Taking her cues from Nature

Ten years ago last week, Debra Lynn Dadd put herself on a five-day fast. As far as she was concerned, her life was at stake.

She was 24, a talented pianist and coach for young singers in the San Francisco Opera, practicing hard to audition for an assistant conducting apprenticeship. If you had told her than in 10 years she would be one of the nation's leading experts on toxic chemical consumer goods and safe natural alternatives, she would have told you to stop joking and let her practice. Her audition was already scheduled when she began to notice that her hands were becoming paralyzed every time she played.

The paralysis was the last in a cruel mess of apparently unrelated symptoms. Insomnia, muscle aches, depression, and binge eating had been making her miserable as long as she could remember.

Her farther had seen other people with the same problems and kept trying to persuaded her to see a specialist in chemical sensitivities. "There was one night when I was just hysterical," Dadd remembers. Her illness was at a crisis point and her father tried to give her the non-aspirin form of Alka-Seltzer, a remedy he had learned often worked to interrupt the severest reactions of chemically sensitive patients.

"If my life were a movie, this would be a great scene," Dadd remembers. She threw the medicine against the wall. Her father had to sit on her to get her to take some. When she did, she says,"within 30 seconds, my reaction had stopped."

She went to a doctor. He diagnosed her as chemically sensitive but treated sensitivities as allergies and gave her antigens. Antigens didn't help. So now she knew what was wrong, but not how to fix it. To heal herself, Dadd began the research that has made her one of the countries few authorities on natural and nontoxic consumer affairs. She read a book about food allergies that recommended a five-day cleansing fast and tried it. The sixth day "was like the first day of my life that I felt good," she says now by telephone from her house in Mill Valley, Calif.

"Once I wasn't reacting to food, I could see my reactions to other things," she says. "I went through this one week when I would put on perfume- and I would get a headache, and I would say perfume - headache.'" Two and two would finally add up.

She wasn't sleeping well. She read about formaldehyde in permanent press sheets. "The first night I slept on cotton sheets was the first night I slept the whole night in my whole life," she says.

She fainted in the shower. She read about chlorine and put a filter on the showerhead. Bingo, her head was clear.

"I had to go through the whole process of unlayering all my reactions until I got down to not reacting anymore, and when I got down to not reacting, everything in my house was natural. There were no chemicals.

Change in motivation

There was no music career either. "My motivation for getting well was so that I could play," she says. But her research on chemical sensitivities fascinated her. She discovered that her reactions were not to allergens, but to household poisons, contained in everyday articles commonly eaten or washed with or worn. No one, she soon found, had provided consumers with good research on the damage that living with these poisons could do or the alternatives that might make other sufferers comfortable.

She and other people who are extremely sensitive to toxic chemicals, especially petrochemicals are like the canaries that miners used to use to check whether the air was safe when they we're working, she says. They are an alarm system for the rest of us because; "probably if we're reacting then that shows that as a species we're all capable of having he same reactions. It just shows up earlier in us." As soon as she realized she could use her sensitivities not only to learn how to keep herself safe, but to teach other people, too, she says, "I really felt that I had found my calling."

The world was waiting. Word about her photocopied list of nom-chemical alternatives for chemically sensitive people and concerned parents spread all over the country. A note about her work from her boyfriend to the president of Bon Ami, the nontoxic household cleanser corporation drew an invitation to go on a nationwide media tour. "And boom, I was on TV," she says.

A growing impact

"Nontoxic and Natural," her first consumers' guide to 1,200 dangerous products and safe alternatives to make or buy had a surprising impact on 1984. In part because of the book, so many nontoxic alternatives came on the market in the months after she wrote it that she started a newsletter, "Everything Natural," in 1985. In 1986, her updated sequel, "The Nontoxic Home," appeared.

But focusing on how to eliminate environmental toxins from people's home and offices began to seem somehow incomplete to her. So Dadd went on a working vacation in a redwood forest to try to figure out what her next step would be. And while she as there, a terrifying windstorm came up. My little tiny house was in the middle of these 80' redwoods crashing around." She remembers. "I said OK, wind, if there is anything I don't need, and that I can live without, take it away." And at that moment the power went out.

The next morning when the storm had passed and she got down to work again, she found that the power outage had erased her computers memory." I lost my whole mailing list. My whole business just went down the tubes," Dadd says. "I said, OK, nature's really talking to me.'"

She decided to let it all go and start doing research using nature as a teacher instead of trying to learn about toxic products and imagine how to make them less toxic. "Just that day I started getting new opportunities," she says. "It was like black and white between my old life and the new life."

How to be natural

Her new catalog of common toxic dangers and safe alternatives, due to come out in the fall, will be called "Nontoxic and Natural Earthwise," her word for her new attitude looking to nature for guidance about how to be natural. She announced new standards for safe products in the fist issue of her new newsletter, "The Earthwise Consumer," which came out in the fall: "When you make a purchase, chose products that are nontoxic and nonpolluting, natural, renewable and sustainable, organically grown or wildcrafted, compassionate to animals, recycled, energy efficient, packaged responsibly, reusable or recyclable, biodegradable, and provided by companies with socially conscious business practices." (One-year subscription costs $20 to The Earthwise Consumer, PO Box 1506, Mill Valley CA 94942; back issues are available and both of her books are available post-paid for $11.95 each from the same address.)

In the 10 years Dadd has been fostering and mastering it, the world of non-toxic and natural products has grown phenomenally. Organic food, once a sized rarity even in natural food stores, is now on her supermarkets shelves. Cosmetics and skincare products which she lists and rates in the second issue of "The Earthwise Consumer," are now available in such completely organic and nontoxic forms that one maker she quotes can say, "If you can't eat it don't put it on your skin."

Two consumer areas - clothes and energy - remain "the two areas where I feel most helpless," Dadd says. Unlike synthetic fabrics, cotton clothes are not made of toxic petrochemicals that pass into the skin. But "cotton has more pesticides in it than anything," Dadd says, and organic cotton clothes aren't available yet in the US [They weren't in 1990, but now there are many--see Debra's List].

So much energy is still fossil fueled that Dadd had to drop energy from the list of criteria she measures things by in her coming consumer guide. But Dadd, who now rents, is looking forward to the windmill and solar panels hat will power the home she hopes to build for herself.

She believes a growing public realizes that a livable planet is more important for survival than money. Some consumers approach this realization with "baby steps" such as junk food made without preservatives, that do little to change their lifestyle, she acknowledges. But "now we've just got to go to the next step and be earthwise," taking our cues from nature, she says, and she means to lead the way.

BACK TO MEDIA INDEX