Today my guest is David Abbot, author of Healing Your Family With Practical Household Toxicology. We’ll be talking about his first-hand experience identifying toxic chemicals in homes, his observations of how these toxics affected the health of the home’s inhabitants, and ways everyone can reduce toxic exposures at home. David became aware he was sensitive to chemicals in the early 1980’s, but in retrospect he realized he had been chemically sensitive since he was a child. Like everyone born in the 1950’s, he had been exposed to DDT and many other highly toxic chemicals. A retired general contractor, David got formal training in a household toxicology program in the early 1980’s. The teachers included a PhD in toxicology, a mycologist for a public health department, a medical doctor who was board certified in environmental medicine and had a masters in public health, a chemist, an engineer, and various EPA experts. He also recieved informal training from a microbiologist, a few chemists, a nuclear inspector at the Bremerton Naval Shipyard, and an electrical engineer. He studied household and industrial vacuum and air cleaning technology at the engineering library, as well as buying many vacuum cleaners and air cleaners and using them and taking them apart, so he could understand how they worked and how many of them are improperly designed, do not really work right, and expose people to toxins and allergens. He then volunteered for about three years, going to the houses of people whose health conditions did not respond to medical treatment. In every case he found chemical toxins and/or biological allergens that are known to cause those medical conditions. You may email David at David healthy.environment@frontier.com for information on how to order his book.

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Tales from Toxic Homes – A Household Toxicologist Shares His Experience

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: David Abbott

Date of Broadcast: May 07, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Thursday, May 7th, 2015. It’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining, no rain, no breeze, just a beautiful sunshine. We’ve got a lot of sunshine here.

So what we’re going to be talking about today is household toxics, which we talk about every day, but from a little different perspective. My guest today is a household toxicologist. He’s written a book and he has many years of experience. He was actually trained as a household toxicologist and he’ll be telling us about that, how he got trained. But he also has worked on many houses in many places in many ways to reduce toxic chemical exposures. So he has a tremendous amount of experience.

He realized that after working for many years as a household toxicology consultant, he started getting the symptoms from exposure to toxic chemicals that were in his clients’ homes. He realized that if his clients had had some written instructions and guidelines, that 95% of them could have solved their own household toxicology problems without him even going to their house. So he wrote this book.

So he’s got a lot to tell us about toxic chemicals in homes, how people react to them, and what you can do to fix them. His name is David Abbott, and he’s the author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology.

Hi, David.

DAVID ABBOTT: Hi, Debra.

DEBRA: How are you doing today?

DAVID ABBOTT: I’m doing well. And you?

DEBRA: Good. Very good. I’m very interested in having you tell your story about how you got interested in this and in particular, household toxicologist, I’ve actually never heard that term before. Is there a whole field of household toxicology that I’m just not aware of?

DAVID ABBOTT: Well, actually, I may have coined that phrase.

DEBRA: And it’s a very good one.

DAVID ABBOTT: There are not very many people who do this although in China, they have started training people to do it.

DEBRA: Wow.

DAVID ABBOTT: The government actually does that.

DEBRA: There’s a whole field of [inaudible 00:03:32] biology, which I think may be slightly different from what you do because I think that you focus on the toxic chemicals and [inaudible 00:03:40] biology includes all kinds of things, electromagnetic fields, molds and all these other things. They include toxic chemicals, but they aren’t as trained as I think you are or as trained as – I mean, I’m not trained by somebody. I’m trained by 30 years of my own research. So I think that most people don’t have that.

So tell us how you got interested in this on the first place.

DAVID ABBOTT: Well, actually, before I do that, I think very highly [inaudible 00:04:13] biology. It’s total common sense and very practical.

DEBRA: Yes, it does.

DAVID ABBOTT: And it works. Around 1973, I started noticing that I was chemically sensitive. I started putting two and two together, “When I used this product, I start to feel this way. When I use that product, I get sleepy or confused,” and that sort of thing. And I found that if I didn’t use those chemicals, I felt better.

So I started studying the toxins in building materials and building practices because I was a general contractor. I spent most of my time building houses and repairing or remodeling or maintaining them. And I started reading all of the fine print on the labels of the materials that I use, and the MSDS sheets, the Material Safety Data Sheets.

I spent a lot of time at the University of Washington Engineering and Medical Libraries, studying indoor air quality, air flow in and around houses, the Ashray textbooks, and that sort of thing. I studied with a guy who has a Ph.D. in Toxicology from the University of Washington, [inaudible 00:05:36] to work for the Seattle Health Department and some chemists and biochemists, a physicist, electrical and biochemical engineers, medical doctors who specialize in environmental medicine and EPA department experts.

DEBRA: Yes, so you have lot of training. And you mentioned to me that there was a Household Toxicology Program in the 1980s that you were a part of. Do you know anything about how that came together? It sounded from your description there was actually a program or people were being trained to learn what you know.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes, it was. And technically, I’m not supposed to mention it to you because they said they didn’t want anyone to use the training from that program to make money or to engage in other activities besides their program.

DEBRA: Okay. Is that program still existing because I’ve never heard of a program like that?

DAVID ABBOTT: Well, as far as I know, it is. I haven’t talked to them in some time. And I actually broke off with them because they were being funded by two groups that were using the program to collect data about homeowners’ use of toxic chemicals for their own studies. And so it turned out that that was actually the main goal of the program rather than teaching the program participants how to protect themselves from the exposures while they were doing the consultations.

DEBRA: Did you find that once you were trained – you had mentioned, I think, in your e-mail to me about your book that after you started doing these consultations that you became more chemically sensitive? Did you find doing the work actually affected your health?

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes, I did, very much so. Typically, when people have health issues that don’t respond to conventional or alternative medical treatment, they are being exposed to chemical toxins or sometimes mold and pollen and animal dander and that kind of thing in their own house. And sometimes their use of insecticides was so excessive as to be really frightening. Insecticides are usually neurotoxins and insects and human beings have brains and nervous systems that operate through the exact same basic biochemical mechanisms.

And so many insecticides that poison insects by attacking their brain and nervous system does the exact same thing to people. It’s frightening to use insecticides especially when we consider that most of the insects that we poison are not really dangerous to us.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. That was something that I came to many, many years ago. I don’t remember the last time I used a pesticide because I’ve been doing this for so long. But I came to a point where I said, “Wait a minute. Do I really want to spray toxic chemicals in my house because I have flies?” I could put up screens. Are spiders so bad?

I think that we were trained to see insects as being pests that need to be eradicated by poisons just by watching television and general society. But when I started becoming more aware of nature myself, I started thinking, “Well, wait a minute. These insects, these are all part of the ecosystem. I just need to put up a barrier and say, ‘You stay out there and this is my house.’ I don’t need to spray them.”

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes. And you can get a spray bottle and fill it. What we have available here locally at the liquor stores is something called Diesel, which is not diesel oil or diesel fuel. It’s actually about 90% and under so pure grain alcohol. And so it’s the same type of alcohol that we drink in beer or whiskey or whatever.

But if you spray a fly or a bee or a wasp or a hornet with this stuff from one of those hand spray bottles, it just drops right out of the air. It’s much easier to deal with.

DEBRA: Much easier, much easier. And there are so many solutions. There are so many things that we can do instead of things that are toxic.

We need to go to break but when we come back, we’ll talk more. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is David Abbott. He’s the author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology. And this is a brand new book. It’s just barely available. But if you would like a copy, you can e-mail David and just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Look for the description of this show and you can get his e-mail address that way. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is David Abbott. He’s the author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology.

David, could you tell us some stories about toxic exposures you’ve seen in homes and how they were affecting people?

DAVID ABBOTT: Sure. There was a girl named Amy, whose mother called and asked if I could help her. She kept getting lung infections and she had memory loss that was making her college work difficult. And her doctor said, “I don’t know why you keep getting sick because you have a good attitude, you have a good diet, you do 45 minutes of aerobics every day. You seem to be doing everything right.”

And he had her on a bronchodilating inhaler. It’s steroid inhaler. And she had to take cycles of antibiotics. But the lung infections kept coming back.

And in inspecting her apartment, I found a leaking furnace gasket and a leaking can of insecticide. And when she fixed the furnace and got rid of the insecticide, the lung infections disappeared. She started getting better grades in school with less effort, and her doctor took her off all of the drugs.

This actually makes sense because the carbon monoxide leaking out of the furnace is something that’s known to cause memory loss and the insecticide can make people more vulnerable to lung infections. It weakens the immune system. And so a lot of times, when people aren’t responding to medical treatment, it’s because they’re being exposed to toxins.

DEBRA: And I think that that’s a very important sentence that you’ve just said. A lot of times when people aren’t responding t medical treatment, it’s because they’re being exposed to toxins. Because I’ve been saying for a long time that right now, today, people are being so exposed. Everybody is being exposed and all these illnesses that people are having. You can do all the medical treatment whether it’s standard medical treatment or alternative medical treatment, and if you are exposed to toxic chemicals, you’re still going to be sick. You still are going to be sick if you’re being exposed to toxic chemicals. And that’s just the fact of it today.

And so if anybody wants to be healthy, the first thing is to address your toxic exposures because everybody has them. And people say to me, “But I’m not sick.” Well, it’s only a matter of time. It really is only a matter of time because they’re there if they’re making your body sick. And that’s just the truth of the matter today.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes. A lot of times what I run into is one of the people in the house will say, “I don’t know why you say you react to this chemical because I don’t react to it at all.” And their assumption is that everybody is going to react in precisely the same way to the same chemical. But truthfully, we each have a different balance of health in our liver, kidneys, lungs, brain, endocrine system, and all the rest. And so it isn’t really possibly to predict how a given person is going to react to a given toxin.

DEBRA: That’s right.

DAVID ABBOTT: In fact, a friend of mine who has a doctorate in chemistry from Berkeley told me that no government or research institute or private clinic or hospital or an industry has enough time and money and technical expertise to determine how a specific person will react to a specific combination of toxins. And this incredible complexity of the issue actually simplifies it because as you said, if we reduce our exposure to chemicals simply as a result, it can only help us.

DEBRA: I did a lot of research in the beginning when I first learned that my body was getting sick from toxic chemical exposure in my home which totally shocked me because at that time, I thought that the government was removing toxic chemicals from everything. But that’s not the case at all. And I did all this research because I was trying to say, “Okay, here’s my list of symptoms. I have headaches, I have insomnia, I have depression. And what are the products in my home that are causing those?”

And so, I could see that if I sprayed hairspray on then I would get a headache. As I did my research, I learned that formaldehyde on bedsheets causes insomnia. I had to put those pieces of data together to figure that out. But I found out in separate books and I put it all together and I went, “Oh, my permanent-pressed sheets have formaldehyde and formaldehyde causes insomnia.” And I changed my sheets and I could sleep. It just solved that just like that.

And on a larger scale, you can’t always make those associations that are that precise. And what I found was that if I were to just remove all the toxic chemicals I possibly could, then it would make my body healthier just in general. And I think that that’s what people need to do instead of saying, “Well, I have cancer,” or, “I’m impotent.” Sure there are causes of chemicals that relate to these things but say we removed all the carcinogens in your life but you still have all the neurotoxins.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes. And another thing that we often run into is when people start hearing about all of these toxins, they say, “I don’t feel safe. I worry all the time. I don’t feel safe in my house. I don’t feel safe going out in public.”

The thing that we need to remember is that we just do what we can do at the time and take steps other than getting rid of toxins such as eating a good diet, having a good attitude, meditating ,doing yoga, Tai Chi Gong, this kind of thing. Even just going for a walk every day.

And these things can be really beneficial.

DEBRA: Yes, and there are all kinds of detoxing that I write about. There are so many things that we can do. Actually, I was just writing in my one my blogs, Toxic Free Body, I was writing about – you know that old song, Accentuate the Positive? I even put a video of that song in the blogpost because so many times we focus on what is the negative aspect of things. But there’s always something positive. There’s always a positive and there’s always a negative in any situation.

And so the negative is that toxic chemicals are all around us and poisoning us. But the positive is, there’s a whole lot of other things that we can do that aren’t toxic and we can keep making those choices, keep accentuating the positive, keep doing the things that remove toxic chemicals from our body, take them out of our homes, help remove these toxics in our communities. There is so much we can do. There’s so much we can do.

DAVID ABBOTT: Definitely.

DEBRA: I think we’ve come up to the break. So this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is David Abbott, author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for today’s show and it has his e-mail address where you can e-mail him and get information on how to order his book.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is David Abbott, and he is the author of a book called Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology.

So David, let’s talk about some things that you have some solutions to these problems. You’ve looked at so many houses. What is the most common thing that you find and what do you tell people to do about it?

DAVID ABBOTT: Well, the most common thing I found that I think is the most dangerous is insecticide use. But there’s also a lot of just really simple stuff that actually doesn’t take any effort or any money to solve.

For instance, a woman told me that she always needed to use her asthma inhaler when she was cooking dinner. And so she had a gas stove. And I said, “You cook on the front burners, right?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay, let’s turn on the front burner and take a smell of the air when that burner is on.”

And I showed her how to identify the smell of the combustion fumes from the gas flame. And then I said, “Now, you’ve got a vent soaked or a vent fan here above the stove. Let’s turn it on.” And she turned it on and I said, “Now, pretend that you’re stirring a pot on this front burner. In fact, let’s put a pot full of water there and stir the water with a spoon.”

And when she did that she could still smell the combustion fumes even though the vent fan was on. Because to be honest, there isn’t any vent fan that would remove the combustion fumes from the front burners when you’re stirring something on the stove.

So I showed her just to cook on the back burner and when she did that she didn’t need her asthma inhaler when she was cooking.

DEBRA: Well, now, that’s exactly the kind of quick and easy and practical thing that everybody should know and we don’t know. I’ve been studying this for more than 30 years and I didn’t know that.

DAVID ABBOTT: In fact, I didn’t know it until she asked me.

DEBRA: But then you figured it out because you had a background.

DAVID ABBOTT: And I was thinking about how can this happen? Why would she need her inhaler? Well, the only thing she is being exposed to here could be combustion fumes because that’s the only thing that changes when she turns on the stove. So yes, really simple.

DEBRA: But you figured out – here’s the thing that you figured out, I think, is – I would figure out that she was being exposed to combustion fumes. But it would never occur to me that how the hood vent is pulling up the fumes or not pulling up the fumes from the front burners versus the back burners. It just would never occur to me. But that opens the door. Just knowing that opens the door to people who are listening to us. It opens the door to being able to use a gas stove maybe for some people who can’t use them.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes, I actually use an electric stove for that reason. But a lot of people assume that just because they have a vent fan that it works perfectly. That in all the years that I’ve done consultations, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one vent fan that was properly maintained. And when they’re not working right, they don’t work efficiently. And even when they are working as they were specifically designed to work, most of them actually still don’t get all of the fumes out.

And so I’d say, “You know, you got to figure ways around this sort of thing.” And a lot of times, even the building codes don’t really protect people against a lot of sources of toxins. As you pointed out in your books and on your show about toxins in building materials and they’re approved by the building departments. They’re fine with them.

DEBRA: We need building codes that protect us from toxics. I love that.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes. We need new building codes.

DEBRA: Maybe I need to write my own building codes.

DAVID ABBOTT: That would be good. I think typically, the building codes are quite a few years behind common knowledge and they only catch up with common knowledge when enough people say, “Hey, come on. This doesn’t make sense.”

There is actually a building code here where I live where, before you put the drywall in your house, you had to put a solid layer of plastic sheeting all around the stud walls and then put the drywall on. And what was happening is the moisture from the air that people exhale and from showers and cooking and laundry was going through the drywall which it does. It goes through the paint and through the drywall, it would hit the plastic and condense there because the plastic was colder than the inside air. And then it would create mold. And so there were mold infestations in virtually all of the new houses in this area.

And the city got sued for it and then they changed the building code. These building codes, a lot of times, they’re not really efficient.

DEBRA: So I want to go back to insecticides for a second. So if insecticides are the most common, then obviously, you tell people to stop using them. But what about the insecticides that are already in the home?

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes, that’s really an issue. And a lot of parts of the south where they would take – I forgot the name of it, but it’s a really potent insecticide. And they would take 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 pounds of it and just put it on the building site in the center of the house on the dirt, and then build the house over it. And their logic was this will kill termites or fire ants or whatever other kinds of insects that might get into the house. But the problem is it hurts people too.

There’s got to be other ways to deal with this stuff.

One of my clients’ daughters had a brain seizure and the doctors at a major university hospital didn’t know why and they didn’t know whether she would have more. They prescribed a potent psychoactive drug that had very serious side effects. And when I inspected the house, I found four insecticides in the house. Three in the lawn care products that they stored in the attached garage and one, a leaking can of bee spray in the laundry room. And what people need to understand is that all of those spray cans of insecticides leak even when they’re brand new.

And in fact, you can walk down the aisle in any hardware stores and you can smell the insecticide in that aisle because the valves leak. They’re made out of very soft thermoplastic and they simply don’t work properly.

And so the girl, for her own reasons, she didn’t like the side effects. She refused to use the drug that they prescribed. Her parents got rid of the insecticides. And when the doctors read my written report, they said, “Yes, this is true. These four insecticides can cause brain seizures.”

And now eight years later, no seizures. She’s healthy and happy. She has good friends and getting good grades in school.

DEBRA: That’s so good. See, what a difference this makes.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is David Abbott. He’s the author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology. And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look for his show and you can see his e-mail address where you can write to him for more information on how to order the book.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is David Abbott, author of Healing Your Family with Practical Household Toxicology.

David, I want to hear more about some of these easy fixes like you just told us about cooking on the back burners of your gas stove.

DAVID ABBOTT: Well, keeping the furnace well maintained is really vital because all the air in the house pretty except for in the closets and in some corners is cycled through the furnace, if you have a four-stair furnace. And most people use those blue or green-colored, really loose furnace filters. And what they don’t understand is that those filters are specifically designed to keep large clumps of dust out of the furnace blower motor. They’re not actually designed to keep dust out of the house. And there has been studies and virtually all samples of household dust in America had the heavy metal lead and the long-banned insecticides, DDT, and lots of other toxins in them because dust is like a sponge for toxins.

And they make high efficiency furnace filters that really do a pretty darn good job of filtering out dust and pollen and mold spores, yeast spores, this kind of thing. But the key thing is not only to use these furnace filters, they have to be changed when they’re dirty. And so you buy two at the same time and you keep one in the plastic wrap and you check it every month or so until you’re familiar with how it’s going. And you compare the filter that’s in the furnace to the new one that’s in the wrap. And you can see the difference in the color between the new one and the one in the furnace. It’s time to change it.

DEBRA: Another thing I didn’t know. That’s a really good tip.

DAVID ABBOTT: And if you have asthma or any other respiratory or immune system disorder, when you change the furnace filter, you want to wear a good dust mask. And the kind of dust mask to wear is the same kind that most dentists and doctors use. It’s the accordion fold, very soft, almost cloth-like filter with the ear loops. And because those harder cone dust masks don’t really work. They led dust in around the corners, around the edges. So you simply put the used furnace filter into a garbage bag and put it in the trash and put in a new one.

But you don’t want to use the anti-microbial furnace filters because those contain chemicals that are registered with the EPA as insecticides. And insecticides are not safe for us.

DEBRA: We don’t want them blowing all through. What you don’t want to do is take insecticides and put them in our HPAC system and have them blow all around the house.

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes, that’s right. I found that a lot of people say, “I use so many toxic chemicals for so long that it wouldn’t make any difference if I stop now. So why bother being careful?”

DEBRA: Oh, good. Answer that question.

DAVID ABBOTT: That’s like saying, “I’ve hit my thumb with a hammer so many times that it wouldn’t make any difference if I stop. And in fact, I think I’ll hit my thumb with a hammer right now just to prove it.”

And no one would do that with a hammer. And yet so many people do it with toxic chemicals.

DEBRA: Why do you think that we still have so many toxic chemicals when there is so much evidence that they’re harmful?

DAVID ABBOTT: Part of the reason is that we are genetically hardwired to be afraid of flier, to be afraid of falling, to be afraid of abandonment, these kinds of really basic, visceral, emotional triggers. But toxic chemicals haven’t been around long enough for us to have a genetically hardwired fear or concern about them.

And so it’s basically information-based. And a lot of people don’t have the information. And then when you get into insecticides and some weed poisons and moss poisons and things, then there’s the neurotoxic effect to be dealt with because actually, I have seen people who I believe who were using insecticides to self-medicate in the same way that many people use alcohol or recreational drugs where they have these issues that are difficult for them to deal with and face. And they’re not sure what to do about them. And they found through experience that if they spray some bee poison or some ant poison or fly poison or whatever, that they feel better that those emotions disappear.

The reason they disappear or seem to disappear is because the insecticides attack the nervous system and prevent certain circuits in the brain from functioning properly.

It’s not the best way to deal with those issues.

DEBRA: No, it isn’t. I’ve heard that about painters in the past. The painters get addicted to the toxic chemicals in paint. And so they actually get withdrawals and things. And so they have to keep painting and then they just get sicker and sicker and sicker. Kind of like with any drug or cigarettes or anything like that. These are all related chemicals and that our bodies can get addicted to them.

I think that’s actually a thing that we should be considering more is how people are getting addicted to the toxic chemicals in their homes that all talked about much.

DAVID ABBOTT: And there’s a neurologist named Barry Sterman, S-T-E-R-M-A-N, and he found that when he – he was hired by NASA because the astronauts were getting exposed to rocket fuel, of course, when they were shooting up into the atmosphere. And the exposure to rocket fuel was causing epileptic seizures. And that’s the last thing you want an astronaut to be having.

And what Sterman found is that when he did neuro feedback on cats and then exposed them to that particular toxin, the cats didn’t react to the toxin. They had no apparent reaction whatsoever. And what he was training them to do was to exhibit strong SRM sensory motor brainwaves. And those are the brainwaves that a cat has when it’s sitting by a mouse hole and patiently waiting for the mouse to pop its head out. The cat’s totally relaxed but totally alert.

And that brainwave state helps people apparently to resist the effects of toxic chemicals. And I have found that to be true in my case. Although I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to get neuro feedback and then say, “Now, I can use chemicals.”

DEBRA: No.

DAVID ABBOTT: But I would advise people who are having symptoms of chemical exposure to try neuro feedback and see if it can help them deal with the symptoms.

DEBRA: Well, I hear people saying, “I’m chemically sensitive.” Or that they’ve been poisoned by something and they say, “How can I be tolerant to be around these toxic chemicals?”

Now, I understand where they’re coming from because having been in that situation myself in the past. I understand that you want to just be able to be a normal environment and not react to it. But the thing that I think that most people aren’t realizing is that when they ask that question, they’re saying, “How can I be around poison and not have the normal reaction to it that would tell you that it’s toxic and you shouldn’t be around it?”

DAVID ABBOTT: Yes.

DEBRA: And I think that people are confused. There has been so much information about multiple chemical sensitivities and I did believe that there is such a thing as people being sensitive to a chemical. But if we think of it only as a sensitivity, we miss the whole picture that their poisons, and we’re all being poisoned. We’re all being poisoned.

DAVID ABBOTT: You are right. Yes. I have a friend that I’ve talked with a lot about this stuff. And he found for him the perfect solution. When I talk about this stuff, he says, “Oh, yes. You are chemically sensitive.”

And what I say is just what you said, “Now, wait a minute. These are actually poisonous chemicals. And even people who think that they’re not reacting almost undoubtedly are.”

I know a guy years ago when I was construction, he was 6’4″, built like a football linebacker, one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met in my life and just full of life. And he was exposing himself every day in his work to these toxic chemicals and one day, he visited me and he was skin and bones. And I say, “What’s going on?” And he said, “Well, I’ve got cancer.”

And a couple of months later, he was dead. And I found myself thinking, “That was a gamble that didn’t work.”

DEBRA: I don’t tell this story very often but when I was much younger and – actually, I’m not going to tell this story because we only have 30 seconds left. So thank you so much for being with us, David. And your book is very interesting. I’ve been reading bits and pieces of it. There’s a lot of information in there. Remember listeners, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, get David’s e-mail address and find out how you can order his book.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be Well.

DAVID ABBOTT: Thank you, Debra.

DEBRA: Thank you, David.