Raising Healthy Kids: Avoiding Toxins in Foods, Skincare Products, Detergents, and More with guest David Steinman

About this Episode

About David Steinman

David is the author of the best-selling books Diet for a Poisoned Planet and Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins. He’s the chief officer of the Healthy Living Foundation—a consumer advocacy nonprofit group. He formerly represented the public interest at the National Academy of the Sciences.

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Website: www.RaisingHealthyKidsTheBook.com

X: @ByDavidSteinman

Instagram: @DavidSteinman_Author

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Read the transcript for this episode:

DR. AMY: Hi, smart moms and dads. Welcome to another episode of the Brainy Moms podcast brought to you today by LearningRx cognitive skills training centers. I’m your host, Dr. Amy Moore. I am joined by my co-host, Sandy’s Zamalis, and Sandy and I are going to have a conversation today with David Steinman. David is the author of the bestselling book, “Diet for a Poisoned Planet” and he’s the chief officer of the Healthy Living Foundation, a consumer advocacy nonprofit group. He formally represented the public interest at the National Academy of Sciences. And he’s here to share more healthy living insights from his new book, “Raising Healthy Kids; Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins.” This is actually going to be a two-part episode. We’ll talk to David first and then Sandy and I recorded a short follow-up episode to give you some practical tips for where to start protecting your kids from toxins in food and in the environment. So stay tuned at the end of our interview with David so you don’t miss that bonus conversation afterwards. Welcome, David. 

DAVID: Oh, it’s great to be here today, DR. AMY, with you and Sandy.  

SANDY: We’re so excited to have you. Yeah, this is such a good topic for parents. I know there are so many are going to tune in because talking about raising healthy kids is all of our passions, right? So let’s get started. Why don’t you tell our guests how you got interested in this specific topic? What’s the story behind the story?  

DAVID: Thank you for asking. In the 1980s—so, I’ve been doing this for a long time. In the 1980s, I was poisoned by the DDT that was dumped into the Santa Monica Bay by the Montrose chemical company, about 2,000 tons of DDT-tainted waste sludge. Public officials thought the solution to pollution was dilution, and that being in the sea that all the DDT would dissipate and become inconsequential. But what it ended up doing instead is bio accumulating and all the living organisms, from the plankton to the anchovy to the fish that ate the anchovy to the bonito, the barracuda, the bass that we were catching and eating. And during that time, dolphins began to wash ashore on the beaches of Southern California. And a colleague of mine from the Southern California coastal water research project had begun measuring their blubber for both and PCBs to see if that was a cause and why so many dolphins were washing up on shore and he found enormous amounts of and PCBs. When I went to do, when I went to my editors at The Weekly and said, “Let’s do a story about dolphins washing up on the shore,” my editor, and this is like, I have to thank he dying dolphins and my editor for what happened next, because he said, “Instead of writing about dolphins, why don’t you write about the people? Because they’re eating the same fish the dolphins are. Let’s see what’s in the people’s body.” And that was an insane request because you have to take their blood. I recruited a doctor friend of mine, a marine biologist with the sequence program and a toxicologist. And we went around to fishing peers and sport fishing boats all throughout Los Angeles literally asking people if we could draw their blood. It’s incredible, but about 40 people did participate. We also did a seafood questionnaire and ask them, “Do you eat fish from the local waters or do you eat seafood at all? Or do you eat seafood from … what kind of seafood and from where?” What we found was that the people eating the most seafood from the Santa Monica Bay had much higher levels of and PCBs in their blood. I was one of the people who decided to have my blood and PCBs measured too because of my own past history of fishing so much in the Santa Monica Bay. And I had really high levels of well. As it ended up, I hooked up with Tom, the late Tom Hayden, the politician, and at that time, he was trying to get a proposition passed in California called the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. And it would require the companies with chemical toxins in their foods or products at harmful levels would need to put them on the label and it was really a time of darkness in the 1980s. And that proposition passed. I was a journalist, but I ended up testifying before Congress. And the state assembly, the Santa Monica Bay was declared a superfund site and warnings were put up all around the bay about eating harmful fish. But that’s the short story of how I got into it.  

DR. AMY: I actually have two questions. One, could you just clarify for our listeners what DDT and PCB stands for? What that is? 

DAVID: A DDT dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane is the parent of all modern pesticide and PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyl and they’re used in industry as heat capacity in a capacitor. 

They will be the heat shield that soaks up the heat and prevents the capacitor from overheating or catching on fire. They’re used widely now, by the way, in old classrooms where your child has fluorescent lighting above and they have those ballasts. This is where the PCBs come from in your child’s life today, because they’re still being used, especially in schools that are 40 or 50 years old, because PCBs were finally banned in the 1980s. That’s what they are. What we didn’t know about these chemicals, though, one, the organisms that they kill develop resistance. So they’re only good for a short time, and then you have to develop a stronger organochlorine. That’s why after DDT there was chlordane, dieldrin, aldrin, heptachlor, all these weird-sounding chemicals that came after DDT because the insects were gaining resistance. So now these chemicals are, they’re not useless, but they’re very dangerous. But what we did know about DDT and related compounds was they also act like the sex hormone estrogen once in the human body. We should have known because when researchers were using DDT on lab rats in the 40s all the females went into estrus. It was like they were getting bombed with sex hormones. But it wasn’t until the ‘90s that we started to realize the real profound implications. And what’s really interesting about our DDT and PCBs, and what we’re talking about is, none of us knew anything until Rachel Carson published her book, Silent Spring, in 1962. And that’s because that was the first time we even had a language to describe what was happening. She was the first one who popularized these concepts of these hidden chemical toxins. And their impacts on our health. Before Rachel Carson, we didn’t have ideas like parts per million or parts per billion. We didn’t know what DDT, you’re asking me now, “What’s DDT?” And until the ‘90s, we didn’t really have the vocabulary to describe xenoestrogens or fake estrogens or neural endocrine disruption. Everyone was looking at cancer as the important marker, and it’s huge, it’s important because I can, I share ovarian or endometrial cancer that are hidden in our everyday products. We didn’t know about this until the 1990s. It was a researcher named Theo Colburn, who wrote Our Stolen Future, who was the first to popularize the idea that these sex hormones are actually robbing our children of their human potential. Because when you are interfering with a child’s sex hormones, the two organs in the human body that need sex hormones to develop are the genitalia, and particularly the genitalia in the brain. But no one thinks of the brain as a sex organ, but it is. It’s how we gender identify. It’s the brain differentiates between male and female as the fetus develops. But if you overload it with fake hormones, and it develops at a different time than the genitalia, you can get a dysphoria between the genitalia and the brain and these were concepts the researchers didn’t even begin to understand until the 1990s. So now, instead of relying on chemicals that were obviously very carcinogenic, like DDT, which is causes cancer, they developed a, they began developing another class of pesticides called organophosphates. And these were based on the nerve gases that Germany began to develop in the first part of the 20th century, and these didn’t work by hormonal effects, although I imagine some do hormonal effects. They worked by inhibiting the enzyme cholinesterase, so the nerve-conducting chemical acetylcholine starts building up at the synapses between nerves in the pest’s body and in the human body, and that can cause spasms. It kills the insects very quickly and they claim these were all safer. And there’s a town in California called Salinas. That’s the town where John Steinbeck, the author, grew up. It’s carved right out of the farm fields of Salinas Valley. And it’s known as the nation salad bowl, because about 70 percent of the nation’s lettuce is produced in the Salinas Valley. It gets a lot of really nice cold winds from the Pacific and it’s a really fertile region. All the schools there and are built right out of the town itself, or just carved right into the farm fields. It’s a community and the farm fields dominate. In the late 1990s, researchers from UC Berkeley began measuring the pesticide levels in the moms of Salinas. And then, following their offspring for about over 15 years, what they initially found was that the children of moms who had the highest levels of organophosphates, they had lost about 5 points, and they had higher risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But as the kids matured, the researchers actually looked at their cortical brain tissue and what they found was that there were dead areas in the brains in the kids’ brain tissue where the tissue just never developed. But the same study was done in New York City among kids. And the same high normal levels of organophosphates again, led to the same IQ loss, 5 to 7 points increased risk for ADHD. So, it’s not just if you’re in the farm fields, but if you’re eating the wrong foods. And so that’s why when I talk to parents about “Where do I start?” I always start with food and they’ll ask me about GMOs and things like genetically modified organisms. “Should I avoid those?” And I point out if you get organic foods, you don’t have to worry about the GMOs because organic doesn’t use them. Every slice of bread that my nonprofit, the nonprofit group for which I’m chief officer, Healthy Living Foundation, has tested has these organophosphate pesticides in them. Now, it’s likely to be, for example, among others, but they have the same effect on the developing fetus. They interfere with the nervous system development and the same effect continues as kids are growing. And you know what? It also affects adults. We always focus on kids, but similar studies on PCBs, for example, I found that adults tend to lose, with the highest PCB levels, have greater memory loss. So, that’s why I tell mom and dad and parents and adults alike: This is not just good for your kids. It’s for you to start with foods and make them organic.

DR. AMY: Okay. So, now I’m hearing half of our listeners saying organic is just too expensive. Is it really that big of a deal? Explain why it’s really that big of a deal.

DAVID: Oh, great question. And being an activist. I know what it’s like to live on a budget. I’m always, especially during the pandemic, when I was writing, raising healthy kids, I was on Instacart constantly looking for bargains and figuring out how do you afford organic foods. 

There’s some really good news. Affordability, it’s a myth that organics are always going to be more expensive. Because over the last 20 years since, and again, this is important to understand our consumer power, it wasn’t the government that said, “Hey, we’re gonna have an organic label.” Around the late 1990s, it was consumers demanding chemical-free foods that created the organic movement, that put the pressure on the government to create an organic seal, which means a lot. So do look for the USD organic seal. It’s a good, it’s a good indicator of better quality, but the staples like celery, lettuce, potatoes, bread, you can buy most of these for about the same price as conventionally sourced foods. The staples are about the same price. When you get into some of the more exotic, what I recommend in Raising Healthy Kids is one, you can shop in season, like right now, you can find cantaloupe, plums, apricots, nectarines—organic for really reasonable prices because they’re all in season. But say your kids, like mine, love the berries like raspberries, strawberries, and other fruits like those can be more expensive. But if you buy them frozen in those big 3-pound packs organic, they last longer and they’re just about the same price. So there’s a lot of workarounds for organic foods. And so I want to bust that myth right away. There are some times when organic foods are more expensive. Sometimes it’s worth it. In my book, Raising Healthy Kids, I point out, for example, probably want to get organic or grass-fed beef if your kids are going to eat meat. And that’s because beef tends to be the one animal raised in North America that’s implanted with the sex hormones. You definitely want to get grass-fed beef, and that might be a little more expensive, but you can certainly do a lot for about the same price. The other interesting thing is you asked, “Why do it? What’s the sell point? What’s in it for us as a consumer? What’s the real story?” And I hate it when people on the Internet will say organics are fake, or you’re wasting your money, or they can’t feed the world. The truth is published peer-reviewed studies have shown kids on organic diets have less diabetes, less obesity, less allergies, lower risk for certain cancers. Moms will have a lower risk for genital malformations with their child. They’ll have less pregnancy complications. And dad, versus a conventional diet, will have better sperm quality and more sperm. These are all published peer-reviewed studies. There’s no question. As soon as women start using safer skincare products, markers in their, in healthy breast tissue that are indicating some risk for breast cancer, these tend to go down again. There’s no question now in my mind from reading the research that organics make a big difference.

SANDY: Can we talk about dairy to come back to that? So not just produce, but then let’s talk about dairy.

DR. AMY: No, that’s what I said. So you’re not just talking about produce, right? And so Sandy’s going in this direction now. Cause obviously they’re not going to only eat produce. So keep talking.

DAVID: So yeah, the first step with dairy is nonfat because most of the chemical toxins that are in dairy and those old organic chlorines accumulate in fatty tissues. They’re much more likely to be in whole milk and 2 percent milk and full-fat ice cream than they are in—nonfat doesn’t contain them. I looked at the monitoring studies. On the other hand, dairy also can have a lot of antibiotics and sulfur drugs in them, and these can be very routine and conventionally sourced dairy herds. Plus, they can have about bovine growth hormone, which is another milk-stimulating hormone that some producers use. I do recommend, again, organic dairy products. There are … some of the pesticides that are in conventionally sourced dairy foods probably come from the grains that dairy animals are fed, but if it’s an organic operation, even the grains that the animals are fed are organic. So, even if you get a fatty dairy product, like sour cream or full-fat cottage cheese, it’s still going to be safer because it will not have all the antibiotics or sulfur drugs and the same degree of pesticide contamination as you would find in conventionally sourced.

DR. AMY: Okay. So, knowing that we have all this peer-reviewed research and seeing the trickle-down effect and the medical implications and the behavioral implications and the cognitive implications of pesticides and growth hormones, why in the world do we still have conventionally grown food? Why is it allowed?

DAVID: That’s a huge philosophical question. And first of all, there is a shift. Remember, the shift comes from the grassroots. It doesn’t come from government. The shift comes from the grassroots. And so you’re framing it in a way with, “Why doesn’t everyone know?” but it’s a really young movement. There was no organic food until around 2000, so this is about a 20-year-old movement. And if you think about it, you’ll see that we’ve made an enormous impact. More and more people are buying organic foods. One, it’s a matter of education. Two, it’s a matter of busting those myths. And from a regulatory perspective, the government really isn’t helping to push us towards organics. Organic farmers don’t get the same kind of subsidies that the large corporate farmers get. Farmers get paid to grow all that pesticide sugar cane down in Louisiana. I go down there a lot for our nonprofit work and just to give you an example of what’s going on … 1,000 acres of organic sugarcane, you drive down along that great river road in Louisiana, where all those plantations where it’s still being grown. It’s all being sprayed with atrazine. And when then, when, which is another, a very dangerous herbicide, which causes cancer and also acts like the sex hormones that we’ve talked about. It’s in every glass of drinking water along the Cancer Alley in Louisiana. About 1.3 million Louisianans drink water with atrazine. That’s a problem, DR. AMY. That’s a problem that organic agriculture, which would be just as efficient, it’s being done in Florida. If Louisiana had the foresight, they could have organic sugar cane fields. And clean up one of the most dangerous toxins in everyone’s drinking water. There would be fewer cancers and it would be a really good thing, but it’s not happening. And so there’s a real paucity of adults sometimes running around in our state and federal state capital. You know, and what’s the reason? Why is that we’ve been sold as consumers a bill of goods saying “a little bit of poison won’t hurt you. A little bit of atrazine, a little bit of forever chemical, a little bit of phthalate, a little lead all of it together won’t hurt you.” Well, again, I get back to the fact that maybe in 2000, we didn’t have the studies. But now we do have the peer-reviewed studies. I mentioned the organophosphate studies. Just to give you another example, women who use cosmetics with a hidden chemical toxin I discuss at length in Raising Healthy Kids called phthalate, which is a plasticizer. They have high normal levels. Their boys are born again with significant losses, cognitive and learning difficulties, increased ADHD, and gender behavior is modified towards the feminine because these are again blocking their sex hormones. They also have higher risk of testicular cancer and higher infertility rates.

DR. AMY: And that’s called phthalate?

DAVID: Phthalate, yes. And it’s not listed on the label, but for listeners, if you see a product and it lists fragrance or parfum, it’s very likely to have phthalates, too. And we share how to avoid products that will tend to have phthalates in Raising Healthy Kids. But again, we’re not being protected. There is no Superman. There is no Uncle Sam who’s really looking out. We grew up, all of us, thinking, “Oh, Washington is actually looking out for us.” That’s like the great father, right? Uncle Sam or whoever, but actually Washington is the last resort. And if you grew up in states like Alabama, Florida, Texas, there’s no one looking out for you. In California, I mentioned the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Sometimes I feel like it’s California looking out for the rest of the Union. But really, all those laws that were supposed to protect us: the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act; Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, Rodenticide Act; Toxic Substances Control Act. What they do, they set monitoring levels. They set tolerance levels. “We’ll allow a little bit of this poison in the drinking water.” And our population, we consumers, have bought this gaslighting as if a little bit of poison is okay. If we really want to be safe as parents and then activists, as we’re being safe, antitoxic activists, zero tolerance is a key concept. A little bit of poison isn’t safe for your kid. Now, you’re not going to get rid of all of it, but when you have that concept, you have a much better chance of significantly reducing your child’s exposure. We need to educate and we need to educate both on the health effects of conventionally sourced foods: the environmental impact and consumers, and how they can pressure legislators in friendly states to write better laws. I have a lot of hope but it’s a long stretch too.

DR. AMY: So, this regulation, I’m hearing you say, would start at the state level. Just like you initiated in California.

DAVID: I would say it has to start really in the home and we have to turn the consumer into an anti-toxic activist through action. But yeah, you’re right. DR. AMY. You’re right. States like California are far more receptive. Washington, New York are far more receptive to controls on chemical toxins, and the result is a healthier population and a healthier democracy.

SANDY: Is Europe doing this better? I hear in the news and my daughter actually had this experience. She was in Scotland for a summer abroad and she has autoimmune issues and when she was eating when she was in Scotland, she felt so much better. And then she got into looking into what’s allowed in Europe versus what’s not allowed. What are they doing differently than we’re doing to protect their people? 

DAVID: There’s a lot more respect for the slow food movement, that is for using natural. If you go to France, their food has far fewer additives than food in the United States. I’ll just give you an example, though, from our own work. Here at the Healthy Living Foundation, we sued the largest producer of industrial olive oil in the United States because we kept finding a reproductive toxin called Carbaryl in their olive oil. They hired the largest law firm in the nation, if not the world, to defend them. It was a big case and it’s just coming to a conclusion. I write about it in Raising Healthy Kids. I feel we’ve alleviated the problem. We’ve taken care of it, but say, you’re a family that’s already being affected by chemical toxins. And your partner is saying, “You should have this olive oil, Honey, because it’s really healthy for you and we want to have our family.” And say your partner has a reduced sperm count. Maybe they’re on the cusp of fertility infertility, which is not unusual today in the United States. The researcher we worked with did the studies that showed men who would consume this product would be moved from subfertile to infertile. And that’s a nationwide shift because it was the biggest producer of olive oil in the United States. Carbaryl was banned over a decade ago in Europe, but it was still being used and is still being used here in the United States. Europe can have much stronger standards than us. I can give example after example in cosmetics, where Europe has banned the use of certain compounds. I was in a documentary called “Not So Pretty” on HBO Max, and we found products that use two or three quat compounds on their ingredient label. There aren’t the regulations here. I happen to think we are probably the most plasticized society in history. We’re finding plastics in our boys’ testicles, and we’re finding that boys with high plastic levels have lower testosterone. You are hitting a really important point. Yeah, Europe is way ahead of us in some ways.

DR. AMY: Can you talk about detergent? Because I know that’s a big one. Our skin is our largest organ, right? So, of course, we can absorb toxins that way.

DAVID: That’s a great question. In fact, I went shopping the other day with a friend of mine at Target, and we were looking for a safe laundry detergent. And what I’m talking about applies to laundry detergents and also bubble baths and shampoos. If you see any detergent bubble bath or shampoo that has a word like sodium laureth, sodium myreth, the PEG compounds or polyethylene glycol, any word that contains the three letters ETH, it’s really dangerous for you and really dangerous for our communities across America. And it’s an immediate sign that this is a product you don’t want in your home. Here’s the double danger. These products tend to be contaminated with a chemical called dioxane, which is a male breast carcinogen, and showing up in drinking water across the United States. And it’s costing communities millions of dollars to clean up their drinking water. It doesn’t have to be there. It’s there because laundry manufacturers, the big ones, have dioxin in their products. They’re not cleaning their products up now. My friend wanted it was in the Target and they said, “What about Seventh Generation?” And I pointed out that some of their products also contain the ingredients. Now, Seventh Generation says, “Yes, we contain some ingredients, but we don’t have dioxin because we strip it out. See, we care about consumers.” But from my understanding about Seventh Generation, and certainly about the ethoxylated ingredients—and these are the main ingredients and detergents—my understanding is these are made with a chemical called ethylene oxide. And in the past, we have studies showing nurses getting high rates of breast cancer when they sterilize the medical equipment. And the reason is that they were using ethylene oxide. It’s one of the most potent and dangerous human carcinogens on earth. And you have all these plants across the United States now producing ethylene oxide and phosphorylated detergents, and they’re releasing the ethylene oxide into communities. And these communities are spread throughout the United States, and I list them in Raising Healthy Kids. I visited one of the plants that produces ethylene oxide. In Reserve, Louisiana, and it’s located right next to a school called the 5th Ward Elementary School. And on the other side of this elementary school is a neoprene plant. That produces things like things that we so desperately need, like a beer cozies or neoprene tote bags. These kids are breathing so many carcinogens. My nonprofit went down there and brought 32 high-efficiency particulate air filters for the kids because they’re slipping through the cracks. But you can be nontoxic and like buy Seventh Generation and that’s nontoxic. At least there’s no dioxane in the product and that’s good for the local environment and you. But if you want to be anti-toxic, you avoid the ETHs completely, because your neighbor, like in my friends in Louisiana, and your neighbors in cities across the United States, are breathing this stuff and you can just be a little more helpful and it’s very simple to avoid any kind of bubble bath laundry detergent shampoo that contains a sodium laureth, sodium myreth, the PEG compounds, anything with an ETH in it by avoiding it completely, you become antitoxic and you’re actually, we’re all doing this together. That’s the thing. It’s, I’m not a lone voice out there. I know people want to do this and it takes all of us, but we are making a difference. As I said, there was no organic cosmetic market. Seven years ago, you couldn’t even buy safe detergent. But today, you can look for ingredients like glucosides. If you see glucoside on your shampoo, on your laundry detergent, or your bubble bath, that’s a safe product. Because the manufacturer obviously gets it.

DR. AMY: What do you wash your clothes in?

DAVID: There’s a company we use, a brand called Ecos, I think it’s really good, it’s Ecos. And there’s a reason why we use them. If you look at their packaging, for all their products, it’s clear. They don’t use any dyes even in their packaging. It’s not like Tide or all that are blue and orange. No, they don’t even dye their detergent. They’re also really conscious of what I’m talking about, and they’ve completely eliminated detergents that are based on alcohol voxelates. So they’re coming as close as possible for a mass popular brand to being non and anti-toxic. They’re already pretty much non-toxic, but they’re also becoming anti-toxic. So I do recommend ECOS as a first step. As a laundry detergent, but really the thing is just try to avoid the ETH compounds. It’s good for your family, but good for communities.

DR. AMY: Okay. We are out of time, believe it or not. David, what do you want to leave our listeners with that you haven’t gotten to say? 

DAVID: Oh, be part, be part of the change. It’s good for you. It’s good for our environment. Good for your kids. And you have so much power as a consumer in Raising Healthy Kids. I just want folks, if they read the stories, it’s like becoming a black belt in protecting your family from hidden chemical toxins. At first you say, how do I integrate everything? But by the time you reach the end, you’ve earned your black belt and it’s all fluid. And you’re going to understand you don’t need to go to your app every time when you’re shopping. And when you do make that choice, it’s good for you and good for everyone else. But it’s not just me. It’s all of us. We are really making a difference and we’re a very young movement. Keep a lot of keep the faith that it’s getting better, but it depends on you and me.

DR. AMY: Okay, so we need to say goodbye to David and then Sandy and I are going to stick around and talk about some practical tips for what to do with all of this information. David Steinman, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us to educate us and our listeners. If you want to really dive into this, you can read David’s book. You can find it at RaisingHealthyKidsTheBook.com. We’ll actually put that link in our show notes. You can find him on X at ByDavidSteinman, on Instagram at David Steinman_author, and on TikTok at DavidSteinman101. Listeners, you may be feeling overwhelmed by some of that information. You might be feeling fearful after hearing some of the dangers that David talked about in terms of pesticides and chemicals and how they are impacting our children’s development, how they increase the risk for cancer. Some of the brain and sex organ development information was fascinating, but really scary all at the same time. So I think we should offer some practical tips on where to start, where to look right now that you’re armed with this information about how scary it all is. 

SANDY: That was like a fire hose of information. 

DR. AMY: Yeah. And I have to say, and I think I said this in the episode, we eat organic in our house. We use natural cleaning products in our house, but this was, this went way beyond what even we do, right? It scared me and I already do safe things. Yeah. I don’t know. How did it leave you feeling Sandy?

SANDY: Yeah. I am not someone who’s in that space of going fully organic. My life is just too busy. So I usually default to what’s easy. Right. So with that in mind, and I was thinking about this from a listener perspective, I was overwhelmed and I, it sounded impossible to me when we talked, we thought we need to at least come back and share some practical tips for parents because it is important. This isn’t, you can’t avoid everything. So where do you start? Cause if it just looks like a mountain, you’re never going to give it a try.

DR. AMY: Yeah, and let me just start by saying it’s not impossible, right? I have lived an organic and natural lifestyle for more than a decade, and we adopted that in our home because we have some health issues. And so we did it so that we lowered the toxin burden on those health issues, and it seemed daunting at first, but it really, once you know what to look for, it makes it a lot easier. And Sandy and I thought that maybe we should just give you guys some practical tips, right? You don’t know where to start. So let’s just give you some advice on where to start because you don’t have to do everything all at once. Right? Small changes can have a big impact is what we think.

SANDY: Yeah, so let’s start there. What is one small change that you think would have the biggest, most huge impact on just living more toxin free?

DR. AMY: Yeah, so I think the number one, first and easiest change to make is to stop using plastic. And what I mean by that is don’t store your food in plastic. Don’t microwave anything in plastic and transition away from plastic water bottles to glass or aluminum. So, let me talk about that a little bit and why it’s so important. What the research is showing is that when. Let me just back up a little bit. Plastics are made from carbon polymers that are then held together by additional chemicals, right, that help give them their shape. And again, I’m not a chemist. I’m a psychologist. So this is my general overview of the plastic issue. But when we heat plastic, when plastic gets hot, it actually starts to break down the chemicals holding the plastics together. And when it breaks it down, it leaches micro-plastics and nano-plastics into the water or the food. 

And so then we ingest those. And those are toxic to our body. So what research is showing is that our kidneys are pretty good at filtering most of the microplastics, but those nano-plastics are so small that they can permeate our cells in our organs. That’s super scary to think that we’ve got nano-plastics floating around in our body and disrupting our hormone and endocrine system. And stop microwaving any food in plastic. Just throw it in a glass dish. That is the simplest, easiest, safest way to transition. That’s a non-issue, right? It doesn’t cost us anything to throw something into a glass dish before we hit start on the microwave. And it is hard to transition away from plastic water bottles because they’re so easy. It’s so easy to buy an eight-pack of plastic water bottles at Costco or Sam’s and grab it on your way out the door. Here’s what happens with plastic water bottles. It’s not actually the water bottle that creates the biggest problem. It’s the cap. As we twist off the cap, every time that friction releases plastics. Isn’t that interesting? 

SANDY: Yeah, no, I never would have thought of that.

DR. AMY: Yeah, so that is the next change I would make. First of all, it’s cheaper to use a reusable water bottle than it is to buy plastic water bottles. So even though it’s convenient, it’s a lot cheaper and healthier to grab a glass water bottle or an aluminum—I can’t say that. Aluminum. I use glass. I don’t like, I think the aluminum water bottles change the taste of the water. And so there might be a chemical exchange happening there too, but again, not a chemist, so I don’t know. But I use solely glass water bottles. That is a little harder for kids. That’s why a lot of the aluminum water bottles come with a carabiner clip on the cap. And so you just clip that right onto the side of the backpack. That is so convenient. And that’s what we did with our kids when they were younger. Anyway, it’s so easy to have a nice water filter in your refrigerator dispenser or a water filter on your kitchen sink tap and fill those reusable water bottles. Simple, inexpensive start to reducing the toxic burden that we get from food and water when it’s stored or heated in plastic.

SANDY: All right. So let’s say we put that into our daily practice. What would be your next go to?

DR. AMY: So my next go to would be to eliminate artificial food dyes and colorings. They are super appealing to children and that’s why manufacturers use them. So when you put pretty pink and purple and red and blue dye in a food, in a cereal, in a yogurt, in popsicles, right? That is a marketing strategy because it’s appealing and beautiful and bright. And so a child will go, “I want that.” So we know from listening to David Steinman in his episode and from research that food dyes can have detrimental health effects. So that would be my next step is to really read food labels. and anything that says artificial coloring, especially red and blue dyes, don’t buy it. And find a way to pick beautiful, bright fruits to replace it with, right? So instead of buying the yogurt that is artificially colored red, purple, blue, and green, put some fresh berries into some plain yogurt that you sweeten with maple syrup or honey. And you can get that same color, right? Like when we mix a raspberry into yogurt, it changes it pink. It’s a beautiful pink. So look for whole foods. Right? Fruits, vegetables, and then combine those with a natural product that doesn’t have a food dye in it. You could make your own popsicles. Just there’s, there are easy ways. It takes an extra step, maybe, but just read those food labels. And there are hidden dyes in things like granola bars that you wouldn’t even think. And so get savvy about reading those food labels. That’s the next step.

SANDY: Yeah. Oftentimes they recommend just doing the outer perimeter of the grocery store, right? Trying to stay out of the middle in general, because you’ll miss a lot of these things. If you are just running that perimeter instead. Let’s talk about the dirty dozen. Would that be the next one on your list?

DR. AMY: Sure. So that’s moving us into that organics step. And if it seems daunting and overwhelming to say, “Okay, I’m going 100 percent organic,” then let’s just back up and say, “Start small.” And the place to start that we’re recommending is with the dirty dozens. 

And what that means is these are the 12 that have been known to have the most pesticides used on them and even after washing the most pesticide burden. All right, so number one are strawberries. Number two, spinach. Number three, kale, collard, and mustard greens. Then grapes. Then peaches and pears, nectarines, apples, bell and hot peppers, cherries, blueberries, and green beans. So, the top 12 fruits and vegetables that have the most pesticides. And so that is where we are recommending that you start if you want to adopt an organic eating lifestyle. Organic foods will have a certified USDA organic label on them so that they have met those quality standards for not having pesticides used on them. 

SANDY: Okay. We’ve got three super simple ways to start. Do you have resources that you recommend for parents so that they can go look online and start maybe picking through one piece at a time? Sometimes it’s helpful to have a website resource that just tells you exactly what you read off to us. So just the list, right? Go here, start here.

DR. AMY: Yeah, that’s a great question and we certainly don’t want to get into the business of recommending specific products or brands because things can change with products and brands over time. And so we’re not going to recommend specific ones, but the Environmental Working Group has done all that research. And so their website, environmental working group, EWG.org. They’ve got all the lists. So you can go on there and you can click on “What are the safest baby lotions? What are the safest detergents? What are the safest cosmetics? What are the safest kitchen cleaning products?” They’ve already done the research for you to determine what, which one of these are toxic and which ones aren’t. And so you can go on and just see the list after list of the different non-toxic products that are being manufactured out there. So they’ve done the work. That’s the resource that I trust the most in choosing safe products for my family. And so that’s our recommendation is to go to the Environmental Working Group’s website. 

SANDY: Okay. Is there anything else we want to add on? Because, like I said, this is a deep-dive topic, but we wanted to be practical. We wanted to leave everybody with something they could do today or tomorrow.

DR. AMY: Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we think about raising healthy families, a lot of times we just think about, “Okay, let me make sure that I’ve taken my child to the doctor. Let me make sure that my kids are washing their hands.” Right? Which we know is the number one way to avoid sickness, right, is to keep our hands washed. But we don’t always think about these things that we are using on our bodies that we’re using in our home and that we’re ingesting as part of that healthy family lifestyle. And so I think it’s so important to brain development to physical development to cognitive functioning. We spend our lives talking about mental health and cognitive functioning. And so what we’re breathing and what we’re putting on our skin and what we’re putting in our bodies directly impacts cognitive functioning and mental health, as well as physical health and development. And so I think as parents, anything that we can do to make our kids’ lives easier, whether it’s thinking, learning, growing, feeling, then we should do it, right? And that has lifelong benefits. So we should do it for ourselves. We should do it for our kids.

SANDY: It’s an investment, right? It’s an investment in health. It’s an investment in their future and yours too, because you benefit as well.

DR. AMY: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks for joining us. That is all the smart stuff that we have for you today. Catch you next time.