My guest Mark Sneller, PhD is the author of Greener Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. Twenty years in the making, his book is considered to be “the most complete and readable guide on indoor air quality for the average consumer.” We’ll be talking about some of the many indoor air pollutants you might find in your home and how you can eliminate them. Dr. Sneller received his Bachelor’s Degree in Education from California State University at Los Angeles (1965); served in the Peace Corps (India) 1965-1967; Master’s Degree in Microbiology/Biochemistry from California State University at Long Beach and Doctorate from the University of Oklahoma in Microbiology/Biochemistry with a specialization in Medical Mycology (1976). He received two Post Doctoral appointments from the National Institutes of Health in combination drug therapy and cancer research; served as Asst. Professor of Microbiology at San Jose State University, San Jose, California 1977-1979. Dr. Sneller began his air quality company, Aero Allergen Research, in Tucson, Arizona in 1979. He was twice recipient of the Clean Air Government award from the Arizona Lung Association for contributing to better respiratory health of citizens of the state; former member of the State of Arizona Air Pollution Control Hearing Board appointed by the governor; featured on ABC, CBS, NBC national network news, National Public Radio, the New York Times, Newsweek magazine, Hippocrates magazine, and Allergic to the 20th Century (Peter Radetshy, author) for indoor and outdoor air quality work; helped institute and oversaw the nation’s first pollen control ordinance; terrorism consultant for the City of New York, Department of Human and Mental Services; former member of Literacy Volunteers of America; former contractor with the U.S. Department of Justice and Defense; fifteen-year weekly newspaper columnist on air quality; newspaper and TV consultant on bioclimatology; fifteen scientific publications in the fields of mycology, fungal toxins, palynology, and incidence of mold around the world; pollen and mold consultant and enumeration expert for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology; radio talk show host for The Breathing Easy Show (Tucson and Phoenix, AZ); Sensei with the Japan Karate Association; member of the Society of American Magicians and three-time president of the Society of Southwestern Authors. www.globalgreenair.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Have Clean Indoor Air
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Mark Sneller, PhD
Date of Broadcast: February 04, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.
It’s a beautiful early spring day here in Clearwater, Florida on Tuesday, February 4th 2014. I’m feeling really good today. The reason I’m feeling really good today is last week, I had a guest Dr. Kellyann Petrucci and we talked about – I guess it’s been two weeks, almost two weeks now, ten days, about 10, 11 or 12 days. We had a show about doing her program, the 30-Day Reset and removing dietary toxins from your body.
I decided that I was going to do that program. I’ve been blogging about it on my website. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And at the top, there’s a button that says ‘food’ on the navigation bar, click on that and you can read about how I’ve been doing on this program since the beginning – what I’ve been eating, recipes, et cetera.
But the point here is that usually on the show, we talk about toxic chemicals, industrial chemicals, heavy metals, solvents, things like that. And what this program is about is about removing the toxic residues in your body from toxic foods. And these are every day foods that you think are okay, but they actually are causing problems in your body.
I always thought that I could eat any food that I wanted to eat as long as it didn’t have any toxic chemicals in them. Well, boy! Was I wrong? Because there are some foods that I think probably nobody should be eating. So I’m not eating those foods. I haven’t been eating them for almost two weeks. And this morning, I woke up and it’s like – you know, you grow through any program and there’s little things along the way. But this morning, I woke up and it was like, “Wow! I really get it.” She said, “If you can just go through the first two weeks, you’ll see a big change.” And I’m seeing a big change.
We’re going to have Dr. Petrucci on again, Dr. Kellyann in two weeks from Thursday. We’re going to be talking about the whole program and what happened. But I just wanted to just give you this little – I’m just feeling so good today and my fingers are typing fast, I have lots of energy and I’m very happy. I feel a relief of not having some toxic stuff in my body that was there before.
There are different ways that you can remove toxic things from your body, but there are specific ways for different things and I’m finally doing one that I haven’t done before. It’s great! Great, great, great! I encourage you go read this. I’m doing really well.
That said, we’re going to talk about something entirely different today. We’re going to talk about indoor air pollution, which we haven’t really talked about much as a general topic. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD. He’s the author of a book called Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. This book as 20 years in the making. His book is considered to be the most complete and readable guide on indoor air quality for the average consumer. I would agree with that because I read a lot about indoor air quality, but most of the books are written in a very technical way and this book is very easy to read.
Now, he’s had his own air quality company called Aero Allergen Research in Tucson, Arizona since 1979. So he’s been doing a lot of research, working with a lot of clients right there in people’s homes and buildings, whatever. He was the recipient of the Clean Air Government Award from the Arizona Lung Association twice and he’s got a whole list of credentials that is just like very long.
Anyway, he’s done a lot of stuff. He’s even had his own radio show. He had a weekly newspaper column on air quality for 15 years. So he knows a lot – a lot, a lot, a lot. We’re going to talk about indoor air quality.
Hi, Mark.
MARK SNELLER: Hi, Debra. It’s an honor and a pleasure. You have been somebody that I followed and admired for many years and to be interviewed by you is really a high point of my career.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you, thank you.
MARK SNELLER: Thank you. Thank you for this.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us, give the story about how you got interested in indoor air quality of all things?
MARK SNELLER: Oh, man! I regionally started out in cancer research and antibiotic research and combination drug therapy and mycology, the study of fungi and molds. So the end of the story is that I’m a mold expert. But in there is a whole bunch of other stuff. I morphed from that into university teaching at San Jose State College for a couple of years and found out that I was an academician, not a politician and resigned that after two years and moved out to Tucson at ’70.
While I was at San Jose though, I had hooked up with an allergist who wanted a professional to monitor the homes of his clients and find out what kind of mold they were allergic to or exposed to, so he could prepare agents suitable to the individual.
So I had that experience for a couple of years. That was quite intense along with the teaching. And when I came out, I decided to expand my own development of my business and expand it not just to cover mold, but to cover indoor air quality.
The more I researched it, the more I found that the less that we know, that there’s no real spokesperson for the homeowner. It’s just a sellers’ market. There’s no protection for the homeowner and the things that we’re exposed to on a daily basis that change our moods, our attitudes, our health. It’s pretty well recognized that we get ten times more cancer exposure indoors than outdoors. Even the federal government, if you can imagine actually recognizes that.
That’s because of a lot of different factors. It’s a combination of factors. It’s sort of like the cup runneth over. You have some allergies and then you have exposure to fragrances and perfumes, which the EPA and FDA say should be on the hazardous waste list along with heavy metals and pesticides. We’re exposed to those in terms of perfumes and fragrances.
And then we’ve got diesel exhaust, carbon inhalation. It’s quite a list. And then we’ve got allergies to pets. And then, of course, as you had mentioned, the things that we eat. And then we’ve got climate changes. So I address all of these things in the book.
And so things just developed through the years and the business grew. I was hired by the county health department in ’85 to start a pollen and mold monitoring program where every day, I would monitor several areas of the city to ascertain their level of pollen and mold. And then the press got a hold of that, so we had great exposure. Half a million to a million people a day were able to get the information. There would be forecasts and predictions.
And then I got hired by other cities to help them with a pollen control program – Las Vegas for one, Boulder, Colorado, El Paso, Fresno, like that. So then they dropped the program in 2000. I hit the ground running and then my business expanded and on and on. And in there somewhere, I was kind of teaching martial arts for the Japan Karate Association when I first moved out to Tucson to make ends meet while I work my way into the scientific community.
And then I wrote the column for the newspaper as you had mentioned and then put that together and updated everything and put it together into the book. And since the book…
DEBRA: Oh, that’s why it’s a whole bunch of little chapters.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, yeah. I think it was 116 chapters and 14 sections.
DEBRA: Yeah, but it’s great. It’s great. No, I understand that because I do that with books too like if I want to research something, if I want to figure out some new area of where there’s toxic chemicals, I start writing about it on my website and then I put it all together after I figured out in little pieces. So I do the same thing. It’s like making a quilt or something.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah. I mean, you have to stay organized too to see what you’ve covered and learned new things. There are always new discoveries coming out. I’m a microscopist and I have a…
DEBRA: What’s a microscopist?
MARK SNELLER: An expert at using the microscope. And so I have several of them and I’m always puzzled by new things. I can identify maybe 50 different types of particles in addition to pollen and mold identification, but there was one particle that took me 20 years to learn how to identify until I finally figured out what it was.
DEBRA: Wow!
MARK SNELLER: So not everything is cut and dry. You don’t really know what you’re looking at and there’s a lot of questions about what you’re seeing and they’re yelling at you saying, “Here I am! Don’t you know what I am?” and you’re saying, “No, I don’t” and you’re trying to figure that out too.
DEBRA: Well, we need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll talk about what some of these pollutants are and as we go through the show, I want to learn about what to do to reduce indoor air pollution. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living. We’re going to be talking about indoor air quality now, how it affects you and what you can do to improve your indoor air quality.
Oh, I should give his website. It’s GlobalGreenAir.com. You can get his book there. You can also get it by just going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. There’s a description of his show, you can click right there and order it from Amazon.com, which gives a tiny commission to defray the expenses of running this radio show.
Anyway, there’s so much information in this book. Why don’t we just start by talking about like what is the scope of how indoor air pollution can affect your health. You cover a lot of different things. I focus mostly on toxic chemicals. We don’t often talk about mold or dust or those kinds of things, but in the definition of toxicology, something is toxic – even an allergy is considered a toxic exposure. So why don’t you just give us a quick overview of the range of illnesses that can come from indoor air exposures and the range of pollutants that are considered indoor air pollutants when you’re talking about indoor air quality.
MARK SNELLER: Wow! Okay, there are two basic ways to categorize our problems, our indoor problems. One of them is particles and the other one is gasses.
DEBRA: Gasses, yes.
MARK SNELLER: So by particles, that includes dust, carbon exhaust by vehicles and rubber tires. We’re talking microscopic respirable stuff that gets down into – we call it PM10’s, 10 microns and below by the federal government. It gets into your deeper lung spaces. And then you have the bacteria and then you have viruses, those are all particles.
And as a quick aside, the dirtiest area of the home in my estimation and in my experience is the refrigerator for a lot of reasons. I devote a whole chapter to the refrigerator and why it probably communicates more disease than other area of the home.
That being said, you have the particles that are – most of them are tracked in by shoes. So the dust get ground including pesticides by the way.
Most of the pesticides that we find in homes (or maybe a half a dozen to a dozen) have never been used in those homes before. They’re just tracked in from hither and dither, wherever they’re being used, whether they’re being used in the garden or out on the lawn or wherever. They’re tracked in the home. They mix with the particles and the dust. They get into the air and they’re circulated throughout the home like that.
But that’s basically your particle factor. That can be reduced by having a scrub mat outside the door, to hang off your shoes at the door. That will actually reduce and lower the dust level within the home.
Removal of the dust itself by vacuuming is okay by slow vacuuming, but at the same time, by instrumentation, I find that the dust level inside of a home a thousand-fold once you begin vacuuming. It’s an interesting factor.
DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that.
MARK SNELLER: Another instrument that is used is air filtration. And empirically, it would seem that air filtration works because it reduces the level of particles in a room and like that, but we’ve never been able to prove that it works because setting up experimentation is virtually impossible to get matched sets of people and that kind of thing. So that’s [inaudible 00:18:05].
The other category is – and I’ll get to the symptoms and problems in just a second. The other category is the gasses, the volatile organic compounds – the carpet glues in industrial settings, outgassing from paints and there’s acetones and [inaudible 00:18:28] and benzene and those kinds of factors that are in paint that outgas. That’s responsible for most of the smells inside of a newer home rather than the carpet. So therefore, the home needs to be aired out completely, so that that VOC level decreases.
But the biggest problem that we’re running into now is perfumes and fragrances. Your imagination can run riot thinking about the number of perfumes and fragrances that we’re exposed to on a daily basis even if we don’t want to.
I even have a chapter, We’re Covered with Chemicals section and then one of them is in the bathroom and getting up in the morning. I counted 200+ chemicals that we’re exposed to and perhaps a dozen different fragrance product. And this is just normal living.
Now, the thing is what we’re finding – and if I had to expand my book, I would put this in because now, what we’ve been able to do scientifically is to take a perfume, a fragrance. Let’s call it a perfume that has a combination of perhaps half a hundred or a hundred ingredients and run them through gas analyzer. It’s an instrument that tells us what is in there. The items that are in there, there may be a dozen of them that are carcinogenic that are on the list .
So the end result of all of these…
DEBRA: I just want to interject here for a second about the perfumes. None of these is on the label. All it says is ‘perfume’ or ‘fragrance’.
MARK SNELLER: Right! Because it’s proprietary.
DEBRA: There’s no ingredients. It’s all proprietary. I mean, perfume doesn’t sound like a carcinogen that it is going to cause cancer, but listen to what he just said. What was it? A dozen carcinogens, did you say?
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, up to a dozen, yeah. And you take the plug-in air fresheners. I analyzed a home just recently and a man collected antiquities. He trailed around the world. He had these antiquities within his home and his house maid suggested that he has plug-in air fresheners to make everything fine. I come in there. I run air analysis in his home and I find millions and millions of these little microscopic particles of organic solvents that are in the carpeting, that are in every room of the house, every closet of the house that originated from the air fresheners. I told him that he needed to cease and desist because they’re going to affect his antiquities. Some people like them fine.
The point is not to stop everything. That’s not my philosophy, but realize what you’re being exposed to and cut back and to save money. This is really my reason for being and reason for writing this book – save people money, save hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year on doctors visit and the time that you spend at the doctor’s office and traveling. You won’t need medical care if you just take care of yourself at home. I’m serious.
DEBRA: I agree. We need to take a break. Wait, wait. We need to take a break. We’ll be right back. We can continue to talk about this. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, very enthusiastic about his topic of indoor air. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living.
Well, before the break, we were talking about how many millions of dollars could be saved from people reducing indoor air quality. And that’s actually consistent with studies that I’ve seen that said that something like 70% of – I’m trying to remember the number, 70% of all illness that require medical attention is based one exposure to toxic chemicals actually as we go about our daily life and that it could be $5 billion of savings collectively per year in America if we were to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals and consumer products.
MARK SNELLER: I totally agree with that? And we never did get to the symptoms. I want to touch on, if I may, a couple of items in this segment in terms of symptoms, the obvious allergy symptoms of sneezing and coughing and itching and watering eyes. And this includes the pets too of course.
But what’s interesting is that our exposure to these volatile organic compounds (and let’s just stick with the gas part right now) results frequently in headaches, depression and mood swings. So if you wake up in a lousy mood, it may not be your fault. How is that? It might be what…
DEBRA: Exactly! I had that experience in my life. I’m a pretty cheerful person. But I just wanted to tell a story because this so relates directly to indoor air quality.
Many, many years ago when I was back in my early twenties, I used to be engage to a man who lived – I lived in Oakland, California at the time. He lived in Berkeley, California. And in Berkeley, California as in probably a lot of cities with old houses – big, old houses. There are a lot of big, old houses that had been split up into apartments. And so the apartments are not made quite like a regular apartment building would be because they’ve been remodeled by various different people. Some are up to code and some are not.
And so this apartment where he lived is in a beautiful, old house. Great architecture and it had a kerosene heater in it. It was just one kerosene heater in the living room and it had open flames in it like a fireplace. You could see the flames inside the kerosene heater.
We would get along just fine when we were someplace else, but when we were in his apartment, we were depressed, we would argue with each other. It was just like not a good situation at all.
We finally broke up. We were engaged to be married and we finally broke up. A couple of years later – this was before knew anything about toxic chemicals. A couple of years later, I had learned that a lot of what was going on with me was reactions to toxic chemicals and I was working for a doctor. This man came to my doctor’s office and he said to me, “I want to tell you that I realized that what was going on with me was exposure to toxic chemicals, that that was what was causing us to fight like that in my apartment.” He said, “It had nothing to do with you.”
MARK SNELLER: Perfect! Yeah, yeah. I mean, how many marriages are based on that disintegrate from that today?
Debra; Yeah! I mean, he was just so sorry and he wanted to talk to me about how he could get the toxic chemicals out of his body and all these things because he could see the damage that it had done to us.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah. It’s a story that repeats itself on a daily basis in many households. The mood swings happen in children. They’re very sensitive to these things too. So if you see your child or your spouse having a mood swing for some reason, figure out if they just used a lot of hair spray or there’s a lot of fragrance and possibly what their last meal consisted of or if there’s headaches. You might see if there’s an incoming storm and there’s a drop in barometric pressure. There are a lot of variables there too. I just wanted to mention that.
Now, I would could your listeners to the following, to highlight what I’m saying. Take all the products that are underneath your bathroom sink and your kitchen sink and your laundry room, take them all and put them all into one place and add up the cost on all of those products.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s really helpful.
MARK SNELLER: How many of them have volatile organic compounds in them and petroleum distillates? And now add up the cost of a jar or a bottle of concentrated lemon juice, a gallon of vinegar, baking soda and borax. The latter will cost you $10 and will probably last you half a year. The former will cost you $200 or $300 and would be gone overnight.
So now, you can replace everything with – in 90% of the cases, for your laundry detergent, you can use borax. Baking soda, you can use for your clothes, softener, anti-static. There’s a way to use vinegar for that. Fresh lemons, you can use in your showers to remove lime as well as vinegar.
And vinegar is a wonderful disinfectant. But it can’t be called a pesticide or bactericide because it’s basically a naturally occurring product. Same thing with borax, like 20 Mule Team Borax. It’s a naturally occurring product, so by definition, it can’t be called a pesticide. There are other regulations involved in the nomenclature.
But these four items, you can polish your furniture, sanitize and clean your toilet, the sinks, on and on and on, do your laundry and do your dishes and sanitize and sterilize your kitchen after you cut up chicken, you get the salmonella off of that. You need to use it for your refrigerator and clean up the ten areas in your refrigerator that are problematic especially on the doors and like that.
These four items replace the hundreds of dollars of organic solvents and volatile organic compound-producing substances that you have. As far as personal care products…
DEBRA: Wait! We have to go to break again. So let’s take the personal care products after the break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Mark Sneller, PhD. We’re talking about indoor air quality. I want to say those are exactly the four things I clean my house with, so you must’ve been reading my books. But they are, those are the things to use instead of all these toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, my guest is Mark Sneller, PhD, author of Greener, Cleaner Indoor Air: A Guide to Healthier Living.
Before the break, you wanted to start talking about personal care products, so let’s go.
MARK SNELLER: Personal care products, be really careful about them especially the types that are aerosolized. And again, I’m not saying quit everything cold turkey, but I am saying that use it wisely. If you’re going to use a hair spray or some kind of aerosol, make sure it’s a pump spray or an aerosol can. The latter makes microglobules that travels through the air space and get circulated throughout the home. So use it sparingly. Keep the fan on if you have one in the bathroom to exhaust that air too.
Much of this is really insidious. We’re sold a lot of things. We get perfume in the mail, we’re sprayed with perfume in department stores. Indeed, we use perfume laundry detergent and dry our sheets. Why?
DEBRA: Yeah. Why? I would like to know why they think that we need to have all that perfume?
MARK SNELLER: Because it’s a sellers’ market. The perfume industry is like the sugar industry, it’s like the petroleum industry, it’s an industry. And so they’re out to sell their product. And so you’re going to wash your sheets and pillowcases with this fragrance and then you’re going to sleep in it. It makes no sense.
DEBRA: It makes no sense.
MARK SNELLER: But why? Because it smells good, you’re going to get a better sleep? It never worked for me. I mean, I’ve got other variables going on when I sleep and it has nothing to do with the fragrance.
So it’s all insidious. It’s permeating through our society and our age and the marketing skills and our ease of exposure through television and various marketing plans and ads and like that. So it behooves us as individuals to wise up and just say, “No, I’m not going to buy products out of petroleum distillates. I’m not going to do this and that. I’m just going to stick with some basic products and do a little bit of research as necessary.” Read your books, read my book. That’s going to change lives and it’s going to save a lot of money not only in terms of purchases and in terms of expenses – doctors visits, time…
DEBRA: Time lost from working when you’re sick.
MARK SNELLER: …argumentation, depression, headaches, better health, better lifestyle, the whole thing. And it’s simple to do.
DEBRA: It’s so simple. It really is very, very simple. I remember back more than 30 years when I was first faced with this question of, “Well, where are the chemicals and what do I do?”, there weren’t any books like mine, there weren’t any websites like mine, nobody has done the research that you’ve done. But I figured it out.
And now that I’ve figured it out, it’s so easy. It really is so easy. It’s just a matter of deciding that you’re going to get the toxic chemicals out of your indoor space and finding out what can you use instead of this that is less toxic and it really becomes second-nature, it really does. I really find that living this way is actually more pleasurable and enjoyable than living with toxic chemicals.
There was a point where I felt like in my mind, I just wanted to put a little skull and cross bones on everything that was toxic. I kind of imagine myself going to the grocery store, putting a skull and cross bones on all the toxic foods and all the toxic products. I think one day, that would be fun, to just go into a grocery store and start doing that.
MARK SNELLER: I would just do the same thing to what used to be underneath my sink and in my laundry room. You take them out and you’re amazed at the number of jars and bottles and cans. Some of them aren’t even properly sealed, some of them are leaking and so on and so forth.
I mean, the kitchen is the worst room for the home for particles. The laundry room is probably the worst room in the home for VOC’s – that and the master bathroom because the master bathroom has of course your fragrances and perfumes. Everything is perfumed in the bathroom and then in the laundry room, everything is perfumed.
And so the highest concentration – I’ve got different machines and devices that measure VOC levels, volatile organic compounds. The laundry room typically has the highest VOC level in the home. It’s a confined space. There’s no air ventilation usually other than, say, through the dryer, but that really doesn’t count for air escaping from the air proper.
So you have then the VOCs there. You’re standing there and you’re working there and you’re exposed, you’re there. Don’t buy perfume detergent. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to buy commercial detergent. What borax does, 20 Mule Team Borax, what that does is boric acid ties up the hard water in the washing machine. So it takes out the hardness of the water and allows the detergent (a small amount of detergent if you will, half as much as you usually use, even less than that) to actually penetrate. It will bind up with the calcium and the magnesium and the lime. It goes through directly to the clothes and cleans it thoroughly. And then in the rinse cycle, you throw in some baking soda, which is an odor remover, borax along and you’re set.
DEBRA: Yeah!
MARK SNELLER: You used a cheap product to tie up the hard water and then you use less soap to get to the detergent because you don’t need as much, you’ve got clean clothes and you’re good to go.
DEBRA: See, saving money all around. We only actually have just about five minutes left of the show. Didn’t that go by fast? Amazingly fast. You mentioned the refrigerator before. Tell us more about that.
MARK SNELLER: Well, we talked about the surfaces, the handles, the sides, those needs to be wiped on a regular basis. Cold and flu are transmitted, we’re believing now through contact more than through sneezing for a lot of reasons. And so contacting a surface, shopping carts, railing in the supermarkets, at home, the refrigerator handle, microwave handle and then sticking your fingers in your orifices, in your nose, in your mouth (as humans, we do this), we should cease and desist that habit. And so that’s how the bacteria and the viruses are transmitted – aside of course from salmonella. That’s a little different story.
Inside the refrigerator, check the seals, behind the seals. If it’s green, chances are it’s going to be a mold called cladosporium that eats seal and it can become airborne and it’s allergenic. It’s a naturally-occurring mold in those seals and in air ventilation system.
The vegetable tray needs to be cleaned out. As a matter of fact, take everything out of the refrigerator, open up your jars and cans and see what’s spoiled and rotten. Throw it out right then and there. When you move the refrigerator, you’ll find things that you lost before. You got to clean that out, make sure your fan is clean. On top of the refrigerator, it’s usually sitting there, the stove, so it’s going to be full of grease. That’s got to be cleaned off too. Just go through the unit and clean it up. Clean up the floor underneath it. Clean up the walls behind it and like that. And throw out the bad food. There are a number of things to look for that I talk about in the book.
That one, when I really started exploring the refrigerator, I said, “Nah, what could be wrong with the refrigerator?” I think the list was at ten and it’s still counting. I’m finding new discoveries as far as the refrigerator are concerned.
So its surfaces are really important. And cleaning surfaces, you can use vinegar. Dilute chlorine bleach, a 1:10 is fine. Vinegar works just as well to remove the salmonella out of the sinks, out of the surfaces. And again, it’s a very powerful bactericide and virucide, but it can’t be advertised as such. So it’s just word of mouth that helps the spread. And it’s white distilled vinegar that we would normally use to remove the stains.
DEBRA: That’s what I use.
MARK SNELLER: There we go!
DEBRA: And you can buy vinegar in gallon-sized jugs. You don’t have to buy a bunch of little bottles of vinegar. I have probably three or four gallons of it sitting under my kitchen sink right now. You can just go to some discount warehouse kind of store where they sell things in bulk. Even at the supermarket, I think you can buy a gallon.
MARK SNELLER: I think I just pay $2.5 or something like that for a gallon.
DEBRA: Yeah, it’s very inexpensive.
MARK SNELLER: The white distilled vinegar, you can’t buy enough of it for cleaning. The list is endless. As a matter of fact, I ran across a book in the store the other day. They had over a thousand uses for vinegar.
DEBRA: I think I have a book like that.
MARK SNELLER: And a hundred uses for baking soda. It’s endless!
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. It is. I mean, if you just have vinegar in baking soda, you can do anything with it. I remember, my very first book even before my first published book, my first self-published book, a friend of mine was just glancing through it and he said, “The name of this book should be ‘You Can Do Anything with Baking Soda’” because that was the first book that I wrote about.
MARK SNELLER: Yeah, on clothe, drain, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah, it’s just a simple, simple thing. If you have vinegar and baking soda in your house, you can do almost anything.
So, wow!
MARK SNELLER: Wow!
DEBRA: What a treat this has been to have you here today. We’ve got less than two minutes left.
MARK SNELLER: Oh, thank you. GlobalGreenAir.com, I have to promote that new website. Go find out about the book, GlobalGreenAir.com. Read your newsletter and listen to your radio show. This has really been an honor and a pleasure to be with you today.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I hope you’ll come back because there’s so much information we can talk about in your book. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more and I’ll be back tomorrow.
