You might have read a post on my Toxic Free Q&A about immersion blenders, which had a comment with a link to a post on another blog about toxic chemicals being released by immersion blenders. Well, I went to check out that post and found a whole website created by a woman who is very much in agreement with me. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She blogs at It Takes Time and is the owner of Just So Natural Products. We’ll be talking about how and why she lives and works toxic free. Andrea is a former journalist and the mother of nine children ranging in age from 29 to 13. Following a health crisis in 2008, Andrea and her family discovered the wonders of natural living. Andrea is also the founder and president of momsAWARE, an educational organization designed to empower others to live healthy in a toxic world. www.it-takes-time.com | www.justso.co
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO Living Toxic Free with Nine Children
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd Guest: Andrea Fabry
Date of Broadcast: November 20, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, November 20th. It’s getting to be winter. I just heard on the news while I was waiting for the show to start (and maybe you did too) that more, more snow in Buffalo, New York area.
And it’s cold here in Florida, but I got my heater. I was talking the other day about my old heater broke and I had ordered a new one. I’ll just say it again because I know that a lot of people are buying the space heaters nowadays or you have one because it’s getting cold, you want to make sure that you don’t use a plastic space heater because the heat will cause the plastic to up gas.
What you want to get is something called a ‘utility heater’ and they have metal housings, metal with a powder coat, baked-on finish sometimes. If it smells, if the powder coat finish smells, just put it somewhere where you can just run it and it’ll bake off. That’s just some residual thing.
But I just took mine out of the box and there was no odor at all. It’s heating my feet up nicely under the desk. I got it at Home Depot for $19. You might have to order one because they’re just lying off the shelves. But just go into Home Depot or Lowe’s or whatever your local hardware store is and ask them for a ‘utility heater’, which just went on. I don’t know if you can hear it.
Anyway, that’s how you can get a heater, a small heater that will heat you personally, not your whole, entire house. It will heat you personally sitting at a desk or lying in bed inexpensively and non-toxically. It’s the most important thing, that it’s toxic-free.
Actually, it sits toxic-free in your home. The electricity, of course, is putting toxic pollutants out into the environment, but that’s another thing.
Alright! It’s Thursday, November 20th 2014. And today, my guest is Andrea Fabry. She has a very interesting blog at It-Takes-Time.com. She also has a business selling hand-made natural personal care products. She’s got an organization called Mom’s Aware to educate moms to live healthy in a toxic world.
And it’s just every interesting for me to read her blog because she has things on it that I didn’t know. In fact, that’s how I found her. One of my readers sent a comment to one of my posts with a link to Andrea’s website about immersion blenders. Maybe we’ll talk about that a little bit.
But as I looked around her blog, her viewpoint is very much in common with mine. She does things slightly differently in an interesting way and I learned a lot by looking at her website (and I’m still looking at her website) because she’s very creative and has her own way of doing things.
Hi, Andrea!
ANDREA FABRY: Hi, Debra. So great to be here. I’m so excited.
DEBRA: Thank you. Oh, so the thing that I forgot to say is you have nine children.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, yes.
DEBRA: So nobody can tell me, nobody can say to me now that they’re too busy to be toxic-free.
ANDREA FABRY: Ah! Well, that’s a story and I’m sure we’ll get into it.
DEBRA: So I gave a little summary about what you do, but why don’t you in your own words just give us an overview of what you do.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, I just have a passion like you do, Debra just to return to nature, really explore what it means to live as naturally as possible. I haven’t always been that way unlike you who’s been on this journey – you’re way ahead of your time.
DEBRA: Thank you.
ANDREA FABRY: I was not on this journey until the year 2008. So it’s very recent for me, in the last six years. But I know that if I can make some of these changes, anyone can.
DEBRA: Exactly, I totally agree with you. So first, tell us how you got interested in this in 2008. What happened in your life? What was your life like before you changed?
ANDREA FABRY: Right! Well, before, we were a drivethrough family. I was raising nine children, busy, activities, living the good life, buying the cheapest products I could find. Even my next door neighbor, I remember, got pregnant with her first child and she wanted to go to natural products and I said, “Don’t throw your old ones away. I’ll take them all.” I just had no concept.
We were managing okay. My oldest at the time in 2007 was in her twenties and then our youngest was six years old. Up until that point, I didn’t cook. I bought as cheaply as I could and thought nothing about the world in which we lived.
So in the year 2000, we had moved into a home that we didn’t make any connection with. For the first time in our parenting, we found ourselves in emergency rooms. We began to get medical diagnosis. This was in the year 2000. And again, I still thought nothing of it except that we made a move from Illinois to Colorado, maybe the elevation, I don’t know. We had a lot of mysterious illnesses that lasted up until the year 2007.
Well, in that year, we found some mold in the house and uncovered some carpets – and not just a little, but a lot. We called someone to come fix this and unfortunately, we called the cheapest company possible, which was our mindset at the time. Very unfortunately, they remediated it improperly and blew fans all over to it and into the heating system, the ventilation in the home.
So shortly after, about six weeks later, we began to see serious illnesses come up – autoimmune disease, vertigo, migraines, digestive problems, vision problems, respiratory problems, fatigue problems to the point where we had surgeries. My 11-year old was in a wheelchair. And these were kids that were active and thriving. Before I knew it, our youngest, four couldn’t even read because the [inaudible 00:07:49] was so intense.
So something severe was happening, but to be honest, Debra, I was just hoping a doctor would figure it out for us. And so we want to 60 of them that year. It was only thanks to the internet and a friend who suggested that there’s such a thing as big building syndrome, environment matters, that kind of thing who just mentioned it to me. I didn’t want to think about environment or even taking ownership of our house in any way. That was a new concept.
But desperation will take you a lot of places and I became desperate to find an answer. And when I connected the dots, that this mold exposure was so intense and the remediation was so improperly done, that we were living in a very toxic situation.
That led me to speak with one of the leading toxicologists in the field who helped me understand what had happened to our family and encouraged to leave everything, treat the home as if it were on fire. And October 4th 2008, we did that.
At the time, we had seven children living with us. The others were out. We left everything and started completely over. I had a great hope that some of these health issues would be behind us. And unfortunately, what I didn’t understand about our immune system and rebuilding it is we couldn’t keep the lifestyle we had.
And as one who was completely clueless – and now, I’m 51 years old. I was an older parent, I’ve lived a certain way. My house had declined so severely that not only did I have nine sick children, but I was having a hard time functioning, a lot of memory loss and fatigue and joint problems, liver problems and so on. So it was a very steep learning curve suddenly.
And out of desperation, I made a lot of changes including just we moved to Arizona to kind of figure out how we were going to survive and thrive again or if that was even possible. We were just kind of limping along. And I’ve discovered that it’s more than – there’s clean air, there’s clean water, there’s clean food.
Well, our diet was pretty typical American. So to change and alter – and our products was full of chemicals, something I’ve never thought about. I had to make all of those changes. This is why I know that if I can do this, limping along, I know that anyone can. They key is understanding the process and it took time. That’s why I had such a passion to call my blog that.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. But I do want to say that I just can’t even imagine what you went through having gone through that whole process myself (I know a lot of people listening have gone through that same process), but I only had to do it with one person. I just can’t even imagine multiplying that by nine especially children who you have to help as well.
We need to go to break now. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Daddy and my guest today is Andrea Fabry. When we come back, we’ll hear more about her adventure and how she became toxic-free and nature-oriented.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She’s got nine children and she went through a whole ordeal of having to change their whole lifestyle – hers and her whole family when they all got sick of toxic mold.
So Andrea, when you got to the point where you decided that you needed to change everything, reading your blog, you have picked up on some things. I’ve been looking at toxic chemicals for 30 years, more than 30 years. I’ve been writing about them for 30 years.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, you have.
DEBRA: And I actually started, I went through my own ordeal in 1978. That was a long, long time ago. And so I looked at a lot of products. But you write about things I’ve never heard of. Let’s talk about toxic chemicals and immersion blenders. That came up on my blog because somebody sent it in, but it sparked a lot of interest. So how did it ever occur to you to look at toxic chemical in immersion blenders?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, here’s the thing. I went from complete disinterest in the whole subject and thought people like myself and probably at the time, I would’ve thought you were kind of – you know, nuts!
DEBRA: Thank you.
ANDREA FABRY: I mean, I really just was not interesting and I just couldn’t understand asking questions about our lifestyle honestly. So to go from that to reading the science journals – that’s what I do. I’m sure, just like you, I’m on notifications on a lot of keywords.
And so this study came up and it’s very recent, it was in Sweden I believe of finding chlorinated paraffin in immersion blenders. We live by our big blenders because when you fix food from scratch, there’s a lot to do and this really helps speed the whole process up.
DEBRA: Right, it does, it does.
ANDREA FABRY: I make mayonnaise with my immersion blenders. So it really caught my eye. I just wrote about it. The next day, I wrote the author of the study because I knew it had really just come out and what’s so interesting – and it was just interesting more than, “Oh, I’ve got to quickly take action” because Debra, you and I both know, you do the best you can. You do the best you can and then you make choices and you learn and you grow. And next time I need an immersion blender, I’m going to get this brand.
But I thought a little more urgent about that. But more than that, it was such a new – I use it all the time and I never thought to look. And of course, I buy stainless steel. I never thought to look under that hood where there is this plastic. And that what type of plastic? To find that chlorinated paraffin – and I know enough to know. I don’t want that in my food. I don’t know want it. And we’re heating it up? It’s electrically applied. There are heating bulbs.
And the author of the study, he just came on it by accident where this cat food had been contaminated. And so they tried to figure out why and how. So all that to say, I know you and I are just very like-minded and like-hearted, I just couldn’t wait to share that information.
DEBRA: Yeah, whenever I see things like that, I always want to tell people. When I finally figured out in my own life that I could feel better by not being exposed to toxic chemicals, it was like, “Oh, my God! I have to tell everybody.”
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, yes.
DEBRA: …because nobody had told me. If somebody had told me early in life or if my parents had known early in life that they could’ve raised a healthy child by not exposing them to toxic chemicals and they have done that, how different my life would’ve been and how different my life would’ve been if I had felt better and not gone through the illnesses that I went through.
I just said, “I have to talk about this because I don’t want anybody to be exposed to toxic chemicals because they don’t know.”
ANDREA FABRY: Right, exactly!
DEBRA: …if you don’t know.
ANDREA FABRY: You don’t.
DEBRA: Yeah, if you don’t know, you can’t make a choice.
ANDREA FABRY: I feel that way so much about a house, an indoor environment of any sort – a school, an office, a house. To understand that our air matters, that’s a new way of thinking.
DEBRA: It is a new way of thinking. When I started 30 years ago, there was no such field as indoor air pollution. I was writing about people getting sick from carpets and stuff, but there were no studies then. I was just saying, “You know, well, I know this person who got sick… we took out the carpet and they were fine.”
And then the studies started coming out. And so now, we think of things, toxic chemical exposures very differently than we did.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes, you’ve seen it all. Boy! You’ve really seen it.
DEBRA: Yeah, yup. I really have been here through the whole history.
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah.
DEBRA: But I want to back up for a minute. What should somebody be looking for in an immersion blender to try to figure out if they’re being exposed?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, I’ll be honest. If you have a stainless steel one, look under the hood, the part that contacts the food and see if you don’t see a rim of plastic there. That’s the problem. And convenience is a problem, isn’t it? I like it because it saves me some steps and it works. Otherwise, I’d get my big blender out with the stainless steel whisk and use that or do it by hand and so forth.
But you know, it looked to me from the study like it’s enough to cause an issue. And if we’re going to invest our time in this high-quality nutritional food, I want it from the farm to the table. I want to keep it as non-toxic as I can.
It’s up to every individual as to where that lies on your priority list. For me, I’m on the hunt for one that doesn’t have. And there are a couple. There were four brands in this study that came out clean. I don’t think – well, most of them were not made in China. And in fact, eight of them that had this chlorinated paraffin were from China (or maybe it’s not eight, I can’t recall the exact number).
But that’s the clue sometimes even if you buy it in America where it’s been made. So I have bought two now since I’m really on this and I really want to write about it. I do want to replace mine because I use it so often. I bought two and they’re from Europe.
And so I’m currently waiting on the voltage adaptor/transformer before I can use either one.
DEBRA: I understand. It’s an adventure. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She has a blog called It-Takes-Time.com It Takes Time. She’s also the owner of Just So Natural Products. We’ll talk about these when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry and we’re talking about how to live toxic-free with nine children.
Now, I have to say I was looking at your blog again (I keep looking at your blog), I was looking at your blog again during the break and I have to say that you can go to my website and you can find all kinds of – probably anything you want or know how to buy, any toxic-free products in and I have recipes and things. But Andrea has this unique viewpoint because she’s a mom and because she has a family. There are things that I would never even think to write about.
For example, there’s a whole section about food cold By Kids, For Kids were her kids are coming up with the recipes and pictures. They’ve written a blog post and there’s pictures of them making them. One of them is cacao stripes cookies, gluten-free cacao stripes cookies. She says, “Looking for a healthier alternative to the ever popular Keebler Fudge Stripes?”
Well, see, I don’t even know what a Keebler Fudge Stripe is because I gave up eating packaged cookies 30 years ago. So it would never occur to me to make an alternative to a Keebler Fudge Stripes?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it turned out that way when I looked at the pictures. It’s exactly what it looked like. And Debra, I’m sorry, but eight years ago, that’s all what we’re eating. It’s pretty fresh in my mind.
DEBRA: I understand! No, I understand because I will admit that prior to – it was hard for me to change my food.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes.
DEBRA: I removed the toxic chemicals a lot sooner. The food took years. And even after I was living in a totally toxic-free home and eating additive-free food, that additive-free food still could be a bag of cookies. I used to have this European cookies that I really loved and they didn’t have any preservatives or artificial colors or flavors in them. And so that was fine. I could eat wheat and sugar and all the other garbage. The only thing I was not eating was preservatives and artificial colors and flavors. That was as far as I had gotten at that point.
And so I would just take a bag of these cookies and a carton of pasteurized milk (non-organic because there was no organic milk then), and I’d sit and that’s what I’d have for dinner. Very well balanced.
So that’s what I’m coming from. I mean, I grew up on TV dinners.
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah, me too.
DEBRA: And Jack in a Box and A&W root beer.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes!
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what I – shake and pizza.
ANDREA FABRY: We are kindred spirits.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what I grew up on. I mean, I didn’t know any different. And so the whole thing to stop eating those cookies and make my own cookies or make my own ice cream instead of – there used to be this flavor of ice cream. I don’t know if it’s still available. It’s called Cherry Cherie, which is full of these candied maraschino cherries and chocolate chips. I could eat half a gallon of that. I’d just sit there and watch TV and eat half a gallon.
So I want people to know, I am totally normal. This is where I’m coming from. I haven’t always been this way, but I learned…
ANDREA FABRY: Yeah, over the years.
DEBRA: Over the years, you learn, you learn.
ANDREA FABRY: You do. And you know what propelled us in our family [inaudible 00:30:10] one of them right after we blew fans on the toxic mold, my son, six weeks later, developed type I diabetes. Well, that obviously is a life-changing diagnosis. And as a mom, well, I choke up thinking about this. He already lost so much and now, he’s got to change his diet.
Fortunately, at the time, I knew nothing about diet and we were told just to cover his carb. He could eat whatever he wanted. And this is why. It’s mainly because Collin is now 14, watching him take ownership and learn to love real food and learn to cook real food and find things that he just loves about the sugar has been so encouraging. If he can do it, then all of us can. All the other kids kind of followed his lead. It’s like you don’t need sugar the way you think you do.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right.
ANDREA FABRY: Food tastes wonderful in its natural state. So that’s really why we started By Kids, For Kids. They were just whizzes in the kitchen and I thought that’s going to help somebody. We’ll inspire another child with type I or their mom.
DEBRA: Yeah, it really is. I see that after all these years of research, I see that there’s basic information that we need to have like what’s toxic and what’s not toxic. But how you apply it is very individual. It’s so encouraging and gratifying for me to see a blog like yours where you’re applying the same concerns that I have and the same information that I have in your own unique way with your family.
On the one hand, we could say that this is a big, horrible, tragic thing, that everything is so toxic, but on the other hand, seeing now that there’s a whole alternate universe of things that are not toxic and things that are good for you.
But they aren’t so commonly available or commonly known. And so it’s about finding out about them and then using your own creativity. It’s just amazing opportunity to create your life the way you want it to be out of your own creativity.
ANDREA FABRY: Exactly! I think of it now as like a treasure hunt as opposed to when this first happened. You know, a part of our story, Debra, a big part of it is that after we left the house and after we started to recover, we developed multiple chemical sensitivity where one whiff of the laundry aisle in the store, I would have to go lay down for three hours or my children, one little, tiny ant trap that’s so innocent would create this huge nosebleed.
That hasn’t been the case. So to become chemically sensitive on top of everything else, my initial reaction was I resented it. Why can’t we just go back to our old life? Because we simply had to alter our life.
Some people make these decisions for a healthier lifestyle simply because they’re smart, they’re wise, they get it, they want to avoid things. I applaud that so much. That wasn’t me. That’s not my story. I had to. If my kids were going to survive and thrive again, we couldn’t have the chemicals in the house. We couldn’t have the chemicals in the food. We had to do it all so fast.
DEBRA: I understand, so did I.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes! And there was a sort of resentment about it initially. Well, that, thankfully, the journey, I’m six years out. I really do see it as a treasure hunt now. It’s the best part of what came out, it’s discovering this whole world of natural and realizing how much better we’re going to do over the long run despite our crises that we know what we know and then to enjoy it.
That’s what I love to help people. Get people over that hurdle of, “I don’t want it! I just resent the whole thing. Why can’t we just make the way it was or why do we have to think about immersion blenders or heaters?” like you opened the program, I wrote that down because I didn’t know and I’m in Arizona and my feet are cold. So I’m like, “Oh! Utility heaters. Thank you, Debra” and I just wrote that down.
You know, I like thinking about that now, whereas before, it was a burden.
DEBRA: I totally understand what you’re saying. It is a treasure hunt for me too. It’s just so much delight when I find things.
We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry and we’re talking about the delights of living toxic-free. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Andrea Fabry. She is the mother of nine children who all went through toxic mold exposure and multiple chemical sensitivity and came out the other end smiling and creating a new life with much better products in their homes.
So Andrea, I wanted to ask you a question that I know a lot of people have on their mind. And that is at the beginning of the show, you were talking about how you used to buy everything because it was cheap. And so it sounds like budget was a consideration for you.
So does it not matter to you anymore? How are you? Tell us, is it more expensive to live this way and how do you do that?
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it depends. I’m an economics major. I graduated 1978 with economics. I didn’t go into that field. However, something stuck with me over the years. And that is short run and long run. When it comes to health and the world in which we live, there’s a short run and there’s a long run. I now understand that I’m going for the long run. When I spend more on food –
And honestly, when you start making your own cleaning products and beauty care products, that part, I think that expense can go down. I don’t know any way around spending more for grass-fed pastured meats. It’s more expensive. But I see it as an investment. And I know in the long run, I know what I know what I know is that it pays off.
DEBRA: It does.
ANDREA FABRY: It may cost more now, but you will be spending less. And if you look at a hundred years ago, what we spent on food, it was a substantial part of our income, but what we spent on medical care was much smaller with that split. Now, we’re spending a great deal of income on medical care and less on field.
And that’s a mindset. Really changing that mindset to, “Yes, I may be spending more now, but…” – and we’ve seen it, the medical bill. Because we had that horrific – especially 2007, 2008, our medical bills, it took us a long time to dig out of that hole, plus we lost our house and started over. So financially, it was quite devastating, to say the least. We really did start from ground zero again. But we knew we had no choice, that if we were going to help our kids recover and thrive again, we had to get away from that mentality of, “Well, that’s the cheapest?”
And I didn’t even realize that I said that in the beginning, Debra, but that truly was a big part of my mindset, how buying in bulk, buying the cheapest. Now, I belong to an organic buying club. We do group buys. It’s just like that treasure hunt. There’s nothing like finding other like-minded people and getting together and sharing some of these costs. We ended up buying a quarter of cow. That’s a lot cheaper than the special cut of grass-fed beef.
And that’s the other part. I do understand. I understand the financial concerns and you can’t do it all right away, but in the end, you will be saving in terms of quality of life.
DEBRA: I found that too and that there are certain things that are more expensive and there’s other things – like when you start cleaning your house with baking soda and vinegar instead of expensive cleaning products, you start saving money.
And I found that my medical expenses did go down. I mean, there had been studies, which show – I don’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it’s on my website – about how many billions of dollars are being spent on illnesses related to toxic chemical exposure.
And so when you remove the toxic chemicals from your life, you’re cutting all of that out, so that your body actually has a chance to thrive and have its own natural health and that things like the extra expense of food is much, much less than the cost of medical bills. I mean, the cost of having cancer, for example, is astronomical.
ANDREA FABRY: Right. You know, we were on so many prescriptions. We had seizure disorder on one of our children and that was huge amounts of drugs and visits and tests and so forth. These are free now. Thanks to clean air, clean food, clean water, her body has just really appreciated the change and so we’re saving.
But honestly, you have to remember that. You’re giving up that lifestyle of walking in and seeing – food is incredibly cheap this way when it’s industrialized. It’s almost like just a giving up and a letting go of that.
DEBRA: Well, it’s a letting go, but also, I think you’ll agree that this other world that we found is actually much more enjoyable like I’d much prefer the taste of food organic to cheap, processed food.
ANDREA FABRY: Everything is better, everything is better.
DEBRA: Yeah!
ANDREA FABRY: And that is the long run view, the risks. And again, I did it kicking and screaming. And now, I’m beyond grateful. So my heart and my passion is for the kickers and screamers, but if they’re probably listening to your program, they’re probably not kicking and screaming, but maybe part of them. They’re obviously smart, they’re listening to this.
But my heart is for someone who is having a hard time believing, “Is it really going to pay off?” and I just want to say that the quality of life – well, you can hear it both in you and me.
DEBRA: Yes.
ANDREA FABRY: It gets pretty obvious.
DEBRA: We’re almost to the end of the show, but I want to make sure I ask you this question because I see in your writing that you have a close to nature viewpoint. This is something that’s really important to me. I wish we had a whole hour to talk about that. But maybe we’ll have you back and we can talk more about that because there’s so much we haven’t covered that we could talk about.
ANDREA FABRY: Well, it’s like driving, Debra (and I’m teaching one of our younger ones to drive again, it never gets easy). If you focus on ahead, way what your goal is rather than get caught – when you look too close to the road, you can veer off. Nature really offers just a beautiful picture of thriving health-wise. And so you keep your eyes and your focus on, “Well, what is the closest to nature?”
And I’m very active in the field of building biology and that’s basically it. What kind of shelter does nature provide? What are the materials rather than getting caught up in this and that. You can get tripped I think very easily.
DEBRA: Well, that, in 1978, it had been about 10 years, I was actually starting to feel better (because I had no guidance or anything then), in 1987 – or 1985 actually, I moved out into a forest instead of living in the city. In 1987, I just kind of looked around and I said, “Well, wait a minute! There’s the industrial world and there’s this.” Nature is thriving. Why aren’t we, humans thriving? And I had just a big aha moment about if I wanted to know how to live in a way that was thriving, I should look at nature because nature is doing it.
ANDREA FABRY: Yes! Yes. And you know, I just want to thank you honestly really for pioneering this. That took a lot of courage. And for you to just write about it so quickly and have this passion, I really appreciate it.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Well, I think it takes all of us. It takes all of us doing this. My goal is now to have the whole world be toxic-free. I just started out just trying to make my home, my home and then quickly, we have other people’s homes.
Then I’ve learned so much about how everything that we do has these long tails and they go out into the environment and they affect other people and what other people do affects us and that we really need to do – like in the beginning, I was talking about my heater. Well, it’s an electric heater, so it’s producing pollution. But where I am right now, unless I put solar panels on my house (which I’m considering, but not affording yet), that’s the only choice I have.
ANDREA FABRY: Right, exactly. Yes.
DEBRA: So we need to be looking at what is the electric company doing and what are the government regulations and what are they selling at the big buck stores and you know you know.
ANDREA FABRY: I do! That’s right.
DEBRA: And so everything that I do and everything that you do is all contributing to this—and everything that all our readers are doing. I think that all together, we are changing the world.
ANDREA FABRY: I do too.
DEBRA: And even though it looks weak sometimes, but we are changing the world and we’re changing the way people think and we’re changing what’s happening. So Andrea, I’m so happy that you are on the show. Let’s have you on again.
ANDREA FABRY: I’d love it! I’d love to come back, Debra.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So again, her website is It-Takes-Time.com. Make sure you look at her recipes. I know that I am going to make these little cacao stripe cookies.
ANDREA FABRY: You’ll love them. You’ll love them.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah… and so many other things. She’s got a pizza recipe. Her son makes pizza. Her son makes pizza for the family.
ANDREA FABRY: He’s 13, I know. It’s really amazing.
DEBRA: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? She’s got a great recipe for coconut ice cream, coconut coffee ice cream. And one thing I like about your instructions – I obviously read a lot of raw food blogs and experiment with things myself and write myself, but yours are very simple. Your recipes are very simple and it’s a good place to start. I just go, “Oh, yeah! That would work, that would work.”
ANDREA FABRY: Good! Oh, I love hearing that. Thank you for that feedback.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. And we have to go because the music is going to come on in about five seconds. So thank you so much, Andrea. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can listen to this show again, you can listen to past shows. You can read the transcripts. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
