Today my guest is Rick Smith, one of the two authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck and their newest book ToxIN ToxOUT. Since the runaway success of their first book, they’ve been asking “How do I get this toxic stuff out of my body?” and this book is their answer. We’ll be talking about their practical and sometimes surprising advice. Rick Smith is a prominent Canadian author and environmentalist. He is the Executive Director of the Broadbent Institute (www.BroadbentInstitute.ca), a progressive policy thinktank. From 2003 to 2012 Rick was Executive Director of the national charity Environmental Defence Canada. He co-authored the 2009 book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health which became a bestseller in Canada and Australia and has now been translated into six languages. With a Ph.D. in biology and a stint as Chief of Staff of the federal New Democratic Party, Rick’s career has been equal parts science and politics. He is regarded as one of the country’s leading environmental campaigners and has spearheaded important new “green economy” policies at both the provincial and federal levels. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two small boys. www.toxintoxout.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
ToxIN ToxOUT—How to Get Harmful Chemicals Out of Our Bodies & Our World
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Rick Smith
Date of Broadcast: May 29, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and to live toxic-free.
My guest today, I’m so happy to have him on, and I’m really interested in our interview today. Well, I’m interested in all of the interviews. I love all my guests. But this guest, I read a book that he was a co-author of. Back in 2009 and his co-author published a book and it’s called Slow Death by Rubber Duck.
And it has a picture of a rubber duck on the front.
It was a big bestseller.
This book was their account of an experiment that they did on their own bodies during which they intentionally put toxic chemicals into their bodies by ingesting and inhaling particular common consumer products that contain those certain toxic chemicals that they were looking for.
And then they had their body fluids tested to find out if those toxic chemicals they knew were going on were actually there in their body.
And sure enough, they were there.
And the book was a bestseller.
Now, five years later, these two authors are back with another book called ToxIn, Toxout, which is all about their personal experiences, trying to get the chemicals out of their bodies this time. And they explained which detox method works, and why trendy cleanses don’t.
And at the end of the book—I’ll say this now, but I don’t want to give away the story, but at the end of the book, what they do is they give us a lot of tried and true advice for eliminating toxics to begin with, which as you all know, this I’m totally in favor of. And I’m in favor of detoxing too.
We’ll find out today as we talk, if our guest agrees, that the best thing to do is that it’s a lot easier to just not put the toxic chemicals in, in the first place, but since all of us have toxic chemicals in our bodies, we need to know what works to get them out.
And since my guest and his co-author have tried all these different detox methods, we’re going to find out today.
My guest is Rick Smith, and he’s the co-author with Bruce Lourie of Toxin, Toxout.
Hi, Rick.
RICK SMITH:Hi, Debra, a pleasure to be here.
DEBRA: How are you doing? Thank you.
RICK SMITH: I’m doing very well, thank you.
DEBRA: Good. Are you feeling toxed out?
RICK SMITH: Yes, I am. I tried to take some of my own advice in our book.
DEBRA: That’s very good. And I want to say that, first of all, I really love the title of your book. I actually think we should all be using “toxout”instead of detox because the first thing, I guess, I’d like to say is that the term detox is confusing because it could mean anything from going to a drug rehab place to get drugs or alcohol out of your body, to doing something a cleanse, which is designed to get the waste materials of cell metabolism out of your body, to removing toxic chemicals, and a lot of things.
People just hear that word, detox, and they think, “Well, it’s a detox. It’s going to work for toxic chemicals.”
But as you found out, that isn’t necessarily the case.
RICK SMITH: Well, yes. The big focus of this book is investigation of the whole weird world of detox. As you say, I think the term is in danger of really leaving any useful meaning. You can’t open that women’s magazine or a men’s health magazine these days without the requisite detox article.
And most of the times, these articles are about the latest fad diets, the latest mango juice cleanse, or the latest three-day detox diet.
One of the common sense conclusions we reach in the book is that if these things found too good to be true, they probably are. You can’t eat crummy foods, get no exercise for 50 weeks of the year, and then the last two weeks, you think that a broccoli blender diet, and all your problems are going to go away.
DEBRA: I’d just like to say at this point that our bodies are detoxing every minute of every day. And our cells are detoxing every minute of every day. Detox is a continuous process that needs to be supported. The toxic chemicals are coming in on a continuous basis. Our bodies need to process them and remove them on a continuous basis.
We can’t wait a whole year until you get to those two weeks to do that cleanse. Would you agree with that?
RICK SMITH: Yes, that’s exactly I mean. What we do in the book, as you mentioned in your intro, is we try to tell the story of toxic chemicals, reveal the problem of toxic chemicals in an entertaining and direct way.
So what we do is we conduct experiments on ourselves and other intrepid volunteers to see to what extent some of these toxic chemicals are absorbed by the body, and then how you can best get these things out.
And so the first conclusion in the book is that it’s a lot easier to avoid these chemicals in the first place than it is to get them out of you once they’re already absorbed.
DEBRA: And I think that that’s a really important thing that everybody needs to know because that is an additional motivation. There’s a motivation to not be exposed to them because they’re going to make you sick. But then the secondary thing is that once they get in your body, they’re very difficult to remove.
Not that they can’t be removed, but some of them are more difficult than others. But you’re going to have to go through a process to get them out. And so it really is easier to create your non-toxic lifestyle and have that be the solution. It’s easy for everybody.
RICK SMITH: I’m just going to say that one of the other things to try to do in this book and in our last book, Slow Death by Rubber Duck, we really tried to get specific about the chemicals we’re talking about.
One of the weird things about a lot of these fads, detox remedies out there, it talks vaguely about getting toxic chemicals “out of your body” without being really specific about what chemicals they’re talking about.
There are hundreds of different synthetic chemicals that are now being linked to various human diseases. Each of them has a different characteristic in the body. It’s absorbed differently. It’s flushed from the body in a different way.
And so we go into some detail in the book regarding these different families of chemicals, and the different ways that you can absorb and get rid of them.
DEBRA: I want to hear all about that. We only
have a couple of minutes until the break, so I’d like you to tell us first how did you get interested in doing this.
RICK SMITH: I’m a biologist by training, and Bruce is also a scientist by training. When we were trying to figure out how to tell story about this new generation of population that’s just damaging—a new kind of pollution that’s more subtle, that’s more insidious than the more obvious, big, industrial sources of pollution that we’ve all grown up with.
Bruce and I came up with this idea, this renegade, adult, [inaudible 00:08:18] project, using some of our scientific training for good and not evil.
I hope the way that we tell the story with these experiments, these real life experiments, is entertaining for the readers.
DEBRA: It is. I haven’t read all of Toxin, Toxout because I just got it, but I did read Slow Death by Rubber Duck. I couldn’t put it down.
A lot of this information I already knew because this is what I write about too. But it was very entertaining and revealing to watch you go through your science experiments on your own body—you being the guinea pigs.
It was a very easy way to read some really important information that could otherwise be quite dry and difficult to digest.
You’ve done a great job. You’ve done a great job, and I really recommend that everybody read both books. These are two books that I just think anybody who’s alive today should read, in addition to mine, of course.
We need to go to the break. We’re talking today with Rick Smith. He’s one of the authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck, and the newest book, Toxin, Toxout. And when we come back, we’re going to find out about different causes of toxic chemicals and what goes on in the body, and how we can get them out.
You’re listening to 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, and my guest today is Rick Smith. He and his co-author, Bruce Lourie, are the authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck and Toxin, Toxout, which is their newest book, and which is what we’re talking about today—how to get toxic chemicals out of your body.
So Rick, what do you think is the most important from your research and experience? What is the most important toxic chemical to remove from your body, and what did you find was the most effective way to do that?
RICK SMITH: I think I’m going to have a hard time narrowing it down to one. But what we did do in the book is we tried to think through the few ways that these toxic chemicals can be absorbed into the body.
And if you think about it, it can only happen through what you eat and drink, what you apply to your skin, and what you breathe in. That’s a bit of the way that we organize the book and the way that we organize our experiments, as we were talking about before the break.
So we did an experiment, for instance, on organic food, trying to see if eating organic food will measurably lower levels of the pesticides in the body. And pesticides concern me quite a lot.
We did an experiment with the cosmetics. And so we compared levels of toxic chemicals in the body with our volunteers, using both the greener, less toxic cosmetics, and then the regular brand name cosmetics that contain parabens and other nasty things.
And we did an entertaining experiment, looking at indoor air quality as well.
In each of those experiments, we’ve zeroed in on one or two key chemicals that we are quite concerned about.
DEBRA: Let’s go through each one of those, and tell us about what you found. Let’s start with food.
RICK SMITH: I think like a lot of organic food consumers over the years, I just assumed it was better for me. I don’t think the organic industry has done a good enough job putting a number to the organic benefits because, let’s say, for the organic food, in many cases, cost a little bit more.
So we recruited nine kids for this experiment. That was a 12-day experiment. It was complicated to do, actually.
So for the first four days of the experiment, we fed them non-organic food. For the middle four days, we fed them organic food. And then we put them back on the non-organic food for the last four days of the experiment. And we looked at levels of cancer-causing pesticides in their urine each morning.
Really, really dramatic results. In the middle four days, when these kids were eating organic food, the levels of pesticides in their body were cut almost to zero. And then as soon as they went back on the non-organic food, within a matter of hours, those pesticide levels zoomed right back up again.
DEBRA: A chart with that information should be in every natural food store that’s selling organic food.
RICK SMITH: Yes, it really should. The punch line is, “Organic food is worth it,” even if it costs a little bit more, even if sometimes it’s hard to find. Eating organic food is worth it.
It’s not an all or nothing proposition. Every little bit of organic, you can add to your diet, will measurably lower your pesticide levels.
And that’s particularly important for young kids, who we know, doctors tell us, are disproportionately susceptible to pollution of all sorts.
DEBRA: I actually knew that because when I was researching my book, Toxic Free, I saw another study that had done exactly that in Washington State. They had taken some kids, and did pretty much what you did. And they found exactly the same thing.
And so this is where it’s not a question of what do we need to do to remove the toxic pesticides from our bodies because in this case, and I keep saying this because every chemical is different. And even every pesticide is different because some last longer in your body than others.
But in this case, with these pesticides, it was just a matter of you stop eating them, and immediately, they’re not in your body. Not immediately like one second, but on the first day that you stop giving them pesticides in foods, then you notice the difference, so the second day or whatever it was.
But even if it was the third day, that would be very, very quick. And so it’s not like you need to go on a special cleanse, or do some special program. All you need to do is stop eating pesticides. That’s so simple.
RICK SMITH: Yes, really, really simple, and again, particularly important for kids. And the good news here is that there’s an economy of [scale] happening. The more people eat organic food, the cheaper it gets. And the cost differential between organic and non-organic food narrowed. So that’s great news.
The next experiment that we did is we looked at products in the bathroom. We don’t really think about it very much, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that creams and antiperspirant and shaving products that we apply to our skin are actually rapidly absorbed through the skin, and those individual ingredients in those products start showing up in our bloodstream.
So chemicals like parabens and phthalates that are increasingly being linked to different cancers are very common in bathroom products.
The good news is that, as many of your listeners will know, it’s getting much easier to find very good, very effective brands that have got these toxic chemicals out of their formulation.
So what we did to try to nail down whether bathroom products are the main contributors to paraben and phthalate levels in people’s bodies, we did an experiment with two cosmetic industry insiders. And for a few days, they wore just conventional brands, really smelly, artificial scents and things like those. And then for a few days, they wore this new generation of very good, green, less toxic bathroom products.
And the levels of parabens and phthalates were cut virtually to zero in their bodies in those days that they wore [three] of those products. And they didn’t have to sacrifice beauty or their personal hygiene to do it.
DEBRA: In both cases now, on these first two types of products, the organic food and the green bathroom products, all you had to do to not have that chemical be in your body is simply stop using it.
RICK SMITH: Absolutely.
DEBRA: We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll come back, and we’ll hear about the third type. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Rick Smith, one of the authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck and their new book, Toxin, Toxout.
We’re finding out what are the results of their science experiments they did on removing toxic chemicals from their bodies.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Rick Smith, one of the authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck, and their newest book, Toxin, Toxout. And if you’re interested in ordering these books or getting them at your bookstore, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You can look at today’s show. I’ve got the covers there of both books. You can click through and order them from Amazon if you want.
I highly recommend both of these books because these books really give the information about what is the problem with exposure to toxic chemicals. In Toxin, Toxout, even showing what’s wrong with some of the solutions and it helps to sort those out.
The conclusions of the books were done by interviewing experts, but also by the authors doing “science experiments” on their own bodies and finding out what’s going on.
So Rick, what happened with the third experiment?
RICK SMITH: Well, the third experiment involved the new car smell for that pungent aroma that we all grow up with, we all loved so much. We’re interested in seeing whether these potent chemical aromas that we’re all familiar with, the new car smell, the new shower curtain smell, the smell of different cleaning products that we grew up with, whether these aromas would be sufficiently potent that the individual chemical ingredients of these aromas might show up in measurable levels in the body.
So what we did for this experiment is pretty simple actually. I sat in a new car for a day.
DEBRA: Uh-oh.
RICK SMITH: And then measured my levels of certain cancer-causing chemicals, benzenes, formaldehyde, before and after. And the results were quite stunning. The levels of these chemicals in my body skyrocketed when I was sitting in this new car, breathing in the new car smell, and then came right back down again, as soon as I exited the car.
At a time when most North Americans spend well over 90% of their lives indoors, and that may sound like a lot, but if you think about it, all the time that we spend sitting around the kitchen table, sitting on the couch watching TV, sleeping, perhaps driving in our car on the way to work, the majority of us spend well over 9 out of 10 hours of the day indoors.
And so indoor air quality is arguably more important than outdoor air quality, and these chemically aromas, the off-gassing of carpets and carpet underlay, the off-gassing smells from that new couch that you just brought back from the store, these things really matter and contribute to these levels of toxic chemicals in the body.
And the good news is that by being a more careful consumer, it’s getting easier to shop at retailers who are trying to get these nasty off-gassing chemicals out of their products.
DEBRA: And of course, an excellent place to go to find those products that don’t have nasty chemicals is my website, of course, especially DebrasList.com. If you just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look at the menu across the top, and you’ll find a Q&A section where you can ask questions about these products. You’ll find that little button that says “shop” and you can go to Debra’s List where I have over 500, 600 or 700 websites where you can buy products that don’t have toxic chemicals in them.
There’s a whole lot of them out there. It’s just a matter of knowing where they are and making those choices.
Again, it’s so interesting to me to see in your book that all you have to do, in some cases, is to just stop using it, and they’re not in your body anymore. They’re just not there. But there are some chemicals.
Tell us about some other chemicals that people might need to remove from their body by special methods.
RICK SMITH: So we move on the book. So we spent a lot of time looking at chemicals that need to be avoided, and how you can do that quite easily because we know people are busy. And the big part of this book is to try to boil down some tips for people that can be incorporated into people’s busy, daily lives.
So in the last part of the book, we delved into the whole occasionally weird and wacky world of detox. And we looked at some of these many detox therapies out there to try to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
And it turns out that some of the most [perspective], reliable things you can do to help out your body, and to exhilarate the flushing of these chemicals from the body is to get some good old fashion exercise, and to get off the couch and to break a sweat every now and again.
My co-author, Bruce, did this entertaining experiment where he took a sauna regularly every day for a week, and collected his sweat every day, which you can imagine. It’s a great thing to sweat into these test tubes. Nothing we won’t do to further science.
And so he compared levels of certain toxic chemicals like BTA coming out of his body every day in his urine versus his sweat.
And the results are quite interesting. On many days, it was his sweat that contained much higher levels of BTA are being flushed out of his body.
So the message here is that depending on the chemical you’re talking about, sweat can be a very important mechanism to flush these things out of your body. So to the extent that we’re a nation of couch potatoes these days, and a lot of us don’t break a sweat, don’t get regular exercise [inaudible 00:29:35] work week. Not only is that bad for your cardiovascular health, but it’s actually locking some toxic chemicals into your body.
So we spent a lot of time talking to experts on the relative merits of different kinds of detox methods, and the good old fashion exercise comes in on top.
DEBRA: Well, in addition to that too, exercise, one of the things that carries toxic chemicals out of the body is the lymph system, and it doesn’t move unless you move your body. It’s not like the heart that is a pump, to pump the blood around. You could just be lying down all the time, and your blood would still move because the heart is pumping it.
But the lymph system that carries all the garbage away from the cells just sits there unless you move your body.
And so here we have people who are, as you said, couch potatoes, so their lymph isn’t moving. And they put on antiperspirant, so they don’t sweat.
RICK SMITH: Yes, that’s exactly the double whammy.
DEBRA: We’ll talk about how the body detoxes when we come back after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is author, Rick Smith, who wrote Slow Death by Rubber Duck, and their newest book is Toxin, Toxout.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Rick Smith, co-author of Slow Death by Rubber Duck, and their newest book, Toxin, Toxout. And again, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the description of this show, and you can click right through the Amazon and buy these books.
Excellent books. Everybody should read them. This is just the basic, fundamental information about toxic exposure and toxic de-sposure. I was trying to think of a word. What’s the noun for getting the toxic chemicals out? We need better words.
As I started out in the beginning saying that detox has become meaningless because it could mean so many different things, we need a specific word, and I think I’m going to start using toxout to mean removing toxic chemicals from your body because it’s so perfect. I think that’s the way to go.
So we were talking before the break about how you found the best thing to remove toxic chemicals from your body, and not just theoretically, but you actually took samples of body fluids to show this. It’s just plain old exercise and sweating.
And I would assume that so many didn’t want to exercise. They could go sit in the sauna, which is also very effective. But there’s a benefit to exercising because you’re moving the lymph to get the toxic chemicals moving around. And then it comes out through sweat in the skin.
And right before the break, I was saying that. But what we do in our culture is that we don’t exercise. So we’re not stirring up the chemicals to be released, and we don’t sweat. In fact, people wear antiperspirants to not perspire.
Now, this combination, this particular combination, is horrible because our bodies have this natural function. If you look at people living out in the wild, they would be exercising and sweating as part of their daily lives, but we don’t.
We consider sweat to be a bad thing. And yet, sweat is the redeeming thing.
RICK SMITH: I totally agree. I think that’s right. One of the basic points of our book is that we don’t really need all these often expensive detox remedies to get these chemicals out of our bodies.
A lot of these things probably don’t hurt, but there’s very little evidence that they’re terribly effective. And in some cases, things like ionic foot bath, for instance, there’s actually evidence out there, just outright useless.
What we try to focus on in the book, and the reason that we do these experiments in the book on ourselves, and on other volunteers, is to really to try to nail down what works and what doesn’t, so that people can have some confidence in the tips that we give.
DEBRA: The subtitle of the book is Getting Harmful Chemicals Out of Our Bodies and Our World. So tell us about the our world part.
RICK SMITH: We certainly believe, and we provide a lot of advice in this regard in the book, that being a more aware and careful consumer is an important thing to do. So carefully reading labels, being on a lookout for some of these chemicals we’ve been talking about on labels, parabens and phthalates and crazy antibacterial chemical, triclosan.
Being a more careful consumer is a part of the equation here.
But ultimately, the fact that we have to worry about this stuff in the first place is just outrageous. And the only real permanent answer to this problem is the governments and big companies start to get these chemicals out of products in the first place.
And so the last chapter of the book is about this very encouraging, exciting, emerging world of the green economy, and the different ways that governments around the world are trying to cut down on waste, trying to force consumer product manufacturers to make their products in a safer way.
It turns out that a lot of these chemicals we’ve talked about can be fairly easily replaced. They’re not necessary. They’re not critical to human life as we know it. And as this green consumer movement accelerates, the fact that you can go out to grocery stores now, you can go to mainstream drugstores and find green products on the shelf side by side with non-green products. And they cost, thankfully, the same.
One of these products is toxic, and the other one is not.
So that change in the marketplace, the green consumer movement, I think, is making it easier for governments to change lives and to force these companies to make safer products that they should have been doing all along.
DEBRA: Well, that’s a very good point. I hadn’t quite thought about it that way, that consumers—I’m always saying you don’t need to wait for government in order to live toxic-free. But I hadn’t really realized that our consumer choices are helping government change to make the regulations be such that these chemicals wouldn’t even be allowed.
I’ve been watching all this, and what’s going on with government and regulations, and big corporations. Again, I’ll just say none of these companies need to wait for government to mandate this, just like none of us need to wait for government to make it illegal for us to use toxic chemicals.
And so it’s always a choice. It’s a choice that anybody could make at any time. And a lot of companies are making the choice. And governments are moving very slowly, sometimes frustratingly making a list of toxic chemicals, after 20 years, they have 20 chemicals on the list. That’s a little too slow.
RICK SMITH: It’s a little bit slow. We’re actually quite optimistic in the book about the progress that’s happening generally in this area, largely as a result of change in consumer preference.
But just in the last six months, for instance, Procter & Gamble, Avon, Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, some of the biggest consumer products, manufacturers and retailers in the world have started to get out of the business of these chemicals. They’ve started re-formulating their products to get away from these toxic chemicals.
That’s a huge step forward. I think that change in the marketplace, they’re only going to accelerate.
DEBRA: I am so glad that you said that. I just want to say it again for everybody listening that the companies are changing in response to consumer demand. It’s just an economic law that companies are going to produce what we consumers buy.
And we have tremendous power to change everything.
So whether our representatives in Washington are making regulations happen, or whether you sign a petition or don’t sign a petition, what it all comes down to is the power of voting with our dollars.
So that is the most powerful thing that we can do.
So here, by making a decision to not use the toxic product, we’re not only reducing, removing the toxic chemicals from our bodies, but we’re also removing them from the world. Excellent.
RICK SMITH: The conclusion of the book is that it’s important that people be more aware consumers, but also that we be more demanding citizen because we deserve better from our government.
DEBRA: We do. Well Rick, we only have about two-minutes left. Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t discussed?
RICK SMITH: I think we’ve covered the ground pretty well. What I will say is that the book and with an easy top 10 to-do list, maybe because my co-author and I have kids, we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so we actually thought it would be fun to boil down the message of the book. Boil down the tips of the book to a ripped off page that you can literally rip out of the book, stick on your fridge.
DEBRA: Do you want to read it to us?
RICK SMITH: And then be reminded of some of the simple ways that you can get toxic chemicals out of your life.
DEBRA: Do you want to tell us what those are in the last minute?
RICK SMITH: Very quickly, think about eating more organic food that will dramatically cut down pesticide levels in your body. Avoid products in the bathroom that contain parabens and phthalates. When you’re looking for products for the home, try to shop for low DOC, less off-gassing products whether those are couches or carpeting.
A little bit of exercise every now and again turns out to be the most significant way that you can help your body to wash these toxic chemicals for good and an ongoing basis.
DEBRA: Good. So thank you so much for being with me, and I just wish you all the best with both of these books. You’ve done a tremendous service to furthering the understanding of toxic exposures.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and go to the top of the page where there’s a menu, and just start looking around because all of the things that my guest has been talking about today about using less toxic products, non-toxic products, this is the biggest resource that I know of, in order to get that information.
You can go click on the shop button and find more than 500 websites to explore. You can click on the Q&A and ask a question. You can even call me up on the phone and talk to me, and I’ll answer your questions.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
