Stalking the Nontoxic Lifestyle

Debra Dadd had no choice but to find how to live an allergy-free life in San Francisco. Here's how she did it.

by Gar Smith

If Debra Lynn Dadd tells you she's allergic to San Francisco, don't get her wrong. She's also allergic to Chicago, Santiago, Shanghai and half the homes in Pawtucket. When you come down to it, you just might say Debbie Dadd is allergic to the 20th century.

Debbie Dadd, a 27-year old former piano teacher, and voice coach, is one of a growing community of human beings whose immune systems have broken down under the stress of an environment awash in toxic fumes, synthetic munchies and petrochemical-laced merchandise.

But all this hasn't deterred her from keeping a luncheon date at the Hunan on Sansome Street. Wolfing down fiery helpings of the Hunan's volcanically spiced eggplant and sipping herb tea, Dadd is happy as a clam (but please, no seafood, no meat and hold the Chablis). She doesn't look like someone suffering from ISD„Immune system Dysregulation. Debbie Dadd's got the face of a pixie, the robust constitution of a pentathlon contender and the enthusiasm of a Liza Minnelli. She's clearly in a mood to celebrate.

Five years ago Dadd might have been written off as one of life's losers„an allergy victim so debilitated she would be forced to spend the rest of her days in a clean little tile-lined room in the Sierras. But Dadd rebelled at the idea of spending the rest of her life wretched and famished. As a consequence, she may soon become rich and famous. Why? Because in defying the odds and finding ways to survive in the highly chemicalized haze of a modern city, she has written what may be the publishing sensation of 1983.

Dizziness, fevers and depression

"I was ïsick' my whole life. Only the doctors could never find anything wrong with me," Dadd recalls. For years she wondered if the whole thing„the dizziness, fevers, sudden exhaustion and depression„was all in her head. There were, after all, those terrifying times when her mind would suddenly come unplugged. "One second I'd be talking to someone; the next instant I wouldn't know where I was." It wasn't a mental disorder. It was a severe reaction to perfume!

After one particularly disabling attack, Dadd was finally diagnosed correctly as having an acute sensitivity to "immunotoxic chemicals": hydrocarbon by-products and compounds of chlorine, fluorine, ammonia and sulfur could quite literally knock her off her feet and leave her gasping like a gaffed marlin.

Dadd was forced to flee the city for her life. She sought refuge in the clean, windy seaside mesas over Bolinas. "But I was so sick I couldn't even stay indoors there," Dadd explains. "I had to sleep outside every night." It took her body six weeks to detoxify.

She was healthy again but she was also miles from her home, her job, her friends. San Francisco had become a biological badlands, an environmental war zone mined with chemical agents, populated by unwitting snipers armed with cigarettes and hairsprays. Still, Dadd was determined to return to the city. Somehow.

She settled in an apartment near the Palace of the Legion of Honor where she could "wake up with the fog in my window." And she took the offensive, attacking the chemical-laden fixtures of ordinary urban comfort with the zeal of a White Panther going after recall signatures.

"I started with my bedroom. I took everything out. Ripped up the rugs, tore down the curtains, got cotton sheets, bought an old bed that didn't have any foam in it." When she discovered she was allergic to the ink in her books, she banished her entire library to the living room.

"I got an air filter, started wearing only natural fiber clothing and starting taking long walks on the beach. And you know what?" Dadd prompts, with an infectious grin spreading across her face: "For the first time in my life I started feeling healthy! I feel so good!"

It's one thing to refurnish a house with wicker chairs and cotton drapes, but how do you cope with a city filled with asphalt trucks, pipe smokers and belching Muni buses?

"Coping isn't my style, " Dadd laughs. "I wanted to conquer."

When she realized what chemicals had done to her health, Dadd decided to dedicate her life to helping other victims and learning more about disruptions of the immune system. She went to work for Dr. Alan Levin, a widely published immunologist and champion of the newly emerging field of "clinical ecology."

She plowed through the pages of a $50 chemical encyclopedia like a law student trolling through Shepard's for precedents. She looked up dihydroxyacetone, BHT, phenol and carrageenan. She discovered that carrageenan was a perfectly natural derivative of seaweed and the phenol is an immunotoxic petroleum by-product used in products ranging from shaving creams and aspirin to Spandex girdles and perfumes. "Phenol's known to be toxic," Dadd shudders, "yet people continue to use it. Anytime you see someone splashing on perfume they're just dousing themselves with a toxic chemical."

Dadd tracked down whole alphabets of chemical irritants from acetone to xylene (used in felt-tipped markers, acoustic tile and shoe polish), noting which ones were supposed carcinogens and mutagens. She discovered how formaldehyde turns up in everything from plywood and antifreeze to toilet paper, mouthwash and contraceptive jelly. Sulfurous acid, when it wasn't being used to clean battleships, was used to preserve chopped fruits. Urea moonlighted as a major ingredient in flameproofing, fertilizers and dentifrices.

Polyester clothing, Dadd learned, was constantly "outgassing"„radiating fumes. She can cite a NASA study showing polyester to be more volatile than polyvinyl, polyethylene or polyurethane. And if the chemicals aren't in the food we eat, they usually surround the food we buy.

"Plastic containers give off volatile fumes," Dadd cautions, "even the plastics we wrap our food in. Food's like a sponge. What doesn't wind up in the food goes into the air." Dadd prefers to wrap her food in cellophane rather than Saran Wrap. Cellophane "still contains some chemicals and it's not entirely natural," she admits, "but it's much better than plastic."

It's clear why the chemically sensitive can develop a siege mentality. It also became clear to Dadd as she worked with Dr. Levin's patients that what she had learned could be very useful to other sufferers.

"One of the major stresses for people with this illness is not knowing what you can use to replace your life with," Dadd explains. "Sure, your doctor will tell you to avoid highly chemicalized shampoos and soaps, but how do you go about finding them? Many of the people Dadd counseled were "so symptomatic they didn't have the energy to go out and find the products they could use."

In search of non-toxic goods

Dadd took the next step. Taking a pencil and a deep breath, she plunged into the fluorescent maze of the supermarket. Where once the supermarket had seemed a cornucopia of delights, it had now come to resemble a linoleum-lined toxic waste dump. Day after day Dadd would emerge from these supermarket-scouting missions with swollen eyes and migraines but also with a burgeoning list of products that "I could sniff and they wouldn't make me sick."

These lists would become the building blocks in Dadd's struggle to reconstruct her life by finding alternatives, "the Non-toxic Lifestyle."

Not surprisingly, it turns out that many of the alternatives to the toxic merchandise of the 20th century are found in the products of the pre-petroleum 19th century. Fuller's earth, Bon Ami, baking soda and boraxo are fine traditional cleansers. Instead of chemically active brass polish, Dadd now substitutes a paste of lemon juice and salt. She cleans carpet spots with cornstarch. For skin care there's glycerin and olive oil soaps, commercial products like Sutro Baths Body Shampoo and recipes for do-it-yourself cold creams made from apricot kernel oil, cocoa butter and beeswax.

With Dr. Levin's encouragement and financial backing, Dadd turned several years of red-eyed research into a self-published book, A Consumer Guide for the Chemically Sensitive.

"We were only going to publish this as a guidebook for our patients," Dadd says. "We never thought it would get this big."

To Dadd's amazement the initial printing of 500 copies sold out in the first three months. This is even more remarkable given that the book received no publicity and is priced at $17. The Guide is now in its fifth printing. And major publishers are dickering to pick it up.

"I feel uncomfortable about this," Dadd confesses. "It's like my child. I've spent a lot of years giving birth to this book and now someone else wants to take it away and raise it." It's doubtful that any publisher would take the care Dadd has in producing this book. One of the things that make it unique is that Dadd's editions have all been produced using non-toxic carbon inks on chemical-free paper.

Recently an article on Dadd's struggles appeared in Not Man Apart, the newsmagazine of Friends of the Earth. Within two weeks Dadd received more than 200 orders for her book.

Tom Turner, editor of Not Man Apart, was also amazed. "I don't think we've ever received such a response on any other article we've run," he says.

Allergic America

This suggests that there are a lot of people out there who feel they're being poisoned by chemicals in the environment. The problem, in fact, is larger than one would imagine. An estimated 35 million Americans are afflicted with some form of allergy. Some 6,000 citizens died from allergic shock in 1981 alone. Most suffer from familiar "Type 1" allergies„reactions to dust, pollen, cat hair and the like. But a growing number are falling victim to "Type 2" allergies„the kind triggered by reactions to immunotoxic chemicals.

Critics of clinical ecology have challenged the argument that chemicals in the air and water can cause physical and mental disorders in human beings. "How can you be allergic to chemicals when ammonia and formaldehyde have been around since prehistoric times?" they ask. Dr. Levin agrees that our immune systems evolved to deal with these natural irritants. But since the days of the caveman and the tar pit, he explains, "We have become exposed to possibly a hundred-fold increase in concentrations of these natural chemicals. In addition, we've added to our environment incredible numbers of chemicals our ancestors never knew„like halogenated hydrocarbons and pesticides." Levin views the problem holistically: "If you pull a strand of a spider web at any one point it will affect the entire web. One little defect in what we call the immune system will affect the endocrine system, the brain, all of the other tissues in the body."

"And it's not just us!" Dadd warns. "Everybody has the potential to react to these environmental chemicals. Children are affected. Older people are affected. Anyone who's not in tip-top shape is susceptible in some degree to these chemicals."

And once a person becomes sensitized to one chemical irritant, there is a tendency to become hypersensitive to all chemicals„synthetic and natural. Given the high stakes, it's no wonder Dadd's book has become a self-publishing success story.

Friends and enemies

The Guide is both an Index Medica to the hundreds of little-known chemicals that pervade our soaps, clothing, beverages and foods and„more importantly„it's a Whole Earth Catalog for thousands of readily available natural and non-toxic goods. The Guide includes more than 1,000 sources for non-toxic products in the Bay Area„products ranging from Afghan rugs and aprons, bedspreads and buttons, croissants and cookies, candles and contact lens solutions to office supplies, tampons, soda pop, wooden telephones, organic fortune cookies and natural fiber teddy bears.

In the spirit of the Bay Guardian's own Free and Easy, Dadd's Guide lists the 28 Best Clean Air Spots from Point Reyes to Half Moon Bay and devotes ten pages to comparisons and ratings of hundreds of Bay Area farms, stores, bakeries, delicatessens and restaurants suitable for celebrating the non-toxic lifestyle. Here's proof enough that you donït have to sacrifice the Good Life to live without chemicals. Among the spots winning top marks in Dadd's survey are the Oakville Grocery, Bernard's in Berkeley, Nabolom, Eichelbaum & Co., The French Confection, The Bolinas Peoples Coop, Green's, Chez Panisse and Oakland's Bay Wolf. So eat your heart out, Monsanto.

But what happens to an ISD victim when it comes to dating? "Well," Dadd admits, "honesty is important. Sometimes I have to tell a fellow I'd really like to go out with him but his cologne is making me sick." Some men stalk off insulted. Others express concern and ask what kind of shampoo or aftershave they should buy. "I tell ïem and they come back unscented," Dadd chortles. "I really prefer being with people who aren't chemically sensitive, by the way. I don't want anyone to think of me as an invalid. I'm healthy! I just need people to have an understanding of my limitations."

Her basic limitations are clear enough. Breathe clean air. Avoid smoking and smokers. Give up perfume. Turn off gas appliances. Avoid alcohol. Within those limitations Debbie Dadd is living a very rich life indeed. Another book, written with Dr. Levin and Merla Zellerbach is set to be published by J.P. Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin in October. Dadd's work with non-toxic lifestyles is keeping her busier than ever.

The rain is starting to splatter the sidewalks outside the Hunan as Dadd wraps herself up in a stylish cloak of natural fibers. Her customary silk noir scarf is replaced today by a turtleneck sweater (either of which can be tugged up over the nose in an emergency to filter out any sudden gusts of cigarette smoke or perfume) as she turns to enjoy a walk through North Beach and back to her Sutter Street office.

"I was fortunate," she says. "I found there were plenty of things out there for me to live a normal life. I didn't have to live separate and different from others."

Striding off toward the jackhammer-madness of the financial district and the din of screeching buses and metal saws, Debbie Dadd is showing, once again, it's still possible to enjoy a polluted world that your body, in its own natural wisdom, has learned to reject.

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