Water | Swimming Pools
Update on “easy care” clothing?
Question from julien
Years & years ago, my family and i began following your advice to avoid all permanent press clothing because of the outgassing of formaldehyde from the finish.
Recently my wife received as a gift two beautiful shirts from Land’s End catalog. Sure enuf, we noticed the easy-care labels. Is it possible the no-iron finishes have evolved in a positive direction?
For approximately two years i’ve noticed most manufacturers of men’s shirts and chinos are taking the no-iron route YET AGAIN.
Even Jcrew, Ralph Lauren, and other companies that had pretty much stayed away from these finishes.
I need new chinos and will have to research again! My wife would love to keep the two unique pretty shirts, and we’ve considered the possibility of always handwashing and airdrying so as not to contaminate washer&dryer.
But if today’s no-iron easy-care finish yet has formaldehyde, is it worth having in our home? (we’ve been nontoxic and natural since 1988!!)
Please consider doing an update on this frustrating topic.
Thank you for your life devotion to helping us live healthy lives!!
Debra’s Answer
Yes, there have been some changes in how permanent press fabrics are made to be permanent press, but the active agent is still formaldehyde.
This article explains it all very well: OrganicClothing.blogs.com; Permanent Press: Facts Behind the Fabrics
Caring for Your Dog Naturally
My guest today is holistic veterinarian Dr. Deva Khalsa, author of the bestselling book Dr. Khalsa’s Natural Dog. We’ll be talking about the things that dog owners often do out of love for their pet, which might not be so good for them. Dr. Deva earned her degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine in 1981. Since beginning her holistically oriented veterinary practice over 25 years ago, Dr. Deva has been incorporating homeopathy, acupuncture, Chinese Herbs, nutritional advice, and allergy-elimination techniques. Today her work is a blend of sophisticated holistic techniques and traditional veterinary medicine designed to best enhance the natural strengths and attributes of her patient. Dr Deva has a reputation as a life-saver for ailing animals who would not have survived had they not been brought to her for treatment. She is often featured as a veterinary expert on radio and television, from National Public Radio, to Martha Stewart’s Veterinary Satellite Radio show, to her many appearances on major television networks. Dr. Deva also developed her own line of nutritional supplements through Deserving Pets as a gift to the animals she loves so dearly. Dr. Deva firmly believes that by enabling our furry friends to maintain optimum health through daily nutrition and diet, we will be able to allow them to live their lives to the fullest, by staving off many of the most devastating illnesses and ailments. www.doctordeva.com| www.deservingpets.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Caring for Your Dog Naturally
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Deva Khalsa
Date of Broadcast: June 25, 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.
I just heard, as I was waiting, and you’ve probably been listening to the news too. I just heard a commercial from Lumber Liquidators, and I just wanted to mention that they’re having a sale announced in that commercial, very low prices on wood line.
I have a Lumber Liquidators here. I’ve looked [at it this morning]. If you want to go check out the sale, that’s a really good price. They have flooring that is solid wood. Some of them have things on them, but go and take a look, and see if they have solid wood flooring.
I’m sure they have solid wood flooring. I meant to say solid wood flooring on sale because that’s a very good price. And if you’re looking to redo your floors, a pre-finished solid wood floor is a very good non-toxic option. I have them in my house, and it’s very, very good.
So my guest today is holistic veterinarian, Dr. Deva Khalsa. She’s the author of the bestselling book, Dr. Khalsa’s Natural Dog. She earned her degree in 1981, so she’s been doing this for about 25 years. She has been incorporating homeopathy, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, nutritional advice and allergy elimination techniques.
Today, her work is a blend of sophisticated holistic techniques and traditional veterinary medicine designed to best enhance the natural strength and attributes of her patients.
She really has been a lifesaver for ailing animals who would not have otherwise survived have they had not been brought to her for treatment.
So she’s got a lot of experience and information today. We’re going to be talking about how to care for your dogs.
Hi, Dr. Khalsa. You know what? I’m going to go call her Deva because I know her personally. Hi, Deva.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: That’s much better. Hey! Nice to be here. Very nice to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you. And she lives in Australia part-time.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: No, New Zealand.
DEBRA: New Zealand, that’s right. But she’s here now in America, in Florida, probably right down the street from me. And so we’re talking to her in this time zone, and not another one.
So tell us how you got interested in being a veterinarian, and why a holistic veterinarian.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I always wanted to be a veterinarian ever since I was a little girl. I think when I was about two years old, the story is told about how I collected all the ants before my birthday, and put them in a box, so my mother won’t kill them.
And I collected every animal on the street, whether they were sick or not, and brought them home to treat. So I always wanted to be a veterinarian.
In those days, not that many girls were veterinarians. I actually think I’ve been a veterinarian for almost 35 years or 30, more than 25, as I add it up.
But I don’t want to add it.
But the thing is that those days, mostly men became veterinarians. And by the time I started in veterinary school, a lot more women were becoming veterinarians. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. I totally, totally love it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
But what happened was, the veterinary school at that time, still is pretty much, was the hardest professional school to get into. And it was harder than medical school. Dental school used to be doctor’s backups, and medical school was my backup.
So I got into medical school, but I didn’t get into veterinary school. And I lived in New Jersey, and only [inaudible 00:03:48] New Jersey. And New Jersey is packed full of people [inaudible 00:03:53] to veterinary school. They had deals with different veterinary schools.
So I moved to Pennsylvania, became a Pennsylvania resident in a year. The next year, I applied to University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. I got into veterinary school, and I turned down the medical school. I didn’t go to medical school.
Bur during that year, I thought that if I had to be a medical doctor, which I didn’t want to do, at least I’d become a holistic [inaudible 00:04:15] medical doctor because I felt that, especially in those days—now, times have changed quite a bit in the last 30 years. But in those days, people really didn’t take responsibility for their health as much as they do now.
They expected to go to a doctor and get a pill, and he would fix it. Nowadays, we’re still into supplements, at least, I’m sure the people who listen to this show, and eating rice, and keeping toxins out of our environment. And it’s a big thing.
But in those days, it wasn’t.
And I thought it’s just ridiculous. People don’t care for themselves, then they expect the doctor to fix it. So I wanted to do holistic.
So I took holistic human. Just courses. Lots of course. I got into veterinary school. I knew a lot of stuff. And as I went to veterinary school, I kept looking at what they were doing, thinking that if I did it like they do it with people, then what could happen is they could get better this way instead of this more toxic and more invasive manner.
So by the time I got out, I got a job, and I tried all the stuff I learned on animals, I learned on people but I tried it on animals, and it was beginner’s poker luck. Everything worked miraculously.
So I got so excited. I went to India. I went to Brazil. I went to England. I studied with the best of the best. And before I knew it, I was one of the top holistic practitioners in the world. At the first International Homeopathic Conference at Oxford, in England, I was the keynote speaker. And I just took all the people stuff that I learned, and I kept transferring it to animals.
And so I learned lots of different technologies for holistic health. And I had a huge practice in Pennsylvania before I moved to New Zealand, and loved it.
And that’s a long answer to a short question.
DEBRA: We’re going to go to break early because we’re actually going to reconnect and see if we can get better quality sound because we’re not as good as it usually is.
So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is holistic veterinarian, Dr. Deva Khalsa. And as you’ve already heard, she’s quite experienced and knowledgeable, and we’re going to hear all about taking care of your dog naturally when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is holistic veterinarian, Dr. Deva Khalsa. And her website is DoctorDeva.com, if you’d like to go there after you’ve listened to her speak.
So Deva, you said that you’d like to talk about things that dog owners often do out of love for their pets, which might not be so good for them.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Yes. I think that’s an important concept because remember, veterinary medicine is basically mainstream medicine. And so they live by conventional products and pharmaceutical products. So veterinarians recommend these things all the time [inaudible 00:07:05].
And we like our veterinarians because they like animals, and we like animals, and we trust them.
But they’ve been trained conventionally, and they haven’t been trained to look at what these products do, and how often are they needed. And they also sell these products. And so it makes money to sell products to animals that help prevent certain problems.
But what’s happening is, we love our animals, and we want to do our best for them. So people are spending a great deal of money on products their pets don’t need. And we can go over a few of these different products.
DEBRA: Yes, tell us about some of these products.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: What are your listeners’ area? Are they all over the United States?
DEBRA: All over the world.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Oh, perfect. That’s simple. Well, the first thing is that dogs don’t need the numbers of vaccines that they get. Research has shown, and this research has been thorough and carefully done over a period of almost 10 years by Dr. Ronald Schultz, who is Ph.D. in immunology, and he’s brilliant and well-known and very well-respected in his field, and Dr. Jean Dodds, who is a veterinarian, and that’s very well-respected in her field.
So you know how we get a polio shot when we were kids, and then we don’t worry about it? You’re not worried that your grandmother is 80 years old, and she’s going to get polio, but she hasn’t had her shot in 78 years?
That’s because it lasts for a lifetime. And the vaccines for parvo and distemper, that booster shot that you’re told to go in for every year, that shot lasts for a lifetime [inaudible 00:08:40] and especially after six months of age.
The research is pretty irrefutable. Let’s say, you get two puppy shots. Let’s say, when you have a puppy, you give him a shot at 14 weeks and 17 weeks, which is late, but that’s what I’d like to do with a booster. Then they get [inaudible 00:08:55] a year later. They’re fixed for the rest of their lives. They don’t need that booster every year. They actually don’t need it. It’s unnecessary.
The same thing with the cat distemper shot, the booster shot that you’re told to get every year. Many people with indoor [inaudible 00:09:11] outside. [inaudible 00:09:12] and they get this vaccine.
What [inaudible 00:09:18] is the puppy booster and the kitten booster, and not the rabies shot, just the boosters, they have a whole bunch of diseases in them. And we could spend an hour talking about the diseases, and how rare some of them are, and how they don’t work. But booster shots simply are not needed.
These vaccines are incubated in a broth of chicken. In one of serum, there are embryos, chicken embryos, which are eggs, basically, and bovine serum, which is a serum of cows, and some brewer’s yeast, and a lot of [inaudible 00:09:42] contaminated the broth for years and years and years—and then some adjuvants and some mercury.
It’s really a pretty toxic mix. And when you give it to your dog every year, you’re going to promote autoimmune disease, allergies, and lots of other diseases. In fact, cats commonly get kidney failure and have kidney problems after 10 or 12 years of age. Many cats start to get elevated kidney enzymes.
And that’s because the cat vaccines also have feline kidney tissue in the broth, and you’re sensitizing the cats to their very own feline kidney tissue.
So what we’re doing is basically the same thing as if we ran in every single year of lives, and got our polio vaccine, and got our tetanus vaccine, and got our diphtheria vaccine, and got our measles and mumps vaccine. And we ran in every year, and we did it.
There’s enough autoimmune disease in people, there are enough allergies in people, there’s enough irritable bowel disease in people that if we did that, it would be a plague rather than an epidemic.
So the thing is that we’re giving them these vaccines every year, these multivalent combination vaccines that are terrible for their immune system, and absolutely unhealthy, and they don’t need them.
My site is DoctorDeva, which is doctor spelled out, D-O-C-T-O-R, and then my first name, which is D-E-V-A. So it’s Doctor D-E-V-A, and E as in egg.
And on it, I have under free pet care health help, I have articles, research that was done, what was found, who did the research. It’s irrefutable.
Anyone who is listening can go on there and just look at the free pet health help. It’s a woman holding out to her dog, and then you look at the article about vaccines, and you can read it, and see all the absolute data.
I have 32 YouTube videos on different things. Some of them are vaccines for dogs and cats. I have magazine articles, many, many of them that I have written for magazines. There are hundreds of them. Probably, there is 50 on the site.
And you can get all the information you want about that to prove to yourself that you don’t need them.
And you have to actually educate yourself because your veterinarian is going to say, “Let’s get your dog a booster shot.”
In addition to the bordatella, which is the kennel cough shot, which is unnecessary, unless you board your dog, and it only lasts for three months. So unless you board your dog all the time, there is no reason to give that vaccine.
The last one that is very common is the rabies vaccine, which is legally necessary, even if the duration of the immunity is extensive. It’s lifelong, but it doesn’t matter. Your township wants you to give your animal the rabies vaccine.
But the rabies vaccine is known to be contaminated with the fibrosarcoma virus, a cancer vaccine. So it’s a fibrosarcoma cancer that is caused by a virus.
Cats get it commonly from the vaccination. So the students are taught to give the rabies vaccine to cats in their tails or their legs, so they can amputate one or the other if they get fibrosarcoma cancer in the areas of vaccine.
So in short, vaccines are [inaudible 00:12:48] and consumers should educate themselves as to what their pets really need, and do a good job educating themselves, so when they go to their veterinarian, they can stand up and say, “This is what I read. I printed it out. I’d like to stay your patient, but I want you to understand that I don’t want my animal to get vaccinated.”
So the first is vaccine.
DEBRA: I used to have cats. I don’t have a cat right now, but I’ve had several cats, and we never vaccinated them, and never had a problem with all those things. And I think that we do need to be looking, like I heard you mention mercury. Is mercury in all the vaccines, in all those booster shots?
DR. DEVA KHALSA: As I know, unless something has changed in the past years, yes.
DEBRA: So every time you give your pet those booster shots or those vaccines, you’re giving them a good dose of mercury. And that’s a toxic heavy metal.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Yes, and the thing is, the only real disease that cats get that can be prevented from vaccine is feline distemper, which is also called panleukopenia, and only kittens get it.
So if your cat is a year-old, it’s not going to get feline distemper, and it doesn’t need the vaccine. The rest of the stuff is totally superfluous. And it’s not a joke. They’re just not going to get it. It’s superfluous.
And the other thing is that the vaccines for FIV or FeLV are terrible vaccines. The FeLV vaccine, feline leukemia virus, it doesn’t prevent feline leukemia virus, in my experience, and there are many other veterinarians who would agree with me. It’s very toxic, and according to Marty Goldstein and many other veterinarians, we believe that it can cause cancer in pets, just the vaccine alone.
And we’re seeing one in two dogs get cancer. This is why it’s so important to eliminate toxins because we’re seeing one in two pets get cancer.
So the trick is, and we’ll go over flea prevention and flea products next, but the trick is to minimize toxins that your pets get exposed to, and to maximize goodness that they get into their systems to help them dump the toxins out.
DEBRA: Well, that’s just about the same formula as what is good for humans.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: You got it.
DEBRA: And so when people do things to remove toxic chemicals from their homes, they’re also removing the exposures for their pets. And I would think that one of the things that we talk about in terms of children’s health is that a child, if you think about the amount of toxic chemicals in a home, that we have big bodies, but children have small bodies, and babies have even smaller bodies.
And so the amount relative to their body size is much more than it is for an adult. And then you start looking at a pet or a cat or a kitten, it’s just amazing how the concentration just gets greater and greater and greater.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Look at vaccinations. When they vaccinate your pet, there’s a little vial with all the bugs in it, and then water. And then you’ll take the sterile water and put it in, and you mix it up, and then you stick it in the dog.
So you can stick it into a two pound [inaudible 00:16:01] puppy the exact same amount that you would stick into a Great Dane adult. And look at the amount of toxins that little dog is getting.
In fact, little dogs and young dogs get terrible vaccine reactions because they’re so small, and they’re giving them such a burden.
But interestingly enough, our dogs—are you there?
DEBRA: I’m here.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I heard a click and I got a little nervous. Interestingly enough, when lawns are sprayed, your dogs don’t usually stay on your lawn all the time, and you may spray your lawns, or your neighbor may, or the park may. We assume that when the rain comes and washes it down, it goes into the ground.
And actually, what happens when it rains is that it mixes up the stuff, and it forms a mist that goes up about two-feet from the ground, of all the herbicides and the insecticides that have been sprayed on the lawn.
So then when your dog goes out and runs through that mist, it’s running through a mist of insecticide.
It’s the same thing with fall leaves. If your dog is allergic to mold or has allergy, you walk through the leaves, you’re wearing shoes and pants, and you stir them up, the mold, because that’s what makes leaves to grade. But the dogs are in there and there’s dust, mold dust.
So they actually get a much higher exposure than we do. And besides that, we give them their heartworm prevention all the time, and we give them their spot-on products all the time.
I developed a vitamin under the name of the company, Deserving Pets, which has things in it to detoxify our pets because we’re giving them so many toxins. That was the purpose of it because one in two dogs is getting cancer because kale dumps toxins from cells about eight times faster.
The longer a toxin sits in a cell, the more the chance it has to change it into a cancerous cell and alter the DNA.
So all these vegetables and fruits that you’re talking about, these essentials that people should take, it’s the same cell in a dog as it is in a person, except dogs don’t like raspberries and blueberries that much. There are lots of recipes in my book, Doctor Deva’s Natural Dog, and its second edition in January coming out next year.
The first edition is still out, but it’s $400 on Amazon.com. I don’t think anyone is paying that. You can still buy it on—
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we need to go to break. The commercial is going to play even if you’re still talking. So you’re listening to
Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back with Dr. Deva Khalsa.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is holistic veterinarian, Dr. Deva Khalsa. And her website is DoctorDeva.com, and it’s doctor spelled out, and then Deva is D-E-V-A, DoctorDeva.com.
So let’s talk about fleas.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Okay, let’s talk about fleas. Depending on where you live, it depends on, really, how many fleas you get. And there are these Top Spot products which people dab on which seem really nice compared to the dips, sprays and powders since the collars we used to use before.
Now, note that dips, sprays, collars, and flea powders, and even collars, the poison gets into your pet’s bloodstream and circulates all through the capillaries, through all the organs, the kidney and the liver, so that if the collar is sitting on your dog or cat’s neck, and the flea comes and bites them on the tail, it’s going to drop dead because of the poison in the blood.
The collars and the dips don’t powder on. They go systemically.
But then what seemed to happen was these Top Spot products came online, and they were thought to be really handy, little things. You put them on, and they keep the fleas and ticks away. And everybody’s worried about Lyme disease, and no one wants fleas on their dogs.
And so what happens is they start to use these commonly. It was thought that they were relatively safe for years. And we, as veterinarians, were told that they were safe. But actually, it’s not true because in 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency began reviewing the safety of these spot-on flea and tick products. What they found wasn’t pretty.
And additionally, the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, which is a non-profit investigative news organization, and the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, they began to look at these over-the-counter flea and tick prescriptions.
What they discovered was that they are totally not safe. The active ingredient, which is Fipronil, in many products like Parastar, Frontline, EasySpot, [inaudible 00:20:41]. We’re told as veterinarians that it’s absorbed into the sebaceous gland, which is the oil gland of the dog. And it provides a natural reservoir, which kills the ticks.
But then this woman—or I don’t know if it’s a man or woman—Dr. [DeBoise] of the EPA’s Pesticide Division, took a look at it, and discovered that it enters the body, and was excreted into the urine and feces of dogs, and then enters the fat and all the organs. And it showed that low doses of Fipronil long-term, which is what animals have when they’re dotted with this one particular product every single month, has the potential for nervous system toxicity, thyroid toxicity, thyroid cancer, ultrathyroid hormones, liver toxicity, kidney damage, convulsion, whining, barking, crying, reduced fertility.
It can go on and on.
Loss of hair at the spot.
It doesn’t even work against fleas and ticks that much, so what they do is they add more ingredients. They add other toxic ingredients.
So basically, Pesticide.org says that Fipronil, which is the ingredient in these spot-ons, disrupts nerves in animals other than insects. It doesn’t bind as tightly to these nerve cells, but it does, when it’s exposed to the sun, it becomes 10 times more toxic.
So you put it on your dog and he lies in the sun, it’s going to get much much more toxic because the sun is hitting the product.
DEBRA: I just want to say, I’ve never come across that before. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, that idea. But it’s fascinating to me that a chemical would become more toxic in the sun. And suddenly, I’m thinking, well, what about the chemicals that humans are exposed to? Which of those chemicals become more toxic in the sun?
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I don’t know. A lot of the stuff isn’t easy to find as data.8
DEBRA: I know.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: It’s not like you can just look it up. And anyone who has that chemical doesn’t want it to be known that that might happen. But it’s a good point. It’s a very good point.
DEBRA: Especially now, in the summer time when people are out in the sun, and it could be activating toxic chemicals that we don’t know even know about.
I mention this not to be scary, but it’s another reason why we should be watching and eliminating as many toxins—
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Yes, you should research that. And I’ll to find you my support, and you can actually maybe go from that and see what you can figure out.
DEBRA: That would be great because I would like to know what.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I want to be fair to all the products too. There’s another insecticide called, Imidacloprid. It can be called [Iminoclopromid] and Imidacloprid. But we’ll call it Imidacloprid. And it is the compound that’s in many of the insect-dusting things they put on crops that’s killing the bees worldwide.
In fact, Europe and Russia have put bans on Imidacloprid use in their crops, I think Europe for two years, and Russia refuses to use it. I think they’re saying, by some trade agreement, Monsanto says they should use it, and Russia is saying they won’t use it until it’s proven it’s safe, and they’re going to do the research that it’s proven it’s safe.
And meanwhile, Putin is very much against using this in Russia at all.
But this is what you use in Advantage and other products. It’s a hard word. It’s neonicotinoid. And they act on the nervous system too. And they can damage their kidneys, livers, thyroid, heart, lungs, spleen, adrenal, brain and gonads. It’s a neurotoxin. It can cause incoordination, labored breathing and muscle weakness.
And researchers found an increase in birth defects in mice, rats and dogs when this drug was tested after its debut in 1994.
So that’s another thing that we put every month, thinking that we’re protecting our animals.
Now, the pyrethrin and synthetic pyrethrins, which are called the pyrethroids—pyrethrins are made from marigolds. Everything thinks it has to be safe because they’re natural.
They are the highest cause of reported death.
Now, all these adverse reactions are reported. But honestly, if your dog or cat, and any of you listeners listening now, if your dog and cat has an adverse reaction, you went to the vet or the emergency service from one of these spot-on products, would you be savvy enough to call the appropriate department and report the adverse reaction?
DEBRA: Probably not.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I won’t because I’m a veterinarian. I don’t have the time.
So these are reported reactions. But the most common reported death cause—in fact, there are lawsuits. There are class action lawsuits against some of these firms. The most common cause of death is the pyrethrin, the synthetic pyrethrin.
And what happens is because they are not as effective per milligram as the other products, they really [whoop] it up. The new product has 36.8% in it, and that’s a very high amount to put on.
So what we’re doing is we’re putting all this stuff on our dog every single month because we don’t want to expose them to disease. So let’s just go two simple things. Let’s say, you don’t want your dog to get Lyme disease or any other diseases that are passed by ticks, which are quite a number of diseases. And you’re worried that, “Oh, my god. A tick might get on my dog.”
Well, first of all, the spot-on products don’t necessarily guarantee that a tick will not bite your dog and inject a disease before it dies from the product. That’s number one.
And number two, the best way to prevent your dog from diseases is to keep them healthy. The commercial about garlic, and if you chop up garlics very finely, and let it sit for 10 minutes, the chemical reaction occurs, which releases a lot more lysine, and then you mix it in with your dog’s food, it’s like giving him an antibiotic every single day.
And an article on my site called Garlic: Friend or Foe? gives explanation, doses and everything in garlic. It’s totally safe for dogs.
I hear music, so I bet there’s a break.
DEBRA: Yes. It’s time for a break. Thank you. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Deva Khalsa. You can go to her website, DoctorDeva.com. It’s doctor spelled out, and then Deva is D-E-V-A. And we’ll be right back, and talk with Dr. Deva more about what we can do to take care of our dogs.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is holistic veterinarian, Dr. Deva Khalsa. She’s the author of the bestselling book, Dr. Khalsa’s Natural Dog, and has more than 30 years of experience treating pets in a holistic way.
So one of the things that I often say about humans is that we should be creating health instead of treating disease, and I think you would agree with that.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Absolutely.
DEBRA: Could you give us some tips about things that our listeners can do to create health in their dogs?
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Well, the people buy for their dogs a processed, very heated, and very highly compressed dog food that’s made with byproducts, and when you look at what the bag costs, even if it’s expensive, you’re buying the more expensive brand, the ingredients can only be so perfect to sit into that bag, especially big companies that pay enormous advertising costs, television commercials, whatever.
They’re paying for that somehow, and it’s coming out of the cost of that bag of dog food.
So you’re buying basic dog food which is telling you it has everything you need for your dog. And in fact, all of the studies on vitamins and minerals for dogs are incomplete, everything. But no one really knows exactly what they need.
And if they’re being in practice for over 30 years, I would use human vitamins, different combinations of human vitamins, all kinds of things for my patients because of the fact that I didn’t have anything that I felt was good enough in the veterinary line. And that’s why I made Deserving Pets [inaudible 00:28:47] because I put in kale, broccoli, pumpkin, and so many things, alfalfa and cranberries, carrots, and all of these different fresh fruits and vegetables, in addition to high quality, human grade vitamins.
And then I micro-encapsulated them, so that they’re palatable. Your dog doesn’t know, he’s eating kale, and that he’s eating broccoli, and that he’s eating lots of healthy grains. He just thinks he’s getting a treat because it’s micro-encapsulated, which means it is coated, and it is flavored, so the vitamins never oxidize because they don’t reach the air, and the whole fruits and vegetables that are organic also never oxidize.
And so I created this, so that cells would have the building blocks to stay healthy.
For our homes, we use vacuum cleaners, and we use natural products, like vinegar or whatever, to clean our home, and we use scrub brushes and water and window cleaner. And we have paint and tape, and all kinds of things to keep our house in shape.
And we have to because if we didn’t create and create and create it, it would just get destroyed.
And cells have to do the same thing. And their tools are vitamins and minerals and the phytonutrients in super foods. And that’s what helps keep their cells clean, dump toxins, and also repairs themselves.
And they don’t get that every day. They get a processed, highly heated dog food, in which the vitamins and minerals are basically destroyed due to the process. And they’re told that their dog is getting everything, or their cats, that they need, especially cats.
Cats don’t eat vegetables. That’s why my cat vitamin is so good because the cats like it and they get everything.
So when you give the cells everything they need, what happens is they’re able to fight off and clean out all the junk that both we and our pets are getting exposed to every single day.
People go out and go, “I want my dog to have good joints. I’ll go out and get glucosamine. I want my dog to do this. I’ll go out and get this.”
You actually need a product that gives you everything you need to keep everything healthy every day that’s put together in a smart way, so the cells have what they need and everything stays health.
I have animals that are on glucosamine, they go on this product, the alfalfa and the vitamin C, it works to keep the dog’s arthritis and joints healthy, they can go off all their other products.
So you have to have a balanced, complete product that your dog gets every single day that’s really, really well-made. A lot of pet vitamins do not have the milligrams, the international units. They have a general jumbo on the bottom that tells what it’s in, but it doesn’t tell you how balanced it is, and exactly what’s in it. So giving your pet what they need to stay healthy every day is really, really important.
And on the other side of the coin, just like people, it’s minimizing toxins.
DEBRA: Those are the two things. After all of these years of studying this, what it finally came down to for me is eliminate toxins and put in lots of nutrition. And that people need to be eating whole foods. They need to be taking whole food supplements. And pets do too, but it’s the same formula for pets.
But when we look at, as you said, what the pets are actually eating, what the pet foods are about, it’s all cooked. I think there are a couple of raw pet foods out there. And I haven’t researched it a lot because I don’t have a pet right now.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: Well, they have, but the people who feed raw are not feeding lots of vegetables either. You know [inaudible 00:32:14] for people (that my family from New Jersey is doing now because there’s just so much cancer in my family). I’m adopted, so I don’t really have to genetically worry about it. But the new diet is 80% vegetables.
DEBRA: That’s great.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: That is the new thing out there the doctors are telling people. 80% vegetables, and then other 20% is carbs and protein.
DEBRA: I think I eat at least 50% vegetables, but that’s not how it’s been. I didn’t grow up on that. I grew up on TV dinners actually.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: I didn’t grow up on that either, but I’m a vegetarian. And when they told me—and I was for years now, I would eat fish occasionally, for the past 10 years, but it’s very rarely. But the thing is that when my family told me that they were eating 80% vegetables, I’m like,
“I’m a vegetarian. I’d have a hard time eating 80% vegetables myself.”
And do you count them from when they’re fresh, or when you cook them and they melt down?8 I don’t know, but it seems like a lot of vegetables.
There are two salient things that I say that reflects how we think nowadays, and we’ve been conditioned to think this way, through commercials and through advertising, and some sort of self-conscious routine that we have to have great lawns, and we have to have this and that.
So dandelion is one of the healthiest herbs on the planet. It does so much. It cleans the liver, unbelievably [inaudible 00:33:31]. It is healthier than milk thistle for the liver. It’s great for the urinary tract. It moves toxins out of the lymph system, circulates and gets things going in your body.
The Italians pick it in the spring, and they eat it. It grows on our lawns. And what’s the first thing we do when we see dandelions growing on our lawns? We spray it.
DEBRA: With RoundUp.
DR. DEVA KHALSA: We spray it. Everybody goes, “Duh,” because it’s one of the healthiest things around, and we’re busy spraying it because someone on TV or someone on the radio or somewhere in the magazine, we got convinced we had to do that so our neighbors would like us.
And then there are all these bad press on the web about garlic. So I got completely disgusted with it because people have been giving dogs garlic for years, that dogs can’t have garlic, that it’s toxic. Well, it turns out the FDA did a study, in which dogs did get sick from garlic, and you know why, because what they’ve said were dogs that were size of a Golden Retriever, 75 entire cloves of garlic every meal, two meals a day.
What dog would eat the equivalent of 75 cloves of garlic, two meals a day for weeks on end? You and I could not possibly do that.
Only some of the dogs would get sick from it. So they said that garlic was toxic for dogs.
Do you know that you could actually kill someone by having them drink too much water? You can die from too much water.
So I called the National Animal Supplement Council, which gets every report, every adverse report on products that are out there. And for 5000 years, garlic has been used for medicinal purposes. The price of a slave in Rome used to be a couple of garlic.
So the thing is that I called on the adverse reports on garlic, and millions and millions of doses have been for—and these were products that had other things in the mix, so who knows if it was garlic or the rest of the stuff?
And they weren’t bad adverse effects. They were diarrhea, vomiting, something like that.
So the thing is that garlic is excellent for dogs. I wrote an article for Dogs Naturally magazine, an excellent magazine. And it’s on my site, Garlic: Friend or Foe? And it gives all the statistics, all the information about garlic.
And meanwhile, everyone is afraid to feed their dog garlic. We’re spraying our dandelions, and we’re scared to feed our dog garlic. But we’re putting on Top Spot stuff every month, so they don’t get fleas and tick. See what I mean?
DEBRA: I do know what you mean, but I think that a lot of people who are alive today, I think you and I are similar age, and we grew up at a time where what we were told was better living through chemistry, and we were given all the TV commercials about the chemicals we should use and everything. And that’s what everybody thought was normal. And now, we’re finding that it isn’t what we should be doing.
We need to be learning all these things that you’re talking about, and we need to be changing our viewpoint about how we approach life because it’s a very different thing to decide that you’re going to be creating health by doing the things that create health, rather than just doing anything, and getting sick, and then trying to repair the body whether it’s a human body or a pet body.
And it’s a different way of looking at things that we’re not oriented to in this culture, but it’s [inaudible 00:36:40].
DR. DEVA KHALSA: No, and we have difficulty enough deciding it for ourselves. And then what people have to do for their dogs, people are convinced they can’t cook for their dogs. They could have raised seven strapping kids, but they’ll kill their dog if they cook for them. But it’s better to feed this highly-processed food with lots of byproducts in it.
And the fact is we can cook for our dogs. We can make them healthy meals. We can make them healthy snacks. And we don’t have to be [inaudible 00:37:05] about it. We could give them a kibble if we need to. We can cook for them when we need to. We can make nice snacks when we need to.
In fact, my book has a chapter called The Hassle Factor. And basically, you fill out a form. Where do you live? What do you do if you live in New York, and you have a tiny apartment and three Great Danes? You better be dating a butcher, if you want to cook for your dogs.
So the thing is that you look at what your lifestyle is, and how you can easily make your dog healthier. And then you figure out what process you can do. And it all works, but it’s just common sense.
The good news is that there are so many people, and the people who listen to your show are learning that common sense, and so we can look forward to a healthier world because people like you and your radio show, and thank you for having it.
DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, we’ve only got about 30 seconds left, so I’m going to say thank you so much for being on the show.
And we’ve learned so much. I’m sure that there is much more you could tell us, so I hope you’ll be on again.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to my website at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more about this show. You can see what shows are coming up, and you can go listen to the archives of all the shows we have done to learn more great information like this, about how you can live toxic-free. Be well.
Where to Start Eliminating Household Toxics
My guest today is Amy Ziff, Founder and Chief Capidealist™ (someone who believes that world change will come about through harnessing our collective purchasing power on the free market) of Veritey, a website that makes it exceedingly simple to find products and services that are healthy. Amy puts an amazing amount of work into evaluating the products she sells and rates each one for being nontoxic, sustainable, cruelty-free and socially responsible. We’ll be talking about where to start once you decided to eliminate toxics from your life as well as her own process of choosing toxic-free products. Amy is a trained journalist, proven entrepreneur, start-up veteran, and healthy living advocate. She never wanted to work at a women’s magazine writing about make-up. Amy always was looking for ways to make a difference, and to find better ways to live a healthy life. When she became a mom, everything came together. Amy was frustrated by how hard it was to make what should be simple decisions – healthy decisions – for herself and her family. For years as a hobby, Amy has been seeking out the truth about products and their real ingredients. (What companies put in their products can be shocking, including known carcinogens and other toxic chemicals that can cause an array of conditions from asthma to infertility, and which are often not disclosed.) Amy believes you shouldn’t need a PhD to decipher what products are safe to use and which to avoid. Yet the reality is that getting to the truth of what’s in a product can take hours of research and a lot of legwork. Most busy moms and parents just don’t have that kind of time. Veritey makes it simple for people who are time pressed to make healthier decisions. Veritey is about where truth meets healthy living. www.veritey.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Where to Start Eliminating Household Toxics
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Amy Ziff
Date of Broadcast: June 24, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic-free.
It’s a beautiful summer day here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re going to be talking about something simple today. We’re going to talk about where to start if you want to be eliminating toxic chemicals from your life, from your home. Where do you start?
I remember a long time ago when I first started, more than 30 years it’s been now. I had no idea where to start. And there were no books. There were no radio shows like this one. There was no place for me to even ask that question.
And now, of course, we have a tremendous amount of information. Sometimes so much information makes it difficult to decide what do you do first.
I first asked myself this question back in 1986 after I had written my first book, and people were saying, “What a great book.” It was called Non-Toxic and Natural and I listed all these different non-toxic products I had found.
And then people were saying to me, “But where do I start? Where do I start?”
So I wrote my second book called The Non-Toxic Home which put everything in order of what I thought was most important.
But what I found from doing that was that it was hard. There isn’t a hierarchical list that you can’t say this one thing is most important, and this other thing is least important because everything has a different level of toxicity.
But there are some easier things that we can do, things that are easier to do that make a bigger impact in terms of reducing your toxic exposure.
That’s what we’re going to talk about today. It’s where to start. And even if you’ve already started, you might pick up a few tips of things that maybe you haven’t done yet that are things that are important to do.
My guest today is Amy Ziff. She’s the founder of a website called Veritey. Her purpose is to make it exceedingly simple to find products and services that are healthy.
And so she does a tremendous amount of research into her products. I know that one of the things that’s happening now is that to live toxic-free is getting so much more important that there are a number of products and websites that are just popping up, where people who really don’t do their research, just say, “Oh, I just want to cash in on this.”
But Amy is not one of those kinds of people. She really is dedicated to finding out what is the truth about the products, and giving you only a very small selection of products that she has personally researched.
Welcome to the show, Amy.
AMY ZIFF: Thank you, Debra. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Thanks for being here. So tell us, how did you get interested in this.
AMY ZIFF: Well, it was a long and a quick and efficient journey all at the same time. When I was nine, I personally had a health crisis, and my mom refused to listen to what the traditional doctors were saying. What ultimately ended up making me well was changing my diet, avoiding certain allergens.
They’re common today, but in the 70’s, this was radical. It was going off of corn, sugar, and gluten.
And then it turned out that I was allergic to a lot of stuff in my home, molds and dander, dust and different mites and trees.
And so I became very aware at an early age that what we surround ourselves with is so impactful to our own health and wellbeing. And it can really make the difference between surviving and thriving.
And so I was surviving.
Then we cleaned up our home environment, my diet, and I was able to thrive.
Then fast forward into my own journey into parenthood. I have three children, and I had my first child, five-and-a-half years ago, and then I had twins after two years later. And one of my twins was incredibly allergic to things that I thought were natural, things that certainly were labeled as such.
I was an eco-shopper, and I went to Whole Foods, when I could, for products. And I thought I was buying really good products for my children. And so I thought, “What could possibly be in these products that could be bothering my daughter? What’s going on here?”
And I have a background in journalism, and also, I’ve been an internet entrepreneur.
So what happened was, the journalist in my started digging and digging and digging, and going, holy moly. There is so much stuff in our everyday products, and especially, products that we’re using on children and babies that is not very natural at all, and is not safe or necessarily what I want to be using for my kids.
And there is no uniformity in labeling, and there’s no way to really know this unless you become your own detective [blues], and really do your homework.
And so that’s what I started to do. And then before you know it, I was keeping those massive lists, and that grew into a database that became the real basis for Veritey, my site, that helps people find, what I’d like to say, the truth in healthy living.
We’re really looking at the truth in one these products are. The bottom line is, I want to use safe, non-toxic products for myself and my family in order to give my children their best chance in life. And as a parent, I feel it’s my responsibility to keep my little ones safe.
And so I don’t want to invite in toxins that are related to anything, any kind of issue. It could be asthma. It could be ADD. It could be cancer later in life, or infertility. It just really spans the gamut.
And now, knowing what we know about genetics and epigenetics, and the ability for these chemicals to be modulators on our genetics and our DNA, we realize, wow, it really does not matter what we surround ourselves, and particularly, in those early years.
So that’s how I got started. I did this deep dive into products and toxins a couple of years ago, and I’ve been non-stop ever since.
DEBRA: Well, it is important to do the deep dive. I’d just like to jump in and say that for many years, especially those of us who are older like me, and have been around for a while, back in the 70’s and 80’s, 1970’s and 80’s, that was in the last century.
There started to be products that were called natural products. And this was at the time when everybody was wearing polyester leisure suits, and plastic was thought to be a really good thing.
And so as opposed to that, then there were these natural products that were not made from better living through chemistry. They were products that were made from natural materials from nature like cotton, for example, or a natural food was any food that didn’t have artificial color and flavorings and preservatives.
That was as far as it went.
And so the only thing about a natural product that’s natural is that it starts as a renewable resource. For most natural products, they then are processed through the industrial process, and various toxic chemicals are added, and various good things are taken out.
And so what comes out at the end isn’t anything like what it started at the beginning.
How many years has that been? 30 years, 40 years, since we started having natural products? As time has progressed, then the natural products have become purer and purer, and they’re now being made out of organic ingredients.
But there’s still a wide range of what’s called a natural product. And as consumers, we can’t just say, “If it says it is natural that means that it’s safe.”
We can’t say that because there’s so much industrial process behind it.
Certainly, if you have an organic apple on your hand, that’s pretty safe. But if you have something called natural apple pie, it could have anything in it.
AMY ZIFF: That’s right. Natural will have all kinds of additions in food. You can have MSG in natural flavors, for example. So it’s a great way of pointing out that the word, natural, has such a wide berth at this point in time given that there is absolutely zero legislation around what that term means that we can’t really trust it.
And in fact, I remember looking at this Johnson and Johnson cream that I was using on my kids, and it said it was hypoallergenic. So here I am thinking, okay, this one’s safe. Well, it turns out it contains something called DMD hydantoin, and that forms formaldehyde in the bottle.
So I certainly don’t want to be slathering my kids with formaldehyde-based cream.
DEBRA: I have to interrupt you because we have 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 Amy Ziff, founder of Veritey, and we will come back and talk more about natural products, and how you can get started removing toxic chemicals from your home. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Amy Ziff. She’s the founder of Veritey. How do you pronounce that word actually?
AMY ZIFF: It is Veritey. It’s a fictional word that we based on the actual word, verity, which in Latin means truth. So we are truth in healthy living, but we tailored for your life.
So we blended that together, and came out with Veritey.
DEBRA: Oh, I see. I get it. Good. Very clever. I like having that truth in the word. I knew the Latin word for truth, but I was trying to figure out exactly what this word was.
So tell us, let’s go on to talk about where people can start. What’s the first thing you would say?
AMY ZIFF: I’d like to say, start wherever you’re at. And here are my three principles in that. One, keep it real. And when I talk about keeping it real,
I’m really talking about the [inaudible 00:11:20] in your life, from real ingredients into what you are eating and buying. So that applies to your couch, or the foods you’re going to eat.
It should be untreated within keeping it real. Think about you want to get whatever it is you’re buying as true to its original source as possible.
So there are lots of things that go in here, and of course, tons of nuances. But you can really keep this very basic, and just think about this. Keep it real. Ask yourself what [inaudible 00:11:53] in this product. If you don’t know, ask the person you’re buying it from.
If they don’t know, or they give you this exhaustive speech, it’s probably not going to fit into this rule, keeping it real.
Try and keep it unprocessed. And if you can’t get totally unprocessed, minimally-processed.
And the reason why I mention this, it applies to your couch, is that couches are one of the most toxic elements that most of us have in our homes because, of course, there’s a lot of processing that actually goes into furniture. This is something that often shocks people.
So happy to talk about the flame retardants, and how to get those out, but again, it is something to really think about in my rule.
So one, keep it real.
Two, keep it simple. This is where you just think about less is more. Less handling of your products, less manipulating of your products is better. And fewer ingredients does best for it as well.
And again, that’s whether you’re buying a snack bar, or furniture. These complicated compressed woods that have been highly treated are usually also highly toxic in your home. So going back to the basics can really help you on this.
Again, so keep it real, keep it simple, and then this is the key, start with whatever it is you need next. That might be a toothbrush, that might be a desk, it might be a couch, it might be baby food. I really, really mean it.
Start with the very next thing on your grocery list, and let’s start attacking it there because I believe we can create change through shopping.
Women control 85% of the wallet share in this country. And if we don’t start applying what we know to how we shop, we won’t create a new change.
But if we do, wow, are we a force to be reckoned with.
So women, let’s get together. Let’s take that 85% of our wallet share, ad let’s change what kind of products are being made in this country by demanding to know what’s in them, keeping it real, keeping it simple, and starting what we need next.
DEBRA: I completely agree with everything that you said.
AMY ZIFF: Like minds.
DEBRA: Yes, like minds, exactly. Well, what I found in this field is that there really is a truth. There is a truth. And that if we get down to that truth, and we just keep applying that truth, then we’re going to end up in the right place.
And that truth is that for the most part, and I say for the most part because, just because something comes from nature doesn’t mean it’s not toxic.
There are plenty of natural toxic things in the natural world.
But for the most part, people aren’t making products out of things like botulinum toxin. They just aren’t.
AMY ZIFF: Well, you are not getting botox, but it is truth. And the other thing is that nature has so cleverly designed the natural world that most of the toxins are not, and intentionally so, bio-available. It is only the manipulation of them through human interaction that we’ve made a lot of these toxins bio-available. Lead is a great example of that.
So we’ve taken something natural in the world, but it wasn’t bio-available, and we’ve made it extremely bio-available. And now, we have a real problem on our hands with lead that needs to get cleaned up.
And most people are unaware of it, and unaware of how to deal with it. There are a lot of people that I talk to that think that’s going to be a really pressing human health issue in the coming decades, even though we took it out of gasoline, and we got it out of paint. Shouldn’t it be gone?
But all of those houses that were painted in the 70’s with lead paint are now sweltering. So it’s around. You have to be careful.
And that can be scary. Once people get scared about going non-toxic, I think it, very quickly, can get overwhelming, and people want to put their heads in the sand, and just say, “Well, I can’t do it. I’m going to do it like I’ve done before, like my mother did it, like my neighbor does it, and we’ll just keep going forward that way.”
But I’d like to say, please, please, please don’t do that. It can be scary, but you’re not there alone. As you’ve said Debra, there are so many resources nowadays. Reach out. Veritey hopes to be a lifeline in that crazy sea of “what do I dos,” and try and help point you in the direction that could be safer, better, healthier for you. It does matter.
When we look at diseases in this country, and what’s happening with childhood cancers having grown 25% since 1975, one in three kids having autism, one in six U.S. couples struggling with infertility. These are all related to toxins in our environment, and products that we may or may not be using, but are surrounding ourselves with.
Chemicals are, as I’d like to say, they’re uninvited guests to the party of the life that we’re living here. And we’ve got to take control back, and get these toxins out.
I really encourage people, don’t get overwhelmed, know that knowledge is power, and take some control back. You can do it, and you can start it with your very next product that you have to buy.
DEBRA: That’s great advice. I totally agree with that too. Again, great minds thinking alike.
We need to go to break in just about 10 seconds. So I’m not going to ask you another question right now. But when we come back, what I want to do is ask you about you were talking, and I agree, that whatever is the next product that you buy, then buy it non-toxic.
So we’re going to talk about that when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Amy Ziff, from Veritey. We’re talking about how to take that first step to start removing toxic chemicals from your life. And we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Amy Ziff, from Veritey. We’re talking about how you can get started removing toxic chemicals from your home.
So Amy, let’s just role-play for a minute, and do a little example of somebody’s made a decision that they are going to start with the next product that they buy, and buy something that’s less toxic than what they were buying before.
So they go to the supermarket, or wherever they’re shopping, and they decided that they’re going to buy pickles. So what’s the process to go through to take that step?
AMY ZIFF: So you want to buy pickles, but you’re not really sure how to determine whether your pickles are non-toxic.
So you’re in the store, and the first thing you’re going to do is go to the pickle section, and start looking at different containers.
Now, I can tell you just from bringing up this image of pickles in my mind that one of the things you’re going to notice is color variation on these pickles. So if you flip over the labels, then you want to look for, are there artificial food dyes, or what is free of those.
A lot of the pickles that we get are not actually normal color. The color that seeped into them is from added dyes because manufacturers think that’s what a person expects the pickle to “look like.”
So you look for words, in general, pickles and otherwise—this serves as the catchall, but for things you can’t recognize or pronounce.
So when you see a string of alphanumeric numbers, and it’s like a jumble of letters, [inaudible 00:20:05], they probably don’t have something real in there. That’s a chemical. That didn’t happen in nature.
With pickles, again, you’re going to look for something contains no natural flavors because natural flavors are anything but. They’re a catchall much like fragrance can be a catchall for all kinds of chemicals and additives in your personal care items.
With foods, natural flavor is one of those ones that I’m always wary of, and won’t buy unless I’m really clear on what that is.
And then simple, simple, simple. So the pickles that I like most and my kids just go crazy for have about five ingredients, none of which are sugar, by the way. So it is possible to find. It’s salt, it’s vinegar, it’s some very specific spices, depending on how hot or how not hot, I guess, that I like the new pickles. My husband likes [inaudible 00:21:10].
Some of those spices go up and down. Garlic, usually typical, salt, and water. That can make a really fine tasty pickle.
And that’s what you’ll be looking for.
One of the things you’ll compromise in this is you may not be able to keep those pickles outside of the fridge, and you may not be able to keep those pickles for a year. Things that have no preservatives in them don’t last a long time.
It makes sense. Now, vinegar and salt do act as natural preservatives, so in this case, the pickles were lucky. They’re not going bad anytime soon.
But that said, they may have an expiration date.
So it’s something to be aware of. But I think we’ve all gotten into this mindset of buying in such bulk things that we don’t necessarily even need. It just seems like a good deal at the time. And so we have to reverse that thinking a little bit.
And when you’re trying to buy less toxic, often times you’re not buying in bulk, you’re creating this whole ethos around you of using what you need, and trying to use it all, and using less.
And for anyone out there whose next question is, “But how can I afford it? These things are more expensive.”
I always like to say, when you do this, when you go non-toxic in your life, you start evaluating everything, just like what we did with the pickles.
You’re flipping over, you’re looking at that ingredients list, and you’re realizing, “There’s all this stuff in here.” And then you say, “Maybe I can do without.”
So for people who I go in to their home, and I’m looking at their stuff, and we’re talking through it, they stopped using, I would say, more than 50% of what they had been using. It turns out we don’t need dryer sheet.
DEBRA: No, we don’t.
AMY ZIFF: You can stop spending your monthly allowance that you were spending on your dryer sheets, and put that into a higher quality, essential oil-based, scented laundry detergent, for example. And right there, you’ve cleaned something up.
And baking soda, vinegar, lemon, those things go a long way in cleaning your home. The lemons are pricey, but not really when you stop buying all of these premade things.
And I’m not advocating for everybody making your own DIY. It’s a little bit too far along the path, but there are really good, simple products that you can get that aren’t made of too much more than that that will help you go a long way and detoxing your life because the cleaning stuff that we use in our home is really a significant source of what’s called indoor air pollution.
And our indoor air is 5 to 10 times more polluted than our outdoor air.
So another [inaudible 00:23:48] open your windows every day, people, because that will really help you literally breathe easier. And if you live right next to a road, try and open the windows on the other side of the house or the apartment.
DEBRA: Good. So I want to go back to pickles for a minute because I just discovered something. You can go online and search on pickles label, and all these different labels will come up from all these different brands of pickles. And you could just sit here and look at the pickle labels and their ingredients for as long as you like until you find a pickle that you like.
Now, here’s one. I won’t tell the brand name because I’m going to criticize it. So it has cucumbers, vinegar, salt, garlic, turmeric, natural dill, oil, salt—fine so far. But then there’s sodium benzoate, and that’s a preservative that you don’t want to eat.
We’ve already mentioned artificial colors. I’m looking at another label here with ingredients that are so small, I can’t read it.
AMY ZIFF: Sodium benzoate is one that really bothers me because once you set it, and it jumps out, you will start to notice sodium benzoate is in a lot of your food, and it’s in almost all of your personal care products. There isn’t really enough research on sodium benzoate.
There’s the research that does exist definitely points towards the fact that we need more research because it’s doing some funky things in lab rats.
So I think we have to be very careful with the fact that it’s coming into our bodies, not just through what we ingest, but also through what we put on our skin. We absorb as much as 80% of what we put on our skin.
And suddenly, you have this synergistic effect of a chemical that we don’t really know what it does.
DEBRA: So here now, I’m just picking these labels at random. This one I’m going to mention, this is Bubby’s Cultured Dill Pickles. It’s made from cucumbers, artesian well water, salt, calcium chloride, garlic, dill and spices.
Now, that’s a pretty good one. The thing that I would be red flags for me still is that it’s not organic, so there are pesticide residues in it. There’s also a note on here that it’s non-GMO-verified. So this is not a GMO pickle.
We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and I’m talking with Amy Ziff of Veritey. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Amy Ziff from Veritey. That is at Veritey.com. Amy, you want to spell it?
AMY ZIFF: Sure. It’s V-E-R-I-T-E-Y dot com. Veritey.com.
DEBRA: So we’re going to talk about in a minute what you can find when you go to Veritey.com, but I want to say that if all this talk about ingredients, strange-sounding ingredients that we’ve been talking about with pickles sounds like, “What are you talking about?” I just want to say that when I first started learning all of this, and remember, I was trying to learn it in an environment where there was no help at all. Nobody was talking about this subject at all.
I just started with one chemical. I think it was formaldehyde, in fact. And my father bought me a chemistry dictionary. And I looked up the word formaldehyde, and it told what the health effects were, and it told how formaldehyde was made.
The difficult part was finding out where it was in products, which I had managed to do. But that was a different book entirely.
But what I want to say here is you’re going to look at the pickle jar, and it’s going to say polysorbate 80. It’s going to say sodium benzoate. And you’re not going to have a clue what that is. But it’s a good idea if you see those words to just not eat them, is the first thing.
But the second thing is that you just start with just one product or one chemical, and you just start. And then as you start looking at more labels—I know what sodium benzoate is because I’ve seen it so many times. And just start seeing it.
AMY ZIFF: Yes, you get better and better.
DEBRA: And you get better and better the more you read the labels, and you start recognizing it. If you just say, “I’m going to learn sodium benzoate. I’m not buying any products with sodium benzoate,” and then what you’ll find is, I think you’ll find you just won’t go to the supermarket.
You’ll just go over to a natural food store instead, which doesn’t mean that 100% of the products there are okay. You still have to read the labels.
But you’re not going to find sodium benzoate in most products in a natural food store. There’s going to be a whole list of things. You’re not going to find in a natural food store that you will find in the supermarket.
So you can do things like read a lot of labels, but you can also do things like you can come to my website and look at Debra’s List. And just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and look for shop in the menu. You can go to Amy’s site.
We both already have products that we’ve done the label-reading for you, that we’ve chosen these from our expertise. And so you don’t have to start over again.
And so if you’re looking for food product ideas or what kind of shampoo to use or any of those things, you can just go to my site or go to her site, and see what we have to say because people are already reading the labels for you.
AMY ZIFF: That was one thing that I really learned, Debra, was that. It was hard to find—when I started, I didn’t know about you at the time, unfortunately, so I was really having trouble finding someone who had done this before. But as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper into this, I do find that there are other resources.
You get better at it, and you start, as you say, recognizing things, then you get a little bit more sophisticated. And the reason why our symbol is an onion is because this whole thing is constant. And even today, I’m still learning. And I’m sure you still are.
DEBRA: I’m still learning.
AMY ZIFF: I moved cross-country and my goal was to create a non-toxic home, and sadly, I was made aware that doesn’t exist, and that’s an impossibility. But I have probably pretty close to have created as non-toxic as it can be in this day and age. And then I know what to fight back with against the toxins, what kind of plants to surround myself with, and all that.
But that has been a real process. And so you start where you are, you start to make it [inaudible 00:30:52]. And then you get better at it, and you realize the connection, and that we are living in an ecosphere that is totally connected, and that your whole world is you can’t just reduce the toxins in your home without starting to think about what you’re ingesting.
So you mentioned GMO’s when we left off with the pickle. That’s really an important, I think, if you’re trying to avoid toxins, to try and start getting out of your diet. And they are everywhere.
For sure, nothing with high fructose corn syrup is going to pass the test anymore because that is pretty much guaranteed to be GMO. Canola oil goes on that list because it’s a genetically-engineered product.
It can be shocking. Things you think or thought were healthy turn out—this is rewriting that book, so it is really important to lean on people who’ve done this before, so you don’t have to shoulder all that burden. And know that every single thing you do to make a difference in your life, to be a less toxic, to reduce your chemical footprint, I often say, when you’re doing that, everything makes a difference.
That is good news for your body because our bodies are made to detox.
DEBRA: Every single thing that you do, don’t think that a jar of pickles is too small. Start with a jar of pickles.
AMY ZIFF: No, it makes a difference.
DEBRA: And tomorrow, you get organic ketchup.
So what I’d like to do, we only have about five minutes left of the show, could you just give us a couple of suggestions of things that somebody could just walk into a store and buy, and have it be less toxic. I would say, go to a natural food store, and buy anything that has the organic label on it. If you can see the USDA organic symbol, and just look for that, and buy something that has that on it.
So what’s one thing that you would say that for somebody to go find a non-toxic product?
AMY ZIFF: I would say some of the biggest things—I tend to look at this in terms of in your home, what are the biggest things that you could get out and replace. With [inaudible 00:33:07] things, it’s a little bit different, Debra, from starting in store, but I’ll tell you why I’m getting there.
So I think about the most important thing you can do to support your body is create a healthy boudoir. Get a bedroom that isn’t off-gassing.
And so if I were going to the store, I’d be thinking about, “What’s in my bedroom? Maybe I’m not ready to throw out all my furniture and start over.”
And that’s probably a good thing. But you want to think about what’s touching you every single night. You spend a third of your life in bed, generally.
The statistics say. Eight hours of your day is going to be in bed and asleep.
Well, make sure you’re using a laundry detergent that you’re breathing in and out that’s going to be non-toxic.
DEBRA: Good suggestion.
AMY ZIFF: Now, I’m going to the store to get my non-toxic laundry detergent, but there’s still many claiming all kinds of things. What do I do and where do I look?
Again, this is where you keep it real, keep it simple, and this is what you need, but look for a brand. And often times, this is a generalization, but if you’ve made it to a health food store, they’re going to have stripped out a lot of things from this.
So you’re not going to see the Tides and the Whiffs of the world. You’re going to be seeing some alternate brands. And they do span the gamut. I personally really like the Ecos, the earth friendly products brand. You can get it free of scent, or you can get it scented with essential oils.
I think they’re pretty good and clean.
Seventh Generation is not perfect, but you know what? They’re so much better than others that I think. They’re good.
If this is sounding really complicated and overwhelming, you could go to a service like Honest.com, and order direct. Their products, again, not perfect, but the truth of the matter is, if you’re using someone like Honest.com, you’re still so much better than 95% of what’s out there.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right.
AMY ZIFF: I want people to feel that they can do this, that they can start, that they can make differences in their lives.
Perfection is something we can all strive for, but it’s really hard to achieve in any aspect of our lives, including going completely non-toxic. So make it easy. Go easy on yourself, so that you feel good because you know what, there is proof that when you buy something that’s good for you, and good for the environment, maybe they’re 1% for the planet, and giving back, that makes you feel good, and you get an endorphin rush.
“Now, that product actually works.”
And you continue to use it, there’s a whole cycle of goodness that’s happening for you, for the world, for everything. And that’s what I love.
DEBRA: And you should take whatever step you can take in the right direction. I didn’t start off with the most non-toxic products. I started off saying, “This is what’s available. This is what I can afford. This is what I understand.”
And now, I’m pretty sophisticated in my choices, but it took me many years to learn this. It took many years for the market to start catching up. It took many years—
AMY ZIFF: You were the pioneer.
DEBRA: Yes. Thank you. I was.
AMY ZIFF: You were. And now, it must seem really easy when you look out at the world. You’re like, “This is nothing.” You are so lucky.
DEBRA: It is. People who are starting now are very fortunate because other people came before. Yes, there are possibilities.
At this point in time, there does exist a non-toxic solution for everything. It’s just about knowing about it, and some of those things you need to make yourself. But you can eliminate so many toxic chemicals. And I’m going to have to stop talking because the show is going to be over in two seconds.
Thank you so much, Amy. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more, to listen to past shows, to find out what’s coming up, and even listen to this show again. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
I was a minute off.
This show is over at 12:56 and 30 seconds. It’s now 12:56. I ended at 12:55 and 30 seconds. So we do have a few more seconds. But what I want to say is that people should do what they can. Every step helps, and you can go to Amy’s website, Veritey, I don’t have it right in front of me, V-E-R-I-T-E-Y dot com. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and find out more about products that you can choose that are toxic-free.
AMY ZIFF: Go non-toxic. You won’t regret it.
DEBRA: And this is the end of the show now. Thanks, Amy. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Tile and grout cleaner
Question from Claire
Hi Debra,
I’m thinking of using Tile Lab tile and grout cleaner/resealer. Here’s the MSDS:
www.custombuildingproducts.com/media/2386841/
msds_tl_grouttilecleanerresealer_en.pdf
Do you think there’d be any lasting health dangers to it once the job is finished?
Thanks so much.
Debra’s Answer
This MSDS lists NO hazardous chemicals but it does list some health effects. It recommends skin and eye protection. It’s hard to tell without any ingredients.
On their Technical Data sheet, just published a few days ago, it says that it “Complies with all Federal and SCAQMD Standards for VOCs.” That doesn’t mean no VOCs.
Sorry I can’t tell you more, there’s just not enough data. You might call them and see what you can find out.
How Antibiotics and Antibacterials are Compromising our Health
My guest today is Martin J. Blaser, MD, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. We’ll be talking about how the massive increases in the developed world of “modern plagues”—such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and autism—are related to loss of diversity of the complex—and crucially important—ecosystem of microorganisms within our bodies on which we all depend. As diversity diminishes, our immune systems are compromised, and we become much more susceptible to new infections. And this loss of micro-organism diversity is due to the use of wide use of antibiotics and products that contain antibacterials such as triclosan. Dr. Blaser has studied the role of bacteria in human disease for more than thirty years. He is the director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, the former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and has held major advisory roles at the National Institutes of Health. He cofounded the Bellevue Literary Review, and his work has been written about in many newspapers and journals, including The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City. www.martinblaser.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Antiobiotics and Antibacterials Are Compromising Our Health
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Martin Blaser, MD
Date of Broadcast: June 12, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, this is Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, June 12th, 2014 and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida.
We are having a very interesting show. I don’t like to say that, because I think all the shows are interesting. But this one is unique and different and it’s something we’ve never talked about before.
My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser. He’s written a book called Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues. We’re going to be talking about all these different illnesses that look like they’re separate and distinct like obesity, type 1 diabetes, asthma, allergies, esophageal cancer, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, autism.
All of these, he says, are related to the loss of the diversity of the complex and crucially important ecosystem of microorganisms in our bodies. Every function in our bodies depends on these microorganisms, and these are being killed off by things like antibiotics and anti-bacterials.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I think this is going to be very interesting. Welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio, Dr. Blaser.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: It’s great to be here.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. I think your book is so interesting. And when I saw it, I thought we’ve never talk about this before. This is not something I have ever seen, and yet it seems so remarkably simple and obvious. How did you get interested in researching this?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: First, before I answer your question, which is a wonderful question, I wanted to just say that listening to you – you know, here’s a guy who’s saying all of these diseases are due to a change in our microbes. To me, it sounds quite grandiose.
But actually, I think it’s true. I’m going to try to explain why I think it’s true and tell you from the beginning that at this point, it is a hypothesis, but there is more and more support for the hypothesis.
So the story began in two different places. The first place is that many years ago, I was working for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta in their Enteric Disease Branch. That’s the branch that deals with infections to the intestinal track. And I was the Salmonella Surveillance Officer of the United States. I was involved in studying salmonella.
At that point, we were very concerned about antibiotic resistance in salmonella because more and more salmonellas were not being easily treated with antibiotics.
And at that point, more than 30 years ago, I learned that most of the antibiotics used in the United States are used on the farm. They’re not used for people. They’re used on a farm. In particular, they’re used to fatten up farm animals. It’s what’s called the ‘growth promotion’.
In the 1940s, farmers found that if they fed their livestock low doses of antibiotics, their livestock would gain weight and they reduced their feed more efficiently. This is much more profitable for farmers. And that’s why the use of antibiotics is still extensive on the farm and why it’s continued, because of the strong economic motivation.
DEBRA: Okay. As we’re talking about that, let me just say something about that first. As you’re talking about that, I’m thinking back to my teenage years when I was given low doses of antibiotics for acne. I think that that’s the standard treatment. Of course, I gained weight. I just think of all these people who are on antibiotics for different reasons and obesity.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, exactly. So you’ve skipped a little ahead of me, but we’re going to the same place.
And so about 10 years ago, a light bulb went off. I thought to myself, if farmers are feeding antibiotics to their livestock to make them fatter, what are we doing to our kids? Could there be an unintended consequence of all the antibiotic use that our kids are getting?
And another thing that the farmers found is that the earlier in life they started the antibiotics, the more profound the effect, suggesting that early childhood was particularly important.
And now, I will skip forward and tell you that over these last 10 years, we’ve been doing experiments in mice and other laboratory animals to ask the question, “Do antibiotics change the development of the mice? Do they change how obese they’re going to be?” And the answer is yes.
We have done a whole series of studies. We had a big paper that was published a year and a half ago in Nature that shows that giving antibiotics to mice changed their body composition. They had more fat. They changed their metabolic pathways in their liver. So we have more and more experimental support that this hypothesis is actually correct.
DEBRA: Wow! I’m just stunned to hear this. When I think about the billions of dollars being spent on people trying to lose weight, not to mention the personal way that people feel being overweight and the health effects of being overweight, this is something – this is the first time I’m hearing this, and I read a lot.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: It’s interesting, because I’m a physician. In fact, my specialty is infectious diseases. And as infectious disease doctors, one of our main occupations is to oversee the use of antibiotics in ill people to consult with other doctors with people who are really sick.
And of course, we love antibiotics. I want to say that I love antibiotics. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where there were not antibiotics because from the very introduction in the 1940s, these drugs were miraculous. There were people on the brink of death who were saved because of antibiotics and disease that were untreatable were cured with antibiotics.
And as a result of that, we all considered that antibiotics were miraculous. Because we couldn’t see there were some minor and infrequent side effects that basically, they were safe. So everyone, myself included, gave antibiotics a clean bill of health.
Little by little, the medical profession and the public began using antibiotics more and more and more for milder and milder conditions – not just the conditions that were life-threatening, but for mild conditions like acne or to prevent acne. Now I’m not saying that acne can’t be terrible, but it’s certainly milder than a case of spinal meningitis for example.
So in 2010, the Center for Disease Control did a study of antibiotic use in the United States. What they found was astounding to me. They found in the United States for outpatients, not even including people in the hospital, for outpatients, there were 258 million courses of antibiotics prescribed in that year. And that’s in a population of 300 million people. So what that meant is that in 2010, there were five courses of antibiotics prescribed for every six people. This has been going on year after year after year.
And the CDC looked at the data by age. And you can extrapolate that and say that the average child in the United States by the time they’re two has had three courses of antibiotics. By the time they’re 10, they’ve had 10 courses. And by the time they’re 20, they’ve had 17 courses of antibiotics. That’s the average child. That’s across every child in the United States.
These numbers may seem high, but they’re entirely consistent with many other studies that have been done. None had been done on this big a scale. So this enormous antibiotic use and nobody has been paying attention to what the consequences could be.
DEBRA: We’re going to need to go to a break in about 30 seconds, so I’m not going to ask you another question because I don’t want to have to interrupt you.
But I think that this is incredible. It’s just another taste of having there be an industrial product that people look at as being a miracle. And then time goes by – not even just a miracle, but something that’s not harmful. Time goes by, we start seeing that it has profound effects.
We’re going to talk about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, M.D., author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling our Modern Plagues. You can go to his website and find out more at MartinBlaser.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes .
Dr. Blaser, I want to just back up for a minute now that we know where the story began. You talk about the microbiome. Explain to us what that is.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, certainly. So the microbiome is all the microbes that live in and on the human body. That’s a very big number of microbes. In fact, if you take a census of all the cells in the human body, 70% to 90% of them are microbes. Only 10% to 30% are human cells. So we are mostly microbial cells.
And that’s the way it’s been since time in memorial. We got lots of our microbes from our moms, and she got it from her mom, and so on and so forth, all the way back. In fact, ever since there had been animals on this planet, which is about 500 million years, they have had residential microbes living in them.
We now know that most of these microbes are beneficial to us – beneficial or neutral. But in depth, they’re beneficial. They do important things for us. They help protect us against invaders. They help train our immune system. They help us digest food. They make vitamins for us. So the microbes that had been living with us are there for a purpose. They help us live.
DEBRA: I think that most people, if you say microbes, they think that they’re in the intestines, but where are some places in your body that they might be?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Well, the biggest group are in our intestines, but they’re in our mouth, they’re in our skin and our ears, eyes. In women, they’re in the vagina. So we have been living with these microbes since time immemorial.
And one of the things that have happened is that because infectious diseases have been so terrible like cholera and tuberculosis and typhoid fever, the public has always been fearful of these tremendous plagues. I’ll call those ‘our ancient plagues.’ The advent of sanitation and antibiotics had been a godsend. So we have now controlled these ancient plagues.
We, as a society, have become germaphobic. We think that all microbes are bad like cholera and plague and tuberculosis. Of course, some of them are, and we are at war with those guys. But most of the microbes in the human body, most of the microbes in the world are neutral or beneficial for us.
And that’s a greater level of sophistication that I try to bring out in Missing Microbes . The the whole title of Missing Microbes is that we have lost some of our defenders. We have lost some of our friendly organisms that help our babies grow up and develop normally – develop normal metabolism, normal immunity and maybe even normal cognition.
DEBRA: So it seems like that there needs to be a balance between protecting ourselves from the harmful microbes and not destroying the good microbes.
An example that I frequently give is that when we drink tap water that has chlorine or chloramine in it, it’s put there for a reason because it was found that it was needed to do that so that the harmful microbes that might be in the system or even in the pipes.
Often, people will ask me, “Why did they put it chlorine and the chloramine at the water treatment plant? Why don’t they just leave it out and then the water can come to our house clean?” Well, they have to put it in because the pipes that the water goes through are contaminated with all kinds of microorganisms that could get in the water and then cause us harm if we drink that tap water.
But then, we drink that tap water (I filter my water and I’m always telling people to filter their water), but if people don’t filter the chlorine or the chloramines out of their tap water, they drink the antibacterial, chlorine or chloramines, it goes into their intestines at least and starts killing off the beneficial bacteria.
So how can we protect ourselves without destroying ourselves?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: That is really the question because the chlorination of water was a tremendous advance in public health. We have clean water. We can turn on the tap, and we know that that water is safe to drink. But in many parts of the world (in India; in Africa, and parts of Asia), we can’t. And people are becoming ill, they’re dying for many kinds of diseases because of dirty water.
So as you say, we have to find the right balance between things that protect us against pathogens but, don’t do in our beneficial organisms. Again, this is one of the themes of Missing Microbes .
I want to point out (because there’s so much to talk about and so little time) that I gave you the figures for the United States in antibiotic use. And a few months after that paper was published by the CDC investigators, a group in Sweden published their use of antibiotics. I first want to point out that, as I think all your listeners know, Sweden is a small country with a high standard of living. The Swedes are at least as healthy as we are and they are using 40% of the antibiotics that we’re using at every age.
When our children at three had four courses of antibiotic, they have had 1.4. When our kids have had 10, they’ve had 4. So there’s no epidemic of childhood deafness in Sweden or early childhood mortality. They’re doing just fine. What that implies is that at least 60% of the antibiotics we’re using are unneeded.
So one of the things I’m calling for is the much more judicious use of antibiotics. Use them when we really need them and don’t use them the other times. That requires education of doctors and it also requires education of the public that antibiotics are not free. They come with cost, biological cost.
And when people bring their kids to the doctor and the doctor says, “Your child doesn’t need an antibiotic, those parents should feel relieved, not deprived.
DEBRA: Yes. I remember many years ago (I don’t even know how many years ago it has been now), I remember being told that if I take an antibiotic, that I should eat yogurt to restore some of the bacteria, the beneficial bacteria that’s being destroyed by the antibiotic.
I don’t know that that’s even commonly known even now, but it was something that I was told a long time ago. Nowadays, I would probably say, “Take a probiotic or drink Kombucha tea or something like that to restore the flora in the gut after taking an antibiotic.” But always, it would be preferable to do something else instead of taking the antibiotic.
But as you said—we need to go to break. So let’s just go to break and come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I know there’s so much to talk about. I just want to go on and on.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, M.D. He’s the author of Missing Microbes and we have lots to talk about. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes .
Dr. Blaser, right before the break, I said something you wanted to jump in, so go ahead and give me your answer.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: You talked about what you should do after you take an antibiotic. Should you take yogurt? Should you take a probiotic? Should you take some special teas?
Most of that is folk wisdom. Very little of it has been studied. It’s not clear to me whether that’s any better than a placebo. I think we are going to learn through science, we’re going to learn what organisms we have to give back after somebody takes an antibiotic.
One of my theories is that every time somebody takes an antibiotic, of the thousands of species that we have in our body, a few go extinct. And the next time, a few more go extinct.
Now, what’s the chance that that’s true? There is some support for this idea because we know if we compare people in the United States with people in developing countries, we’ve lost diversity. We have just a smaller census of different kinds of bacteria than they do.
So what’s the chance that taking one or two organisms in yogurt are going to restore our diversity? Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
DEBRA: It’s not. It’s not. think that people don’t really realize that yogurt has very few strains of…
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, very few strains. But let me just say…
DEBRA: And if you’re taking a probiotic, it’s very few strains as well.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: The same, exactly. Let me just say that I eat yogurt everyday. I love yogurt. But I eat it because it’s delicious. And I think it gives me a lot of nutrients. But I don’t think it’s helping my microbiome. It’s neither helping nor hurting my microbiome. I think we need to discover the organisms that we’ve lost and replace them. Maybe, we’ll be giving them to our kids in the future.
DEBRA: Wow! As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about what you said in your book that mothers pass on microbes with their children in various ways when they’re born. And if the mothers don’t have those microbes, then the children don’t have them from the beginning of life.
And if they were taking antibiotics and continuing to lose and lose them and lose them, that if the things that we’re doing thinking that we’re replacing some of those are not necessarily lining up with what we’ve lost, then I can see how the pool of diversity of microbes is just getting smaller and smaller.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes. A number of years ago, we speculated that this loss of microbes, this loss of diversity is actually cumulative across generations, that each generation of moms has fewer microbes to pass onto the next.
And again, we’re finding evidence that this is true. That was the theory, but we’re beginning to find evidence that this is true.
And that’s very alarming because the recent suggestion is that we’ve lost perhaps a third of our diversity. It’s silent. You can’t tell when somebody has lost their diversity. The only way we can tell is that we have all these diseases that are rising.
We come back to my original grandiose idea. Let’s just say we have 10 diseases that have risen dramatically since World War II. You’ve mentioned them, obesity, juvenile diabetes, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, food allergies, peanut allergy, and the list goes on.
So either each of those is rising independently and each has its own cause or there’s one commonality, something that is underlying all of them. The one thing that could fit that is big enough to encompass all of them is changes in the early life microbiome, the microbiome that our babies are developing with, that are choreographed to help our normal development, and that we have been inadvertently changing.
One of the things you mentioned was about birth. My wife, Maria Gloria Dominguez, has been studying this for the last few years. She’s been studying the difference between babies born vaginally and by C section.
So we humans are mammals. For the last hundred million years, all mammals are born by passes through the birth canal. They go out through their mom’s vagina and in the process, they’re picking up their mom’s bacteria. They’re covered with bacteria, they’re swallowing the bacteria. Those become the founding bacteria to help them start their life.
So this is what mammals have been doing for 100 million years including us. Then we started doing C sections, which again are an incredible operation. They are life-saving sometimes for babies and for moms, but we’re doing more and more and more.
So most recently in the United States, we were up to about 32% of babies now born by C section. That’s one baby out of three. In Brazil, it’s about 50%. And all over the world, C sections are rising.
What Gloria has shown and others is that the microbiota, when the baby is born vaginally and by C section, is quite different. So all these kids born by C section are not being born with the normal compliment of microbes passed from mom the way they were back in the old days. This is what I point out in Missing Microbes . Just because something is common, it doesn’t mean it’s right.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. As you’re talking, I’m getting this picture of like a science fiction movie and the future of people fighting over the microbes that they’re supposed to have when they’re born. Because we don’t pass them on anymore, there’s like this secret stash of the microbes that you’re supposed to have and that everybody is supposed to get one of these capsules at birth.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Actually, we’re hoping to develop that stash. We’re hoping to understand what are the microbes we’ve lost, what are those missing microbes, develop them and give them to kids.
There’s an organism I’ve been studying for about 30 years called Helicobacter pylori, which was first discovered as a pathogen causing ulcers and stomach cancer. We were involved in those studies on stomach cancer as well. The more we studied it, the more it became clear to me that this is one of those ancient organisms that are disappearing. That was my first missing microbe. And I thought, “If one microbe that is an ancient microbe is disappearing, probably there are others.” That’s the where the whole idea came from.
But in 1998, in the British Medical Journal, I predicted that doctors of the future would be giving H. pylori back to children. So far, nothing has happened. And I think it’s actually still too early because we still have to do a lot of science to understand this, but it is my belief that that will be coming. We’re going to be giving H. pylori and other organisms back to kids so that we can get the early-life benefits of those organisms and maybe then eradicate the organisms later so we don’t have the late-in-life cost.
DEBRA: Well, people are already taking probiotics and prebiotics. So this is just more biotics. We need to go to break again. But what I want to ask you is (and we’ll look at the answer when we come back) do you have any idea how many microbes we lost to this?
We’ll come back and get the answer from Dr. Blaser who is the author of Missing Microbes . You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Martin Blaser. He’s the author of Missing Microbes . Before the break, I asked him if he knows how many microbes we’ve lost.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yeah. Thank you. We can only estimate, but there was a very nice study that was published about two years ago now in Nature comparing the microbiomes of healthy people in the United States, Africans and Malawi and Amerindians in Venezuela. This is led out of Jeff Gordon’s lab at Washington University. Gloria Dominguez and Rob Knight participated in this study.
And what they found is they took a census of how many species were present in the gut, really a fecal specimen from healthy people. In Africa, it was on average about 1400 species. In the Amerindians, it was about 1600 species. And the people in the US, it was about 1200 species. So from that estimate, we’ve lost between 15% and 25% of our diversity. A more recent study by Maria Gloria and colleagues suggests that maybe about 35%.
So that’s a lot. That’s something that’s quite measureable. In a sense, this is like the global warming inside of our body. It’s the same kind of thing. Global warming has been happening for some time, but we didn’t wake up to it until it was well on its way. And that seems to me, that that’s what’s happening with our missing microbes.
DEBRA: So I want to make sure that we talk about antibacterials, because things like triclosan is just in everything. I went to buy a pair of scissors at an office supply store, and there was only one out of six or seven options for buying scissors that didn’t have anti-bacterial on the handle of the scissors. Tell us about that.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Antibacterials are everywhere. They have two purposes. One purpose is to protect the scissors so that the scissors will last longer because bacteria and fungi, they cause decay of many things. So it makes some sense.
But part of it is that they’re also in materials that we use to so-called “protect” us. For example, they’re in toothpaste. The problem is that we Americans were exposed to millions or tens of millions of times everyday to these anti-bacterials, which we would predict would have an effect on our microbiome. But nobody has really measured this. We have no idea what the consequence is. But we need to know.
I will note that about two weeks ago, the State of Minnesota banned triclosan. They said you can’t use it in things that go into products for people anymore. That won’t take effect until 2017, but it is a first step. I think we really have to understand what are they doing to us, because they have just crept up.
Another thing we do is we put on all these antibacterial lotions on our hands. We think that we’re protecting ourselves from germs. There are times to use those lotions. When you’re in the hospital, you don’t want the transmission of dangerous antibiotic-resistant germs. During flu season, we don’t want the flu spreading from person to person. Hands are important.
But those two things together represent probably less than 5% of all the times when one could use the hand thing. And the other 95%, we’re just slathering it on by the millions.
My question is, “Are we doing more benefit or are we doing more harm?” By trying to get rid of bad organisms, we may be actually hurting our good organisms, depleting our good organisms that one day we’re going to need.
DEBRA: I totally agree with you. We just talked about this before earlier in the show, but I just want to say it again, because I think it’s a really important point. And that is when we’re talking about these microorganisms, they’re not like a system of our own body. They’re like something that is symbiotic with us, yes? Am I understanding this correctly?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: Yes, they are symbiotic with us, but you can also think of them in essence like in other organ of our body like a kidney or a liver because they are doing many different kinds of functions for us like our kidneys or our liver. Increasingly, we think of it as an organ, which just gives you a sense of how important we think they are to our health.
DEBRA: My mind is just twisting around trying to comprehend this because I have studied – now this is going to sound strange maybe, but when I was writing my last book Toxic-Free, I realized that I really didn’t know what were the organ systems in my body.
As I started researching, I was finding that they aren’t very well explained and there aren’t books – I mean, I think if you would ask people on the street what are your body systems, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. And yet, we need to be aware of what they are, because toxic chemicals are damaging each one of them.
And I really am seeing how the microbiome of our bodies – I love that word – the microbiome of our bodies, whether it’s an organ or a symbiotic ecosystem of its own that is working hand in hand with our bodies, they are performing functions. And without this microbiome, we wouldn’t be able to live, our bodies wouldn’t live.
And so we do need to consider what are the toxic chemicals, what are the factors that are destroying it since we need it.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: This is why I wrote Missing Microbes . I wanted to explain these ideas to the public, because explaining it to the medical profession – and I speak quite frequently to doctors and scientists trying to get these viewpoints out. I have to say that in general, they’ve been very well-received. But that’s not enough. We really have to change the comprehension of normal people about all these things that we’re doing.
Everybody thinks that antibiotics are free, that antibacterials are good for us. It’s much more complex. And if we can change the dialogue in the doctor’s office so that parents say, “Can we avoid giving antibiotics?” rather than, “My child must get an antibiotic?” we’ll be getting some place. Again, we know that we’re doing so much, much too much in many areas.
DEBRA: If somebody’s listening to this and they’re saying, “What can I do to maybe restore some of my microbes?”, what would you tell them?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: I say the first thing is to prevent further damage, prevent more decline of your microbes. The restoration is going to be more complicated. I don’t know that we have the state of science today to do that.
I’m hopeful. That’s what we work on in the lab, come up with the real probiotics that we’re going to be using in the future to restore those missing organisms. We have several candidates that we’re working on in the lab that we think that we’re going to be giving especially to kids.
For adults, it’s more complicated. We’re mostly concerned about how kids develop because so many of the important diseases, their roots are in childhood. If we can catch the root, then we can prevent a lot of diseases.
We know obesity begins in the early years of life. So somebody may become obese when they’re 25 or 35 or 45, but there’s a lot of evidence that the first five years of life are the critical time for when that’s developing.
DEBRA: This is so interesting to me, because for me weight has been an issue in my body my entire life. And it’s not about what I eat or what I don’t eat or how much exercise I get. I can do all those things and my body still doesn’t lose weight.
DR. MARTIN BLASER: We’ve known for 50 years that how your body forms in the first few years of life will determine a great deal about a person’s ways.
DEBRA: This is actually such a relief to me. So we’ve only got about two minutes left. So is there anything you’d like to say in closing?
DR. MARTIN BLASER: There’s so much I’d like to say…
DEBRA: Another five hours…
DR. MARTIN BLASER: I want to come back to the tremendous use of antibiotics on the farm because as a result of that, antibiotics are getting into our food, the meat, milk. In some communities, antibiotics are in the drinking water because the water intake is downstream of the ethylene from industrial farms.
Millions of people are getting exposed to trace levels of antibiotics. What are the consequences? We don’t know. We need to know. And probably we need to stop it because all these antibiotics we use on the farm ultimately are affecting our human ecology. That could be another thing that is causing the depletion of our diversity.
And we need that diversity, because the good guys help protect us against invaders. They’re our coastguards. If we deplete them, we become susceptible. And I discussed that in a chapter of Missing Microbes , that I call Antibiotic Winter. It’s a very bleak thing, but we need to prepare. Otherwise, we’re going to be in trouble.
DEBRA: Wow! I need to say something, because I can’t have dead air time.
Listening to everything that you’re saying, I understand the magnitude of what you’re talking about because I could say everything that you’re saying about all the toxic chemicals that I’ve researched over the past 30 years where there are these fundamental things that underlie everything. One of them is what you’re talking about, about losing our microbiome.
Another thing is all these toxic chemicals that are destroying every one of our body systems. It all underlies everything.
Anyway, I’ve only got about 10 seconds. So I’m just going to say thank you so much, Dr. Blaser. His book is Missing Microbes . You can go to his website at MartinBlaser.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to this show again, listen to the other shows, find out what’s coming up. Be well.
Why One Couple Decided to Get an Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn, husband and wife, and 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. Their products also caught the eye of the producers of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs show. The show’s host, Mike Rowe, “helped” them make a batch of their very popular Pure Earth Hair Wash, which was enormously funny and has been aired repeatedly on the Discovery Channel around the globe. Their Pure Earth Hair Wash was just named the “Best of Washington DC” by the Washington Post. www.terressentials.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH DIANA KAYE & JAMES HAHN
- GMOs in Personal Care Products
- Toxics in Essential Oils?
- How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
- How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products
- More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution
- The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
- What Organic Means — From the Experience of Being Organic Farmers
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Why One Couple Decided to Get An Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye and James Hahn
Date of Broadcast: June 11, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is – what’s the date today? The 10th or 11th. I haven’t looked at the calendar of June 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where we’re having a lovely summer day.
I have a new mic today, a new microphone and I love it. But I’m still getting used to it. The old microphone sometimes – yesterday, we had a technical difficulty and couldn’t do the show at all because my old mic was having a problem. It’s been having problems off and on. So I think this one is going to be better. I’m still getting used to like how far I need to speak away from it or close to it and all those things, but we’ll get used to it. We’ll get used to it.
Okay! So today, we’re going to be talking about USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products. These personal care products had been around for quite a while. One of the first organic personal care products that there were. I’ve known about this company, I’ve been recommending it for many years. They’ve been doing this almost as long as I’ve been writing about it.
They have their own organic farm. They produce more than a hundred of these gourmet products. They’ve been on television, the Discovery Channel’s DEBRA: show. The host, Mike Rowe, helped them make a batch of their very popular Pure Earth Hairwash, which we’re going to be talking about later. It’s actually a dirty thing. It’s made out of mud, but it gets your hair really clean.
So welcome to my guests, Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. Hi, Diana and James.
Diana Kaye: Hi, Debra. I’ve had a little bit of a technical glitch here and I deeply apologize. I haven’t been able to get – we had a little, minor crisis that James has had to attend to. He’s going to try to join us, but he’s not on the line right now. I’m really, really sorry about that.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. Things happen. This is live radio. Sometimes, we don’t have guests at all. Sometimes, I can’t show up like yesterday. I didn’t have a microphone. So it’s totally fine. We’ll start with you.
Diana Kaye: Sure, no problem.
DEBRA: Okay. So Diana, tell us you are one of the pioneers in organic personal care products. So tell us, how did you get interested in this?
Diana Kaye: It really goes back to 1989. A year before that, I completed a radical course of chemotherapy that really, really played havoc with my immune system and caused me to become so reactive to so many things that has been around me all of my life that my partner and I, James were trying to figure out why I had become so reactive. This was not an expected side effect when thinking about therapy.
Our research showed us that first of all, the cancer I had, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has been linked in numerous studies to chemical exposures. So that was quite an eye-opening experience to learn about that. And then to find out that a lot of the chemicals in products that we had been using were considered by our County Municipal Waste Authority as hazardous waste!
DEBRA: Hazardous waste, yeah.
Diana Kaye: It was quite disturbing. We were trying to clean up our lives. In fact, your books were of great help to us back then and some several others.
DEBRA: thank you.
Diana Kaye: We went to our kitchen, the garage, got a big box of products, put it out for the trash people one evening and then the next morning, I went out to get the paper and the box was on my doormat, on my welcome mat. It was a note from the trash people saying that this was hazardous waste and had to go to a special hazardous waste facility. So yeah, that was really a scream.
And so, we learned. We began to question what these ingredients were. When we didn’t know how to pronounce something – and this was all pre-Internet, so…
DEBRA: I remember those days.
Diana Kaye: Yeah, yeah! So it was books. We live really close to DC in Arlington, Virginia so we spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress and the university libraries reading textbooks trying to understand what these ingredients were that we could not pronounce.
And so we learned a lot about chemical processing, chemical manufacturing. We read patents. We read industry textbooks. It’s safe to say that what we found out shocked us. Ingredients that were in (and still are) in products that are labeled ‘natural’ are manufactured in industrial chemical facilities using petrochemical reactive agents, in factories that are regulated by the EPA because of their air, their water and ground pollution. And these are ingredients that people call ‘natural’?
DEBRA: Yes.
Diana Kaye: We have kind of a different definition of that. If I can buy feeds for something and plant it in the garden or it actually is part of the soil, to me, that’s natural.
DEBRA: I completely agree, I completely agree. I know that when I first started writing about this, so much has changed in the last 30+ years since I started. But when I first started writing about it, I was looking at, “Well, here’s all these toxic things. And then here’s the natural products” and the natural products seem to be more natural. A lot of them had ingredients like – they would say sodium-something, lauryl-something and in parenthesis, it would say ‘coconut oil’.
It took me actually a lot of research and a lot of time to learn that these natural ingredients aren’t. I’m sure that you and I will talk about this more in the course of this show, that these natural ingredients are actually not natural. They are natural to the degree that instead of being made from petrochemicals, that the original material is a renewable resource like a coconut, for example.
But then it goes through the same industrial process. That’s not the same thing as just taking a coconut and rubbing it on your skin or whatever.
Diana Kaye: Yes, exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah! And so we have this word ‘natural’, which kind of makes us think it’s okay, but what is allowed to be within the realm of natural is so different from one end of the spectrum to the other. We’ll talk about that more, but I want to hear more about your story.
So you did all these research like I did (we were both doing it in the same period of time in those libraries, looking those things up). And then what decisions did you make out of that?
Diana Kaye: Well, it’s pretty safe to say that after doing considerable amount of research for two years, three years, we found that we had fewer and fewer off-the-shelf option for conventional products to use to clean out, to clean our bodies, to take care of our pets, to take care of our yard and garden.
And we searched the world, by the way. At one point, we were talking to a holistic doctor in Australia to have him actually produce soap for us because we were so disillusioned with what was available here in the States. We talked to some folks in Germany. We were bringing some of their products over.
It was very expensive, I have to tell you, to bring products from Australia and from Europe. And at the time, I was also involved with numerous support group, chemical sensitivity groups, a cancer support group and people that we were talking to who were the people that were like us who were very persistent researchers or were not willing to accept what was being told to them because they could read labels and they’re looking at these ingredients the same as we were.
And so we were sharing information. We were doing research. We were successful in finding some things and people said, “Well, share it with us!” Here we are in a major metropolitan city or area, the Washington D.C. metro area and there are all these people who couldn’t find products that they felt comfortable using. We realized that there was a large gap back then. There was an area in the marketplace that just didn’t have the solution.
So one thing led to another. We first started producing just a mail order catalog – again, pre-Internet. There weren’t websites back then. And so, we put a lot of books in there, one very excellent book and of course, we had some of your books, we had several others, we added another book called The Truth About Where You Live, which was published quite a while ago and it’s still highly relevant. It took every county in the United States and listed all the toxic sources of pollution from underground storage tanks of petroleum…
DEBRA: I think I remember that. We actually need to go to break. I’m so busy listening to you. This is all so interesting that I forgot to look at the clock.
Diana Kaye: Uh-oh.
DEBRA: So we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back.
Diana Kaye: Sure.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m talking with Diana Kaye and later, we’ll have her husband, James Hahn on as well from Terressentials. That’s Terressentials.com. We’re talking about personal care products, al the toxic stuff in them and what Diana and James are doing to give us safer products. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye and her husband, James Hahn who will be on shortly after he handles his emergency. They have a business of USDA certified organic gourmet personal care product called Terressentials. That’s at Terressentials.com.
So Diana, I would just like to say something before we go on with what you have to say. I want to say something that came out this morning in an email that somebody sent to me. It was an article about people with MCS, multiple chemical sensitivities. It had a lot of photos of people living in dire straits who had this condition.
It was describing the illness in a way that I had never really noticed this before, what I’m about to say. It describes the illness in a way like even the name, when I first heard about those and went through this myself, it was called ‘environmental illness’. It’s an illness about the environment. Now, it’s called ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’ or MCS.
That states that the person who is being affected, that they are somehow sensitive to these chemicals. They’re just sensitive to chemicals, “there must be something wrong with them.”
But in fact, what’s happening is that people who are suffering from this are being poisoned and it’s not being acknowledged as a poisoning because even the name is – well, here’s this group of people who are extraordinarily sensitive to otherwise not dangerous things. That’s the way it’s presented. That’s even the way it’s presented by people with MCS who write these articles.
I would like people to understand that multiple chemical sensitivity, it’s difficult to get this accepted as an illness because people keep looking at the people who are being affected and saying, “Well, this doesn’t make sense as an illness.” Well, it makes sense as a poisoning.
And it’s not just MCS. MCS is just a little, tiny corner of this great, big picture of all these illnesses that are now associated with toxic chemicals – cancer, diabetes, infertility, heart problems.
I say this a lot, but I’m going to say it again because it needs to be said over and over and over. When I was researching my most recent book, Toxic-Free, I went and looked at the literature again and I had as my hypotheses that toxic chemicals were affecting every single part of your body. They could be at the root of every single illness, any symptom and I found the science to back that up, that now, you can go online, you could look up any illness that you may be having, even down to things that we can’t even perceive like changes in our DNA. Toxic chemicals in consumer products we are using every day are affecting every single one of those things. And yet people don’t look at it as a poisoning.
There! [inaudible 00:17:23]
Diana Kaye: We’ve been doing the exact same research for the past 27 years. I reached the same conclusion and I too have the data to back it up.
My concern – and I’ll add another illness in there or category of illnesses, neurological disorders.
DEBRA: Absolutely!
Diana Kaye: It’s really troubling to me because neurological disorders aren’t just the really obvious things like Parkinson’s Disease (which has been attributed to pesticides use), also things like migraine, developmental disorders including autism, progressiveness, violent behavior, apathy, lethargy.
And then you did mention metabolic disorders like diabetes, but let’s take it a step further, neurological disorders that involve the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s ability to feel hunger or to feel satisfied. The list goes on and on and on.
We’ve always had these concerns because in toxicology, the previous models for exposure used to be – and this is, again, when I started 25 years ago or so, ingestion was your number source of toxic exposure. But in the past 10 years, that’s been rearranged. It used to be ingestion, inhalation, skin absorption. And now, it’s inhalation, skin absorption in second and ingestion third.
DEBRA: Exactly!
Diana Kaye: So I’m concerned because in our business over the years with having the catalog, the website and two retail shops, we meet a lot of people. I’ve spoken first hand face-to-face to people who think, “Oh, I buy organic food sometimes, so I’m okay.” And then I ask them, “Well, do you drink the water?”
I’m concerned about our water ways. I think that probably that’s our mission here at Terressentials, to raise awareness about the chemicals that people buy that are manufactured in industrial, chemical factories that pollute our water.
And then (this is something people have a hard time getting their heads around) is the fact that we’re part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed here in Maryland. There are about 14 million people based on the previous census that live in the watershed area. The bay has been so unclean, so unhealthy for so many years that Congress actually mandated a federal clean-up policy, which Maryland, Virginia and all the watershed states failed.
It worries me now that it seems like the public’s exposure here to what the root causes are of the problems in the bay are always being tacked back to a couple of farmers. Now, granted, there is run-off, but that’s really not the biggest problem.
I’m going to go back years back to a very excellent researcher at the EPA, a scientist called Christian Daughton who, again, more than 25 years ago began researching what is in our waterways. He published several reports, written articles, scientific articles about his concerns.
One of the most outstanding quotes (and I’m going to do this to the best of my recollection here) that he stated in one of his articles was his concern that neurological change were occurring in the population, but they were going to occur so slowly over time that these neurological changes would be accepted as “normal”.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about that some more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye. And coming up, hopefully, her husband, James Hahn will be joining us. They have a business called Terressentials, which has USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products, Terressentials.com. We will be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye and maybe her husband might be joining us. She’s from Terressentials and they make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products.
Diana, say now again what you said right before the break.
Diana Kaye: In terms of our concern about the pharmaceuticals and the personal care product ingredients in the water and the EPA scientist?
DEBRA: Yeah, what he said. Quote him again.
Diana Kaye: Yeah, I actually pulled up his article, which is highly readable. There’s an abstract. People can find it online. The title of this special report – okay, it was published December 1999. This is how long this issue has been known and this was the report. The research had been going on for years prior to this. The title is ‘Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change’. The first author listed is Christian Daughton who I’ve spoken to in the past and he had a co-author, Thomas A. Ternes.
Again, this is a long article and I don’t have the quote in front of me, but generally, what he’s saying here is that there’s so many chemicals in our waterways and many of them cause neurological problems and that we are already seeing these changes in humans. His concern was that – and again, I’m going to paraphrase what he said as a quote in the report. His concern was that these neurological changes had been happening in humans slowly over time. They’ve been happening so slowly (which is why he calls them ‘agents of subtle change’) that the population, society is considering these or beginning to accept neurological changes as normal.
That worries me. We’ve been seeing a rise in – and I don’t believe it’s just in better detection of autism, spectral disorders. It’s frightening to me that I keep reading about these aggressive incidents. I’m sure that some of that has to do with the Internet and more widespread reporting, but it just seems like more and more of this is happening in children.
And again, a neurological change is apathy, lethargy.
DEBRA: Yes, it does.
Diana Kaye: And you mentioned earlier your concern about people labeling MCS, ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’, thereby trying to say that, “Oh, it’s a victim. This is just a person that’s extremely sensitive,” but I agree with you, this is a concern that we have about chemicals poisoning people.
This is why because, again, going back to toxicology issues and forces of chemical exposure, we think that it’s going to be merely impossible to regulate – and what I mean by ‘regulate’ is to filter the air that you breathe every single day unless you live in a bubble.
But the EPA has said in years passed that you can control what you bring into your home, which is a source of chemical emissions, whether it be furniture, a personal care product, a household product, these – and I think, Debra, you and I are both aware of this and maybe the public isn’t so much – volatile organic compounds. We don’t mean ‘organic’ in the good sense of the word.
DEBRA: No, no.
Diana Kaye: We’re talking about organic chemistry here. This is a worry that I have with people who do, again – and you mentioned writers who say they’re chemical sensitive, it seems like their whole focus is on fragrance rather than all the other many chemicals, some of which can cause bigger problems, long-term problems because of their build up in the body. With fragrance, a lot of times, it does cause problems and I totally agree and those are often immediate reaction.
We’re concerned about the long-terms effects. I’m not talking maybe even 20 years, maybe just a year or so of absorbing these chemicals into your body every day.
DEBRA: And having them build up.
Diana Kaye: …right, right! And causing all these interference with all of the systems in your body and a breakdown, so disease occurs or shall we say poisoning. I think one of the big issues – I like to paint a picture for the public to try to understand this.
For example, you buy a bottle of body lotion. Ooh, a nice, big bottle. You got it from your friendly health food store or wherever. It’s labeled ‘natural’ or it might even be labeled ‘organic’ (and that’s a whole other topic), but this product has a host of ingredients that the normal person could not pronounce.
And yet a lot of people accept that and I wonder if that’s part of the neurological agent of subtle change, apathy or lethargy, not investigating what you’re actually putting into your body.
But here’s the picture. You have this bottle of body lotion, a big bottle. You got the 12 oz. size or 16 oz. because it was at a really great reduced price. You put that body lotion on and wow! It absorbs quickly. You like that.
And yet when the bottle of body lotion is empty, where did all of the lotion go?
DEBRA: In your body!
Diana Kaye: Hello? Yeah! People just never make this connection. And then we try to draw the next picture, which is you’re buying a bottle that says it’s all natural and it’s foamy or bubbly and it’s got three or four different detergents and foam boosters in it. But it’s all natural.
You take it home and you use it in your shower and you bubble and scrub and foam up and rinse… and rinse and rinse. Where does it all go? It ends up in our waterway.
DEBRA: Yes.
Diana Kaye: People don’t understand water treatment facilities. They’ve never researched them, so they don’t understand that water treatment really is a series of screens – seriously, fill screens, metal screens that filter sediments (i.e. sewage sludge, a.k.a. sewage sludge). And then what passes through is the water with all the chemicals that you used in your house and your garage. Anything that goes down the drain in your house ends up in the water.
And then what water treatment do in the vast majority of communities in this country is adding chemicals to the water. You precipitate out or cause flocculation of some chemicals and then also adding in chloramines as a disinfectant to kill the bacteria from the messy, poopy stuff that’s in the water. And that’s the recycled water that everyone gets.
It’s also sometimes drawn from community rivers. I know in our community, some of our water is drawn from the Potomac River (not mine, we’re on a well up here). But we’re concerned about that and that is why we’re trying to explain to people that there is a big difference between natural and organic.
And in addition, just one more thing to add, many of these chemicals, petrochemicals, that is, that have toxic issues are what’s called lipophilic; lipo- meaning ‘fat’, -philic is attractive. So in other words, these are chemicals that are actually attracted to fat molecules. So once they penetrate your skin, many of the migrate to the fat because of their affinity for fat and they’re stored there.
DEBRA: And we need to go to break again.
Diana Kaye: Uh-oh.
DEBRA: It goes by really fast, huh?
Diana Kaye: It does.
DEBRA: My guest today is Diana Kaye. She’s from Terressentials and they make USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back and talk about this subject more.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Diana Kaye from Terressentials. And Diana, before we go on, I just want to point out, we just had a commercial about a water filter that will remove pharmaceuticals and all those toxic chemicals that we’ve been talking about in your waterways. The reason that I really make a big deal about this water filters is because of all the things that you are saying that get into our water and those toxic chemicals that are not removed.
I just want to say this again about this whole cycle of consumers using the toxic chemicals in their homes, they go down the drain, they go down in their waterways, they do not get removed by the water treatment company. And all those toxic chemicals that we’re using and polluting the indoor air come back to us in our tap water.
So everybody, I just think a water filter is needed in every home, absolutely every home.
And earlier, you were talking about how the EPA says that we do have control over what we bring into our homes. Well, we do. But as soon as we walk out our doors, we’re still being exposed to all those toxic chemicals.
So we’re living in a world that’s dangerous right now. It’s dangerous to our health. We can see that in the statistics of increased – even in my lifetime, the incidence of disease has increased and the ages of children are getting lower and lower. They’re getting diseases now and conditions that only adults used to get and the numbers are higher. And that’s just happened in my lifetime.
So yes, we need to do everything that we can do to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals we use in our home and that make a significant difference. We can great improve our health by doing that and also, by removing toxic residues from our bodies. But when we go out the door, we still are being exposed to toxic chemicals from car exhaust and other people’s buildings and public buildings, in restaurants.
In all these places out in the world, they’re still there. We need to be keeping that in mind and looking at how are we going to create together a world where you don’t have to be concerned about toxic chemicals because they’re just not there.
Diana Kaye: That’s a lovely dream to hold onto.
DEBRA: It’s my goal. It’s my goal.
Diana Kaye: I know! Mine too.
DEBRA: Yeah, recognizing that that’s not where we are now, but recognizing that if we all work together, it’s something that could be achieved.
Diana Kaye: Absolutely! That’s why we spend – and I’m sure, Debra, you do the same thing with so much education. We’ve invested so much researching, writing articles, doing community talks, talking to people even one-on-one, doing whatever we can to raise awareness about – this is my feeling about this. I think we need to get people to understand where things come from, that they don’t just magically appear on a shelf, that there’s a process that’s involved. And unfortunately, with food and body care products (especially body care products), the processing itself can result in so many harmful chemicals that hurt our air and our water.
I have great concern. I’m an animal lover. Forget the animal testing in the labs. That’s being covered, but I have always been concerned about the wildlife that has to swim in the water, live in the water, drink the water that we have so polluted. So we’ve been trying to just get people to hello? First of all, read your label. Read your label.
‘Natural’ isn’t good enough. If you’re talking about a product, for instance, a little baby butt balm and it says all natural, but it’s not organic, it consist oils, fat and maybe beeswax, none of which are organic, this is the product where the toxic chemicals that were sprayed on those plants, which are lipophilic (they’re attracted to the fat), they’re going to concentrate in those oil.
If the beeswax is not organic and it comes from conventional agriculture area where chemicals are sprayed, again, because it’s a fatty substance, these chemicals are going to concentrate in that natural beeswax.
So the next step is organic and legitimate organic. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of enforcement in that area. There are a lot of products that are labeled ‘natural’, which really is meaningless unfortunately. Even ‘organic’ now that are not certified, that contains a host of different chemicals and non-organic ingredients.
That’s the first step that people can do to protect themselves because again, referring back to the toxicological models of chemical exposure, we have to be concerned about inhalation, number one, breathing and number two, skin absorption.
If you think about it, people bathe. They take a shower. Some people, twice a day, those people who work out. You wash your hands hopefully eight to ten times a day. And the curious thing is when our skin is wet, it becomes five times more absorptive than when it’s dry.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that. Oh, I’m so glad that you said that because most people, this makes a huge difference because even all the things that get put in beauty kind of soaps, all the colorants and the fragrances and all those additives and everything and then you wash your hands or you put it on the shower, you’re just putting all those chemicals in your body and your skin is all opened and absorbing those more than even if you were not taking a shower. Wow! Wow, wow, wow.
So Diana, I hope you’ll come back again because there’s so much that we can talk about, but we only have about five minutes left of this show and I want to make sure that we talk about your products. So tell us about Terressentals and what you’re doing that is so different from what we’ve been talking about.
Diana Kaye: Sure! I’d be happy to. First, I’d like to say that with my experience and researching, I don’t feel comfortable with processed ingredients. I’ve been through the ringer. Having had cancer at a very young age, having developed [inaudible 00:45:36] ‘sensitivities’ or shall we say awareness of my reactions to the chemical poisoning. I feel comfortable about saying…
DEBRA: I like that, ‘my awareness of my reaction to the chemical poisoning’. Thank you.
Diana Kaye: Well, it’s what it is, right?
DEBRA: It is what it is, it is.
Diana Kaye: I try to get through to people about that. Just understand that once you inhale that chemical and you realize that your olfactory nerve endings are being burned, that’s what’s causing you the pain in your head through the top of your nasal cavity, this is a physical pain that we’re being exposed to.
And so I’m trying to get people like you are to understand that this is a poisoning. So for me, when I bathe, when I moisturize my skin, which is rapidly changing as I age, I want to make sure that what I’m rubbing into my body, I would feel comfortable eating.
And I’ve actually done that. I have proven my point on several occasions. I’ve actually eaten our products. I’ve had a little [inaudible 00:46:49] of lotion, which I have drunk. I ate some of our body creams in Washington D.C. at the National Organic Standards Board’s meeting, on television for ABC because the point is if you’re rubbing it onto your skin, you are ingesting it.
DEBRA: You are.
Diana Kaye: Not everything is through your mouth. So we’ve created over the years – I love to call them ‘gourmet’ because they smell delicious. We have body oils and creams where every single ingredient is organic. Many of them are the same ingredients that are used in food products, organic orange oil, lemon oil, peppermint oil, organic vanilla oil, coconut oil, coconut butter, sunflower oil, things that are really wholesome and healthy and were grown organically with certification.
We go through a certification process. We have to document everything that goes into your product, we have to document what we buy against what we say that we sell. So we have to account for every drop of organic material. We do have an inspection. It is a lot of work, a tremendous amount of effort and time and expense to document this year around.
And I’m happy to do it. It is a big headache, but this is what separates us. This is how I can tell people, “This is what we’re doing versus what everybody else says that they’re doing.” We’re authentic. It’s my life. I live, I breathe organically. I try to teach people about edible landscaping to bring it all home, to get people to understand where things come from.
And in our case, we’re a small artisan producer. I often like to give people the idea that we’re almost like a gourmet bakery. We make things in small batches fresh and we ship things directly to our customers and to a handful of stores so that they know when they’re getting a product.
And when you open one of our products, you can smell the difference. It’s in your face. I mean, these are fresh, real ingredients. There’s nothing weird or synthetic about them. They smell delightful, delicious and lovely. They feel good.
And do they work? Yes! Our clay hair washes are so amazing. It’s this gift from Mother Earth that absorbs dirt and oil from your hair. It doesn’t strip it and it binds this excess oil and dirt into itself and then carries it down the drain. And when it goes into the water, it’s dirt. It’s amazing that this is something that just comes right out of our planet that doesn’t require processing other than just grinding the rocks of the clay into a powder to make it easy to use.
DEBRA: Okay, I need to stop you right there because in about ten seconds, the music is going to come on and we’re going to be at the end of the show. So, I need to just thank you so much and say where people can go to your website, Terressentials.com. We’ll continue this conversation on another show. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well!
Lead and Chromium in Crock Pots
Question from Claire
Hi Debra! I love your site and find the information to be extremely helpful!
I had a question about chromium in crock pots.
I recently tested five crock pots with an XRF device to check for lead.
Though the lead levels were okay (they all ranged from 14 ppm to 257 ppm) they all had varying amounts of chromium (2637 ppm, 6813 ppm, 3567 ppm, 2554 ppm, and 4223 ppm).
The XRF device does not tell you what type of chromium it is, so I don’t know if it is trivalent or hexavalent. The levels were pretty high. Do you think this would be okay?
I know you have posted about chromium electroplated into another metal before, but was curious what your thoughts were since this would be chromium on stoneware. Thanks so much!
Debra’s Answer
First, there is no safe level for lead, so I don’t consider these levels to be “OK.” Since cookware is available that doesn’t leach lead, I prefer to use the lead-free cookware.
Now about the chromium. Chrome is used by potters in the forms of green chromium oxide, iron chromite, and potassium dichromate. These are used in slips and glazes as colorants.
EWGs Skin Deep Cosmetics Database has this to say about Chromium Oxide
“Chromium oxide is a mineral pigment, Cr2O3, used as a colorant in a variety of products. This ingredient contains trivalent chromium, a form of chromium that functions as an essential trace element in human metabolism.”
Iron chromite and potassium dicromate are also naturally occuring.
So I would say that any chromium found in pottery would likely be trivalent.
There is some data that would tell us how much trivalent chromium would be safe or harmful. There is no “safe upper limit” established for chromium as a dietary supplement. Apparently chromium ingested is very poorly absorbed. So while those numbers may sound huge, it’s not very toxic and little may be absorbed European Food Safety Authority.
How many milligrams of chromium are in those crockpots? Well, 6813 ppm is 6.813 mg/g. 1 gram is 1000 milligrams. Even at 6813 ppm, for each gram of material only 6/1000ths would be chromium. And 250 mg of chromium is considered OK.
I think the chromium is fine, but somebody correct me if this math doesn’t look right.
My conclusion is: I’m not concerned about the chromium, but am concerned about the lead.
Outgassing Camping Foam
Question from Sandy
Hi Debra, I know the camping foam you buy in sports stores is probably petro and not the healthiest. I am wondering if it is baked out in the sun for a month or so if it would eventually become safe. Thks
Debra’s Answer
Well, it would improve, however, it is made from some pretty toxic chemicals PLUS fire retardants, so I can’t guarantee it would outgas. You could wrap the whole thing in Reflectix and seal the seams with foil tape. That would make it nontoxic.
Your Baby’s Toxic Womb
My guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer, a multi award winning documentary filmmaker, writer and children’s environmental health advocate. She’s working on a film called Toxic Baby. Today we’ll be talking about what Penelope has learn about how toxic chemicals can affect your baby even before it’s born. Penelope is the first black, female director to be nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. Born in London, of Trinidadian parentage, she started her career at the BBC, before moving to Channel 4. She has won many awards for films created for the BBC and Channel 4. In addition to being the director, producer and writer of Toxic Baby, Penelope has been named one of the top 100 Green Online Influencers and has been awarded the “Mom On A Mission” award by Healthy Child, Healthy World, the non profit named by Vanity Fair magazine as one of Mrs. Michelle Obama’s two favorite charity organizations. Penelope’s TED talk with Professor Tyrone Hayes on the effects of toxic chemicals on babies and children has been viewed over 300,000 times. She is also an author for Toxipedia, writes her own blog and for publications around the world. A mother of two, Penelope lives in Brooklyn, New York City. www.toxicbaby.com | www.ted.com/talks/tyrone_hayes_penelope_jagessar_chaffer_the_toxic_baby
You may also be interested in listening to Why Women (and Men!) of Childbearing Age Need to Detox their Bodies Before having Babies
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Your Baby’s Toxic Womb
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Penelope Jagessar Chaffer
Date of Broadcast: June 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 Monday, June 9, 2014.
We’re having a different kind of show today because usually, what I like to do is talk about all the positive things that we can do to live toxic free, but we also need to balance that with finding out what’s going on in our toxic world, and to find out really how serious the problem is. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
My guest is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer, and she’s a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and children’s environmental health advocate. She’s working on a film called Toxic Baby. It’s not done yet, but she’s given a really excellent TED Talk. She has a website. She has trailers for the film. She knows a lot. She’s been named Mom on a Mission by Healthy Child, Healthy World, for her work on the Toxic Baby film.
She writes all over the world. Her TED Talk has been viewed more than 300,000 times. She writes for Toxipedia. We’ve had Dr. Steven Gilbert, who runs Toxipedia. He’s on monthly to tell us about toxic chemicals. She writes for Toxipedia. She knows a lot about what’s going on in terms of how children, babies and even babies in the womb are being affected by toxic chemicals. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Hi, Penelope. Thanks so much for being here.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Hi, Debra. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us, how did you become interested in this subject?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Well, like a lot of women, it really hit home when I thought of considering whether I wanted to have children. And as the time started ticking, I started thinking about it more and more. And once I got pregnant, I felt really compelled to have a sense of what was happening in my body, but also what was happening in the world that would affect my child.
I think that’s an instinct that we all really, really feel when we’re at that stage of our lives.
I was a really committed environmentalist up until that point, so finding out how toxic chemicals, they’re so prevalent, they’re so many of them, and how they really do affect children and their health, I was just stunned by the fact that I didn’t know about it at all.
DEBRA: And most women don’t. You have on your trailer a very dramatic trailer for your film, Toxic Baby. People can go to your website, ToxicBaby.com, and see this. You have a picture of the fetus in the womb, talking about the toxic chemicals that it’s being exposed to, listing Bisphenol A.
And when I watched that it was so dramatic for me because even though I’ve known, I study this, I write about this, I’ve been writing about this for 30 years, and even though I knew those facts that all fetuses are being exposed to these chemicals unless their mothers have, prior to conception, done something to detox these chemicals out of their bodies.
So if you haven’t done that and you’re pregnant or you’re about to become pregnant, your baby is going to be exposed in the womb to these chemicals and many more than what is listed there.
But it was just so dramatic to see the baby speaking, the fetus speaking, and saying, “This is what I’m being exposed to” because it’s absolutely true. And yet, most people don’t know this.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: You’ve really hit home something there by picking up on that piece of footage. I personally think the situation is as bad as it is because so much of the toxicity of chemicals is unseen. We can’t really see the effects of Bisphenol A that mimic an estrogen in the body.
Every time your baby was exposed to this or you were, you had a boil on your face, your hair fell out or something like that, that’s a lot more fish oil, that’s a lot more […] And I think that we would have a lot more movements on this.
But it is really an unseen epidemic, and the consequences are not necessarily known. We don’t even know for sure exactly what’s going on, but they won’t be seen for potentially long time afterward.
And so part of the challenge in being a filmmaker with an issue like this is trying to reproduce in a way that people can see and understand. I just kept thinking if my unborn baby could speak to me, what would it say to me? And that was the image that I had in mind.
We were really fortunate in that those images, most of them, were very famous fetal images that made the cover of Life Magazine way back in the 1960’s, the original iconic fetal images. And what we’ve done through the magic of Hollywood and computer generation at 21st Century, we manipulated those images to make them speak. They’re actually real fetuses saying those words. And that’s my son’s voice that you’re hearing.
And he’s not allowed anyone to ever do that. This is the first time that that has been done. But for me, it was really important to not show lots of scientists talking, and it’s all black, and it’s very gloomy. I really tried to be cinematic in my approach because I think that if people can see the issue, if they can really visualize the problem, then they can connect with it in a much more profound way.
What you just said really backed that up. So I’m thankful that you felt that too.
DEBRA: I did. I did feel it because it was very real. I actually don’t have children myself. In my particular case, I don’t talk about this often, but I think I’ve had a lot of endocrine damage. And so I wasn’t able to conceive children. Instead of taking dire measures and doing all kinds of fertility things, I just decided that if this was the way it is, this is the way it is.
And I put my time into doing my writing and other things. And I think that my work, in fact, has helped a lot of children, and helped them to have healthier lives.
Another thing that touched me in your TED Talk, you were talking about, I don’t remember the exact words that you used but it was something about the fetus being in a captive environment. Do you remember exactly what you said?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Yes, I said the fetus is trapped in a contaminated environment.
DEBRA: That’s exactly what you said. I remember those words now. Yes, and that was so dramatic. It’s like I can read and write things that are facts and data about toxicity, but what you’re really doing is using your artistic skills to make these things real. And to think about the fact that I might be carrying a child or somebody is carrying a child, they’re soon-to-be-born baby, and that baby is trapped in a toxic environment, in a contaminated environment where there are all these toxic chemicals.
And it’s like, “What if I was trapped in a room that was contaminated and I couldn’t get out?” And that I had to breathe these toxic chemicals. In every glass of water would have toxic chemicals in it, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
I can’t even imagine what that would be like, but yet, that actually is what’s going on in pregnancy today.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Absolutely. There are two points there, and I would like to address them both if I can.
And those points, I think it’s amazing to hear you share that. But I have to say that your experience is not uncommon. It’s incredibly common.
I had two miscarriages myself. I have two children, but I’ve had four pregnancies and two miscarriages. It is an epidemic that no one talks about, the struggles that women have to conceive. I’m really grateful that you had the strength and the conviction of your character. I guess you’re at peace in where you are in the world to be able to say, “Okay, well, this is it. I’m not going to go down this route,” because the root for insecurity is a lot of hormonal intervention.
It’s about pumping your body full of hormones to make you more fertile. Once you do happen to conceive, to keep the fertilized egg and prevent it from miscarrying […]
DEBRA: And I just couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t put all of that in my body. We need to take a break, but we’re going to talk more about this when we come back.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer. She’s working on doing a film called Toxic Baby. She’s also an environmental health advocate for children. She knows a lot about what’s going on with toxic exposures to children, to babies, and to fetuses.
We’re going to continue to talk about that after we come back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer. She’s an award-winning documentary filmmaker. She’s working on a film called Toxic Baby. You can go to her website called ToxicBaby.com, and see the trailers for the film. And you can also see her TED Talk about toxic chemicals that babies are exposed to in the womb.
So go ahead with what we were talking about before the break.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Well, I was just saying that the whole process of conception and carrying the baby is it’s all regulated by hormone. And in fact, every aspect of our life as human beings is regulated by hormones. We understand estrogen and testosterone, but even the way that our heartbeats, how many beats that it produces a minute, that’s driven by hormonal activity.
And it’s really crucial when you’re talking about babies. So if you had gone down that route, you’d have been ingesting the hormones that are mimicking hormones that we already have, and putting in doses that we don’t really understand what the repercussions of that.
We’re now seeing women who have gone through fertility treatments with later cancers, cancers associated with the sexual organ, particularly uterine and ovarian cancers.So many of these cancers have […]
So I think that by not going down that route, potentially, you have steered yourself away from something that could have been in your future.
And going back to the idea of the fetus being locked into this environment, we used to think traditionally that pregnancy was the time of absolutely protection. You have a baby literally in your body, and nothing can get to that. And there’s an organ called the placenta that traditionally, the medical community thought was an absolute filter, and that anything that was bad, the placenta’s job was there to stop anything coming through.
Now, the thing is, the placenta is an ancient organ. And we’re inventing things that the placenta has never heard of it, it’s never had to deal with.
In my film, again, I try and put a […] placenta. What does the placenta do when faced with a certain pesticide that was invented during the 1940’s, during the Second World War, something like Bisphenol S, which is the replacement for Bisphenol A.
These are compounds that the placenta has never had to deal with. And everything that goes into the mother’s body will be present within the umbilical fluid and in her blood, and therefore, in the baby’s blood.
There’s a researcher who is in my film who I’ve talked to at great length, […] He’s Dutch. He’s been studying this for several decades now. They were measuring chemical contaminants in umbilical cord, the blood in the fluid, and in the babies when they were born. And they were finding almost the exact same level in the mother and in the baby.
So these babies are being polluted in the womb, and they are being polluted at the level that the mother is carrying. There’s no sense that the percent is going to diminish the amount of pollutants that the unborn baby faces.
And so if you just imagine that the fetus, the embryos and the fetuses can’t go anywhere, everything that they need has to be available within that environment. There’s no replenishing of the amniotic fluid, there’s no new air coming in. Everything is coming from the mother. And they are trapped because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
A significant number of these chemicals have the ability to disrupt our hormonal signaling. This is a problem for fetuses, embryos and babies in particular because, as I’ve said the act of conception, when a woman releases her eggs, the sperm and egg coming together whether that fusion happens, whether that conception happens, how the embryo develops, how it does not develop, how it becomes the fetus, the timing of the pregnancy, the timing of the delivery, when that baby comes, if it’s going to come early, if it’s going to come late, all of these things are determined by hormones.
They do have something that’s coming in that is telling the developing fetus that actually, this is going on. When it’s not going on, it’s actually not a real hormone that the baby is accessing. It’s actually a mimic. It’s actually something that’s coming in and pretending to be that thing. Then you’re going to have a problem because the hormones say, “Well, you should be developing your heart right now.”
And something comes in and says, “Well, maybe you wouldn’t necessarily do that. You would have another hormone doing that.”
Then that could have repercussions for that particular organ development. That’s something that is really new science, Debra. It’s the kind of science that has really turned so many things on its head, classical toxicology, obstetricians, and the way that they view pregnancy, or just biology in general.
It’s a huge cause for concern. And unfortunately, it’s not taught in medical schools. So a lot of the doctors have no idea about this.
DEBRA: Well, it’s not taught in medical school. It’s not just not taught to obstetricians. It’s not taught to any doctors. And so what we have now is a system where I would say from my study and from talking to leading edge doctors. I just had a doctor on last week, on Monday, where we were talking about how the number one health problem in the world today is exposure to toxic chemicals, and that you could have any treatment with any drug or a chiropractic adjustment or take herbs or whatever.
You can do all of those things. But if the problem is that you’re being poisoned, and you do nothing to remove the poisoning, then you’re still going to be sick. And yet, people are going to all kinds of practitioners of all kinds, traditional and alternative, and toxic chemical poisoning, everybody is experiencing every day is not being recognized as a contributor to health.
Even after I’ve been talking about this for 30 years, even after everybody that’s on this show has been talking about it that we still have the majority of health care not recognizing this problem.
And yet, you and I, and other researchers can come up with all this evidence that toxic chemicals are causing health problems, that they’re there in our consumer products, and yet, it’s still not widely enough known.
We need to go to break again. And when we come back, we’ll talk more.
My guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer. She’s the filmmaker for a film called Toxic Baby. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and Penelope and I will be back.
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DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer. She’s an multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, making a film called Toxic Baby. You can go find out more about that at ToxicBaby.com, and also hear her TED Talk there.
Penelope, in the trailer, you showed that you were getting blood taken to be tested for the presence of toxic chemicals in your body, what did you find out from that?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Well Debra, I thought that I was really toxic. Like many people who live with vaguely healthy lives […] you can’t be as toxic as they all make you out to be. And actually, it’s true. The things that they were finding in my blood were astonishing, flame retardants, chemicals, plasticizers, dioxins, PCB’s that were banned in the United States. That was very restricted to use in the United States. And that’s one of the chemical groups that’s heralded the Toxic Substances Control Act way back in 1976. It was still present in my bloodstream more than 30 years later.
So that was really astonishing, and it really signaled how long these chemicals can stay in the environment, and they can get into our body and stay there. That was really horrific.
But I had actually had some great news, which was also surprising. And that was that I didn’t have some chemicals which would be widely expected that we found within the average person in the United States. I didn’t have any BPA. I think 93% of the earth’s population will have detectible levels of BPA. I didn’t have detectible levels of BPA. I didn’t have detectible levels of organophosphate pesticide. I didn’t have detectible levels of triclosan.
And these are chemicals that one can avoid through the choices that you make in your day-to-day life.
And so I’ve become such a big advocate, increasingly more so. I had move advocacy work in getting people to clean up their lives and inspiring people to make those choices because I see that you can actually make those changes and not have those chemicals present.
I didn’t do that deliberately or specifically, but it was interesting to know that that was the case.
DEBRA: There have been some other studies which have shown things like BPA actually leaves your body fairly quickly, and that if people have it in their blood, it’s because they have had a recent exposure actually within 24 to 48 hours. If you don’t be exposed to BPA, you won’t have it in your body.
And so what you’re telling me is it seems like a confirmation to me that if you’re not exposed to triclosan and you’re not exposed to BPA, then you’re not going to have it in your body. It’s not going to be causing health effects.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: That’s absolutely true. The thing is, some of these chemicals are processed by the body really quickly. So something like BPA will go through the body within roughly about 24 hours. It’s the same thing for phthalates.
And so, once you remove that source, you can actually remove those chemicals from circulating in your body.
DEBRA: But there are other chemicals that stay in the environment and in your body for a very long time. And they’re not so easy to remove.
I’m just saying it over and over, I’m so glad that you told us about what the results were because it really does make a difference for people to not be exposed to these things in the first place. And I think that a lot of times, people say, “Well, there are chemicals all over the place. What difference does it make for me to not use this shampoo or whateve?”
And it does make a difference because all these toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to, whatever we can do to reduce them, reduces our risk of becoming sick from those toxic chemicals. And so it’s a really good thing.
What was the most surprising thing that you found in your research, the thing that surprised you the most?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Finding out how toxic I was, it was really surprising. That was a real shock because I also think that we think that if we’re living next to Chernobyl or nuclear power plant or something like that the expectation would be that we would be really toxic. And that if you’re living an average life, you probably won’t be that toxic.
So that was really surprising. And the amount of things that one can do, the study of science, the scientific study of epigenetics, which is a new science, was probably one of most surprising things for me.
DEBRA: Tell us about that because I think most people don’t know what that is.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: For a long time, the question was, “Is it genetics or is the environment?” And the nature versus nurture, sort of, argument. People thought that they weren’t really, really separate things.
What the science of epigenetics tells us is that there are factors within the environment that have the ability to switch on and off, but in […] switch on genes that continue to be switched on as those genes continue to be passed on.
And so in laboratory animal studies, you expose a mother to a certain chemical, and you follow the pup. And what you find is that the genes have been switched on because of exposure to that chemical. The pup then has that gene that is switched on, you see the manifestation of whatever that might be. And then you see it in their pups, three generations later, four generations later.
So what that is saying to us is that when these genes get switched on, unless they get switched off, they’re going to keep carrying that potential for that disease.
On the one hand, it’s a really horrific thing to think about because the decisions that we make are affecting generations to come, the generations that are not even a blink in the eyes. But the other side of that is actually great news, and that is that we now think so many diseases are mitigated by this expression, these gene expressions.
And so if we can find a way to take the chemical markers that are switching on the genes out of the environment, and therefore, switch the genes off, we have the ability to treat and remove diseases that we thought were unremovable in our day-to-day lives. And we’re thinking really specifically about cancers here.
So you can look at it as something that’s really negative and really horrific, but I choose to look at it as something really amazing, and really powerful. It really makes me want to do the work that I do, and raise awareness about it because the more awareness there is, the more money that there is, the study, these kinds of things because potentially, it’s really good news if we’re looking at the ways of preventing these diseases.
Then it means that we’re going to have healthier people, and we’re not subjecting our generations to come to things that we would not ourselves want to have to live with.
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DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Penelope Jagessar Chaffer.
We’re talking about the film she’s working on called Toxic Baby.
So wow, this is just so mind-boggling, all of this information, because again, as I said at the beginning, I know all of this as data, but when we actually talk about it in the context of real life of women actually having babies, which I have no experience with, I believe you. I believe it when I hear women say, “I got pregnant, and then suddenly, I started thinking about what was going to happen to my baby and how to create a safe world.”
I think that that’s something that is common for mothers to feel that sense of protection. And then to be faced with, and then finding out about all of these toxic chemicals.
Finding out all of these things, how did that change your life as a mom? What did you do differently?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Well, first of all, I made a commitment to do everything that I could do. There are some things that we can’t do, and that’s why it’s really important to get a federal legislation that really protects people in a way that it’s not doing right now.
But there are many things, I found out, that I could be doing to give my children the best possible start. And a lot of that is now being backed up by scientific study, which is great. There’s a study that came out of California which showed that if you try to feed your children a 75% organic diet, then we could reduce their levels of organophosphate pesticide. It’s probably one of the more common pesticide, certainly one of the most toxic ones. You could remove that pretty much, undetectable in children’s urine and blood.
And so my children eat an organic diet as possible. Their diet is mostly whole foods, prepared at home, very little packaging, certainly no tin cans.
DEBRA: I agree with all of that.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: The thing is, Debra, that I appreciate that there is not that many people doing what I’m doing. I live in New York City, I live in Brooklyn, and from my family, people are really surprised. For a long time they really didn’t get it.
I’ve had people say, “That’s crazy. It’s a bit out there.”
But I have to say that my children are robust. They really are. Considering they’re navigating the New York City metro, subway, network. They’re sharing the same germs as millions and millions of other people. And I think a lot of people who know, after a while, they were like, “Wow, the kids don’t really get sick.”
I don’t want to hold my children up as some kind of example. But what I see that’s really important is to people understand that you do actually see the benefits of trying to clean up. And not just trying to clean it up, but keeping it clean.
I don’t bring scented products into my home unless they’re naturally scented like perhaps a soy-based aromatherapy, natural oil-based product. That might find its way home. I read labels avidly. Everything that’s coming in, I’m going to read, I’m going to question it before I bring it into the home. I don’t want to bring it in and then wonder about it.
It made me really vigilant. And to a certain extent, it probably feels like hard work, but the amazing thing is, like anything that can become habitual, once you do it for certain amount of time, you stop thinking about it. I pick up something, I read it.
Well, I know what most things now, but I’m like, “I don’t like the look of that. I’m going to bring that in.”
DEBRA: I find that too. The way I live now may seem odd to people, but it’s second nature to me now. And it was odd to me when I started so many years ago, when I started being aware of toxic chemicals in consumer products.
I had to figure out which products to use, and which products not to use, because there was no website like mine to go to. There were no books like mine to read. I had to figure it all out. But once I figured it out, it’s not that difficult to keep buying the same non-toxic product over and over again.
I’ve learned how to clean my house with baking soda and vinegar. I don’t have to learn that again. I’m always looking at new things, and I’m always learning new things. Right now, I’m learning more about different whole foods that I can prepare in different ways to prepare them because I’m totally committed to preparing all my food, and not buying anything from take-out, or not going to restaurants because you just don’t know what’s in them.
One of my favorite shows to watch, I hate to say this, but I love watching Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri on the Food Channel because it shows me what I’m going to eat if I go to a restaurant. And it’s horrible if there’s sugar in everything. There’s wheat in places that you think that you’re not going to find it. None of it is organic unless you go to an organic restaurant.
It’s really an eye-opener to watch that show.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: Yes, I completely hear you. When you think about food, our health, the foundation of our health is really based on what we put into our bodies. And really, food is primary to that because, of course, that’s how our bodies run.
For me, I know that leafy, green vegetables, particularly spinach, but I think the science is showing perhaps that it’s the same compound also do the trick. What matters is that they protect against BPA exposure.
There was a great study that came up in Duke University that showed that in rats, if you expose rats to dark, green, leafy vegetables like spinach, the effects of BPA were mitigated.
And so from my perspective, I’m like, “Okay, great. How can I get those leafy, dark green vegetables into my diet?”
DEBRA: That’s exactly it. That there are so many things that we can avoid, but there’s a lot of things we can’t avoid. BPA is one of those things you could say, “I’m not going to eat anymore canned food.” But it’s really hard to go shopping and not get BPA exposure from the cash register receipt.
Then you have to look at the other side and say, “Well, what can I do to support my body if some BPA comes in that I can’t avoid that it will process it, it will protect me?”
And I think that it’s really, really important that women who are thinking about conceiving be doing things to start removing toxic chemicals from their body. And I have a lot of information on my website about detox as well as information about products that don’t have toxic chemicals in it.
So it’s all available. It’s just a matter of people making those decisions. And if women start out by lessening their toxic exposure and removing toxic chemicals that are already in their bodies, and getting really good nutrition, we’re going to have such healthy babies. It will be amazing.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: I couldn’t agree with you more. Before I had my first child, I did a detox. I didn’t even really understand the full ramifications of that until later on. But I was already starting on that journey, and I thought, “Well, it sounds like a good thing.” And I’m so glad that I did it.
And I think when we see the rising levels of disease for children, it’s really heartbreaking, and it’s really astonishing. If you have a child with asthma, you suddenly take out those cleaning products or those scented products or whatever, and you see those symptoms really lessen, then you can see that that linked really clearly.
I want to say something really quickly also about preparing for pregnancy. I was speaking actually on a Skype call this morning to someone in Europe about this. The Dutch have the best toxicity measures that I have seen, at least having spoken to many researchers in North America and in Europe because they had a couple of really bad accidents and incidences.
And now, in Holland, over 75% of pregnancies are planned in Holland. Officially, the obstetricians and the gynecologists are saying, “You should consider not wearing make-up. You should consider taking out perfumes.”
They’re actually advising patients to do that. And I think that is so wonderful.
DEBRA: It is.
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: They are really encouraging people to not only get the information, but use it in their own lives. And I think we all need to do that. I’ve been preparing my daughter for any pregnancies that she might have. And people are always really freaked out by that. She was really uncomfortable. But I said, “No.”
I’m preparing her for any pregnancies that she might have in 20 years’ time, 30 years’ time from now. And I think that’s what we need too.
DEBRA: Well, we do because in order for our species to continue, that’s what we’re designed to do, it’s to have healthy children and move our species forward, and continue life on earth. And I just think that toxic chemicals are the enemy of so many things. They’re the enemy of that. But they’re the enemy of our health and happiness, not being able to have strong bodies to do the things that we want, or not being able to think clearly, or being spiritually aware.
It cuts across everything that we just need to do the things that we’re doing, you and I, and so many others who are aware of this, and moving this all forward. We just need to continue to do it because it’s so important. It’s just an underlying thing.
Well, we have only less than a minute left. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show. Is there anything else that you’d like to say just for a couple of seconds?
PENELOPE JAGESSAR CHAFFER: I just want people to really understand that there is so much that they can do. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and frightened and scared, but there’s a lot that you can do. Be empowered, get the knowledge, and make the changes, and you’ll see that difference in your life.
DEBRA: I agree. Thank you so much. My guest has been Penelope Jagessar Chaffer. Her website is ToxicBaby.com. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and find out more about the upcoming guests. You can listen to this show again. You can tell your friends to listen.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Contaminated Clothes
Question from Bonnie Johnson
Two years ago I had a contracter seal some areas in my spare room closet for ants.
Although I gave him some caulk to use he managed to run out and replaced it with another.
I am really sensitive to glu and caulk, I could not go in the closet for a year and even now it bothers me.
During the first year I had a lot of clothes I love stored in the closet. Last year I took them out and washed them all twice but due to cancer treatments never wore them. This year I decided to try them and have been very reactive to them. I have washed these clothes about 4 times now. I can not imagine that the seal is still in the fabric but maybe that is the case.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to get the caulk toxin out of my clothes? Or at this point are they a total loss?
Debra’s Answer
I agree with you. I cannot imagine that there is still any contaminant left in the clothing.
Readers, any ideas on this?