and Tham Jamikorn, co-founders of Rawganique. They’re at Rawganique.com. They grow, knit, weave and sew pure clothes all the way from the beginning to the end and household goods and things. They’ve been doing this since 1999.
So could you tell us before we go on in here more about how wonderful everything is that you do, could you tell us some about the toxic chemicals that would be found in clothing and household goods that you’re making that people will not find in your products?
KLAUSS WALLNER: We’ve done a lot of research on the toxicity that’s involved in growing the fibers, in processing, in softening, in the dyes of course and the wrinkle-proofing and all these things. They come packaged in materials and all that.
We really don’t want to stop at that point of feeling encaged in all these negativity that a lot of people are aware of in present times such as [inaudible 00:15:03] environment. But these times, they’re also very liberating because it’s amazing what we found out when we looked around for what you can do chemical-free. We connect it to artisans in Europe where the tradition of growing organic hemp and linen has never been broken. We’ve discovered amazing pure, handcraft artisan work that still continues.
DEBRA: But then let’s talk about that. Let’s just go ahead and talk about that and give us more details. Let’s start with the artisans that you’re working with and the traditions. Tell us more about that.
THAM JAMIKORN: Okay, like for example, you mentioned hemp shoes with natural rubber sole. Well, we have artisans [inaudible 00:15:49] who have been making shoes like cobblers for years and years going back generations. And so in the beginning, we approached them and said, “Well, is it possible to be able to do this with a fabric, you know a fiber in that leather with no chemicals?” and they were really open-minded in working with us. They said yeah, they know somebody in their village and stuff who hand-knitted hemp and hand-wove hemp and all that stuff.
So the dialog became about what we can do and what materials are available out there, so we started looking and found out that we can have access to 100% natural rubber that had been cut and mold to make soles and the [inaudible 00:16:31] is just all-organic hemp that we grow and weave because if you outsource a lot of these things, you’d come across situations where you’re not in control of what chemicals or processing go in because you ask us what’s not in our clothing and in shoes? Well, what’s not in anything that’s probably objectionable like formaldehyde, dioxins, wrinkle-proofing, chemical dyes. There’s none of that because we do everything from top to bottom. And so we’re able to not put anything of that in.
And I think our cause is more about what’s not in it than what’s in it, which is just organic cotton, organic linen and organic hemp.
DEBRA: I’m sitting here with a big smile in my face because I’ve been doing this so long and what I finally get down to after years and years and years is that it’s so difficult to find things for all the reasons that you just said that I’m always looking for, “Well, how can I make something myself? How can I start with the raw material and then make whatever it is I need with the most natural, least toxic materials?”
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, and that’s probably why we…
DEBRA: And you’re doing exactly the same approach.
THAM JAMIKORN: That’s probably why we sell tons of raw materials because people just got set up with like not knowing what’s in what. So it’s like, “Let me just get organic fabric or twine or rope or fiber and start weaving and start knitting.” I’m sure a lot of people out there will listen to you share your theme, do-it-yourself mentality, which is wonderful.
DEBRA: But what you’re doing is you’re taking that viewpoint that I have and you’re doing the work with the same care and concern that I would do it myself. And so it really is an artisan business and it’s not an industrial manufactured business, which has a whole different way of viewing things.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, exactly! Because out there there, it’s really small case. If we go to too big of a scale, then you can’t control a lot of the aspect, right? Every time I go and visit our tailor in Europe, there’s just warm and friendly and just so proud in what they do. They’ve been making products for us for so many years. They’re like friends and family.
And the reason we’ve got to be even more strict with ourselves and our standards is our customers are extremely vocal. They ask all the most detailed questions you can possibly think of, “Is this in there? Is that in there? How do you make this? How do you make that?” So it started our own dialog in ourselves to say, “Well, how can we make it even purer?”
So we’re always coming up with new things like 100% hemp sock, 100% organic cotton sock, 100% organic linen socks, things that people didn’t think of possible. You can go to 99%, but now it’s like, “Why not a hundred?” and things like that.
DEBRA: I love it! I love it, I love it because you’re just like going through the same process I go through. I have to say that probably some of those people who are asking you all these questions were asking them because they were reading my books.
THAM JAMIKORN: Ah, I agree. I can totally see that. They ask, “Why do you have to make elastic? Why do you have to put elastic in underwear? Well, how did people live 500 years ago, 200 years ago before elastic?”
DEBRA: Wait! Tell us. Answer that question. How do you make underwear without elastic?
THAM JAMIKORN: We just use 100% organic cotton, 100% organic hemp or 100% organic linen. You can do it. And actually, they’re comfortable. They’re actually functional.
KLAUSS WALLNER: And strings…
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, we draw strings.
DEBRA: Oh, strings. Yeah.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, exactly, we draw strings without the elastic in it. And so the whole thing is 100% organic. And of course, it’s possible, it can be done. People love it. We make the strings. We weave or we came up with this weave, this trim that’s really thin and light and so you don’t really feel when you tie the strings under your jeans or under your pants.
It’s comfortable because you can have it through any tightness you want without confining you or compressing against your waist or your skin.
DEBRA: Wow! Wow! This is so wonderful. This is so wonderful. We need to go to break again.
THAM JAMIKORN: The result of this years of endeavors and journey is actually a very simple product.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what it comes down to, yeah. Yeah, I need to go to break. But when we come back, then I want to hear more about all your products. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re having a wonderful conversation with Klauss Wallner and Tham Jamikorn about the clothing that they make at Rawganique. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Klauss Wallner and Tham Jamikorn, co-founders of Rawganique.
I just was looking at your site again. I keep looking at your site. During the break, I was just looking around. I just want to say, one of the most difficult things to find is organic wedding dresses and even more difficult is any kind of formal or business clothing for men. To find just a jacket that you could wear to work or wear to get married in is just almost impossible to the standards that you make them.
I was looking at how beautiful these pieces of clothing are. And the wedding dresses, these are made of organic hemp. They’re absolutely gorgeous, classic, couture kind of designs and they’re $299. You can’t buy the worst fabric, the most toxic wedding dress for $299.
THAM JAMIKORN: That’s wonderful. Thank you very much. Well, we started with – yeah, we don’t mark things up the same way that fashion houses do and that’s the main reason why. What the price reflect is the hand-made labor, the amount of time it takes our artisans to make this and the raw materials itself, the fiber and all that.
So we don’t think of fashion in terms of a business, but rather if people want to exchange their vows in organic clothing. That’s what we want to offer. For the bride and the groom, we have the whole thing.
It’s kind of funny because we have sort of been known as the hemp wedding central for many years because when the bride and groom get married, they want the whole party to be organic in a way.
DEBRA: Yes!
THAM JAMIKORN: From underwear to stock tissues to ties to vest to jackets to dresses. We kept coming up with new things that we can offer to make it a whole, complete experience. And that’s just what it is. We try to make it as pure as possible. It takes a long time to make each garment. I’m there all the time at the workshop where we make these things and it’s amazing, the amount of work that’s done when you do things the natural way. Everything is by done by hand.
DEBRA: Okay! So tell us how step-by-step all this handwork that’s being done.
THAM JAMIKORN: Okay. Well, first, the hemp is grown for this particular thing. It’s grown organically without any chemicals or pesticide or even water because the beautiful thing is in this part of Europe where we grow the hemp, it rains in the summer. So that’s where the hemp is actively growing. And by the time September comes, it’s harvested, October. And then the rain stops and so the hemp dries in the field naturally without chemicals or toxic [inaudible 00:29:41] that are often used.
DEBRA: Wow!
THAM JAMIKORN: So we ret it naturally. We dew-retting, river or stream retting to break down the fiber. And then we comb it mechanically without breaking it down with acids. So it’s mechanically combed to get these beautiful, long fibers, long staples.
And then we go into the weaving process. For wedding dresses, it has to be [inaudible 00:30:05]. And so we go with the finest hemp we can possibly do, which is about 18 meters per square yard. And then comes the cutting, the designing, the cutting and the sewing. And so it’s passed on from station to station.
We have a few sewers, maybe 14 or so. They specialize in different things. One person specializes in the color, one for the sleeves. And so the garment gets passed on from artisan to artisan and then it gets finished without chemical, detergents or anything. And then steamed iron, packaged and then there’s your wedding dress.
And so that’s what it means to us to be sweatshop-free because that’s one of our big concerns when we started. It’s about the whole sweatshop experience. So we want to make sure it’s all hand-made, handcrafted and no sweatshop involved.
DEBRA: So first of all, there’s no big machines that these are being made on. But when they’re doing the sewing, when you say by hand, do you mean it’s an individual person using a sewing machine or are they sewing/stitching by hand?
THAM JAMIKORN: Oh, no! Well, some parts of it, I hand-knit it. The lacy part of the wedding dress, for example, but yeah, what I meant by hand is that we still use sewing machines of course. But normally, I think in commercial production, you cut fabric, for example, 20 or 30 or 40 in a pile with a commercial cutter. Well, for us, we do the paper pattern and then we cut with scissors by hand just to make sure that it’s precise and all of that. So that’s what I mean by making things by hand. You feel and look at each garment, each process. But of course, we use the sewing machines too, yeah.
KLAUSS WALLNER: For me…
DEBRA: So individual human beings are making these. They’re making them in an artisan way like you would sew a dress at home as opposed to technicians?
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, we have really great working conditions, natural lights, not crowded and all of that. So individual artisans meaning yeah, exactly, they’re not a sweatshop part of a big factory or anything.
DEBRA: Right. And I think that that’s – I mean, even in the pictures, I’ve actually never seen any of your actual garments, but even looking at them in the picture, they have a quality of qualitiness, of excellence and artistry that you don’t often see.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, and we actually – because so many people are curious about our process, we make videos, mini-videos explaining and showing in audio-visual stuff how it’s made like how it’s grown, how it’s sown, how it’s knitted and all of that.
And we kept pushing the boundaries because a hundred percent hemp [inaudible 00:33:12] didn’t exist years ago when we started and now we’re making 100% hemp knit in tissue weight – really white, really soft almost like a heritage linen. We make a 100% organic linen knit, which is really are, 100% everything.
There’s just this challenge from customers, “Why can’t you? Why can’t you?” and we say, “Well, let’s see if we can” and it goes back and forth like that.
DEBRA: I just love this. I love this so much. I love the creative process. I love starting with a natural material and say, “What can it do?”, which is kind of the reverse of what I think in industrial products are designed more by there’s an industrial designer and they say, “Well, what are we going to do to fit this design?”
And so even though I don’t sell clothing, but with food, for example, it’s kind of the same process where I’ll look at some new ingredient that don’t understand like coconut flour, for example, which is so much better for you than wheat flour. I’ll say, “Okay, what will this coconut flour do? How can I create a really delicious [inaudible 00:34:19] or whatever out of this coconut flour?”
You’re doing the same thing. You’re taking these materials that are raw and pure and are as pure as possible and you’re saying, “Now, how are we going to turn this into clothing? What are the historical ways that people used these materials?”
I am just in heaven talking to you and looking at your website because that’s just so how I think.
We need to go to break. We’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Klauss Wallner and Tham Jamikorn from Rawganique. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on the Rawganique link so that you can be sure to get there. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Tham Jakiron and Klauss Wallner from Rawganique. And I forgot to come in and announce the show over the music because I was looking at the site at these beautiful dresses.
I have a hard time finding dresses. Well, first of all, there are no dresses in stores like this in terms of quality of fabric. But finding any dresses that are even – forget about organic cotton, even cotton that don’t have all the finishes on them and everything and now here are all these pretty dresses.
Here’s something that everybody needs to know about this clothing. It comes in size extra small to XXX large. So no matter what your size is, you can find something to wear on this website.
Talk to us for a minute about the dyes that you use because I see that you have all kinds of beautiful colors here.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Yeah, the sizing. We want to be as inclusive as possible. The dyes are actually fibro-reactive or natural. So we use natural dyes meaning vegetables, really vegetable-derived dyes where we can for things like socks and knit tops. There’s quite a choice.
The other items are fiber-reactive, which means it doesn’t use petrochemical [inaudible 00:40:16] and that’s the critical thing we believe in keeping it [inaudible 00:40:22]. And yet they are very stable. There’s no limit really to the dyes you can create there.
DEBRA: I think natural dyes just look so beautiful. They just have a softness to them that you don’t get with the chemical dyes.
And the other thing I want to say about the sizes is on the page where they’re showing the individual pieces of clothing, it has themeasurements – a whole list of like a dozen measurements for the different sizes. And so you can measure your body. It shows us a little diagram that shows us exactly where to measure and so that you can take your own measurements and order something that will actually fit! There’s no guess work about it. It’s just so thoughtful in every way.
KLAUSS WALLNER: What we do every day is when people ask us about sizing, when they’re not sure, we just ask them to send their body sizes and we, with our experience here at the warehouse measuring clothes, we find items that are most likely to work for them. It’s not all a blind guess in what you’ll get in the package, will it fit or not. We can measure it for them. We do that all the time.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, and the other thing about sizing that you started to mention is we really do want to be inclusive because over the years, people ask, “Well, what about my size? What about my size?” Well, we want everybody to be able to wear organic and that’s why we kept, again, pushing in both directions just to make sure that we have clothes for everybody.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I so appreciate that because I often can’t find things in my size and to have all these beautiful clothes in my size is really, really something.
So just tell us about more of the different kinds of products because we haven’t talked about all the products and we’re getting to the end of our time here, so I want to make sure that you mention all the different kinds of things that people can buy from you.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, we have over a thousand products as you may know. And so we encompass the whole range. I mean, one of the big things, of course, is organic shoes, organic hemp shoes with natural rubber soles and with glue-free sole and then elastic-free underwear, all-organic, 100% hemp socks, organic hemp socks, organic linen socks, bed sheets, organic bed sheets, organic linen sheets, hemp sheets, organic cotton sheets and towels like hemp towels, organic linen towels, shower curtains, hemp shower curtains, organic shower curtains, the list goes on and on.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Yoga mats.
THAM JAMIKORN: We have yoga mats, hemp yoga mats…
DEBRA: I want to say as I’m sitting here – hold on sec. Wait, wait, wait. Wait just a second. Hold on. As I’m sitting here, you’ve got this little slide show of different things on the page. What just went by quickly was a picture of the hemp shower curtain. You weren’t hanging it with metal hangers, you’ve got – I’m assuming hemp little braided hemp holders with little wood knobs on them. This is so great! It’s so great.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, I know. We tried to do everything with a natural materials. All the buttons either with coconut buttons or tagua nut buttons that helps out the Brazilian rainforest.
Also, one of the big things is shampoo. We have 100% organic top-of-the-line and there’s no chemical in it, just one to three ingrediens. That’s our body care line. Facial wash is 100% organic mungbean powder, organic jasmine rice powder. These are really simple that have worked for hundreds of years in different parts of the world. That’s the specialty that we do.
DEBRA: I can really see that you’re taking this viewpoint of using renewable resources as opposed to industrial materials, so that you’ll use wood or a shell or something instead of using something like metal, which has to be industrialized. I mean, certainly there was a metal age where people were pounding on metal and stuff like that. But in today’s world, if you’re using zippers and hooks and all those things, that’s all industrially processed where you’re looking in saying, “How can we take these materials that exist in nature in their natural state and when you’re done with it, will go back into the ecosystem and just biodegrade?” I mean, you just can’t get a higher standard than that.
THAM JAMIKORN: Well, that’s exactly what we think. We’re definitely on the same page with your book and your life philosophy. Our thing is to re-imagine everything that everybody uses and how to make it as natural as possible. We keep looking for new ways to do that without chemicals and synthetics.
KLAUSS WALLNER: We always draw inspiration from looking at the past because a lot of needs has been beautifully solved hundred years ago before the age of a lot of chemicals and plastics and it worked just fine.
THAM JAMIKORN: It’s amazing what you can do with this organic hemp, organic linen or organic cotton, almost everything.
DEBRA: Yes, I think you can. One of the things that I like to do is I like to go to places where they’ve re-created how life was in earlier times. I just go and I look and I see – what comes to mind first is a dress that I saw in a place like that where I knew that that dress was created by a woman sitting in that house hand-stitching every little stitch. What kind of design comes out of that when that’s the way it’s produced as opposed to how is it going to be produced on a machine?
I’m sure that a lot of the design issues in today’s clothing comes out of, “How can it be made on a machine?” as opposed to, “How would it be made whatever is the natural design?” And in the same way, food is designed for how it can be processed and put on a shelf instead of how does it taste good. You’re getting back to those basic life processes, those basic life design that you’re integrating what you do into the flow of life rather than in this separate industrial way of thinking.
I just can’t admire you enough for that because it’s just that’s the way we should be living. That is just the way we should be living. And when you’re talking before about scale, I was thinking that you can only grow your business to a certain size because of you can’t go beyond certain scale. But what you can do is you could replicate your business and have another small scale business. Not only you, but anybody could look at your business model and say, “Let’s think like this and let’s make a whole different kind of product.”
I mean, there’s millions of people in the world who need these products like this. This is the business model, this is the manufacturing mode, this is the production model, to be in alignment with nature like this. You’re doing it and you have it. You’re such a role model.
THAM JAMIKORN: Yeah, thank you very much. And we can’t agree more with your philosophy. We love your historical re-enactment. It’s interesting you mentioned that because we supply a lot of hemp rope, hemp twine, hemp fabric, linen fabric because people who do historical re-enactments wants to be authentic and they actually want to work with the actual material that were available 200 years ago. It’s just amazing. You go into the room and you actually feel time drop and you’re like, “Wow! I’m in a different planet. It’s amazing!”
KLAUSS WALLNER: Our goal isn’t so much to grow to a particular size. We enjoy being a family scale operation. That’s wonderful. Our goal rather is not to let anyone’s needs go unmet. So over time, as awareness spreads and more people want to purge their lives of chemicals and be as natural as possible in their clothing and their daily product, then we may need to grow and then we’ll find ways of replicating that multiple small scales.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. Wow! Well, we only have about 30 seconds left. So is there anything that you just want to say in closing really quickly?
KLAUSS WALLNER: Yeah. We’re at this point involved in bringing a lot of what we’re doing into the modern age, which is with the technologies of social media, of online things that have been developed the recent years. So we’re making a new platform called PureClothes, PureClothes.com where we have all these bells and whistles like customer reviews and…
DEBRA: I’m sorry, I have to cut you off because the closing music is going to come on any second. Thank you so much for being here and explaining all of these.
KLAUSS WALLNER: Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on the Rawganique link and go see their website. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.