Water | Swimming Pools
Kitchen Cabinets Certified for Low Formaldehyde Emissions
Question from Toby Zallman
Some cabinet Manufacturers (over 100) are ESP certified, which means they adhere to the California standards for plywood emissions of formaldehyde. Does anyone know how good these standards are? We are finding that solid wood cabinets are super expensive and out of our price range. There are many good companies that are certified, but I was uncertain how good this standard is.
Debra’s Answer
The ESP certification on kitchen cabinets comes from the [Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association (KCMA).
The simple way to answer this question is to say that all of the certified cabinets must meet the requirements of the California law for formaldehyde emissions from cabinets.
The standard is 0.05 – 0.13 ppm formaldehyde emissions. This is consistent with OSHA standards.
So many cabinet brands are listed because they can’t be sold in California unless they meet this standard. By law.
The question then becomes, is this a safe level? It depends on your body condition and how much time you are exposed, how much ventilation in your houe (will levels build up in the air or ventilate out?).
My personal rule of thumb is always get as close to zero as possible when it comes to toxic chemicals.
Using Sunshine to Disinfect
Question from J in Va
Hi Debra, I am interested in learning more about disinfecting with sunshine. I have a few questions: Does sunshine just disinfect clothing/fabrics or is it useful on other objects as well (i.e. plastic, books, etc). How long does something need to be in the sun? Does it need to be outside or is through a window also effective? Does sun disinfect against cold/flu/stomach viruses? Thanks for everything. Your website provides very useful info.
Debra’s Answer
Well, here is a reference I found on the subject.
SF Gate: Natural Alternatives to Bleach for Disinfecting
Perhaps the most surprising natural disinfectant is sunlight. Ultraviolet radiation of the sun kills pathogens that cause diarrhea. In fact, scientists have found that exposing a bottle of water to sunlight for 6 hours is an economical way to provide developing countries with safe drinking water (see References 2). The disinfecting properties of sunlight can also be useful around the house. If you have an object that you can move outside, the sun’s rays can help disinfect it. A stained piece of white laundry can be effectively brightened and disinfected by spraying the stain with lemon juice or vinegar and then hanging it in the sun (see References 1).
1. Idaho Department of Health and Welfare: Safe Alternatives to Hazardous Household Chemicals
2. “Environmental Science and Technology”; Solar Disinfection of Drinking Water in the Prevention of Dysentery in South African Children Aged Under 5 Years: The Role of Participant Motivation; Martella du Preez, et al.; October 2010
I think that answered all your questions.
How to Protect Your Body From Your Cell Phone
My guests today are Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang from Pong Research, I use Pong cases on my cell phone and ipad to block harmful radiation. We’ll be talking about the health effects of radiation from cell phone and how you can protect your body. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/pong-research.
Dr. McCaughey is the Chief Technology Officer for the company. He leads the technical team that designs and tests the Pong technology. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Manchester (UK) for his thesis on Laser Stimulation of Nerves. He also received a Masters in Physics with Technological Physics from the University of Manchester. Dr. McCaughey grew up in Northern Ireland, before moving to the United States in 2007 for a research position at the Beckman Laser Institute, University of California, Irvine, where he researched laser surgery of the bones in the ear. In 2009, Dr. McCaughey joined the International Foundation for Science, Health and the Environment (IFSHE) in Los Angeles, where he worked on development of a plasma centrifuge for isotope separation and the genesis of the technology that became the foundation for Pong Research Corporation.
Dr. Rong Wang joined Pong in 2011 as Chief Science Officer. She is responsible for the oversight and scientific integrity of all research, published content, and documentation related to the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation emitted from cellular and Wi-Fi devices (including cellular phones, tablets, laptops, routers, and Bluetooth accessories). Rong reports directly to the CEO as lead technical writer, editor, and media representative on all scientific issues related to mobile health, wellness, and environmental topics that pertain to Pong’s technology. As a co-inventor of Pong’s internationally patented technology, Rong also continues to participate in product research and development and helps identify and qualify new technologies and applications for the company.
Rong received her Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a joint degree from Harvard in Health Sciences and Technology. She is a specialist in radiation biology, and her doctoral dissertation focused upon human cellular responses to radiation. She also earned two bachelor’s degrees in Physics Engineering and Economics from Tsinghua University in China.
Prior to Pong, Rong is originally from the Sichuan Province of China.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Protect Your Body From Your Cellphone
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Ryan McCaughey & Dr. Rong Wang
Date of Broadcast: October 23, 2013
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 we talk about this because there are toxic chemicals all around us, in the water we drink, in the food we eat. In fact, you’re probably being exposed to toxic chemicals unless you’re doing something to be aware of where they are, and choosing toxic-free alternatives.
But in addition to chemicals causing harm, we also are concerned about electromagnetic fields, radiation and other things that are in consumer products that cause harm besides toxic chemicals.
And today, we’re going to be talking about cell phones—cell phone radiation, how it affects your health, and what you can do about it.
My guests are Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang from Pong Research. And what Pong Research does is that they make cases for cell phones and other wireless devices that block the cell phone radiation up to 95%.
So we’re going to be talking with them today about Pong, as a company, what their technology is about, and how it can protect you.
I have Pong cases on my iPhone and my iPad. And while you can’t really tell that it makes a difference, you can’t feel a difference, I have confidence in these products. And so I feel good that I’m protected.
I actually had an experience a few months ago. I was at a conference. I was walking through the parking lot, and this woman called out to me, and she says, “Are you Debra Lynn Dadd?”
And I said, “Yes.”
And she said, “Oh, I bought those Pong cases because you recommended them, and I feel so much better. I bought them for myself and my family. All my children now have Pong cases, and it’s so wonderful that I feel that they can be protected.”
And she was so happy that I had recommended them that she stopped me in a parking garage—a perfect stranger—to tell me this.
So, welcome to the show, Dr. McCaughey and Dr. Wang.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: It’s a pleasure!
DEBRA: I’m going to get this all right. Dr. Wang, right?
DR. RONG WANG: That’s right.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Well, why don’t you introduce yourselves? Dr. McCaughey—I’m going to write this down. I’m going to make sure that I get it phonetically.
Dr. McCaughey from Ireland, and Dr. Wang from China. So Dr. McCaughey, tell us something about yourself. Let’s start with you. You’re the Chief Technology Officer for Pong Research.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right. Pong Research is a mobile technology company dedicated to advancing the performance and safety of mobile devices. And as you mentioned, I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Pong Research.
I’m originally from Ireland. And I’m now based here in Virginia with Pong Research. I’ve been here in the United States for about five years. I have a background in Physics, a PhD in Physics, from the University of Manchester in England. That’s how
I’m able to provide expertise in this realm of electromagnetic interactions.
As you rightly introduced, cell phones and other wireless devices emit wireless radiation or electromagnetic fields. And the Pong cases are uniquely designed to interact with those fields, to re-distribute the energy in a much safer way, so to redirect it away from you.
In your introduction, you actually mentioned that the Pong cases block cell phone radiation. And really, an important distinction is that we don’t block radiation, we re-direct it.
DEBRA: I apologize.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Oh, no. It’s just something I want to tell you to clarify. As you’re probably aware, it’s essential for the communication ability of the device that the signal has to get in and out of the phone, so we don’t actually want to block it. And what makes Pong cases unique is that we direct it. So it’s not something directed towards your head when you’re on call, for example. It’s not sent out the back of the phone.
DEBRA: Good! Okay. We’ll talk a lot about that during the course of the show.
So, Dr. Wang, tell us about your background. You’re the Chief Science Officer for Pong.
DR. RONG WANG: Yes. Hi, this is Rong. And I’m currently the Chief Science Officer for Pong. And my background, I received my PhD from MIT’s Nuclear Engineering in the Science & Technology Department with a joint PhD degree in Health Science & Technology from Harvard.
So basically, I came to a lot of knowledge about radiation and how radiation interacts with human bodies—human cells, to be specific—from my PhD research.
And before I joined Pong, I worked in research team in Los Angeles. We did basic research to look for innovative solutions for a wide variety of problems facing us today.
And one of the technologies we developed in the laboratory is—I created the prototype of the current Pong technology, the re-directing technology for the wireless device.
Right now, I’m based in Kansas City. And it’s a great pleasure to be here with you, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m very happy to have both of you. You have just impeccable backgrounds, so I’m very interested. And I’m sure my listeners are interested to hear what you still have to say on this subject.
So, Dr. McCaughey, could you tell me something about the company? How did Pong get started? What was the motivation that led the founders of Pong to decide that they needed to start this company?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Sure! Really, in the mid to late 90’s, at that time, Dr. Henry Lai—he’s a researcher at the University of Washington—found that radiofrequency radiation, similar to that emitted from cell phones can cause damage to DNA in the brain cells of rats.
This was really at the time when cell phones were becoming more prevalent. It was really when people started—the general population, everyone, started getting a cell phone mid 90’s.
That was a very concerning research that came from the University of Washington, and we at Pong wanted to use our knowledge of radiofrequency antennas and electromagnetic interactions that we developed through research at UCLA and the company that Dr. Wang mentioned before. And we wanted to provide cell phone users a way to protect themselves.
It’s still a matter that’s under considerable research, exactly what the impacts of cell phone radiation are on health. But until such time as there is a conclusive evidence that they’re safe or otherwise, we want to be there to provide consumers just an option to protect themselves, a way to reduce the unnecessary exposure from a cell phone.
DEBRA: Thank you. We need to take a break, and we’re going to be back in just a minute. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, I’m talking with two scientists from Pong Research about cell phone radiation and what you can do to protect yourself, Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang.
And when we come back, Dr. Wang is going to tell us the health effects of radiation from cell phones and other devices.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about cell phone radiation and what you can do to protect yourself with two scientists from Pong Research, Dr. Ryan McCaughey and Dr. Rong Wang.
Now, before the break, Dr. McCaughey said that in terms of health effects, that there is not complete agreement about what those health effects are yet. But there’s something called the precautionary principle which I apply all the time and have been applying for 30 years, which is if there is some question about the health effects of something, it’s better to be precautionary about being exposed to it rather than be in danger, and be exposed to it, and then find out later that it causes cancer, or could kill you, or something like that.
So I feel there’s enough evidence so far to bring into question the safety of talking on cell phones all day, or even carrying them around with you.
So Dr. Wang, tell us what you know about the health effects of cell phone radiation.
DR. RONG WANG: Before I give into the topic of the health effects of cell phone radiation, I would like to first explain what cell phone radiation is.
DEBRA: Thank you. Good. I would like to hear that.
DR. RONG WANG: As you know, cell phones, and essentially all wireless devices, use radio waves to communicate. The radio waves emitted from cell phones is a form of electromagnetic radiation, commonly referred as the cell phone radiation.
When you hold your cell phone next to your head or wear it on your body, you can absorb over 50% of the transmitted energy.
While cell phones bring enormous convenience to our modern lives, the possible health consequences of exposure to cell phone radiation have aroused a considerable—it’s a topic of concern and scientific debate.
So, when we talk about the cell phone radiation, the first thing people should understand is that it is different from x-ray which is an ionizing radiation and a known cancer-causing agent.
On the other hand, the cell phone radiation is a type of non-ionizing radiation, which means it does not carry enough energy to break the DNA bonds directly. And it is the same type of energy used by microwave ovens to heat up food […] except that it has much lower power compared to a microwave oven.
So a typical cell phone emits about 100 mini-watts or 1/10 of a watt average power with a peak power somewhere between half a watt to two-watts.
So many people assume that this low-level, non-ionizing radiation is safe for humans. But the fact is that we don’t know yet.
The existing scientific findings on this subject are mixed and conflicting. So that means about half of the studies showed some kind of effect, while the other half showed no effect.
And the reported effects from cell phone radiation include cancer, especially brain cancer, impaired brain and the nerve root functions, sperm damages in men, and behavioral problems in children, just to name a few.
So, let me give you an example. In 2011, a U.S. study showed that safety limits of cell phone use changed the human brain’s glucose metabolism in the region of the brain closest to the cellphone antenna. Although the health outcome from this change in glucose metabolism is unknown from the study itself, at least we know that cell phone radiation starts to interact with our brains, and that they said one hour of exposure is enough to change our brain activities.
So, that’s a very interesting finding.
DEBRA: Yes, I would agree.
DR. RONG WANG: With regard to the health outcomes, the relationship between cell phone use and the brain cancer has been the subject of several large studies in the past decade or so. Those studies normally in scientific terms called epidemiological studies, they normally involve a large number, sometimes up to hundreds of thousands of human subjects, and compare the cell phone use pattern, and the actual brain tumor incidents among the studied population.
If we look at those studies, while no study was able to say for sure that there is a definitive link between cell phone use and brain cancer, many studies observed increased risks for subgroups of heavy cell phone users or people who use the cell phone for long periods of time. We’re talking about at least five years or longer, sometimes more than 10 years.
DEBRA: I had an experience where I know a good friend of mine is one of those people who are on the cell phone all day long. He’s a business executive, and he just carries his cell phone with him all day long. And he had a brain tumor.
Now, I can’t say that it was related to his cell phone, but I can tell you that he literally talks on his cell phone at least eight hours a day. And he got a brain tumor.
So when I heard that, I thought about these studies about brain cancer and cell phones, and what you said earlier, there are studies that show that there is a change in the brain when the cell phone is near the brain.
We need to take a break, but we’re going to continue to talk about this when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re talking today about cell phone radiation with two scientists from Pong Research. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about cell phone radiation, how it can harm your health and what you can do to protect yourself. My guests are from Pong Research.
I want to just suggest that you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the description of this show. And on there is a link to my listing on my link to Pong Research on my website on Debra’s List. You can also just go to any page of my website, and type in “Pong Research,” P-O-N-G Research into the search box, and it will take you to the listing that I’ve written for it.
And on that listing, there’s a very dramatic picture of looking at how much radiation emits—you can actually see it on the picture, and how much there is with Pong device. And it’s virtually nothing without it, and you can really see the radiation in this picture.
And I’ve seen other pictures. I don’t have them right here in front of me, but there are other pictures that maybe you’ll find on the internet, or I’ll find them and put them up here too, where you can see the radiation from the phone on the ear penetrating into the brain area.
So it’s not just the phone is just out here doing nothing. It’s emitting these radiation rays, I guess they are, and they’re going into your brain.
Now, that’s not something that was designed by Mother Nature to have us be exposed to, and there are plenty of evidence that there is some harm. It’s just not completely proven yet.
So Dr. Wang, go on with what you’d like to say about the health effects.
DR. RONG WANG: Thank you, Debra. So basically, I was talking about some studies showed some evidence of increased brain cancers, while others do not. But still, the limited evidence of increased cancer risk from those studies led the World Health Organization to classify cell phone radiation as a possible carcinogen to humans in 2011. We all know that.
And I do want to emphasize that, when it comes to children, we believe—and health experts, they generally agree—that children are more vulnerable to cell phone radiation because they have thinner skull and skin which allows a deeper penetration of the cell phone energy as you just mentioned.
And also, they have a smaller head, and still, their nervous system is still developing (they’re not yet mature). So it’s more susceptible to any damages.
Besides, children, they start using cell phones at a very young age. They have the potential of accumulating many, many years, or even decades, of cell phone exposure when they are old. So that is a concern.
And again, the search data for the effects on children is very limited.
DEBRA: That’s a big thing in my field when we’re talking about toxic chemicals or electromagnetic fields or radiation, any of these things, is that all these things are being used, and yet, there’s limited data on their safety. And we need to do more research. We need to be finding out definitely what the dangers are, and if there is any indication that there is a danger, we need to be applying the precautionary principle.
I really believe that even if adults don’t use these cases, anybody who has children, the children absolutely should be using the cases because some of us—I didn’t start using a cell phone until well on in my life, but if somebody starts using a cell phone when they’re five years old, they’re going to have a lifetime of exposure to this.
Especially since there is technology available, it is relatively inexpensive for what you’re getting. You buy a case and it lasts—since there’s nothing being used up, this case would just last as long as it lasts. You could it use it for years?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Absolutely! We strive to make our cases as durable and sturdy as possible. We want our technology to stay on the phone and be used.
DEBRA: So considering how long it could be used, the investment is very small, and the amount of protection that you’re getting, it’s just a very high value product, especially when you’re looking at the health of your children.
I wanted to ask you, Dr. Wang, so as long as the cell phone is on, it’s getting off radiation whether it’s in your pocket or in your purse or up next to your ear.
DR. RONG WANG: That’s right.
DEBRA: So even if you’re just carrying your cell phone—you don’t even have to be talking on it. If you’re carrying your cell phone, you’re getting that radiation in your body.
DR. RONG WANG: That is correct.
DEBRA: But if it’s in your pocket, it’s not next to your brain—so how far away—I know with electromagnetic fields that the further away you get, it diminishes exponentially. So how far away do you need to be from your cell phone in order to not be feeling the effects of radiation?
DR. RONG WANG: Really, there is no—because the radiation, they don’t just disappear. The intensity goes down exponentially over distance. So that means if you hold the cell phone further away from your head, the less radiation exposure you are going to get.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: The cell phone manufacturers provide warnings in their manuals in small print, which most people don’t read, that advise you to keep your cell phone at least half an inch away from your body.
And that’s something that we also agree with. We often advise people not to keep their cell phones in their pockets particularly because, as you mentioned, the proximity to the body is a big factor. So if possible, try not to keep your device in your pocket.
But that’s somewhere where that the Pong case can be a benefit. If you have to keep it in your pocket, the Pong case will reduce exposure in that instance. But of course, the less exposure is always better.
DEBRA: The less exposure is always better. We need to take another break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’re talking with scientists from Pong Research today about cell phone radiation, its health effects, and what you can do.
And when we come back, Dr. McCaughey, I’m going to have you explain the Pong technology. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guests today are from Pong Research where they make cases for cell phones and other wireless devices in order to protect us from the cell phone radiation.
So Dr. McCaughey, explain to us how the technology works.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: When you normally talk on your cell phone, it’s emitting energy in all directions really. And that’s next to your head, and half of that is being absorbed in your head. Not only this has health implications, which we just discussed, but you’re also wasting the signal.
What the Pong case does is when it’s applied to the phone, it has a built-in antenna technology that pairs with the antenna inside your phone to re-direct the wireless energy away from your head.
So essentially, it draws the energy towards the back of the phone and away from your head, so it provides you with a reduced exposure to the cell phone radiation, and at the same time, providing a greater cellphone signal to the tower for improved [unintelligible 29:39] which is dropped calls.
So really, it’s multiple benefits from one solution.
DEBRA: Yes, it improves performance and increases battery life too.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Yes, simply by less waste of your signal in your head, you have a more efficient device for communication. And we made these cases slim line cases that sit on the phone snuggly. We make them for a range of devices, including I guess the iPhones, Samsung Galaxy products, and tablets including the iPad and the iPad mini.
Just this week, it’s available for pre-order now on our website, our case for the iPhone 5S, which was recently released.
DEBRA: And I find it to be that they’re very attractive cases, and particularly, the one in my phone, it actually makes it easier to hold. It just wraps around the phone.
I did a little research. Some people asked me, “Well, aren’t they made out of plastic?” all these kinds of things. But I talked to the company when I first started became aware of these, and I found out that the cases are made of polycarbonate, but it’s all bound up in the plastic.
The problem with polycarbonate, people know about BPA and polycarbonate, is that you actually have to have something like a polycarbonate water bottle, though BPA will leech into the water because—it leeches into the water. If it’s just there around the phone, it’s not leeching into the air.
And it’s not anything like handling a cash register receipt, which gives off BPA.
If there is any BPA coming off of this case, it’s so minimal that—you would be exposed to more BPA in just going shopping, and handling the cash register receipt, or eating canned food. And the benefits of this are so astronomical just in every way that we just need to be protecting ourselves from this radiation.
Is there more you want to tell us about how the technology works, or anything innovative?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Sure! So, the technology itself is an embedded technology—an embedded antenna, I’m sorry. It’s wafer thin, thinner than a human hair which is very important. We don’t want to make a huge, bulky case that you’re not going to want to carry around with you.
And how it works is that it attracts the electromagnetic energy towards it. And it’s precisely engineered and designed to function at the frequencies that your cell phone operates on. Your listeners may not be aware that your cell phone operates at many different frequencies.
DEBRA: No, I didn’t know that.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: Over a range of about 1 Ghz, which is a large variance, but the Pong case is designed to work at any of the frequencies that your cell phone can operate at, not just here in the U.S., but worldwide as well.
So a lot of engineering goes into making sure that it pairs precisely with the cell phone antenna.
DEBRA: This is an amazing thing. I’m looking on your website right now, and it says that it’s been tested in FCC-certified laboratories. That’s the Federal Communications Commission, and that Pong is the only mobile device case proven to reduce your exposure to radiation while still protecting your signal strength.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right.
DEBRA: And I think that that was the thing that impressed me was—because I’ve been looking at other technologies, and that you have such a high rate of reduction, and that it also—there’s performance instead of decreasing it.
So that’s just between those things—it was just—why not have this on my phone? That was just so obvious.
We only just have a few minutes left. But I wanted to ask you, is there anything you want to make sure you get to say that you haven’t covered yet?
DR. RONG WANG: Yes, Debra. I do want to resonate with your previous comments on the precautionary principle. The reason is, just last week, WHO classified air pollution as a leading cause of cancer to humans. And it actually took the Director of IARC, an international agency for research on cancer, to come into the [desk].
It actually takes two, three, or four decades, once the exposure is introduced and before there is sufficient research data to show a relationship to the cause.
So, if you look at cell phone radiation, I think it’s—we’re talking about the [unintelligible 35:34]. So right now, we only have widespread cell phone use for about 10 to 15 years, so we are still at a very early stage compared to three, four decades time period that it normally takes to define a carcinogen or a cancer agent.
So, it’s really the uncertainty and the time. I think they all justify the application of precautionary principle which we definitely support. At Pong, we support the worldwide call for precaution.
And lastly, just last Tuesday, the French National Agency for Food, Health, and Environmental Safety issued recommendations to limit exposure to cell phone radiation, essentially, for children and the heavy cell phone users.
Again, really, I think it’s all early evidence and the worldwide call for precaution. They are, I think, a good cause of concern on this issue.
DEBRA: I agree with you. And yes, I do see as well that as time goes by, there are more and more recommendations by intelligent people who have done research and looked at the research to say, “This is something that we should be watching out for.”
In history, there was a time when we thought that cigarettes were safe. And now, we know that they cause cancer. If there are indicators that we should be watching out for something, why not watch out for it if we can?
Dr. McCaughey, any final words from you?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: I think until we reach that time when there is conclusive evidence, we should adopt this precautionary principle. And one way to do that is to use a Pong case.
For any of your listeners that would like to get one, we’d like to offer you a discount. If you enter Pong, P-O-N-G, PONG10, in the checkout, you’ll get a 10% discount just for your listeners, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. So that’s P-O-N-G 10, the number 10. 1-0.
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s right, yes.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. And until when is the discount good?
DR. RYAN MCCAUGHEY: That’s available for up until the end of the month, October 31st.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Thank you very much. I’ll announce that on my website as well.
So now, we really do only have a few seconds left, so I just want to thank you both so much for being with me. I learned some things, and I’m sure my listeners did. And thank you for providing such a great product that can protect our health.
If you want to learn more about Toxic Free Talk Radio, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, where we have a list of the guests that are coming up this week. And also, every single show is recorded and archived, so you can listen to this show again, you can tell your friends to listen to this show, you can listen to yesterday’s show. You can listen to the 200-something shows that we’ve done, and find out what’s going on in the future.
You can also find out more about my website when you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Across the top, there’s a navigation bar that will take you to various places where you can find out about where to buy non-toxic products, how to get toxic chemicals out of your body, et cetera, et cetera.
So tune in tomorrow, and we’ll have more. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
Healthy Halloween
My guest today is Annie B. Bond and we’re going to talk about how to reduce toxic chemical exposure on Halloween—everything from candy to costumes. I met Annie many years ago when her publisher asked me to write the forward to her first book Clean and Green. Annie is the best-selling author of five books, including Better Basics for the Home (Three Rivers Press, 1999), Home Enlightenment (Rodale Books, 2008), and most recently True Food (National Geographic, 2010), and winner of Gourmand Awards Best Health and Nutrition Cookbook in the World. She was named “the foremost expert on green living” by “Body & Soul” magazine (February, 2009). She has been the editor of a number of publications, including “The Green Guide.” Currently Annie is the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Wellness Wire and leads the selection of toxic-free products for A True Find. www.anniebbond.com
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH ANNIE B. BOND
- Toxics Then and Now: Debra Celebrates Thirty Years in Print
- Eight Steps to Improving Your Food Choices
- Toxic Free Valentines
- Great Toxic-Free Holiday Gifts
- Cleaning for Your Holiday Party – Before and After
- Toxic Free Cleaning Basics
- Natural Solutions for Bugs
- Tips for a Toxic Free Home
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Healthy Halloween
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Annie B. Bond
Date of Broadcast: October 22, 2013
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 we need to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals in the world today, all around us, in the food we eat, the water we drink, consumer products and even in our bodies from plastic exposures.
So, on this show, we talk about what’s toxic, what’s not, where are the toxic chemicals and where are things that are not toxic? And today, we’re going to talk about the scary toxic chemicals that are in our Halloween traditions and products that we buy at Halloween.
My guest today is my friend, Annie Berthold Bond. She has written five bestselling books about toxic free living. And she has experienced, as I have, many, many toxic-free Halloweens. Hi, Annie.
ANNIE B. BOND: Hi, Debra. It’s so nice to be here. Thanks for having me again.
DEBRA: Thank you. And Annie has been on before and if you enjoy today’s show or a fan of Annie’s books, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and just type her name into the search and all of the shows that she has been on will come up and you can listen to all of them. I’m sure she’ll be on again since we’re such good friends. We have known each other for so long and are so in agreement on this subject.
ANNIE B. BOND: […]
DEBRA: I know you’ve written about Halloween in the past. You’ve written so much in so many ways. So we’re going to talk about some specific things. I have some information specifically about candy and costumes. But we just start out.
Tell me just some tips that you would give somebody about how to have less toxic Halloween and then we’ll talk more specifically about candy and costumes. Tell us some of the things that you did with your daughter Lily to make her Halloween less toxic.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s an interesting question. When I was thinking about this show, I still to this day remember Halloween mask I wore. I must have been eight or nine maybe or six, I don’t know. And the taste of it and how it bothered my face, it must have been absolutely saturated with fire retardants or something. The chemical exposure I had that evening from that mask must have just been unbelievable. And I, to this day, remember it.
DEBRA: I remember that too.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah. It’s just an incredible. With my daughter, my main focus usually was around the candy. So we can talk about that. I have a lot of alternative thoughts about using candy that doesn’t have fructose in it because I think…
DEBRA: Let’s just start out talking about candies. I have some things to say too. Let me just talk a little bit about the toxic chemicals in candies that children are likely to encounter and then we can go into talking about our alternatives because I’m sure we both have a lot of experience with this.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: There was just an article. I was just searching this online and there was some article just a few days ago in the Huffington Post that said, “Halloween warning, watch out for neurotoxic artificial food dyes in M&Ms candies.”
This article is about the health effects of artificial colors, which are made from petroleum. And it says that if you know a child with ADHD, you know hyperactivity can make it difficult for parents and that many food and candy companies use unnecessary ingredients that can trigger hyperactivity and petroleum-based artificial food dyes are found in everything from cereal, yogurt and granola bars to candy chips and even children’s medicine.
So they’re making the point here that even though it’s Halloween, you’re going to get a lot of artificial colors in that bag of candy. If most people are giving away candy that just comes in the bags of Halloween candy that is sold cheaply at this time of year and it’s not the best quality candy. And M&Ms and other common brands do use these artificial flavors.
I mean ADHD is only one of the things that can happen when you consume artificial colors because it’s a neurotoxin and it affects your entire nervous system. So anything that has to do with the nervous system, mood, depression, all those things, even moving your fingers, I’m sitting here moving my fingers while I’m talking. Moving your fingers is something that your nerves do and message is going through brain and all of those kinds of things are all part of your nervous system. And so that’s one thing to watch out for.
Another article that I found, let’s see what else I have here, there was another one about lead. I have so many articles open on my desk right now. There was another one about lead in candy and I can’t find that one right now.
ANNIE B. BOND: One of the things when you’re talking, in England, the physicians have gotten together and urged all parents to not feed their children food with artificial color. And this is what started maybe three to four years ago. It was so impressive that the pediatricians got together to say this because it was so strong.
I think also the other thing that I just wanted to throw in there is my personal experience, which was that my daughter didn’t really have much exposure to chemicals, but I always let her go to birthday parties and eat whatever they had and of course they were always loaded with toxic food dyes. She was a sweet little girl, but she has come home as the most belligerent little human being you ever, ever wanted to be around. And it was just awkward. She’d have that kind of food and she would be so belligerent with me.
So it’s so sad because the kids get into bad behavior and parents punish them and they don’t know what’s the cause. It’s just a real tragedy.
DEBRA: It absolutely can be something as simple as eating M&Ms. Let’s also talk about dangers of sugar and then we’ll give our safe alternatives because I actually consider sugar to be a toxic chemical now. I do.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s interesting.
DEBRA: And I didn’t use to think it was a toxic chemical because most of the toxic chemicals I knew were made from petroleum. But when I wrote my most recent book, Toxic Free, I really researched everything anew because I had a lot of ideas about what was toxic from the past many years ago when I first started working in the field. And so I researched everything again.
One of the things that I realized is that there are certain chemicals that are inherently toxic. There are certain like dioxin or something like that. There are naturally occurring toxins like food poisoning kind of things like botulinum toxin.
But there’s also a whole category of things that are toxic because they’re refined. And if you look at something like salt, like natural salt versus refined salt and natural salt is actually vital to life, yet refined salt can give you high blood pressure and all kind of things. It’s actually an industrial chemical.
And so when I look at refined sugar – I’m not talking about all sweeteners, but I’m talking about that refined white sugar that most candy is made from, especially Halloween candy that acts in your body like a toxic chemical does. It’s not something that occurs in nature. It’s something that is an industrial product that’s been refined. So I actually consider it to be a toxic chemical now and something that people shouldn’t be eating and it’s not necessary to health. So I put it on the list of dangerous poison.
ANNIE B. BOND: Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. There’s a website and I’ve forgotten the name of it, but it listed 134 ways or something like that that sugar hurts your body and especially one of it is that it depresses the immune system.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, interesting.
DEBRA: And especially what happens here is that we’re in the cold and flu season and we’re eating Halloween candy or eating Thanksgiving desserts or eating Christmas desserts. And all through the whole cold and flu season, we’re depressing our immune system when our immune system should be at top form to be fighting all those bacteria and viruses.
ANNIE B. BOND: And all of those holidays celebrate the…
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s right. So alternative is – I just have a general statement here and say that there are many other sweeteners that are not as bad for you. And I hear my little cue of music that it’s time for break and I could just keep talking about all this stuff with you.
But we’ll take our break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie B. Bond. When we come back, we’ll talk more about Halloween and how to have a healthy one.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond. We’re talking about healthy Halloween. So Annie, tell us what you’ve done about candy with Lily.
ANNIE B. BOND: I was thinking about this when you were talking about sugar because there are increasing number of products in the market, candy products on the market that are actually made without FD&C food dyes. The health food stores have them. They can have M&Ms that don’t have that problem.
You still get the sugar. Sometimes with kids, you want to be able to give them what everybody else has and make it look like what everybody else has. And you get into one of these classic slippery slopes where is it better to give them something fun that they feel great about that also isn’t as toxic as something else? So this certainly still includes the sugar.
We should also probably throw in corn syrup as something that is increasingly…
DEBRA: Absolutely, absolutely.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s on my list of things I would want to avoid because of the GMOs if nothing else.
DEBRA: Right.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s just a really serious, serious, serious problem that I think is – I read a book called The Autism Revolution by Herbert, MD that just blew my socks off about how she’s actually healing autistic kids and making their lives completely normal and she’s doing it in a myriad of ways. But one of the main focuses is on gut bacteria.
We know that sugar throws gut bacteria off, corn syrup and the GMOs in Roundup, no researches are showing that it’s actually affecting gut bacteria in a really negative way. So it’s horrifying that these little kids ¬– healing their gut bacteria is helping to bring them back to health. And why is their gut bacteria so badly off? And one of the reasons may just well be corn syrup and chemo corn products. It’s terrifying when I started researching this. It’s just absolutely terrifying.
And the same GMO, gut bacteria problem can be linked also to some problems with the honeybees because they’re getting the corn syrup because a lot of the honeybee farms use corn syrup-based seed for them and so it’s just a horrible, worrisome problem that’s just beginning to reveal itself in more detail. So I pay a lot of attention to corn syrup now.
DEBRA: Yes. That’s something I eliminated a long time ago. Actually if I had to eat something and I had to choose between corn syrup and sugar, I would eat sugar in a minute before I eat corn syrup.
ANNIE B. BOND: Me too. Yeah, I completely agree.
DEBRA: And I think that there are actually for me gradient different sweeteners being more preferable and less profitable.
Corn syrup is way at the bottom. And sugar is actually somewhere near the middle. And then there are artificial sweeteners.
But then there are other much better sweeteners near the top like honey and coconut sugar and unrefined cane sugar and things like that. And I know, I’ve seen in natural food stores that there are many candy products that are using these better sweeteners as well as not having the artificial toxins.
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s right, exactly, totally.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: So you become a label reader and it becomes incredibly valuable at this time of year to go browse around the biggest health food store you can find because the prices tend to be cheaper. And just look at the widest variety of materials of candy, you can, and see what there is. I completely agree to that.
DEBRA: A couple of things that I think I have just off the top of my head and not having gone to the natural food store and looked for it, but just by being aware of what’s in the store. At my particular natural food store, they have, right at the register, these little bite-sized chocolate candies, just a little bite of chocolate that’s organic chocolate and it has unrefined cane sugar in it. So you could certainly get a bunch of those and pass those out. Everybody loves chocolate.
ANNIE B. BOND: Absolutely. Totally. And so for Easter, instead of jellybeans, I would get little chocolates and place them around. I would do just exactly that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: I would do everything I could creatively to come up with alternatives to food dyes and the more wholesome the sugar, the better.
DEBRA: They also have lollipops and hard candies made from brown rice syrup, which is also another good slow acting sweetener.
There’s a website online called NaturalCandyStore.com. And they have a whole page called Organic Halloween Candy. If you want to get to this page, you just type organic Halloween candy into your favorite search engine and it will come right up. And it’s got all kinds of things. They’ve got Gummi Bears…
ANNIE B. BOND: Beautiful colors too.
DEBRA: …organic maple candy pumpkins and root beer flavored organic candy drops and lollipops and all kinds of things.
And they’re all made out of organic and natural ingredients. So if you want to have that kind of thing and you don’t have it in your natural food store, just go online here. It’s all available. It’s just a matter of knowing that these products exist and choosing to get them instead of the standard toxic stuff.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, exactly. And because then there’s the whole stretch where we do make so many desserts at home too, one thing that I got really good and we just enjoyed doing would be making foods with vegetable dyes and making the frosting type things, coloring things with vegetables. And so blueberries make a gorgeous bluish purple and there are just all sorts of foods that you can cook…
DEBRA: Beets.
ANNIE B. BOND: …to get a great food diet, to make your own, which is another fun thing to do.
DEBRA: It is a fun thing to do. I was looking on my own website, on my Green Living Q&A. I looked up on Halloween to see what I had written in the past. In one of them, there was a tip from a woman who said that when her children were on trick-or-treating age, they would invite their friends over. The woman writing said, “We’d invite their children’s friends over for pizza and apple cider and homemade pumpkin pie after they’re trick-or-treating.” Oh, no. Then the kids would go out for trick-or-treating.
So they’ve already had a good meal. And after they got home from the trick-or-treating, their kids and their friends, this parent would check the candy and they would divide it up. And then she would buy the candy back for whatever the price was that it would be sold for at the local grocery store. And then they would put it back in their trick-or-treat box and give it away to the other trick-or-treaters that were coming to their house. And the kids would have money then to go spend, to buy toys or whatever that they wanted and they didn’t eat the candy at all. I thought that was a great way to make it…
ANNIE B. BOND: That’s a creative way of handling it and giving something to the kids so they can find that fun and the more money they can make or something. That was a good idea to fill them up first. So yes, it’s interesting.
DEBRA: So we need to take another break. And when we come back, let’s talk about costumes because that’s a big part of Halloween, getting dressed up and having fun. So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of many bestselling books about toxic-free living.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Annie B. Bond who does a lot of things. She’s written five books on toxic-free living. She’s the Editor-In-Chief of the Wellness Wire. And she leads the selection of toxic-free products for a wonderful website called A True Find. It has some gorgeous products from all over the world. Her website is AnnieBBond.com and you can find out all about everything she does by going to AnnieBBond.com.
So Annie, I want to start by just talking about some articles I found about the toxic chemicals in costumes. I always felt very uncomfortable in Halloween costumes and you were talking about the masks. Before there were rubber masks and there were plastic masks. I always felt as a kid that I didn’t want to wear the mask. It looked nice, but I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t like the way it smelled. And so I very soon just didn’t wear the mask at all.
All of those, I was just looking at the costumes all made out of synthetic materials when I was recently in a store, a big discount store. And I just was walking up and down the aisle and just everything is made from nylon and polyester and plastic and they have purple pumpkin bags that you can carry your candy in and all these things.
There was an article that was just out last week about how that there was a shipment of children’s costumes from China to distributor in Seattle that was confiscated by Consumer Products Safety Investigators because they tested it and they found that there was lead in the costumes that are 11 times the legal limit.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh my goodness.
DEBRA: They seized 229 cartons of 1371 costumes and that they will all be destroyed. But those are only the ones that were tested.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, it’s so discouraging.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes. And I’ve said many times on the show, but we’ll say it again, we even said this yesterday about how lead, there’s no safe level for lead and even though the government has set a standard, there’s really no safe level. And it can poison children’s brains and all kinds of developmental problems come later in life from being exposed to lead as a child.
And there really isn’t any reason why we have to be, have our children be exposed to these kinds of things.
And then there was another article I found where they found all kinds of toxic metals. There’s a whole list here. There’s a group called EcoWaste Coalition where they test Halloween costumes, body and face paint, masks, decorations and candy.
And they said that more than 20% of the products that they tested still contained lead. And in 2011, two years ago…
ANNIE B. BOND: What percent was that again, Debra?
DEBRA: Twenty percent.
ANNIE B. BOND: Is it 20 or 40?
DEBRA: Twenty.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: Twenty percent still contained lead. And two years ago, when they tested, they found excessive levels of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury in 70% of the Halloween costumes that they tested.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh dear.
DEBRA: And last year, the number came down to 28%. This year, it’s 20%, but that’s still only just a little tiny amount that they tested. And if you multiply that out by all the Halloween costumes that you’re seeing in stores across the country, 20% of that is a lot and there’s no way for you as a parent to know if you’re buying a Halloween costume that is full of heavy metals that are very, very toxic to children.
So my recommendation is that we should be making our own costumes. And just not even buy any of that stuff because number one, there’s no way for you to tell if they are safe or not safe. And number two, they’re made up of synthetic fabrics.
And number three, none of this is on the label, but the other thing is that they actually, many if not all of them, have fire retardants applied because if there’s any time of year that is dangerous for children having lose clothing on, it’s Halloween with all those candles and all those pumpkins and people walking around with candles and stuff. The official government recommendations for Halloween costumes say, “Buy fire retardant costumes.”
ANNIE B. BOND: I was thinking about what my recommendation would be. And I think that report you gave actually changed my mind because one of the problems with kids of course is that they want to be like their friends and they want to fit and you want to help them to fit it if you can just because it matters so much to them. So it’s always a toss-up sometimes about what’s more important for them. But it’s more important for them not to get exposed to heavy metals than it is for them to fit in and I think that there’s no question about that.
It’s hard. I sewed a lot of costumes and my daughter was also in a lot of musical theater. She always just loved to have me sew the costumes. It became a fun family project.
And what I was going to say that’s great news – I mean I’m with you now about the costumes. I was going to say that you use your common sense. You’re out there and you’re shopping and you do the best you can in the sense of trying to get the most natural, you smell things, you try to navigate as best as you can given what costumes show up when you’re out looking.
But I think I changed my mind and I agreed about the making. The fun thing is that the fabric stores have absolutely wonderful patterns available and all sorts of fun accessories. So it can become a really fun family project. Most families these days have both parents working. It’s really hard to find the time. But it is one of those meaningful times that you can have with your kids I think. I’m with you, Debra. I agree.
DEBRA: Thank you. I know that it’s been a long time since I bought a Halloween costume. It’s been since I was a child. But as soon as I was able to make my own costume as a teen and figure it out, then that’s what I started doing.
You can go thrift stores and pick out things that might be suitable for costume or you can make things. Teenagers can learn how to sew. I remember when I was in school, I took a sewing class. It’s not that difficult. It really isn’t that difficult.
But I know for myself, I now try to keep my costumes. I like to dress up for Halloween. But I keep my costumes really simple.
One of the things that I did was that if you go to a party store, then they have these little hats you can wear, just little tiny hats on headbands. Sure, they’re synthetic, but it’s a very small amount of synthetic. I have a little witch’s hat and I’ll tell you more about this.
ANNIE B. BOND: This is what I mean by the common sense so you make an educated decision at the time.
DEBRA: It’s very different than having a whole dress full of fire retardant. We’ll be back after the break and talk more about how to make creative costumes that are toxic-free. My guest today is Annie B. Bond. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Annie B. Bond, author of many books on toxic-free living and her website is AnnieBBond.com and you can find out everything that she does.
So Annie, what I wanted to say about what I usually do now at Halloween is I either do something simple like a little witch’s hat. Or I paint my face and I just dress in black, all my black cotton clothes and then I paint my face. So let’s talk about…
ANNIE B. BOND: I was just going to talk about face paint too.
DEBRA: Yeah. I think it’s a wonderful creative thing to do. But I want to make sure that people understand that if you go and buy face paints at the store, they probably have lead in them because several years ago, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics had face paints tested and found that 10 out of 10 children’s face paint tested contained low levels of lead and again, there’s no safe level of lead, and other heavy metals they found were nickel, chromium and cobalt.
But here’s the good news. There are natural face paints that you can buy if you go to NaturalEarthPaint.com. They’ve got great, great, great face paints and they are just so natural. The woman who developed them, I had her on the show and she totally understands all of this about colors and paint and everything. And she has created these fabulous face paints.
Actually, I just put a blog post on my website, safe pace paint. That’s hard to say. I’ll say that three times fast. Safe face paint, if you just type that in my site’s search engine, “safe face paint,” it’s got a link to the natural face paints you can buy.
And it’s also got a link to – I see I have a typo here, I need to fix it – to a place where you can make your own homemade face paint. And that’s on a website called Mommypotamus.com. And I have the exact link by the end of the show. I’ll put the exact link here to where you can make your own face paint at home from natural colors and things that you were talking about, natural vegetable colors.
And so these are two creative ideas that people can use to have some fun and have it be natural and safe.
ANNIE B. BOND: And it’s really easy to make a natural face paint. A recipe I have has a shortening, a [coat] shortening and I would use coconut oil instead. And it has cornstarch, white flour and glycerin and you mix that up and then you could add colors.
I think that you could do different kinds of starches. So you mix the corn altogether and you’d be able to use arrowwood or something.
DEBRA: This recipe I have in front of me from Mommypotamus says has cornstarch or arrowroot powder. Then she uses honey instead of glycerin, natural food coloring.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, okay.
DEBRA: Yeah, I haven’t tried it, but it looks like it would work and I think that that would be a fun thing to do. I always like making things myself if I can.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, me too. Honey is very healing for the skin.
DEBRA: It is.
ANNIE B. BOND: So that’s a very, very nice recipe that you just said. I like that.
DEBRA: Yeah, I like it too and the recipe for the natural earth paints is very good. It’s got natural pigments in it and things like that she’s put together. But I really like these kinds of do-it-yourself formulas where you can make it out of basically foods that you could eat. I mean you could eat this face paint. It might not taste very good, but you could eat it.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And the other thing is you could make paper mache masks If you wanted to get into some fun projects, you could definitely do that.
DEBRA: That sounds fun.
ANNIE B. BOND: I think it’s the kind of thing that you want to – I was invited, of all things. I had such a fun time. Last year, I went to that Middle Earth Halloween party and I spent six weeks working on my costume for that. And even for hurricane Sandy with no electricity, I was sitting by the fire, sewing and sewing the thing.
DEBRA: And what did you make?
ANNIE B. BOND: I made myself looking like – I found a picture of Madonna who had dressed up as the queen of arc – I mean the Joan of Arc. I did something very similar. So I made it like a chain, a real chain and I made the chainmail hat with the chain hanging down. It was very fun.
DEBRA: Wow.
ANNIE B. BOND: I actually heard somebody say it was going to be in Martha Stewart. Actually the picture of me is going to be in Martha Stewart. I should go out and buy a copy. I just realized that it’s a magazine. But it was so much fun. It was just an absolute bliss doing it.
But it became a project. It just became something you plan a couple of months in advance and you work on it and think about it.
DEBRA: That’s right. It becomes a creative thing. I think that this is one of the things that we’ve lost in our consumer culture.
We think of ourselves as consumers, so if we want something, we need to go out and buy it and so then we’re only limited to what the manufacturers are giving to us. But we are creative beings by nature and we can create anything that we want to create and I think it’s much more fun if you’re doing something like a costume to go out and create something, figure out.
I’m a member of Toastmasters and we are having a Halloween party. Just after Halloween, we’re having an open house and we’re going to, each of us, be giving a very short speech as a character from a book or a movie. And so, we’re all going to come dressed as that character.
ANNIE B. BOND: What a fun. What a fun idea. Yeah.
DEBRA: Doesn’t that sound great?
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s very fun. It’s very fun.
DEBRA: And so I happened to be receiving an award that night, which is one of the reasons why this is going on. In Toastmasters, the highest award is the Distinguished Toastmasters Award and you have to give 50 speeches and do a whole leadership program and everything to get this award. And so I had already started working on my, I’m going to say, “costume,” my evening gown for that occasion.
It’s like a fairy dress with the little stars, purple little stars. And I thought now, I have to come up with a character from a book or movie to be – that’s my dress that I already started working on. And so I decided to be Glenda, the Good Witch of the North.
ANNIE B. BOND: Very nice.
DEBRA: And so I’ll have to give my speech as Glenda.
ANNIE B. BOND: Oh, that sounds very fun. What a great idea.
DEBRA: Yeah.
ANNIE B. BOND: But it is exactly right. It becomes an event. When I have my costume that I was – I mean I had my daughter and all her friends involved. It was a big e-mail thing back and forth, taking iPhone pictures, “What about this? It’s a bracelet.” It just became a very fun community event really.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes. We still have just a few more minutes. But the conclusion here is that Halloween can be turned into a creative, homemade event rather than a toxic […]. And it can be something really fun and something that is an annual thing that you do together as a family and with your friends.
I wanted to mention about trick-or-treating that children don’t have to go out and trick-or-treat. It may not even be safe in some neighborhoods. And there’s something wrong with inviting your children’s friends over for a party and they can get all dressed up and you can feed them organic food and you can have sweet things to eat that are prepared better. And they can go around and trade treats or something.
I mean there are all kinds of things that you could think of to make an event that children would rather come and do that event every year than go out, trick-or-treating because it’s so much fun.
ANNIE B. BOND: Exactly. Yeah. It’s just a matter of being creative and thoughtful really.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah. So Annie, do you have any last thoughts before we get to the end of the show?
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s really a matter of paying attention I think. I think that’s everything that you’ve said. And it has been about needing to pay attention. We can’t just be in denial about the fact that so many of the things that we buy for Halloween are actually really dangerous. We can’t pretend that’s not the case and we do have to make change. We have to adapt and accommodate that knowledge creatively. It’s just something we have to do. It’s not a question anymore I guess.
DEBRA: Yeah, there really isn’t a question.
ANNIE B. BOND: It’s just like I can never have dry-cleaning in my house because I’m so chemically sensitive and I haven’t for 30 years. And I haven’t missed it. It’s fine.
DEBRA: I haven’t missed it either. I haven’t missed it either. I had a woman e-mailed me with a consulting question about her daughter’s room has a fairly large vinyl decal on the wall. And she wanted to know if it was toxic and should she remove it.
Vinyl, as we know, causes cancer and it’s giving off fumes into her daughter’s room. And she was saying, “I don’t have the money now to replace it. Should I remove it? Do I need to remove it?” And I looked at that and I thought she knows it’s toxic and she’s asking me, “Should I remove it? I don’t have money to replace it.” What’s more important, that her daughter live in a toxic-free room or there will be something on the wall? And I think it’s much more important to be choosing, to continue to choose.
At the beginning, when I was so sick, I didn’t have money to buy everything, but I took everything that was toxic out of my house. And I was just left with emptiness because I had no money to replace anything. But over the years, what was important was to remove those toxic chemicals. We need to go.
ANNIE B. BOND: And then you make…
DEBRA: The show is over.
ANNIE B. BOND: Yeah.
DEBRA: […]
ANNIE B. BOND: Actually I did it too.
DEBRA: Annie will be back with us again another time. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Have a happy Halloween.
The Basic Principles of Toxicology
Toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.
He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH STEVEN G. GILBERT, PhD, DABT
- Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health
- Toxic Solvents and Vapors
- How Pesticides Can Harm Your Health
- Why Do People Doubt the Science Behind Toxics?
- There is No Safe Level for Lead Exposure
- Fewer Chemicals Make Healthier Babies
- Why We Shouldn’t Have Nuclear Power Plants
- How Mercury Affects Your Health
- Nanoparticles
- Persistant Bioaccumulative Toxicants
- How Endocrine Disruptors Disrupt Our Endocrine Systems
- The Dangers of Exposure to Radiation and How to Protect Yourself
- Toxics Throughout History—Exposure to Toxic Substances is Not New
- The Ethics of Toxics
- How to Determine Your Risk of Harm From an Exposure to a Toxic Chemical
- Meet a Toxicologist
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Basic Principles of Toxicology
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Date of Broadcast: October 21, 2013
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 we do that because there are so many toxic chemicals in our lives today at this point in time, and the water we drink, the food we eat, our consumer products, our homes, even in our bodies from past exposures.
And on this show, we talk about how to recognize toxic chemicals, where they are in products, how to choose a non-toxic product, and how to get toxic chemicals out of our bodies, and be healthy, other ways of doing things that are not toxic, and just being able to recognize the difference.
So today, we’re going to be talking about with—my guest is a toxicologist. There’s a whole field of toxicology that just figures out what is toxic and what isn’t. And there are processes on how they do the standard ways of doing things.
And my guest is going to tell us about some of those. His name is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He is a Ph.D., D.A.B.T. He’s the Director and Founder of the Institute of Neurotoxicology in Washington State, and author of an e-book called “A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals.”
He has a very extensive website called Toxipedia.org that is a suite of sites that puts scientific information about toxics in the context of history, society and culture.
He’s got a lot of information and explains things very clearly. And I’m going to have him on many, many times.
So today—he’s already been on once. You can go back into the archives at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the other show, listen to today’s show, listen to the future shows, because here, you’re really going to learn what’s this whole question about toxic things really is about.
Before I introduce Dr. Gilbert, I just want to say that we’re going to be talking about his book today, A Small Dose of Toxicology.
And you can get that book free, it would be nice if you made a donation, but you can get that book free by going to Toxipedia.org.
Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I actually have the title of his book in the description of show, is the link to the place where you can get it for free. It’s totally worth reading. Even if you just read it in little bits and pieces, you’ll get so much information to understand the toxic chemicals in the world around you.
Hello, Dr. Gilbert. Thanks for being here.
STEVEN GILBERT: Hi, Debra. It’s good to see you again.
DEBRA: Thank you. And how are you today?
STEVEN GILBERT: Very good.
DEBRA: Good. So where shall we start? First, I’d like you to tell our listening audience what inspired you to be interested in the field of toxicology.
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, I started quite a while ago, but I was very interested in protecting children’s health because I felt we expose them to many chemicals, and we need to have better control of the chemicals we expose them to.
So I was very interested in chemicals, such as lead and mercury, and the consequences to the developing nervous system.
DEBRA: Good! So let’s just start right out. I’m going to let you lead this interview. Usually, the interviewers wants to lead the interviewee, but you know your subjects so well, I’m going to let you guide us as to what you’d like to talk about. So, go ahead.
Give us a lecture. Just pretend like you’re in the classroom giving a lecture
STEVEN GILBERT: Okay, it sounds like fun. Let’s first talk a little about caffeine. And I want to emphasize my book, A Small Dose of Toxicology. Each chapter of the book has a PowerPoint presentation that goes with the chapter. So if you’re not up for reading the book, you can just look at the PowerPoint presentations. And much of what I’ll talk about today is based on the first couple of chapters of the book and the powerpoints that are associated with those chapters.
But I thought we’d talk about caffeine. Are you a caffeine consumer, Debra?
DEBRA: Off and on. It depends on how I’m feeling. I am a chocolate consumer, and I also understand that there are different types of caffeine. Somebody I had on the show was talking about tea, and he was saying the type of caffeine in tea is different from the type in coffee, and different from chocolate. And I haven’t researched that, and I don’t know if you have anything to say about that.
But I do know that caffeine does affect your body. And it’s on my list of “better to not take it.”
STEVEN GILBERT: Caffeine is a really interesting compound. It’s the same in tea and coffee. It’s the same type of caffeine. Caffeine is, the chemical name is 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. Chocolate, however, has more theophylline in it. It has a little bit different—it has a dimethylxanthine instead of a trimethylxantine in it.
DEBRA: So does that make it better for you?
STEVEN GILBERT: It makes it a little bit different. You don’t get quite the central nervous system effect that you do with caffeine with chocolate. So it’s a little bit different.
But for example, you have to be really careful with dogs, for example. If they get a hold of chocolate, it could be very toxic to dogs. They don’t metabolize theophylline very well.
DEBRA: So, is there a difference? We might as well just define caffeine here in terms of its differences in coming from different sources. I know green tea has some caffeine in it, but it’s not as much as coffee.
STEVEN GILBERT: Actually, most tea, a lot of tea, or black teas, by weight, will have more caffeine than coffee. But we do a much better job of extracting the caffeine from coffee than we do from tea.
If you want more caffeine with your tea, you just have to brew it longer because the hot water will extract the caffeine. But with coffee, because we grind it up so small, and the coffee granules have a bigger surface area, we’ll extract more caffeine from coffee.
So your average cup of coffee has about 100 mg. of caffeine in it. But there’s enormous variability in that.
So, I think one thing to remember and think about caffeine is—and this is a really great lesson in toxicology—is how does caffeine distribute throughout the body?
DEBRA: Tell us about that. That’s really important point.
STEVEN GILBERT: When you consume caffeine, it absorbs relatively quickly, so your peak caffeine levels will be about 30-minutes after you consume your caffeine-containing beverage, and caffeine distributes throughout total body water.
So your urine, if you go to the bathroom, your urine will have about the same concentration of caffeine as your blood does. And actually, for breast milk, it will be about the same. So that’s a good lesson to be thinking about. If you’re breast feeding a child, you want to consume your caffeine after breast feeding, not before, because you want to minimize the amount of caffeine that goes to the child.
DEBRA: Absolutely! This whole idea of how the chemical distributes through the body, that’s one of the points that toxicologists look at. That’s one of the things that’s important to know about a chemical that you’re being exposed to.
STEVEN GILBERT: Absolutely! That’s a really important property of the chemical. We have mentioned caffeine distributes throughout the total body water. But something like lead, which substitutes for calcium, it distributes to the bone and absorbed by the bone. It substitutes for the calcium that’s in the bone.
Compounds like PCBs, DDT, flare retardant, and a range of other compounds, distribute to fats. So they’re fat-soluble compounds.
So you have to be really aware of where a compound distributes.
Another important property is how fast it’s metabolized—how fast it’s changed by the body, and excreted by the body. Caffeine, if you think about caffeine, if you consume your cup of coffee, how much time does it take for you to be ready for a second cup? When you feel like you’d like a little more caffeine to boost your caffeine levels back up again, do you have any idea?
Debra, when you think about you drinking coffee or anybody else?
DEBRA: Well, I only rarely drink coffee. And I actually try not to drink coffee. And I have never been a cup of coffee in the morning kind of coffee drinker. But I drink it when I’m traveling usually because I’m in some different time zone. And I drink it if I haven’t slept well, which is—usually, I can sleep well nowadays. But at times, when I haven’t slept well, and I need to work long hours, then I’ll have a cup of coffee because it will perk me up.
Now, in my particular body, if I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, then it lasts me all days. That’s all I want to drink, just one cup of coffee. And I don’t even drink a whole cup of coffee. I only drink about half a cup of coffee.
STEVEN GILBERT: You’re probably more sensitive to caffeine than others because some people can drink caffeine throughout the day, or coffee throughout the day.
DEBRA: I know people who do that.
STEVEN GILBERT: I know! And it amazes me because I’m pretty sensitive to it also.
DEBRA: And when they’re not drinking coffee, they’re drinking Coke, or some other caffeinated beverage.
STEVEN GILBERT: So your Coke, your can of Coke, your average cola beverage, will have about 50 mg., about half of what coffee does (unless you’re consuming Jolt or one of the high caffeine beverages). But those high caffeine-containing beverages are pretty popular right now.
DEBRA: And I think that coffee is actually better for you to drink than a soda because you can have more control—especially organic coffee—over the sugar and anything else that might be put into it.
We need to actually take a break right now, but we’ll come right back, and hear more about this fascinating subject. I actually love toxicology.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m talking with Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re talking about basic principles of toxicology with Dr. Steven Gilbert, Ph.D., and he is the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And he has a fabulous website about toxicology called Toxipedia.org which is very easy to understand.
There are lots, and lots, and lots of information there, but it’s all written in a way that, I think, any average person could understand it. It’s not a technical website at all. It’s very good.
And so today, we’re talking about principles of toxicology. So go on, Dr. Gilbert.
STEVEN GILBERT: Right before the break, we were talking about how fast a compound is metabolized or removed from the body. And with caffeine, the general principle of that is called the half-life.
So you think of the compound, the compound gets up to say 10 in your blood, how long does it take to drop the 5?
DEBRA: Why do they do that? Why don’t they just say from whatever it is to zero? Why do they do half-life?
STEVEN GILBERT: Because you want to look at how quickly the chemical is being removed from your body. So if it’s a fast metabolizer, and the half-life is short, it moves out of the body relatively quickly. The compound that’s got a long half-life stays in the body for a longer period of time.
So, it’s a really good marker for how long the compound sticks around. And it has to be also where it’s distributed in the body.
DEBRA: Okay, good.
STEVEN GILBERT: Caffeine, for example, the half-life is pretty short. For most people, it’s three to four hours, but there’s variability in that.
So, if you consume a cup of coffee or a can of cola, your caffeine blood levels will rise let’s say to 10, three to four hours later, it will be down to 5. And you want to boost your caffeine levels back up if you like the stimulant effects of caffeine.
But there are some really important changes in that. For example, a woman that’s pregnant, the second and third trimester, the caffeine half-life about doubles. So it goes up to about seven or eight hours, which means, your blood caffeine levels will be higher for a longer period of time during pregnancy.
DEBRA: And if you keep drinking the same amount of coffee a before pregnancy, then you’re really getting a jolt.
STEVEN GILBERT: You are, and your fetus is getting a jolt too because that caffeine—and it’s quickly distributes across the placenta. So the child is basically swimming in caffeine that’s metabolized during pregnancy.
Another thing to remember with half-life is the infant, from zero to six months, does not metabolize caffeine. So the half-life is measured in days. So all it can do is excrete it in the urine. That’s a really important property to remember. It’s much different for a child because their liver function is not really developed yet.
DEBRA: I didn’t know that. That is amazing. It’s making me think about other chemicals that children are being exposed to as well during that same period of time—like caffeine, it would take them longer to metabolize than an adult.
I just think that the most critical time to not be exposed to toxic chemicals is that pregnant mothers, pregnant women, should not be exposed, and newborn babies should not be exposed, and anything that people in those two groups can do to reduce their chemical exposure is well, well, well worth it.
I think that that’s the most critical population to be concerned about.
STEVEN GILBERT: I agree. I think women of child-bearing age and infants and kids, it’s a really important period of time. But unfortunately, we are exposed to a lot of chemicals now. Several studies have been done that showed that there can be over 200 chemicals, industrial-based chemicals, in fetus during development.
So, it’s really become a greater and greater problem. And we often don’t know what chemicals are in our products that we’re consuming.
DEBRA: That’s right. Well, just off the topic, but relevant to this, is that, just last week, Target Store announced that they are now having a new sustainable product program where they’re going to be looking at the toxic chemicals in every single—well, not in every single one of their products, but they’re rolling out category by category.
So, the manufacturers will now have to tell them all the ingredients. And all the products will be rated for their toxic levels at a store like Target. So I think that we’re making progress with that. And I think Walmart has a program like that as well.
Walking into these stores, I don’t see that they’re really in effect yet. But at least they’re looking at this, that that’s how much toxics issues are coming to the fore now, that major retailers like that are having programs where they’re actually paying attention to that.
STEVEN GILBERT: I think that’s right. I think there are more efforts to do that. And Walmart, I believe they had a problem with some lead in some of their child products recently. There’s a study done by Washington Toxics Coalition here in Seattle that found lead in some of their products.
So, I think they need to do better about that. They need to really be working with the public to protect us from exposure to toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: I agree. And it’s the work of toxicologists like you that makes it possible then for the retailers and the consumers to then understand what the toxic chemicals are, and then be able to control them, and manage the risk either as a retailer or an individual in their daily life.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, and really put more pressure, and encourage retailers to be more responsible, and be more aware of the chemicals that might be in their products.
For example, in the food industry, in the Washington State, we have Referendum 522 about labeling genetically-modified organisms in products. So, the GMO Referendum 522 would require grocery stores and others to label if there’s GMO in the product.
And one thing Whole Foods just came out saying they’re moving towards labeling all their GMO products now, which is really great.
DEBRA: I think that’s really good. But I also just have to say that a place like Whole Foods, you would expect that there would be no GMO products. But if there are, they need to be labeled, for sure.
Well, let’s go back to—
STEVEN GILBERT: I want to mention one more thing about caffeine. Some of the listeners—when you stop consuming caffeine, you get a headache from caffeine consumption.
DEBRA: Yes, that happens to me.
STEVEN GILBERT: Have you had that ever happen to you?
DEBRA: Yes.
STEVEN GILBERT: That’s a really interesting property of caffeine. And you could almost say that’s a sign of drug addiction because you can end up consuming a product to avoid the adverse effects of withdrawal from that product. So you’ll have withdrawal syndromes from caffeine which is a headache.
And that’s one reason some of the analgesic tablets will have caffeine along with analgesic in them because a lot of headaches are caffeine-induced headaches.
If you think about the caffeine, and why people make money from caffeine—the cola and the coffee companies—it has a relatively short half-life, three to four hours, you have to keep consuming it because you can’t store it up, and you get a headache when you stop drinking it. So, it’s almost a perfect compound to make money from. A lot of people exploit those properties in caffeine to make a lot of money from the drinks and coffee beverages. It’s really a fascinating compound.
DEBRA: It is. We need to take another break, but we will be right back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more about Toxic Free Talk Radio at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And he also has a website, Toxipedia.org.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. And a lot of what we’re talking about on the show today is in this book, plus much, much, much more. And you can get this book free, this e-book for free, by going to Toxipedia.org.
And I hope you’ll go there and get it. If you want a link directly to the book, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and in the description of today’s show, the link to the book goes right to the page where you can get this book for free.
I think every household needs to have it, study it as quickly or slowly as you need to, but this is the basics of what you need to understand to be living in the world today where we’re so exposed to toxic chemicals.
Dr. Gilbert, you’ve done a great job with this book.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you very much, Debra. I really appreciate that.
DEBRA: It’s the best basic toxicology book I’ve ever seen.
STEVEN GILBERT: Thank you.
DEBRA: So, I’m looking at the page—not the page, but the beginning of the chapter—about caffeine in this book. And it tells you things like the source of this chemical, the recommended daily intake.
And by the way, it says that the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, advises pregnant women to avoid caffeine-containing foods and drugs or consume them only sparingly. That’s the recommendation from the FDA. So, if the FDA is saying that, I think that’s something to watch out for.
And you just have all kinds of information.
So, I know we advertise in the description that we’re going to be talking about caffeine and—I’m looking for it in the description here—mercury and lead. So let’s move on to talking about lead.
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, lead is a very interesting compound. So it’s a heavy metal. It’s wildly used. It was added to paint. And we knew a long time ago that lead makes the mind give away. We knew that two millenniums ago. So we knew lead was toxic.
In Europe, lead was banned from paint in the 1920’s by the League of Nations, recognizing the toxicity of lead. But United States did not ban lead-based paint until 1978 which is really tragic because that perpetuated exposure to children.
We also made the huge mistake of adding lead to gasoline, which increased average blood levels across the nation, and really, around the world. And there are still some areas trying to get lead out of the gasoline.
So what’s interesting about lead is that it substitutes for calcium. So when you’re consuming lead, it goes through your body, it gets into your blood, and then it’s sequestered in the bone. And this can have serious consequence because, if you were exposed to lead while you’re developing, then you store lead in your bone, when does lead come out of the bone? When does calcium come out of the bone?
One important time during those periods is when a woman is pregnant because the fetus is really a sink for calcium, and that lead is mobilized out of the bone to support the child.
So, if you’re exposed to lead during development, you can pass it along to your infants and children.
And the other thing to remember with lead is the absorption of lead. Because the growing child needs lead, when the child ingests lead, about 50% of that lead is absorbed. If they don’t, they only absorb about 10%.
So, that’s a really important distinction to make because a child is more susceptible to lead exposure for a couple of reasons—one, is that absorption factor of 50% of the lead they ingest is absorbed, and also, the [hand-them-out] behavior. A child will have the highest blood lead when they’re one to three years of age, when they’re on the ground, they’re sticking things in their mouth. And anything that has lead on it, lead in paint, will come off. And the lead will be absorbed by the child.
So, that’s a really important fact to remember. It’s the same exposure representing a much bigger dose to the child.
DEBRA: One thing I want to mention about a lead exposure—I’m actually going to be talking about this tomorrow. We’re doing a show about scary toxic chemicals for Halloween. But there are a lot of toxic chemicals that you’re exposed to in Halloween.
And one of them is lead in face paint. And there was a study done where they actually took 10 brands of face paint, and they sent them all to the lab. This was a campaign for safe cosmetic. They sent them all to the lab, and all 10 of them had lead.
And I’ll let you say that there is no safe level for lead.
STEVEN GILBERT: There is no safe level of lead exposure. And lead exposure should always be avoided. We are exposed to a little background lead because we’ve done a great job spreading it around the environment. But there is no reason for products like face paint have lead in them.
Titanium is a great product. And most paint is switched to titanium. So, cosmetics should not have lead in them. And they should remember this, that a child exposed to that, lipstick will have lead in them. There’s been a study showing how much lipstick can have in it. And that’s really detrimental because you put lipstick on your lips, obviously, and you lick a little bit of that, so you’re ingesting it when you rub it off your lips.
So, there is just no reason to have lead in cosmetics. And I think our industries and our product developers need to be accountable for that and need to get the lead out of their products.
DEBRA: I completely agree. So what are some other sources where people might be exposed to lead that they could avoid?
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, one, you have to be careful of, some candies will have lead in them (in the wrappings on the candies, the lead paint). And jewelry is a really important source. They’re really clammed down on that. There have been increased laws about that, trying to remove lead from products. And then, Washington State did pass a law trying to ban lead, cadmium and phthalates from baby toys.
But there are a lot of products and a lot of toys that have lead paint on them. There was quite a campaign to get lead out of products coming from China, for example.
So, lead is a great additive. It makes things shiny. It dries quickly. So there’s a lot of incentive to use lead. But it’s really detrimental to the child’s development when they’re exposed to lead. And those detriments occurred at very little levels.
The Center for Disease Control just the last year has lowered the blood lead action level. It wasn’t as far as I’d like to see it go, but they did set a new level of lead action, really emphasizing, again, that there is no safe level of lead exposure.
DEBRA: Another source is lead in the glaze on dinnerware, and also lead crystal. And those are very—
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, good point. The lead can be on glazened dinnerware. So you have to be careful of that.
And a new technology now called XRF Technology allows you to scan products fairly quickly to see if there’s lead in them. And where you live, there are agencies and other non-profits that have this XRF Technology, and do programs where you can bring in toys and other products in to get checked for lead.
Another source of lead is actually, just recently, is bath buts. Old bath tubs can have lead glazed on them.
DEBRA: I read about that in my books, yes. And so you just need to—so what is your opinion about using the little test kits, the little swabs?
STEVEN GILBERT: Those little swabs are good. They give you a basic indication if there’s lead there. But they’re not great in the sense they don’t tell you how much lead is there. They don’t go beneath the surface—so it’s just surface lead such as paint chips. Lower paints may have lead in them, they will not check for that if there’s some painted over. They’ll give you a gross indication, but they’re not super reliable.
DEBRA: My viewpoint is that I think that they could be used as an inexpensive way to—if it tests positive, you know there’s some lead there. And you just make a decision not to use it right there. If it tests negative, then you want to go and get the other tests.
STEVEN GILBERT: If you suspect it might have lead in it, then you have to move on to a more specific test like using the XRF Technology.
DEBRA: We need to take another break.
STEVEN GILBERT: …which has really been a great development because it’s a very cheap way. It’s quick. It gives you feedback immediately about the product. And you can actually look in dirt also, lead in dirt, or in the paint […] and things like that.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. So we’ll be right back. And we’re going to be talking about mercury when we come back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m talking with toxicologist, Dr. Steven Gilbert.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s a toxicologist. And his website is Toxipedia.org. And you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and look for this show.
There’s a link there to his book, A Small Dose of Toxicology: The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. When you click on that link, you can get a free copy of the e-book.
So, Dr. Gilbert, let’s go on and talk about mercury now. This is really fascinating to hear, these different characteristics of these different chemicals. So how is mercury different from lead and caffeine?
STEVEN GILBERT: Mercury is a very interesting compound also. Mercury comes in two flavors—inorganic and organic.
So, the inorganic, many people have experienced playing with the silver metal. Have you tried playing with that, Debra?
DEBRA: I think in science class a long time ago.
STEVEN GILBERT: It’s fun to play around with on table top. Broken thermometers will have quite a bit of mercury. Your old thermostats will have mercury in them in old houses. This one had a mercury-based thermostat that I finally got rid of. It could be recycled safely.
But mercury has been widely used. It’s got many, many uses in the electronic industry. And it’s actually a good fungicide. It’s been added to paint before, which is not a good idea. But it’s a very powerful compound.
Now, the thing about mercury is it could change to organic mercury, methyl mercury, when it gets into the environment.
So, bacteria change the mercury, the inorganic into organic mercury, methyl mercury, and it gradually moves up the food chain from algae, bacteria and other organisms, up into the fish we eat. It’s concentrated in high tropic level fish—fish that consume other fish. For example, tuna, shark, pike, will have high concentrations of mercury in them. Swordfish has generally high levels of mercury in that because it’s concentrated in the muscle.
So, mercury goes to the muscle and also the central nervous system. It’s stored there—not in fat, and not in bone, but in muscle. So it’s very hard to get rid of it from the fish.
So, we learned about mercury—the first instance where we really became aware of this was in Minamata in Japan in the 1950s. This caused a really tragic exposure and great consternation in the population there. It caused fetal deformities and really retarded development.
So, the question lately is how little mercury—is there any level of mercury that’s safe?
And generally, there’s no level of mercury that’s really safe, although it’s very difficult not to be exposed to some mercury because fish is a very important food source.
So, one of the sources of mercury that everybody should be aware of is coal. Coal has some mercury in it. Coal-fired plants will produce mercury. And that’s been one of the issues in Washington State in the Northwest because they want to ship a lot of coal to China.
Coals burn in China, the prevailing winds move the ethylene from those smoke stacks, which contains mercury, in the Pacific Ocean, and into the Northwest United States, which contaminates our water supplies with mercury. And the fish and wildlife become sources of mercury.
So, mercury causes neurodevelopment disorders. It’s a well-known neurotoxicant. Inorganic mercury is like the Mad Hatter.
Remember the Mad Hatter?
DEBRA: Yes.
STEVEN GILBERT: And that’s a great story. It was used in the felting and hatting industry, and their exposure to mercury there.
DEBRA: I’m trying to remember. Don’t they lick the brushes, and that’s how they were doing, getting the mercury, because they licked the brushes? Maybe I’m thinking of something else.
STEVEN GILBERT: It was mostly from vapor. So the mercury would evaporate and they would be exposed to them that way, inhaling the mercury. You’re thinking of paint, licking the paint radium. Dial watches were well-known for that because people were painting the dials on watches and would be exposed to radium which is a toxic and bone-seeking compound.
DEBRA: And also, did you know that Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, died from mercury poisoning?
STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, I’ve heard about that. There are some thoughts about that. There were also a couple of Chinese emperors that died from mercury exposure too. It seems they were taking mercury tablets.
Mercury has been used as a medicine for a long time. It’s for syphilis and for other diseases. It also shows up in cosmetics because it’s a great fungicide. You might know that some vaccines will have organic mercury in vaccines. There’s a lot of concern about that potentially contributing to autism. Most of the data is not supporting that, but that’s another issue because we’re exposed to mercury from a variety of products and sources.
DEBRA: Well, I can tell you that I—well, I do occasionally drink coffee. I do not eat fish or any kind of seafood.
STEVEN GILBERT: Seafood is really good. It’s got omega-3 fatty acids in it. I think it’s more looking at which fish you eat. Like salmon, for example, they spend a lot of time in the ocean, but they’re relatively short-lived. It’s the longer-lived fish that you really have to worry about mercury exposure in them like tuna, swordfish, pike. They are longer-lived fish that consume other fish that you really have to worry about.
But fish has got a lot of important nutrients in it.
DEBRA: I agree. But ever since I was a child, and I took my first bite of fish, which happened to be halibut, I’ve never wanted to eat seafood. I put it in my mouth and I go, “I don’t want this.” And I know that some people just love seafood and think it’s the most delicious thing in the world. And it just isn’t for me. I just pay attention to the fact that my body doesn’t want it, and I don’t eat it.
STEVEN GILBERT: Well, that’s important to do. I think that, again, it’s the developing nervous system that’s the most vulnerable to mercury exposure. So it’s women of child-bearing age, and the developing nervous system of kids that are most vulnerable to mercury exposure.
Actually, one more thought on that.
DEBRA: Go ahead.
STEVEN GILBERT: The EPA is actually looking at revising that because there are numerous looking at the amount of fish that are consumed because high fish consumers are more vulnerable to mercury exposure. So the EPA is looking at changing its recommendations on how much mercury is safe to consume. It would be very interesting to see in the next year.
DEBRA: Well, Dr. Gilbert, we only have a few minutes left, so is there anything that you want to make sure that you say in this show? We have about four minutes left.
STEVEN GILBERT: The thing I would like to—well, one quick thing about lead is we have to be careful of lead in drinking water. So you have to watch out for that. Old homes have lead-based pipes that bring water into the home. And even some schools, the older schools can have lead in the drinking water. So just watch out for that.
I think the other thing I just want to mention is we need to take a more precautionary approach to chemicals we’re exposed to.
The precautionary principle says that we need to look at the uncertainty and not focus on the uncertainty that we need to take a precautionary approach and reduce exposure to these chemicals.
The Food and Drug Administration, we put new drugs on the market, we take a very precautionary approach, requiring that chemicals or data be submitted from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries demonstrating safety and efficacy of products. We do not have a similar approach in industrial chemicals.
And that, I think, really needs to change. They’re trying to modify the Toxic Substance Control Act, which is an old law passed in 1976, to really adjust that and provide more data on chemicals and the potential hazards of industrial-based chemicals that we’re exposed to.
DEBRA: I think that’s really important. I’ve been thinking, one of the things that I’ve noticed because I’ve been doing this work a long time like you have is that I’ve seen things change over the years in terms of the general awareness of the society, but also the information that has become available. There are so much more information about the toxicity of products than there was 30 years ago.
And so I now see many more individuals and agencies and organizations saying, “Well, we need to do something about these toxic chemicals.”
And then what happens is that a list is put together of chemicals of concern, and then it all has to be supported by scientific data.
Now, I think that that’s all a good thing to do. I’m not against science by any means. But as a consumer advocate and somebody who’s trying to avoid chemicals in my daily life, it seems to me like there are some things that are obvious—that organic food without pesticides is better for you than food with pesticides sprayed on it.
I think that there’s ample enough evidence to know that we shouldn’t be consuming pesticides. And yet, that still continues.
And what do you think needs to happen in order for us to stop trying to prove how toxic various chemicals are, and just make that leap out of them entirely? That’s what I would like.
STEVEN GILBERT: I totally agree with you. And that’s why I really emphasize we need a more precautionary approach and more emphasis on the precautionary principle because we have all this information.
That’s one thing I’m trying to do with my website. We have tremendous amounts of knowledge. The issue is applying it and making the information accessible. We need to know what is in our products and what we’re being exposed to.
Caffeine is a great example of that. It might be listed as an ingredient, but you don’t know how much is in the beverages you’re consuming. And it can be fatal. There have been a couple of incidences where people consuming high caffeine-containing beverages have died.
So, we really need to have a better approach to chemicals in the environment where the burden of proof is not for the consumer to demonstrate harm, but the industry has to have the burden of demonstrating it showing safety.
Bisphenol-A is a great example of that. We secrete a little bit of Bisphenol-A in urine, and nobody gave permission to be exposed to these compounds.
DEBRA: No, we haven’t. I haven’t, and I don’t want to be exposed to them. Well, we’re going to run out of time in about less than a minute, but I just want to close with this statement. And we’re going to have a lot more time to talk, Dr. Gilbert.
What I wanted to say is that I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a lot better labeling so that we know. There needs to be disclosure, there needs to be labeling, so that consumers really know what’s in the product, and we can make informed choices.
Thank you so much. And I want to work on that a lot more coming up. So, thank you so much for being on, Dr. Gilbert. We are going to have you back very soon.
STEVEN GILBERT: Great. Thank you very much. And thanks, Debra. It’s really great.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out who else is going to be on this week.
Target’s New “Sustainable Products Standard”
Nine months ago, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families asked the top ten retailers to remove one hundred hazardous chemicals from their store shelves. After months of communications from this organization as well as consumer pressure, last week Target announced their first step in the Mind the Store challenge.
Target now has a new “Sustainable Products Standard.”
I think it’s great that Target is starting to look at toxic chemicals in the products they sell. They have identified authoritative lists of chemicals of concern and will give a product ZERO points in their rating system “if they have one or more ingredients on one of the designated hazard lists…A product can receive a maximum of 50 points if they have no ingredients on the hazard lists.”
So can you now assume that all products sold by Target are or will be safe?
Not yet.
First, their rating system only covers a limited list of toxic chemicals. The worst ones, to be sure, but there are still others not addressed.
And I agree with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families that Target should make their ratings for each product known to consumers, so we can tell which products on their shelves are the safest.
Meanwhile, you can shop at Debra’s List, knowing I’ve listed only the safest products I can find.
The Seal that Defines “Natural Product”
My guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs Manager for the Natural Products Association (NPA). We’ll be talking about the what defines a natural product, how natural products are labeled, what, if any, government regulations apply to them, and what the Natural Products Association is doing to identify products that meet their definition.Vicki works with the association’s self-regulatory quality assurance and regulatory education programs, and manages the NPA GMP Certification Program. In this capacity, she works closely with program advisors, third-party auditors and companies seeking NPA GMP certification. She has been involved in the development and revisions of the NPA GMP Standard and related program materials and GMP education for the past 14 years. Through her work, Ms. Whitsitt has developed competencies in dietary supplement law and regulation compliance. www.NPAinfo.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Seal That Defines “Natural Product”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Vicki Whatsitt
Date of Broadcast: October 17, 2013
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 it’s necessary to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals all over the place—in the air we breathe, then the food we eat, the water we drink, in our homes, in consumer products, and even in our bodies that our bodies are carrying around toxic chemicals from past exposures, toxic chemicals that your body can’t process very well.
And so we talk about toxic chemicals, and we talk about their health effects, and we talk about what’s toxic and what’s not, and how we can live in a way that is healthy for us, and eliminate as many as toxic exposures as we can, and find the things that are not toxic.
Today is Thursday, October 17, 2013. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, and it’s a little bit overcast today. We’re not having our usual sunshine that we were talking about yesterday when we were talking about sunscreen, and I just want to remind people that even if it’s cloudy, you still can get a sunburn, so watch out for that.
Today, my guest is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s the scientific and regulatory affairs manager for the Natural Products Association.
And we’re going to be talking today about what is a natural product. That term natural product is used very widely and has been used for a long time, but there actually is an organization—the Natural Products Association, who has set a standard and a definition, and certifies products as being natural. And we’re going to find out what that means today.
Hi, Vicki. Thanks for being with me.
VICKI WHITSITT: Thank you, Debra. It’s a pleasure to be here.
DEBRA: Thanks. Well, first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, what your interest is, and your background in, how you got to the Natural Products Association? And then tell us about the history of the Association.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, my background is, of course, as a consumer, I’ve been interested in the whole natural industry approach, whatever you want to call it, since I was quite young. I won’t tell you how long ago that was. I raised my kids to eating what people would call naturals foods, and avoiding processed foods, avoiding a lot of refined sugars, that sort of thing.
Then I started actually with the Natural Products Association.
So I always had a personal interest.
And then I started working for the National Products Industry about 16 years ago. And now, I’m on the other side of it, meaning, not the consumer side, but now, I’m on the business side. And so, I’ll tell you a little bit about the organization—who we are, what we do.
So we were founded in 1936. That means we’re 77 years old. We’re the nation’s largest and oldest trade association dedicated to the natural products industry. And as a trade association, of course, a lot of what we do is advocate on Capitol Hill […] for the rights of consumers to have access to natural products, for the rights of retailers and suppliers so they can sell the products.
We have over 1900 members, and that accounts for over 10,000 retail, manufacturing and distribution locations throughout the U.S. We have companies in all 50 states, as a matter of fact.
And we are the only trade association that covers the entire spectrum—from the ingredient suppliers, the manufacturer to the retailer. And we believe that our membership diversity makes us strong. Our retailers are particularly important because they’re the gateway to the consumers, and they let us know at every turn about what’s important to consumers.
DEBRA: What happened in 1936 that made it necessary for this association to be founded?
VICKI WHITSITT: That is a great question. I don’t have any exact answer. I just know a long time ago, it wasn’t as broad a focus. And so trade associations are important because that’s people with common interest grouping together to talk to Capitol Hill, and to advocate for business opportunities, that sort of thing.
And so a small group of people, we were not very large, and we started when we were established. And one of the early activities that we did besides advocating was started trade shows. So our association started the first trade show in this industry—a place for business to come together, and retailers and business talk about what’s out there, what the consumers want, and interact.
So from the very beginning, we’ve been very involved with all aspects of the industry.
DEBRA: So now, I understand that there’s no legal definition of the word natural product.
VICKI WHITSITT: That’s true.
DEBRA: And I wanted to just give the URL of your business. It’s NPAInfo.org, Natural Products Association. NPAInfo.org.
And you have a lot of information on this site, and I’m hoping that my listeners will go there, and take a look. And when you get to the site, there are different tabs. It’s the top one. It says for consumers, for retailers and for suppliers.
And of course, you can look at all of them. But if you click on the for consumers tab, then there are various pieces of information there, including a store locator where you can type in your zip code, and find stores that sell products that have been certified.
So one of the things that you do at the Natural Products Association is that you certify natural products. So first, please tell me, what is your definition of a natural product.
VICKI WHITSITT: The definition is that products are made of ingredients that come from or are made from a renewable resource found in nature—fauna, flora, mineral. Absolutely no petroleum compound, and that the processing is used to make these are only those that are allowed under the standard.
Under the definition, it does allow, and the standard does allow for—it’s 95% truly natural, and then there’s a very limited amount of synthetic preservatives that can be used in products that will certify natural.
DEBRA: I’ve been researching this regarding about this subject for 30 years, so let me ask you some questions. So it sounds like when I first started, I thought the definition of natural was just as you said, that it would be a plant and animal, or a mineral, and it wouldn’t have any petroleum ingredients in it.
And then you said about processing that it needed to just be minimal processing.
And that’s what I thought too. So in that case, a natural product would be something that has, say, on the label, ingredients that we would recognize like—well, these are ingredients that would be in a product, but apples and lemons and coconut oil, and salt, and things like that. Am I on the right track here so far?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, yes. And I mean, for a food that’s probably exactly what you would see on the label. It’s a little trickier with cosmetics, with personal care products because they use what’s called INCI Nomenclature. It’s very specific naming, convention for ingredients.
And so sometimes when you’re looking at a label, you see something that you can’t pronounce, but it really might be a natural ingredient, or there might be something, an extract, “Oh, yes. Lavender oil extract. I know what that is,” and you would assume that that’s natural.
But depending on how it was made, it might be what we consider natural under our definition—cold-pressed. But it also may have been extracted using a solvent—a petroleum-based solvent, which then would make that what we would call synthetic ingredient.
DEBRA: I exactly agree with you on that. So this is the question that I’m trying to ask is because you wouldn’t accept for certification if it was lavender oil, for example, that was extracted with a solvent. But you would accept it if it was cold-pressed.
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes, exactly. And that’s the value of a program like ours. All of our products and ingredients have gone through very vigorous third party reviews as part of the certification process.
DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about that when we come back. We need to go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, and she’s from the Natural Products Association. They look with great scrutiny natural products and certify ones that are truly natural. And we’re going to find out more about what that means when we come back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt from the Natural Products Association. And we’re talking about what makes a natural product.
Okay, so what we said before the break was that it needs to be a plant or animal or a mineral, and not a synthetic, petrochemical ingredient. Yet, let me ask you this. I’m going to ask you this question, but it’s not to be critical because I want to understand the logic of what you’re applying here.
So you wouldn’t certify a product that had lavender oil in it that was extracted with a solvent, but you allow some small percentage of preservatives and stuff that are synthetic?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes, and that’s a really good question. And we’re often asked why we allow any synthetic ingredient under the natural standard. That’s a good question.
DEBRA: A lot of listeners are asking that question.
VICKI WHITSITT: These are temporarily allowed as the standard of a living document. It’s reviewed continually. We’ve already made some revisions that strengthen it.
For example, we now only allow natural fragrances under the standard. And that’s progress. That’s a tremendous progress.
And it took several years of ingredient companies working to make sure that there were commercially available natural fragrances, so that we could move to that step.
It’s important for natural products to be effective and properly preserved for consumers to choose them over the alternative, and for them to come back and buy them. You take it home, but if it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t hold up, if it’s not shelf-stable at home, you’re not going to want to buy it again.
And so the allowed synthetics, you’ll notice it’s limited to a very specific short list, most of which are there because they provide preservation activity to ensure that the products are shelf-stable in the store and also in the consumer’s home.
Like I said, we’re evolving, adjusting the science technological advancements. We’re always looking for natural alternatives.
So this is reviewed every year to determine if there are viable alternatives commercially available. And as they come available, these things will be dropped from the standard.
And our goal, of course, is 100%. And by the way, we think that being 95% of the way there is much better than where we were a few years ago. And many of our products are able to be formulated not using any synthetics.
But we feel it’s important, especially the preservation activity, that there needs to be those alternatives out there for ingredients that need the preservative in them to be stable, and not to go rancid, to stay a [viable] product for the consumer.
That’s why we have these limited lists.
So just to be clear—it doesn’t mean any synthetic. The only synthetics that are allowed are those on that very limited list.
DEBRA: That’s very clear. Thank you for clearing that up. So if you have a seal, it says Natural Products Association certified, it has—I see two of them here. I’m thinking one is for personal care, and one is for household products […]?
And so if I see that on the label, as a consumer, that means that that it’s 100% natural, it may be 100% natural, but it may also have some of these other ingredients that are allowed.
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. And our standard does require that all ingredients are listed, so a consumer can see exactly what’s in the product.
Any of these products that might be using a very—and normally, we’re talking 1% or less, but they will be listed on the label because they also are…
DEBRA: And I just want to say because I know that there are some people listening, and sometimes including myself, that want everything to be 100% natural. And so they say, “Well, how do I identify what are the ingredients that are not natural?”
So in this case, you really need to learn what those ingredients are. The ones that are allowed are listed on the website. And I want to say that it’s a tremendous, tremendous step in the right direction that these products are certified have moved away from even more toxic things that could be in products. They’re so much better than the really toxic products that are on the market.
And so to have these very small amounts of synthetics in them, well, you’d have to not walk outside and breathe the air. It really is that […], wouldn’t you say?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. And we appreciate that. We don’t feel that we’re doing the consumer any good if we have a standard that companies can’t meet, first of all, because they’re not going to put out a product that is unsafe or stable. Then you’re not going to have the products.
And number two, again, we want everybody—consumers, and I’m a consumer as well, I want that product to last when I open it up more than a day or two.
And again, one of the strengths is that this is a constantly evolving standard and definition. And we have very great technical expertise involved in this that they really understand. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of the ingredient industry.
And so we are able to evaluate when we can move a synthetic off of the list.
DEBRA: That’s great that you’re doing that.
Now, I know some of my listeners are wondering, well, what about—are all the ingredients organic, or do they have pesticide residues? I’m asking a lot of hard questions, I know…
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, that’s a good question. Organic might be natural. Natural is not necessarily organic. So there are companies that use the organic ingredients, but it’s not a requirement under our standard.
One of the things we also do—no, this is good. These are good questions, is that part of the documentation companies submit is they do have to submit […] that lists contaminants as well, so that we do look for issues, but we’re not an organic standard.
DEBRA: Okay, good. We need to take another break. And we’ll be back with more hard questions.
VICKI WHITSITT: Okay. I love them. Thank you.
DEBRA: I’m just trying to make it clear what you’re doing, so that people know what it is when they see your seal, that they know what it represents.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s with the Natural Products Association, and they certify natural products.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s with the Natural Products Association. And we’re talking about what makes a natural product, and about what kind of products they certify, and why.
So I have another ingredient question for you, Vicki. We were talking about lavender oil that’s cold-pressed versus lavender oil with a solvent—that you wouldn’t certify something that had solvent extract of lavender oil
What about ingredients—a lot of ingredients that are in, what are considered to be products in the natural products industry, are products that have as their source material a renewable or mineral product, like coconut oil, for example. But then that coconut oil goes through an industrial process, and gets turned into something like sodium lauryl sulfate.
So are those kinds of ingredients that are industrially processed also included?
VICKI WHITSITT: No.
DEBRA: So it explain to us more about that.
VICKI WHITSITT: They’re included on the prohibited list, if that’s what you’re asking. So if you’ve been looking on our website, and you looked at our standard, you’ll see that within the standard itself, we have prohibited ingredients, and we also have a separate illustrative list.
So we describe prohibited ingredients by class or type, and then we also have called out some specific ingredients that are prohibited and why, and one of the things that part of this vigorous, third party review, when companies want to get a product certified or an ingredient certified, they have to include documentation that tells us the source because something like glycerin, or there are other ingredients that can come from a natural source or a synthetic source.
So we have to go all the way back to the source, we have to look at how it’s processed, and we don’t allow, even if it was processed using a solvent that’s not in the final product, our standard doesn’t allow it even in the processing.
DEBRA: That’s excellent.
VICKI WHITSITT: So we do a really vigorous ingredient review, as well as product review. And also, any of our certified ingredients, no synthetics are allowed in the finished ingredient, or in the processing of the ingredient. So those are 100% natural.
You have a company that wants to make a natural product, and they are searching for sources for their ingredients. They can go to our website, look at our list, and those are ingredients that have already been through the review process and qualified—well, qualified under our standard.
Our illustrative list, I think what you brought up is a really good point, if anybody is listening, that is a formulator, understand that the list—again, we use the lavender oil. If you have to look at the source, you have to look at how it’s made because just simply being on that list doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to qualify under the standard.
DEBRA: I’m glad you pointed that out. I wanted to tell you how happy I was to see that list because one of the things that’s happening right now, and whether it was just some progress about this in the last couple of days, is that you may or may not know that there is an organization that is asking top 10 retailers to take certain chemicals, products with certain chemicals off their shelves.
And this past week, Target was one of those on the list, and they were not doing it, and not doing it, and not doing it. And they finally agreed to do it.
And so I’m having been looking at products and evaluating products for myself as a consumer advocate for more than 30 years, I’m asking myself, as good an idea as this is, to ask retailers to do this, how are they supposed to evaluate the products that are on their shelves if they don’t have any kind of background in this subject?
But that same question comes up in terms of consumers too. I know what I know because—I didn’t take chemistry in school, but I certainly studied toxicology books and chemistry books, and all of these things. And it seems like that right now, we’re at a point where there’s a lot of pressure from different directions for retailers and manufacturers to identify their toxic ingredients, to reduce their toxic ingredients, and yet, everybody seems to have to start at square one, and look at an ingredient, and learn how to evaluate it, and go look it up in a toxicology book.
And what you’ve done is that you put together a list that says these are the acceptable ingredients.
And this is what we need on a much larger scale. This is my opinion. We need to have lists of the toxic ingredients that are not acceptable, like you’ve made, and we need to have lists of ingredients that are acceptable, like you’ve made.
I’m in complete agreement with your process, and I wish this would be done more, so that consumers can then say, “Well, we know what to look for now.” And I wish that there would be more information on the labels, so that it can say lavender oil cold-pressed, and that would be the standard, so that those of us who want to take a look at it can.
I think you’re doing everything exactly on the right track.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, thank you. With that in mind—you’re right. Consumers probably are not going to have access to all of the information, obviously, that we have, when a company submits ingredients. But a consumer can go to our standard, for example, and look where we have ingredients that are prohibited.
And even if you just started with our initial list where we talk about parabens, or the SOS, or petroleum, mineral oil, paraffin, glycols, phthalates, some of those things—it’s surprising how many products with the term natural in their name have these ingredients in them.
So maybe a consumer won’t know where that lavender oil, or exactly how it was processed, but they could use our standard and familiarize themselves with some of the more commonly used synthetics, and look for products that avoid those, or they can buy some things that have our seal on it, and they’ll know that NPA’s done the hard for them.
DEBRA: And also, anyone can go to your website. And again, I’ll give it. It’s NPAInfor.org. And if you click on the “for consumers” tab, one of the things is right there on that page. Look for the headline that says “certified natural products.”
And then there’s a list of personal care products, there’s a list of homecare products, and you can just click on either one of those, and it tells you the exact brand names.
Then you can just go to the store and choose those, and know that they meet the standards.
And I really do think—you have put together some great information that anyone who’s interested in natural products to go and look your standard, go look at your list of products, and they can start to learn what are the ingredients to look for that are good, and which to avoid.
We’re going to talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt. She’s from the Natural Products Association. And we’ll learn more about natural products after this.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Vicki Whitsitt, from the Natural Products Association, and they certify products to be natural. They have the standard, and when a product meets their standard, then they can display the seal.
Vicki, could you just tell us, step by step, what a product needs to go through in order to get the seal?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, sure. For a company that has a product that they want to put through the process, the first thing that they have to do is ensure that at least 60% of their product line needs to the NPA standard. That’s to qualify. They don’t have to certify all of those, but our program is intended to be more than a green washing program.
So we want a company that has a real commitment to natural, and part of the way they demonstrate that is having at least 60% of their product line qualify.
So then we recommend, the next step is they read our standard, become familiar with what’s allowed, what’s prohibited, there’s an application process, and they will have to provide how it works, and detailed information about each of the ingredients, as well as the manufacturing process that they’ve used to make the product.
It sounds very simple. It can be very complicated because we do ask a lot of information. But we need that to be able to verify that their ingredients qualify under the standard.
And the cost for certification is $500.00 per product for NPA members, and $1250 per product for non-members—the flat fee that covers all the administrative work on our end, the cost of the audit, and the use of the seal for two years. If they use NPA-certified ingredients—
DEBRA: I think that’s a reasonable…
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. It really is. It’s a bargain, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It is. It is. Yes. So I’ve seen on your website that you have some articles about labeling. So let’s talk about labeling for a little bit. There was one about GMO labeling. What’s your position on that?
VICKI WHITSITT: NPA’s position is that we support the consumer’s right to know in a nutshell.
DEBRA: Good!
VICKI WHITSITT: So there you go. But when we’re looking at it from a legislative point of view, we want to be sure that that’s really the goal of it. That’s something that NPA just grappled with this past year. We spent a lot of time discussing it. But we have always, for quite a long time, NPA’s position has been supporting the consumer’s right to know what’s in a product.
DEBRA: I agree with that. And I think that I probably more than most people in the world want to see everything. I know some consumers say, “But I don’t even know what that means if I see it on the label.”
But I want to know everything.
And also, you have something about caffeine labeling. Do you think that caffeinated beverages and food should be labeled?
VICKI WHITSITT: Yes. We did a voluntary standard, and it’s not about restricting. It’s really, again, consumer’s right to know. And so we did come out in support of voluntary labeling caffeine standard.
DEBRA: Good. So that’s a standard that you’re having that can be a part of your standard.
Now, you particularly work in the NPA GMP Certification Program. Now, what does GMP mean?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it means Good Manufacturing Practices.
DEBRA: Good Manufacturing Practices. I knew it must have meant something standard like that […]
VICKI WHITSITT: The companies that are certified say it means—yes. So it has to do with the systems that you use to make sure that your product meets the established specification, so you’re producing quality products.
DEBRA: What products does that apply to?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, in NPA Certification Program, it’s specific to dietary supplements. There are good manufacturing practices for foods, there are voluntary guidelines for cosmetics, for example. But NPA Certification Program is specific to dietary supplement. That would include vitamins, minerals, herbal products—they all fall under the regulatory definition of dietary supplement.
DEBRA: And what kind of practices might not be good practices? Why would a company need to get certified, or want to get certified to show that they’re not doing what?
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it’s not about what they’re not doing. It’s about what they are doing. Did they have appropriate procedures in place? Are they documenting their work like they should? Do they have—you might call it a recipe and a cookbook, but do they have a master manufacturing record that describes how everything is going to be done, so that no steps are left out, that the right amount of the ingredients get in?
Have they set appropriate specifications for their ingredients to ensure that they have the correct strength, and that they don’t have any contaminants in them?
So it’s about setting up a strong, quality system that puts controls in place from the raw material stage, all the way through the manufacturing, all your verification testing, and even your distribution practices.
So it really is creating a very strong quality system. And the reason you would be certified is because, again, you have undergone a very rigorous third party review to evaluate if you meet that level of compliance.
And so by law, everybody has to meet the FDA GMP’s for dietary supplements. But there’s other variance as to how companies do it, and how strong their systems really are. So certification is the way you can show your customers, their businesses, your retailers that, in fact, you have strong quality systems in place.
DEBRA: That’s actually very interesting to hear you describe all of this because I’m mostly looking at ingredients. I’m wanting to get the most natural ingredients that I can and avoid the ones that are synthetic and toxic. But I hadn’t really thought about the quality of the manufacturing.
And while you were talking, I was thinking about how I, as a homemaker, am manufacturing things that I make in my home, such as dinner. I was thinking about you saying, did they have it written down how much to put in, this and that, and the other thing.
And as consumers, we want to know that if we buy a product that it needs certain standards of quality. But we don’t quite know what those quality standards are. And we also want to know that if we buy a product once, and it has a certain standard that we can expect that it’s going to have that standard again.
But I honestly can’t tell you […] going to do the same for me from one night to the next.
VICKI WHITSITT: But the cooking at home, making your famous chicken soup is different. And like you said, that’s where variances are okay. But you don’t want variances in your dietary supplements. You want them to be consistent from bottle to bottle.
DEBRA: But it makes sense to me that—I know my skills at cooking, I know the skill of other people as cooks, and I know that there’s a big difference. It’s just human beings, people like you and I, who are working in these manufacturing companies, and they have different degrees of skill as to how well they’re going to do, put these quality assurance things into place.
So it makes sense to me that there would be a certification that would just look at the quality of how the product is being produced.
And I also thought that I should say that I know I’ve talked to a lot of different organizations that have different kinds of certification programs. And I know from my past experience that just because a product doesn’t have a certification doesn’t meant that it’s a bad product, that there’s a lot of reasons why people don’t get certifications.
That doesn’t mean that they don’t meet the standard, for example. They just aren’t certified.
VICKI WHITSITT: We agree with you. That certification is a way to demonstrate to others that our programs are based on third party assessments. But you’re right. A company choosing not to go through it should not necessarily be seen as a negative—more these programs are a positive. They are a way for you to demonstrate to others that third party assessment demonstration that a lot of consumers are looking for.
Because most of us don’t—I mean, I can’t think of any consumer that has access to a manufacturing plant, for example. It just doesn’t happen.
And so if you’re concerned, or if you’re looking for a way to have more confidence, that’s what it’s about.
And also GMP certification is valuable business to business. And so there’s another level there why companies participate, not only for the consumer, but it’s also their businesses where they are—the retailers, or companies that manufacture, but don’t sell their own product, they manufacture for others.
Those people buying, they’re having their products made by them, want some level of assurance, some qualified assessment of the systems in place.
DEBRA: Well, our time is just about up. Thank you so much for being with me today, Vicki. And I do understand a lot better now what your organization does. And I’ll take a look for that seal when I know what it means now when I see it.
VICKI WHITSITT: Well, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on your show. We appreciate you reaching out to NPA about our natural standard and certification programs. We love to get the word out about what we have to offer, and let consumers know about where to look for, what to look for, and that they can come to our website to find even more…
DEBRA: Sorry. There’s the music. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd.
Safe Face Paint
Question from Deanna
I have some great homeade recipes for face paint http://www.mommypotamus.com/how-to-make-homemade-face-paint-thats-safe-enough-to-ea/ but it would be nice not having to make something from scratch! I have come across this company a few times & wonder if their face paint is safe? http://www.naturalearthpaint.com/2013/07/07/introducing-our-natural-face-body-paint-kit/
Debra’s Answer
Yes, this face paint from Earth Paints is safe. It’s completely natural and organic, and tested by toxicologists to be free of heavy metals, parabens, animal products and formaldehyde.
Several years ago, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics had face paints tested, and found that 10 out of 10 children’s face paints tested contained low levels of lead. Lead can be absorbed through the skin, and there is NO safe level. Lead is a neurotoxin that affects the nervous system.
According to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics:
Other heavy metals found were nickel, chromium, and cobalt.
MelanSol Certified Natural Skin Care
A very natural sunscreen (in three strengths) that does not contain the common toxic ingredients found in most sunscreens, plus moisturizers and sunburn care products. This site also has a lot of information about toxic ingredients in sun care products.
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Listen to my interview with Oceana Naturals President Michael J. Russ. |
Raise a Green Dog
An excellent resource for all things toxic-free for dogs, chosen by a caring human who loves her dogs (and cats). There’s a blog with lots of information about toxics in dog products and safer alternatives (click on “Learn to be Green”) and lots of toxic-free products.
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Listen to my interview with Raise a Green Dog authors Leslie May and Johann The Dog. |
