Focus; Household Environmental Issues

Eddie, our morning telephone talk show. My name is Jack Brighton. Glad you could listen today. Most of us are concerned about the environment, and I think most of us recognize there's a connection between environmental pollution, chemicals, and human health and the health of other living things around us, and particularly when it comes to our household, there are many ways in which the things we bring into the household can affect our health. During this hour of focus 580, we'll get some advice on green living from Annie Berthold Bond. She has been writing about the subject for some 20 years, including three books on the topic, better basics for the home, clean and green, and the green kitchen handbook. She's also the founder and editor-in-chief of green alternatives for health and the environment, a national consumer magazine, designed to provide a community to the emergency emerging environmental health field, and she's also the founding editor of the Green Guide, an anti-rear alternative press award recipient for general excellence in newsletters, and she's also involved in a new thing. It's a website entitled care2.com, that's C-A-R-E number2.com, which is a site that has a wide array

of resources for those concerned with the environment, whether it be globally or in the household. She is a producer of the green living channels, which are a number of discussion areas where people can get good advice on green living, and she's been good enough to join us for this hour. If you would like to ask questions, that's what this is all about. You can call us around Champaign Urbana at 333-9455. We also have a toll-free line anywhere you hear us, that is 800-222-9455. Again, around Champaign Urbana, 333-W-I-L-L, if you match the letters with the numbers, that's what you get. toll-free anywhere you hear us, 800-222-W-I-L. Any breath hold on, good morning. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thanks for joining us. First of all, I wanted to give you a chance to say something about care2.com and the green living channels, what's that all about?

Well, care2.com is a light green portal, as you say. I mean, you could come to that particular website, and there are about a million and a half members, and you can do email, do e-cards, but we also have a lot of really great content on the site, and I am personally the channels producer for the green living channels, and I have a very strong feeling that most people are very well-intentioned about choosing environmentally safe products for their home and for their health and the environment. But they often don't know what to choose, and so what I've tried to do on the channels at care2.com is to have very practical information with great specificities, so that if your problem is fleas, you go to the pets channel and you can figure out how to handle fleas in a less toxic way for your health and the family and the pets, or if you're having a garden problem with snails, you could choose a less toxic pesticide there, or for the home

how to clean the bathtub. I also have started a schools and offices channel so that people around the country can sort of not reinvent each other's wheels, but learn what has worked in some school districts and not others, for example, for carpets or whatever, and also a green consumer channel, and I've contacted a lot of experts to provide their information on these channels, so it's becoming what I want it to be is a community of people to present ideas about less toxic solutions, really. Okay, what is a channel, and what does it mean to produce for it? Well, a channel is like a TV station you could be on CBS or NBC or something like that, it's just a, it focuses the content, the content actually, so there are five green living channels and one is called pets, and that's one channel, another channel is garden, so those are the channels, and so as the producer, I am basically like an editor, so it would be like

our editing a magazine on pets, and that would be the pets channel, or editing a magazine on garden. Right, but a lot of these areas are very interactive, people can post questions and get answers or exchange information and so forth. Yeah, I have a column that's also there called Care to Ask Annie, and there's their discussion boards and every single one of these sections, so that you can chat about these, and that's the brilliance of the internet is that develops a community so fast. Right, I'm just looking at the site now, and there's just all kinds of areas, cleaning, personal care, indoor air quality, holiday crafts gifts, you name it. Yeah, it's been such a great opportunity for me to be able to gather experts together too, and an excerpt from wonderful books, and so it certainly isn't just my content at all, I've really had a great opportunity to pull from a lot of people. Good, well let's dive into the content areas, some of them anyway, and talk a bit about what people might want to think about as consumers. Pretend I'm a dumb human, which is pretty close

to the truth. Exactly. We all sort of have the same limitations here. You're right, and I'm buying chemical products, and I'm bringing them into my house, and so forth, like any good consumer I suppose. What might I ought to think about? Well, I really truly have a pretty simple approach to less toxic living in the home in terms of cleaning, and I think that a person needs to make a decision that they actually are concerned about their health and the environment, and take a few minutes to learn about the alternative approach, which I'll tell you, and then they're set for life. It's not that hard to do after you learn the few basics. I think that you can mix and match making some of your own recipes using ingredients of kitchen-covered ingredients and make some very effective cleaning products. I found that the old folk remedies actually, the chemical companies have mimicked the old

folk remedies because the chemistry was always good. I have some guidelines if you want to buy your own commercial products, which many people still do, and with the combination of safer products that you buy in the store and mixing and matching some of your own recipes, I think you can have your house become much, much less toxic, much, much more restful place to be. I basically have, in terms of buying commercial products, I have a few guidelines. One is there are signal words on products, and the signal words range from danger to poison to caution, and I think that there's a big misunderstanding in the consuming public that we're really truly protected by government in some way, the products we buy that they've been tested enough, otherwise they wouldn't be on the market. I just have to say that that is simply not true. There are products with incredibly poisonous ingredients and very toxic and carcinogenic

ingredients on the market now, and the only thing we have to give us a guideline are these signal words on the products that will say something like poison and danger, and when it says something like poison and danger, it means just a few drops could kill you, and so people talk about make your floor so clean that you could eat off of it, you could kill yourself if you ate off of it after using some of these products. I suggest people only buy products with nothing stronger than a caution on it, and that is a product that only two tablespoons to a cup of that product could kill you, and an example of that would be a detergent, because all detergents can be very dangerous if you drink them, but a caution is sort of my maximum that I suggest people use for buying products. Health food stores have very, very good cleaning products now. There's been a lot of competition in that particular natural food industry for coming up with the best environmentally safe products, and so I recommend health food stores for buying ready-made

products. There are some terrific products on the market there, but I love to make my own homemade recipes, and I know a lot of people do. They're so easy, and I have five basic ingredients that I think, if you get these five ingredients, and most of which most people already have in their house, you can actually clean anything in the house. Would you like me to just tell you what should I buy? The one is baking soda, and I buy a big box, and I use it for everything from making my own homemade soft scrubbers to taking odor out of laundry, to using it as a non-abrace of scouring powder. The second ingredient that I recommend people buy is washing soda, and washing soda is the same family of chemical as baking soda, but it's been processed differently, and it is much more caustic, and it doesn't give off harmful fumes. You do need to wear gloves,

but it is the best substitute I know for a solvent, so that if you have an engine oil spill or soot, or any big, horrible cleaning problem, washing soda works wonderfully, it even will peel wax off a floor, and washing soda is usually next to borax and in the supermarket in the laundry section, and it's almost in every store in the country now. I rarely get emails from people saying that they can't find it. The third ingredient that I suggest people use is vinegar, and the baking soda and the washing soda are very alkaline minerals, and the vinegar is an acid, and so you use it for different kinds of cleaning problems, and I can talk about those. Cleaning the windows is certainly one of the top reasons for getting vinegar, but you need to add a little dab of soap and water to the vinegar, because if you've used commercial window cleaners for years, you'll have left a residual wax on the windows, and the vinegar alone won't take that off. But once you add a little soap,

the first time, and you get the wax off your set forever, I know a lot of people give up on non-toxic cleaning because they try to, they hear that vinegar is great, and then they get streaks, and they didn't realize that they had the wax buildup. So my fourth ingredient is a good liquid soap, or a liquid all-purpose detergent, and I recommend, again, a health food store for these products, because they tend to be pure and more concentrated, but in a supermarket it would be something like Murphy's Oil Soap would be an all-purpose liquid detergent, even though it's called Murphy's Oil Soap, it's actually a detergent, and in the health food store there's Castile Soaps, or all-purpose liquid detergents, and the way to determine whether you need a soap or detergent is whether how hard your water is. I happen to have quite hard water in the East Coast, and the, and most people actually in the country now do, and so I need to use a detergent otherwise, I get a lot of soap scum, because soap binds with the hard water minerals and makes soap scum.

And so therefore I use, I choose all-purpose detergent, even though it's not probably the most, it's not as environmentally preferable as a liquid soap. And then my fifth ingredient is something that is not that common, but health food stores again have it, and it's called tea tree oil, it's Australian tea tree oil, spelled TEA like a cup of tea. And I choose this as a broad spectrum fungicide, and so if I have a leaky roof or a musty burrow or mildew in the bathroom, I put about two teaspoons of tea tree oil into two cups of water in a spray bottle. How about that? I didn't know you could use it like that. It's also used for, you know, dealing with common warts. Yeah, and but definitely it's used a lot for fungal problems. Yeah, that's right. Well, very good. We're talking this morning during this hour focus 580 with Annie Brithold Bond. She's the Green Living channels producer for the Environmental Website CARE2.com, and she's also the author of several books on Green Living and Better Basics for the Home. That's one of the titles of her books.

If you have questions along these lines, you are welcome to join our conversation. Around Champion of Anna, you can call us at 3339455, toll free anywhere you hear us, 8002229455. Let me, we're going to get some calls here in a minute, but just back up a little bit and ask us sort of a global question. How big a, how big a problem is it that, you know, we're bringing stuff into our house without thinking what it might be doing to our home environment? I mean, how, how greatly does this affect human health and so forth? Well, I, I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. I know that I got into this because I became, I got poisoned by a chemical that's on the market that that has was, was a pesticide that has been taken off the market now because it was claimed, it's so neurotoxic and I got central nervous system damaged from it before it was taken off the market. And so I had to live in a environment free of chemicals and

it is very hard to do that in our society and it took me a long time to understand the profound level of degree of pollution we actually all have in our homes because once you can't have it there, you see it's everywhere and it really staggered me to see how much sort of low level pollution we're all living with and I get calls and emails from people all the time telling me that they switched the non-toxic cleaning, their babies are now sleeping through the night, they're not getting headaches, they're feeling better. I think that they're sort of a general, I think exposure to a low level of toxic chemicals all the time wears us down and once you start reducing that exposure, people just start feeling better and there certainly are statistics available showing that housekeepers for example the use chemicals a lot or have higher rates of bladder cancer and this and that and you know it's just I think it's a matter of common sense that if we

can try to reduce our exposure, the better off we'll be. We have a call to talk with let's include them and this is a listener in Champaign online number one. Good morning you're on focus 580. Hi, I've got a question about one thing that I cannot seem to find a good non-toxic way to do and that is to keep carpets clean. Yeah, I have actually and and when I said that there was only one thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do my problem is the dishwasher and I'll come back to that in a minute. It's very hard with hard water to use the phosphate free detergent for the dish washing machines but for carpets what I do and I've used a professional carpet cleaner for this as well as as rented a machine and and use this for successfully. There's a product available in in health food stores called Infinity. It's an all-purpose liquid detergent called Infinity Heavenly Horse Tail and any all any great name. Yeah,

it was actually a plant. It's a weed that has a lot of soapy opponent which is a soapy ingredient but a good concentrated detergent from a health food store will. I gave this particular product to a professional red cleaner to clean a oriental carpet I had and he said it works better than any other commercial product he'd ever used and or industrial product actually because he was a professional and you did it's concentrated so you need to use about a quarter of the amount of what you would normally use but I will steam clean carpets by but renting a steam cleaner and I will use that product. You just have to so you want to find something that doesn't have perfumes in it or dives and and and again to just browse through what's available at the at the health food store. So you're saying that it's would be possible to just rent one of those machines and then do it yourself but just not use their chemicals. That's exactly right. And that's what I do and you just have to rinse out those

machines carefully because a lot especially in August and September when it's flee season because a lot of them have the people before may have put a flea flea cleanser in there and it'll be a pesticide and you don't want to get the residue on your carpet. Well we did have someone steam or come in and clean a carpet last year and the next day my four-year-old son his eyes were so completely swollen up. I mean it took like three weeks for him to it was some kind of really strong allergic reaction to whatever they put in and you know but we need to keep the carpet cleaned too. No absolutely it's I have yet to find one of one of the companies that will come in and do it for you that has a perfume free safer product. I wanted to tell you something about the dishwasher. I haven't really been able to find a good detergent either to use just on its own in the dishwasher but one thing that I did read was that if you have you know that the portion

where you put this open or the detergent that closes and then you have the portion that stays open. Yeah a little container that what I do is in the one that stays open is put baking soda and in the one that stays closed to do the detergent so you're using only half the detergent that you would and then the baking soda you know access and a abrasive cleaner and that works really well so that kind of cuts down at least on some of the detergent use. Yeah well that's I might try that. I just have really hard water and everything I've tried is leaves a residue that doesn't isn't the commercial product but as I say I'm in a different part of the country and other places might have a much easier time. Unfortunately the detergents really the commercial ones all have phosphates in the minute except for the ones you find in the health food store and so it's a really it's it's a terrible compromise I'm making and I I feel badly about it but certainly

using half the amount sounds a lot better. Yeah okay thanks yeah thank you. Thanks very much for the call. Other calls are welcome the numbers again around champion abandoned 333 WILL toll free anywhere 800 222 WILL allergies seem to be a problem for a lot of people. Yeah you know that there may be just like some kind of like perfume put in something you know can cause an allergic reaction that doesn't even it's not even an essential ingredient into whatever it is or the product is. Well exactly and I that's why again I I recommend the health food store brands because they don't do that unless they tell you and if they put something in it tends to be natural and people can be less sensitive to natural fragrance and they are synthetic but sometimes sometimes sometimes that's not not the case. I I I know that again people are I overwhelmingly get from everybody that they feel so much better when they start using less toxic products in the house

and it's also talks about when I was really sick the doctor once talked to me about what they call the barrel analogy that that if you think of your body as a barrel and everything you put into the barrel fills it up and so you spray the rose bushes with with the pesticide that fills it up and then you use a oven cleaner and that fills it up and then polish the furniture or whatever and that every time you put something in it is for some of us the barrel gets filled up and it overflows and that's when you get sick and so it is really great if the fewer things you put in the barrel the less chance you you have of getting into that overload and and I know that a lot of people that have allergies if they can lower their sort of threshold of of that's in that barrel they they don't get sick as much. There seems to be an aversion to anything seen unclean or especially that might can have germs. Are we overly germ phobic do you think? Well actually we're we're facing a whole new problem with household cleaning and disinfectants

because there's been a lot of research coming out of Tufts University that is showing that the disinfectants that are now in every sponge you can you buy in my supermarket and the disinfectants that are in the detergents hand washing you know hand soap and things like that are very often it's called trickle sand that the disinfectants themselves are causing drug resistant bacteria the same way that antibiotics do and so we're causing actually a very frightening situation in our homes if we start using too much of the distance the chemical disinfectants that are on the market because the last thing we want is drug resistant bacteria in our cutting boards. So the and it's I'm not kidding when I say I cannot buy a sponge in my town that doesn't isn't impregnated with a disinfectant I have to go to a hardware sort of buy a sponge that doesn't have have the disinfectant disinfectant in it and so you have to have an eagle eye when you're

reading product labels to see if it says odor fresh stays fresh things like that that will designate that it has a disinfectant I know that the consumer reports to the big research project on disinfectants a few years ago and found that there's just absolutely no way we can sterilize our homes anyway so we shouldn't even think about trying to do that it's just not going to be possible and I have a few guidelines that for example I recommend people use cut meat only on plates or portable cutting boards that can be put in the dishwasher because the high temperature of the dishwasher will kill the germs you can disinfect sponges by boiling them for five minutes in water once a week or something like that so you don't have to buy the disinfected the products that are impregnated with disinfectants you could also put sponges through the dishwasher and the EPA recommends soap and hot water for washing your hands anyway and as for killing germs and so you don't need to buy soap with disinfectants in them research is implying but I don't have

anything definitive yet that the that when you use essential oils to kill bacteria it does not cause drug resistance and so I have a lavender essential oil spray that I often use on our cutting boards that I don't use meat I don't cut meat on that board but like two teaspoons of lavender oil the two cups of water that I I often will spray the cutting board at night before going to bed and just let it set there and then clean it off in the morning very interesting well we have a couple other calls to talk with let's go on next to a listener in Urbana online number one good morning you're on focus 580 yes hello I'm a science news writer and wanted to add just a bit that I discovered through research for a feature article on trichlessons good for one thing I think few people are aware and perhaps you mentioned it while I was away from the radio that total toothpaste has trichlesson in it and that is what opened up whole new areas of consumer products for the use of trichlesson and the addition of antibiotics so I talked to a laboratory that tests trichlesson

one of the problems in its manufacture is that it is closely related to furans and dioxins and therefore in its manufacture if it is not carefully controlled for quality you will get a substantial amount of furans and dioxins nothing that anyone wants to mess around with or have in consumer products as an example they found 1700 times the legal limit per the EPA in some samples from developing countries there's a big part of the problem once the market opens up everyone in the world became interested in entering it and no one is monitoring what is coming in to the country not a big problem yet I believe but something that is worth looking at and I just thought I'd add my two cents yeah I'm really glad to hear about that I'll have to look that up yeah I'd be more than happy to speak with you off the air if I could leave my name and number

I'd love that thank you so much okay good we'll appreciate that very much our director Jason will I'll put you on hold here and he will talk with with the caller and get the information and that'd be great we're a little past our midpoint we're talking with this morning with Annie berthold bond she is the green living channels producer for the website care2.com that's c-a-r-e-2 number two.com and she's has over 20 years of experience as a authority and writer on green living and we're talking about a number of issues pertaining to how we use products and maybe some good alternatives that would be less chemical based and better for our health if you have questions we have one person waiting and plenty of time for others the number round champion abana 333 9455 toll free anywhere you hear us around Illinois Indiana parts of the other states where a signal travels 800 222 9455 we have a listener in Indiana next online number four good

morning you're on focus 580 hello yes my internet whether this is appropriate or not I got in on this rather late but I came across a bunch of flatware in a drawer that's been moldery there for I don't know how long and it's developed a kind of a green mold or corrosion on it what can be used to you know sort of soak that and clean it off do you know um moldery they're like well I'm assuming it's silver well it's silver and silver plated and you know all kinds of mixtures I think well I have a couple suggestions I think when it's that bad if one of the things you could do is to soak it in a big pot of water but you need to do use this at do this outside because you'll get sulfur dioxide actually which is about the last thing I want to be recommending

people do but it's a good start is you put it in a big pan of water and you take a couple sheets of baking of aluminum foil and you put it in the water and then you add about a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of baking soda and you then drop the silver in there and let it set for a while and you will get that rotten egg smell but then you rinse it and then you can go back and use a old-fashioned white toothpaste presumably this doesn't have a trichle of sand and therefore follow-up dioxins or anything but you you you put some toothpaste on your hand your finger and you rub you polish with the toothpaste the silver and it takes all the tarnish off and I think that that combination you would do very well you could skip the soaking of the of the silver altogether and just use toothpaste if you'd like but I was just thinking if it has all that much corrosion on it you might want to actually soak it. It's an interaction between aluminum foil and

the baking salt. Yeah but it sort of magnetizes the tarnish off onto the aluminum foil. Does this have to be warm water or just water? Well thank you very much. That's an old old folk recipe that's come down for years I see it and all the old folk rep recipe books. Good well thanks for the call and good luck with that. You know it's just thinking as we were talking that there there's sort of a couple contradictory trends going on when you know chemicals became you know after World War 2 you know we jumped on this bandwagon of better living through chemistry and so forth and all these wonderful things that these new chemicals could do for us and then later we kind of found out well GPCBs are really you know very bad you know to put in transformers because they cause you know major problems in dioxin and all these all these other issues that that we're dealing with and so now we're starting to get a little bit wiser about hopefully about using chemicals in appropriate circumstances. At the same time we have this globalization of the market and sort of you know as

as the the caller before the last one indicated there are a lot of products that maybe we maybe we know that we shouldn't be doing this or that there might be problems in the manufacturer if it's not control correctly but unfortunately because of market forces the control on the manufacturer is much more problematic. I know it's it's actually so so frightening to me when because I mean pesticides are a great example I mean and how they're pulled off the market you know left and right but they're the damage that they can cause before before they're pulled off is can be really profound. I am a really deep believer in the precautionary principle so it's the opposite which is to only put products on the market when we really feel like they're safe and and that's I think what everybody has to push for is that we have to be able to get

the global market to start implementing the precautionary principle because the destruction is just for the environment and for health is just the tolls way way way too high and and one of the things I I write about in better basics for the home is that I recommend people use as much as they can only what are called grass materials which are generally regarded as safe and they're they've been around for so long you know like baking soda or vinegar that whereas we all know I mean if you splash vinegar in your eyes you're going to hurt yourself but if you use common sense and you use generally materials that are generally regarded as safe that you'll go a long way towards protecting your health and that of your families. There's a temptation to cut costs by you know buying things that you really don't know too much about I was thinking that we installed some vinyl blinds in our children's bedroom and then you know a few months later story comes out that you know cheap vinyl blinds sometimes give off lead. Right I know it it's just and you're here you

are doing the best you can. I know it's extremely it's extremely demoralizing it it really is and so that's again where the precautionary principle is something that you know you just really are all of us have to push for because that shouldn't happen you should your children shouldn't be vulnerable under those circumstances. Yeah well how can you know I mean how can you inform yourself as a consumer about what it is you're buying I mean what are some of the strategies that you can use to do that. Well I have well yeah it's interesting actually the environmental health foundation wrote a book called toxic turnaround and they compiled a list of the top four chemical groups we should reject and it's a really good guideline because it would have actually protected you in your situation I think from from your blinds it would protect a lot of us and a lot of different things and I add a fifth ingredient a fifth a fifth chemical to avoid but their list is their first one is pesticides and their second one is toxic gases such as chlorine

and ammonia. The third is heavy metals now you wouldn't have known that you had heavy metals in your in your in your blinds but the fourth are volatile organic compounds and those are from aldehydes an example of a of a VOC also solvents are and I've added the fifth one which is plastics because plastics are increasingly a lot of the plastics are are shown to be hormone disruptors and I think that we should just have that be in our list of products to try to avoid and and if you so when you shop for paint and you see that we will list on the label how many VOCs and you try to buy a VOC free paint or a low a low VOC paint you'll be better off it's really hard I it's why I do the work I do because your question is probably the best

question anybody could ask I it's very very complicated to choose safe products for your family another thing just basically is to try to find material that's inert the more inert it is the less outgassing it will have and more less problematic chemicals so that you know that if the sun shines on vinyl you can start getting the smell of vinyl and that would be what it's not which means that it's not so inert and you would maybe would choose a metal one instead. We have just about 14 or 15 minutes left during this our focus 580 we're talking about alternatives for green living ways you can go about solving the things that you have to do around your house in ways that are healthy or greener and anti-breath old bond is our guest she's a producer of the green living channels a variety of areas that provide information on green living at the website care2.com if you have questions if you'd like some advice you can join us in the time remaining the number around Champaign Urbana 333 9455 and toll free anywhere you hear us 800 222 9455

one of the things you mentioned was pesticides and you know a lot of people who have animal companions offer often have to deal with you know fleas and things like that or there's some good ways of addressing that without using what are really some pretty scary chemicals. Yep there definitely are I have found that and again we're sort of on a slippery slope because this is not a perfect solution for the health or the environment but it's profoundly better than than the other products that you could choose that are much more toxic synthetic pesticides but the there's a much a product called delimiting which is a ingredient found in citrus peels and so all of the citrus products that you see on the market are the citrus peel products on solvents have delimiting in them and that particular material will kill all stages of the

flea and it is a volatile organic chemical though it does provide indoor air pollution but it's a natural product and it is which I'm not saying that means it's safe but it's but it's much better for the environment than a synthetic product and so you could only use this if you really you should only use this if you open the windows and and that sort of thing but because it kills all stages of the flea it's extremely effective for fleas but you can't use it around cats because they're sensitive to citrus but for dogs it is really great I've washed our floors with it you know like once a week about I've what I do is I put about a quarter of a cup of citrus extra solvent in a bucket of water and I wash the floors and the we we don't have any fleas at all we have two dogs and you can get citrus shampoo and it's just it's just extremely effective and so that's that is definitely what I recommend for for fleas you mentioned a shampoo

and that's another area that you know you know people we just you know buy soap or shampoo or whatever is that another area that we got to be concerned about yes in fact there is an ingredient in it's again it's a byproduct in in the sodium laurel sulfate which is a detergent that's an almost every shampoo that you can find anywhere that can't is like the it's similar to the problem with bacon and and it's that there's a byproduct of nitrous summons and so that is a carcinogen and so you have to if you but again every shampoo has this problem virtually anywhere in the country um health food stores have detergent free shampoos um you can uh but you it's very different to not you where you very used to using uh shampoo that is a detergent and it's much more drying on the hair so you don't need to wash your hair as often and when you switch to a detergent

free shampoo you suddenly have to wash your hair a lot more um there might they tend to be more oily very good we have a couple collars uh to talk with let's go next to a listener in Clinton Indiana online number four good morning you're on focus 580 yes thank you uh you were just picking your fleas on a dog yeah i don't think there's a dog alive probably doesn't have a fleas but uh i've used uh the guy told me uh that did uh use seven dust i know it's you know he's on gardens well i wouldn't recommend that at all for a dog be a seven seven dust did you say uh because it's a it's a powerful pesticide and and it wouldn't be something that i would recommend on on a dog myself because i think i think it's an organic phosphate pesticide and and they're very very central they're very hard on the central nervous system uh okay i kind of wondered about that because it is effective for a little while well i'm sure it is effective but you know the they're they're safer ways to do it and and i

would suggest you switch to the to the citrus yeah okay all right that's all i wanted to know thank you yeah thank you okay thanks the call yeah well that you know that's one of those this uh you you know you you apply this uh it's like uh you know napalm or something to burn down you know you burn down the forest along with uh with everything the weeds um and then and his call is a perfect example of you know manufacturers that they say in tiny little print only use this on on weeds and then the next thing you know somebody's using it on our pet and and especially again in the global global world you might not even be able to read the language that the the warning is put in and and so people are misusing products all the time and it's really um it's i think people need to be aware that they're dealing with very very powerful poisons we have a couple other people to talk with let's go next to a listener in mattoon online number one good morning your own focus 580 good morning jack what a informative guest and we're so happy to have her

talking in our area good oh thank you i i do mechanical fleet picking myself i find that about the safest for all of us yeah i bet that's you have a fleet comb is uh yes yes all of them and i i pull it through the dog and immediately dip it into a vessel of soapy water yep that would be perfect yeah it works for us and my big concern right now and i am anxious to look at your website um i'm needing some pots and pans that i can feel safe about i don't use a lot of them at this point in my life but i still do use some and i thought the calphalon was going to be great and that's worn off i now have an aluminum pan and i i've read so many things that have made me nervous about stainless steel because of it being made from possibly weapon materials with the radioactive component and i i really am kind of wondering what do you feel is the safest kind of a vessel to use well i think it's an absolutely excellent question and i

have evolved on it also i think probably the best the safest thing we could use for pots is glass probably the most inert stainless steel also has some nickel in it um that's i've used that over the years as being safer than feeling feeling like there'd be less leaching than with aluminum um but i think also the um the kind of i don't the brand lucru say um has uh yes i know uh um like the enamel yeah that's right and the and the there's less leaching in that from what i understand but um it's a very very good question and i i the only thing i can think of that is um problem would probably be have the least leaching of anything as glass but that's not going to work for a fry pan but it but they i think there is a pro a glass product on the market but i'm wondering if those are coated with and then they look to me like they're coated with something i don't own any but i know folks that do and um i have wondered

about by trying to buy older pots and pans i don't think that'll matter okay i've wondered thank no i mean if you put tomato sauce and an old aluminum pot it's going to pull out as much you know but with the acidic tomato pull well pull out as much aluminum well pull out aluminum and as well as at what 30 years ago so nickel is part of the stainless steel process so you're always going to have that presence i would i i don't know the answer specifically but i would think so okay well thank you so much yeah no it's a great question and i don't think anybody really knows what to suggest okay less cooking maybe yeah thank you yeah thank you thanks for the call we have just about five minutes left and uh one caller waiting probably time to squeeze in another one or two beyond that if you'd like to join us quickly three three three nine four five five or eight hundred two two two nine four five five next up another listener in matt tune online number four good morning your own focus five eighty thank you um i have a self-cleaning oven and

had to have the controls replaced and now it doesn't function as a self-cleaning oven do you have a recipe or a formula for something that's uh effective i'm so glad you ask because i have a recipe that nobody believes me that it works as wonderfully until they try it and then i get letters and calls the people say oh my gosh i can't believe how well that works so believe me this really really works what you want to do and and it's such an improvement um overusing a toxic product uh you just cover the bottom of the oven with baking soda and um the but you cover it so you've you've had a dusting of snow is what it looks like and then you get a spray bottle with um clean water and you spray it or sprinkle water onto it till it's actually very damp and then if you have if you need to have some problem on the top with the walls of the oven um make a baking soda paste with water very wet one and and put that on the sides and then all you do is you go away and you let it do its thing and and um

you every couple hours maybe go back and spray it or before you go to bed spray it again to make sure that it stays wet and the only time this doesn't work well is that people don't use enough baking soda so you don't want to overdo it because you'll have to rinse it all out but you don't want to underdo the baking soda either and then the next day uh or maybe six state hours later if you want to put the baking soda on the morning for example and clean it off in the afternoon um you just take a wet a sponge and scoop and it's all of the grime has been uh loosened and it will just scoop out of the oven like you would as easily as you could imagine and there's no scrubbing oh wonderful and then the only problem is just that you have to rinse it but you have to rinse with a commercial oven cleaner too otherwise all your food gets impregnated with those chemicals so it's really it's so easy it really works and the only downside is just the rinsing at the end well thank you very much yeah good luck bye bye thanks the call we have a couple people waiting we'll try to get at least one in before we're in a time next

up listener banana line number one good morning may i ask you please i didn't hear your first uh a comment about using vinegar to wash windows and you added something to that what did you add well my recipe is to add about a cup of water or two cups of water to spray bottle yes and then two to four tablespoons of vinegar depending on how much um vinegar yep and did you say you added salt no you what you had to do is you add a dab of liquid soap or detergent that was a liquid soap or detergent and the reason you do that is to get the residual wax off the windows that have been on it from all the years of um using a commercial product yes i didn't i didn't catch it i didn't know what it was salt or soap you used it's soap and it's this is a perfect a really perfect window cleaner i mean and then you could also use it as sort of an all-purpose cleaner around the house too could i use could i use say ivory in it every self yep every all right yep that would be fine okay thank you very much

you're welcome thanks to the call we'll squeeze in one last caller quickly uh listen and ran tool on line number two good morning yes hello yes i wonder have you published a book in about these things because i don't have a computer i i can't follow the dot com business well um in my book everything i've talked about this morning is actually in my book better basics for the home oh it's published last year yeah three rivers press is the publishing company better basics for the home is the title of the book yes three rivers press and anybody can order it for you from a bookstore or a health food store thank you okay your name please um it's uh it's Annie and the last name is berthold hyphen bond berthold as spelled b-e-r-t-h-o-l-d hyphen b-o-n-d

b-o-n-d like James Bond yeah berthold thank you you're very welcome and uh i'll just mention we're at a time but i'll mention for folks if if you want more information uh and you don't have a computer to go to the website you could always call here w-l-l ask for me and i'll make sure that you get the the name of our guest and any information that uh that you need um we're at a time and there are many things we could talk about one thing that i wanted to mention is the ask Annie feature in on the website which has a a whole lot of uh advice organized by topic and so forth uh can people actually post questions for you and you can yeah they sure can and um i'll get it right in my email box so uh by all means please do okay all right and that website again is care2.com at www.caret2.com and a lot of good stuff there and our guest has been Annie berthold bond she produces the green living channels you'll find there and also three books uh

she's she's authored so you can find those in bookstores libraries health food stores probably and Annie berthold bond thanks so much for talking with us well thanks so much for having me have enjoyed it