Environmental illness was first recognized more than five decades ago, but mainstream medicine still generally disregards this syndrome. When patients come in with the symptoms of sensitivity to a toxic environment, doctors often do not know the correct protocol. Standardized blood tests appear normal, leading them to assume that no problem exists.
Another issue is that most doctors today are not trained to work with a disease that affects the whole body. Heather Millar, author of The Toxic Labyrinth and former sufferer of environmental illness, notes, “In the medical community we have created a world of specialists. Physicians are now neurologists, cardiologists, rheumatologists, and so on. We have gotten away from the old-fashioned approach. We no longer have a large percentage of general practitioners. Before, you would go to a doctor’s office and tell him your history from start to finish. He would look at you as a whole individual, checking the psychological as well as the physical aspect of the body. Only then would he make an assessment.
“Now technology has compartmentalized the body. The neurologist looks only at the symptoms of numbness, tingling, and headaches. The rheumatologist looks only at arthritis, joint pain, and aches. The infectious disease doctor looks only for infection. What happened to me was, I would go in and give a detailed history of what was happening. The doctor, according to his specialty, would look only at one specific area. He or she did not want to hear about the other symptoms I had.
“What we are failing to realize with all this supertechnology in medicine is that the body works in harmony. You do not have one body system that works separately from something else. They all work together. So if you are having symptoms in one system, you are probably having symptoms elsewhere.”
I started becoming ill a year before I realized what was happening. At first I just thought I was tired. I was having trouble getting out of bed. I was dragging myself to work. I would come home feeling exhausted. Sometimes I had asthma like symptoms and couldn’t quite catch my breath. I wondered why this started all of a sudden when I was thirty years old, because my understanding was that most people develop asthma as children. I attributed these symptoms to working and living a fast-paced lifestyle, and I ignored them. One day my wrist started to ache for no apparent reason, which made me wonder if I was getting arthritis. But I ignored that as well and thought it would go away. I had these warning signs for a year before collapsing at work.
I had woken up feeling as if I had the flu but thought I was well enough to go to work. I had gone shopping with my mom that morning and had had difficulty walking up stairs. When I arrived at work, I realized that I was feeling quite unwell and that I would be able to work only part of my nursing shift. At the end of the first hour, I needed to go home because I was too ill to walk down the corridor and deliver medications to my patients. It was then that I returned to the nursing station and collapsed. I could hear, but I couldn’t move. I felt as if I were paralyzed. I couldn’t communicate with the other nurses who came to attend to me.
They took me to the emergency room, but I started to feel better and went home. I decided that I had the flu and that I would be better in three days.
Three days of flu evolved into a year and a half. During this time, I experienced many difficulties. The problem with environmental illness or chemical sensitivity is that you have a wide array of symptoms that come and go. You don’t really know where to start and what connections to make. These are some of the symptoms I experienced:
Flu symptoms plagued me every day and became worse with time. As time passed, I was having more difficulty getting out of bed and walking around the house. I was extremely tired. No matter how much I slept, I just could not seem to get enough sleep. Even small tasks that shouldn’t take much energy overwhelmed me. Cooking a meal was too much to even think about.
I also started having disturbed sleep. Despite my fatigue, I would wake up between two and four o’clock each night with numb hands. Sometimes I would have an incredible thirst. And sometimes I would wake up shaking as if I had a very high fever.
At one point I lost sight in my right eye. This happened for a short time but was extremely frightening nonetheless. All of a sudden, the vision in my right eye became completely silver, as if I were trying to look through a piece of tinfoil.
I had headaches with stabbing pains in my temples and a burning sensation in the back of my neck that made it difficult to turn my head. If you try to drive a car or move to do something, you realize how important it is to have range of motion in your neck.
The next month, I started to experience food allergies. It started with a few things. First I wasn’t tolerating wheat very well and stopped eating it. Then I noticed that I did not feel well after drinking coffee and milk, so I eliminated them also. As the months progressed, I was unable to tolerate more and more foods. By January, I was virtually down to two foods: lamb and yams. By February, I lost my tolerance for everything. I was caught in a vicious cycle. I knew I needed to get nutrition in order to turn my health around, but eating these foods would make me even sicker.
As I became increasingly ill, my sense of smell became more and more acute. All of a sudden perfumes were a problem. I absolutely hated going to the department store and passing the perfume counter. I couldn’t stand the smell of car exhaust either. I even avoided the hardware store because of the strong smell in there. Going to public places became difficult, as many people wear scented products such as clothes washed in scented laundry detergents, perfumes, and aftershaves. I would walk into a room, and if someone had perfume on, I would suddenly feel like I had the worst flu. My shoulders and muscles would start to ache. I would feel short of breath. I would get a headache.
A heightened sense of smell is part of the illness. People who are not affected need to understand what is happening when individuals with environmental illness ask, “Please do not wear that fragrance because it makes me feel sick.”
I also started to have ringing in my ears. That would come and go, so I never could associate it with any particular event. Sometimes it would affect one ear, sometimes both. It was bothersome trying to have a conversation with somebody and trying to hear that person over the ringing in my ears.
Additionally, I felt dizzy. I had days when it was even difficult for me to stand up and navigate my way to the bathroom. Several times I fell over.
One of the most disturbing symptoms I had was difficulty concentrating. I could no longer read something from start to finish. It would take me three to four tries to read material I should have comprehended in the first reading.
I also noticed that I was forgetful. Previously I had had an exceptional memory. All of a sudden I noticed that I couldn’t remember things that were extremely important. At age thirty I was wondering if I was getting the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the loss of memory was so apparent. Some days my memory was better than others, and some days my ability to concentrate was better than others.
Then there were the panic attacks. My heart would race while I was driving my car on the interstate. I did not understand why I felt better on residential streets. Later, I real-ized that I had difficulty on the interstate because the exhaust was so much more prevalent there. Every time I was exposed to exhaust, my heart raced; I felt anxious and had difficulty concentrating.
I also felt extremely anxious in shopping malls. I have since learned that there are extremely high levels of chemicals in shopping malls, such as formaldehyde, emitted by new building materials. These synthetics are highly toxic. What I couldn’t understand was why I felt anxious at some times and not others. The reason was that some shopping malls are less toxic than others, and some stores, because of the types of merchandise they carry, are also better than others.
The day I collapsed at work was the last day I worked as a nurse. I kept assuming that within a month I would feel better and go back to my job. One month rolled into two, two months into three, and three months into a year and a half.
Being a nurse, I felt that I would receive the support I needed. After all, I was a medical person myself. What I experienced instead was how a patient feels when he or she is told that nothing is wrong. I had always been on the other side of things. I found this new perspective extremely alarming.
The medical community has become technologically based. Everything relies on a diagnostic test. I would go in, and they would run a gamut of tests. As with most people with environmental illness, the standard tests would come back negative. The doctors would then tell me that there was nothing wrong. This was disturbing because I was extremely ill. I was so sick that I could hardly get up off the couch. Nor could I make myself a meal. Going to the bathroom was an effort. How, on a diagnostic test, could I look perfectly normal?
When the doctors could not diagnose me, they said that I was suffering from stress. But this was not the case. Before I got sick, my life was wonderful. I had one of the least pressured jobs I had ever had, and I was enjoying what I was doing. At the end of a contract I would go on vacation to Europe for a month. I was about to get married. My life couldn’t have been better.
Stress is becoming the catchall diagnosis in the medical community. We must ask why so many people in our society are being told that they have stress, panic disorder, anxiety, and depression. That category is growing larger and larger. People have to ask: Why is this happening in our society? Is something chemical bringing this on? Do we need to make changes in the environment?
If you are feeling some symptoms of toxicity, it is time to take action now. Don’t wait until you end up, as I did, in a wheelchair, bedridden, and completely intolerant to food.
—Heather Millar
Dr. Stephen M. Silverman of Port Washington, New York, says that thousands of poisons in our food, water, and surroundings are responsible for environmental illness: “The first thing you must realize is that what you eat can have a tremendous effect on your immune system. One of the most toxic foods that people expose themselves to unknowingly, for example, is hydrogenated oil. People don’t realize how widespread that ingredient is. It’s in crackers, all commercial breads, potato chips, pretzels, and cookies, and it has a very strong damaging effect on the immune system.
“Along with what you eat, you must consider what you drink. Most people are being exposed to tap water, whether directly from the sink or outside when they buy a cup of coffee or tea. Probably one of the highest exposures to carcinogens comes from this source. . . . Ralph Nader’s group identified over 2,000 chemicals commonly found in people’s drinking water. When water is tested over the course of the year, it is tested for approximately 120 chemicals. When you are told that the water is safe to drink, it means that it is safe with respect to what it was tested for. You have no idea about the other 1,900 chemicals. Insecticides and pesticides in the water have been associated with Long Island’s high rate of breast cancer. Certainly, if they can create cancer, they can cause immune system damage.”
Skin and hair care products may be another source of environmental illness. “Among the other factors that can set you up for illness are the things you put on your body,” Dr. Silverman says. “I am talking about cosmetics, moisturizers, and hair sprays. We know through medical applications of the nicotine and estrogen patches that what you put on your skin will be absorbed into the bloodstream. If you were to take a look at the ingredients in your cosmetics, hair sprays, and underarm deodorants, you would see that they are loaded with chemicals. You have to realize that when you use these chemicals every day, they eventually get into the bloodstream. When you think about it, is it possible that these chemicals have no effect on your immune system? It’s almost impossible.”
According to the late environmental medicine specialist Dr. Marshall Mandell, “There is absolutely no question that environmental factors play a major role in many diseases; where they do not actually start the disease, they can complicate it. Anything that makes your illness worse is important for you to know about.”
In the same way that cocaine goes right from the nose of the user to the ner-vous system in a matter of seconds, producing a wide variety of effects, toxins in food or air produce a range of effects in the systems of highly sensitive individuals. Conventional physicians and traditional allergists simply miss this phenomenon by recognizing only a very limited range of symptoms. If their patients aren’t sneezing or itching, they will not recognize the possibility that an allergy may be present. But logically, once a doctor recognizes that minute flecks of animal dander or pollen in the air can produce marked symptoms, is it so difficult to see that chemical toxins in meat or milk or air pollution, among a host of other possible causes, might also have an adverse effect?
Simply put, the human race has evolved over millions of years and has adapted to most of the conditions on this planet. But many of the pollutants and toxins we are dealing with have arisen over the last thirty to fifty years. Our bodies just haven’t had time to evolve in response to these changes in our environment. Unless we act sensibly by at least recognizing this discrepancy, we may cause great damage to our environment and ourselves.
Whatever you breathe in enters your body along with the oxygen. If your home, work, or school environment is polluted, the pollutants will travel through the walls of the lungs, go into the blood vessels of the lungs, and ultimately reach the heart through the pulmonary circulation. Similarly, chemicals, additives, and contaminants in our food and beverages will pass through the digestive system and reach the heart. Once there, they will be pumped through the bloodstream. Every tissue in your body is exposed to what you eat, drink, and breathe. That is why so many people are sick today.
“Research shows that women are more prone to environmental illnesses,” says Heather Millar. “The reason is that many chemicals, such as formaldehyde, benzene, phenols, and chlorine, have estrogen-mimicking properties. These chemicals take the place of estrogen in the body. The body thinks it has enough estrogen and doesn’t make enough. Estrogen is responsible for reproduction as well as many other vital functions in the body. Problems occur when the body calls upon the estrogen it thinks it has but doesn’t.
“Silicone breast implants are making women terribly ill. They have a tendency to grow fungus inside the implant, which adds a problem to an already existing one. Fungus is extremely hard to get rid of once it starts to grow. After breast implants are removed, women do not feel better. This indicates that their immune systems have been damaged. It will probably take a very long time for them to recover, and we do not know the long-term effects.”
Symptoms vary with a woman’s constitution and may include fatigue, aching muscles, a flu-like feeling, ringing in the ears, burning eyes, headaches, migraines, disturbed sleep, shortness of breath, food allergies, a heightened sense of smell, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, memory loss, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and irritable bowel syndrome. There is a marked progressive debilitating reaction to consumer products such as perfumes, soap, tobacco smoke, and plastics.
In her book, Heather Millar has a checklist to help people determine whether they may be suffering from environmental illness. These are some questions she asks people to consider:
“Discovering the cause of the problem is a detective process,” Millar says. “It involves taking a close look at your home, workplace, and neighborhood.
In the home there are several factors to address. “You may ask,” Millar says, “‘Why didn’t we have these problems before? We always painted our house and put new carpet in.’ What I’d like to suggest is that technology has changed a lot of chemicals and manufacturing processes. Since the 1980s we have added more synthetics and are now seeing their effects. A lot of these products emit gas. The newness smell is a gas that is coming off. Basically, it’s a chemical soup that is very hazardous to our health. Also, since we live in energy-efficient buildings, we do not have the ventilation needed to lessen the concentration of these gases.
“Plastics present further problems. They have a lot of these estrogen-mimicking properties. Softer plastics have more toxicity. We used to live with metal, wood, and glass. These are far safer alternatives. When replacing plastic with wood, consider the type of finish on it. Does it smell?”
After evaluating what’s going on at home, turn your attention to the workplace. Millar says, “Ask yourself, what are you doing as an occupation? Are you working with chemicals on an ongoing basis? Or are you working in an energyefficient office building that was recently renovated? Is it currently being renovated? Does it have no open windows? Do other people in the office frequently get colds and flu or feel unwell?”
The neighborhood should also be examined. “Where do you live?” Millar says. “Do you have chemical manufacturing in your backyard? Is there some kind of toxic incinerator nearby? What is in your water supply? What kinds of pesticide regulations does your neighborhood have?
“You may react differently to toxins in your environment than your coworkers do. For example, in my workplace, which was extremely toxic, my symptoms were mainly neurological. Other colleagues were diagnosed with chronic fatigue. Still others experienced asthma or fibromyalgia, which is an aching of the muscles. We react differently depending on our genetic predispositions.”
Fortunately, there are physicians who do recognize the illness, and there are tests available to pinpoint the condition. Occupational health doctors and environmental physicians prescribe tests that look at solvent levels in the blood. They look at pesticide levels in the blood and check mineral levels, which are usually low in people who suffer from chemical exposures.
Dr. Michael Schachter, a clinical ecologist, or environmental medicine specialist, identifies four contributing factors that he considers key in his examination and in determining a course of therapy: the quality of nutrition generally and the identification of any nutritional deficiencies, infections, psychological stresses, and toxicity. According to Dr. Schachter, the course of therapy should be determined by the condition of the patient in regard to these four criteria.
Dr. Schachter is also concerned with improving the oxygenation and energy utilization of the body at the cellular level. Anything we can do to improve that process is going to strengthen the immune system and thereby help reduce a person’s tendency toward sensitivity and reactions. Thus, Dr. Schachter encourages the use of oxidant therapies, but only up to a point, since oxygen in too great quantities can have a damaging effect. The key here, as in virtually every area of health, is balance.
The first and foremost oxidant therapy must be aerobic exercise. Keeping in mind that oxygen is the main nutrient of the body, it is easy to understand that as we improve oxygenation, we improve the body’s ability to detoxify and enhance the immune system. Beyond exercise, a number of new nutrients are available to enhance oxygenation, such as germanium and ubiquinone, as well as a variety of traditional oxygenation techniques.
Vitamins and minerals are another key component in Dr. Schachter’s approach. He sees vitamin A as a major protective factor that guards against both chemical sensitivities and infections. Thus, cod liver oil, which parents once gave automatically to children, is indeed an excellent preventive medicine with its high concentrations of vitamins A and D. In treating children with recurrent ear infections, Dr. Schachter has found that by simply enhancing their diet, removing most of the sugar and refined foods, and adding a spoonful of cod liver oil, the ear infections can be controlled and prevented in many cases. Other useful vitamins include vitamin C, vitaminB12, and vitamin E, which is an antioxidant. Selenium and beta-carotene are also important antioxidants. Vitamin B12 can help counteract the adverse effects in the body of pesticides in the environment. Moreover, while conventional physicians may test for vitamin B12 levels in the bloodstream, normal levels may be present in the blood while there are deficiencies at the cellular level.
According to Dr. Schachter, infections are a key factor in going from troubled to good health. Frequently, infections will yield to nontoxic treatments.
Take Candida, for example. Women who have repeatedly used antibiotics, include a lot of refined carbohydrates in their diet, and may have been exposed to steroids or birth control pills tend to develop a chronic overgrowth of Candida albicans, a yeastlike, funguslike organism that we all have in our bodies. In certain cases the infection will give off toxins that may impair the immune system and produce a variety of symptoms. Some of these symptoms will be the result of food and chemical sensitivities that have been aggravated by the infection.
Dr. Schachter has found that starting the patient on a special diet that excludes refined carbohydrates, especially sugars and alcohol, and includes various nutrients, especially certain fatty acids that inhibit candida growth, will go a long way toward controlling the infection in many cases. He also notes that garlic has strong anticandidal properties.
Chronic viral syndromes are another key problem. A previously healthy individual suddenly gets a flu and instead of recovering completely experiences frequent fatigue, exhaustion, swollen glands, sore throat, night sweats, anxiety, and loss of appetite. However, conventional testing shows nothing definite. More sophisticated testing may show exposure to various viruses, but the main problem here may be that the person’s immune system just isn’t responding as it should. Dr. Schachter has obtained excellent results in patients with this profile by using nutrients to bolster the immune system. Intravenous vitamin C may be used, along with germanium and a variety of other vitamins and minerals given orally. In cases of herpes virus, for example, he may use high doses of the amino acid lysine, which has antiviral effects for the herpes virus and certain other viruses. For short treatment periods, he may administer as much as 10 to 15 grams of lysine per day.
Psychological stress is another key factor, according to Dr. Schachter. Environmental medicine specialists, he warns, must be careful that in emphasizing the importance of the physical environment they do not underestimate the importance of psychological factors in determining the strength of an individual’s immune system.
As for toxicity, Dr. Schachter feels that hydrocarbons and other chemicals are already playing a major role by damaging our immune systems, as are heavy metals. He sees chelation therapy as a valid treatment to detoxify our systems of the effects of heavy metals. Chelation therapy has also shown impressive results in patients with cardiovascular disease.
Without detoxifying the system, all other steps to repair the body will be of no avail. Dr. Zane Gard, an expert in toxicology, explains some methods of detoxification that have had impressive results in the reversal of environmental illness: “Heat stress detoxification includes wood saunas, hot sand packing, steam baths, and sweat lodges. The history of these approaches goes back several thousand years. Careful supervision is required. Heat stress detoxification can be effective but requires knowledge of toxins and their potential effects on the body. If it is not administered properly, there can be a lot of complications, and the patient can actually end up worse.
“The biotoxic reduction program was designed with the toxic-chemical-syndrome patient in mind. It is a comprehensive, medically managed program that addresses toxicology, psychology, neurology, pathology, and immunology. The program must be followed seven days a week, one to two hours a day, for a minimum of two weeks. It would be nice to have Saturday and Sunday off, but patients actually regress one or two days every time they take a day off during the first two weeks. So it has to be every day during that initial period.”
Increasing niacin, aerobic exercise and sauna therapy also may be recommended. “With those who have neurological damage, other therapies will be needed,” Dr. Gard says, “including one that stimulates the myelin sheaths of the nerves to regenerate. As a result, many peripheral neuropathies completely reverse. In more than eighty peripheral neuropathies, including multiple sclerosis (MS), we have only two patients who did not fully recover.”
It is no longer enough to watch what we eat or the medicines we take; environmental toxins have become an unavoidable reality, especially for those living in densely populated urban areas. The very air we breathe on the streets or in our homes and offices can attack our health; noise pollution and artificial lighting add to the physical and mental stress of urban life.
The myth is that you should look for the big toxin. But it’s the chronic, day-in, day-out exposure to small toxins that are really the concern. It may take decades—none of these environmental toxins, even asbestos, will knock you out right away—but you may pay for your lack of awareness with lung cancer, leukemia, arthritis, or heart disease down the line. Perhaps worst are the subtle symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, and minor nagging physical problems that many of us come to accept as a normal part of life.
Elimination of the unseen substances that attack your system stealthily, over time, is half of achieving good health. If you never use any supplementary vitamin, mineral, or herb but simply eliminate those factors that depreciate your health, you should be able to live to one hundred years of age in a healthy way. One group of people, nearly 70,0000 in number, in the north of Pakistan at the base of the Himalayas, often live well past ninety or even one hundred, putting in full days of work daily until they die. It may not be possible for all of us to live in the pure atmosphere of the Himalayas—not to mention emulating the diet, activities, and social structure of these people—but we can alter our environment realistically and functionally. A good place to start is where we live.
Dr. Alfred Zamm, a fellow of the American College of Allergists and the American College of Physicians, has written a book, Why Your House May Endanger Your Health, which explores the relationship between our homes and our well-being more thoroughly than we can here. Dr. Richard Podell also contributed to the discussion.
The “sick house” is a relatively new development. Materials and methods used to construct houses have changed considerably since World War II; an extreme example is the energy-efficient office buildings built during the energy crisis of the 1970s, about which we’ll have more to say later in this chapter. But not only are houses built with more emphasis on energy efficiency—which means heavy insulation and minimum ventilation to the outside—the construction materials themselves, as well as the furnishings (carpeting, fabrics, furniture) are new, often more convenient, cheaper, lighter synthetic compounds unheard of in prewar houses. The particleboard that is so useful in modern house and furniture construction exacts a price for this convenience; it is a silent time bomb, giving off invisible, odorless—but no less dangerous—vapors years after it is installed.
Formaldehyde is a major culprit in the modern house or office building. Particleboard, new synthetic carpets, insulation, many interior paints, and even permanent-press fabrics can give off formaldehyde. It is invisible and odorless except in high concentrations, but even quite low chronic levels can cause symptoms ranging from burning eyes and headaches to asthma and depression. New houses may be built largely of materials that vaporize formaldehyde for years; the worst culprits are mobile homes, which also are often poorly ventilated.
Another important factor in a house’s potential toxicity is its source of heat. Combustion-heating appliances using natural gas, oil, coal, kerosene, or wood can all create afterburn by-products even if you can’t see or smell them. Good ventilation can help, but this makes it harder to keep a house warm. Electric heat, though expensive, is the safest source.
What can be done about a toxic house? Some changes can be made in the furnishings, floor coverings, and ventilation and heating systems, but often much of the problem lies in structural components that would be expensive and difficult, if not impossible, to alter. Building your own house or having it built with attention to all the materials used is one solution if you can afford it or have the time and skill. If you are looking for a place to live, consider an older home. Prewar houses were often constructed of bricks, plaster, and hardwood, not the chemically treated plywood, composite board, and other synthetic materials used almost universally now. If synthetic materials were used in an older house, they will have had years to emit their toxins. Often a house built before the energy crisis will allow more air circulation. Ceilings are often higher, allowing fumes to rise away from the inhabitants.
There may be disadvantages in an old house, however; molds and mildews may have accumulated over the years. Old carpet is a fertile ground for mold as well as accumulated dust, animal hair, and whatever toxins have been tracked in or sprayed over the years, but it can often be pulled up to reveal a hardwood floor. Outdated heating systems can usually be replaced without too much trouble.
If moving or rebuilding your house is not an option, you can still do a lot to detoxify your home. We’ll identify the weak spots room by room.
An attached garage is like a toxic waste dump stuck to the side of your house. Many garages have heating and cooling systems that lead directly into the house; anything that can be absorbed through any crack or ventilation system will end up in the house. What’s in the garage? The car, of course, and gasoline. Gasoline vaporizes. The afterburn fumes caused by inefficient burning of gasoline are mostly carbon dioxide, which has no odor and is invisible. Breathing these fumes results in headache, dizziness, and mood swings. (Think of people stuck in traffic jams, breathing the afterburn of all the cars around them for hours at a time.) When you park a hot car in the garage and close the door behind it, the hot oil in the engine is volatile and gets into the air. Park the car outside and wait for it to cool off before you bring it into the garage.
Other things you may keep in the garage—paint thinners and removers and turpentine—also vaporize easily and stay in the air for months at a time. If you smell a rag that was used for paint thinner three months ago, you will see that it is still giving off these fumes. Try to minimize the number of these substances in your garage. If you must keep them, use a small shed or garbage can outside the garage to store them. And the garage should be ventilated out, not into the house, with a suction fan. There should be no ducts from the garage into the house.
Your garage is probably where you keep chemicals you use on your lawn and garden: pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides, for instance. In the first place, do you really need them? Look at it this way. If it’s going to kill an insect, a plant, or a mouse, it’s a toxin and it can affect you, your pets, and your children. If you spray a weed killer on your lawn and then walk around on the lawn, you will repeatedly be bringing it inside on your feet. It doesn’t just go away. Think of all the things you bring in on your feet and think, for instance, of your kids playing on the carpet, perhaps putting things into their mouths that have been on it.
Taken individually, none of these things is going to kill you, but be aware that everything you spray outside is likely to be in the air you breathe or will make its way back into your house and settle there. There’s no real need to run this risk: We can use diatomaceous earth and natural biological controls or just weed without spraying.
A typical basement in a private home is often damp. People like their lawns unencumbered by debris that might wash down from the gutters of the roof through the downspout, and so the downspout is kept close to the house. Thus the water runs off the roof, down the downspout, and into the ground directly by the foundation of the house. You might just as well run this water directly into the basement, since its walls are rarely waterproof. A little dampness in the basement is enough to support a healthy growth of mold, which can then permeate the house. A forced-air system of ventilation, which has ducts running to the basement, will create a vacuumlike effect that will suck particles of mold into the system, to be dispersed around the house.
Many people react to mold whether it is eaten or inhaled, a point that is obvious to anyone who begins to sneeze as soon as she walks into a damp basement. More insidiously, though, mold that is inhaled even in small quantities cross-reacts with mold that is ingested in food. This effect, known as concomitancy, means that a small quantity of inhaled mold that in itself would hardly cause a noticeable reaction will enhance sensitivity to foods that contain mold.
Any food made by fermentation can induce this reaction. Wine and vinegar are fermented fruit juice, cheese is fermented milk, yeast in bread ferments, and even mushrooms are in the mold family. Thus, it is easy to ingest mold three times a day, exacerbating our inability to tolerate the mold that has circulated upward from a damp basement. Obvious symptoms are sneezing and watering eyes, but allergic symptoms can also be systemic, making them harder to pin down to a spe-cific source. Fatigue, headaches, depression, and even arthritis can have a basis in chronic allergic irritation.
In addition to water coming into the basement from the downspout, groundwater can flow down a hill toward the house, which then serves as a dam. You can place a drain field around the house using deco-drain piping in two tiers. Contact your local hardware store for more information. If a high water table is the problem, a sump pump is needed. Thoroseal, a dense cementlike material, can be applied to the outside block foundation as caulking to keep water out.
If the basement is still damp, a dehumidifier can help, but these work well only above a temperature of 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Chemicals such as baking soda are only temporary measures. The best way to remove the mold is to scrub the area with sulfur water. The basement can be hosed down and the water removed with an industrial vacuum.
What’s the most dangerous toxin in most kitchens? Gas. You should always have a vent in the kitchen; it has been shown that cerebral allergies are often directly attributable to the gas burnoff of pilot lights on stoves, which leak constantly. If you often have headaches and suspect that they are more common when you’re spending time in the kitchen, try disconnecting your stove when you’re not using it. If this makes a difference, you should consider replacing the gas stove with an electric one. Not only are gas ovens a health risk, microwave ovens can leak; a defective microwave creates a very unhealthy environment within about eight feet around it.
The freon in the condenser of the refrigerator is a highly volatile, dangerous chemical. It is a very good idea to replace refrigerators that are more than ten years old.
The refrigerator contributes to another seldom-considered form of pollution found especially in the kitchen: noise pollution. You should be able to tolerate background noise of about 30 to 35 decibels. Noise higher than 50 decibels becomes uncomfortable. Above 80 decibels, you become substantially irritated, and noise above 100 may cause ear damage or central nervous system overstimulation. The compressor in most refrigerators is up to 60 decibels. You don’t appreciate this until you turn on a refrigerator when everything else is totally quiet. But think of a kitchen with a television or a radio on, things cooking, telephone conversa-tions—you can’t even hear the refrigerator, and the noise level may be up around 100 decibels. The kitchen is one of the most stressful places because of this level of background noise. Even if you are unable to replace appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners with less noisy ones, you can cut down on the number of noisemakers you are using at the same time.
Street noise can be irritating in any room. Noise-buffering double-fold drapes can keep noise down as well as insulate.
Mold and mildew are common invisible toxins in a kitchen. When was the last time you changed the water tray in your refrigerator? Under the condenser coil is a tray to collect water, but it can also collect all kinds of mold. Mold spores are in the air all the time, and you’re inhaling them. If you’re sensitive and your immune system is low, you’ll feel it: Your eyes will get puffy, your nose will clog, and your throat will get sore. Keeping this area clean and dry could make a big difference.
Look under your kitchen sink; you’ll be amazed at the range of toxic chemicals you keep there, so close to your food. Cleansers, for instance, especially ammonia-based products, often vaporize easily. Ammonia is very toxic and will stay in your blood for hours after you’ve smelled it. When you wax the kitchen floor, the floor wax will evaporate and you will breathe it in. Try to install floors that will not need waxing, but if you don’t want to tear up your current floors, you might want to settle for a matte finish rather than a high sheen if you have to constantly apply volatile chemicals to maintain that sheen. As with the weed killers and insecticides in your garage, there are alternatives to chemical cleaners in the kitchen. Apple cider vinegar and hydrogen peroxide mixed half and half in cold water do the same job as ammonia. This preparation will clean windows and glassware perfectly too.
Roach sprays are very stable. They can last for months and vaporize constantly. A dog or cat licking the floor can pick them up directly. A safer alternative is to use boric acid. You can mix it with sugar as a bait, but be sure pets and children can’t reach it; line all the counters and fittings underneath with a strip of this no thicker than a pencil. This mixture is not volatile and is safe as long as it’s put only in inaccessible places. Diatomaceous earth is safe and works well too. Or use the roach motels that use resin instead of poisons.
Aluminum-based cookware in which the aluminum can come into contact with food should not be used. Aluminum has been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. It is a heavy metal that lodges in the blood, brain tissue, and central nervous system, where it can cause motor problems. Aluminum foil is all right to store cooked food but should not be used in cooking, where it can oxidize in microscopic amounts. You can’t see this, but it can get into your food and your body. Teflon and all other nonstick coatings should also be avoided. They easily scratch or flake off with age, getting into food as well as exposing it to the often inferior metal underneath.
Water from the kitchen tap may contain over a thousand chemicals, including those which the government puts in, such as fluoride; traces of herbicides and pesticides that have leached down into the water supply from fields; and traces of metal, rust, and molds from the inside of your pipes. Most water filtration systems can remove only a portion of these; the finer particles, including toxic chemicals such as pesticides, come through. If you live in a polluted area and your water supply is from underground streams, buy bottled water. I would buy plain distilled water. You get minerals from food; you don’t need them from water. Since 72 to 74 percent of our bodies consist of water, we should be sure it is the purest water possible.
One of the most common causes of allergy is what we put on our bodies: soaps, deodorants, and cosmetics. We use these things day in and day out, rarely thinking about their effect on us. For example, women who wear lipstick every day and lick their lips are absorbing chemicals never meant to be eaten. Perfumes vaporize and get breathed in. Read the ingredients of your antiperspirant; most likely it contains an aluminum-based compound that can be absorbed through the skin and carries the risks of aluminum outlined above. You can minimize these sources of toxins by using natural soaps and shampoos made out of vegetable ingredients, a nonfluoride toothpaste such as Dr. Bronner’s or Tom’s, and mouthwash you can make yourself with a little ascorbic acid in water.
It’s important to air out the bathroom after a shower or bath and let it dry out. A window fan to evacuate the moist air is a good idea. Bathrooms are too often closed up most of the time and can be like little chambers that trap the perfume, deodorant, and cleaning-fluid fumes in a small space. Odor disguisers such as pine- or lemon-scented aerosol sprays are worse than useless; the odor is a molecule floating around in the air that can be removed only by letting the air escape. Products that claim to take away odors only cover them up with a chemical that probably smells worse and is certainly worse for you.
The “disinfectant” cleaners so popular for bathroom tiles and tubs are virtu-ally useless. To disinfect something, you have to boil it for twenty minutes, but within one minute it will be covered with germs again. Those germs are not going to kill anyone despite the fear tactics used to market these cleaners. Their heavy aromatic odors are often more of a problem than the germs; pine, for example, is a resinous material that is quite troublesome to allergic or sensitive people.
Never store medications in the medicine chest; it’s hot and humid in the bathroom, and this can cause them to go bad. Store medicine and vitamins in the refrigerator.
As in the kitchen, look around the bathroom and think about potential toxins: cleaners for the tiles and sink, toilet fresheners, and so on. Do you need all those things? Can you substitute natural, nontoxic products?
We spend a third of our lives in the bedroom; if you live seventy-two years, that means twenty-four years in bed. An ecologically ideal, safe place to spend all this time should be as free of dust as possible. Many bedrooms have wall-to-wall carpeting, which is an ecological disaster. Carpeting is toxic in several ways. Whereas new synthetic-fiber carpeting contains chemicals, such as formaldehyde, which will vaporize for a year or more, old carpets collect dirt, yeast, fungus, and mold. Dust mites live in rugs. Through an electron microscope these mites look like tiny dinosaurs; their diet is chiefly composed of the shed human skin cells that are another large component of dust. House dust mites can be wafted into the air by currents and breathed into the lungs. People who are allergic to them react as they do to cat or dog dander. Like dander, they can get into your eyes and make them red and puffy.
Think about ripping up your old carpet and putting in nice hardwood floors. They’re easy to maintain and nontoxic. The Japanese have never had polyvinyl fluoride or no-wax floors; they use natural resins on wood, and some of these floors are 500 years old. If you feel you must have carpets, buy wool or natural fiber rugs with natural dyes. Stay away from synthetic carpets. And learn to vacuum efficiently. Most people just zip the vacuum over the carpet; by the time the dust has had a chance to get up through the nap into the air, the vacuum has moved on and has only raised the dust. You’ve actually increased the pollution in the air. Run the vacuum very slowly over the carpet, giving the dust you raise time to get into the vacuum.
You may be sleeping on foam-filled synthetic pillows and using synthetic-fiber pillowcases and sheets. Replace them with down-filled pillows and comforters and pure cotton sheets. Be aware of what you’re putting in your sheets when you wash them; bleaches and fabric softeners are potential irritants. Many manufacturers of bedding use chemicals to which many people are allergic in order to fireproof the material. The way to test for this is to sleep on bedding that is not treated to be fireproof and see if your symptoms disappear. Again, if you feel better when you are sleeping away from your house on vacation, it should alert you to the fact that something in the bedroom is causing trouble.
Sleeping on clean sheets that are changed frequently reduces possible reactions to dust and dust mites. When you wash bedding, it’s best to avoid perfumed detergents, antistatics, and softeners and to use biodegradable brands. Bleach should be oxygen bleach, not chlorine, which leaves an irritating residue. Miracle White, made by Beatrice Food Company, works well. If you suspect that a pillowcase, for example, is bothering you, wash it with a simple unscented detergent, rinse it three or four times, and try it again to see if the problem goes away.
Even your closets can affect your health. Mothballs emit a dangerous gas. Try a mixture of rosemary, mint, thyme, ginseng, and cloves, which has the additional advantage of smelling good.
If you ever see the sun slant into a room at a certain angle, you know how much dust and smoke are in what you thought was clear air. It’s there all the time. An air purifier with a negative ionizer is the best way to eliminate airborne toxins: spores, dust, cigarette smoke, hydrocarbons and pollutants from the street, cat hairs, and positive ions. The ionizer bombards the room with negative ions that attach themselves to the positive ions of pollutants, which then drop to the ground and can be filtered out by the filtration system.
Humidifiers are fine for improving air quality as long as you use distilled water in them. Otherwise mineral deposits from the water will end up all over your carpet, floor, and furniture.
One efficient and natural air-quality improver is living greenery in your house. The more plants in your environment, the better. A large number and variety of houseplants will increase the oxygen level in the air. Green, nonflowering varieties are best, since they will not give off pollen. Plants are also a great natural air pollution filtration system. They help maintain humidity levels and a proper electricity balance in the air. They also create a living energy field that we can share and be invigorated and calmed by.
Your visual environment is more important than you might realize. If you feel tired, ill, or depressed inside in the winter, especially if you live at a high latitude where the days are very short, and if you spend most of your day indoors, you may be suffering from seasonal affective disorder. In this condition the hypothalamus of the brain is deprived of full-spectrum natural sunlight—most artificial lights use only a part of the spectrum. The best solution is to allow plenty of natural light into your house; use double-glazing rather than small windows or heavy drapes if insulation is a concern. Try to spend time outdoors or arrange your activities so that you’re near a window.
If getting more daylight is beyond your control—the days are short, your house is dark, and you must stay indoors—the situation can be improved with fullspectrum light bulbs. Full-spectrum incandescent lighting works on a completely different principle from that of fluorescent lighting (discussed in the section on the workplace below) and is more natural for the eyes. These bulbs are available in health stores in all sizes; using them in your office as well as in your home can make a big difference in your energy level and mental state.
In cold areas we shut down for the winter, closing and sealing the windows to avoid ventilation from the outside. These practices contribute to the toxic state of the air inside.
Oil heaters often burn inefficiently and release unburned oil fumes into the house. An afterburn catalyst that is available on the market can now recycle these fumes, creating a clean air burn. Electric stoves are not a problem. Gas or oil space heaters are one of the worst offenders. Dry radiated heat can dry up your nose and skin. Wood-burning stoves may seem rustic and natural but can be one of the worst sources of indoor pollution.
In forced-air combustion heating systems that use gas or oil, a little pinhole not infrequently develops between the heat exchanger, which is next to the combustion chamber, and the air going past it to be heated. As the air that you’re going to breathe goes around that heated chamber, it sucks in the partially combusted gases. You may not even perceive this in the air, because it’s at a very low level, but over a six-month period this air can produce severe illness. Therefore, you must have your forced-air system checked out electronically for these pinholes every year. The smell test is not satisfactory. If you don’t do this, you’re at risk.
The energy crisis of the 1970s led to a generation of very well insulated but poorly ventilated office buildings. People who work in these buildings often complain of fatigue, nasal congestion, dizziness, and a host of other mysterious symptoms, yet there has been clear-cut documentation of toxic levels of pollutants in very few cases. The levels of toxins in these buildings are rarely high enough to provoke official alarm, but they are high enough to cause fatigue and illness through long-term, chronic exposure. Even low levels of organic chemicals, pesticides, formaldehyde, carpet cleaners, and tobacco smoke can affect those exposed to them for a long enough period.
The individual pollutants can be located and reduced, but the single most important factor is ventilation. Monday is the worst day for headaches and stress, at least partly because the ventilation systems have often been shut down over the weekend; you’re breathing old, stale air. The ducts of your office air-venting system probably haven’t been cleaned in years. Dust and molds have built up inside them and are coming out into the air you breathe when the system is restarted. Ask the maintenance people to clean them; if they won’t, get a heavyduty charcoal filter and put it in the vent with a thick white insulation pad over it. These filters can be bought inexpensively at any hardware store. In one week the insulation pad will be covered with black particles large enough to see.
If it’s noisy where you work, wear earplugs. You can also make your desk more pleasant with a small portable ionizer. The ionizer can actually fit in your pocket and is also useful in airplanes or on the dashboard of your car.
The fluorescent lighting often used in offices flashes on and off rapidly and constantly, placing great stress on your central nervous system. Although you are not consciously aware of this very rapid flickering, your eye and nervous system are overstimulated by it; two or three hours of work under fluorescent light can have the effect of three or four cups of coffee. At a certain level of overstimulation the central nervous system will shut down, and you will find yourself deeply fatigued. Replace the fluorescent lighting at your desk with a lamp that uses incandescent bulbs and use natural full-spectrum light bulbs. It’s best to have an office with a window or skylight for true natural lighting; if you don’t have one and can’t arrange it, it’s especially important to have natural—and sufficiently bright—lighting.
Stay away from the photocopier at the office as much as possible; it uses volatile chemicals. Don’t leave typewriter ink or correction ribbons lying around open; put them in a sealed plastic bag when they are not in use. An exhaust fan on the ceiling will help draw away vaporizing fluids.
An increasing body of evidence is showing the benefits of natural modalities to overall health and well-being. The following is a sample of recent peer-reviewed scientific studies in the area of environmental illness.
A 2015 report in JAMA Psychiatry concluded that that prenatal exposure to poly-cyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) air pollutants may affect the development of left hemisphere white matter and is associated with cognitive and behavioral problems in childhood, including slower processing speed, attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, and externalizing problems. A 2014 article in Townsend Letter reviewed the literature and determined that mycotoxins—toxic chemicals produced by both molds and yeasts—may disrupt endocrine, thyroid, and adrenal function. Mycotoxin exposure has been linked to many adverse conditions, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, various cancers, diabetes, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, autism, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Raynaud’s disease, kidney stones, and vasculitis.