TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Does the Natural Approach to Life Really Makes Us Healthier & Happier
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Nathanael Johnson
Date of Broadcast: June 25, 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.
Yes, there are toxic chemicals all around. And we encounter them every day, but there’s something we can do about it. We can eliminate toxic exposures in our own homes. We can remove toxic chemicals from our bodies. We can support legislation that limits toxic exposures in consumer products and choose to have a toxic-free life where we can think clearly, our bodies will feel good, we can feel good, and we can be productive and happy and do whatever we want.
That’s the point of this show, is to get to those solutions and find out what we need to be doing in order to have a toxic free world.
My guest today is Nathanael Johnson. He’s the author of a book called All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier.
But before we talk to him, I want to tell you about a summer vacation I had a few years ago. I went to Concorde, Massachusetts, home of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. And for those of you who don’t know who these people are—I have discovered that some people in the world don’t know these people—I grew up with them and that probably ages me.
Louisa May Alcott is the author of a very famous book called Little Women which has been a movie also. Her father was a big mover and shaker in social change going on at that time. And Henry David Thoreau wrote a very famous book called Walden, which he—well, I’ll tell you about him in a minute.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the greatest philosophers of all America ever. And he wrote a number of philosophic books about the importance of nature and the importance of spirituality. And all of these people were living at a time in the late 1800s when industrialism was coming to America and getting established and the whole American scene was changing from being agricultural and having lots of open spaces and lots of wild land to being more industrialized. And instead of having artisans making things, they were being made by machines and factories.
Henry David Thoreau was one of the most outspoken people on this. And his book, Walden was about his experience living for a period of time—I don’t remember how long he lived. But he built a house with his own house on the shores of the lake there which is still there (the lake is there, the house is no longer there). He built the house and Walden is the story of him living there and what he spent his money on and how he went for walks and how he grew his food and all these different things.
What he was trying to do was keep connected with nature at a time when we were fast losing nature to industrialism.
There’s a wonderful museum there in Concorde that addresses this very issue. I learned a lot by going there. I highly recommend a visit to Concorde, Massachusetts to anybody who would like to go on a nice vacation, an instructional vacation.
Right near Concorde is also Lexington where the Revolutionary War started. So there’s a lot you can learn about the founding of our country going to that area.
So, that’s essentially what we’re going to be talking about today, the struggle between nature and industrialism.
Nathanael, thank you for being here with me.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: I took a look at your book, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an interesting conversation.”
So, I’ve read part of your book. I haven’t read all of it, but I’ve read enough of it to get the idea of what you’re going to be talking about. So first, let’s start by having you tell our listening audience about your childhood and how you came to write this book. What motivated you to write this book?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I had parents who were really influenced by those transcedentalist philosophers that you were just talking about. And they really believed that it was healthier to embrace nature rather than trying to protect ourselves from nature using technology.
And so, this meant that I had this childhood where you grew up in a small town up in the hills of the Nevada mountains. We ate a lot of natural foods. There’s a lot of kale and brown rice. We’re backpacking in the mountains every summer. It was really an idyllic childhood in many ways.
My father went so far as to ban diapers even because that was unnatural. The idea was that here are the kids in the fastest period of growth wearing these big, bulk things between their legs, it would warp the bones. And so, this is yet another example of technology causing problems with nature.
I mean, I really had this wonderful childhood. In some ways, I also got a front row seat from which to observe the ways in which it failed. The diaper thing, as I checked that out as an adult, there’s really no evidence that diapers deform bones. And 99.9% of Olympians, pretty much everybody, had some form of diapers and they’re fine.
So, I really became conflicted in some ways. This idea that what’s natural is good is deeply wedded to my sense of childhood innocence and purity. But at the same time, I thought these ways in which it kind of went to crazy places.
And so, as an adult, as I was trying to make decisions for my own children—my wife and I just had our first daughter—it’s no coincidence that the daughter and the book came around the same time. I started doing all these research to try and figure out if there was a way to logically pick through the wisdom and separate it from the craziness.
DEBRA: Well, my background, just so you know, is kind of the opposite in that I grew up in a very technological childhood—on TV dinners and television. And then, I got to a point in my adulthood where I got pretty sick pretty early in my adult life. At age 24, I was disabled. And it turned out to be from exposure to toxic chemicals. And I had no idea there were toxic chemicals in my home. I thought that manufacturers were ethical and wouldn’t give us anything that was bad for us, and that the government was watching out for us. And yet, here, my ordinary American home was making me sick—very sick.
And I had to re-examine everything about the technological world because I had to take everything I owned and look at it and say, “Is this toxic? Or is it not toxic? Is it making me sick or not sick?” And the answer for me was to look to nature and see that my body belonged to nature.
It came from nature like any other species. And things more natural would make more sense.
And as I made my life more natural, my health improved and I did become healthier and happier.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: There’s a certain logic to that, right?
DEBRA: Yeah!
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We came from this world. We spent thousands of years living in this world. Our bodies are adapted to this world. And now we’ve begun to change it very rapidly. And we changed it in some ways in which our bodies are not adapted.
DEBRA: Well, we’ll talk more about that after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. It’s the longest subtitled in the universe.
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 Nathanael Johnson, author of author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. His website is AllNaturalBook.com (no longer in business).
And I thought that this would be a very interesting conversation to have since I’m very naturally oriented. And this is what I’m talking about on my show all the time, is to say “Let’s get closer to nature. Let’s get closer to nature.” But I also know that it’s very difficult to do that.
Again, Nathanael, I’d just like to tell you something that I’ve experienced and see how your experience corresponds or doesn’t.
When I first “discovered nature,” I had an experience where I said, “Oh, my God! Nature is there.” It’s like I didn’t see it before a certain point in time. And I said, “All the answers are in nature. All I need to do is look at nature and do what nature does because, after all, all the other species are doing fine. It’s the humans that don’t know what they’re doing.”
And so, I started to try to pursue that path and very quickly found that it actually couldn’t be done, that I couldn’t completely leave the industrial world. And so I had to have one foot in nature and one foot in the industrial world.
And at the time, I didn’t know how true that was. But now I know that there really isn’t a place on earth that we can go where nature actually exists in its pre-industrial state.
I know that a lot of your book is about looking at the pros and cons. So tell me what your experience was in that dichotomy of having these two worlds of nature and industry.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, the question of finding all the answers in nature is a tricky one. I mean, obviously, we don’t want to completely go back to nature. There’s a lot of bad things. I think that sometimes people who are very technology-oriented use this kind of facile argument where they say, “Well, hurricanes are natural. Tornadoes are natural. Nature isn’t good.” And I think that that’s not what we’re saying.
But there is a need to distinguish between what’s good in nature and what’s dangerous. There are a lot of toxic chemicals I read about in plants.
DEBRA: Yes, there are, there are.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: And that’s something that we’ve lived with and evolved with and adapted to. But there’s some evidence that, perhaps, we could make our lives longer if we started parsing out some of those and finding them. If we go back completely to nature, our lives would certainly be shorter.
So, I say that early in the book. I want to return to nature, but I’m not willing to give up antibiotics. I’m not willing to give up space travel or movies or all of these things that I love about technology at the same time.
DEBRA: Well, you know, honey has natural antibiotics. Why not just take honey?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I would say pretty much all antibiotics are natural. Penicillin comes from mold. So, all of these things—
The line between what’s natural and what’s technological gets very fuzzy when you look closely at it. Penicillin comes from mold, but it’s grown in petri dishes and it’s refined by giant corporations and turned into antibiotics. So then it feels less natural.
It gets harder to parse what’s natural and what’s not. And I really think that this division says more about us, that we divide the world into these two spheres than it says about a real division that actually exists out there.
DEBRA: Well, I think there could be the argument that—well, first, I would argue that we, as human beings, are part of nature.
And so, anything that we do is as natural as anything that a tree does—except that my observation has been (right or wrong) that other species don’t think as much as we do as human being and that we have our ability to change things, whereas…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We are environment-changers. That’s something that’s very different. The scale with which humans use technology—you can argue that there are some animals that’s very interesting. Crows use tools. Chimpanzees use tools.
We use technology that’s altering the planet […]
DEBRA: That’s right. So it’s not like when a tree grows, for example. It’s altering the environment, but it’s altering the environment in a way that is harmonious. And so it takes nutrients from the ground, but it also produces nutrients. And it produces shade and environment and food and all kinds of things. Whereas, a lot of what we’re doing as humans is destructive. And it’s not that we couldn’t make choices that are more life-sustaining. It’s that we haven’t been.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I wouldn’t argue with that. The question if you’re trying to distinguish between what’s your natural antibiotics and which are unnatural antibiotics, it becomes very fuzzy very, very quickly. I just don’t think that’s a useful dividing line in choosing how to cure an illness.
DEBRA: Well, I would say yes and no. That’s a question that I can’t comment on in the next nine seconds.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: We’re coming up on the break.
DEBRA: Yeah. So let’s come up on the break, and we’ll be back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Nathanael Johnson. He’s the author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. We’ll be back after this.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier.
So, Nathanael, does the natural approach to all those things really keep us healthier and happier? What did you finally come to decide about that?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I wish that there was an easier answer. It certainly would be better for my book sale if I could say, “Just embrace nature in every way” or “Just chuck nature out the window and be space age.” But of course, like we were saying, you only have to think about for a few seconds to think of parts of nature that are dangerous and parts of technology that are truly harmful.
And so, the conclusion I ended up coming to is that you really have to go through and assess the evidence on a case by case basis.
DEBRA: I totally agree. For me, what I came to—I mean, I went through that same process of saying there’s good and bad things about each. But what I finally came to was that the whole point of life, what it’s trying to do is sustain itself. It’s trying to survive. And so, if you say “Does this contribute to survival or not contribute to survival?”, sometimes the natural thing is going to contribute to survival, and other times, it won’t. And the same for the industrial thing.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I think there is that basic evolutionary wisdom, that there’s some logic to embracing nature because we come from nature. We figured things out over many, many years. And now we’re starting to experiment with all kinds of new substances.
And in doing that, I just want to do it in a systematic, thoughtful way rather than embracing all one side or all the other.
DEBRA: Well, I would agree with that. I could agree with that totally.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Okay! We have our platform to start with. Now maybe we can build out from here.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So now that we agree on that, tell me some examples of things that you decided that you wouldn’t do because they didn’t contribute to what you wanted to have happen that were of nature and some things that you decided to not include in your life from industry.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Okay, let’s see. What’s a good example? I mean I mentioned the issue with diapers. So that’s an industrial product—even cotton diapers are an industrial product—that I opted to us.
I think the bigger issue with nature, what I didn’t end up doing, when I was growing up, I really struggled with trying to improve my performance as a distance runner. I was an athlete in high school. I tried all different types of things and spent a lot of time in health food stores trying different things. And I came to the conclusion that I was kind of spinning my wheels.
There are all these people that were extremely committed to being healthy and were taking all kinds of different supplements, but didn’t seem healthy. They were just so nervous about their health and are kind of knocked down by any little thing that happen to them…
DEBRA: I know people like that.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I didn’t want to be that way.
At the same time, I really come to this from the other direction, from wanting to make sure that I didn’t take industrial medications that were going to do more harm than good. There are thing like Vioxx as a good example, this heart medication that’s really done terrible things in worsening people. And so, I really wanted to be critical about the industrial medical complex.
And as I started looking into that deeply and developing the skills to figure out the science and where they were cheating and lying, I saw that I needed to apply that same science to natural cures as well and be just as critical.
So, I think the medical area is one where I’ve become much more—I think a lot of the things that we think of as “illnesses,” we immediately look for a fix, whether it’s a big pharmaceutical drug to make us feel better or numb the pain or a natural supplement. And often, our physical problems have to do with the way our lives and our emotions and the people that we surround ourselves with much more than any biophysical problem.
DEBRA: I would totally agree with that. And what I’ve come to after all of these years dealing with my own health problems has been that I think that most illness is caused by the things that you’ve just stated and also environment, lifestyle choices. I don’t think about how to solve almost anymore. I think about how to build health and create health. If I do things like get proper nutrition and get adequate rest and exercise and give my body the things that it needs, including social interaction—
And a big one for me, as you and all my listeners know, is stop beating ourselves over the head with toxic chemicals. And we’ll have a lot more health.
An example I like to give a lot is that there’s formaldehyde resins on bedsheets. And formaldehyde causes insomnia. People who are sleeping on those formaldehyde-soaked sheets every night over and over again are spending billions of dollars buying sleeping pills.
Now, if people would just change their sheets, then they wouldn’t need to have sleeping pills. It’s really that simple.
So, that’s where I see that people could make a change towards something more natural and that it would help all around.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I didn’t know about that. I just want to point out—I don’t know how much formaldehyde is on the sheets, but formaldehyde is something that we manufacture in our liver. In small quantities, it’s something that’s necessary for life.
So, again, definitely, you don’t want so much of it on your sheets that it’s keeping you awake. It shouldn’t be a blanket fear.
DEBRA: It shouldn’t be a blanket fear. But I’ll just say very quickly (because we need to go to break) that there is a difference between a naturally produced chemical and the same chemical formula or the same molecule produced industrially. We’ll talk about that for a minute when we come back from the break because there is a difference in that.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ll be back with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural—and a very long subtitle—when we get back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Nathanael Johnson, author of All Natural: A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover if the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing and the Environment Really Keeps us Healthier and Happier. I said it all in one breath.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: All Natural is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation.
DEBRA: Alright! So, before the break, I had said to Nathanael that, in fact, if you have two identical molecules and one is made in nature and that the other one is made from petroleum in a laboratory or a factory that they actually are physically different.
And there’s a lot of research on that that comes out of the natural supplement industry—and not just supplements, but I’ve read this in books that have nothing to do with nutrition. If you take these two molecules, and one is manufactured and one is made by nature, that they have a fundamental difference in that they will bend light differently, and that there are certain parts of the molecule where it turns right instead of left. And I don’t have it right in front of me to give you all the science all about it, but this is something that I’ve read widely in many different places.
And I think that that’s right because if there’s one thing that I know about nature is that nature has its own way of doing things.
And I don’t think that it can be duplicated in a factory. And as close as you might come, there’s always going to be something different, something missing.
And I know that if I take natural vitamins, like whole food vitamins that comes strictly from food instead of vitamins where those same nutrients are manufactured from petroleum, I feel completely different. My body responds to them in a completely different way.
So, I wouldn’t agree with you on the point that industry could duplicate nature. It might be a very fine line, but it’s enough of a line that I think our bodies can tell the difference. And that’s just my viewpoint on that. And I don’t want to take a lot of time…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, I just want to respond very quickly.
DEBRA: Go ahead, yeah.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: I absolutely respect your personal experience. I think that that’s important. When it comes to science, I’m convinced by peer-reviewed substantial evidence. And the scientific consensus is different than what you just stated.
But I haven’t seen all the stuff that you have. And I’d be interested in learning more.
DEBRA: I can send it to you. I can send it to you. I look at all that science too. But my experience has been, over 30 years, that science doesn’t have a nature viewpoint and that there are a lot of assumptions that science make that I have a different assumption because I’ve learned some things from nature.
And I think it would be great for scientists to learn more about nature.
DEBRA: I think that you’re right at a fundamental level, but don’t tar all the science. There’s some wonderful, amazing…
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, no, no, no. I’m not trying to tar all the science or industry. In fact, I just want to tell you—and I know some people are going to be horrified to hear me say this—that I’m so naturally oriented that I will go to great lengths to not do something industrial. And yet recently, I started taking an industrial drug to save my life.
DEBRA: And because I was doing everything natural, and I had done it for so long, and I was just at a crisis where I was going to end up in a hospital if I didn’t take this drug, I took it. And all my symptoms started subsiding.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: And I think that it’s something that I need to say because I think that people do become too extreme, as you say, one way or the other. They won’t do something industrial if they have an all-natural viewpoint or the industrialists won’t do something natural. But it comes down to what’s the right thing to do.
We live in a world right now where, as I think I said earlier, there’s no place to go on earth where we can be pristine natural—there isn’t. And so we need to do some industrial things to correct industrial problems. If my body is sick because of industrial reasons, I might need to use an industrial solution in order for it to get well. And it may be that the traditional, natural things just don’t work.
I’ve heard from doctors who do things like chiropractic adjustments, for example, where they’re now saying those natural remedies aren’t working because our bodies are so full of toxic chemicals that they need to do something to rid our bodies of toxic chemicals before the natural thing can work.
And so, we really are in this state of push-me/pull-you between these two extremes.
So, I appreciate your saying that we need to be considering both.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: The point is there are some lovely, lovely scientists who do have a truly natural perspective and just have this wonderful balance.
DEBRA: I agree. I agree with that. I agree.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: And it is true that there is a type of science that focuses very narrowly on individual molecules. It tends to sometimes miss the bigger picture. And I think that is maybe what you’re getting at. Because you’re so focused tightly on how this one molecule acts just the same as this other molecule, that you miss the big picture that one comes from an organic farm that makes the world a more lovely place and one comes from this awful, industrial [unclear 33:10]. The bigger picture is really worth looking at.
DEBRA: Yeah. And just during the break, I checked my email. And I got an email with a story in it from the Environmental News Network called The Lead In a Songbird. And it was talking about that there’s dangers for people who work with lead, but there’s also dangers for birds who live near lead mining district. They said “about half of ground-feeding songbirds collected from a historic lead mining district in Southern Missouri contained toxic levels of lead in their blood and internal organs.”
If we weren’t digging up these things that belong underground and turning them into industrial products, then the songbirds would not be exposed to them.
So, this is where it just would be nice if everybody had a bigger viewpoint. And I don’t want to be making generalities about all scientists or all people with a natural viewpoint because I can see people who have strange ideas on both sides. But I think there are laws of nature that can be applied, there is commonsense that can be applied and that there is an inherent desire to survive in everybody and wanting to do the right thing that leads to health and happiness.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: There’s an interesting article just recently looking at obesity. We know the obesity epidemic is rampant. But the interesting thing is that we’re seeing weight gain across the board in other species as well.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t know that.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: So there seems to be an indication that there’s something else going on. I mean, obviously, our food system has big problems with it. But perhaps there’s something environmental that’s really intrinsic across the board.
DEBRA: Well, it could be endocrine-disrupting toxic chemicals being in the environment.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s one theory.
DEBRA: Yeah, because they affect our human weight gain and other animals are being affected by them too in the same way.
Or it could be sun spots or it could be all kinds of things.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Yeah, there’s lots of theories. But that’s certainly one of the leading ones.
DEBRA: Well, Nathanael, we’re getting to the end of our hour, is there anything that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Well, I think there are some things out there like bisphenol-A which is something that we don’t have proof-positive that it’s hurting us yet, but I think the evidence is sufficient that we really should be getting rid of it. And in America, much more than Europe, we’ve opted to make ourselves guinea pigs. And that has some benefits in terms of we all have fancier iPhones and stuff. But we also—
This is one area where if you go through and look at the evidence, I think enough is compiled that we really should be getting rid of it.
DEBRA: I agree, I agree. And I think that there are some other chemicals as well that we can do that.
I read the last line, the last paragraph from your book, so I know what your conclusion is. But I don’t want to give it away if you don’t want me to.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: It’s fine. Either way, either way.
DEBRA: Okay, then I’ll just say that Nathanael’s conclusion, what he was looking for, the idyllic-ness of the natural picture that he had in his mind really had to do with his childhood and his experience of family. It all came down to that […] So, it’s a very interesting book to read.
Thank you so much for being with us.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Oh, it’s such a pleasure.
DEBRA: Thank you. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
