Chapter 15 - Toxic Gick vs 20 Years of Your Life

A Better Cleaning Strategy Than Replacing Dirt with Poison

Stay-at-home parents are 50% more likely to develop cancer than parents who work outside the home.1 The reason: toxic chemicals in household cleaning products. The exception to this is people who work outside the home as professional cleaners, who have it worse. Yikes!

Toxic cleaning products cause all sorts of health issues. Some people can hardly go out in public without getting a huge headache or breaking out in spontaneous hives because of some toxic chemical or another. For example, when I was younger, I used to get nose bleeds around laundry detergent, even just from walking down the laundry aisle at the grocery store. You might be dismissing these words now, but I promise that a lot of these issues are cumulative, and there is a high probability that your sensitivities will develop soon if they haven’t already. Maybe you are suffering from something now, and you have not yet made the connection to the cause.

A few years ago, I watched the documentary film Chemerical.2 It was about a family switching from toxic household cleaning and body products to more natural products. They hauled out four to six grocery bags of products from the house and then they tested the air quality in their home. Almost all of their rooms had way over the generally accepted safe limits of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The mom was horrified.

At first, there was a lot of resistance to change. The mom was weeping. She kept asking how she would be able to clean things. At the end of the documentary, the whole family seemed dramatically healthier. And I don’t really know how to express this, but they seemed…smarter. The mom went from being barely able to form sentences to being clearly articulate. By the time it was all over, she could not fathom ever using those old products again.

A really neat thing that they did in this documentary was to calculate the cost of the old toxic stuff: $239. The new stuff they bought, that wasn’t nearly as toxic, was around $60 and just as effective. And the mom made a huge bucket of her own laundry detergent for just $2. Although I think there are better solutions than some of the ones mentioned in that documentary, the ones they presented are still far better than what was being used in the first place.

When considering what to use for cleaning, be wary of marketing fear tactics pushing sterility. There is a time and place for sterility, but it is not as much as what marketing people tell you. There are more bacteria cells in the human body than there are human cells. We cannot live without bacteria. So before you kill all bacteria willy-nilly, it would be wise to learn a little about good bacteria vs bad bacteria.3

Consider for a moment the bacteria that live in a septic tank and drain field or at the sewage treatment plant. If you pour something down the sink or into the toilet that kills them, they will not be able to do their very important job.

Here is a pretty complete list of cleaners I suggest:

As a final note: keep in mind that just because something occurs in nature, doesn’t mean it is nontoxic or “good.” Lead, arsenic, and cyanide are good examples.

Cast Iron Can Be Nonstick; Teflon Is Always Poison

I once heard about a person who was cooking with teflon (on a low temperature) and their pet birds died from inhaling the fumes – the birds’ lungs filled with blood.4

I’m convinced that “nonstick” surfaces, such as teflon, are toxic. Newer products come out that sound better, but I cannot help but think that folks just haven’t yet learned how toxic the new surfaces are. At the time of this writing, I feel comfortable cooking with cast-iron, glass, and some steels.

Many of my happiest cooking memories involve cast iron.5 I remember my grandad cooking almost everything we ate in a cast-iron skillet. My grandad was a really great guy, so I find I like to do a lot of stuff that he liked to do. For a long time he was a professional mountain guide – how cool is that? And when he took me with him, the cast iron skillet would come with us too!

Using cast iron is a skill from a simpler time. It can last hundreds of years, while many modern skillets and griddles only last a few months. The best cast iron is the stuff that is already well used. Some people make a great score for $2 at a yard sale, and others end up dropping $80 on eBay. Even at $80, cast iron will earn its keep in less than a year.

Cooking with cast iron is one of those things where, at first, I failed utterly and repeatedly. It took seeking the wisdom of dozens of people, but I can now get that egg to slide off the skillet every time. A little knowledge and a little practice is all it takes.

Here are a few of my tips for cooking with cast iron:

  1. Use a good cast iron skillet with a glassy-smooth cooking surface. The new cast iron with the rough cooking surface is going to be frustrating.

  2. Keep it dry! Using water short-term (minutes, not hours) has its uses. When the time comes to put the cast iron cookware away, give it a few seconds on a hot stove, just to make sure all the water is out.

  3. Use a little oil or grease.

  4. A little smoke is okay.

  5. Too much heat on an empty cast iron skillet can ruin the surface or even crack the skillet.

  6. Clean cast iron immediately after each use and leave a very thin layer of oil/grease.

  7. Avoid soap! There is a myth about how you should never use soap on cast iron. The reality is that you can use soap on cast iron, but it is better if you don’t.

  8. Use a stainless steel spatula with a perfectly flat edge and rounded corners. This is what makes the cooking surface glassy.

  9. The best way to season a cast iron skillet is just to use it. Going for a ride in the oven for the sake of “seasoning” is a waste of energy.

Going Pooless

For the uninitiated this might sound really weird, but for the last six years I have not used soap or shampoo in the shower…and I don’t stink. I still shower every day, I just don’t rub toxic gick all over my body as part of my shower routine anymore.

I am definitely not the only one who has tried this.6 Millions of people with all sorts of hair length, color, and style have gone pooless and have never looked back. 98% of our funk is water soluble and thus can just be rinsed off.

Most people are concerned that, if they go pooless, their hair would be too greasy. Soap and shampoo strip away all of the natural oils being put out by our body. As a result, our bodies go into overdrive producing extra oil to compensate. And when we don’t use shampoo for a day or two our hair gets really greasy because of the overcompensation. However, once we take the plunge and go pooless, our bodies adjust and stop producing so many oils. There is a bit of a transition period which varies from a few days to a few months depending on the person, but it all balances out in the end.

I recorded several podcasts about going pooless,7 and a listener wrote to me to say that he tried it. After decades of daily migraines leading to vomiting and/or blackouts at least once a week, the migraines are now gone. After a month of being pooless, he used shampoo once and the migraines immediately returned. Is this man the canary in your coal mine?

With pooless we buy less stuff, so we have more money, and we are giving less money to the chemical factories…we use less water and use less energy for hot water…we have less toxic gick in our home, and we are putting less toxic gick on ourselves. Overall, we gain money and time, and we have improved the environment. We are building a better world in our backyard and making our lives more luxuriant along the way. Going pooless is one of my favorite examples of what this book is all about.

Bug Killer You Can Eat!

Depending on where you live, household pests can be a huge issue. Unfortunately, the conventional approach is to bring a bunch of poison into the house to kill the pests. And it usually doesn’t even get them all. And the bugs and spiders that are the natural predators of those pests end up dying too.

Thankfully, there is a better solution that is so safe you can eat it! Despite all of the fancy poisons on the market, diatomaceous earth (DE) has been reported to be the most effective solution when fighting pests like fleas, ants, and bed bugs.8 It is an off-white, talc-like powder that is the fossilized remains of marine phytoplankton. It kills nearly all bugs.

When DE gets on bugs that have an exoskeleton (such as fleas, ants, or bed bugs), it compromises their shell so that their innards turn into teeny-tiny bug jerky. At the same time, we can rub it all over our skin, rub it in our hair, or even eat it…and we are unharmed.

One strange thing to keep in mind about diatomaceous earth is that for it to work at killing bugs you have to keep it dry. Even morning dew can make it ineffective for this purpose.

I have encountered over a dozen ignorant people who have proclaimed “Diatomaceous earth does NOT work!” I have read this statement in all caps. In extra big fonts. With italics. And I’ve even had it screamed at me. On closer inspection of each case, there is always a flaw. Usually, the problem is that it was not used correctly. For example, DE is not a bait. If you put a little bit in a pile somewhere, the bugs are not drawn to it, and they do not invite all their friends.

The only known problem with food-grade diatomaceous earth for people, mammals, and birds that I have ever been able to find any reference to is breathing it in. I have heard from two people who said that they won’t use DE anymore because “the tiny particles cut my lungs!” (deep sigh goes here) All I can say is “Did you actually examine your lung with a microscope and watch the diatomaceous earth cut into it?” Of course, they did not. I think the truth behind these reports is that these folks heard how diatomaceous earth works, and, when they breathed in the dust, it made them cough – just as breathing in flour or cornstarch would make you cough. And then they thought of the sharpness at a microscopic level.

My understanding is that when diatomaceous earth becomes moist, the sharp thing is no longer happening. That’s why you have to keep it dry when you use it as bug killer. As long as you are using food-grade diatomaceous earth you are quite safe, even if you breathe in gobs of it. Of course, if you are asthmatic, or have lung problems of any kind, I would think breathing in big gobs of any kind of dust would be a bad idea.

There exists another variety of diatomaceous earth that has been fiddled with so it can be used for pool filters. The pool-grade stuff would be bad for you because it contains up to 70% “crystalline silica.” My understanding is that if you work with the pool-grade stuff all day, every day, for years, you could get cancer. Don’t mess with the pool-grade stuff!

Food-grade diatomaceous earth will contain less than 1% crystalline silica and is far less dangerous. Many farmers feed it to animals and swear that the stuff kills all sorts of worms in their critters. And I’ve talked to a number of people keen on living past 100 who eat a quarter cup of food-grade DE every day. I have found references where it is cited for colon cleansing, parasite control, and detoxing. There are millions of people who are certain that eating this stuff makes for stronger fingernails, stronger bones, and more luxuriant hair. Further, nearly all grains are stored with some DE mixed in – to keep the insects under control without the toxicity. So not only is it far more effective at killing bugs than anything the pesticide companies have to offer, but you are already eating it – and millions of people choose to eat heaps more in the name of good health.