Guide for the Blissfully Oblivious: 5 Common Toxins in Your Home
“Sure. You can turn me into a hippie just like you,” my husband said last week.
This is just one of a thousand ways he says “I love you” every day. He had never eaten broccoli before meeting me (I smothered it in cheese the first time I served it) and my future father-in-law warned him I was a “tree hugging hippie” just because I lived in British Columbia.
“Not true!” I recall protesting at the time while vaguely remembering writing letters on behalf of animal rights when I was a pre-teen in small town Saskatchewan. Trees probably enjoyed hugs. I just didn’t think living life in a way that was conscious of the earth and animals around me made me a hippie.
Now we are over 11 years into marriage and I have somehow converted my husband into an OCD recycling champion who chases down our kids to ask why they threw that piece of paper (or can or bottle) in the trash and reclaims tossed banana peels or watermelon rinds so he can feed them to our goats while asking me regularly about compost.
We have spent the better part of a decade intentionally choosing healthy foods and products for our home. Since we are both Family Medicine physicians, I like to think we have a pretty good handle on what is good and bad for our kids and our bodies. We are starting a regenerative ag farm in Northern California from scratch and we eat only local produce and protein from our county’s CSA weekly delivery.
However, the bubble of COVID in 2020 has somehow turned my mind toward medical and nutrition research I hadn’t even heard of before. Was I just an exhausted and overworked mama (kids born in 4th year of med school, 2nd year of residency and 2nd year of real life practice) who didn’t have time to pay attention to the shocking developments? Did I do a poor job of keeping up with the news? Why didn’t our med school colleagues talk about this stuff as it was breaking? I vaguely remember friends shouting down Monsanto and hearing that organic is good and GMO was bad. But if I could find it on the grocery store shelf by a trusted name brand, wouldn’t that mean it was okay for my kids to eat?
Apparently not.
Did you know Big Food does not have your family’s health as a top priority for their business model?
Did you know Big Ag is more supported by twisted nutritional pseudoscience than ethical government policies?
You probably did. But I’m just starting to wrap my head around the SAD-ness of the “Standard American Diet” and and learning what food sovereignty and functional medicine really means. As much as I’d love to jump ahead and help all of my patients, I’m starting with my family. And genuinely shocked at the levels of toxins I find on our “healthy” panty shelves.
Wading through the dozens of resources and hundreds of toxins can be daunting at best. If you’re wondering (like I was) where to start, here are a few simple (but pervasive) items.
1) Glyphosphate
There is more glyphosphate than vitamin D in a bowl of Cheerios. And vitamin D is intentionally added to fortify the nutritional value of the cereal. Starting in 2006, glyphosphate has been commonly sprayed on wheat crops right before harvesting to help dry it out. This is right around the time gluten insensitivities spiked in the US.
I had been steering our kids away from the sugary cereal nightmare that makes up breakfast in America and thought both Rice Krispies and Cheerios were relatively good choices: only 4gm of sugar per servicing compared to 10–36 grams in other colorful boxes. Apparently, I was feeding our kids more of a carcinogenic herbicide than an essential vitamin that helps with bone development.
Also, I have been intentionally buying whole wheat breads forever. We’re not a big sandwich family, but our oldest will eat 4 pieces of toast most mornings, sometimes up to 8. He has been suffering from upset stomachs at bedtime for many years. We initially thought it may be a dairy-intolerance, but are now considering the way glyphosphate destroys our intestinal microbiome and helps him digest wheat. We have switched to organic breads and I bake at home with only organic, non-GMO flour.
2) Artificial colors
Artifical dyes are made from petroleum. Yellow #6 and Red #40 require warning labels in Europe and are linked to hyperactivity in children. Blue #1 is linked to increased risk of kidney tumors, it can also pass the blood-brain barrier and act as a neurotoxin. Red #3 has been known to cause cancer since 1984 and even the FDA commissioner tried to (unsuccessfully) ban it. Americans consume products with 15 million pounds of food dye every year. Most of these are kids, enticed by bright colors added to foods that are essentially void of any real nutrition, contributing to our overwhelming obesity epidemic.
Again thinking that we are steering our family in the right direction, we have been limiting processed sugar for some time in our household. But the occasional treat still makes it’s way past our doors. And Halloween was just last weekend, so this was a timely reminder for me.
What’s wrong with a little petroleum in our diets? The crude oil used in dyes (making margarine yellow, mint ice cream green, and cola brown) have been linked to cancer and allergic reactions, as well as hyperactivity in children. They have also been shown to “trick” our senses the way artificial sweeteners do and impair our body’s ability to feel full and break down the product. European versions of similar products do NOT have the same artificial colors as we do. Why not just take them out, America?
3) Teflon
“I remember a friend of mine saying he couldn’t cook with that frying pan because he had a pet bird,” commented a colleague when I asked if she had seen the Netflix documentary, “The Devil We Know.” (I have since heard about the 2019 movie “Dark Waters” with Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway and Tim Robbins, but haven’t seen it yet. Go watch it and tell me how it is.)
I don’t even need to know the full science behind DuPont and the C8/PFOA disaster when I hear a comment like that. The air kills birds in your home when you cook with it? How can that be safe for our lungs?
In another example of gracious support from my husband, he said, “Which frying pans do you want to throw out? Are you sure you don’t want to just donate them? Oh. Okay. Sounds good.”
And that was that.
4) Natural flavors
This one was a little bit harder for me to understand and jump on board with. After all, it’s a “natural” flavor. Doesn’t that mean it comes from nature? Isn’t nature good for us?
Again, it is an example of Big Food NOT having our family’s health at heart. This term is used as a catch-all marketing ploy to hide ingredients that you may not actually want to eat if you knew where in nature they came from. For example, castoreum is a natural extract that mostly comes from beaver castor sacs, located next to their anal glands. They use these sacs with their urine to mark territory. Castoreum is used for vanilla flavoring.
WHAT?
If that isn’t enough, consider that natural flavors are not used to increase the nutritional value of a food. An apple actually FROM nature has flavor that is associated with its’ nutritional value. Our tongues and brains and digestive systems recognize this and enjoy it the way our body was designed to. Processed foods with natural flavors added do not add nutritional value. So our tongues and brains and digestive systems get confused and keep eating. We don’t feel full when we should and our brains and bodies don’t get the signal that we got what we nutritionally needed from that food because it ISN’T THERE.
We keep eating and keep buying more and keep eating. Which fulfills the Big Food business model perfectly.
5) Fragrance
This last one is not related to food or nutrition, but is super important and likely just the tip of the iceberg as I look into our household products. It is an all-encompassing category referring to any and all fragrances in shampoo, cleaning products, soaps, make-up, lotions, candles, air fresheners, pretty much anything made to Smell Good.
To confuse things a little further, “unscented” is not the same as “fragrance-free.” Unscented products can actually (legally) contain chemicals that neutralize or mask the odors of other ingredients.
But what’s the big deal? Well, “fragrance” is a catch-all umbrella term that can refer to any number of chemicals attached to phthalates: toxic plastics that have been shown to disrupt endocrine metabolism and cause cancer. These phthalates are harmful enough to be banned in children’s toys, but are still widely used in millions of household products.
We have switched to vinegar and castor oil cleaning products in our home, as well as fragrance-free bathroom cleaners, shampoos and soaps. However, I still have Bath & Body Works Wallflower room scents in a few places around the house. This is mostly because my husband has been super tolerant of my throwing things away, but may suspiciously ask what happened if I unplug them before the little glass jars are empty. I’m sure he’ll be happy that I’m spending less (no!) money on that moving forward.
As I mentioned at the outset, this is a process for our family. An adventurous journey in educating ourselves on things the government can’t or won’t regulate. You can’t rely on Big Food or Big Ag to have your family’s best health at heart. Their track record over the past 100 years isn’t great. I feel enormous responsibility for my three children and the health of my husband. It isn’t enough for me to make changes on my own.
I once heard a popular food activist blogger say, “The most important thing you can do for nutrition is to tell others about what you’ve learned.”
Sometimes I find myself thinking, “I wish someone had told ME.”
But then I realize people probably were talking about it… I just wasn’t at a place in my life where I was ready to hear it and take action. I hope you are.
