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More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution

Diana-and-JimToday my guests Diana Kaye and James Hahn will tell us more about what goes on behind the scenes in the world of organic agriculture and the making and sales of organic products. We’ll be talking about politics and how regulations affect the distribution of organic products in the marketplace. This husband-and-wife are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. They own a small organic farm in lovely Middletown Valley, Maryland and have operated their organic herbal personal care products business there since 1996. Terressentials was originally started in Virginia in 1992. It grew out of their search for chemical-free products after Diana’s personal experience with cancer and chemotherapy in 1988. Prior to Diana’s cancer, they were involved in commercial architecture in Washington DC. Diana and James are proud to be an authentic USDA certified organic and Fair Made USA business. They are obsessive organic researchers and artisan handcrafters of more than one hundred USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products that they offer through their two organic stores in Frederick County, Maryland, through a network of select retail partners across the US, and to customers around the world via their informative web site. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/terressentials

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye and James Hahn

Date of Broadcast: September 17, 2014

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. Well, it’s raining today. We’re having a wonderful rain storm today here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s only 72°, which means it’s getting cooler. It’s not 90° and it’s so nice. I’m so happy that we’re getting cooler weather now. It’s getting to be fall.

And today, we are going to be talking about organic again with my guest, Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. We’ve been doing a series about different aspects of what organic means, what about organic certification, about how the products, different things about organic products, how organic agricultural products are turned into products, et cetera, et cetera.

So today, we’re going to be talking more about organic, about the politics of organic and about the regulation of marketplace distribution.
Hi, Diana. Are you there and James too?

DIANA KAYE: Yes, ma’am.

JAMES HAHN: We are.

DEBRA: Both of you. Good, good.

JAMES HAHN: Good morning, afternoon.

DEBRA: I wasn’t sure James was there or we just have Diana today. I’m so happy both of you are here today with me.

And so why don’t you just give us a brief introduction about who you are and why you’re interested in organics, how you got interested in this just briefly because I know that we’ve talked about this before. For our listeners who haven’t heard you before, give us a brief introduction and then we’ll get into our discussion for today.
DIANA KAYE: Sure! Jim, do you want to handle it or…?

JAMES HAHN: No, go ahead, Diana.

DIANA KAYE: Okay.

JAMES HAHN: Keep it short though.

DEBRA: Keep it short, yeah.

DIANA KAYE: I know. I do tend to ramble. Our journey into the world or organic personal care products occurred because we had been dealing with me having a surprise visit from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It was very urgent and we didn’t have a lot of choices or time to make choices and I ended up doing chemotherapy.
The chemotherapy was very, very strong and it really kind of made a mess of my immune system. It made me extremely reactive. It was baffling to us why this would happen, why I was reacting to everything.

That led us down the path (with the help of Debra’s book) to find out that I was reacting. My immune system have gotten so out of whack from double dose chemotherapy. It was an experiment that I became very sensitized to things in my environment.

So we began (as Debra, I’m sure you’re familiar doing) the whole weeding out of your place, examining every single thing that you come into contact with. One thing led to another and we were able to get our house pretty much cleaned out (with your help, thanks), we worked on our diets. We’ve done vegetarianism for a number of years. The remaining problem was caring for our bodies.

When we were looking at products in health food stores, they said ‘all-natural’ and yet we were seeing all these chemicals and we began this really long journey into learning all about cosmetic formulation, looking at patents, the patents and trademarks at the Library of Congress on microfilm and all these articles to find out how these products were made, what these chemicals were and why they were in these products.

And that led us to decide that we didn’t want to use these products on our bodies and dump them down the drains into the water, which we all have to drink.
JAMES HAHN: We literally couldn’t find products that met the standard we set for ourselves.

DEBRA: And let’s also just mention what year this was.

JAMES HAHN: When was that?

DEBRA: Nineteen ninety something. A long time ago.

DIANA KAYE: It was from 1989 until 1991. And then we began trying to find products for us to use. And during the course of that period, in 1992 is when we started our business as a catalog. We used to sell your books in our catalogs because we were trying to help other people who were like us seeking answers. And we wanted to be able to offer them body care products and household products, but we had a limited amount of things to offer people, which we thought bizarre because we were living in a major city. We’re thinking, “My goodness, if we can’t find products here in the Washington D.C. metro area, what are other people doing?”
DEBRA: Well, yeah. When I first started my work and I wrote my first book in 1982…

DIANA KAYE: Yehey!

DEBRA: At that point, I was just learning about where these toxic chemicals were, but I had a good idea of what it was that I was looking for in a natural product. All the information that I could find on all the products in all categories that did not have toxic chemicals as far as I could identify, it all fit in a shoebox, in 3 x 5 cards in a shoebox. That was it. That was all I could find.

Clothing, for example, if you wanted to wear cotton in 1982, it was a t-shirt and jeans.

JAMES HAHN: Right.

DEBRA: That was that.

JAMES HAHN: Back then.

DEBRA: And so I want to applaud the two of you for being among the first to even be looking at this issue in the body care area.

DIANA KAYE: Also, Jim is a registered architect and I’m a designer. And so we also took a lot of courses in non-toxic building design. I mean, we really went to a lot of great depth just like you did to try to get our environment clean.

But the body care stuff, the more we learned about how your main sources of toxic exposure are skin absorption (number one), inhalation (number two), food by your mouth is number three…

DEBRA: It is number three. Yeah, because when you inhale something or you put it on your skin, it goes straight into the blood stream.

JAMES HAHN: Yeah.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, yeah.

DEBRA: If you put it in your mouth, it goes down through your digestion and mixes with the protein and the food and the fats and everything and it’s a much slower process to get into your body.

So really, if you’re thinking about toxic chemicals, you need to be most concerned about what you’re breathing and putting on your skin.
DIANA KAYE: And with personal care, you get a double whammy…

DEBRA: It’s both.

DIANA KAYE: …because if you’re buying a personal care – and for example, if it’s a shampoo, a foamy, bubbly substance, it’s a detergent-based product laced with preservatives and usually, even the health food stores, chemical fragrances – you’re absorbing all of these chemicals when you’re putting it on your head. But the worst part is all day long, you’re now surrounding yourself with these volatile compounds that are [inaudible 00:07:59] from your hair all day long.
DEBRA: Right, right.

DIANA KAYE: So yeah, it’s really a can of worm. And that, all of those reasons and that history is why we felt compelled to start making our products and sharing them with other people.

And like you, I think we wanted to share this information because the more people that knows, the fewer chemicals we have to deal with. I mean, it might be a little selfish, but…

DEBRA: Well, I don’t think it’s selfish. But it’s like I got to this point where we can think about ourselves as individuals. I think this is an important point. We can think about ourselves as individuals, but then we go out into an environment where everyone else is still doing the toxic thing.

And so it’s not about us staying in our non-toxic homes, it’s about the whole world being toxic-free because when everybody lives toxic-free, then everybody can have a happy life, all the different species can live. A tree doesn’t have a choice, a butterfly doesn’t have a choice…

DIANA KAYE: No.

DEBRA: …to not choose toxic products. And yet we’re putting all that toxic. All these toxic things end up being toxic waste, the things that we use end up out in the environment as toxic waste and all the other species have no protection against this.

JAMES HAHN: Yes.

DEBRA: And so we’re just killing species right and left. Pretty soon, we’re not going to have all these what we call ‘natural resources’ in order to make products that we need for our own life if we keep killing them.

DIANA KAYE: Absolutely. It’s so stirring that we’re disrupting the balance of the planet. We need, we depend on the tiniest insect, the butterfly.
DEBRA: Right!

DIANA KAYE: We need all of these animals. We need the creatures that are living in our tainted waters to maintain the balance of this planet.

That worries us so much every day. That’s another reason why we’re so passionate about – you know, I think we’ve come to expect after 22 years that we may not see a major change in our lifetime. But Debra, I have to tell you, since you wrote your book and since we started our company ten years later, I have seen some changes…

DEBRA: I have to.

DIANA KAYE: …and that gives me hope. It makes me feel better. but I think we still have a lot of work to do.

DEBRA: We do. We’ve come a long way and we still have a long ways to go. So we need to go to break. And when we come back, we’re going to start talking more about organic. You’ve been telling us a lot of great things and there is more to hear.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. That’s Terressentials.com. We’ll be right back!

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials and we’re talking about organic.

Okay! So where would you like to start? Would you like to start with politics or the regulations of marketplace distribution?

DIANA KAYE: Oh, boy! Politics, huh?

JAMES HAHN: Everything starts with politics.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, yeah, doesn’t it?

DEBRA: Alright! Then let’s start with politics. Go ahead.

DIANA KAYE: Well, I think the biggest surprise to us in the early years of our business was finding out that number one, there was no legal definition anywhere in the United States for the word ‘natural’.

DEBRA: And there still isn’t.

JAMES HAHN: That’s right.

DIANA KAYE: No. No, there still isn’t. And in fact, it’s just – oh, my gosh! We’re going to call this the ‘misrepresentation’ of that word in the marketplace in many different product categories is just frightening. It’s just become so widespread.

DEBRA: Could I just say something first about the word ‘natural’ as it pertains to body care products. That is that if you go into – like this was particularly true when I first started and Diana and James first started. There was a field called ‘natural beauty care’ or whatever it’s called.

If you look at the ingredients, the ingredients originally start as something that is not a man-made petroleum product. It originally starts with something like a coconut. But most of the ingredients in these so-called natural products are industrial chemicals because the…

JAMES HAHN: I have to say something about that.

DEBRA: Yeah.

JAMES HAHN: And that is if you think about it, everything that exists, the cellphone on my desk, the car parked outside, everything that exists, all the parts came from something in nature. Silicon came from sand and the metals were mined. Everything comes from the earth, but if it’s changed into something else, it’s not natural, what you’ve done.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. And so I think the ‘natural’ industry – and we even do call it the “natural” industry, the natural industry tries to delineate that their source ingredients are renewable resources like plants and animals and minerals and that they’re not the bad petroleum, man-made chemicals.

But petroleum is from nature as well. I mean, I remember going to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and you can see the tar oozing out of the ground. That’s just part of the same petroleum that we make plastics out of, it’s just a different form. But all these man-made petrochemical petroleum things, they’re all from nature, but that source material is modified by man, by industry.

Now, it doesn’t matter if you start with petroleum or you start with a coconut, it all goes into the industrial system and it comes out with something altered. And if you look up how a coconut become sodium lauryl sulfate, there’s lots of manmade chemicals involved in that and lots of man-made processing. And so sodium lauryl sulfate, I’m sorry, is not the same as a coconut.

DIANA KAYE: No.

JAMES HAHN: No, it’s [inaudible 00:17:26].

DEBRA: It’s not.

DIANA KAYE: No.

DEBRA: And so that’s what a lot of natural products are.

JAMES HAHN: Yes.

DIANA KAYE: We address that with an article that we call Bursting the Bubble. The article was writing to try to decipher the technical, scientific information about how to process these various chemicals, oleochemicals, surfactants and emollient, et cetera.

And so when people think about these natural and safe surfactants that are in the shampoos that they’re using on [inaudible 00:18:06], they’re not understanding that as you pointed out, they have been coconut oil, but then it’s put into a reactor, which is very similar to a nuclear reactor in terms of the pounds per square inch, the intensity of the pressure and also in terms of the core heat. These giant vessels, these industrial vessels will incorporate a liquid-heavy metal that’s used as a catalyst…

JAMES HAHN: …in many cases.

DIANA KAYE: …in most cases. And many of these heavy metal constituents they’re using are in nanoparticle forms (the smaller the particle, the greater the reaction). And then once the temperature and pressure reaches a certain point, there’s often a petrochemical agent or two added (ethyleenoxide is one) to the process to crack and split these molecules into new things that never before existed in nature. And voila! They’re sold as safe, baby products.

DEBRA: Well, yeah. And it says on the label. It’ll say the name of the chemical and in parenthesis afterwards, it says ‘coconut’.

JAMES HAHN: Yes.

DIANA KAYE: Yeah, that is…

DEBRA: And so you look at that and you say, “Oh! Well, this is coconut. It’s natural,” but it’s not. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not.
JAMES HAHN: It’s not.

DIANA KAYE: No, not at all. And this is an experiment. This is a giant experiment and people are subjecting themselves as guinea pigs.

JAMES HAHN: Not willingly.

DIANA KAYE: No!

DEBRA: No.

DIANA KAYE: But they’re trusting this word ‘natural’. And that is the huge problem. That is something that we feel in the world of politics really needs to be addressed. What we’ve seen is that the government has been reluctant to do anything in terms of defining this word although curiously, there is a definition for ‘non-synthetic’ in the National Organic Program Regulations in the section of ‘Definitions’. How about that?

DEBRA: Wow!

DIANA KAYE: Yeah. And non-synthetic equals natural. So technically, we have one that nobody pays attention to and I think that they’re sorry they ever put it in there because over the last 15 years, we keep pointing this out to people.

I think there has been some class action lawsuits in the food world, in the personal care world where the lawyers are basically seeing opportunities to try to set the records straight and it has worked to some extent.

JAMES HAHN: It’s making a part of a difference so far.

DIANA KAYE: But it’s the shame that we have to depend on lawyers and the legal system, class action rather than having enforcement of the law by the agents of the government that has this enforcement power within their reach. It’s at their hand and they’re able to do that. That’s the world that we live in right now.

JAMES HAHN: And see, there, you’re getting [inaudible 00:21:09].

DIANA KAYE: Right! So…

DEBRA: Alright! So now we have to go to break once again. When we come back, we’ll talk about politics.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, boy!

DEBRA: Let’s see at 12:57, we’ll talk about all these. Okay! You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn who has so much to say about organics and we’ll hear more when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. So now, we’re going to talk about politics and organic.

DIANA KAYE: It’s so weird that we have to mix politics in with fine organic skin care.

DEBRA: I know! I know, I know, I know.

DIANA KAYE: Oh!

DEBRA: I mean, we should be able to just make things out of the renewable resources at hand and use them to make our bodies clean and healthy.

DIANA KAYE: I know. And that’s what we really had intended just to be able to blend these beautiful, organic and edible butters and essential oils and the herbal extracts with beautiful things like clay from the earth and salt and just have things that would nurture us.

JAMES HAHN: When we started, we hoped to spend all of our time doing that.

DIANA KAYE: But we quickly learned that we had to actually get heavily involved in the politics. And the problems that we’re having is that there are so many giant corporations – and let’s not just limit to the U.S. because this is not just a U.S. problem. This is…

JAMES HAHN: World wide.

DIANA KAYE: …an international problem. We have giant corporations that are making body care products around the world and they love the word ‘natural’. They have loved it for decades now.

JAMES HAHN: Because consumers do.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

DIANA KAYE: They do not want to give that up. And then something strange happened 20 years ago. They found out about the Organic Foods Production Act and saw a huge opportunity to use the word ‘organic’… with abandon, I might add.

JAMES HAHN: Without meeting…

DIANA KAYE: …any organic standard. And so that’s what the companies did on a global basis. They jumped on to this organic bandwagon. Natural wasn’t good enough. Then it became ‘organic’ and they don’t want to give up that word. They’ve been giving it up slowly, but reluctantly, some companies, but other companies see it as an incredibly profitable buzz word if they can put on their website, on their product…

JAMES HAHN: …on their store, on their salon and spa.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, exactly! I mean, we’ve sen it driving it by on a sign outside a salon.

DEBRA: Well, let me ask you a question because I think this is the question that’s running through all the listeners’ mind right now and this relates to politics. Isn’t there a law about using these words?

DIANA KAYE: What do you think? There is a federal law called the National Organic Program, which was signed into law in October of 2012 and that was the result of the Organic Food Production Act of 1990.

The USDA, with consumer input, put together these regulations. They were published on the federal register for public comment. There were more than 200,000 public comments generated, more public comments generated regarding input into the Organic Program Regulation than any other law in history of law-making. And yet despite that, we have virtually no enforcement in the personal care world over the word ‘organic’.

JAMES HAHN: Well, what started in the beginning when the National Organic Foods Act came out, we thought that was really pretty terrific. And then the USDA said, “Oh, by the way, you cannot apply this to body care products” and we said, “What?”

DIANA KAYE: Because we had spent ten years formulating our product to the Organic Foods Production Act and we were ready to rock as soon as the rules went into law, it became a final law.

This was very disturbing to us and a couple of other companies…

JAMES HAHN: …not very many.

DIANA KAYE: No, not very many, but a few that we had been working with in the Organic Consumers Association, they filed a complaint. And then the USDA said, “Okay. Well, we changed our mind. We’ll let you all. If you want to seek certification, we’ll let you do it. You can get certified to this organic program.”
So that little waffling caused us a little bit of time because for basically a year, they said we couldn’t get certified to the new law. And then they changed their mind after a complaint was filed and we were able to get certification.

And so the industry though, the other giant – we’re a very tiny company, but many giant corporations were unhappy with this turn of events.

JAMES HAHN: You can’t believe.

DIANA KAYE: And again, they didn’t want to give up their use of the word ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ because they have been using those words to promote those products. And again, internationally, it started to split off and a lot of manufacturers working with their suppliers and their distributor, their retail store partner began to create their own so-called “organic” and “natural” standard independently of USDA National Organic Program Regulation to justify their use of the word ‘natural’ and ‘organic’.

JAMES HAHN: There’s something that’s really important I need to jump in here with and that is even though the USDA said, “Okay, you can get your body care products certified to our standard, we changed our mind,” even though they said that, they said, “We will continue to enforce the organic standards for foods and agricultural products. But in our opinion…” – these are not literally their word, but they said, “In our opinion, the body care products don’t count as agricultural products. Therefore, we’re not going to enforce that field at all… at all.”

DEBRA: But that’s so funny.

JAMES HAHN: I know.

DEBRA: I mean, it’s not a laughing matter that they’re not doing it, but what’s funny about it is that it just kind of goes to the mindset I think and the understanding of how people think about things because obviously, food is an agricultural product. Obviously, body care is not because it’s made from all these industrial chemicals.

DIANA KAYE: Right.

JAMES HAHN: Exactly! In other words, what it came down to…

DIANA KAYE: Jim…

JAMES HAHN: Go ahead, I’m sorry.

DEBRA: Let me just finish, okay? I want to hear everything you have to say. If people thought of body care the way you and I think of body care as being made from agricultural products, of course, it should be certified organic and of course. But I can see where the common way of thinking about body care product is that it’s an industrial product.

DIANA KAYE: Right! But that’s what we have to change because that’s what’s been causing us problem. The bizarre thing is that farmers, the majority of farmers today thinks that the application of pesticides and herbicides, that’s the traditional farming method.

DEBRA: No!

DIANA KAYE: And the organic method where you don’t use chemical input, “Well, that’s a strange alternative thing.” I mean, this is a crazy world that we live in.
DEBRA: No, using pesticides to grow food is a strange, alternative thing.

DIANA KAYE: Yes!

JAMES HAHN: Yes.

DEBRA: …if you look at the whole history of growing food.

DIANA KAYE: It’s totally bizarre. And there were people who said, “Oh, you can never make organic body care products.” This is what we were told repeatedly and we said, “Really?”

JAMES HAHN: [inaudible 00:34:18]

DIANA KAYE: “…because we’re doing it.” In fact, there was an archeological dig outside of London (this is now 10 years back) where they actually found a tin in this – they were excavating a road on the way to a temple and they found a tin of cream that was nearly 2000 years old and they analyzed this cream. All these scientists were fighting over it. And they finally got to analyze it. It’s very interesting. What they found out strangely, amazingly was that this cream 2000 years old was still viable.

JAMES HAHN: And when Diana says cream, she means skin cream.

DEBRA: Wow!

DIANA KAYE: It was a skin cream.

DEBRA: Wow!

DIANA KAYE: In fact, the cool thing was the woman – and we presume it was a woman, her fingerprints were dipped into the cream and you could still them after 2000 years.

DEBRA: I love this! And I have something to say about it when we come back from the break. We have to hurry up and go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re going to continue with our discussion about organics.

Here’s what I wanted to say before the break. Now, I’m going to tell you something personal about me that I’ve never said on the radio before.
DIANA KAYE: Ooh…

DEBRA: First, I have to say before I can tell you this, I have to tell you that I’m half Armenian. My mother was 100% Armenian. And so I grew up in a family where my grandparents – I mean, I had this whole half of my family was Armenian with that whole kind of ancient, middle eastern viewpoint.
And so I grew up culturally with belly dancing in my family. I know that a lot of people think belly dancing is strange, exotic, sexy, et cetera. But you know what? Belly dancing, I read a book not too long ago about belly dancing, the history of belly dancing. What I found out from belly dancing was that it was not designed to seduce men. What belly dancing was designed for was as a health exercise for women.

JAMES HAHN: Really?

DEBRA: All those movements are to get women’s bodies – it’s like doing Tai Chi or something like that where it’s a series of movement that enhances the flows in your body to be healthy.

DIANA KAYE: Wow! Wow.

DEBRA: And as I was reading this book that contained that information, it also said that women in these cultures, ancient cultures, they made their own cosmetics. The reason they made their own cosmetics was because that was one of the few areas of life where they had control over their own life, it was to make their own cosmetics.

I’m almost in tears now even just saying that because these are the things that culturally and historically belonged to us to make for ourselves and as food for us to cook for ourselves. They’ve been so taken over by the industrial system.

JAMES HAHN: Argh!

DEBRA: They’ve taken away our creativity and our self-determinism and our connection with nature and all of these things. And even though you’re making products and selling them in a consumer way, it’s so much closer to what people used to do, that they were making their own cosmetic products, their own body care products. All these things that they used to nourish and take care of their bodies, women made them themselves. And that was what happened for millennia.

DIANA KAYE: Absolutely.

JAMES HAHN: For sure.

DIANA KAYE: Absolutely. In fact, women, they were the guardians. They took care of the sick, they nurture the children, they took care of the communities. They were in touch with the plants!

DEBRA: …with the plants! They know which plants did what.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, yes!

DEBRA: That is our heritage as women, to have that information and to make these things and to have a nourishing home. And instead of doing those things, what we do is go to doctors and we buy products.

DIANA KAYE: Yeah.

DEBRA: When I realized that, when I learned that by studying history, I started doing all those things myself because I wanted to have that birth right of doing it. And so I think that the highest good that we can do as individuals is to reconnect in that way and that you’re doing that in a way of showing people how wonderful these products are.

DIANA KAYE: It makes me cry.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So when you do something yourself, when you go out, when you plant herbs in your own backyard and you make something yourself or even if you buy the ingredients and make it yourself, there is less of government regulation and government interference because it’s more directly you and nature. And that’s the way life is designed to be.

There! I’ll stop being philosophical.

DIANA KAYE: No, it’s absolutely true. The reason again that we started to make these products is that people today, people’s lives are so intense. They’re so busy. They’re so pressured. There’s so much stress. We wanted to have products that were just like all the products that we were talking about, things that have been made for thousands of years.

When they analyzed that cream that they found on the road to the Roman temple outside of London, when they finally were able to analyze it just three years ago or four years ago, they found out that the formulation was remarkably sophisticated and it was virtually identical to what we’re making today with our creams.
DEBRA: Yes. Yeah.

DIANA KAYE: So we’re saying to people that it can be done.

DEBRA: It can be done.

DIANA KAYE: Big companies say it can’t be done because you know what? It’s really expensive to preserve a product with organic herbal extracts and essential oils. It’s really expensive. If you look at a little bottle of an herbal extract in the store, a 1 oz. or a 2 oz. bottle and look at that cost for 1 oz. bottle and then if you compare it to phenoxyethanol, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate, the parabens and all these other synthetic, industrial, chemical preservatives…

JAMES HAHN: …dirt cheap.

DIANA KAYE: They’re dirt cheap. You’re talking pennies per pounds. They’re so toxic…

JAMES HAHN: And the same thing goes for the other thing, the emollients.

DIANA KAYE: Right! The synthetic fatty acid, the bubbly, foamy surfactant. They’re way more inexpensive to produce than real [inaudible 00:44:48] or buying virgin, extra virgin olive oil or virgin coconut oil, all certified organic.

But these things are precious, they work and frankly, we are also so disturbed talking about politics by the psychological manipulation through photoshopping and imagery where corporations are preying on a woman’s psyche to manipulate her into feeling that she won’t be loved, she won’t feel important and she has no value.

DEBRA: And she won’t be beautiful, she won’t be beautiful.

DIANA KAYE: Right, right! Unless she alters her body, colors her hair, uses make-up, uses all these toxic body care products.

JAMES HAHN: That’s a whole show of its own right there.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, my gosh!

DEBRA: That is a whole show. We should probably do that one day. But we only have a few minutes left of this show, so I want to make sure that for a couple of minutes, let’s just talk about the regulation and marketplace distribution because that was in the title of the show.

JAMES HAHN: Yes.

DIANA KAYE: My goodness, yes.

DEBRA: You know, I think for the next one, I think we’ll just say, “Diana and Jim are going to talk.”

DIANA KAYE: No, no. Debra, your questions are great.

JAMES HAHN: “…about whatever you want.”

DIANA KAYE: You really understand, which is why it just makes you such a great hostess for this show because you have studied for 30-something years. You get it like us.

DEBRA: Yes, I have. Thank you.

DIANA KAYE: So few people get it. And that’s what’s so important about your question. You’re really good at this. You’re good at translating the information so that people will understand what we’re talking about and getting the importance and how it relates directly to their personal health and whether or not they’re going to live a long, healthy life or have a short where they’re battling illness constantly.

That I think is why we’re on the same page and why we love your questions.

DEBRA: We are at the same page, we are.

DIANA KAYE: In terms of the marketplace situation, first of all, there is still the Organic Certification Program. Personal care product companies can choose to seek this. And honestly, I have reviewed personally every single body care standard that’s out there. Oh, my gosh, how boring.

JAMES HAHN: World wide.

DIANA KAYE: Yes, reading all these industry standards. There really aren’t very many government standards. The U.S.A. has the most potent one in terms of its restrictiveness and what you can and cannot use to make organic products and/or to grow organic raw materials.

So really, based on all of our research, the USDA Organic Certification is still the no.1 organic certification.

We’re sad because there are rules where youc an use clays. This is just one example of something that – it’s not ideal. You can use clays to filter food. You can use clays as ingredients in food products and in livestock beef, but they don’t grow. They’re not organic. They’re allowed, but they’re not organic.

Like for example, we have a product, our hair wash, which the bulk of it is clay, a natural clay that comes from the earth. It’s wonderful and amazing.

JAMES HAHN: It’s the dictionary definition of natural, not the marketer’s definition.

DIANA KAYE: Right!

DEBRA: Right, right!

DIANA KAYE: The only human alteration there is grinding it up into a powder that can be utilized to cleanse the body.

You mentioned Zeolites in a promotional piece. Again, Zeolites are allowed in animal feed and they’re so healing and wonderful. But they count against you – clays and Zeolite.

A salt is considered neutral, which we think all minerals, all clays should’ve been considered neutral. But the only thing that’s considered neutral under the rag is salt.
JAMES HAHN: I think they weren’t thinking far enough ahead.

DIANA KAYE: No, I don’t think so either.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

DIANA KAYE: So you can have a product that still can be totally natural, but it may not be certifiable to the organic [inaudible 00:48:52].

DEBRA: And I think that that is a problem because if somebody is looking for something that is I’ll say ‘of nature’ in the sense of it being a renewable non-industrial ingredient, close to its natural state as it appears in the world, then something like clay or salt or Zeolite or all of those things meet that standard.

DIANA KAYE: Oh, my God! Yes.

DEBRA: And I think, my opinion is that your hairwash, for example, that has so much clay in it, that’s about as natural of a natural product as exists in the world. But I understand you can’t get certified for it because it’s got ingredients in it that are not agricultural products.

DIANA KAYE: Isn’t that crazy? And yet there are all these companies with chemically, bubbly, detergent shampoos laced with chemical preservatives boldly calling these products organic still being sold on the shelves of health food stores across America.

DEBRA: Oh, I’m not even watching the clock. We have to go.

JAMES HAHN: We’ve got to go, Diana.

DEBRA: Thank you so much.

DIANA KAYE: Thank you.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

DIANA KAYE: You’re a lifesaver, kid.

DEBRA: Thanks!

The Vegetarian Myth: Why A Vegetarian Diet Might Not Be Best for Health or the Environment

Lierre-keithToday 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.” Lierre and I will both share our experiences The Vegetarian Mythwith vegetarian eating (Lierre was a vegan) and why we needed to move away from these diets to regain our health. Lierre’s viewpoint goes way beyond the taste and nutrition aspects of food, to looking at the whole big picture of environment, politics and our own wellbeing. 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. She’s been arrested six times for acts of political resistance. www.lierrekeith.com

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Vegetarian Myth: Why a Vegetarian Diet Might Not Be Best for Health or the Environment

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lierre Keith

Date of Broadcast: September 16, 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 to live toxic free. It is Tuesday, September 16, 2014, and it’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s overcast, so it’s not too hot or starting to come in to autumn.

After a long summer, you just get to that point where it’s so nice that it’s even 10 degrees cooler. And that’s how I’m feeling today. I’m just very happy that we’re coming into autumn and winter, which is the most beautiful time of year here in Florida.

So today, we’re going to be talking about food and specifically, about the vegetarian diet. My guest has written a book. Her name is Lierre Keith. She’s written a book called <em>The Vegetarian Myth</em>, and we’re going to talk about her experience, and my experience of each of us being on a vegetarian diet, and why it didn’t work for us, and some of the scientific reasons why we both think that it’s not the right diet for human beings.

This book has been very controversial. And so I would just ask you to listen and just decide for yourself if this information that we’re talking about today is right for you. This is actually, as it turns out, part 1 of two parts, because I have read this book from cover to cover. I read it when it first came. It is one of the books that has the most yellow highlighting in it and scribbles all over the margins as I agreed with her over and over and over from my own experience and my own research.

And so we’re going to talk about the vegetarian diet today. Next Tuesday, the 23rd, we’re going to talk about the other half of the story which is talk to about how our connections with nature and food. Both of us have a lot to say on that subject, so we decided to just do a second show and talk about that next week.

But today, we’re going to talk about the vegetarian diet starting right now.

Hi, Lierre.

LIERRE KEITH: Hi. Thanks for having me on your show.

DEBRA: Thank you so much for being here. Go ahead.

LIERRE KEITH: That wasn’t me.

DEBRA: Let’s start with your story about your experience with the vegetarian diet, and what led you to write this book.

LIERRE KEITH: I became a vegan when I was 16. I was a very impassioned young person. I cared a lot about the state of the planet, and the state of human justice as well. And I met another teenage vegan. And that is the way that actually most people become vegetarian or vegan, is that they meet somebody, and they are convinced by the arguments and the information.

And I was convinced in about two weeks. This was information that I had never been exposed to, and when you hear about the horrors of factory farming, it is very compelling, and it should be. There’s really no reason for anything should be something like that.

So I was overwhelmed by what I had been participating in just by eating. And it’s a very compelling argument.

So this other young girl and her family, they were vegan, and they were able to answer all my questions about it, and I had no counter-information. It was the best that I had at that point.

So I went into it, just full course.

So I was a vegan for almost 20 years. My health declined and then collapsed. And I still did not realize that it was the diet that had destroyed me. It is really hard when you are in that world to engage with counter-information.

A part of the problem with being a vegan is that it becomes your identity. It becomes who you are. It’s not just the diet. It’s not even just the philosophy. It becomes your sense of self, and of course, you surround yourself by other people who agree with you on that and also makes this a part of their identity.

And when you get to that point where you’re willing to start questioning or you’re willing to start engaging without that information, it was like a friend. This is a story I’ve heard over and over [inaudible 00:04:29] community. You’re driven from the garden.

And so you know that as it starts to sail. People just go through such a terrible time. First of all, your own sense of yourself collapses, your own sense of morality and ethics and is this supposed to be the right thing, why isn’t working, I must be doing this wrong, this incredible turmoil, but in the back of all of that you know that half of your friends are no longer going to speak to you if you tell them that you’re considering changing your diet.

I’ve seen marriages break up over this. It can be really terrible.

So all of that is going on, and in the meantime, I’m a very curious young person, and I do start investigating more fully. What are these foods that I’m eating? Where do they come from? And what is the cost of […] all of this?

And of course, every time I step outside of that charm circle of vegan ideals, I’m coming up against completely counter-information about the level of destructiveness of the foods that I’m eating. None of this meshes.

So I lived with that kind of tremendous disjuncture between these different branches of knowledge and how they come together or not. And you do live in incredible turmoil.

So a lot of times, this is causing a dissonance. You set it aside. And I think for a lot of us, we really reach that final point when we’ve done permanent damage to our bodies. And I can’t pretend anymore. And that’s a terrible day. I’m sure you know yourself, nobody gives this up easily. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.

But on the positive side, it meant that I was finally free to engage with all that information that I had been collecting over 20 years about what true sustainability might look like, about the number of animals that were actually dying, depending on what food I was eating, and the fact there was no way out of that.

I really wanted my life to be possible without any stuff [inaudible 00:06:30] sense of being and as complete as possible.

So all of that I was finally able to absorb and start really engaging with.

So that’s ultimately why I wrote the book was I had to explain to myself what I had done, why it didn’t work. I got bored having the same conversation over and over with people. So if I just write it down, I can just hand them the book because it’s not an easy conversation.

And the other problem is that it can’t be done in slogan. It’s a huge, vast body of conflicting facts that people have to engage with on their own. And it can’t be done in five minutes. It’s a much longer set of conversation, and people have to be willing to engage, and not everybody is, or you have to do it in your own time.

I’ve heard from people who took them a year to read my book. And I understand that because it took me 20 years just to put it all together.

DEBRA: I understand it too. It’s a very wonderful book, and it has a lot of information in it. And there were so many times because I was on a similar journey two years. I was reading all the same books that you are reading. I was studying. I was asking all the same questions.

And so to get to your book, it was just like, here’s somebody who agrees with me. And it was so wonderful in that way, but it did take me a long time to read the book. And I can see that for someone who holds dear the basic principles of vegetarian and veganism that it would be very difficult to even consider some of the things that you say in the book.

And we’re going to talk about some of those things today.

I just like to, for a couple of minutes, just tell my story about being a vegetarian because I never was a vegan. But I didn’t eat meat, I think, for about seven or eight years. And I was convinced that it was the right thing to do nutritionally, but what ended up happening was that my health did deteriorate over that period of time. And there was just finally a day. I went to England and it was very hard to find vegetarian food or vegetarian restaurants or anything. I was traveling, so I couldn’t make my vegetarian food.

And so I just decided one day that I would just eat a piece of meat, and my body felt so much better. That I just continued to eat meat.

I want to make it clear. I’ll say this, speaking for myself. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t eat vegetables. And I eat a lot of vegetables, but the problem is that vegetables themselves nutritionally don’t provide all the nutrition that you need in order to be healthy. And we’re going to talk about that.

And also, some of the foods that vegetarians commonly eat are no so good to be eating either, and we’re going to talk about that.

We need to go to break. So I’ll tell you after the break.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re talking today about The Vegetarian Myth with Lierre Keith. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

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. And there’s a lot of information on this book about the vegetarian diet, and how it actually isn’t and cannot be sustainable either for human health or for the environment.

And we’re going to talk about a lot more about the sustainability part of it next week, next Tuesday, in part 2 of this show.

And today, we’re talking about The Vegetarian Diet and some of the things that she has to say about the diet. And we’ll talk about sustainability next week.

I do want to say that my second experience with being a vegetarian was much later in my life when I had a friend living with me who was a raw food vegan. And he insisted that I just do his diet with him while he was there, so that I could see how great I would feel being a raw food vegan.

Well, not only did I not feel great being a raw food vegan, I was getting acupuncture treatments at the time. And after two weeks of this, my acupuncturist said, “What are you doing to your body?” And when I told him, he said, “Please immediately leave my office and go get a cheeseburger, a bacon cheeseburger.”

Because it was just from his Chinese perspective, I was being so out of balance by only eating vegetables. And I’ll just say again, we’re not saying don’t eat vegetables. But vegetables are not everything that we need for a diet.

So in your book, Lierre, you talk about three specific types of vegetarians. One is the moral vegetarian and the political vegetarian and the nutritional vegetarian. So I want to get through just talking about all these three of those briefly in the time we have together today.

Can you give us just a general idea of what is a moral vegetarian?

LIERRE KEITH: So the moral vegetarians believe that the human life can be sustained without death, without any harm to any essential beings. And some of them go even further and say that no creature depends on death.

There have even been people in the New York Times who have argued on the [inaudible 00:12:24] that we should essentially kill all the carnivores on the planet, because all they do is create death and suffering in their wake.

So there is something profoundly anti-life about not understanding that death is part of the cycle. All of us are alive, and we are only alive because millions of other creatures have died to keep us alive. And then we give our lives back.

We’re all part of this tribe called carbon. Every single molecule of my body will one day be recycled back into this amazing planet. The grass will eat me, and the bacteria will eat me, and all kinds of animals will eventually be part of that. And it will all just go back to where it came from, and more life will come from that.

And as a vegetarian, as a vegan, I thought that I could sustain my life, and there would be no harm to any other creature. What I didn’t understand was that agriculture, all my food came from agriculture. It was all grains and beans and vegetables that that’s the most destructive thing people have done to the planet.

I didn’t know what agriculture was. I grew up in an urban environment. I had not a clue of the place it came from, and I thought I was being conscious and ethical. I didn’t know that.

In really brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it (and I mean down to the bacteria) and then you [inaudible 00:13:56]. And that’s what agriculture is.

We’ve had 10,000 years of this activity. We have trashed the planet. 98% of old-growth forests are gone, and 99% of the world’s prairies have been destroyed. And this is in the service of agriculture. And there’s no way you can take an activity that has destroyed 98% of the habitat for other creatures and say this is somehow animal-friendly.

But again, I was not aware of this. I just thought if I look at my plate, and I see a dead animal that’s a bad thing because something died. When I looked at my plate and I saw rice or corn or kidney beans, I didn’t realize that an entire ecosystem had been laid to waste, and then converted to human use at the expense of all those other creatures who had it seen as simply been driven into extinction because they had nowhere to live.

And that is the progress of agriculture across the planet. We are now losing 200 species a day. And ultimately, it goes back to that process of destruction and draw down.

So in a nutshell, that’s the problem, and I didn’t realize that. Most people who live in agricultural society really had no idea what the cost of this to the planet.

The moral argument is that you can have a life that is somehow free from suffering and death because the food you eat can somehow be pure and life-affirming and all this. And it simply isn’t true. On a more micro level, a smaller scale, plants want to eat dead animals, and I found this out as a vegan who was trying to garden that there was no way to have health soil without incorporating some kind of animal products into it whether it was manure, whether it was [inaudible 00:15:40] or blood meal. Those are basic things that the soil needs.

That was horrifying for me as a vegan. And I ran right up against that wall, and there was no way through. Just ideologically, I smacked right into reality, and I couldn’t find a way through it. And it was really hard because I wanted to grow my own food, and I couldn’t do it.

And then there’s a tremendous amount of death involved even in having a garden because, of course, you grow nice, juicy plants. Well, there are plenty of other creatures that want to eat those things, so you’re in a battle.

I just experienced tremendous ethical agony over what to do about that. And it became clear to me that the only way to do it was to kill them. That it was my life against theirs. Repelling only went so far, and when you’re fighting a battle with slugs, there’s really no repellant that works. They were going to help to die.

So I just went through that ethical collapse on a small scale because this didn’t match the version of reality that I wanted to be true with essentially a fairy tale.

The third time or the fourth time that I replanted that lettuce and the slugs devoured it in the night, I said, “Well, I guess I just won’t grow any lettuce.” And I went to the store. Just very clear, I remember this moment of holding this head of organic lettuce, and I thought to myself, “Who are you fooling? The people who grew this lettuce does the same thing that you’re refusing to do. You’re just paying somebody to do it for you.”

But they’re killing those slugs. There’s no way they’re not. It was a real moment of you have to grow up. You have to face the basic algebra of the system. These animals are going to die and the only thing you can do is do that well, do that wisely, and do that with as much humility as you can, and know that you’re [inaudible 00:17:33] eventually.

But it was a terrible moment for me as a vegan.

DEBRA: I understand. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lierre Keith. And we’re talking about her book The Vegetarian Myth. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

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, and that’s what we’re talking about today is The Vegetarian Myth.

So I had mentioned that the second type of vegetarian is the political vegetarian. But I actually just want to skip that because we have so little time, and I want to go straight to the nutritional vegetarian because there is so much to talk about there.

Lierre, first, would you tell us about exorphins, and why they’ll make us eat certain foods?

LIERRE KEITH: They’re basically substances that exist in mostly grain, and they act in our bodies. They’re more [inaudible 00:18:36] substances essentially. So they’re very addictive, and they give us a great pleasurable feeling.

You might not know they’re addictive because if you’re eating wheat three times a day, you’re not going to notice that you have a low-level addiction going on. But there’s plenty of people, if you say, you might think about going gluten-free, you might think about going low carb, you might think about not eating bread all the time, and they look at you in complete horror, “I could not live without bread.”

And that’s why. That’s the big reason why.

And so for a lot of us, as proteins like gluten makes their way through our gut, they actually turns into what are called gluteum morphine, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s morphine made out of gluten, and they’re very addictive.

I can speak to this myself. Pretty much everybody in my family is always addicted to wheat. I went gluten-free mostly because I have an autoimmune disease, and the results for me were very dramatic in a positive way. But one of the side benefits for me was that I never had to think about it again. Once I knew that this was going to work, I never looked back. And it was such a relief. I didn’t have to think about muffins or bagels or bread again. It’s not food to me anymore because that stuff just pulled my name from across town.

I know there are bagels. If I get in the car, I can have one.

I wouldn’t sell my children into slavery for it. I’m not going to pretend this is heroin or meth, but it has that pull on people to the extent where dramatically, I’ve seen friends have great results going gluten-free, especially with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. They tend to respond very quickly.

So within 48 hours, I’ve seen people be able to bend their fingers again. It’s that fast. It’s amazing. They cannot keep off the gluten. They would rather have a piece of pizza or a bagel or a muffin than be able to use their hands.

And that really tells you the level of addiction that is provoked by eating gluten and some of these other substances that contain this morphine-like addictive substances. It’s very profound.

DEBRA: It is. And dairy also has these in it.

LIERRE KEITH: There’s some in dairy, yes, but to a certain extent.

DEBRA: And so for me, in my life, it’s like my favorite thing to eat was give me a good load of artisan bread, and put butter all over it, and I was absolutely happy. It was so much easier for me to give up sugar than wheat. Sugar was nothing in comparison to wheat. Oh, my god.

And yet, on a vegetarian diet, grains are the staple of a vegetarian diet. And vegetarians are eating these grains all the time, as well as everybody else.

And so again, I’ll just say we’re not suggesting that you don’t eat vegetables, but there are components, common components, of the vegetarian diet like grains which I personally have been identifying toxic substances being more work. I would say that wheat is as harmful, or grains in general, and particularly, wheat is as toxic to your body as any toxic manmade chemicals. It messes everything up. It just does.

And as someone who no longer eats grains, I used to do this thing. When I first trying to get off of grains, I would do this thing of cheating by when I would go to Costco. I shop at Costco because where I live, that’s the least expensive place to buy organic food. And they have a lot of organic food.

And so I go to Costco and they have all these little samples sitting out, and I’d go, “I could just have this one cookie and I could just have this sample of bread.”

But you can’t because just that little sample will do these things that set up the addiction. But as you said, when you get off it, and you stop, you just stop. It stops being food for you when you start seeing what else you can eat, and you don’t have that addictive pull anymore. You don’t have that addiction, and you don’t binge on it.

When was the last time you’ve binged on a carrot?

LIERRE KEITH: Exactly. People don’t binge on hard-boiled egg or on steak or salmon, smoked salmon. You don’t. You eat it and then you’re full. We actually have shut off mechanisms for both fat and protein.

Our brains can say, “You’ve had enough. You can stop now.”

And if you ask people, how many hard-boiled eggs could you eat? They can come up with a number. “I could eat four. I could eat five. I would be totally full after that. No more.”

When you say, “how much cake could you eat?”

We all know there’s no shut off valve. You eat until you’re ready to vomit.

DEBRA: Literally, yes.

LIERRE KEITH: We have no shut off valve for carbohydrates. It’s not in us. We don’t know when we’ve had enough.

DEBRA: I remember when I was a kid. My family used to like to go on a Sunday morning to a brunch at a fancy hotel. And I remember one day eating and eating and eating because there was all this food just right in front of me, and I just ate, and ate, and ate, and ate until my stomach hurt. And I learned that day why don’t I feel like I should stop eating. And I was just a kid, and I thought that. But that’s the way it is.

But when I noticed that when I eat the right foods that my body is biologically adapted for, things like proteins and vegetables and fruits, I feel satisfied at a point, and I stop eating. And I’m surprised that how little food it is in comparison to how much wheat I used to want to eat.

LIERRE KEITH: It’s biologically true because we have no mechanism to tell us when we’ve had enough carbohydrates.

DEBRA: Another thing I want to ask you, and I’m just picking and choosing things from your book here. There’s so much information. I’m just picking and choosing things because our time is so short. I want to talk about vegetarians and sugar, and we’re coming up on the break, so I don’t want you to get started.

But I’ll just ask a question, and then you can give the answer after we do the break. You talk about how vegetarians crave sugar, and you give three reasons for that. We’re going to give them after the break. But I wanted to say that I have noticed this not only in myself, but in my vegetarian friends that vegetarians, they really, really want sugar, and they are very interested in dessert, and you’re going to tell us why.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Lierre Keith. She’s the author of The Vegetarian Myth. And when we come back, she’s going to tell us why vegetarians crave sugar.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

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. Today is part 1 of our interview where we’re talking about the vegetarian diet. Next Tuesday, September 23rd, we’re going to be talking about sustainability, the cycle of life, and our connection as humans to the world of nature and food.

So tell us why vegetarians love sugar.

LIERRE KEITH: There are three reasons. One is tryptophan, the next one is fat, and the third is your blood sugar.

So in reverse order, one of the big problems of eating a vegetarian diet is that it has essentially nothing but sugar. And you can make yourself feel better by calling it complex carbohydrate, but at the end of the day, those complex carbohydrates are broken down in your gut. That’s the job of your digestive system is to break everything down into tiny, little components that can be sent through into your bloodstream, and then the rest of your body picks up the nutrients and keeps you alive, keeps you healthy, keeps rebuilding you, and that’s how it works.

So it’s supposed to be broken down into small bits. And that’s what happens to complex carbohydrate. It’s broken down into simple sugar. And if we were all to eat the amount of carbohydrate recommended by the USDA food pyramid, which most of America did indeed try to do, that’s equivalent to eating two cups of sugar a day.

The human body was never intended to deal with that much sugar at any given day. It’s insane really.

This is the problem. This lends itself to all kinds of diseases.

And we call them the diseases of civilization. One of the main reasons that agricultural people get these kinds of diseases is ultimately because of that excess sugar for three times a day, every single day.

So what happens is all that sugar ends up in your bloodstream. We have one blunt instrument to deal with it, and that’s the hormone’s influence. And this is a biological emergency. Your brain can only function at a very narrow range of sugar. If it’s too high or too low, you will die. And this is life-threatening for diabetics because they’ve lost this ability to handle it.

Ultimately, everyone will wear out their insulin receptors by doing this day after day. But they’re already there. I can’t tell you how life-threatening this is.

So insulin, you eat all the sugar, terrible emergency, pancreas releases all the insulin that it can. Insulin runs around in your bloodstream, grabs everything and shoves it into your fat cells as fast as it can to clear that sugar from your blood before your brain goes into shock.

The problem with it being a blunt instrument, of course, is that it grabs way too much. So now, instead of having too much sugar in your blood, you’ve got too little, and it’s a hypoglycemia. And now, you’re cranky, and you’re shaking, and you’re sweating, and if you don’t put food in your mouth, you feel like you’re going to die.

And this is the state that many people who eat high carb, low fat diet, and [inaudible 00:29:00] (and this is especially true for vegetarians. There’s no way around it if you’re vegan. This is where you’re going to end up), you’re going to burn through those insulin receptors. And every time this happens, you’re wearing down the cell receptors, the surface of the cell that can lock onto the insulin and receive the nutrients.

And so each time you do this, it’s going to get harder for insulin to do its job for the next round. And that’s the problem.

So every time your blood sugar drops like that you’re desperate to put more food in your face especially sugar because now, your blood sugar is too low, and your brain isn’t able to function. So it turns out this terrible emergency call, “Feed me, feed me, feed me. I’m going to die.” And that is true. If your blood sugar is too low, you will fall into a coma.

So you’re responding to the emergency. You can’t figure out why you can’t keep control of your food intake. That’s why. You’re just responding to that emergency that you provoked.

DEBRA: I remember those things. I used to have to eat sugar or I was going to die. I remember that. You don’t think that you’re having that because, like you’re saying, I’m not eating cookies or whatever. You don’t realize that you’re having that reaction in your body because you just ate whole wheat bread. That’s supposed to be a health food.

But I don’t have those kinds of feelings at all anymore. Just not at all. So it is good food.

LIERRE KEITH: Nobody has to live like this. You can stop that entire vicious cycle pretty quickly. In a few days, you can have a really stable mood state, really stable food intake, and feel really happy and satisfied. It does not take long.

But blood sugar is number one. Number two, as I mentioned, insulin grabs pretty much everything and shoves it into your cells as fast as it can. One of the things that it can’t grab onto for unknown reasons is tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid, and if you’ve ever been on Prozac or any of those SSRI’s, you probably know that tryptophan is the precursor to serotonin.

Without serotonin, we just aren’t happy. The amino acid that we would have to have is tryptophan that makes the serotonin. The thing about tryptophan is what’s called an essential amino acid. The human animal cannot produce this. We can only eat it. We can only eat tryptophan. We cannot make it on our own.

And when you’re eating these kinds of vegetarian or vegan diet, there’s really no good plant sources of tryptophan. You’re never going to get enough. The only moment when you’re going to feel like your brain has enough tryptophan, therefore, it has enough serotonin, is when you provoke these kinds of blood sugar responses if you eat sugar.

Now, the insulin runs around, grabs everything, shoves it into the cells, and the one thing it’s not grabbing onto it is tryptophan.

Now, tryptophan has no competition at the bloodstream barrier, and it manages to get through to your brain pretty quickly. Now, for 10 minutes, you finally have enough tryptophan. You’re not eating it because you’re a vegetarian or a vegan. It’s the only way you’re going to get it. It’s by provoking that kind of blood sugar crisis in yourself.

This is why depressed people crave sugar, and it’s why vegetarians and vegans crave sugar just because they want that tryptophan in it. It’s a very bad way to get tryptophan. You end up with blood sugar problems. You’re going to end up with diabetes. You’re going to end up with cardiovascular disease, [inaudible 00:32:30] and all that. But in a pinch, it’s all you’ve got.

So this is why over and over, and I’m sure anecdotally you’ve seen this in your vegetarian friends. They crave sugar like nothing else. And this is one of the big reasons why. It’s the tryptophan.

DEBRA: And you open a vegetarian magazine on sold desserts, it’s a big thing. I have had people tell me over and over that people who don’t eat meat crave sugar. Just period. You’re not the only person who said that. It’s common.

LIERRE KEITH: And the third reason that they crave sugar is that usually, they’re eating very low fat diet along with this. It’s hard to get enough fat when you’re just concentrating on eating all that carbohydrates, and also they vilified animal fats, of course. They’re not going to eat those at all. So you’re not getting any saturated fat. And honestly, you need it. The human body just needs a big chunk of saturated fat every day for lots of different reasons.

DEBRA: It does.

LIERRE KEITH: In particularly, your brain, I think we should start there. Your brain is somewhere around 80% fat. Your neurotransmitters can’t transmit without fat. Nerves can’t be healthy without it.

We are a set of electrical impulses inside a watery environment. That’s the one description of animals. The only thing that lets those nerves transmit the electrical signal is they’re insulated. And that insulation from the watery environment is made up of saturated fat.

So there’s no way your brain is going to function without saturated fat. Now, if you’re denying yourself saturated fat, it’s such an important nutrient that we have a fallback plan. And that fallback plan is if you eat sugar, the human body can actually create saturated fat out of sugar. And that’s again why people—yeah, low fat diet, vegan diet will crave sugar. It’s actually a craving for fat. But it’s the only avenue by which they will let their bodies get it.

If you take fat off the list, and if you take animal fat off the list, your body says, “All right, but you’re going to crave sugar instead because you’ve got to give this to me or we’re going to die.”

And I have had so many people in my life who they make the switch to a more appropriate diet. They start eating either bacon or eggs cooked in coconut butter, coconut oil for breakfast and [inaudible 00:34:52] because they say, “I wasn’t hungry again until 4 o’clock in the afternoon.”

That’s what life is supposed to feel like, and it’s because you’re giving your body appropriate fat. Now, you’re not starving, and you’re not getting that constant emergency signal, “I need fat. Give me sugar because I’ll make do,“ which is what your body is saying with those terrible cravings.

So those are the three reasons that you will find most vegetarians or vegans crave sugar to an often extraordinary length.

DEBRA: And sugar has even more problems that we’ve already discussed, so we won’t go into that. We only have less than two minutes before the show is done, and there are so many other questions I wanted to ask you. But we’re going to talk next week on September 23rd, next Tuesday. We’re not going to talk about the vegetarian diet, but we are going to talk about food. We’re going to talk about food and the environment and nature, just the whole cycle of life and how we, as human beings, fit into that cycle of life, and how we eat, how life eats us.

I’m going to share some information that my big realization about this, I’ll talk about that too. And Lierre will talk, and we’ll see how we can connect in the food that we’re eating with all of life in a positive, harmonious, sustainable way.

So Lierre, are there any final words you’d like to give us?

LIERRE KEITH: I try to always make plain that the values that underlie the vegetarian aspects are not the problem. So, compassion and sustainability and justice, these are really the only values that are going to get us to that world that we need. So that’s not the problem.

The problem really is just the vast amount of information. And I really hope that your listeners will at least reach out a little bit beyond their comfort level to try to engage a little bit more because you’ll still be the same person at the end of the day, but you’ll be able to make better decisions both for yourself and for the planet. You don’t have to change your basic moral framework. You don’t have all the information that you need to make perhaps a better decision.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next Tuesday, September 23rd. We’ll be back with Lierre Keith, and I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Mold prevention in bathroom

Question from Paula

Hi Debra,

I’m concerned about long-term health dangers in biocides. I’m having work done on my bathroom that will include sheetrock, joint tape, joint compound, primer and paint.

My contractor recommends using the mold-resistant or moisture-resistant version of all those products, and adding a mildewcide to the paint.

Debra, I realize that you prefer plaster walls, but if you were using the above materials,
would you choose mold-resistant products…or would you take the risk of future mold problems?

Thanks, Debra. Your help is very appreciated!

Debra’s Answer

DGreenBathroom

The problem with answering this question is that biocides are not one chemical, but a class of chemicals of varying degrees of toxicity. Where I wouldn’t want you to use triclosan, for example, there would be no harm in using a product that used silver as the antimicrobial because silver in a paint, for example, doesn’t outgas.

The first thing we need to know is what are the biocides used in each of the products and then I can answer your question. Feel free to write back with that information.

Click on the image Debra’s Guide to Creating a Green Bathroom to see how I remodeled my bathroom in 2007. No biocides. No mold problems.

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Looking for a Place to Live with Clean Outdoor Air

Question from Jenny

Hi Debra,

We recently moved in with family to save money. We are contemplating what might be a safe area to live in -in the future:

What distance is ‘safe’ to live from a natural gas plant up to 550-600 megawatts. It’s hard to understand how much can travel in the air. We’ve been told the power plant will be like adding 60,000 more people in the area. Is 4.5 miles or even 11 miles far enough?

Debra’s Answer

This is a difficult question, because in an urban or suburban area, if you go out 4.5 or 11 miles you’re likely to run into another pollution source.

The question is where do you have to be in relation to the pollution source to not be affected by it. And the answer to that is more than distance.

When I was a little girl, there used to be a coffee roasting facility on the San Francisco waterfront, right at the San Francsico end of the Bay Bridge. As my family would drive across the Bridge into the city, there was a point where we would smell the coffee roasting.

I’ll tell you that we had to be practically on top of it before we could smell it. Less than a mile. And it also depended on which way the wind was blowing.

So when I look for a place to live, I check around for pollution sources, but I also find out the direction the wind is blowing. Where I live now, virtually 100% of the time it’s blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. No agriculture, no factories, just blowing over a sleepy little downtown and residential streets. And beyond that, miles and miles of open sea.

There are usually government agencies in local areas that are tracking wind directions. In the San Francisco Bay Area it’s called the Bay Area Air Quality Management district. Look for a place like that in your area and they should have maps of wind directions and how many days per year the wind is blowing from that direction. This kind of information will help a lot to determine toxic exposures from environmental sources.

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How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health

Pamela Seefeld,R.PhMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about new discoveries about “cell signaling,” the secret communication between cells that makes health happen. And how eating fruits and vegetables and taking plant-based supplements helps that communication happen. 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

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Eating Fruits & Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph.

Date of Broadcast: September 10, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is – what’s the date? Wednesday, September 10th 2014. I’m here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining today. It’s a beautiful, late summer day. We’re going to be talking today about fruits and vegetables, why you need to eat your fruits and vegetables. It’s really fascinating. It’s probably something that you don’t know anything about because I’m still learning about this subject.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist. And what that means is that she uses medicinal plants instead of drugs. She’s very, very, very effective at this. She’s right here in Clearwater, Florida with me and I met here because a friend of mine told me how she had gotten his mother off of all her prescription drugs by using medicinal plants and that right away, she started doing better.

I, of course, immediately went to her and she started helping me with problems that I’ve been having with my body that I’ve been trying to handle for years and years and years. All the things that I have done handled them some, but not as much as I would like. So she gave me some medicinal plants and we’re being quite successful at taking care of problems in my body that I have otherwise not been able to take care of.

So I’m very happy to have her on. She’s on now. I’m having her on every other Wednesday, so the next show will be two weeks from now. She has so much knowledge and so much information. We’re just going through all kinds of what’s coming up. We’ve got it all scheduled out through the end of the year about what we’re going to talk about in terms of how medicinal plants and foods can be used to heal instead of taking drugs.

And she knows all about drugs too because she is a registered pharmacist and is trained in that as well.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m very happy that you’re back. So I know what we’re talking about today is cell signaling and how eating fruits and vegetables can help your cells create health. So why don’t you just start by telling us what is cell signaling.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, that’s very good. It is exactly what it sounds like. Your cell communicates with each other. They have little signals, hidden messages perhaps you would call them. The messages that they send each other determine if the cells are going to be robust and healthy and they’re not going to cause cancer or it’s going to be the other extreme where you’re going to be actually repelling cancer, stopping the blood vessels from going to a cancer state.

And so the cell signaling from fruits and vegetables and I’m going to talk about the flavinoids and the compounds in these fruits and vegetables, how the science is pretty concrete and it shows exactly what you can eat, what you can take for supplements to enhance the cell signaling so that cancer cannot form in the body.

DEBRA: That’s just so amazing. And for me, it also comes back to I keep seeing that nature knows best. And when we come back to just being align with nature and eating natural foods and taking natural supplements that that’s exactly what our bodies want. It just keeps being proven over and over again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. So we know in herbal medicine and if you look in the plant kingdom is really there are three bioflavinoids that we look at a lot. Can we use those actually in herbal medicine? There’s quercetin, hesperidin and rutin.
Quercetin was originally found in apples and in onions. Rutin was originally found in buckwheat. And hesperidin is found in the pithy part that’s around grapefruit. That’s where they originally located that. I use quercetin and rutin probably exclusively more so than the hesperidin.

But when I was looking, I went to the National Library of Medicine because I like to have everything be very scientific and to the point and very recent, so I did a recent search of some of the bioflavinoids and I found some interesting information that was just recently published. Actually, one of the studies that was just published was out of August 28th of this year, so it’s very recent. It talks about quercetin preventing prostate cancer through cell signaling, probably signaling to stop prostate cancer from dividing – very, very interesting.

Also, and this is actually something I wasn’t quite aware of. Quercetin looks like it’s preventing neurodegenerative diseases. This is of August 7th of this year in neuroscience. So these are major journals. They’re publishing things about bioflavinoids that show disease prevention and it’s all through cell signaling. It’s affecting the way the cells communicate with each other and preventing disease in the process.

DEBRA: Tell us just a little more about – could you paint a picture of what happens between the cells when they’re signaling each other and how the bioflavinoids and other phytochemicals affect that. Tell us what the cycle is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So what happens is there’s good signals and bad signals. We’re going to try and make it easy because I don’t want to make it too difficult.

DEBRA: Yeah, let’s make it easy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, exactly, easy for everybody to understand. So there’s good signals and bad signals. The cells have a potential to put up both. So we know that if for some reason bioflavinoids and flavinoids and sesquiterpenes and alkaloids and phenolics, these are all these different compounds that are in the foods, you see, the plants make these compounds to prevent herbivores from eating them. So the plants aren’t making this just for no reason at all.

Quercetin in particular is being made by a plant to maintain the structure of its leaf. So if they took quercetin away from plants, the leaves would fall to the ground. It maintains vascular stability in the vessels that are in the leaves.

So what happens is when you take these components, it interferes and it blocks the bad signals, but the good signals are actually enhanced. And it does this through several different mechanism. What we’re seeing is that it can reduce inflammation and cytokines definitely play a part in disease processes. They’re just recently realizing how these cytokines – and cytokines make you fat too. People don’t realize it too.

That’s why when people eat a plant-based diet, when they’re having a greater proportion of flavinoids in their diet, quercetin, rutin from buckwheat, all these different components, that’s why we know that when cytokines decrease (and those are inflammatory cytokines that are actually produce by the fat cells, the adipose cells), when they decrease, you lose weight. It’s not just because you have less calories coming in, you actually are affecting the signaling out of the fat.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think it’s amazing.

DEBRA: It is amazing. So again, that’s when people fruits and vegetables and that is what helps the cell signal your body to lose weight.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly right, yes. We found here that this is also another new study that was published in the Journal of Nutrition in June of this year and we found that overall, when you take quercetin – you can take this as a supplement. There’s different doses that I use for different indication. You can take it as a supplement. And quercetin, they’re seeing here that in cancer patients, it prevents severe weight loss. But in normal patient, it actually can help prevent the cytokines from circulating and prevent weight loss. So it’s actually going to help in both situations – someone that has cancer, but also someone that’s healthy.

DEBRA: Wow! It’s so interesting how this things work. It’s boggling my mind. Let’s just talk about weight loss for a second. Let’s talk about weight loss for a second because there’s so much emphasis on lowering the calories in and burning calories. It’s all about calories and balancing them. But really, there’s all these other things going on that affect things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly right, that’s exactly right.

DEBRA: It isn’t just the calorie balance.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, it’s not. And I think it’s really important to realize that because this is what we’re really told in the media. You need to exercise a lot. I work out all the time. You need to exercise a lot and you just lower your calorie. And people are associating that the fruits and vegetables that you’re eating, this type of diet, when you have two-thirds of diet as fruits and vegetables, which is what I recommend, when you’re doing that, you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m consuming less calories, that’s why I’m losing weight.” It’s not the reason why.

Calories are a part of the component, but the big part is that we’re seeing is it’s affecting inflammation and these cytokines that are coming in and out of the fat that make you more fat. Cytokines, inflammation, this is why when people are kind of overweight, they tend to have a lot more arthritis, lupus, all these different diseases. Well, it’s not just because the weight is affecting it. It’s the fact that the cytokines being produced in the fat are making you gain more weight and making you have pain.

So when you take these components, it’s kind of blocking these cytokines. So the circulating amount, the net amount is decreasing. And so these negative signals that are coming from the cytokines and the fat are reduced.

DEBRA: And then you don’t have those problems anymore. This is so – wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right. The pain goes away, you lose weight. I mean, that’s what’s really happening. I think this is very, very important for people to realize that it’s not all about this guilt trip about how many calories you’re eating a day. It’s not about that. It’s about what you’re eating supplement-wise and food-wise to change the signaling of the cells so that your body is more in harmony and the cytokines are decreased, the fat goes away and you feel better.

DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist, which is a pharmacist who uses medicinal plants to heal. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. What she does is she uses medicinal plants instead of drugs to heal the body.

Now, Pamela, before the break, you made the comment that we should be eating two-thirds fruits and vegetables. That’s a lot of fruits and vegetables especially for people who are not eating them. I mean, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, but I don’t even think I eat two-thirds fruits and vegetables. And all the vegetables people are eating is iceberg lettuce salad with a slice of tomato on it and lots of dressing. What does that look like to eat two-thirds fruit and vegetables?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s a good point. I’m not saying that I’m always perfect at that. But maybe two weeks, we can try and focus on the vegetables and fruits that you eat. It’s got to have high impact. So maybe it’s not two-thirds of your diet, maybe it’s even half your diet, but the things you’re eating like you’re talking about the iceberg lettuce, it has low nutritional value, we know that the high nutritional value are these plants that have not been modified so much over the time period.

So we know scallion, onion, garlic, green apples. They have not been modified over the past hundred years. They pretty much look the same. Arugula, dandelion greens. And believe it or not, what’s really high in nutrition is watercress because that has not been modified at all.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really basically a wild plant. So I’m a big fan of incorporating these plants.

DEBRA: I have heard that vegetables and fruits that have a lot of color in them have more nutrient. But this is the first time I’ve heard someone say plants that haven’t been modified. That kind of goes back to the Paleo idea of what people ate many, many years ago. I am very much in favor of people eating as close to nature as possible, but I’ve never divided my fruits and vegetables into like how – how can I even say this?

When I was gardening in California, I would grow heirloom varieties. I loved eating those heirloom varieties because those are the natural non-hybrids. I’m not shopping at the supermarket, so I’m not even going to say that. But if I go to the natural food store or even to a farmer’s market, at a farmer’s market, you can ask the farmers what they planted. But at the natural food store, you don’t know whether these are hybrids or heirlooms unless they’re labeled heirloom and they’re practically not. I mean, even organic, most of what they’re growing is hybrid.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s true. What I would tell you though is that what I make a point of doing that’s pretty easy to do is my breakfast always has a green apple associated with it because the inulin is present in it, the bacteria in your gut really like it. In fact, they’re healthy food, they munch on it. So that’s a good start.

We look at the gala apples and the grannies, just the golden delicious, all those different apples. They have been modified a lot and they have a lot of sugar. Granny Smith apples are a great way to start the day with maybe some Greek yoghurt and some nuts. That’s typically what I have. That has the proteins. It has the carbohydrates and the fat. But the carbohydrates are going to be liberated out of the green apple because of the pectin. It keeps your blood sugar very stable. So it’s a really good fresh start to the day.

DEBRA: Oh, great!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would say too that the garlic and the onions, I just put tons of that stuff with my lunch and dinner.

DEBRA: I do too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So we’re really kind of getting it from that. And then, of course, the dark, leafy greens. The trickiest too when you’re looking at the vegetables you’re eating that the variety of the color is important, but what’s really important is there’s fat present on the salad because if there is not, you’re not going to absorb them. These are fat-soluble components. The flavinoids in these fruits and vegetables need to have a small amount of fat.

So olive oil with a little bit of lemon and I usually put garlic in there too, that’s my typical salad dressing because you’re going to really absorb them. If you don’t have something that has a small amount of fat even if it’s just nuts on the salad, you’re not going to absorb these flavinoids. And these are fat-soluble. You want to have them peak in the blood stream.

DEBRA: Then I’m doing the right thing because my salad dressing is olive oil and unrefined salt.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect!

DEBRA: Yeah, and I think that it taste better. I used to be a big salad dressing person. I love ranch dressing and thousand island dressing, all those tasty things. But once I started using olive oil and just unrefined salt, organic olive oil and unrefined salt, you can actually taste the vegetables.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: It just taste so fresh that I don’t even want to eat those over the salad dressings anymore.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it enhances the flavor and that’s really proven to be true. And if you think about it, I was looking here, there’s another study that came out in Cancer Prevention, which was August 26th of this year and it talked about why do fruits and vegetables prevent cancer. The anti-cancer properties appear to be cell signaling the topic we’re talking about today, cell signaling). We know now that this particular cell signaling I was talking about, the cytokines, it down-regulates these cytokines, which can be pre-cancerous (initiators) and it starts something called – it stops angiogenesis.

Angiogenesis is when cancer forms in one area and blood vessels have to come out to feed it particularly. It’s kind of like outside of the normal pipeline so to speak. And angiogenesis is what we want to stop. We want the blood vessels to not go and seed a tumor cell.

So we know now that the plants, when you take them and you consume them, these flavinoids stop that process where the blood vessels are able to go on feed onto the cancer.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty great.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow! So in another show, we learned that sugar feeds cancer. So now we know no sugar and lots of fruits and vegetables, that would prevent cancer in the first place.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And this is in the Cancer Journal or this year like less than a month ago. So that’s really important.

There’s another study I was just looking at today because I did a full Medline search of anything most recently published. This was just published in Asian Pacific Journal Cancer Prevention. We see that lutein bioflavinoid (and lutein, people take it a lot of times for their eyes), lutein has cell signaling pathways and it stops the progression of colon cancer.

So these things are found, these bioflavinoids are found in fruits and vegetables to varying degrees. What you need to do is say, “I need to try and incorporate as many of these in every day for disease-preventing activity.”

Also, too, you can take these things as supplements. And depending if you had a cancer history, we can prescribe bioflavinoids and these antioxidants that go to certain areas depending on which cancer somebody has. I think someday you’re going to see cancer prevention and treatment tailored by their diet.

DEBRA: Wow! That would be so cool. That would be so cool, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s where we’re headed. Luckily, the cancer journals are picking up on this and it’s not pharmacognosy journals and the people just meeting that are plant scientists. It’s becoming mainstream that people are embracing this. Cell signaling is all about – remember, we talked about dampening the anybody signals, enhancing the good signals.

DEBRA: Wow, that’s amazing. Okay! Well, we’re going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacognocist – and that word, pharma- is drug and then –cog is intelligence. And so it means plants, these medicinal plants have intelligence really. This is what we’re talking about, intelligence and the ability to communicate, which I think is all amazing – not amazing, but so wonderful because I think everything alive can communicate.

Anyway, I’m going to stop talking. We’re going to go to break and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. She uses medicinal plants and other things like fish oils to heal the body instead of drugs.
So Pamela, what else do you want to tell us about cell signaling?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So flavinoids, we were talking about these flavinoids. These bioflavinoids and flavinoids in general are found in plants. There’s also other things that can affect cell signals. I’m going to talk a little bit about some of these other things as well.

But this is interesting, the flavinoids themselves. We’re talking about these components in the plant that the cells produced to keep herbivores from eating then, animal grazing in the grass. They have enhanced activity for us.

It’s interesting. The cytotoxicity or the anti-cancer effects – this is just some chemistry for some people that are interested in that. This is a brand new study that just came out. They have found that the reason why this has anti-cancer effects, the flavinoids that are in your salad is there’s a 2-3 double bond in a C-ring, one of the structures. They look for that in the flavinoids. If it has that double bond, it causes what’s called mitochondrial poisoning.

So the mitochondria if you remember back in highschool, it’s the power house of the cell. It’s where some of the energy is produced for the cell. This actually stops. The cell signaling prevent cancer from having the mitochondria perform correctly and that’s why it kills the cancer cell. So they actually know the very mechanism why these components – you can take them in a supplement or you can take them as well in your salad – actually stop cancer from growing.

Interesting that we see know too is that flavinoids are very much arresting cell cycles with the cell signaling, the cell cycle signaling in breast cancer. And breast cancer we know affects one in eight women in America. So it’s one of the most common cancers. There’s a high propensity of people concerned about cancer – family heredity, BRCA gene testing, all these sorts of things that are going on right now. But really a big prevention of breast cancer is consuming flavinoids and consuming them along with the fat – we were talking about the olive oil – to make sure that you get a high peak in the blood stream.

Another interesting study that just came out too and I think your guests would find this interesting is that there are inhibitors of cell signaling for cancer and genistein, which is found in soy – and I’m not saying people go out and eat tons of soy. I’m saying genistein looks like it has some activity in preventing that.

Now, of course, someone who has a history of breast cancer, eating tons of soy is not a good idea, but a small amount of soy seem to be preventing this and it stops the signaling from the cancer cells themselves.

Now,I want to talk a little bit about Resveratrol because this is a supplement that people take quite a bit. Resveratrol, I really have high regards for, not so much – people say, “Well, I drink red wine.” Well, it’s not really quite the same time. But Resveratrol, if you take medical grade Resveratrol in a capsule, it’s very economical and it’s very effective.

And what we found now in this new study – this just came out this year August 21st, Molecular Medicine Reproductive Technology – in this particular journal, we’re talking about what’s going on as far as proliferation or the acceleration of cancer. We see that if you take Resveratrol, it induce what’s called apoptosis. Apoptosis means that the cancer cell actually burst open and die. So Resveratrol, its affinity for inducing apoptosis or the actual breaking up of the cancer cell is very high.

And also, new studies that just came out prevent cancer in the mouth epidermis. So this means that they look to induce skin cancer in this mice – and this was just published in Cell Molecular Biology in 2014, August 29th. This shows that Resveratrol stopped the mouse epidermis from proliferating for cancer. So it can have anti-cancer effects especially us being here in Clearwater and having lots of sunexposure. Skin cancer is a big problem here in the United States. So preventing skin cancer and the invasiveness of cancer is a brand new study as well. It stops the cancer from actually invading into the tissue.

So all this is through cell signaling. That’s how it works, just all through cell signaling.

DEBRA: And this is just amazing. I hear that – what is it? Like two out of three people have cancer, some big number like that? I think it’s different for men and women. I don’t remember off the top of my head. But these solutions are so simple.

PAMELA SEEFELD: They’re very simple and they’re very inexpensive. You’re going to eat anyway, right?

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And some of the supplements I’m talking about, the quercetin, Resveratrol, if you have a cancer history and so forth, I would be glad to talk to anybody. I don’t charge for my time at my pharmacy. If you had a question about dosages and how to incorporate them and what to eat them with as far as to get the highest peak in the bloodstream, as far as where you want it to target, whether you’re looking at colorectal cancer, breast cancer, any of your clients that are listening here today can call me some time at my pharmacy. I’m just going to give the phone number.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s Botanical Resource and it’s 727-442-4955. You could check with me and see exactly what you’re doing as far as gearing towards the right dosage and the right product. I can help you with that.

So, we see also – another study that came out in a cancer journal this year, October. Actually, it’s October of last year. That was the most recent one that came out. In this study, it shows that also Resveratrol stops the cell signaling for prostate cancer. So we were talking before about how the different flavinoids affect prostate cancer. And prostate cancer really for most men that are going to be in their sixties and seventies, they’re going to end up with some kind of prostate issues as well.

Now we know that in the past, they used to treat these things very aggressively and they found that there was incontinence and sexual problems and a lot of things that were associated with it. Now, they’re trying not to be so aggressive because they realized that the outcomes were not as favorable as they thought.

So these are some simple things that you can take if you’re concerned about that. If you’re, males in particular, are having some issues with their prostate, these are simple supplements that you can take to prevent this. But at the same time, you can prevent cancer for the skin as well. So this is really something that can be all-encompassing.

Now, I’m going to talk a little bit about fish oil.

DEBRA: This is just – wait, we need to go to break. Actually, we have one more minute, go ahead, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: After the break, we’re going to talk about fish oil and I’m going to talk about how that’s cell signaling as well. This is important because a lot of people take omega 3’s and we want to make sure it’s signaling to prevent cancer.

DEBRA: Good! Well, I’ll just say that I’ve been taking fish oil for the last couple of weeks. I absolutely refused to take fish oil before because I don’t eat fish, my body reacts to it pretty badly. But Pamela explained on an earlier show about how fish oil is processed and that if you get a good quality one, then there’s no toxic pollutants in it and it also doesn’t have the protein in it that most people react to.

And so for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking fish oil with absolutely no problem. I actually feel very happy taking it. I go, “Oh, good! Fish oil, it must be doing something right in my body.” So after the break, she’s going to tell us more about this.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. She’s at Botanical Resource in Clearwater, Florida. She has a website, it’s BotanicalResource.com. But you can just call her on the phone. And when we come back, she’ll give her phone number again. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld who dispenses medicinal plants to heal the body instead of drugs. Okay, tell us about your fish oil. I know that’s your favorite subject.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I love fish oil because it’s so effective and it turns on 300 different genes in the body. So we know it’s all-encompassing, it goes to the entire body. And of course, because it’s fat and fat-soluble, it has high penetration to the central nervous system. We know it works really good to prevent cognitive decline, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, all these types of things that people are really concerned about. It has high penetration for the brain.

The brain is mostly made of DHA. But EPA, giving it on the front-end tends to be more of a mood-elevating load. So actually, when they autopsy, they only find DHA in the brain. So these things are really interesting.

Fish oil, you can get DHA from algae, but a lot of times, I don’t like to use DHA by itself because it can tend to make people depress. So usually, you want to have ratios. There’s different ratios depending on what types of effects we’re trying to do towards mental health.

But the cool part about the fish oil, we’re talking about cell signaling, we know it signals cells all throughout the body and in a favorable manner. For cardiovascular reduction, it’s a 75% reduction of cardiovascular disease. So it’s really significant.

And we know that what it’s doing too as well – and this is a new study that I just downloaded talking about on the skin. Say someone has a cut or an injury and they’re taking fish oil, it looks like injury from blood vessel being damaged, say you get a bruise or a cut, what this seems to be doing is it’s protecting the endothelium, the skin and it allows new blood vessels to go and have more nutrients to the tissue where it’s needing repair.

So somebody that has maybe diabetic wounds or even gum disease, something is not healing correctly, fish oil can be an adjunct therapy to make sure that the blood vessels deliver the nutrients directly to the wound. To me, that is just absolutely amazing.

We’ve known about the effects on the heart and that’s what most people take it for, but really, we know too now that it can prevent the damages taking place. Say something is just not healing correctly, a wound that won’t heal properly or if you have a cut, if you already are on fish oil or taking omega 3’s, it’s going to make a huge difference as far as the blood vessels reaching the area and delivering medication, nutrients, things that will actually repair where the injury took place.

We also see that it helps augment brain repair. Go ahead.

DEBRA: Wow! Well, what I wanted to say is that I’m just thinking about in times past when people ate diets that were not industrial diets, they were eating things like fish and so getting the fish oils. They were eating plants that were just right out of the ground.

If you think about the hunter/gatherer – again, going back to the Paleo diet – and every time I say the Paleo diet, I feel like I want to add a disclaimer and say, “Meaning foods that people actually ate prior to industrialization” because a lot of what’s called the Paleo diet now, I look at those recipes and I go, “Oh, my God!” They’re not very natural even though they’re designed around eating things that are basic to nature. I mean, people didn’t eat a pound of bacon for breakfast, I’m sorry.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. You’re correct about it. They’ve really kind of gone to the deep and say, “Okay, we used to eat lots of meat. So that’s what we’re going to eat, just always meat.” That’s now what it’s about.

DEBRA: That’s not what it’s about and that there is a lot of meat in the Paleo diet, a lot of emphasis. But what I found after being on a Paleo diet for three or four months just trying it to see how it would work, what I found was that it was way too much meat for my body – way, way, way. And it’s not that I don’t eat meat or that I’m a vegetarian or whatever, but it’s just the whole emphasis on all this meat because that’s what people ate in Paleo times.

I actually think that they ate a lot more vegetables and fruits because you could go around and gather them, whereas to eat meat, you have to go kill a big animal.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And you’re right. If we look at these people that are talking about the hunters and gatherers, they weren’t sitting there eating steaks all day long. That really was not the situation.

DEBRA: No!

PAMELA SEEFELD: They’re eating lots of berries and lots of plant. This is what they decided to start calling the Paleo diet, just basically eating every kind of meat you want. It’s kind of like a modified Atkins, but you throw a few plants in it. That’s not really what we want to do.

We want to say that these plants that I talked about that haven’t been changed that much, colorful vegetables are very important and making sure there’s fat present. All these things are very important. And you can take Resveratrol as a supplement, you can take quercetin as a supplement.

And fish oil is a very, very important supplement. Especially if you want to have maybe mood elevating or calming effects. I do a lot of mental health. And especially if someone has anxiety or lots of stress, you can take fish oil that takes the edge off and makes you just a lot more relaxed about day to day activities.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I noticed that since I’ve been taking fish oil – I don’t remember what was the mental health benefit we were going for. I’ve only been taking it for two weeks, but I noticed that – not that I was so anxious before, but I noticed my ability to just sit and concentrate and do my work and feel calm and not be worried about things or just have my concentration distracted, I can just sit here and work very calmly hour after hour after hour. And that’s tremendous for me. It’s just tremendous.

I really see everything you’ve given me, I see the benefits. I just see the benefits. And I’ll also just mention just because I’m so happy about it – I’m happy about all of it. I really encourage you if you have anything wrong going on or anything that you want to prevent, please call Pamela because she will give you the right thing.

One of the things that I’ve had problems with is sleep. For years, I’ve had problems with sleep. She gave me Passion Flower. And now, I just sleep the eight hours. I just fall asleep and I sleep for eight hours. I am so happy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. That’s really great. And you know too, I have tried probably ten different Passion Flower products for different people. And the one I settled on was the prescription quality. So I’ve really kind of done the leg work. I’ve been doing this probably 20 years. I’ve been 25 years as a pharmacist, but I’ve been doing 20 years of naturopathic pharmacy.

Really, it’s important to understand that people take a lot of different things, they might read a magazine or something, but especially knowing and taking the right dose at the right time and how to make sure that what you’re taking, you respect people’s time and money is really important.

Like the sleep issue, the few products that I didn’t think were working, I don’t have them anymore. That’s what it felt especially even homeopathy. You know I’m a big fan of homeopathy. They’re finding now that homeopathy prevents – it actually affects cell signaling. That’s the brand new studies that came out.

So all the things that I’ve been telling people about homeopathy are really true. It affects cells signaling favorably.

DEBRA: Well, it’s interesting because homeopathy is one of those things where place say, “Well, there’s nothing in the bottle, but the energy of the material is so dilute, but it’s not like eating an apple or something.” That’s interesting that a study has come out to say that. It just goes to show that very small amounts and even just the energetic imprint of things can affect our bodies.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, very much so because they found that effected reactive oxygen species, it reduces that. It helped for mediating cell signaling in a favorable manner.

And homeopathy, what’s great about it is you can give this to animal. You can give it to little children. You can give it to adults. And really, a lot of times for homeopathy, I’ll give a homeopathic product that I think really can be all-encompassing for a family. They could all use it in different doses and everybody comes back feeling better.

So people need to embrace that homeopathy really is kind of like secret repair. That’s the way I look at it. It kind of goes to the area of where it needs to in each individual and repairs and stops disease processes on multiple levels.
Wendy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s some amazing. We have so many amazing tools available to us and they all come back down to nature.

The thing that I wanted to say and I got kind of sidetracked before was about how in the past, pre-industrially, people were eating the food that was there in nature. And so it included things like fish oils and a lot of plants. And all these things that we’re talking about, people were getting on a daily basis in their diet because they were eating the foods direct from nature.

And the fact that we need to supplement them and be paying attention to them is because just our average food supply is processed foods and hybrid foods and all these things. It’s so far away from nature. And just as we get back to having the things that we would have if we were just living in a natural environment, then that handles all these diseases because we’re just getting what we need, what our bodies need.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. A lot of people are embracing fresh diets if you looked around. I mean, this is what people want. But it’s not just that it’s trending, it’s neat. It’s the fact that we know that there’s certain flavinoid you can take, certain doses of fish oil you can take, certain types of Resveratrol like the passion flower product that we’re talking about, there are certain things you can take to really target and say, “Okay, I want a therapeutic outcome. I’m not just taking this because I read about it and I want to take it. It sounds neat!”

That’s what’s really important, using your knowledge. I mean, God gave us, everybody, unique knowledge and applying those talents is what it’s really all about.

DEBRA: Yeah. So I just want to emphasize again what Pamela just said that it is about getting a therapeutic result. And so if you just are going to read an article or go to the natural food store and pick something off the shelf, call Pamela because she has the experience of knowing what to use for what condition and she also has the products that she’s honed down after 20 years of experience to see what works and what doesn’t work and she’s going to give you something that works. Give the number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. If they have any questions, they’d like to contact me, my number here in Clearwater is 727-442-4955 and I would be very honored to help any individual that has questions about medications they want to go off of or if they just want to enhance their health or if they actually want to treat a disease state, I would be very happy to share my knowledge.

DEBRA: Thank you very much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: We’re at the end of the show. We look forward to talking to you again in two weeks from today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I love it! Thank you.

DEBRA: This is Pamela Seefeld, she’s a pharmacognocist and she’s great. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Organic Mattress for Adjustable Bed

Question from Bonnie Johnson

I noticed Dr Weil has put his name on a new mattress. It is supposed to be natural and is made by Beautyrest. So far I have not been able to get any answer about if it has fire retardents. Although it is not organic I was looking at the fact that it can be put on a frame that will adjust. I could use that for my breathing problems. Any info that you have on it Debra?

Debra’s Answer

I went to the Comfortpedic IQ website to take a look. With all due respect to Dr. Weil, he endorses products for various different health reasons, and not necessarily toxics.

They don’t give much information about the materials of this mattress, except to say that it is made with memory foam. I have no reason to believe it’s anything other than standard memory foam, which is polyurethane foam. It needs to pass the flammability law requirements, so I imagine it has chemical fire retardants, since they don’t state anything else. Why do you think it’s supposed to be natural? I didn’t see anything about that on their company website.

If you are looking for a mattress that can be put on an adjustable frame, Naturepedic now makes organic adult mattresses and an adjustable frame. So that’s an option for you.

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Making the Switch to Solar Energy

John GambillToday my guest is John Gambill, president of Hotwire Enterprises. For the past 16 years, this company has focused on wind- and solar-powered systems and energy efficient appliances, with customers worldwide. Today we’ll be talking about how switching to solar energy can reduce the air pollution generated by fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, and the practical steps of making that switch. John has a diverse background ranging from owning and operating a whole grains bakery and motorcycle/auto/airplane mechanic to wind generator manufacturer and solar integrator. For fun, John recently converted a Mitsubishi Expo from a mechanical car to an electric car which gets plugged into a solar array for recharging at his solar-powered home. John has installed solar electric systems on boats, RVs, ambulances, and residences. He has been a frequent guest on WMNF’s Sustainable Living program with Jon Butts. www.svhotwire.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Making the Switch to Solar Energy

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: John Gambill

Date of Broadcast: September 09, 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. Today is Tuesday, September 9, 2014. I want to say that it’s a sunny day because we’re going to be talking about solar energy, but the sun is just coming out from behind the clouds, which we get a lot of at this time of year because we’ve got a lot of rain here in Clearwater, Florida.

But over the weekend, I was at a potluck. I want to mention about this potluck because this is a very interest concept we have here in Clearwater, something called a time bank, which is not barter. It’s where you can do things and earn hours, and put them in a bank, the time bank. And then you can spend them on other things that you want.

For example, I would like to sew my own clothes, but I don’t sew very well. So, I can do things like help people with their websites or something that I do well, and exchange the hours that I earn for somebody to sew clothes for me or drive me to the store if I can’t drive or go shopping for me if I’m sick or whatever it happens to be.

And I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and it’s a very good way to get to know people in your community. It’s a good way for people to be able to help each other without the exchange of money.

We have potlucks once a month, so we can get to meet each other. But also, there’s a database online where everybody registers the hours that they’ve earned and spent. But I like to go to the potlucks because I like to meet people that I might be able to do exchanges with.

So I was at the potluck, and one of our new members got up and spoke, and said how he works with solar energy. And I thought, last week, when Dr. Steven Gilbert was on, he’s a toxicologist, he was telling us about how he had just switched his home to solar. And we talked about how important that is to reduce toxic exposures to pollutants in the air that come from the creation of the energy that we use.

Before I introduce our guest, I just want to tell you where our energy comes from. And I’m reading this out of my book, Toxic Free, that I wrote a few years ago.

49.8% comes from burning coal, 19.9% comes from nuclear power, 17.9% comes from natural gas, 6.5% from hydroelectric, 3% from burning petroleum, and 2.3% comes from renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar energy that we’re talking about today.

So that’s 97.7% of our electricity is putting toxic emissions and greenhouse gases into the air every time you turn the switch on. And that’s air that we breathe.

And as we go through this show today, I’m going to be talking about some of those health effects and how doing something like using solar energy can reduce that air pollution, not only for ourselves, but for everybody in the world, all the animals and trees and the birds and everything, that all of life can be helped by switching to something like solar energy.

So my guest today is John Gambill. He’s the president of Hot Wire Enterprises. For the past 16 years, he’s been focused on wind and solar power systems and energy-efficient appliances. And he has customers worldwide.

Hi, John. Hello, John. Are you there?

JOHN GAMBILL: Yes, I’m here. Hello.

DEBRA: Hi. Can you hear me? I can hear you.

JOHN GAMBILL: Yes, I can hear you just fine.

DEBRA: Thanks. So John, tell us how you got interested in solar energy.

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, my wife and I were living aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean. And, of course, you don’t have extension cords long enough to supply power to your boat. So you have to make your own energy when you’re living aboard a sailboat and cruising around.

Most people in that situation use a combination of wind and/or solar to make their energy. And so, of course, we were doing the same. We came across this guy in Trinidad that’s on the southern end of the island, Eastern Caribbean Island chain near South America. He was building wind generators.

And so I went over and looked at them. I had a homemade wind generator on my boat at the time. And it looked like he was doing a pretty good job of it.

I went back and talked to my wife, Vivian, and said, “You know, these are pretty neat devices. We could probably sell these in the U.S. if we go back.”

And I finally talked to her into that. So we sailed back to the U.S. for several days and underneath the [inaudible 00:05:22] table in our boat, came back in time for the Annapolis Boat Show in 1998. We didn’t actually get to go, but we made it here just in time to get nailed by Hurricane—I forgot the name.

DEBRA: Katrina?

JOHN GAMBILL: No. It hit mostly the southern part of Florida in 1998. George.

DEBRA: Yes, I remember that.

JOHN GAMBILL: George. Anyhow, we started selling this wind generator. Then we had solar, and we started doing stuff on land-base as well. So now, we do mostly still cruising sailboats, but we’ve done a number of houses and a couple of water-pumping installations set up a cabin up on one of the rivers that’s really hard to pronounce up north, near [inaudible 00:06:23]. It’s got a chic and a wee and a bunch of other around.

DEBRA: All of our rivers here have long names like that that are hard to pronounce and hard to remember.

JOHN GAMBILL: Anyhow, we’ve been involved in that and we’ve also done some RV’s and things like that.

So that’s how we got started and pretty much where we are right now. We ended up flying out the wind generator manufacturers. We’ve been building them here in Tarpon Springs now for the last couple of years.

DEBRA: That’s Tarpon Springs, Florida. I think what we would like to talk about today is how can somebody start to do the thinking, the planning and the practical steps of moving from having pollution-generating electricity to having cleaner energy like solar?

That’s something that I’m really, really interested in. But I think the last time I tried to look into this, it was something like $40,000. And I just didn’t even know where to start or how it might cost less, or if there were any subsidies for me. I just couldn’t even begin to take that first step.

Why don’t we start with that?

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, you must have checked on that about six to eight years ago because prices have come down by more than 50% now, mainly because of the plummeting price of solar panels. And that was brought on by the Chinese building lots of solar panels. More than half of the solar panels in the world are being manufactured in China right now.

And while the Federal Trade Commission is imposing duties and tariffs because they’ve been dumping, selling at prices that are less than what it costs to build a panel here in the U.S., the definition of dumping. So the prices are likely to come up a little bit, but right now, you can buy solar panels for a little less than a dollar per watt. And six to eight years ago, in 2000, they were about five times that cost.

DEBRA: That’s a big difference.

JOHN GAMBILL: Now, that $40,000 system would probably cost more like $15,000 or $20,000. That’s certainly one way to get started. In fact, there are three ways that I would go about figuring out what you need for your house.

We’d either start with your electric bill, and then calculate what it would take to zero that out. And we do that on a yearly basis. Or we’d look at the space that’s available, and we’d figure out what would work there. Or you can tell me how much money you’ve got to spend, and I’ll spend it.

DEBRA: We’ll talk about more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is John Gambill. He’s the president of Hot Wire Enterprises, and his website is SVHotWire.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re having a thunderstorm, but then I can hear the thunder. So if you hear any grumbling in the background, that’s what’s going on.

My guest today is John Gambill, president of Hotwire Enterprises. His website is SVHotWire.com.

John, I wanted to ask you, the thing that I have been doing before I get my solar system is that the first step, I’ve read many, many times, is to simply reduce the amount of energy that you use, so you don’t have to have so many solar panels. So why don’t we start there?

JOHN GAMBILL: In fact, that would be the first step, is to reduce your energy usage, so that you don’t need as large of a solar system. And that’s usually very cost-effective to do things like CSO light bulbs or even LED light bulbs if there’s [no installation] in the home and those kinds of things.

And there’s a lot that you can do that is not too awfully even very expensive. The Department of Energy actually has some really good information online. If you go to the USDOE.gov, they’ve got a lot of information about reducing your energy usage.

I guess we can lead into water heating.

DEBRA: That was actually my next question because I would suggest that we can start going solar in small ways, even if we don’t do a whole $20,000 or $40,000 solar panel system. A way to start going solar could be with a solar water heater. And that’s something I’m looking at right now is that I need to replace my water heater. Am I going to go just buy a regular water heater, or I’m going to do tankless water heater that only heats up the water as it’s going through, instead of heating it up and keeping it hot in a big container? Or do I want to go solar? And those are the things that I’m considering at the moment.

So why don’t you tell us about solar water heaters as a first step?

JOHN GAMBILL: That’s a lot of territory to cover. First of all, let’s start with the instant water heaters. Those can be cost-effective, but it depends on how you use water. In a typical house, the water heater kicks on and off, maintaining a lot of temperature in the tank, 130 or 140-degrees. I know this is outrageous, but if you are gone for a couple of days a week from your house, the water heater is still kicking on and off, keeping that water hot. And if you only use the water once a day, then you’ve got basically a toaster running most of the day, keeping the water hot. And that’s quite a waste.

So if you use water, say, once a day, then an instant tankless water heater can be very cost-effective.

Now, there’s another option. There are systems that can hook up to your air conditioner.

DEBRA: Tell me about this.

JOHN GAMBILL: At the compressor. Thus, if you may have noticed this box outside your house that’s very warm, that’s wasted heat energy that could be used for heating water.

Now, as far as solar is concerned, there are two types of solar systems—solar thermal or solar electric. I deal mostly with solar electric. But solar water heating is even more cost-effective than a typical system for a water heater for a typical house. It’s going to cost something like $3500 to $5000 installed by a professional.

However, the components to put that together are relatively inexpensive. Now, I spent some morning looking on Craig’s List for water heaters. And there was one in Tampa for $75, used, of course. And there were a lot of these things built and installed years ago. And for whatever reason, they’re coming onto the market relatively cheap.

Now, I have this idea. If we get a bunch of people together, we could do a water heater [arm-raising]. If we were to build our own collectors—though initially, I said, if we could build our own collectors—we can do it pretty cheap, probably less than $300. Of course, it’s going to take a weekend or so. And if we get a group together, we can teach people how to [start] our pipes together, and rivet these things in glue and whatever to put water heaters together.

Solar water heater is a real simple device. It’s a black box. In fact, you could put a black box or black pipes outside your house, leading to the water heater in your house. And the sun would pre-heat the water going into your water heater.

DEBRA: There’s just all this sun all day long. It’s shining on my house. I feel like I should be putting it to use.

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, that’s the simplest way to do it. It’s just some black pipes. We had a system at Marina that I’ve lived up years ago. In fact, it was cheap PVC, the stuff that’s supposed to get hot, painted black, that was on the roof. And that’s heated the hot tub. And it was very hot.

So the basic technology involved here is really simple. After seeing what’s available to use, by the way, these old copper and aluminum water heaters are repairable pretty much forever, so chances of them going bad are pretty slim. Now, I should also mention, there are a lot of solar pool heaters available, which would not be very good to our [domestic] hot water because while they collect a lot of heat energy, they only raise the temperature a relatively small amount. So they’re not really designed for the higher temperatures that we have in our water heaters.

And you mentioned, you need to replace your water heater. Well, the professionals that install these systems will tell you that you need a bigger water tank. And it’s true that that makes it more efficient. So you could double the size of your water heater, and that would mean that you could go for a day or two without any sunlight and still have relatively hot water.

DEBRA: We need to go to break, but we’ll talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is John Gambill, president of Hot Wire Enterprises, and his website is SVHotWire.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is John Gambill. He’s the president of Hot Wire Enterprises. Before we go on, I just want to read a couple more things about the health effects of outdoor air pollution.

“When we use regular, fossil fuel-type energy to produce our electricity, then we produce outdoor air pollution. And I could read you a list of pollutants, but instead of that, I’m going to tell you that when you breathe air pollutants, your respiratory system is designed to protect your lungs from germs and large particles like dust and pollen. However, toxic chemicals in air pollution bypass those defenses causing harm to lungs and lung tissue. Air pollution can make your eyes water, irritate your nose, mouth and throat, and make you cough and wheeze. But the most common air pollutants can also cause more dangerous health effects, including premature death, shortness of breath and chest pain, increased risk of asthma attacks, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, that’s COPD, a group of diseases, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis that share the common symptoms of breathlessness.”

“In addition, once inhaled, these air pollutants can be absorbed into your bloodstream and reach all areas of your body.”
So this is not an inconsequential thing. This is something we need to start paying attention to. And solar power can help this tremendously.

Just seeing about what it would be like if, instead of solar power being less than 2% because it’s shared with wind power and all the other renewables, but if renewables were 89% of the method by which we produce our electricity, how different our air pollution situation would be very, very different.

So John, let’s go back to what you were saying at the beginning when I asked you about how to get started with the actual solar system. And you said, “Show me your electric bill, and we’ll zero it out,” or, “Tell me how much space you have, and I’ll fill it,” or, “Tell me how much money you have, and I’ll spend it.”

JOHN GAMBILL: We can do that. If you wanted to get started very small, then there’s a fairly new technology out called micro-inverters. When you hook up solar panels to your house, we usually use a grid tie inverter. The grid tie inverter takes the energy from the solar panels, and changes it, so that it can be pumped back into the grid, or used in the house.

With micro-inverters, each individual solar panel has an inverter on it. And so you could start with a single solar panel and a micro-inverter, and tie that into your distribution panels of the fuse box in your house.

So that would be one way to start small.

DEBRA: So how much would something like that cost?

JOHN GAMBILL: About $1000.

DEBRA: And that way, you would be displacing some of the pollution that is currently being generated by the electricity you use. And then you could add to that, and you could just add as you could afford it.

JOHN GAMBILL: It’s true. That would work.

DEBRA: Wow, that’s such a different picture than having to come up with $40,000, or even $20,000.

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, like I said earlier though, the low-hanging fruit, as you mentioned too, and some people said that the source of new energy is conservation to start with. Don’t use the energy in the first place. And then water heaters are more cost-effective than the solar electric system. The sun’s energy hitting a black box, 95% or so percent of it just turned into heat. But as the sun [inaudible 00:21:58] solar panel, about 15% or 17% of it gets turned into electricity. So it would be crazy to use solar electric to run an electric water heater, just that the big, black box sitting up on the roof or in the yard is going to be at last five times more efficient.

DEBRA: I think here in Florida, I was reading a book. Actually, the author of this book was on my show. I forgot what it’s called. I think it’s called Let it Shine, or something like that is the title of the book. I read every word of that book when it first came out. It’s not out in a revised edition. I’m not sure if I even lived in Florida at the time, but I remember him saying that solar water heaters were just standard equipment on houses in Florida in the 20’s or 30’s, or something like that. That there was just a time, he had just pictures of these solar water heaters on house after house after house on a street.

It just made such an impression on me that in a place like Florida or the Caribbean, or sunny places along the tropics at least, solar water heaters should just be standard equipment.

JOHN GAMBILL: Absolutely. In Florida, the home builders don’t offer it as an option as a rule. Just whacky!

DEBRA: Well, I’m really going to look into this because I have the opportunity now where I need to change my water heater. It was leaking and, now, it’s suddenly, just by itself, stopped leaking. So I think I’ve got a little more time. I don’t have to [inaudible 00:23:43] and buy something.

JOHN GAMBILL: Don’t let it start leaking dramatically. You don’t want to—that could do.

DEBRA: I know. It’s definitely on the top of my list of something that I need to handle as soon as possible. What I have here in Clearwater, Florida is that our water company, water and electricity, they have a program where I can buy a water heater for half the price from what it’s sold in the stores. They subsidize the rest of it. And so I actually can buy that one. I can buy a regular tank heater. I can buy a tankless heater.

I’m probably going to go with the tankless heater, but I need to see what the difference would be and how much it would cost to do the solar thing, and see if that’s practical for me, given that it’s an emergency.

JOHN GAMBILL: Even with the solar water heater, you still need a water tank. Although there are some solar water heaters that have a tank that’s built into them, again, depending on how you use water—let me just use our house as an example.

We have the standard 40-gallon water heater. It’s from Home Depot, least expensive, whatever.

DEBRA: Yes, that’s what I have.

JOHN GAMBILL: It does happen that on a cloudy day, by the end of the day, or after 24-hours, the water is not very warm anymore. And so if you wanted to take a shower, you just turn the hot water all the way on, rather than having it mixed with cold water. And occasionally, we even turn on the circuit breaker that powers up the electric water heater especially in the winter time when it’s cloudy.

But my system costs about $300, and we’re saving $25 to $30 a month.

DEBRA: I want to hear more about that but we need to go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is John Gambill, president of Hot Wire Enterprises. His website is SVHotWire.com. And when we come back, we’ll talk more about simple things that we can do to get started on solar.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is John Gambill, president of Hot Wire Enterprises. His website is SVHotWire.com.

Before the break, we were talking about the $300 solar hot water heater. How do you get one of those for $300?

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, here’s my idea. Because the solar water heater is pretty much the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, it just makes sense that people would want to put these on. Of course, it prevents pollution from burning fossil fuels to make electricity. But mainly, it’s cheap. It’s an inexpensive way to get started with solar.

It’s going to require some elbow grease. My idea is to get a group together. I found a source for very inexpensive water heaters. It looks like it’s going to be less expensive to buy them than it is to build them myself. And we can put together a very simple system.

For example, the one that I have, which consists of solar collectors, the original water tank, the original water heater, a pump, and a small solar panel. Solar panels, when the sun is shining on it, produces electricity to run the pump, so the pump runs and moves the hot water from the collector to your original water tank. Turn off the circuit breaker for your water heater, and that’s it. That’s the whole system.

Of course, there are pipes involved. It can get much more complicated than that but the collectors are available used or even new at very low prices. And all it takes is elbow grease.

So we get a group of people together and, of course, the time bank that you were talking about earlier, you could perhaps build up time in the bank that could then be used to have other people come in, people with more expertise, as far as putting pipes together, to install the system.

DEBRA: John, you could train a solar water heater time bank installation team. And then people could use their time bank hours to have the team come up and do their installation.

JOHN GAMBILL: That’s a good idea. Yes, I like that.

DEBRA: I think that’s a fabulous idea.

JOHN GAMBILL: I’m so tired of people talking to me about solar. We attend these eco fests and sustainable living and talk to a lot of people. I’m so tired of people talking about it. Just get off your ass and do something.

DEBRA: I agree. You know, during the break, I was remembering from a long time ago when people used to make solar showers by just building a wood frame out in the backyard, and putting a garbage can on top, filling it with water, letting it sit out in the sun, and then gravity-feed it through a shower head, and then there’s your hot shower outside.

JOHN GAMBILL: That’s how basic this technology is and how simply it can be.

DEBRA: It really is that basic. I think that sometimes humans make things a little too complex, and that’s a lot of what goes on in our industrial society. But that is the simplicity of it.

So we’re almost to the end of the show. I just wanted to recap for people about the process that they could go through if they’re interested in starting the solar. So the first one would be, start with something simple like a solar water heater could be a good first step. And then the next one we talked about was just getting one solar panel with, what did you call it, an individual inverter?

JOHN GAMBILL: Micro-inverter.

DEBRA: Micro-inverter. And then you could add to those one by one. And then another thing that you can do is reduce the amount of energy you’re using now, so that when it comes time to switch the solar that you don’t have to have so many solar panels.

Another one would be to, if you looked that in the past, take a new look at it because the costs have come way down.

JOHN GAMBILL: There you go.

DEBRA: And see who’s doing what in your community in order to see what kind of help you can get.

JOHN GAMBILL: Absolutely, you got it.

DEBRA: Well, we still do have about five-minutes left. So is there anything else you’d like to say about solar that we haven’t talked about yet?

JOHN GAMBILL: I’m open to any questions that you might have. I mentioned that a typical system on a house is about 5000-watts or 5-kilowatts. And in doing just a little bit of research online, the savings in coal that would be burned to produce that amount of energy over a year’s time is about 3000-pounds of coal. I was pretty amazed with that too.

And there are some other things here too. 6.6 barrels of oil would be required to be burned to make that same amount of energy. And that reduces the CO2 that’s produced to make that electricity, by the same amount as about 22 acres of trees.

So even a little bit, even small systems can make a pretty big difference.

DEBRA: They can. I’m looking here. I had a page that I had found before the show that had some statistics on it. And then I was looking for other things and it got lost. So I can’t tell you those. I’m just going to click through here.

Here it is. This is from Environmental Defense. And they say the generation of electric power produces more pollution, in bold letters, produces more pollution than any other single industry in the United States. Isn’t that amazing?

I mean, it’s been ordered to produce the electricity that we use causes more pollution than anything else. And what’s commonly used are fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, known as non-renewable resources, and burning of fossil fuels such as coal or oil creates byproducts that pollute when released to the environment. There’s sulfur, 62% of sulfur dioxide emissions that contribute to acid rain. These are all produced by us making energy or using energy that needs to be made.

Twenty-one percent of nitrous oxides contribute to smog. Forty percent of carbon emissions contribute to global climate change. And it just goes on like this.

So it really is making a big impact, and we can make a difference in what goes on in the environment by looking at what’s going on in our homes and the choices that we make.

JOHN GAMBILL: Here you go. So let’s stick together and do it.

DEBRA: I agree. And I really like your idea of having there be teams of people and groups of people working together to make this happen. Can we build our own solar panels and not to have them come from China?

JOHN GAMBILL: Yes. I haven’t done an exact materials list, but I believe it’s going to cost $300 to $500 to build your own solar collector, depending, of course, on a lot of factors.

DEBRA: And how much are the ones from China?

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, you can buy one from China right now. You can find from deals. And I found one this morning that was $100.

DEBRA: $100 for a solar panel?

JOHN GAMBILL: Yes.

DEBRA: And of course, there are some, maybe, toxic materials that are used to make solar panels. But the point about this is that once you make them, then they can be used for how many years.

JOHN GAMBILL: Well, the solar water collectors, solar water heater collectors panel, if they’re well-made, I don’t know, this stuff doesn’t exactly go away. It’s pretty much permanent. Solar electric, the panels typically have a warranty that they’ll be producing 80% of the rated capacity in 25 or, in some cases, 30 years. They’ll probably still be producing some power in a hundred years if possible, if somebody could be using one, although it would be reduced in efficiency, in a long time, in a very long time.

And if you go on and look at some of the right wing website, they’ll say, they’re using toxic chemical tools to make these, and it’s more polluting than burning coals. Realistically, if you had a solar plant, a plant-building solar panels that was run largely by solar panels, it’s pretty obvious. And it’s cumulative. Every time somebody adds to the amount of solar energy that’s being produced, they simply add to all the other ones that have come years before.

DEBRA: Well, I think it’s a great idea. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Again, my guest is John Gambill, president of Hot Wire Enterprises. And his website is SV, v as in victory, HotWire dot com.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. If you’d like to know more about this show, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, where you can see all the guests for the week. Each one of these shows is recorded and archived, so you can listen to all the shows as many times as you want, 24-hours a day, anywhere in the world. That’s lots of valuable information, lots of really interesting guests, lots of ways to help you live toxic free.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

How Toxic Obesogens Can Make You Fat and Prevent Weight Loss

Lara AdlerMy guest today is Lara Adler, Environmental Toxins Expert and Certified Holistic Health Coach. We’ll be talking about how obesogens affect your weight, what happens to toxics stored in fat when you lose weight, specific chemicals that are obesogens, and and what you can doShe trains and educates practitioners within the health and wellness community to better understand the links between environmental toxins and their impact on disease states—from weight gain and diabetes, to thyroid disease and developmental disorders—so they can better support their clients. Lara is deeply committed to peeling back the curtain and opening up the conversation about environmental toxins to people in a way that’s informative, accessible, actionable and totally free from overwhelm. She takes a practical, real-world approach to minimizing toxic exposure to safeguard our health. www.laraadler.com

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Toxic Obesogens Can Make You Fat and Prevent Weight Loss

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Lara Adler

Date of Broadcast: September 04, 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 4, 2014, and it’s a beautiful day in Clearwater. I know I say that a lot, but it is a beautiful day in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. It’s just the end of summer. I’m looking forward to a cooler autumn. The fall and winter is the most beautiful time of the year here where it’s not cold, but it’s cooler than summer. And this is a beautiful place to be.

Today, we’re going to be talking about how toxic chemicals can make you fat and how they can prevent you from losing weight.

And so if fat is an issue for you, you’re going to want to listen to this because toxic chemicals do affect that. And if you’ve been trying to lose weight, it may be that what you need to do is detox and get some of these chemicals out of your body.

My guest today is Lara Adler. She’s an environmental toxins expert and a certified holistic health coach. And we’ll be talking about what are called obesogens.

Hi, Lara.

LARA ADLER: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be bring this topic to your audience.

DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I know you know a lot about this. Now, I should say that Lara is a certified holistic health coach, but she doesn’t coach individuals. You can’t go to Lara as a client. What she does is she educates other health coaches. Tell us about exactly what you do.

LARA ADLER: Well, I realized that all of these health practitioners are on-the-ground working with clients on health issues already, whether it’s excess weight or thyroid disorders or cancer or whatever it is. And I realized that the health and wellness professionals that are out there—whether they’re health coaches or nurses or naturopaths or acupuncturists, whatever—they’re not well-versed in the subject of environmental health, environmental chemicals and how they impact us.

So my work is focused on educating health practitioners so that they can better support their clients in the work that they’re doing with them. It’s translating all of this research that’s really complicated around environmental chemicals and presenting it to practitioners in a way that really makes sense for them and for their clients.

DEBRA: That’s just so needed. I am so happy that you’re doing that. I think what the world needs today is a lot of people like you and me where we are picking our niche. I’m translating it all for consumers, but you, as a holistic health coach, you understand that whole field and how to speak to them, and what it is that they need.

I’m so glad that you’re bringing all of this information to that field because it’s really, really needed.

LARA ADLER: I’m delighted to do it.

DEBRA: Good. Well, you can bring it to us today. I just wanted everybody to know that you can’t call her up and have her work with you personally, but she’s out there educating people that you can work with, and that you can go to a holistic health coach and ask them about environmental toxins, and see if they’ve been educated because this information needs to get into everybody’s hands. Everybody needs to be thinking with this.

Lara, how did you get interested in this?

LARA ADLER: Well, like I said, like you introduced me, I started as a health coach. I had a whole other career before that, but I really started in this field of health coach about seven or so years ago.

Then I had a lot of clients, like most health coaches, who are coming to me for weight loss. Environmental toxin wasn’t something that was on my radar at the time. I actually didn’t really know anything about it. I’ve heard about mercury in seafood and stuff like that. But it wasn’t anything that I’ve learned in my education on the path to becoming a health coach.

And so I had these clients coming to me for weight loss, and I had all these protocols that I knew would work and help them. Some of them were seeing results, they were losing weight and feeling great. But others were doing what I would call “all the right things.” They were eating well and sleeping well, exercising and managing their stress, and they were happy.

Everything was right, but they just couldn’t lose the weight. Something was keeping them fat, and that really bothered me because I wanted them to get results.

And so I started researching what else might be going on here. I started picking apart what are the lesser known contributing factors. In that research, I stumbled into this world of environmental chemicals. And just immediately, it blew my hair back totally like, “Whoa! Where has this information been in all of my studies around health and wellness?” It just wasn’t part of that conversation.

Really overnight, the focus of my practice shifted. I really delved into this subject fully. I found in that initial research that so many of the chemicals that we’re exposed to are linked in different ways to metabolic disease, insulin resistance, resistant weight loss, diabetes, obesity and so on. And that just totally blew my mind.

And so I really wanted to be of service to my colleagues because like I said, in all of my training, this was new information for me. And I didn’t think that was right, so I really started to do the research that was necessary to be able to educate my peers and colleagues in the practitioner community.

So, that’s how I landed in this subject quite by accident. But I’ve been doing this work now for almost three years, exclusively focused on education around environmental toxins—around that way, that’s how I got here.

DEBRA: Well, it’s good. I love it when people apply the toxics information in their own fields.
So you say on your website that you’re an environmental toxins expert. What does that mean?

LARA ADLER: Well, I think—and I’m sure that the listeners of your show are familiar with that term—a lot of people when they hear that term, they still think of things that are what I call “out there,” external in the environmental, like some oil rig off the coast of somewhere, having a massive oil pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, what have you. So those are some of out there bigger thing that an individual, like me or you, we don’t have very much control over those things, and we can feel bad about them. And obviously, we can do what we can to prevent them from happening. But as an individual, there’s not a lot of clutch that we have there.

And so when I used this phrase, environmental toxins, I’m talking more about the things that are in our personal environment, our internal spaces—our home, the food that we eat, the water that we drink, the products that we’re buying and using every day. And so these are in our personal environmental.

And so my work focuses on helping people understand what are the things in their immediate space that they actually do have control over, and how can we understand what’s going on there, and what that communicates to change or behavior or our purchases or what have you to reduce overall exposure.

DEBRA: And of course, this is where we meet because that’s what I do too to a different audience.

LARA ADLER: Exactly! And so I tend to—and like I said, some of these information is going to be recapped or overviewed for your audience because they will have heard it from you or from other speakers as well. We thought this mountain of chemical that hit the marketplace for the last 50 or 60 years—and yes, sure, some of these chemicals have benefitted us.

We don’t want to tar them all with a negative brush. They’re not all bad. Many of those have made our lives easier and better and safer et cetera, and even longer. But most of them haven’t been tested for safety, yet they’re ending up in the products that we’re buying and using every day and bringing into our home.

DEBRA: Today, we’re going to be talking specifically about the chemicals that affect our body weight, the chemicals that make us fat, and the chemicals that prevent us from losing weight. I just want to tell you that Lara has put together a really nice, little, free e-book. It’s how many pages? I’m looking for the page number as well.

LARA ADLER: Eight or nine, I think, maybe.

DEBRA: Yes, 11 pages. It’s called Chemicals Not Calories. It’s free. You can go to her website, LaraAdler.com, and remember, it’s L-A-R-A, and then another A, Adler, A-D-L-E-R dot com. And you can get this free e-book, which we’ll give you more details on the subject that we’re going to be able to cover in the time period of our show.

But we’re going to go to break, and then we’ll come back and talk about this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is Lara Adler. And we’re going to be talking about toxic obesogens. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lara Adler. She’s a certified holistic health coach and environmental toxins expert. And she works in the field of holistic health care to educate her colleagues about toxic chemicals and how they can be affecting their clients.

So Lara, what exactly is an obesogen?

LARA ADLER: Well, it’s an important question. Obesogen is a relatively new term, really going back about 2006. But obesogens are chemicals that are directly or indirectly capable of increasing obesity, weight gain, diabetes or insulin resistance through the disruption of metabolic, hormonal or developmental processes. So they have the ability to alter the development of our fat cells, alter our metabolism and to promote fat retention. And so that’s essentially what an obesogen is.

Although the term is relatively new, we’ve actually been aware of this physiology of this happening in the body for quite a while. The most common example of that is everybody has known—some of you have heard stories, or somebody [inaudible 00:11:20] prescription medication that had a side effect of weight gain. But everybody [inaudible 00:11:25]. They were on some prescription drug, and then within three months, they put on 30 pounds.

Those are obesogens. Those are chemicals that that is having a side effect of weight gain. And a lot of the chemicals in our environment that we’re exposed to on a daily basis behave in the exact, same way.

So we’ve actually been aware of this process for a long time. They just didn’t have a name until about 2006.

DEBRA: So what role do you see these chemicals playing in increasing rates of overweight and obesity?

LARA ADLER: Well, I think it plays a significant role. The reality is that we have levels of overweight and obesity in this country like we’ve never seen before. A full 35% of the U.S. population medically qualifies as obese. And another 34% on top of that are diagnosed as overweight. That’s more like 70% of our population is struggling with it.

The conventional thinking for years around weight management has always been around diet and exercise. That it’s this “calories in, calories out” model that we are now starting to understand is not that accurate. That doesn’t work. If it works, then we wouldn’t be here where we are.

So, there’s a lot more going on. And when we have increases in statistics like 70% of our population struggling with weight issues (that didn’t exist on this scale 30 years), we have to look at the environment because that’s the only other possible explanation.

When we look at the environment and see that so many of these chemicals have the ability to affect the body in this way, it becomes very clear that this is an enormous contributing factor—and certainly, not the only one. But I liken it to a perfect storm. You’ve got all these chemicals. We’ve got sedentary or non-active lifestyles and really poor diet that generally speaking, people are still consuming.

DEBRA: For me, I’ve done a lot of research over the past 30 years about toxic chemicals, and I finally came to the conclusion that I think that toxic chemicals, and it’s not just something that I think. I could show you studies of how toxic chemicals are related to every single body condition that exists. Everything.

When I first started this, it was because I had an immune system problem, and there was a lot of focus on, well, how are toxic chemicals affecting the immune system, but they’re not affecting the liver or something like that.

But now, we know, if you’re sick with anything, anything, there’s a toxic chemical association. And so it doesn’t matter what the problem is, what the health problem is, the first thing to do is to handle the toxic chemical exposures, to get the toxic chemicals out of your body because as long as you’re continuing to do that having those toxic chemical exposures and having toxic chemicals in your body, anything else is pretty much not going to work because the toxic chemicals are still there doing their damage.

I can’t say that too many times.

LARA ADLER: That’s just the body burden conversation. Our bodies just were never designed to be able to process these chemicals out. And some of them—yeah, it can handle some of them, but not the volume that we’re exposed to now.

The symptoms can manifest in thousands and thousands of different ways for different people depending on different things. And so yes, that’s why I focus on working with health practitioners because every single health condition that anyone is ever going to seek a health professional for is attached to environmental toxins. And it’s not okay that health professionals are not fully versed and fluent in this area.

DEBRA: I think all health professionals should be experts in this and what they should be treating is exactly what you and I are doing, it’s getting the exposures and getting the toxic chemicals out of the body. That’s the first thing that needs to be done before anything else is done. And every health professional in the world needs to know this and know how to do it.

That’s just where we are.

So I’m glad you agree.

LARA ADLER: Yeah, absolutely! And the primary thing that I speak to is this concept of practical avoidance because that’s the first step. I think a lot of the conversations these days are around detoxing and that term is used very superficially in a lot of ways, “I’m on a juice cleanse, and I’m detoxing. Woo-hoo!”

But the reality is that you’re just constantly re-toxing all the time. And so we have to reduce our exposures first, and then we can work on getting what’s in us out to the best of our abilities while supporting our body’s ability to do its job on its own.

And I think these are the things that health professionals, and really, individual people need to be considering. It doesn’t help to do a detox if you’re still surrounding yourself with toxic chemicals the second you walk into your front door.

DEBRA: I totally agree with that. We need to go to break. But we’ll talk about more of these things when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lara Adler. She’s a certified holistic health coach and environmental toxins expert. And you can go to her website, LaraAdler.com, and get her book, Chemicals

Not Calories, for free. It’s an a 11-page e-book. It summarizes the things that we’re talking about.

So we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lara Adler. She’s a certified holistic health coach who works with other health coaches in the health care profession to educate other health care practitioners about toxic chemicals and how they affect their health and the importance of considering them in health care.

Lara, so tell us now about those you have in your e-book, Chemicals Not Calories, you have a list of 20 obesogens. Tell us about those.

LARA ADLER: Well, those are just the ones that we recognize now as biologically being obesogenic—meaning they’re able to interfere with these metabolic pathways. So, the reality is that there’s likely a lot more than that. We just haven’t confirmed them as of yet. And this is due in part because we just haven’t tested most of the chemicals that are on the marketplace.

So, that 20 is likely just a small list, but there are things like MSG and nicotine. These are things that we’re commonly exposed to in our foods, and through smoking or second-hand or third-hand smoke.

And then there are ones that are pervasive in our environment like phthalates or atrazine if you’re in the U.S.

Did you want me to go in to what some of those are? Would that be helpful?

DEBRA: Yes, tell us about some of the specific ones. But I want to ask you a question before you choose them. I wanted to ask you, I see on the list, MSG, and fructose, which are two ingredients. And I’m assuming that you’re talking about fructose, like high fructose corn syrup. Are we talking about fructose in fruit?

LARA ADLER: No, not so much in fruits, but isolated.

DEBRA: It’s an industrial chemical. High fructose corn syrup is an industrial chemical. And it’s listed as a food on the label but it’s a chemical. So these are two things. If people were to just stop eating MSG and stop eating fructose in any of its industrial forms, then right there, you’ve handled two of them.

So it’s not that difficult. It’s just about being aware of what they are and where they are that you’re being exposed to them.

So now, you go on and talk about the ones you want to talk about.

LARA ADLER: So one of the first one that I had in this handout, in this guide, is atrazine. Atrazine is one of the most, or is the most widely used herbicide in the United States. We dump something like 76-million pounds of it on crops and golf courses, et cetera, throughout the year. And it’s filtered through the ground water that ends up in our public drinking water where it’s not filtered out.

Studies have shown that 94% of drinking water in the U.S. has levels of atrazine in it.

Atrazine is on that list as an obesogen. It actually interferes with our mitochondria. I don’t know if anybody remembers—

DEBRA: Tell us what mitochondria is.

LARA ADLER: Right! The mitochondria basically is this old power plant inside every single in our body. So, they are our primary source of energy production. And when our mitochondria is damaged or hampered in any way, our overall energy will decrease. And if mitochondrial dysfunction (meaning, when these are altered in any way), it really influences the insulin resistance, the obesity and diabetes.

And these links have been made when looking at this low levels of atrazine exposure—not for people who are applying atrazine to fields like farm workers, but people who are drinking our tap water. Every time you turn on the tap, there’s atrazine in it. We’re getting these low-levels of exposure. And these low-levels have been linked in animal studies to obesity, belly fat, insulin resistance, et cetera.

And so it’s the significant one in that 94% of drinking water tested has this chemical present. And so we know, like you just said, if you take MSG, and if you take high fructose corn syrup, if you take processed foods and sugars out, because we want to regulate our blood sugar in some levels, so that we don’t end up in the pre-diabetic or diabetic state, but then we’re not also addressing other chemicals in our environment that do the same, exact thing, we’re kind of missing the boat.

DEBRA: What would somebody do to reduce atrazine in our life?

LARA ADLER: They would need to get the appropriate water filter that will do that. And I believe that most carbon filters will be able to do that. You don’t need to go out and buy bottled water. In fact, I don’t encourage people to buy bottled water because the bottled water essentially bottles tap water anyway. It’s not as heavily regulated as municipal water supplies are.

So bottled water is not the answer here. The answer is getting an in-home at-the-sink or a whole house water filtration system based on the contaminants that are present in your water.

Everybody’s water is different. There is no one size fits all product that I recommend. Everybody needs to do a little bit of research and understand what’s in their water. And they can do that by calling their water board or googling their water quality report for their town which is federally required and those are produced bi-annually.

DEBRA: So what’s another chemical?

LARA ADLER: Another one, it’s probably one of the most common one. It’s not actually a chemical, but [inaudible 00:23:44] chemical. Those are called phthalate. And it’s spelled with a P-H-T-H, which throws a lot of people because it’s just pronounced with a T-H.

Phthalates are found in a lot of different places in our homes. They’re found in certain types of plastics. But primarily, they’re found in our fragrance products, the scented candles, and the air fresheners, and the laundry detergents, and our personal care products, shampoos, body lotions, perfume, anything that’s got a heavy fragrance.

The phthalates are used in these products as a solvent and as [fixative], so that when you wash your hair, six hours later, they’ll smell like your shampoo. Phthalates are partly responsible for holding that fragrance into your hair or into your clothes after you’ve done your laundry.

And phthalates are what are called endocrine-disrupting chemical. They can interfere with your hormonal system, which, in part, regulates your metabolism. And so these chemicals are directly linked not only to weight gain, but a massive long list of other health conditions from early onset puberty, like cancers, et cetera.

So, it doesn’t really matter what your reasoning is for getting them out, just get them out because they’re not necessary.

So, the first step there is to get rid of unnecessary fragrances in your home. You don’t need to have your home smelling like eternal sunshine or whatever these silly names that they give these air fresheners—spring breeze, mountain spray, whatever.

Open your windows or get some flowers if you really want your house to smell nice. But don’t go for the plug-in or those air fresheners, scented candles, potpourri, et cetera.

DEBRA: And we need to go to break. And you can continue doing more tips about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lara Adler. She’s a certified holistic health coach, and she helps her industry learn about toxic chemicals, so they can help their clients. Her website is LaraAdler.com, L-A-R-A, and then another A-D-L-E-R dot come.

And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Lara Adler. She’s a certified holistic health coach who helps other health coaches and health care professionals learn about toxic chemicals, so that they can help their clients.

Lara, I just wanted to mention, because we just had a commercial on about water filters, that I’ve actually found one that I do think is, it’s not 100% one size fits all. I’ve heard a couple of people say, “Oh, I couldn’t use this because of x, y, z” about their water. But if removes such a broad spectrum of water pollutants that I used to say exactly what you said that you need to find out what’s in your water, maybe have your water tested, get the right water filter that matches your water. And that’s still exactly what people should do.

I’m just saying that this particular filter seems to be a match for most people. And it’s affordable. It’s affordable to buy. It only costs $100 a year to replace all the cartridges. And it really gets the water cleaned. It’s the one that I have in my house.

I am always recommending that every single person in the world needs to have a water filter because I don’t know of any tap water in the world that’s clean. And this is just something we all need to do.

LARA ADLER: Absolutely! I totally agree with that. In fact, it’s one of the number one things that I recommend people do. If you do anything, do that.

DEBRA: If you want to find out about this water filter, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and in the right-hand column, you just look down until you see the picture of the water filter. And just click there, and you’ll find out all about this. It really is the best water filter I’ve found in 30 years of looking at water filters.

Now, let’s go back and continue to tell us about where people are encountering phthalates, and how they can eliminate those from their lives.

When you think about it, people are trying to lose weight and they’re wearing perfume. That’s sabotaging it right there.

LARA ADLER: Yeah, absolutely! A lot of these things, we’re attached to them because of habit or because of savvy marketing, they’ve sold us. Look at the Clairol Herbal Essences shampoo.

DEBRA: I used to use that.

LARA ADLER: Their entire ad campaign has nothing to do with the performance of their shampoo, but how wonderful it smells. And a lot of this is simply marketing. And you need to be mindful of that and not be sold to in that way and be a smarter consumer.

Five years ago, it was really challenging to find natural products, shampoos, lotions and deodorants, that didn’t have these types of synthetic chemicals. Now, the marketplace is absolutely overflowing with products that are made with really clean ingredients, natural ingredients, and that don’t use chemical synthetic fragrances. They used essential oil-based plant fragrances, et cetera.

And those are what I tell people to transition to if they’re still attached to having their hair smell good or their body lotion smells sweet or whatever. But get rid of the conventional stuff, the stuff that you find at Walgreens or Target or what have you, those type of stores, because they’re all going to be loaded with phthalates.

And you’re not even going to know this for sure because of labeling issues. But if you see the word fragrance or perfume on an ingredient list, you’re almost guaranteed that that contains phthalate. That’s the word that you’re going to want to look for on products [inaudible 00:29:52], fragrance or perfume.

And If it’s in there, that’s a source of exposure for you.
You don’t need to cross every single item in your house at once. It’s a whittling down process. Get rid of the non-essential ones, the scented candles first, then your shampoo ones out. And if you have buy a new one, go ahead and buy one that doesn’t include those products.

I actually have a Pinterest board where I pin a lot of products that I really like that people then check out if they’re interested.

Would that be okay for me to share that URL?

DEBRA: Sure.

LARA ADLER: So it’s Pinterest.com/LaraAdler, L-A-R-A-A-D-L-E-R. I have all kinds of products that I pin there that I like. So people are like, “Great! I want to buy this stuff, but what do I buy?” That’s a good place to start. And I know there are all kinds of resources online for people to find those things.

But that’s the first step.

DEBRA: Well, another thing is that you can also go to DebrasList.com, and find my huge list of those kinds of products. In fact, on DebrasList.com, it has different keywords for characteristics. And you can just click on fragrance-free, and it will take you to all the fragrance-free products that are listed.

LARA ADLER: Fantastic. There are so many resources out there nowadays which is wonderful because it means that more people are going to get turned on to these products easier, which is going to ultimately shift the marketplace. So it’s really exciting.

DEBRA: So now, tell us about PFOA.

LARA ADLER: PFOA is the short for perfluorooctanoic acid—not important, but you know that. PFOA is a chemical that’s found in a lot of different places in the home. It’s found in non-stick cookware. We know it as “Teflon” which is a brand name, but we usually like to use that term. [Inaudible 00:31:49] non-stick.

PFOA is a chemical that’s found in non-stick cookware. It’s also found in food packaging—[inaudible 00:32:00] grease-proof cardboards, the lining of a pizza box, or the inside of the microwaveable food meal, or the inside of an ice cream tub, or the inside of a microwave popcorn bag. These are all often coated with this PFOA chemical.

Now, PFOA chemical is another obesogen capable of disrupting our thyroid, which is partly responsible for managing our metabolism and weight. So that’s part of its role as an obesogen.

Most people think the biggest source of exposure is non-stick cookware, and it’s actually not. The biggest source of exposure comes from food packaging. I still don’t think people should have non-stick cookware in their homes. I still think those needs to be phased out, particularly if they’re scratched. But microwave popcorn is a really significant exposure source for people. The entire inside of the popcorn bag is lined with this chemical, so that the butter or oil that’s surrounding the kernels doesn’t seep through. It’s unsightly and all of that.;

And so this is a really simple switch for people to make. As people are aiming to be healthier in their lives anyway, moving away from packaged food is always a good idea. It’s kind of necessary. This gives us another reason to shift away from packaged foods—to avoid exposure to this chemical.

This chemical is found in—I think the statistic is something like 98% of the people tested by the CDC. It’s in our [inaudible 00:33:45] fabric protectors. It’s in all kinds of different places in the home.

The easiest place to address it is in the kitchen. So get rid of the non-stick cookware, move to enamel, cast iron, cast iron, stainless steel. Some people are icky about stainless steel. Whatever people are comfortable with, but move away from non-stick.

Skip out on microwave popcorn. If you want popcorn, [inaudible 00:34:13] or use an air popper. And move away from the kinds of pizzas that come in a box that’s lined with wax like you get at Domino’s, for example.

DEBRA: When you said it’s on the inside of ice cream product, I almost wanted to cry because I love ice cream. But I can’t remember the last time I bought a carton of ice cream. It’s been so long because I don’t buy ice cream because it’s got, like the famous, delicious flavors, all those brands, they’ve all got refined white sugar, and which I consider to be an industrial chemical.

And even if you buy a natural one, there are a lot of sweeteners in them. And now, to know that it’s not only the ingredients in the ice cream that might be making you fat, but the carton itself, I do make ice cream at home out of grass-fed cream and strawberries. I don’t even put the sweeter in my ice cream.

You really don’t need them. You can make great ice cream from grass-fed cream or almond milk or whatever it is, the creamy thing that you eat, and just put some fruit in it. And you can just freeze the fruit and put it in the blender with your liquid, and it makes ice cream. It’s very easy.

We’re getting to the end of our time. Thank you so much. This has been so informative. So if people want to find out more about what you do, how should they contact you?

LARA ADLER: Like I said, they can definitely check out my website. They can check that free guide on my website. If you’re a health professional, definitely check out the programs that I offer. You can find that on my website. If you’re not, and you just want to know about products or keep this conversation going, you can follow me on Twitter which is @LaraAdler or follow my Pinterest board at Pinterest.com/LaraAdler. That’s the best way to stay in touch that way.

DEBRA: Great. Well, thank you again so much.

LARA ADLER: You’re very welcome.

DEBRA: I think this has been really important to talk about, how chemicals make us fat or prevent us from losing weight because chemicals are the number one health problem there is. Obesity is one of the most important things that people need to handle. And the fact that those two are related, I think, is a really important thing that needs to be talked about more.

So thank you, Lara.

LARA ADLER: You’re welcome.

DEBRA: And again, her website is LaraAdler.com, and you can see her on Pinterest too.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Find out who the guests are coming up, and also, you can listen to, all these shows are archived.

You can listen to this show again. You can listen to yesterday’s show.

So I’ll be back and be well.

How Mercury Affects Your Health

 steven-gilbert-2Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org

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LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Mercury Affects Your Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT

Date of Broadcast: September 03, 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.

My guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT and he’s a regular guest on the show. I have him on every month because he tells us about different toxic substances and how they are toxic, how we are exposed to them, what the dangers are because we need to know living in a toxic world. We need to know where these toxic chemicals are because the whole point is to be able to recognize them and not have them be in your life so that your body can be healthier. On this show, we talk about detox getting the chemicals out of your body. But it’s better to not put them in, in the first place.

And today, we’re going to talk about mercury and that’s a very common toxic metal. Most people know that there is mercury in your dental fillings, but where else is there mercury? So we are going to find out those things. We’re going to find out how it affects your body.

HI, Dr. Gilbert.

STEVEN GILBERT: Hi, Debra. It is good to speak to you again.

DEBRA: Thank you. How are you doing today?

STEVEN GILBERT: Oh, very good. I’m having a fine day here in Seattle.

DEBRA: Good. Is the sun shiny or is it raining in Seattle?

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, it’s mostly gray. There’s a little bit of sun peeking out, but it’s been gray and really rainy last night.

So it’s real back to the rains in Seattle.

DEBRA: Yeah. We had a really big storm here too yesterday. So let’s talk about mercury. I see that you have a lot of information about it in your book, A Small Dose of Toxicology. And let me just remind readers that you can go to Dr. Gilbert’s website, which is Toxipedia.org and you can get a copy of his book, A Small Dose of Toxicology for free.
It is an excellent book for everybody to read. It’s written in a way that is very easy to read and the information is organized really well and it is just a good book to start with to learn the basics about toxicology.

So tell us about mercury.

STEVEN GILBERT:The first thing I want to say is that you have or your listeners have mercury thermometers, they should immediately take them to the Hazardous Waste people and get rid of mercury thermometers. That’s the most common source of inorganic mercury in the home, mercury thermometers.

They really are hazardous when you break one. That’s one of the problems with inorganic mercury, the silver stuff. Many of us have probably played a little bit with it one time or another growing up, people in the older generations.

But it is hazardous because it evaporates in the air at room temperature and you inhale that mercury. You really don’t want to do that, so I urge your listeners to take their mercury based thermometers, any mercury items, so that can be toys with mercury in them, to Hazardous Waste and dispose of it properly.

DEBRA: So what about…

STEVEN GILBERT: So in general, quick rundown on mercury, it’s a really interesting complex metal. It’s a liquid in room temperature, so it’s also very dense. It’s about 13 times the weight of water.

So you can actually sit on mercury. If you look at the slides, I have a slide set that’s associated with a chapter of my book, you will see this slide of a gentleman sitting on a big bag of mercury. I can’t imagine what he’s inhaling, but it’s pretty remarkable stuff. He actually floored on mercury.

So mercury metal is used for many things. As you mentioned, it’s in our teeth. It’s also a favorite among alchemists because mercury adheres to gold or gold to mercury. So you get a little silver in a pan that you’ve mixed gold with, you can heat that pan and evaporate mercury. I wouldn’t do this at home, it’s really hazardous, but gold appears. So it could literally appear to be turning a base metal, so there’s mercury in the gold. But in reality, you are doing that, but that was something the alchemists do.

So mercury is used in gold-mining. It still is widely used in that [inaudible 00:04:08]. So they would wash the mine tailings over mercury, and then evaporates mercury to get the gold out of that. It’s a very hazardous business. It’s not good for the environment and it’s not good for the miners.

And the problem with mercury in general is once it gets in the atmosphere, it gets into the land and into the water. Bacteria turn into methylmercury to try to detoxify that mercury because methylmercury bio-accumulates and bio-magnifies and moves up the food chain. And we consume the mercury in many of the fishes we consume, particularly the fishes on the higher food chain. Sword fish for example has high mercury content. So that’s organic mercury. Inorganic mercury absorbs the majority of mercury absorbed in the gut. So it’s really absorbed in the gut and the brain.

If you eat a lot of tuna fishes for example, there are well-documented cases of adults as well as children, which we’re really concerned about, you absorb that mercury and it affects your nervous system. So that’s a very fast rundown on mercury and a lot more to talk about.

DEBRA: Okay, let me ask you some questions. First, could you explain again about the difference between inorganic mercury and organic mercury and tell us which one is the one that appears in nature? And then how does that one turn into the other one?

STEVEN GILBERT: So both mercury are naturally occurring. For example, inorganic mercury is the silver mercury. It’s the metal. It is concentrated. It is really fun stuff to play with.

There’s a movie about it, one of the Terminator movies—the mercury man, I guess you’d call him. He could change form and shape. So it’s been widely used. So mercury occurs when a volcano goes off and it could [inaudible 00:05:50] with it.

The mercury is produced from that because it’s a naturally occurring element. One of the biggest releases of the mercury occurs from some of the largest volcano eruptions that occur.

But also the majority of the mercury that’s put on the environment is done by human use because mercury is very good metal. It’s used for conducting electricity, thermometers, obviously, these blood pressure cuffs. You remember to get your blood pressure taken when you go to the doctor, you have a big slug of mercury. Those are then removed and recycled. But it is also widely used in different forms of treatments that are not good for you either. It’s used in, like I mentioned, gold mining.

So it is widely used. The problem is that the inorganic mercury, quicksilver it’s called, one of the names for it, gets into the environment. It is toxic.

Oh, just one of the use for them, inorganic mercury, was in [inaudible 00:06:47]. The Mad Hatter, you might remember in Alice in Wonderland.

DEBRA: Wow. Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: The Mad Hatter was actually poisoned by inhaling mercury. So if you inhale that mercury vapor and it goes to the brain, it’s not good for you.

So when it gets out of the environment though, bacteria, because it is toxic, tries to detoxify that mercury and add a methyl group, the CH3 group to the mercury. So we have organic mercury.

So, organic mercury moves by the bacteria, up to the snails, up the small organisms into the fish. So it moves up the food chain or it’s concentrated in the muscle of the fish and we consume the muscle. You can cook the fish and get rid of it. We consume that muscle like I mentioned in certain fishes like swordfish, shark. Some tuna fish, teal are hazardous because it’s a long lived fish and they concentrate the mercury in their muscle and we consume that muscle. We absorb about, like I said, 90% of the methylmercury, organic mercury in fish. And that moves to the brain.

So there are two forms of mercury, the silver mercury, which is many of us can see and the inorganic mercury, which we can’t see, but it’s most likely in the fish that we consume and that’s where the majority of exposure to mercury is from, fish consumption.

And mercury is, like I mentioned, in volcanoes. It’s also in coal and this is very important because when we burn coal, we release mercury in the atmosphere. We know how to control some of that, but many of the old coal fired utility plants do not have good pollution control devices on them, so they release mercury in the atmosphere. There are some good maps from the US Geological Survey showing east United States has more problems with mercury because of the prevailing winds blowing through the east.

DEBRA: So you mentioned…

STEVEN GILBERT: Anther very important source of mercury is a lot of coal burning in China. You probably heard about that in China.

DEBRA: Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: They are burning a lot of coal for electric power generation. They don’t have pollution control devices on there and the mercury ends up contaminating the oceans and blows towards the west coast of the United States.

So mercury is widely distributed. Mercury comes out of coal-fired plants and then it turns into organic mercury and it’s taken up by fish and other organisms. So that’s a little bit of history on mercury.

DEBRA: Yeah. I want to ask you quickly because we need to go to break in about 30 seconds. But you mentioned taking thermometers to the Hazardous Waste because if they break then you are breathing the mercury. I’m going to let you answer this after the break. I’ll ask the question. What happens when you break a compact fluorescence light bulb and there’s mercury inside those? We’ll get Dr. Gilbert to answer right after this.

You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. His website is Toxipedia.org and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist and author of the wonderful book, A Small Dose of Toxicology, which you can get for free on his website at Toxipedia.org.

Now right before the break, I asked Dr. Gilbert what about if you dropped a compact fluorescent light bulb? People would ask me that question. It has been so heavily promoted that we all need to be using toxic fluorescent light bulbs, but people drop them.

I was even present once when somebody dropped one. And I said, “Oh, you need to clean this up properly.” Ad she said, “Oh no, I’ll just put it in the garbage.” And she picked it up with a paper towel and put it in the garbage. So what about that exposure to mercury?

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, that’s been a controversy. Compact fluorescent light bulbs have a little bit of mercury in it. They have milligrams of mercury, so very small amounts. And then when we’re reducing that down, so more modern compact fluorescents have even less mercury in them. But you can also get lamps that are LED lights. I encourage people to look into LED lights, which I [inaudible 00:10:50]. LED lights use less electricity.

But the [concept] for us in light bulbs, we need to them up and we need to dispose of them. When they burn out, you really need to take them to Hazardous Waste site again and dispose them properly because even that small amount of mercury, you don’t just want to throw it in the trash and get it back into the environment. And I think that’s one thing that’s one thing that United States struggle with, how to dispose of this light.

So if you do break one at home, don’t use your vacuum cleaner. I would recommend just sweeping it up and even getting some tape, like some masking tape and adhering the debris to the tape and then [wrap] it up. And if you rea¬-lly good about it, you can take that to the Hazardous Waste site. If not, I recommend just throwing it away because you really want to get it out of your house and clean it up as best as possible.

But really the best option is again to prevent things, not to drop the fluorescent light bulbs, to take really good care of them, take them to Hazardous Waste when you want to dispose of them. And clean it up as best as possible in the home.

If you break the thermometer, it’s the same thing. You use duct tape to clean up those little drops of mercury. Do not use a vacuum cleaner because the vacuum cleaner picks it up and the hot air will vaporize mercury and will blow up the vacuum cleaner. So you do not vacuum up mercury. Take duct tape, stick the mercury to the tape and then take it to Hazardous Waste to dispose of it properly.

DEBRA: Good. I totally agree with all of that. So tell us what happens in your body when you are exposed to mercury?

STEVEN GILBERT: So we learned a lot about mercury. I’ll just do a little history from Minamata Bay in Japan. This is in the 1950s where a large chemical plant was releasing mercury into the bay, the Minamata Bay. At that time, the ’50s thought that the solution to pollution is dilution. So you just thrust the pile into the oceans and think the ocean will go away.

DEBRA: Oh my god.

STEVEN GILBERT: Again and again, we learn this countless times that it’s just not the case and we must be really careful with our environment whether it’s plastics we’re throwing away, the big plastic jars on the oceans or throwing mercury into the environment.

So the problem was the fish consumed the mercury. As I mentioned, it turns into methylmercury, the bio-accumulation of fish. So at first, the cats were getting sick in the fishing community. So the people started getting sick and the kids in particular were affected. This was well-documented and Minamata disease is what it’s called this time.

So it really drove home the point that the placenta is not a great de-toxicant. So the mercury moves across the placenta.

Actually further research years later determined that placenta is actually a sink for mercury. Sorry, the fetus is actually a sink for the mercury. And so the fetus will have higher mercury levels than the mom. This is very important because that exposure affects the developing nervous system.

So this is a great lesson learned in the ’50s that placenta is not a great barrier and we really, really have to be careful because even small amounts of mercury are hazardous. Large amounts are extremely hazardous.

So from then on, we really focused on is there a safe level of mercury consumed and how do you regulate mercury? I’ve done many studies on this. The low level of methylmercury exposure is particularly hazardous to children and their developing nervous system causing neurological disorders, reduced intelligence and more subtle things like depression, lack of sleep, headache and things like that. But the real hazard is for developing children, developing fetus and developing their nervous system and the reduction in intellectual ability.

That’s what organic mercury or methylmercury is. They have similar hazards. It’s slightly different with inorganic mercury. It can also affect adults. So it is shown that adults are not off the hook. People consume a lot of tuna fish, a lot of high mercury content fish can have a variety of sleep disturbances, headache, fatigue, lack of coordination, muscle and joint pains, hair thinning, heart rate disturbance, hypertension, tremor. All these things come along with consumption of mercury.

For example, this little case study here, a 64 year anthropologist who ate fish nine times a week who was often choosing tuna, swordfish, sea bass suffered chronic fatigue, headaches and hair loss. He had a mercury level of 21 micrograms per liter. And the EPA recommends about five or even less for women of child-bearing age because the fetus is a potential sink.

So women should be much more careful with their mercury consumption.

So it’s complicated. It’s a long story. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:15:37] on mercury from many different states. And the FDA [weighs in] on this. We can get into regulatory stuff if you’d like.

DEBRA: Well, I am thinking about when I was a child the first time I ate fish. I spit it out and I have rarely eaten fish or seafood. I’ll occasionally eat shrimp, but I just don’t eat fish at all from any source. And I think it’s because my body just said,

“No, there’s something wrong with this.”

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, I don’t wanted scare you with fish consumption because fish is a really important source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.

DEBRA: Yeah, I know.

STEVEN GILBERT: I mean it’s a really important food source for the many people of the world. There are good fishes to eat. For example, salmon is better because it’s not as long lived. It’s not high in the food chain. So fishes like salmon will have lower mercury levels in them. And you just have to look at the list of fish particularly recommended by your state and where you’re fishing and look at what fishes have lower mercury content in them.

But fish is really good source of protein, omega-3 fatty acids and it’s important. And the FDA recommends a small amount of fish per week.

DEBRA: I know. There’s also fish oil and for years, I didn’t take fish oil, but I did another show with somebody and all we talked about was fish oil. And I learned—wait, I’ll talk more about this when we come back from a break because we are actually running over.

You are listening to Toxic Free Talk radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert and his website is Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert and his website is Toxipedia.org. And he’s also the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology, which I think you all know by now, I highly recommend.

So before the break, I started talking about fish oil and what I wanted to say is that a couple of weeks ago, I did a show with Pamela Seefeld who is a pharmacologist and she explained to us about how women make high quality fish oil. And I am not talking about the cheap sets, but something that you would get a high quality medical grade fish oil.

But they are only taking that oil from the very smaller fish like sardines and anchovies. And when they process it, they are processing it so finely. There’s protein from the fish in it, but there’s also no pollutants in it.

So if you want to take fish oil and I actually started taking fish oil for the first time after listening to her interview. And it’s such a good source of all kinds of things. It does good things for your body and I can tell the difference already. I think I should have been taking fish oil all the time, but I was afraid to take it because of mercury and not liking to eat fish. But I think people, if you get a good quality fish oil, you should feel confident that it’s okay to take it. Do you agree?

STEVEN GILBERT: Yes. I think that is a good supplement. I think you do have to be careful what fish oil you use because the older, the bigger the fish, the more mercury they tend to have in them. So anchovies and smaller fishes that have shorter life span will have less mercury in them.

Also with fish oils, be worried about organic pollutants such as PCBs and pesticides or chlorinated pesticides because they’re in the fat. So fish oil will accumulate some of those compounds depending on where the fish was sourced from.

And PCB is widely distributed in the environment, used in transformers with some of the rivers like Hudson at elevated levels. There’s an area around Seattle called the Duwamish Area where there’s also PCB in the water system and in the sediment. So you have to be cautious about that, but my view is everything in moderation including moderation.

DEBRA: I agree. So tell us more about mercury.

STEVEN GILBERT: So mercury, a little bit about mercury, I just want to get into a little bit of toxicology of mercury because it is widely regulated around the world. And there was just a treaty passed on mercury, the [inaudible 00:20:12] convention treaty in trying to limit the transportation and sale of inorganic mercury around the world because it’s a by-product of mining.

There’s a lot of mercury in the environment. And one of the problems is where to store the mercury that we have accumulated. It’s widely used in the nuclear industry. So many sites are contaminated with mercury. And old mines are contaminated with mercury. So it is something that we’ve managed to spread around the environment.

On the regulatory side, the US Food and Drug Administration sets a level that fish do not have more than one part per million of methylmercury in the fish. This may sound very small amount, but its’ really not typically if you look at what the US Environmental Protection Agency sets as a reference dose. So reference dose is how much you consume on a daily basis over lifetime and expect no hazardous consequences.

So the USPDA set the level of 0.1 micrograms per kilogram per day. So it’s 0.1 micrograms per kilogram per day. So it’s related to your body weight.

DEBRA: Could you just translate that into a measurement? Most people don’t know what a kilogram is and the microgram. How many teaspoons?

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, that’s a really great question. So how many fish you consume? That depends on how much mercury is in that fish. And that’s what the FDA tries to regulate with that one part per million or it’s actually one milligram per kilogram in the fish.

So a kilogram is about 2.2 lbs. So you can have one milligram, a very small amount, one part per million in the fish. But if you look at what the EPA recommends that you can consume, the 0.1 microgram per kilogram, it takes a little [flexing] around with the various nomenclature here and you convert your body weight into kilograms and figure out how much fish you consume, how much mercury you consume, how much fish you can consume. It is not very much.

So that’s a problem. You cannot consume a lot of fishes that have a lot of mercury in them. So swordfish, shark, some tuna fish like old tuna can have fairly high or above one part per million mercury in the flesh of the fish and you rapidly go over the amount you safely consume per day.

And this has been shown. We just published a paper on this a couple of years ago for adults consuming this. It’s even more hazardous for children and women in child-bearing age. So it’s a tough one and the US EPA is actually reviewing its RD and trying to come up with a new standard. And some people, myself included, are pushing for lower standards and we like to see the FDA be a little bit more aggressive about monitoring the mercury content of fish, but also lowering the one part per million to at least 0.5. [inaudible 00:23:20] has a level of 0.5 ppm of mercury for retail fish and seafood.

DEBRA: So do they test it? Do they test the fish for mercury levels?

STEVEN GILBERT: Not usually.

DEBRA: Okay. I think a good idea would be—and you can tell me what you think of this. I think they should be testing fish when they come off the ship and find out the parts per million and they should put that information on the package.

STEVEN GILBERT: I think that would be great. It would be tough to do it for a lot of the fish because there’s a huge amount of fish that come through. But at least doing more testing and labeling the fish in the stores as to what might be the mercury content like the tuna fish, which you will expect high levels of mercury in them and with fishes who have a lower concentration of mercury…

DEBRA: Yeah. Even if they didn’t tell you, “We tested this and this is the exact number,” if the fish package has had a little sticker on them that says, “This is a high mercury fish or a low mercury fish,” I think that that would help a lot because there are lists that you can get. I mean you could just—what would you look on? How would you search of that? Well, probably low mercury fish list or something like that that you would get because I know that there are a lot of lists.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. There are a lot of lists around. Most [inaudible 00:24:41] got good one.

DEBRA: Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: There’s a number of websites out there that will list the mercury and the recommended fish consumption [inaudible 00:24:52] and all kinds of information.

DEBRA: Yeah. So if you are eating fish, you absolutely should learn the fishes that have the lowest in mercury. I don’t think that there’s anybody, any system that’s watching out to catch those fishes that have a whole lot of mercury in them and make sure that they get diverted and not be sold in the store.

STEVEN GILBERT: Right.

DEBRA: That’s just not going on in the world today.

STEVEN GILBERT: The fishes to avoid are sharks, swordfish, king mackerel, king fish. They are the big ones to avoid. And then there are some others, the tuna fish. Basically you want to limit your consumption of fish that may have higher levels of mercury in them.

DEBRA: Good. We need to go to break. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. His book is A Small Dose of Toxicology and his website is Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert and his website is Toxipedia.org.

Tell us some of the other places we might encounter mercury.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. That’s a good question. I’ll give you another example of mercury because it is just a good antifungal, antibacterial agent put in paint. And it’s often used in bathrooms because they kill mold. The problem was there’s a little bit of mercury in the paint.

So in 1990,I think it was in 1990 or early 1990s, a family painted their baby’s room, baby boy’s room with mercury based paint without understanding the consequences of that. And the mercury actually evaporated to the walls and the child absorbed that mercury and got sick from mercury exposure. So that was one of the things to try to limit mercury.

And by large, there’s been a huge effort to limit distribution of mercury in the environment. And really…

DEBRA: Wait a minute. Wait. Do they still put mercury in paint?

STEVEN GILBERT: No, they stopped doing that. So 1991, I believe they stopped putting mercury in paint because it was—people thought it was good, mercury was good. It’s very toxic. It’s good for stopping growth of mold and other bacteria and fungus because it is toxic. But the consequences can be hazardous to human health too, so that’s why they stopped mercury in paint.

DEBRA: Yeah. Okay, good. I just want to make sure…

STEVEN GILBERT: But what I want to emphasize is that mercury is in coal. And so our answer to try to reduce the amount of electricity use is actually very important because reducing electricity use reduce the need for coal fired [inaudible 00:27:45] plants. And this has been an ongoing struggle across the United States.

For example, Washington State has a big battle about trying to ship coal to China. China burns coal and the mercury come to the Pacific Ocean. So our use of electricity is directly related to the mercury in fish, which is related to our health. So if you are using compact fluorescent light bulbs, switch to LEDs, try to reduce your mercury or your electricity use.

And this year, I put solar panels on the roof of my house trying to reduce the amount of electricity that we’re using. I think we all have a responsibility to try to look at the bigger picture, the consequence by action. And mercury is one of those things that do have a big consequence and there are ways that we can try to reduce the tendency of the technology, the industries that generate mercury in the atmosphere.

DEBRA: I think that’s a really good point and I’m glad that you brought it up because I just want to emphasize. We tend to think of environmental exposure as being out there somewhere and we don’t always see the direct actions of the environment being polluted with these toxic chemicals because of our actions.

It’s like if we were to open a can of gasoline or something in our house, we would see that that is a toxic exposure to us in our house. But when we use electric, other actions like driving cars and things, the pollutants are happening out there someplace else, but we are breathing that air. As Dr. Gilbert said, the mercury is going into the ocean and then it goes into the fish.

And so we need to consider our actions and how they affect the environment just as we consider our actions and how we create toxic chemicals, the exposures in our homes because those things come back to us then when we bring those other resources that are out there in the environment like a fish for example. We bring that in to our homes. We’ve brought that toxic chemical into our homes. So there is this direct connection between what we do and what goes on out there.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. I that’s really well said Debra. I think that’s really important point to make.

DEBRA: Thank you.

STEVEN GILBERT: Our actions are small, but we have actions of millions of people and they add up to big consequences.

And mercury is a great example of that where we need to reduce the mercury in fish. And that means we need to reduce the mercury that’s being released in the environment. That means we need to reduce the coal fire burning of coal fire utility plants, which means individually we need to reuse the electricity we are using.

And then it also extends to nuclear power plants because nuclear is one of the options. To try to reduce the amount of electricity also reduces the need for nuclear power plants.

DEBRA: Yes, yes, exactly. And we shouldn’t have nuclear plants at all in my opinion. And I just commend you on putting solar panels. That’s been something on my list for a long time.

Can you just say something about that for a minute because they are pretty expensive? Are there programs to help? How did you make that happen?

STEVEN GILBERT: You’re right. Washington State is a really good state. It has pretty good incentives. Right now, at the Federal Incentives, you get 30% back on your taxes. So let’s say you put $30,000 solar power plant, which is pretty expensive, but you would get 30% of that back about almost $10,000 back. So the plant costs you 20,000.

And with the advancement of technology in the solar panels, the payback in a well-situated house is about five to six years with incentives. So for example in Washington State, we can sell the power back to Seattle City Light. We sell it back to our city light utility. And every August, I will get a check and the power is sold back.

DEBRA: Oh, great.

STEVEN GILBERT: I sold it July. So last two months, I generated over two megawatts of power and sold roughly 1.25. So 1.25 megawatts power back to Seattle City Light, which reduces my electric bill. And I’m going to get a check on August by doing that.

Unfortunately, Florida, in my understanding, does not have good incentive. And Florida, in where you are I believe, has a great amount of solar potential. It’s not being utilized because [inaudible 00:32:18].

DEBRA: Yes. It’s very under-utilized.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, it really is. You’d use it otherwise. It is possible that Florida could be generating a lot of power, but there are not good incentives for using solar panels in Florida because the power companies have really worked hard to reduce the incentive to use solar power.

DEBRA: It is what is going on here.

STEVEN GILBERT: So I think individually one way to go is you look at Europe. They are much more in solar power like Germany is trying to reduce dependency on nuclear power plants, switching more to solar.

And we can do a lot more in ¬states like Florida and several other states could do a lot more and create incentives for individuals to generate the solar power right from their homes.

DEBRA: Right here, where I lived, they are wanting to put in a nuclear power plant.

STEVEN GILBERT: Oh there you go. And that’s because…

DEBRA: And they should take that money and just put solar panels on all our houses.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, You should invest. You can take all the money you invest in nuclear power and we can get alternatives to nuclear power. [inaudible 00:33:16] program in that someday. It was just not economically feasible for huge centralized power sources, but we should really be moving towards distributed power systems.

For example, my ability to feed power directly back to the [inaudible 00:33:31] through grid during the day when the sun is out. Even right now, I could look and I could tell you how much power I’m generating. I have a really neat gadget on the system. And we are generating about 3000 watts of power and I’m feeding almost two watts of power back to electric grid right as we are talking.

So this is very powerful technology. It’s really well-developed and it feeds directly back to reducing use of coal and reducing the mercury in the environment and improving health of our children.

DEBRA: Yay. Well, we’ve only got about three minutes left. So what else would you like to tell us in three minutes?

STEVEN GILBERT: I just want to say eat well. Being careful about nutrition is really important. And watch the fishes. And fishes are also contaminated like I mentioned with PCBs and other fat-soluble compounds. So you got to be careful with those contaminants in fish. It’s not just mercury you have to be worried about unfortunately. But watch out for that because these fat-soluble compounds are also potentially harmful particularly for the developing child.

And mercury, I encourage people to read up about mercury because it is widely used in the environment. It’s got many different uses. And because it converts to organic mercury and methylmercury, it gets into the environment and in our food supply. And we have mercury in our teeth, which are the amalgams, which is inorganic mercury. And that’s also source of contamination.

And as a side fact on that one, the problem with cremation is you create somebody and the mercury in their teeth in their teeth goes up smoke stack when they get out to the environment. So there are many good reasons for not using mercury amalgams in our teeth anymore. I generally recommend that. And some countries actually banned the use of mercury amalgams. And it’s less common in the United States, but it is still widely available.

DEBRA: Wow. We’ve learned so much about mercury today. It’s something that I know that I’ve had a lot of attention on as a toxic substance and it’s something that I think people widely know that there’s a problem with it. But we’ve learned so much more about it today. So thank you so much for joining with us.

STEVEN GILBERT: And I think mercury is fascinating. It’s a great, great example of toxicology, how we have learned more about that. And we really recognize that very small amounts of mercury are harmful to developing nervous system and harmful to our children’s health. And we really have an ethical responsibility to ensure that our children can reach and maintain their full potential. I know I work hard with that with my grandchildren, making sure they are not exposed or exposed mainly to all hazards out there.

We are responsible to them. We have to look not only to our own kids, but also globally. What can we do to affect the global distribution of toxicants and child health around the world?

DEBRA: I agree, totally agree. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. Again, this is Dr. Steven Gilbert, a toxicologist. His website is Toxipedia.org.

His book is A Small Dose of Toxicology and it contains a lot of what we were talking about today. So if you weren’t taking notes, you can go look in the book and a lot of it will be there and it is also the basis of mostly the shows that we are doing.

It’s like a book that goes along with what we are talking about. Anyway, A Small Dose of Toxicology at Toxipedia.org.

You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

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