Nontoxic & Natural

How to Avoid Dangerous Everyday Products and Find Safe Alternatives

Debra Lynn Dadd says her mission is to bring sanity and health to the world of everyday products.

While other are investigating environmental pollution in streams, lakes, and soil, Dadd is looking in the livingrooms, bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens of America. Look under the sink Ü is there a chemical cleaner with ingredients that may be even more toxic than the pollution from a local factory? Examine the upholstery treatment used on your couch Ü are you certain that it is not producing allergic reactions more severe than from the food you eat?

Dadd is the author of a popular new book called Nontoxic & Natural (J.P. Tarcher, 1984). It's a reference work that rates over 1,200 brand name products from air fresheners to yarn and that has been called a "survival guide to the last half of the twentieth century." Dadd's interest in the subject stems from the discovery of her own sensitivity to common products used in her home. Having eliminated practically every household cleanser and many other sources of irritation that most of us would never suspect, she began to regain her health. This process led her on an exploration into the origin of allergic reactions and hyper-sensitivity to common things found in our workplaces and homes. Who would have suspected that people could be sensitive to the printing ink on posters? Who would have suspected that rug shampoo could produce hyperallergic reactions?

Dadd not only had these suspicions but she suffered from reactions to the substances. She eventually self-published a book which catalogued the possible dangers in the most common household items. The book, A Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive, was received enthusiastically by many. Dadd was amazed that many others had been searching for the answers that she had personally discovered through her investigations. Nontoxic & Natural, an expanded and more thoroughly researched version of her earlier book, is the result of several more years of personal investigations.

I met with Debra Lynn Dadd in San Francisco in January, over lunch at the natural foods restaurant "Greens" and then at her simple yet elegant apartment. She obviously tries to practice the natural and nontoxic lifestyle that she preaches. Although the changes she has made over the past five years in her environment and her lifestyle have helped her to regain her natural immunity to most of the more subtle pollutants around her, she is extremely conscientious about her diet and surroundings. She makes very certain that the furniture, carpeting, cleansers, and so forth that she buys are of the highest quality and have no suspect chemicals.

As we sat by her window I detected a faint order of tar. Dadd commented that workmen were repairing the roof of her building. She hoped that the smells would not affect her concentration, and admitted that in the past this odor would have completely incapacitated her. We kept the windows closed and I asked her about the health problems in her past.

EWJ: How did you become interested in the subject of natural and nontoxic substances?

DD: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Throughout most of my early life I was never quite well. I had all of these annoying symptoms. I would go to the doctor but he would say only, "Well, there's nothing wrong with you." I was overweight, I had no self-confidence, I had little motivation.

EWJ: Where were your parents at this point?

DD: My mother had died the year before of cancer. Now that I look at it, I'm sure that it was related to my own problems. I grew up in a house where the drapes, plastic furniture, the cosmetics Ü everything was artificial, modern and new. My mother was fifty-one when she died.

It was as a result of my mother's illness that my father began to question the influence of my surroundings on me. "What's wrong with my daughter?" he asked himself. He took me to be tested for my reaction to chemicals, and it turned out that I was extremely allergic. I went through the standard clinical ecology treatment of taking medicines, but they made me sicker. By the time I started hearing about environmental control, I was fainting from the chlorine when I took a shower. I was feeling constantly depressed.

EWJ: Did you modify your diet at that time?

DD: I went on a fast, and after five days I felt like a new person. That was really the turning point for me. I realized that these things were really affecting me. Another effect of the fast was that suddenly I really couldn't tolerate anything. The food allergies were masking all of my reactions to the chemicals around me. And so I had to do things like ripping up the carpet off my floor. It was really a horrible time for me.

Over the next six months, I started learning that when I stopped wearing perfume and using soaps and shampoos, my headaches went away. Then I'd notice that I would get rashes from my polyester clothes, so I switched to cotton. It was a period of trial and error. After a year or so, I finally became more settled and calm, and I started becoming interested in what was in these products that was making me so sick.

If somebody had told me a year earlier what the safe brands were so that I didn't have to try twenty different kinds to find the one that worked, I could have gotten along a whole lot quicker. So I started compiling all of this information, and people started asking me where to get things. After a year and a half of compiling information, and then passing it out, I decided to publish my own book.

EWJ: This was before Nontoxic & Natural?

DD: Yes. I sold about 2,500 copies, at sixteen dollars apiece, of A Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive. I did it all on my own. I typed it and did all of the graphics. I did the whole production, marketed it, and sent out orders as they came in. I felt very strongly that this information had to get out.

EWJ: How had you changed your own environment at this time?

DD: At first I hadn't even replaced the rug on the floor. For a mattress I had piled blankets on top of the springs. I didn't have any books, I didn't have any decorations on the wall. The cement floor was awful Ü there were paint splotches all over. It was not aesthetically pleasing at all. It looked like I was in a prison cell. But it was all I could do. No one ever said that there are pretty things out there to make your environment nice. Now, what you see here is a wool rug and hardwood floors. Every bit of furniture is solid wood. This chair I had reupholstered with 100 percent cotton batting in it. The prints on the wall are all under glass. If this were perfect, all of my books would be in glass-enclosed shelves. The ink in the books can be a problem.

EWJ: Does your computer VDT bother you?

DD: When I was writing the book and used it for eight hours a day, it did. I used to get like a sunburn on my face. Now I use it minimally.

EWJ: Besides that fast, what changes did you make in your diet?

DD: I totally changed what I was eating. I was eating close to half a gallon of ice cream a day. I had no control, but it wasn't that there was some psychological reason why I wanted to eat like this. It was simply the chemicals. When I got away from the chemicals, I didn't want to eat anymore, and I lost forty pounds. I also got away from additives in food, because one of the things I found was that eating the additives made me hungry.

At first I didn't eat organic food because I didn't know about it. Now I try to eat organic, but I like to go out and it's hard to find organic vegetables in restaurants. When I can I make it a first priority to get organic food.

It's a process. You can't change overnight. But you can go from being real sick to being able to control your reactions, and then to not having any reactions at all. I'm almost there now. I don't feel like I live in a prison anymore.

EWJ: If you could develop a scale for the factors that were causing your health problems, how would you rate things like food, cosmetics, furniture and clothing?

DD: I don't think I would be able to rate what made me sick, but I think I can rate what things in the environment are more toxic than others.

Number one of course is to not smoke. The second thing I would say is that if you have any gas appliances in your house, turn them off. Gas appliances give off all kinds of combustible by-products like sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde.

Number three would be carpeting. I've seen people change every single thing but their carpeting, and then find that the carpet was really the cause of it all. The fourth thing would be cleaning products. Window cleaners, scouring soaps, laundry cleaners. Next would be cosmetics. (We haven't gotten to food yet). Then water.

I think the natural foods industry has it all backwards, because food is probably the least toxic of all the things you'll run into on an everyday basis. Although there are certainly a lot of toxic components to it, if you look at what is in all of these other products, there's a lot more toxic things in them, and people just don't pay any attention to these at all.

EWJ: What about air?

DD: Well, air gets polluted by all of the things I just mentioned. If we clean up those, we clean up the air.

EWJ: Haven't the people who consume a natural foods diet made other modifications in their lives at the same time that they've made changes in their diet?

DD: Is that an assumption, or is that really true?

EWJ: If we compare the people in a health foods store and a natural foods store, the people who shop in a natural foods store are more likely to be people who are changing their whole lifestyle as opposed to just their diet.

DD: Among natural food shoppers, that may be true. But what about people who are still shopping in supermarkets? They may be buying things that are additive free, thinking "I better not feed these artificial colors to my kids." But then they'll put the kids down next to the cleaning products while they're washing the windows. I would rather have them exposed to a few additives than the chemicals in some window cleaners.

EWJ: So you're speaking as well to people who can't or won't change their whole lifestyle?

DD: Right. And in terms of what's most toxic, I would say cleaning products first. They're the easiest to change, they're the least expensive, and you can make that modification overnight. And it makes a great big difference.

EWJ: In addition to changing your diet and your environment, what other kinds of changes did you make?

DD: I began to exercise regularly, which I think is very important. Everybody is exposed to a certain amount of chemicals, so you want to be as strong as you possibly can, and exercise helps. I started out with walking. I still walk a lot and I go jogging and I lift weights. I try to exercise only in a clean air environment. I wouldn't go running in a busy street, for instance.

EWJ: How complete did you intend to make Nontoxic & Natural, and how complete do you think it is?

DD: My original intent was to have a publication that would tell everybody absolutely everything that they needed to know in order to live a totally nontoxic lifestyle. I think that I accomplished that to a certain degree. Of course, if I could have added another 500 pages, it might have been more complete, but then it would cost much more and it wouldn't be as accessible. A Whole Earth Catalogue type of book wasn't practical at this point Ü which doesn't mean that it wouldn't happen in another five or ten years. It doesn't go into lots of specialty type products, but all of the products that are common to most people on an everyday basis are covered in the book.

EWJ: You say in the book that the more information people have, the more likely they will affect the manufacturers to change their formulations. Do you know of any instances in which this happened?

DD: I get asked this question often. Are the manufacturers really bad guys? Are they trying to provide harmful things? I feel that the answer is no. I think that at some point in the past twenty years, they quite innocently started formulating their products. Now they''re discovering that natural foods and nontoxic products are starting to emerge as a new market is being identified. As more consumers support these new companies and buy these products, and recognize the quality that they are providing, gradually the sales of other manufacturers will fall off. I think that as consumers we have lots and lots of power. Each one of us takes a responsibility for a better environment by our purchase choices.

EWJ: How do you make sure that the information you provide is up-to-date and accurate?

DD: It's an on-going process. I'm constantly reading and looking for information. People who are familiar with my book, or the newsletter Nontoxic Lifestyles that I publish, send me stuff all the time. I try to keep it all filed in my computer so that when someone asks me a question, I can go right to that information. I've also become friends with various professionals who have particular specialties.

EWJ: In your book, you rate products either A, B, or C. How do you differentiate between these categories.

DD: First of all, these are relative categories. The reason I even made a differentiation was that there seems to be different levels of acceptability and different levels of what was actually available and practical. If you looked through the book and counted them, you would probably see that there is the greatest number of B's and a few A's and few C's. If I had written a book that was full of A products, which I think are the most desirable, it probably would have been about thirty pages long. People would have said, how are we going to find these products, how can we afford them, and why should we take the time? The categories are based on information that's available to the consumer, either from reading labels or directly from the manufacturer. I didn't use any independent laboratory because of the expense it would have entailed.

EWJ: Using, say, shampoos as an example, what differentiated an A from a B or C?

DD: An A would have totally natural ingredients. They wouldn't necessarily be organic, but they wouldn't have any man-made ingredients. B would be basically natural, but it's got methylparaben, say, or something that is petro-chemical derivative. C would have more of these chemicals in it.

EWJ: Why isn't a manufacturer of purportedly completely natural shampoos, such as Aubrey Organics, listed at all in the shampoo section?

DD: When I was researching for this book, I sent letters to several hundred manufacturers, requesting information and complete product lists. If they didn't respond, it was more likely I wouldn't include their product.

EWJ: Is your bias against man-made substances always valid? For instance, you recommend natural bristle tooth brushes as opposed to synthetic bristles. Yet most holistic dentists as well as conventionally trained dentists feel that a soft bristle brush is more preferable to a hard bristle brush, and I don't think that a natural soft-bristle brush is generally available.

DD: My premise in writing the book was to make available information about natural alternatives. I can acknowledge and accept that there may be trade-offs between having it be man-made and more effective, or natural and less effective. I use a natural bristle toothbrush and I have no cavities. I used to have problems with my gums when I used a nylon toothbrush.

I hope the book provides alternatives and allows people to make their own decisions. I'm not saying this is better or worse. All I'm doing is offering a choice, and showing people that these things are out there if you want to use them.

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