Today my guests Diana Kaye and James Hahn will tell us more about what goes on behind the scenes in the world of organic agriculture and the making and sales of organic products. We’ll be talking about politics and how regulations affect the distribution of organic products in the marketplace. This husband-and-wife are co-founders of their USDA certified organic business Terressentials. They own a small organic farm in lovely Middletown Valley, Maryland and have operated their organic herbal personal care products business there since 1996. Terressentials was originally started in Virginia in 1992. It grew out of their search for chemical-free products after Diana’s personal experience with cancer and chemotherapy in 1988. Prior to Diana’s cancer, they were involved in commercial architecture in Washington DC. Diana and James are proud to be an authentic USDA certified organic and Fair Made USA business. They are obsessive organic researchers and artisan handcrafters of more than one hundred USDA certified organic gourmet personal care products that they offer through their two organic stores in Frederick County, Maryland, through a network of select retail partners across the US, and to customers around the world via their informative web site. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/terressentials
LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH DIANA KAYE & JAMES HAHN
- GMOs in Personal Care Products
- Toxics in Essential Oils?
- How to Restore Your “Virgin Hair”
- How to Read a Label on Organic Personal Care Products
- The Challenges of Achieving Organic Certification
- What Organic Means — From the Experience of Being Organic Farmers
- Why One Couple Decided to Get an Organic Farm and Make USDA Certified Organic Gourmet Personal Care Products
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
More About “Organic”: Politics and the Regulation of Marketplace Distribution
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Diana Kaye and James Hahn
Date of Broadcast: September 17, 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. Well, it’s raining today. We’re having a wonderful rain storm today here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s only 72°, which means it’s getting cooler. It’s not 90° and it’s so nice. I’m so happy that we’re getting cooler weather now. It’s getting to be fall.
And today, we are going to be talking about organic again with my guest, Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. We’ve been doing a series about different aspects of what organic means, what about organic certification, about how the products, different things about organic products, how organic agricultural products are turned into products, et cetera, et cetera.
So today, we’re going to be talking more about organic, about the politics of organic and about the regulation of marketplace distribution.
Hi, Diana. Are you there and James too?
DIANA KAYE: Yes, ma’am.
JAMES HAHN: We are.
DEBRA: Both of you. Good, good.
JAMES HAHN: Good morning, afternoon.
DEBRA: I wasn’t sure James was there or we just have Diana today. I’m so happy both of you are here today with me.
And so why don’t you just give us a brief introduction about who you are and why you’re interested in organics, how you got interested in this just briefly because I know that we’ve talked about this before. For our listeners who haven’t heard you before, give us a brief introduction and then we’ll get into our discussion for today.
DIANA KAYE: Sure! Jim, do you want to handle it or…?
JAMES HAHN: No, go ahead, Diana.
DIANA KAYE: Okay.
JAMES HAHN: Keep it short though.
DEBRA: Keep it short, yeah.
DIANA KAYE: I know. I do tend to ramble. Our journey into the world or organic personal care products occurred because we had been dealing with me having a surprise visit from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It was very urgent and we didn’t have a lot of choices or time to make choices and I ended up doing chemotherapy.
The chemotherapy was very, very strong and it really kind of made a mess of my immune system. It made me extremely reactive. It was baffling to us why this would happen, why I was reacting to everything.
That led us down the path (with the help of Debra’s book) to find out that I was reacting. My immune system have gotten so out of whack from double dose chemotherapy. It was an experiment that I became very sensitized to things in my environment.
So we began (as Debra, I’m sure you’re familiar doing) the whole weeding out of your place, examining every single thing that you come into contact with. One thing led to another and we were able to get our house pretty much cleaned out (with your help, thanks), we worked on our diets. We’ve done vegetarianism for a number of years. The remaining problem was caring for our bodies.
When we were looking at products in health food stores, they said ‘all-natural’ and yet we were seeing all these chemicals and we began this really long journey into learning all about cosmetic formulation, looking at patents, the patents and trademarks at the Library of Congress on microfilm and all these articles to find out how these products were made, what these chemicals were and why they were in these products.
And that led us to decide that we didn’t want to use these products on our bodies and dump them down the drains into the water, which we all have to drink.
JAMES HAHN: We literally couldn’t find products that met the standard we set for ourselves.
DEBRA: And let’s also just mention what year this was.
JAMES HAHN: When was that?
DEBRA: Nineteen ninety something. A long time ago.
DIANA KAYE: It was from 1989 until 1991. And then we began trying to find products for us to use. And during the course of that period, in 1992 is when we started our business as a catalog. We used to sell your books in our catalogs because we were trying to help other people who were like us seeking answers. And we wanted to be able to offer them body care products and household products, but we had a limited amount of things to offer people, which we thought bizarre because we were living in a major city. We’re thinking, “My goodness, if we can’t find products here in the Washington D.C. metro area, what are other people doing?”
DEBRA: Well, yeah. When I first started my work and I wrote my first book in 1982…
DIANA KAYE: Yehey!
DEBRA: At that point, I was just learning about where these toxic chemicals were, but I had a good idea of what it was that I was looking for in a natural product. All the information that I could find on all the products in all categories that did not have toxic chemicals as far as I could identify, it all fit in a shoebox, in 3 x 5 cards in a shoebox. That was it. That was all I could find.
Clothing, for example, if you wanted to wear cotton in 1982, it was a t-shirt and jeans.
JAMES HAHN: Right.
DEBRA: That was that.
JAMES HAHN: Back then.
DEBRA: And so I want to applaud the two of you for being among the first to even be looking at this issue in the body care area.
DIANA KAYE: Also, Jim is a registered architect and I’m a designer. And so we also took a lot of courses in non-toxic building design. I mean, we really went to a lot of great depth just like you did to try to get our environment clean.
But the body care stuff, the more we learned about how your main sources of toxic exposure are skin absorption (number one), inhalation (number two), food by your mouth is number three…
DEBRA: It is number three. Yeah, because when you inhale something or you put it on your skin, it goes straight into the blood stream.
JAMES HAHN: Yeah.
DIANA KAYE: Yes, yeah.
DEBRA: If you put it in your mouth, it goes down through your digestion and mixes with the protein and the food and the fats and everything and it’s a much slower process to get into your body.
So really, if you’re thinking about toxic chemicals, you need to be most concerned about what you’re breathing and putting on your skin.
DIANA KAYE: And with personal care, you get a double whammy…
DEBRA: It’s both.
DIANA KAYE: …because if you’re buying a personal care – and for example, if it’s a shampoo, a foamy, bubbly substance, it’s a detergent-based product laced with preservatives and usually, even the health food stores, chemical fragrances – you’re absorbing all of these chemicals when you’re putting it on your head. But the worst part is all day long, you’re now surrounding yourself with these volatile compounds that are [inaudible 00:07:59] from your hair all day long.
DEBRA: Right, right.
DIANA KAYE: So yeah, it’s really a can of worm. And that, all of those reasons and that history is why we felt compelled to start making our products and sharing them with other people.
And like you, I think we wanted to share this information because the more people that knows, the fewer chemicals we have to deal with. I mean, it might be a little selfish, but…
DEBRA: Well, I don’t think it’s selfish. But it’s like I got to this point where we can think about ourselves as individuals. I think this is an important point. We can think about ourselves as individuals, but then we go out into an environment where everyone else is still doing the toxic thing.
And so it’s not about us staying in our non-toxic homes, it’s about the whole world being toxic-free because when everybody lives toxic-free, then everybody can have a happy life, all the different species can live. A tree doesn’t have a choice, a butterfly doesn’t have a choice…
DIANA KAYE: No.
DEBRA: …to not choose toxic products. And yet we’re putting all that toxic. All these toxic things end up being toxic waste, the things that we use end up out in the environment as toxic waste and all the other species have no protection against this.
JAMES HAHN: Yes.
DEBRA: And so we’re just killing species right and left. Pretty soon, we’re not going to have all these what we call ‘natural resources’ in order to make products that we need for our own life if we keep killing them.
DIANA KAYE: Absolutely. It’s so stirring that we’re disrupting the balance of the planet. We need, we depend on the tiniest insect, the butterfly.
DEBRA: Right!
DIANA KAYE: We need all of these animals. We need the creatures that are living in our tainted waters to maintain the balance of this planet.
That worries us so much every day. That’s another reason why we’re so passionate about – you know, I think we’ve come to expect after 22 years that we may not see a major change in our lifetime. But Debra, I have to tell you, since you wrote your book and since we started our company ten years later, I have seen some changes…
DEBRA: I have to.
DIANA KAYE: …and that gives me hope. It makes me feel better. but I think we still have a lot of work to do.
DEBRA: We do. We’ve come a long way and we still have a long ways to go. So we need to go to break. And when we come back, we’re going to start talking more about organic. You’ve been telling us a lot of great things and there is more to hear.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. That’s Terressentials.com. We’ll be right back!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials and we’re talking about organic.
Okay! So where would you like to start? Would you like to start with politics or the regulations of marketplace distribution?
DIANA KAYE: Oh, boy! Politics, huh?
JAMES HAHN: Everything starts with politics.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, yeah, doesn’t it?
DEBRA: Alright! Then let’s start with politics. Go ahead.
DIANA KAYE: Well, I think the biggest surprise to us in the early years of our business was finding out that number one, there was no legal definition anywhere in the United States for the word ‘natural’.
DEBRA: And there still isn’t.
JAMES HAHN: That’s right.
DIANA KAYE: No. No, there still isn’t. And in fact, it’s just – oh, my gosh! We’re going to call this the ‘misrepresentation’ of that word in the marketplace in many different product categories is just frightening. It’s just become so widespread.
DEBRA: Could I just say something first about the word ‘natural’ as it pertains to body care products. That is that if you go into – like this was particularly true when I first started and Diana and James first started. There was a field called ‘natural beauty care’ or whatever it’s called.
If you look at the ingredients, the ingredients originally start as something that is not a man-made petroleum product. It originally starts with something like a coconut. But most of the ingredients in these so-called natural products are industrial chemicals because the…
JAMES HAHN: I have to say something about that.
DEBRA: Yeah.
JAMES HAHN: And that is if you think about it, everything that exists, the cellphone on my desk, the car parked outside, everything that exists, all the parts came from something in nature. Silicon came from sand and the metals were mined. Everything comes from the earth, but if it’s changed into something else, it’s not natural, what you’ve done.
DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. And so I think the ‘natural’ industry – and we even do call it the “natural” industry, the natural industry tries to delineate that their source ingredients are renewable resources like plants and animals and minerals and that they’re not the bad petroleum, man-made chemicals.
But petroleum is from nature as well. I mean, I remember going to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and you can see the tar oozing out of the ground. That’s just part of the same petroleum that we make plastics out of, it’s just a different form. But all these man-made petrochemical petroleum things, they’re all from nature, but that source material is modified by man, by industry.
Now, it doesn’t matter if you start with petroleum or you start with a coconut, it all goes into the industrial system and it comes out with something altered. And if you look up how a coconut become sodium lauryl sulfate, there’s lots of manmade chemicals involved in that and lots of man-made processing. And so sodium lauryl sulfate, I’m sorry, is not the same as a coconut.
DIANA KAYE: No.
JAMES HAHN: No, it’s [inaudible 00:17:26].
DEBRA: It’s not.
DIANA KAYE: No.
DEBRA: And so that’s what a lot of natural products are.
JAMES HAHN: Yes.
DIANA KAYE: We address that with an article that we call Bursting the Bubble. The article was writing to try to decipher the technical, scientific information about how to process these various chemicals, oleochemicals, surfactants and emollient, et cetera.
And so when people think about these natural and safe surfactants that are in the shampoos that they’re using on [inaudible 00:18:06], they’re not understanding that as you pointed out, they have been coconut oil, but then it’s put into a reactor, which is very similar to a nuclear reactor in terms of the pounds per square inch, the intensity of the pressure and also in terms of the core heat. These giant vessels, these industrial vessels will incorporate a liquid-heavy metal that’s used as a catalyst…
JAMES HAHN: …in many cases.
DIANA KAYE: …in most cases. And many of these heavy metal constituents they’re using are in nanoparticle forms (the smaller the particle, the greater the reaction). And then once the temperature and pressure reaches a certain point, there’s often a petrochemical agent or two added (ethyleenoxide is one) to the process to crack and split these molecules into new things that never before existed in nature. And voila! They’re sold as safe, baby products.
DEBRA: Well, yeah. And it says on the label. It’ll say the name of the chemical and in parenthesis afterwards, it says ‘coconut’.
JAMES HAHN: Yes.
DIANA KAYE: Yeah, that is…
DEBRA: And so you look at that and you say, “Oh! Well, this is coconut. It’s natural,” but it’s not. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not.
JAMES HAHN: It’s not.
DIANA KAYE: No, not at all. And this is an experiment. This is a giant experiment and people are subjecting themselves as guinea pigs.
JAMES HAHN: Not willingly.
DIANA KAYE: No!
DEBRA: No.
DIANA KAYE: But they’re trusting this word ‘natural’. And that is the huge problem. That is something that we feel in the world of politics really needs to be addressed. What we’ve seen is that the government has been reluctant to do anything in terms of defining this word although curiously, there is a definition for ‘non-synthetic’ in the National Organic Program Regulations in the section of ‘Definitions’. How about that?
DEBRA: Wow!
DIANA KAYE: Yeah. And non-synthetic equals natural. So technically, we have one that nobody pays attention to and I think that they’re sorry they ever put it in there because over the last 15 years, we keep pointing this out to people.
I think there has been some class action lawsuits in the food world, in the personal care world where the lawyers are basically seeing opportunities to try to set the records straight and it has worked to some extent.
JAMES HAHN: It’s making a part of a difference so far.
DIANA KAYE: But it’s the shame that we have to depend on lawyers and the legal system, class action rather than having enforcement of the law by the agents of the government that has this enforcement power within their reach. It’s at their hand and they’re able to do that. That’s the world that we live in right now.
JAMES HAHN: And see, there, you’re getting [inaudible 00:21:09].
DIANA KAYE: Right! So…
DEBRA: Alright! So now we have to go to break once again. When we come back, we’ll talk about politics.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, boy!
DEBRA: Let’s see at 12:57, we’ll talk about all these. Okay! You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn who has so much to say about organics and we’ll hear more when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Diana Kaye and James Hahn from Terressentials. So now, we’re going to talk about politics and organic.
DIANA KAYE: It’s so weird that we have to mix politics in with fine organic skin care.
DEBRA: I know! I know, I know, I know.
DIANA KAYE: Oh!
DEBRA: I mean, we should be able to just make things out of the renewable resources at hand and use them to make our bodies clean and healthy.
DIANA KAYE: I know. And that’s what we really had intended just to be able to blend these beautiful, organic and edible butters and essential oils and the herbal extracts with beautiful things like clay from the earth and salt and just have things that would nurture us.
JAMES HAHN: When we started, we hoped to spend all of our time doing that.
DIANA KAYE: But we quickly learned that we had to actually get heavily involved in the politics. And the problems that we’re having is that there are so many giant corporations – and let’s not just limit to the U.S. because this is not just a U.S. problem. This is…
JAMES HAHN: World wide.
DIANA KAYE: …an international problem. We have giant corporations that are making body care products around the world and they love the word ‘natural’. They have loved it for decades now.
JAMES HAHN: Because consumers do.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
DIANA KAYE: They do not want to give that up. And then something strange happened 20 years ago. They found out about the Organic Foods Production Act and saw a huge opportunity to use the word ‘organic’… with abandon, I might add.
JAMES HAHN: Without meeting…
DIANA KAYE: …any organic standard. And so that’s what the companies did on a global basis. They jumped on to this organic bandwagon. Natural wasn’t good enough. Then it became ‘organic’ and they don’t want to give up that word. They’ve been giving it up slowly, but reluctantly, some companies, but other companies see it as an incredibly profitable buzz word if they can put on their website, on their product…
JAMES HAHN: …on their store, on their salon and spa.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, exactly! I mean, we’ve sen it driving it by on a sign outside a salon.
DEBRA: Well, let me ask you a question because I think this is the question that’s running through all the listeners’ mind right now and this relates to politics. Isn’t there a law about using these words?
DIANA KAYE: What do you think? There is a federal law called the National Organic Program, which was signed into law in October of 2012 and that was the result of the Organic Food Production Act of 1990.
The USDA, with consumer input, put together these regulations. They were published on the federal register for public comment. There were more than 200,000 public comments generated, more public comments generated regarding input into the Organic Program Regulation than any other law in history of law-making. And yet despite that, we have virtually no enforcement in the personal care world over the word ‘organic’.
JAMES HAHN: Well, what started in the beginning when the National Organic Foods Act came out, we thought that was really pretty terrific. And then the USDA said, “Oh, by the way, you cannot apply this to body care products” and we said, “What?”
DIANA KAYE: Because we had spent ten years formulating our product to the Organic Foods Production Act and we were ready to rock as soon as the rules went into law, it became a final law.
This was very disturbing to us and a couple of other companies…
JAMES HAHN: …not very many.
DIANA KAYE: No, not very many, but a few that we had been working with in the Organic Consumers Association, they filed a complaint. And then the USDA said, “Okay. Well, we changed our mind. We’ll let you all. If you want to seek certification, we’ll let you do it. You can get certified to this organic program.”
So that little waffling caused us a little bit of time because for basically a year, they said we couldn’t get certified to the new law. And then they changed their mind after a complaint was filed and we were able to get certification.
And so the industry though, the other giant – we’re a very tiny company, but many giant corporations were unhappy with this turn of events.
JAMES HAHN: You can’t believe.
DIANA KAYE: And again, they didn’t want to give up their use of the word ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ because they have been using those words to promote those products. And again, internationally, it started to split off and a lot of manufacturers working with their suppliers and their distributor, their retail store partner began to create their own so-called “organic” and “natural” standard independently of USDA National Organic Program Regulation to justify their use of the word ‘natural’ and ‘organic’.
JAMES HAHN: There’s something that’s really important I need to jump in here with and that is even though the USDA said, “Okay, you can get your body care products certified to our standard, we changed our mind,” even though they said that, they said, “We will continue to enforce the organic standards for foods and agricultural products. But in our opinion…” – these are not literally their word, but they said, “In our opinion, the body care products don’t count as agricultural products. Therefore, we’re not going to enforce that field at all… at all.”
DEBRA: But that’s so funny.
JAMES HAHN: I know.
DEBRA: I mean, it’s not a laughing matter that they’re not doing it, but what’s funny about it is that it just kind of goes to the mindset I think and the understanding of how people think about things because obviously, food is an agricultural product. Obviously, body care is not because it’s made from all these industrial chemicals.
DIANA KAYE: Right.
JAMES HAHN: Exactly! In other words, what it came down to…
DIANA KAYE: Jim…
JAMES HAHN: Go ahead, I’m sorry.
DEBRA: Let me just finish, okay? I want to hear everything you have to say. If people thought of body care the way you and I think of body care as being made from agricultural products, of course, it should be certified organic and of course. But I can see where the common way of thinking about body care product is that it’s an industrial product.
DIANA KAYE: Right! But that’s what we have to change because that’s what’s been causing us problem. The bizarre thing is that farmers, the majority of farmers today thinks that the application of pesticides and herbicides, that’s the traditional farming method.
DEBRA: No!
DIANA KAYE: And the organic method where you don’t use chemical input, “Well, that’s a strange alternative thing.” I mean, this is a crazy world that we live in.
DEBRA: No, using pesticides to grow food is a strange, alternative thing.
DIANA KAYE: Yes!
JAMES HAHN: Yes.
DEBRA: …if you look at the whole history of growing food.
DIANA KAYE: It’s totally bizarre. And there were people who said, “Oh, you can never make organic body care products.” This is what we were told repeatedly and we said, “Really?”
JAMES HAHN: [inaudible 00:34:18]
DIANA KAYE: “…because we’re doing it.” In fact, there was an archeological dig outside of London (this is now 10 years back) where they actually found a tin in this – they were excavating a road on the way to a temple and they found a tin of cream that was nearly 2000 years old and they analyzed this cream. All these scientists were fighting over it. And they finally got to analyze it. It’s very interesting. What they found out strangely, amazingly was that this cream 2000 years old was still viable.
JAMES HAHN: And when Diana says cream, she means skin cream.
DEBRA: Wow!
DIANA KAYE: It was a skin cream.
DEBRA: Wow!
DIANA KAYE: In fact, the cool thing was the woman – and we presume it was a woman, her fingerprints were dipped into the cream and you could still them after 2000 years.
DEBRA: I love this! And I have something to say about it when we come back from the break. We have to hurry up and go to break. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’re going to continue with our discussion about organics.
Here’s what I wanted to say before the break. Now, I’m going to tell you something personal about me that I’ve never said on the radio before.
DIANA KAYE: Ooh…
DEBRA: First, I have to say before I can tell you this, I have to tell you that I’m half Armenian. My mother was 100% Armenian. And so I grew up in a family where my grandparents – I mean, I had this whole half of my family was Armenian with that whole kind of ancient, middle eastern viewpoint.
And so I grew up culturally with belly dancing in my family. I know that a lot of people think belly dancing is strange, exotic, sexy, et cetera. But you know what? Belly dancing, I read a book not too long ago about belly dancing, the history of belly dancing. What I found out from belly dancing was that it was not designed to seduce men. What belly dancing was designed for was as a health exercise for women.
JAMES HAHN: Really?
DEBRA: All those movements are to get women’s bodies – it’s like doing Tai Chi or something like that where it’s a series of movement that enhances the flows in your body to be healthy.
DIANA KAYE: Wow! Wow.
DEBRA: And as I was reading this book that contained that information, it also said that women in these cultures, ancient cultures, they made their own cosmetics. The reason they made their own cosmetics was because that was one of the few areas of life where they had control over their own life, it was to make their own cosmetics.
I’m almost in tears now even just saying that because these are the things that culturally and historically belonged to us to make for ourselves and as food for us to cook for ourselves. They’ve been so taken over by the industrial system.
JAMES HAHN: Argh!
DEBRA: They’ve taken away our creativity and our self-determinism and our connection with nature and all of these things. And even though you’re making products and selling them in a consumer way, it’s so much closer to what people used to do, that they were making their own cosmetic products, their own body care products. All these things that they used to nourish and take care of their bodies, women made them themselves. And that was what happened for millennia.
DIANA KAYE: Absolutely.
JAMES HAHN: For sure.
DIANA KAYE: Absolutely. In fact, women, they were the guardians. They took care of the sick, they nurture the children, they took care of the communities. They were in touch with the plants!
DEBRA: …with the plants! They know which plants did what.
DIANA KAYE: Yes, yes!
DEBRA: That is our heritage as women, to have that information and to make these things and to have a nourishing home. And instead of doing those things, what we do is go to doctors and we buy products.
DIANA KAYE: Yeah.
DEBRA: When I realized that, when I learned that by studying history, I started doing all those things myself because I wanted to have that birth right of doing it. And so I think that the highest good that we can do as individuals is to reconnect in that way and that you’re doing that in a way of showing people how wonderful these products are.
DIANA KAYE: It makes me cry.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So when you do something yourself, when you go out, when you plant herbs in your own backyard and you make something yourself or even if you buy the ingredients and make it yourself, there is less of government regulation and government interference because it’s more directly you and nature. And that’s the way life is designed to be.
There! I’ll stop being philosophical.
DIANA KAYE: No, it’s absolutely true. The reason again that we started to make these products is that people today, people’s lives are so intense. They’re so busy. They’re so pressured. There’s so much stress. We wanted to have products that were just like all the products that we were talking about, things that have been made for thousands of years.
When they analyzed that cream that they found on the road to the Roman temple outside of London, when they finally were able to analyze it just three years ago or four years ago, they found out that the formulation was remarkably sophisticated and it was virtually identical to what we’re making today with our creams.
DEBRA: Yes. Yeah.
DIANA KAYE: So we’re saying to people that it can be done.
DEBRA: It can be done.
DIANA KAYE: Big companies say it can’t be done because you know what? It’s really expensive to preserve a product with organic herbal extracts and essential oils. It’s really expensive. If you look at a little bottle of an herbal extract in the store, a 1 oz. or a 2 oz. bottle and look at that cost for 1 oz. bottle and then if you compare it to phenoxyethanol, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate, the parabens and all these other synthetic, industrial, chemical preservatives…
JAMES HAHN: …dirt cheap.
DIANA KAYE: They’re dirt cheap. You’re talking pennies per pounds. They’re so toxic…
JAMES HAHN: And the same thing goes for the other thing, the emollients.
DIANA KAYE: Right! The synthetic fatty acid, the bubbly, foamy surfactant. They’re way more inexpensive to produce than real [inaudible 00:44:48] or buying virgin, extra virgin olive oil or virgin coconut oil, all certified organic.
But these things are precious, they work and frankly, we are also so disturbed talking about politics by the psychological manipulation through photoshopping and imagery where corporations are preying on a woman’s psyche to manipulate her into feeling that she won’t be loved, she won’t feel important and she has no value.
DEBRA: And she won’t be beautiful, she won’t be beautiful.
DIANA KAYE: Right, right! Unless she alters her body, colors her hair, uses make-up, uses all these toxic body care products.
JAMES HAHN: That’s a whole show of its own right there.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, my gosh!
DEBRA: That is a whole show. We should probably do that one day. But we only have a few minutes left of this show, so I want to make sure that for a couple of minutes, let’s just talk about the regulation and marketplace distribution because that was in the title of the show.
JAMES HAHN: Yes.
DIANA KAYE: My goodness, yes.
DEBRA: You know, I think for the next one, I think we’ll just say, “Diana and Jim are going to talk.”
DIANA KAYE: No, no. Debra, your questions are great.
JAMES HAHN: “…about whatever you want.”
DIANA KAYE: You really understand, which is why it just makes you such a great hostess for this show because you have studied for 30-something years. You get it like us.
DEBRA: Yes, I have. Thank you.
DIANA KAYE: So few people get it. And that’s what’s so important about your question. You’re really good at this. You’re good at translating the information so that people will understand what we’re talking about and getting the importance and how it relates directly to their personal health and whether or not they’re going to live a long, healthy life or have a short where they’re battling illness constantly.
That I think is why we’re on the same page and why we love your questions.
DEBRA: We are at the same page, we are.
DIANA KAYE: In terms of the marketplace situation, first of all, there is still the Organic Certification Program. Personal care product companies can choose to seek this. And honestly, I have reviewed personally every single body care standard that’s out there. Oh, my gosh, how boring.
JAMES HAHN: World wide.
DIANA KAYE: Yes, reading all these industry standards. There really aren’t very many government standards. The U.S.A. has the most potent one in terms of its restrictiveness and what you can and cannot use to make organic products and/or to grow organic raw materials.
So really, based on all of our research, the USDA Organic Certification is still the no.1 organic certification.
We’re sad because there are rules where youc an use clays. This is just one example of something that – it’s not ideal. You can use clays to filter food. You can use clays as ingredients in food products and in livestock beef, but they don’t grow. They’re not organic. They’re allowed, but they’re not organic.
Like for example, we have a product, our hair wash, which the bulk of it is clay, a natural clay that comes from the earth. It’s wonderful and amazing.
JAMES HAHN: It’s the dictionary definition of natural, not the marketer’s definition.
DIANA KAYE: Right!
DEBRA: Right, right!
DIANA KAYE: The only human alteration there is grinding it up into a powder that can be utilized to cleanse the body.
You mentioned Zeolites in a promotional piece. Again, Zeolites are allowed in animal feed and they’re so healing and wonderful. But they count against you – clays and Zeolite.
A salt is considered neutral, which we think all minerals, all clays should’ve been considered neutral. But the only thing that’s considered neutral under the rag is salt.
JAMES HAHN: I think they weren’t thinking far enough ahead.
DIANA KAYE: No, I don’t think so either.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
DIANA KAYE: So you can have a product that still can be totally natural, but it may not be certifiable to the organic [inaudible 00:48:52].
DEBRA: And I think that that is a problem because if somebody is looking for something that is I’ll say ‘of nature’ in the sense of it being a renewable non-industrial ingredient, close to its natural state as it appears in the world, then something like clay or salt or Zeolite or all of those things meet that standard.
DIANA KAYE: Oh, my God! Yes.
DEBRA: And I think, my opinion is that your hairwash, for example, that has so much clay in it, that’s about as natural of a natural product as exists in the world. But I understand you can’t get certified for it because it’s got ingredients in it that are not agricultural products.
DIANA KAYE: Isn’t that crazy? And yet there are all these companies with chemically, bubbly, detergent shampoos laced with chemical preservatives boldly calling these products organic still being sold on the shelves of health food stores across America.
DEBRA: Oh, I’m not even watching the clock. We have to go.
JAMES HAHN: We’ve got to go, Diana.
DEBRA: Thank you so much.
DIANA KAYE: Thank you.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!
DIANA KAYE: You’re a lifesaver, kid.
DEBRA: Thanks!
