Mission: To avoid toxic events that contribute to allergies and undermine your health.
Are you ready to dodge dust mites, crack down on chemicals, and clear the air indoors? Then you have what it takes to stay aware of your surroundings and keep your eyes, ears, and nose alert to major toxic threats. Like freshly painted walls. Diesel fumes. The laundry detergent aisle at the supermarket.
Of course, you can’t live in a bubble. That would be no fun. What you can do is minimize your exposure to toxins that increase your risk of allergy and menace your health.
The Toxic Elephant in the Room
Every 2.6 seconds, a new chemical substance is made or isolated. The American Chemical Society has a database of more than 50 million chemicals that are in use somewhere in the world. Many of these can be found in the places where you live, work, study, or shop. Some of them have profoundly negative effects on health, especially for people with allergies or asthma.
Diesel exhaust from trucks and buses, solvents used for cleaning, microparticles and chemicals like styrene and xylene from laser printers and copy machines—these are just a few of the toxins our bodies have to contend with in the modern world. Many of these hitchhike on dust, which is an age-old irritant. Classic symptoms of allergy, like sneezing, coughing, and scratching, are the body’s way of trying to keep out or get rid of toxins like these. But with so many toxins, your body’s defense mechanisms can easily get overwhelmed.
Environmental toxins are like the giant elephant in the room, up on its tippy toes trying to hide. The amazing thing is that despite its enormous bulk, this toxic elephant is able to hide in plain sight. Most people just take the many toxins around them as a routine part of life and have accustomed themselves not to pay attention to them. How many times have I heard the refrain “The smell doesn’t bother me” from people confronted with fresh paint fumes or other toxic hazards?
The fact is that the health of each and every one of us is greatly affected by the toxins we are confronted with in daily life. And they come at us from all sides, from left and right, from up and down. We inhale them into our noses and lungs. We absorb them through our skin, they get in our eyes, and we swallow them in our food and water.
The toxic assault starts from the moment you wake up, before you have even left your house. Pour yourself that first cup of coffee, the one you’ve been looking forward to since you went to bed. If it’s not organic, your cup may very well contain pesticides along with your coffee, because coffee shrubs are among the most heavily sprayed plants in the world.
In the shower you squeeze out some shampoo and lather it into your hair. Most commercial shampoos contain chemicals like the detergent sodium lauryl sulfate, a known skin irritant that can harm skin health and lead to the redness and itch of contact dermatitis.
Or you spray out some shaving cream. Now you probably have a handful of some of the 3,000 potential chemicals that could have been used to create its fragrance, and quite possibly triethanolamine, a skin and respiratory irritant, and the same sodium lauryl sulfate that was in your shampoo. They’re all in your hand, headed straight for your face. And your day has barely begun.
All this toxicity can take a heavy toll. Many of the mysterious symptoms my patients experience can be traced back to toxic exposures. Often there’s more than one source of exposure—cleaning sprays, paint fumes, formaldehyde, fragrances, scented laundry products, or a thousand other things. For many people, it’s the total cumulative load of toxins that tips the scales to the breaking point, and they get sick.
So in this chapter I’m sending you on a mission to lighten your load and detox your life, using the strategies that have helped me and my family reduce our exposure to many common toxins.
Employ Evasive Measures
At the core of the Galland strategy is flexibility. When a toxic event happens, you want to be ready to take evasive action. Here’s how it works:
This strategy may take some getting used to. If you like, you can think of it as a game. Maybe even an adventure. But it’s for real.
Get Allergy Solution Clean
Cleanliness is one foundation of the American dream. The marketing and advertising guys discovered that in the 1950s. You can imagine Don Draper of Mad Men, dressed in a suit and tie, pitching his ideas to a client by launching into flights of fancy about the virtues and benefits of a household cleaner. He would make it seem pristine, beautiful, even sensuous. Of course he’s just selling a bottle of chemicals, but that is what proves so compelling to the clever minds of the Mad Men: how to bring emotion into something so pedestrian.
True clean, however, doesn’t come from a household cleaner in a spray bottle filled with chemicals, or from a floor cleaner loaded with detergent that produces irritating fumes, or from an air freshener that simply covers up odors with something artificial and potentially allergenic. Don’t allow an advertising team to determine what products you use and what chemicals you are exposed to. When you are setting out to eliminate allergens in your home (or, for that matter, in your office or school), why bring new chemicals in?
I’m proposing a whole new way of looking at clean—a fresh take on “fresh” that helps you get rid of the dirt, the allergens, and the chemicals all at the same time!
Your mission is to detox your personal space, the Allergy Solution way. I’m going to give you three buckets to use in your cleanup: one for dust and mold, one for indoor air pollution, and one for chemicals like the ones in that spray bottle.
Dust gets into your home from outside, quietly floating in through doors and windows and silently seeping in through the cracks. Dust and other allergens are generated by many things already inside, too, including your towels, your clothes, your pets, and even your own body. You turn around and there it is again. Dust. It gathers everywhere, like . . . well, like dust. It creates a haven for airborne toxins and for toxic insects like dust mites.
Mold, in turn, grows in damp spaces and can wreak havoc on your health, as we saw in the case of Kate in Chapter 4. Minimizing dust and mold is an excellent first step in detoxifying your personal space and protecting yourself from these major allergens.
Leave Dust and Allergens Outside
As I’ve just said, dust gets in from outside, so let’s not give any more of it a free ride into the house. Kick off your shoes before you come inside. Neon-colored running shoes, dress shoes, flats, loafers, knee-high leather boots, work boots—they can all carry dirt, toxins, and allergens into your home.
And lots of bacteria, according to a research study from the University of Arizona. It found shoes to be contaminated with large amounts of bacteria, including coliforms and Escherichia coli, indicating contact with fecal matter, which the study suggests comes from public restrooms or from animal waste outdoors. In the next step of the study, the researchers also discovered that when these outdoor shoes made contact with clean tiles, up to 90 percent of the bacteria they carried could be transferred to the tiles.1
Now, depending on your activities outside, you may want to remove more than your shoes. Been digging up the garden? Mowing the lawn? Chances are your clothes are covered in dirt and allergens like tree and grass pollen. You will want to change into fresh clothes and toss the soiled ones into the laundry.
Good Bugs, Bad Bugs: Understanding the “Hygiene Hypothesis”
The Hygiene Hypothesis is a poorly named but currently popular theory of the origins of the allergy epidemic. It’s based on a handful of observations: 1) Allergies are very uncommon in the developing world, where sanitation is far less intense than in economically advanced countries. 2) Children living in large families or growing up with pets are less likely to have allergies than those from small families or those who don’t grow up with pets. 3) Babies born by caesarean section are more likely to develop allergies than those born through normal vaginal delivery.
The evolving theory behind the Hygiene Hypothesis is that exposure to bacteria and other microbes early in life conditions the immune system to resist the development of allergy, but the overly sanitized modern world deprives us of this protection, allowing allergies to flourish. In my view, this is an incomplete hypothesis, and from a problem-solving perspective it’s a dead end. It suggests that the solution to the allergy crisis is less sanitation.
The Hygiene Hypothesis ignores all the data presented in this chapter and throughout The Allergy Solution, which show that it’s not just the absence of germs that leads to allergies. It’s the presence of toxic substances that damage your body’s tissues, coupled with nutritional deficiencies that impair your body’s ability to protect itself from that damage.
Within this struggle between cellular damage and repair, there is a role for “good bugs”: the bacteria that normally live in a healthy body and populate the space in which you live and work. I describe the effects of these bacteria in several chapters that follow. Furthering our understanding of how we can help these beneficial microbes keep us healthy is a fascinating area of my research.
Banish Dust-Catching Clutter from Your Home
Horizontal surfaces, such as a coffee table or kitchen counter, are like magnets for dust. And dust loves clutter, not only because stuffed animals, picture frames, handicrafts, and all sorts of other decorative and household objects are perfect places for dust to hide, but also because clutter makes it harder for dust to get cleaned away. So let’s clear the dust, and the air, and get things Allergy Solution clean.
The more stuff you can clear off your kitchen counters, your coffee tables, and your nightstands, the quicker and easier it will be to wipe off the dust and allergens. Later, when they’re free of clutter and oh-so-inviting, you will find yourself wiping off those surfaces more often, keeping your home cleaner than ever before.
For dusting, I prefer to use a damp cloth to keep dust from flying around the room. Another trick is to wear a mask while cleaning, to help keep you from inhaling dust. Damp mopping the floor will help keep the dust down as well.
Don’t Harbor Dust Mites
Here’s another good reason to practice dust control: From that hard-to-reach dusty shelf to the area around your stereo equipment to the space underneath your bed, the dust in your home can contain itty-bitty bugs called, you guessed it, dust mites. You can’t see them, and they can’t see you. These primitive little creatures have eight legs and no eyes and are related to spiders. They feed on the skin shed by people and their pets. One gram of dust often contains 100 to 500 dust mites.
Dust mites are responsible for most of our allergies to dust. In other words, dust allergy is primarily an allergic reaction to the waste products and bodies of dust mites.2 What’s more, mites contain toxic enzymes that directly damage your respiratory lining, allowing increased penetration of airborne irritants and allergens.3
Your body has a protective response, a natural enzyme inhibitor that can limit the damage produced by the toxic mite enzyme, but indoor air pollutants block the effects of the enzyme inhibitor.4 The combination of dust mites and indoor air pollution can create a perfect storm that leads straight to allergic asthma.
Dust mites are actually misnamed: they don’t need dust to survive. They need moisture and a soft place to hide, like stuffed furniture and bedding. To catch the mites most effectively, use a vacuum with a HEPA filter. A regular vacuum could simply blow the dust mites around the room. Use a damp cloth or mop, as noted above, to keep dust down and mop up the dust mites. Using a dry method just spreads them around.
Pull up wall-to-wall carpet or rugs in the bedroom, when possible, and replace with hardwood or tile flooring; this eliminates one of the mites’ habitats. Get miteproof covers for your mattress, pillows, and comforter. At least once a week, launder all of your bedding in hot water to kill the dust mites.5 And keep the relative humidity in your home and workplace low.
A 2014 review article from Harvard Medical School, which looked at the research on minimizing allergens in the home, confirmed this as the most effective strategy for cutting down on house dust mites: cleaning often, using dust-mite-impermeable bedding and washing it in hot water weekly, keeping humidity below 50 percent, and not using carpet or keeping stuffed animals around.6
Knock Out Mold
The obvious signs of mold are a musty smell or visible mildew. But mold can be lurking anywhere, especially where it’s damp, dark, and warm. Mold, like dust mites, loves high humidity. It thrives in places that are moist, wet, or waterlogged. At a humidity of 70 percent or greater, it grows rapidly. So you’ll want to aim for a much lower humidity level—ideally, 30 to 45 percent—throughout your house or apartment.
Think of all the showers you take at home, throwing off all of that steam. That excess moisture has to go somewhere. That’s why you don’t want your home to be sealed tight like Fort Knox. Instead, you want it to breathe a little, so condensation doesn’t build up. Make sure you have adequate ventilation, especially in areas of your home where there’s moisture. A clean and well-maintained dehumidifier or air conditioner can also help reduce humidity.
A great hiding place for mold is the refrigerator, so make sure you clean it out regularly. Check all the food in the fridge and throw out any items on which you spot mold. Remember that mold can also grow in food or beverages that are left out of the refrigerator, so place them in the fridge or discard them.
Banish Roaches
Cockroaches can cause big problems when it comes to allergies. The skin, saliva, and waste from these not-so-small critters are all serious allergens. Take steps to banish these bugs from your home:
The Indoor Air Pollution Bucket
With so much of our time spent inside, understanding the importance of clearing the air indoors is a key goal of The Allergy Solution. In addition to banishing dust and mold, you’ll want to set your sights on eliminating other challenges to indoor air quality. I highlight some key problems here, but there are many more, so you’re going to have to think on your feet and address the particular indoor air pollution challenges that confront you.
Make Your Home a Smoke-Free Zone
Let’s end smoking once and for all. Smoking kills people and pollutes the earth. Secondhand smoke does the same. Then there is the problem of thirdhand smoke, the toxic residue from leftover cigarette smoke that clings to carpet, sticks to walls, and infiltrates furniture. A recent study from the University of California shows that thirdhand smoke causes significant damage to the lungs and the liver.7
Never allow smoking in your home, and ban smoking anywhere on your property. You don’t want any secondhand smoke sneaking in through windows or doors, or cigarette butts or ashes lying around; these can be sources of allergens even after the cigarette has been put out.
Put Out the Fire
Let’s clear the air: burning logs, wood pellets, or coal in a stove or fireplace causes both indoor air pollution and outdoor air pollution. Wood smoke is considered a significant source of particulate matter, commonly known as soot, in indoor air. The science shows that this smoke is a risk factor for disease, including asthma.8
A study from the remote island of Tasmania, south of Australia, where wood stoves are common, found that exposure to wood smoke is linked to more severe asthma in adults. This was observed for people who burn wood at home, as well as for people who don’t but who are exposed to the wood smoke coming from the chimneys of neighbors. The researchers suspect the irritant effect of wood smoke on the respiratory system, along with increased inflammation from the smoke, as factors in aggravating asthma.9
Eliminate the use of wood stoves and fireplaces as much as possible to remove this preventable source of both indoor and outdoor air pollution.
Make Your Bedroom a Clean-Air Oasis
You probably spend more hours in your bedroom than in any other room of your home. That means you want your bedroom to be a special place where you can relax and restore yourself and unwind your body and mind after a long day. To make it as tranquil as possible, may I suggest keeping electronic devices to a minimum in your bedroom? All that blaring volume on TVs, all that buzzing and vibrating of phones, is a lot of extra agitation.
Also, you may want to clear the air in your bedroom by putting away any dust-magnet clutter and by leaving newspapers and magazines, with their off-gassing printed pages, outside the room. Did someone mention printers? Keep these out of the bedroom, by all means, because they emit chemicals that you don’t want to breathe in. Do not use any type of combustion device, such as a fireplace, a stove, or even candles, in your bedroom.
In your oasis of rest, comfort, and safety, you have removed sources of pollution and allergens. Now you can rest easy.
Park Outside and Keep Your Garage Free of Toxins
Once you go to great lengths to remove toxins from your home and your life, why pull the biggest pollution-generating machine of all, the gas-powered car, into your garage? Pollution from the exhaust and the tires, dust from the brakes and engine, are all sources of toxins and allergens being brought into a confined space. You breathe these toxins into your lungs when you exit the car. And if your garage is connected to your house, these toxins can very well seep into the house itself. If possible, park outside and breathe easier.
The Hidden Air Pollution in Your Backyard
What if there was a hidden source of air pollution in your town? You would want to know about it, right? And what if that air pollution was right in your neighborhood? You would sit up and take notice. But what if it was in your own backyard? You would want to stop it immediately and clean it up.
In a remarkable study, the first of its kind, scientists from the University of Washington revealed a hidden source of air pollution that belches hazardous chemicals into the backyards of millions of homes across America. Not the pollution from a car or truck. Not the smoke from a fireplace or woodstove. No, the scientists identified something that looks quite harmless: the typical clothes dryer. It is not so much the machine itself but what gets vented out of the back of the machine that represents the threat.
The Washington team methodically traced the problem back to its source: fragranced laundry detergents and dryer sheets. These products introduce chemicals into the dryer, where they are heated and then vented outside—into the backyard, for example—creating a toxic cloud of chemicals, including some classified as hazardous by the EPA.
So now you probably want to know what chemicals the laundry products contain. Figuring that out is difficult, because as the University of Washington team noted, just the fragrance alone may contain hundreds of chemicals, and they are not required to be listed on the product label. So the researchers set up a test to identify what exactly was vented out of a typical dryer.
The place: Seattle. The setup: two homes, two days, two dryers in good condition, both venting outdoors. The scientists sampled air from the dryers during the laundry test with 1) no products, 2) fragranced laundry detergent only, and 3) fragranced laundry detergent and dryer sheets.
What they found could knock your clean white socks off.
During the detergent-only test, the two dryers vented out 21 volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including acetaldehyde, acetone, benzaldehyde, butanal, dodecane, hexanal, limonene, nonanal, 1-propanal, and 2 butanone.
As I noted in Chapter 2, VOCs are toxic. They can sting the eyes and irritate the skin and airways. And one of these compounds, acetaldehyde, is classified as a carcinogenic hazardous air pollutant by the EPA, “with no safe exposure level,” the Washington researchers explain.10
When what is coming out of your dryer is a hazardous air pollutant, it feels like you need to borrow Walter’s gas mask from Breaking Bad just to run the dryer.
But there is more.
When the use of both fragranced detergent and dryer sheets was tested, the following VOCs were found: acetaldehyde, acetone, benzaldehyde, butanal, dodecane, hexanal, limonene, nonanal, octanal, tetramethylpropylidene cyclopropane. The list goes on, with complex chemistry that it would take a professor to understand fully. The VOCs detected in the above tests were not present in the no-detergent test.
So what is the takeaway from this study? It would be a very good idea to skip the fragranced laundry detergent and dryer sheets.11 Be part of the solution and help clear the air in your home and neighborhood. Use only unscented products.
The Chemicals Bucket
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This part of your mission is going to require vigilance. With the thousands of chemicals that already go into the products we use every day, and many more on the way, this bucket keeps getting filled faster than we can empty it. On the bright side, once you make the switch to go natural, there is less for you to spend money on!
Which brings me right to the topic of cleaning products.
With household spray cleaners linked to asthma (see below), steering clear of spray cleaners is a good idea. Fragrances are linked to allergies, so avoiding fragrances is important. What’s the solution? It’s not as simple as going to the store and picking up a cleaning product whose label says it is “all natural” or “green.” I have been disappointed to find the same skin-irritating chemicals show up in “natural” cleaning products. That is why I use water and a little baking soda as my go-to cleaning solution to handle most tasks. I’ve found that it’s effective as an all-purpose cleaner all over the house.
Cleaning Sprays Increase Asthma Risk
In the movie The Karate Kid, the main character, Daniel, is being bullied by someone bigger and more powerful. He meets a wise karate master, Mr. Miyagi. With a series of lessons, the master teaches the young student to stand up for himself by thinking for himself. At first it is not easy. It takes some practice for the young student to absorb the lessons of his master. But finally he understands.
Like Daniel in The Karate Kid, a big part of The Allergy Solution is getting you to think differently about the world around you. Very differently. Because there are a lot of ordinary, everyday consumer products that are working against your health.
Take household spray cleaners. They are lined up on the shelves of the supermarket. They are a popular product in the United States and also in Europe. Walk into a restaurant, café, or clothing store, and frequently you’ll see a staff member holding a bottle of spray cleaner, trying to keep the place spotless. You may notice the smell of the cleaner, or you may not. But one thing is for sure: it’s made of chemicals.
Now several recent research studies have shown that these sprays are linked to asthma. In one study, an international team of researchers looked at the relationship between using household cleaning sprays and new onset of adult asthma. Looking at information from the European Community Respiratory Health Survey—from Sweden, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Estonia, France, United Kingdom, and Spain—they identified 3,503 people who cleaned their own houses and did not have asthma at baseline, and they followed these people for nine years.
The sprays used by the people in the study contained a variety of active ingredients, including alcohols, ammonia, sodium hydroxide, acryl polymers, terpenes, and glycols and glycol ethers. The researchers noted that the mist of chemicals created by the sprays would create chemical exposures to the respiratory tract.
The study found the risk of incident asthma (defined as diagnosis by a doctor and the use of medication for treatment) increased by 30 percent to 50 percent with the use of a spray household product at least once a week. The results suggest that using common household sprays may be an important risk factor for adult asthma. The authors state: “One in seven adult asthma cases could be attributed to common spray use. This indicates a relevant contribution of spray use to the burden of asthma in adults who do the cleaning in their homes.”12
The researchers also explain that passive exposure to these chemicals in places where the sprays are in use, or have recently been used, could be bad for the people exposed. That is something to think about the next time you see a store employee holding one of these bottles in his or her hand.
Another study looked at data from the Epidemiological Study on the Genetics and Environment of Asthma (EGEA), which gathered data from subjects in five cities in France. The goal of the study was to assess the link between the use of household cleaning sprays and asthma in women. The researchers concluded that use of sprays was associated with increased asthma symptoms and that using the sprays was therefore a risk factor for women.13
So what do these studies teach us? The science says that spray cleaners may carry the risk of asthma. Skip the spray cleaners and reduce exposure to the chemicals they contain.
What Lurks Under Your Kitchen Sink?
Your kitchen evokes a feeling of home, of security. This is where the food is. But just below the surface, underneath the counter, danger lurks. A dark, out-of-the-way place contains forgotten bottles that say “WARNING: Harmful if swallowed” or “CAUTION: Avoid breathing vapors. Use protective clothing when working with chemicals.” Who knows what toxins and allergens lurk under your sink? If you haven’t thought about it lately, check out what’s stored down there.
Typical suspects include all types of chemical-laden household products that often creep in one by one. It could start with a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner, then some detergent for the dishwashing machine. They are joined by other boxes, bottles, and sprays of chemicals that you may have used only once, then shoved out of sight. Pretty soon you have a toxic dump in your home.
These chemicals must be disposed of and handled with extreme caution. The United States Environmental Protection Agency provides information on how to properly dispose of these items to minimize harm to the environment. Visit www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/hhw.htm.
Wash New Clothes Before Wearing Them
“Aww, but I just bought them, and I want them to look new when I put them on.” I hear you. But the problem is that new clothes are usually loaded with dyes and formaldehyde, chemicals you don’t want next to your skin. Here is what I suggest doing with new clothes you bring home from the store: Remove the price tags, of course, then toss the clothes into the washer. Let them soak overnight in warm water. When you flip open the lid of the washing machine the next day and peer in, see how the dye has colored the water. Now wash them on a regular wash cycle, and see how they smell. You may need to wash them several times. They should not have a chemical odor when you are done washing.
Break Free from Fragrances
Once upon a time, fragrance was much more limited in scope. There was perfume, cologne, and aftershave. Soap and shampoo had some fragrance, but nothing too over-the-top.
Now the whole world has been fragranced. Body wash, body spray, makeup, lip gloss, everything has a not-so-subtle smell.
But fragrances are made from up to 3,000 different chemicals, the toxicity of which is not known. What is known is that breathing in these extra chemicals, or absorbing them through your skin, builds up the toxic load in your body.
You know that when you open a fashion magazine you will most likely be hit with the strongly perfumed pages that advertise fragrances. The beautiful models stare out at you, often in a pristine natural setting, looking like they are getting plenty of fresh air even as they provide you with a dose of not-so-fresh chemicals.
Now this advertising method has leapt over the perfume counter right into ads for a wide variety of household products. Scented ads for air fresheners, antiperspirants, body wash, and household cleaners grace the pages of magazines, trying to grab your attention.14 Though most people don’t know this, some publishers are willing to provide scent-free copies of their magazine to readers who request them.15 So not only do you have the option of choosing products without fragrance added, you can get your glossy magazines scent-free as well.
Air Fresheners—Trouble for Allergies and Asthma
Everyday life is filled with natural odors. Some things are pleasantly fragrant, like freshly brewed coffee or a bouquet of flowers. Others, like the garbage and the bathroom, have always had their unpleasant moments from an olfactory standpoint. But these odors, good or bad, convey information that is important, perhaps requiring our attention.
At some point in time we learned to loathe unpleasant natural odors; they went from being an annoyance to being virtually intolerable. Marketers were only too happy to oblige this new aversion. They had just the thing to cover up offensive odors: a new product, the air freshener. Spray some fragranced freshener into the air, and voilà, the old smell was replaced by a new one. But was the air truly freshened? Whatever was causing the unwanted odor in the first place was still there. Spraying air freshener did not take out the garbage or change the kitty litter. It just introduced chemicals into our environment without any fresh air coming in.
A study from the University of California looked at the health effects of things that cause odors indoors, including air fresheners. The researchers explain that air fresheners contain a variety of natural or synthetic perfumes. The most frequently reported health effect of some perfumes is allergies, the study notes. A worsening of asthma is another commonly reported health effect of perfume.
The study further observes that indoor odors are a signal of improper ventilation, and that instead of bringing more fresh air indoors, people look for a quick fix in the form of air fresheners, which bring chemicals into the places we live and work. With more insulation and more airtight buildings, less fresh air gets inside, allowing indoor air pollution to build up. This published research from a leading university highlights the fact that spraying perfumes such as air fresheners is a health risk for allergies and asthma.16
Another study looked at the impact of air freshener sprays on the nasal mucosa of rats. After one month of exposure to the sprays, increased congestion was seen. After two months of exposure, mild inflammation was noticed. Following three months of exposure, intense inflammation had begun.17
This is science that informs and inspires us to makes changes to protect our health. By bringing to light the little-known risks of fragrances, it challenges us to think and act in a new way. Can we forgo fragrances? Avoid air fresheners? Part ways with perfumes?
Save Your Skin
At this very moment, your skin may be trying to get your attention. Sending you a text, an e-mail, or a message in a bottle. Because your skin is not a happy camper. It is not feeling smooth and comfortable, but dry, red, irritated, and itchy. You may feel like you need to squeeze moisturizer on your skin, but when you do, it barely makes a difference, the skin is still so dry. If that sounds all too familiar, then read on.
Dryness and irritated skin can have many causes, and if you have these symptoms, you should see your doctor to determine the cause. But you can also take steps to make sure you’re not making matters worse by the way you treat your skin. Have you noticed that it gets worse the more you shower or bathe? Published research tells us that common, everyday products like shampoo and body wash often contain a chemical that is a known irritant to skin and can cause dermatitis. This is sodium lauryl sulfate, the culprit that I mentioned near the beginning of this chapter. It is used to give the products the foam that we have come to expect.
A long time ago, when people felt the urge to wash, they bathed in a stream or pond. Soap had yet to be invented, so they stuck with what they had: water. Later, as civilization developed, people found new ways of washing themselves. The ancient Greeks applied olive oil to their skin, then scraped it off, hoping to take off any dirt along with it. Luckily for them, pesticides were still unknown, so the olive oil they used was organic.
In our modern times, we can choose from a bewildering array of personal cleaning products. The chemicals in these products can cause irritation with even one use, according to a study from the Indiana University School of Medicine. In fact, sodium lauryl sulfate is so effective at causing irritation that it is used in lab experiments to induce skin irritation when that’s the effect researchers require—say, in order to study a remedy for irritation. It has been demonstrated to cause disruption in the skin barrier function, which can lead to allergic (atopic) dermatitis, an inflammatory skin disease that has become much more prevalent over the past few decades. The severe itch that it causes can impact mood and concentration and contribute to poor health.
Think about this for a moment. By using shampoos and cleansers containing a common chemical, you could literally be opening your skin up, making it more vulnerable to the outside world. That sounds like a very bad idea.18
Here is one simple way you can help your dry, irritated skin. Give it a vacation from all that soap, body wash, shower gel, bubble bath, and shampoo. Just use a tiny bit where it is needed, and nothing more. Give that whole head-to-toe lathering thing a rest and see how your skin feels after a few days.
And unless you’re performing surgery, avoid antiseptic soaps. These are intended to kill bacteria, but they have three undesirable effects.
First, the chemicals they contain are more likely to irritate your skin than ordinary soap.
Second, they deplete your skin of good bacteria that contribute to its health, since the microbes living on healthy skin help to organize a strong protective immune response.19 Some of them, with names you’ve never heard of, have actual anti-allergic effects.20 They’re your friends. Don’t make them collateral damage.
Third, killing off the friendly bacteria that live on your skin allows the growth of not-so-friendly bacteria that are resistant to the antiseptic agents in the soap. The bacteria that live on your skin do not stay on your skin. They float through the air and become part of the environment in which you live and which you share with others.
The study of bacteria inhabiting homes and workplaces—the “indoor microbiome”—and its effects on health is a rapidly growing area of research. The principal source of these bacteria is you, your skin in particular. So the bacteria growing on your skin determine the bacteria that everyone in your home is exposed to. You will learn more about this cutting-edge area of science that is transforming our view of health in Chapter 14.
Go Organic and Heal the Planet
This is so basic, so simple, and yet so necessary. It is an excellent way to reduce your exposure to toxins and shrink your toxic load, which is the total amount of toxins you take in through eating, breathing, and contact with the world around you.
You might even say that going organic is heroic. Choosing organic is not just for you; it is for the planet and all the people who live on it. Each time you buy organic lettuce or blueberries, for example, you are reducing the use of pesticides along a vast chain from the chemical factory to the farm to your table. The people who work on organic farms don’t have to handle toxic pesticides, so it is healthier for them too. The soil itself, which is really a living thing, can remain pesticide-free. That means less pollution running off into streams, rivers, and lakes.
Back in the day, shopping organic meant traveling across town to a little health food store that stocked a few vegetables and pieces of fruit. Now organic has gone very much more mainstream, with organic frozen fruit and vegetables distributed to many supermarkets. So it is easier than ever before to choose organic. Is it a little more expensive? Yes, but I consider it an investment in health and well-being.
Join the Homemade Coffee Revolution
I invite you to join a little revolution. The good news about this revolution is that coffee will be served.
This is a completely grassroots movement. Anyone can join. No long-winded speeches, no membership, just a win-win-win for you, your pocketbook, and Mother Earth. I am talking about organic coffee, the best way to enjoy your favorite brew.
Years ago, finding organic coffee was a chore. Organic coffee was mostly off the radar, something you had to go looking for. You could walk miles of aisles in your supermarket and it would not be sitting there on the shelf. You had to make a special trip somewhere, or you had to order it from a catalog.
Today that has all changed. Push your cart down the aisle at the supermarket, the big box retailer, or the specialty grocer, and organic coffees will be waiting for you. Recent shopping excursions to big stores have revealed ample supplies of organic coffee from Bolivia, Sumatra, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Rwanda. I love to break open a bag of one of these coffees, inhale deeply, and have the aroma bring me to far-off lands where lush coffee plants grow. At home, I grind up the beans and make a deeply satisfying and delicious cup.
So that brings us to the critical question: if you are enjoying organic coffee at home, why do you settle for takeout coffee that is not organic when you’re not at home? For coffee lovers out there, I have a better plan. Why not brew an extra cup of your favorite organic coffee at home and bring it with you? You know how much better your own coffee can be. Plus, by sticking with organic, you are skipping the pesticides that conventionally grown coffee contains, which could help lower your toxic load.
One of the pleasures of bringing your own coffee with you to work or to school is the independence it gives you. No longer do you need to make that extra stop, wait in line, get a paper cup, and rush on. You can do it yourself, with a sense of pride that you are doing the right thing for your health and for the environment. Think of the millions of paper cups we won’t need to manufacture, store, use, and then dispose of in a landfill. Forget that paper cup and join the revolution!
Conclusion
In this episode of Mission Detoxable I outlined a mission that is vital to overcoming allergies and improving your health. I assigned you to detox your personal space, clearing out three bucketfuls of dust and mold, indoor air pollution, and toxic chemicals. As we’re surrounded in everyday life by toxins such as air pollution, chemicals, and tobacco smoke, I showed you evasive measures to take to safeguard yourself against these threats.
You learned to pay attention to important clues about your surroundings, like a detective, and to jettison air fresheners and cleaning sprays that can lead to asthma and allergies. I briefed you on how to get Allergy Solution clean by banishing dust and knocking out mold. You kicked off your shoes before entering the house, to keep allergens and random bacteria at bay, and enjoyed a cup of organic coffee. You will no doubt encounter new challenges as you go about your mission, should you choose to accept it.
It is an adventure in which you’ll be living a little greener and a lot healthier, benefiting yourself and Mother Nature. Remember, this is not an impossible mission, it’s Mission Detoxable. You can do it!
This message biodegrades in five seconds . . . Good luck!