How to Detoxify Your Home with Dr. Jenny Goodman

0:00Why does the air in your house need freshening in the first place? I mean, just empty the bins and open the windows. If your sofa is made, and your carpet, is made of synthetic material, anything synthetic, that means it's made of petrochemical material. That means it's flammable. So by law, it has to be impregnated with flame retardants. It's not one individual chemical that's the worst problem. It's the cocktail effect. It's the fact that we're exposed to all of them all the time. And we spend 90 % of our lives indoors.

0:37Dr. Jenny Goodman:Hi folks, welcome back to Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. As many of you will have noticed, we're now alternating between two different episode types. So one week we'll do a house visit, like the one with Maria Balshaw, and the next we'll do a foundations episode, like the one today. So we'll be drilling down into a particular topic. Today's conversation is about toxicity. My guest is Dr. Jenny Goodman, a practitioner of ecological medicine, who's written two books on the subject, Staying Alive in Toxic Times and Getting Healthy in Toxic Times. A lot of what Jenny advocates relates specifically to the home, so the harmful effects of cleaning products, how to prepare and store food safely, avoiding plastic, reducing electromagnetic radiation, and all sorts of other things like that.

1:27Dr. Jenny Goodman:She tells me why she believes everything from the food we eat to the mattress we sleep on should be organic. She explains why baby monitors should be used with caution. And she tells me some surprising things about tap water. Jenny is extremely passionate about this stuff and I should say that a lot of it is quite subjective. None of us are perfect and I've certainly got a long way to go in my own house. But I do think it's worth considering if we can make some small changes to reduce our toxic load. And some of it is pretty simple to do. Jenny's books have certainly opened my eyes to a few things.

2:02Dr. Jenny Goodman:I don't use cling film anymore, for example. And we now make up our own cleaning sprays at home instead of using shop bought ones. So have a listen and make up your own mind about it. Here it is, and I hope you find it helpful. I'd love to start, Jenny. Let me just give people a point before we talk about the specifics of what they might be able to do in their home to reduce their toxic load. If they action some of the things we talk about today, how will it help them in their long-term health? What are the kinds of things it might help them prevent? Firstly, yes, it is preventive. And I think if you can get all the chemical and electromagnetic sources of toxicity out of your home, you're definitely reducing your long-term risk of cancer and of dementia.

2:48Those are the most important ones. And probably of autoimmune disease as well, like arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto's, and so on. But if you are ill, you will hopefully notice improvements in your general health. I mean, the most dramatic example I can give is, and this is unusual, I cured one lady's migraines simply by breaking her addiction to air fresheners. She was spraying air fresheners all around the place. And within a week of stopping, her migraines have gone. Now, it's not normally that simple with migraines. It's actually a very complex condition usually.

3:26It takes ages to figure it out, what the triggers are in each individual case. But that's one example. But air fresheners are toxic to everybody. And I say to people, well, if you want a lovely smell, just sprinkle some nice natural essential oils around the place, organic oils of lavender or lemongrass, rose, rosemary, jasmine, geranium. There are lots of wonderful smells. And if you want to light a candle, light a beeswax candle, a beeswax tea light under a ceramic burner and put some water in the top with some drops of those essential oils. That's all you need to do to make the air in your house smell lovely.

4:07But, you know, rewinding a little bit, why does the air in your house need freshening in the first place? I mean, just empty the bins and open the windows.

4:17Dr. Jenny Goodman:I love that. Opening the windows is underrated though, isn't it? I mean, we should all be opening our windows every day, shouldn't we? Oh, mine are never closed. Really? That's interesting. So, well, let's talk about indoor air quality then. What are VOCs or volatile organic compounds and why should we care about those? It's almost anything. Volatile just means they evaporate. Organic in this context simply means a carbon-containing molecule. It's not like your nice box of pesticide-free veg. So it's simply any substance that evaporates. And they're not all bad. For example, in a pine forest, that wonderful smell is the pine volatile organic chemicals that the trees give off.

5:01But in the home, we're talking about anything toxic, whether it's formaldehyde from your synthetic furniture like MDF type, you know, these wood substitutes, or whether it's formaldehyde from your non-iron shirts and your non-crinkle shirts or any of the chemo. Apart from the heavy metals, almost every chemical we're going to talk about is volatile. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to inhale it. And I would say in advance, don't freely have to make all the changes at once. Take it slowly. Take it at a reasonable pace and just know that every change you make, however small, is helping your health and your children's health if you've got kids at home.

5:42Dr. Jenny Goodman:it seems to me that a lot of us do home refurbishments especially um when we're younger as well i think we're trying to climb the property ladder we're all quite addicted to this idea of improving our environment which is brilliant on one level but of course the actual building process it seems to me i mean tell me if i'm wrong about this but i would imagine that releases a lot of toxicity just the act of building it's true i mean a lot of toxic voCs are released from the building materials, particularly the glues, the glues that's used to stick everything together. But they do evaporate and go away.

6:19It's even the same with paints. I mean, you can get organic paints, but even if you use conventional paints, so long as you are out of the way while it's happening, especially if you're chemically sensitive and you make sure it's done in the late spring or the summer, within a week, most of those smells have gone, right? They do evaporate. So I'm much more concerned about the things people use every day.

6:41Dr. Jenny Goodman:For example, the cleaning chemicals in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, right? Most of those, if you look at the bottles, they've got the skull and crossbones on. It means what it has always meant. This is a poison. Now, the manufacturers put that on to warn people not to let their kids, you know, swig a bottle of bleach. And if you look up, which you can look up, the data sheet for each and every chemical. It's talking about acute poisoning. It's talking about what happens if you swallow it, which nobody's going to do. What I'm much more concerned about, what we're all suffering from in today's post-industrialized world, is chronic poisoning.

7:20That's very low levels, but every day, the regular drip, drip, drip of tiny doses of toxins that, you know, we just can't, most of us can't process most of these. And it's not one individual chemical that's the worst problem. It's the cocktail effect. It's the fact that we're exposed to all of them all the time. And we spend 90 % of our lives indoors. If you look at those cleaning chemicals, chuck them all out and replace them with hot water, a bit of really ecologically sound washing up liquid like SUMA, S-U-M-A, make one called EcoLeaf. And, you know, hot water, washing up liquid and elbow grease that means really scrubbing hard we'll deal with most things plus bicarbonate of soda is um yeah just sodium bicarbonate it's a very good cleaning agent that's more or less all

8:13Dr. Jenny Goodman:you need you know you can use vinegar can't you jenny you can use vinegar particularly for washing the windows i don't do that because i don't like my house to smell like a chippy but you can do it you can do it absolutely um so then people especially in the covid episode started spraying antibacterial sprays around their kitchen and that stuff's toxic in itself but it's also killing the good bugs that our immune systems need as their training ground and especially the kids you know when my kids would come in from playing in the garden when they were little i did not make them wash their hands if they'd been playing in the woods or the park i did not make them wash their hands because those are good bacteria from the soil that we need.

8:59If they came in from being in the car or on the London tube, I would definitely make them wash their hands because that's petrochemical pollution. That's different. That's carcinogenic. Okay. So yeah, alternative cleaning materials. Cook where? What are you cooking in? Right. Now, the metal in any saucepan is going to get into the food if the food is acid. So I don't mind you boiling an egg in your aluminium saucepan or boiling some rice in an aluminium saucepan. But if you're cooking rhubarb in there, that's a bad idea. Rhubarb, tomatoes, lemons, fruit of any kind is acid and it will dissolve the aluminium into your food.

9:41So what about stainless steel? Stainless steel is okay for most people but it is 14 percent nickel so you know if you're dealing with nickel sensitivity skin rash if you're a woman with a history family history of breast cancer or if you're diabetic or pre-diabetic for all those people nickel is a real hazard and therefore i would apply to stainless steel saucepans the same rule i'd apply to aluminium which is don't cook anything acid in it by all means, you know, boil a potato or something.

10:13Dr. Jenny Goodman:On that, Jenny, I mean, what about non-stick surfaces as well? Ah, yes. Non-stick is really important. Mostly the stuff that's been used to make non-stick surfaces is lethal. It's perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, the PFAs. And if you listen to that name carefully, you can hear the word fluoride in it. and there is in those chemicals a bond between fluoride and carbon it's a bond that doesn't exist in nature and it's almost unbreakable chemically and this is why these are called the forever chemicals and they are finally being phased out they're in non-stick pans they're also in waterproof clothing serious outdoor stuff that you know i've worn for going up mountains and they are in the water in cambridgeshire i document this at the end of the book and we need to avoid them absolutely um so if you have got waterproofs that have still got pfas in that's okay but don't wear them next to your skin i mean you wouldn't would you that would be really strange um but yeah non-stick surfaces are now available in safe ways so um there's something called green pans and the green pans they are expensive but that's because part of their non-stick surface is diamond.

11:30And, you know, if you cook up boiling hot temperatures in olive oil and you never stir, you're going to damage that surface. But I think we need to get back to stirring and then we don't need perfect non-stickness.

11:42Dr. Jenny Goodman:I've got some cast iron pans and I think they're really good. They take a little while to, you know, to get seasoned. Exactly. Don't they? But after the first few times, they work really well. Exactly. And cast iron is what we've been using for a long time. There's also a type of glass you can use. Yeah, borate glass. That's really good. But yeah, you have to have enough oil in the pan or water and you have to stir. Yeah. Then there's also the question in the kitchen of what you're wrapping your food in. And I think we need to go back to ceramic dishes for storage. Like you have a butter dish, you can have a cheese dish, not using plastic.

12:23and for wrapping we need to let go of the cling film because that is the thinnest softest form of plastic and it does get into the food and we're all contaminated by plastic particles and it's just about the only toxic substance that those of us in ecological medicine cannot detox we can't get the plastic out of our systems we can get the plasticizers out the phthalates and the BPA, but we can't get the plastic itself out. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic from microplastics to nanoplastics. We have to stop buying water in plastic bottles, cling film, plastic chopping boards.

13:03All the plastic things in our homes can be replaced by something else, wood or metal or paper bags.

13:10Dr. Jenny Goodman:One of the things that I was quite terrified about was this thing about black spatulas that you cook with which I discovered are made of sort of recycled TVs and things like that and actually when you're cooking with a black plastic spatula it essentially leeches out into your food in the pan so that was another one I thought would be a good one to avoid and I've come across quite a few of those over the years in people's houses. I think that's right and this is the irony that we're all trying to be ecologically sound and use stuff that's made from recycled materials. But what is that material?

13:46Somebody gave me a scarf that was made entirely from recycled plastic. And on the one hand, it's good that that plastic isn't going into landfill, but do I want it around my neck? Because the skin is the largest organ of the body, and it's an absorptive surface. Plastics are petrochemical. So, yeah, I mean, I think there is an issue with implements, and I think probably stainless steel spatulas are the best, but you don't want to scrape any kind of nonstick surface with it. So wood is great, but wood does go mouldy eventually. And I think I would say wooden implements are good, and the same with wooden chopping boards, but you must be prepared to change them pretty regularly, like twice a year at least, because otherwise, you know, like all natural materials, they will accumulate mould.

14:32And when you're actually cooking, are you an advocate of an extractor fan or do you not think that's important? Yes, because otherwise you build up steam. We're doing three things in our home. We're cooking, which produces steam. We're exhaling, we're breathing out water vapour, and we're bathing and showering. and if you have the windows shut and no extractor fan and no ventilation that condensation is going to build up hugely particularly where the wall meets the ceiling and mold is going to grow there but mold toxins are implicated in cancer and in chronic fatigue and rheumatoid arthritis as well

15:16Dr. Jenny Goodman:as obviously in lung problems and this is most of all an issue in the bathroom if it's really cold in winter and you just have to close the window while you're having a shower, that's fine. But when you get out of the shower and you've wrapped a warm towel around you, open the window and put on the extractor fan and a blow heater, a hot blow heater, just for five, ten minutes. Because once you've got rid of the steam, you've stopped the source of the mould. We can look at what's in the bathroom cabinets and a lot of people, women particularly, but increasingly men as well, are putting on their skin stuff that they wouldn't dream of putting in their mouths.

15:53So moisturizers, shampoos, shower gels, deodorants, hair products, all these things, perfumes especially, these days most of them are made of petrochemicals. Now if you think about perfume, I mean 200 years ago perfumes were just extracted from flowers. But they still are. That's your natural essential oils of geranium and lavender and so on. So you can use that instead. But most conventional cosmetic products, so-called personal care products, are full of really nasty chemicals. And the Environmental Working Group in the States found not only there's all the toxic chemicals listed on the label, but an average of 14 chemicals in there not listed on the label, because if they constitute less than 1 % of the total ingredients, you're allowed not to list them.

16:44Now, we have a huge problem with cosmetics that we don't have with food, which is you're allowed to call a personal care product, you're allowed to call it organic if it contains only 1 % organic ingredients. So unfortunately, you can't just walk into your local health food shop and say, oh, look, some organic shampoo with a pretty picture of a herb on the front. What you need to do is look for either the Soil Association logo or the Cosmos logo. And Cosmos is an international association for certifying genuinely organic cosmetic products and the Soil Association is part of it and there is an equivalent for organic clothing textiles it's called GOTS the Global Organic Textile Standards if it's got that label or the Soil Association it's genuinely organic but the simplest thing is just to look at the Soil Association's website health and beauty pages and see what they recommend because it's a minefield out there otherwise.

17:45Dr. Jenny Goodman:Okay, so that's cosmetics and I think that's really clear. And what about food then? Is it as simple as buying organic food? Is that the thing to do? Actually, it is, but I would say, slight caveat, it has to be Soil Association approved organic food, because there are other organisations that certify, like I think the Organic Farmers and Growers Group, which are less strict. The Soil Association is very strict. I mean, some farmers complain that they're fanatically strict and that their certification is really expensive and those are issues but actually I think if you can only take one thing from this it's buy organic food because if you're not you're eating food that's been sprayed with glyphosate a toxic herbicide or grapes that have been sprayed with toxic insecticides you know any fruit the lettuce leaves all of that has been sprayed with pesticides which were designed originally at the beginning of the 20th century as nerve gases so these pesticides are neurotoxic right they're in the soil they're in the food they're on the plate they're in your bodies i see eating organic as health insurance the best health insurance right you're not eating neurotoxic carcinogenic endocrine disrupting chemicals and the only way to not eat them is to eat organic right you don't have to be fundamentalist about it if you go out for a meal with a friend you know they've cooked for you you know love and hospitality takes precedence and you know if you're eating 95 percent organic then that's okay most people's systems can cope with that now we should talk about water if you're not filtering your water you're drinking other people's drug residues, the PFAs that we talked about earlier, the heavy metals and the runoff from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and so on.

19:38But all of those are kind of accidental. Nobody's putting them in the water deliberately. They're just failing to take them out. But the chlorine is put in the water deliberately. And originally, this was done at the end of the century for very good reason, because, you know, supplying safe, potable tap water to 10 million people is a huge logistical challenge. You don't want the cholera bacterium in there. You don't want dangerous diarrhoea or bacteria in there. So chlorine kills most of them, most of the time, not all of them. There was an episode in the 90s in Connecticut, I think some other states, where there was huge cryptosporidium infections in the tap water despite the chlorine.

20:24But there is another much safer way to do it, right? Because chlorine is toxic, right? So toxic halogen, it pushes the iodine out from the thyroid gland and the stomach and the breast and the ovary and all the other organs that need iodine. So we know chlorine is toxic, but the Dutch have a completely different way of killing the bacteria in their tap water. They have a two-stage process that starts with physical filtering and ends with ultraviolet light. And we know the sunshine is the best antiseptic. That's why people with TB have been sent to sunny mountaintops to get better, and it mostly worked.

21:02The sun is antiseptic because of the ultraviolet. So they irradiate their water with ultraviolet, and there you go. It's bacteria-free, and they're not drinking chlorine in the Netherlands.

21:14Dr. Jenny Goodman:If we don't live in the Netherlands, what should we do? Filter your water. Filter your water and filter your water. You hear a lot at the moment, don't you, about reverse osmosis filters. Yeah, reverse osmosis is just one way of doing it. It's just one way of doing it. And some people worry that it takes out all the good minerals as well. You should get your minerals from your food rather than your water. But, you know, natural spring water is full of healthy minerals like magnesium and so on. and I think there's too much fuss made about this one's good and this one's not good. Almost anything makes a difference and you really can taste it.

21:51I mean, we have a plumbed-in water filter and it's a whole house water filter, which means not only are we drinking safe water, rinsing our rice in safe water, rinsing our vegetables in safe water, but also bathing and showering in safe water. And that's very important because the chlorine, you inhale it in the shower. And once you've done that, it was only about five, six years ago, then I would notice if I was staying over with a friend and had a shower in the morning, the smell of chlorine was awful because I had become, if you like, de-desensitized to it. I could notice it again because I wasn't bathing in it every day.

22:35We should mention fluoride as well.

22:37Dr. Jenny Goodman:Yeah, well, exactly. We should mention fluoride. And actually, I mean, on that, I was quite shocked to discover that only 3 % of the population in Western Europe actually drink water with added fluoride. And a lot of us in the UK do, don't we? So tell us about this. Well, in the United States and Canada, almost everywhere has fluoride in the water, and in mainland Europe, almost nowhere. And that should be a big wake-up call, because they are accessible. So the situation in Britain until fairly recently was that there were only two areas with fluoride added to the tap water. One was Birmingham and the West Midlands, and the other, well, not technically in Britain, but in the British Isles, the other is the Republic of Ireland.

23:24Now, in both those places, they've had fluoride in the water since 1964. And I had been in practice for many years seeing children with assorted problems from all over Britain and Europe. And then I noticed, I think I was quite slow, but I eventually noticed a disproportionate number of these really sick kids are coming from Birmingham or the Republic of Ireland. And then I started, I realised, and I measured their urinary fluoride levels, and they were through the roof. And then I measured their urinary iodine levels, and they were unmeasurable, unmeasurable, just not there. The lab kept ringing me up and saying, oh, sorry, we must have made a mistake.

24:04Can you send another sample? Because we couldn't find any iodine. Send a second sample. No, there really is no iodine. And these are children with serious developmental disorders of brain and bone. And there is a case history in chapter three of getting healthy in toxic times of a little boy who was from Birmingham, had very high fluoride, very low iodine. It was nine, couldn't read or write, couldn't count, very, very slow speech, really sluggish, obviously symptoms of hypothyroidism because a thyroid gland can't make thyroxine, thyroid hormone, without iodine. But he also had a really strange gait.

24:44It looked like Ricketts. It wasn't Ricketts. His vitamin D was actually okay. And there was something wrong with his bones. And none of the millions of specialists he'd seen could figure it out or give it a name. After about a year of installing a water filter, so he was no longer drinking fluoride, giving him iodine, gently, slowly, low dose, building up and then tapering off again, and all the general detox measures we would do, the B vitamins for the brain function and so on. His brain function improved out of sight. I mean, he caught up. He became able to read and write and speak normally, but the bone architecture was damaged.

25:21There was nothing we could do for the bone architecture because fluoride does damage it. So you must ask yourself, why is it being put in the tap water. The reason given is that it's good for children's teeth. It is not the real reason. There's a lot of debate about what it does to children's teeth. It certainly hardens them. It hardens the bones as well. But making them more dense doesn't make them stronger or less liable to break. And too much fluoride causes dental fluorosis, damage to the teeth, and skeletal fluorosis, damage to the skeleton. And there are studies showing that in postmenopausal women, the higher their fluoride level, the more liable they are to have a bone fracture.

26:04And it's not about bone density because fluoride makes the bones more dense, but also paradoxically more liable to fracture. So you can argue about whether it's good for children's teeth or not. I think what's good for children's teeth is brushing them and taking them off the sugar. But that's not the real reason. Where's the fluoride coming from? Where is it coming from? What is it? Well, it turns out it is a byproduct, a toxic waste product of two huge industries. The phosphate fertilizer industry, these are the synthetic fertilizers that are damaging our land and our crops, and the aluminum industry.