Book Review: The Non-Toxic Avenger (by Deanna Duke)

Deanna Duke is the mind behind the brilliant blog The Crunchy Chicken. I highly recommend her blog for posts on sustainable living, urban homesteading, raising chickens and the like. So when I realised she was writing a book, I ordered an advance copy; it arrived about a week ago and I’ve finished it already. So far so good! I’m not entirely sure if the fact I couldn’t put it down was due to the content or just because I hate having unfinished books lying around. But I still mostly enjoyed this book and it was an easy read.

The main idea

“Most of us turn a blind eye to the startling array of chemicals lurking in everything from shampoo to baby bottles to the money in our wallets, choosing to believe that government agencies ensure the safety of the products we wear, use, ingest, and breathe in daily. Yet the standards for product safety in North America lag far behind those of other countries. We frequently hear that a substance we’ve relied on for years turns out to have serious effects on our health, the environment, or both.

After coming to terms with the fact that the autism and cancer which had impacted her family were most likely the result of environmental toxins, author Deanna Duke undertook a mission to dramatically reduce her family’s chemical exposure. She committed to drastically reducing the levels of all known chemicals in both her home and work environments, using the help of body burden testing to see what effect, if any, she was able to have on the level of toxins in her body.”

What I liked

Great book idea! I have often wondered how much lifestyle changes actually impact my exposure to toxins, and if changes I make are actually making a difference to my body. Now that this book details a rigorous “before and after” of toxin levels, that’s no longer such a mystery.

Deanna has an easy way with words. It’s easy to mentally get along with her, and her personal story is also compelling. I am also a sucker for reading about everyday toxins, so the topic of her book was my kind of read. Throughout most of the book, Deanna analyses all of her personal consumer products very thoroughly. I liked that she went through her research process – what companies she emailed and what they came back with. And if she couldn’t find any data, she said so, rather than left it out of the book. I felt like I was reading something honest.

Most of the book consists of Deanna researching everything she comes into contact with in everyday life: from her food and clothes to sunglasses, bedding, sunscreen, perfume, deodorant, tap water, house paint, alcohol, non-stick cookware and other non-stick items (more than you might expect), pharmaceutical drugs and electronics. Basically, if she used it she researched it. There were a lot of interesting tidbits to be gleaned. I never realised that laptops usually contain a lot of BpA and that there are actually alternatives out there. Bamboo laptop anyone?

The body-burden testing was pretty unusual and I enjoyed reading about the process. I would love to go through the process myself, but until I have a book contract I’ll enjoy living vicariously through Duke. And aside from the testing itself, Deanna kept the entire process very doable. She stuck to a budget of $5,000 (Canadian dollars) and avoided anything that was too unrealistic, like four-hour-long sweat sessions recommended to her as part of her detox.

What I didn’t like so much

Hardly Deanna’s fault, but many of the brands she analysed were not common names in New Zealand and so the book was not as relevant to New Zealand as I would have liked.

Early in the book, Deanna and her kids have flu shots. I felt like she blithely skipped over all the toxins in vaccines. She did investigate Thiomersal, which is a mercury-based preservative used in many vaccines. Her conclusion was that the amount of mercury was equivalent to that in a tin of tuna and therefore not worth worrying about. I would argue that when you eat tuna, you aren’t injecting its mercury content directly into your bloodstream and might therefore expect it to have vastly different effects. And mercury is hardly the only toxin in vaccines; what about the effects of formaldehyde, aluminium, MSG, artificial sweeteners, benzene derivatives and other ingredients being injected into the bloodstream? (Full disclosure: we began as pro-vaccination parents but stopped after Mila’s 5 month vaccinations; by that stage I’d done enough research to deeply regret ever starting.)

I was also amazed and a bit horrified to see her recommending a DIY recipe that contained palm oil as one ingredient. Palm oil is a huge reason for the deforestation of virgin rainforest: rainforest is destroyed in order to grow palms to support large companies’ desire for cheap oil at any cost. Here in New Zealand, a backlash against Cadbury’s recipe reformulation to make chocolates with palm oil led to the multinational reverting back to the original cocoa butter recipe. Palm oil in consumer products is still an insidious problem – Greenpeace is one of several organisations on the oil case. Given Deanna is an environmental blogger, I was disappointed to see the palm oil recipe.

Finally, I’d have liked to have read more about the research into the effects different substances have on our health. While Deanna investigated endless consumer products, she left a lot less room to write about the chemicals she found in them. The end result was an interesting run-down, but a little light on the research and studies I would have liked to read about.

In summary

I enjoyed reading Nontoxic Avenger. It was interesting and funny and honest. I’m naturally a pretty slow reader and I sailed through it and learned a bit along the way. I wouldn’t recommend it to people as a go-to guide for learning about toxins (I think Healthy Child, Healthy World does a better job of that); but then, I don’t think that was the author’s intention either. I also had a couple of issues with it, as outlined above. But if you want to read about what environmental toxins might be in your system (even if you lead a relatively “green” life), this might be the book for you.

Not So Sexy: The Stinky Story of Perfume in New Zealand

Tags

alternative fragrances, campaign for safe cosmetics, fragrance, labelling laws, not so sexy report, perfume, toxins in perfume

I’m a sucker for a nice smell. Who isn’t? It’s obvious that floral scents appeal: they appear in everything from perfumes, detergents, shampoos, hand creams, baby wipes, paper, ink, pesticides, candles, air fresheners, food, fly sprays and a host of other consumer products. Even products that claim to be “fragrance free” only have to contain no perceptible odour: often they contain both fragrances – to hide chemical smells – and masking agents to hide the fragrance.

It would be nice if all these floral smells came from natural sources. The companies that create them would love you to think that’s the case. Plenty of perfume adverts these days show waifish girls standing in or even rolling through beds of wildflowers. Perfume bottles frequently evoke the shape of flowers; petals are everywhere. The implication is that perfumes are the bottled essence of nature. The gimmick is nothing new – companies have been trying to sell the idea that perfumes come from flowers for years.

These adverts are laughable really (even aside from the idea that you need to be mostly naked with beads wrapped round your torso in order to sell a product), once you know what’s in them. The reality is that perfumes and fragrances – used on their own or added to other products – are a potent cocktail of well over 3,000 individual synthetic chemicals. Some of the most common are listed here.

So what exactly are these chemicals?

Perfume consists mostly of chemicals called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. We smell fragrance chemicals because they become airborne due to their volatility…. Children, since they are closer to the ground, are more likely to inhale VOCs as they fall through the air.

What are the problems with perfumes (aka parfum) and fragrances?

In a wider sense, volatile compounds cause air pollution. They also bio-accumulate in the environment and contaminate waterways and aquatic wildlife.

The chemicals that make up perfumes are commonly skin and respiratory system irritants and allergens. Some chemicals in perfume alter the skin tension to make it absorb more of the fragrance – and then it will also absorb more of any other chemicals it comes into contact with. Some of the chemicals, like formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, are carcinogenic. Some, including toluene (also known as methyl benzene) are neurotoxins. Some chemicals have depressant and narcotic properties. Perfumes often contain phthalates as these plasticisers make fragrances last longer. Unfortunately, they can also cause hormone disruption and birth defects.

Of the 3,000 chemicals that the fragrance industry utilizes to make perfume and other scented products, 900 are toxic, as reported by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. These toxic substances include carcinogens and chemicals such as diethyl phthalate and musk ketone. Diethyl phthalate is a chemical that builds up in human tissue over time, and is found in 97 percent of Americans. It is linked to sperm damage. Similarly, musk ketone is found in high concentrations in human fat tissue, including breast milk.

- The Safety of the Chemicals in Perfume

Some of these chemicals cause irritability, mental vagueness, muscle pain, asthma, bloating, joint aches, sinus pain, fatigue, sore throat, eye irritation, gastrointestinal problems, laryngitis, headaches, dizziness, swollen lymph nodes, spikes in blood pressure, coughing, and burning or itching skin irritations… the chemical industry’s own Toxic Data Safety Sheets list headaches, tremors, convulsions, and even death as a possible effect of exposure to acetonitrile, another common fragrance ingredient.

-The Toxic Effects of Perfume

And some chemicals… well, this is the worst bit really: we just don’t know what all the chemicals do or what effects they might have. We also don’t know what effect they have on children, even though children breathe more air than adults and have more permeable skin. Of the thousands of chemicals found in commercial fragrances, very few have been tested. In fact, 43% of these high production volume chemicals have no testing data on basic toxicity and only seven percent have a full set of basic test data. Most of the chemicals which have been studied have been found to be fairly toxic in at least one area – so who knows what is left lurking in the rest of the compounds used.

There are two main problems with avoiding the toxins in perfumes: 1) the industry safety regulations are crap and 2) so are the labelling regulations. Let’s look at these two issues a bit more.

1. The safety regulations are crap.

Way back in 1986, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences identified fragrance ingredients as one of six categories of neurotoxins that should be thoroughly investigated for impacts on human health. Despite this, there is no requirement that fragrance components (or any cosmetic ingredients, for that matter) have to be proven safe before being added to products. Quite the opposite in fact: ingredients have to be proven toxic before they must be removed. It’s an equation that makes consumers the guinea pig – in fact, there’s an even a NZ site called “I am not a guinea pig” which campaigns against this dangerous retrospective regulating.

Think New Zealand’s laws must be better? Nope. The cosmetic industry in New Zealand is only self-regulated by the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CTFA), a group of companies within the industry. Like the United States, the CTFA follows a policy of “include all the shit you like until you can PROVE it causes harm.” Most consumer products are held to the Product Safety Standard of section 29 of the Fair Trading Act, but cosmetics are exempt. The CTFA campaigns against any increased regulation: their submissions have included asking the Ministry of Consumer Affairs not to match Australia’s slightly better fragrance safety laws; that any new laws be “principles” rather than prescriptive; and not to add a “good faith” clause to the Fair Trading Act (which would ask that suppliers trade fairly and in good faith). They also regularly stipulate that their submissions should not be “heard in public”; although the submissions can still be found on good old Google if you look hard enough. This month, the International Organization for Standardization will hold 217 meetings in New Zealand about cosmetic safety. However, the conference is hosted by – you guessed it – the CTFA, so I’m dubious about it having any major breakthroughs.

2. The labelling regulations are crap.

In New Zealand there are NO laws that cover cosmetic ingredient labelling, even though they have existed in Australia since 1991 (yup – we’re 20 years behind and counting). Fragrances are considered trade secrets and don’t have to be labelled at all. And because there are so many potential ingredients in fragrances, companies can refuse to list ingredients like phthalates because they come under the umbrella of “fragrance” (or perfume, parfum, whatever).

Even if you DO see an ingredient list, don’t assume it’s complete. A report last year by the Environmental Working Group entitled “Not So Sexy” found that the average fragrance contains 14 unlisted ingredients. The unlisted ingredients were not randomly left off: they were much more likely than listed ingredients to be toxic or untested for safety.

In July 2010 the (NZ) Environmental Risk Management Authority decided to remove the expiry date from the use of “alternative labelling provisions”. Alternative labelling provisions means that imported cosmetics only have to satisfy the laws of the country they come from, not the New Zealand law. So if your product was imported from, say, Thailand or India, it only has to satisfy their labelling laws, not ours. This system was supposed to be temporary, but thanks to the removal of the expiry date, has now become permanent. Not only does this mean we have no real labelling laws but it also makes policing compliance damn near impossible. Good one, ERMA :/.

So where to from here?
1. Remember that no fragrance is really necessary. Perfumes don’t serve any purpose other than to smell nice, cover up other chemical smells and enhance artificial flavours. Use fewer chemicals and eat less processed food and you won’t need fragrances in your life.

2. If you need those pretty smells, consider essential oils or a bunch of flowers (or pot plant) to freshen up a room. And check out the Good magazine guide to alternative fragrances. They also have some cool DIY fragrant ideas.

3. Do things the old fashioned way to get rid of odours: open windows, sprinkle the area with baking soda (or put a saucer of it nearby); spritz with white vinegar diluted in water.

4. Look for fragrance free products (rather than unscented), but check the ingredient list to see if it contains fragrance anyway

5. Check out Safe Cosmetics to check the ingredient lists and safety ratings of your beauty products.

6. And most importantly: take action!

• Don’t buy fragranced products – vote with your wallet
• Join the I’m Not A Guinea Pig campaign
• Vote for the Green Party – they have a comprehensive Toxics Policy, including mandatory product ingredient labelling
• It might be worth looking for products certified by Environmental Choice New Zealand. While their certified toiletries are not necessarily fragrance free, they are free of toxic musks and have other environmental standards, like not being bio-accumulative.
• While you’re at it, check out the brand new (launched Nov 10) Safe Shopper website, which is a guide to cruelty-free cosmetics.

Finally… check out this cool video, The Story of Cosmetics.

10 Things To Do When You’re Having a Rubbish Day

Tags

baking bread, facebook, gardening, housework, tea, thrifting

For reasons that are mostly outside of my control, the last few days have been unbelievably frustrating, tiring, draining and upsetting. Boo! It’s hard when something bursts your bubble, but there are some ways I’m getting my mojo back.

1.  Bake bread. Or cupcakes. Or apple crumble. I like that with bread you can knead your frustrations out, and it’s wholesome and real. There is something wonderful about working with live yeast and turning it into bread – I highly recommend it. But whatever takes your fancy, baking is therapeutic.

2.  Thrift shop. Second-hand shopping is brilliantly green; not only is it cheap but you’re giving a product a whole second life. Today I bought 16 children’s books for $8. Mila has no idea the books are not new – she’s just stoked she has more photos of kittens and puppies than ever.

3.  Tidy your house. Bear with me! I know that housework doesn’t exactly put a smile on everyone’s face. But a tidy house is a lot less stressful to be in than a messy one. It is easier to feel calm and centered in a tidy space. Just dive in somewhere. Clean one room you spend a lot of time in (e.g., the living room) and just put the mess into another room if you really can’t face it.

4. Write. A letter, an email, a journal, a blog. Just vent away. It doesn’t matter if you never post a letter or someone never reads it.

5. Go outside. And please don’t take your i-phone with you. Mila and I went for a walk in the rain today, her gumboots poking out of the waterproof pram cover while I pounded the footpath and held imagined arguments in my head. Fresh air does a body good. And it does a soul good too, for that matter.

6. Read something inspiring. Or something funny. Or a trashy magazine. Distract yourself with words.

7. Get off Facebook. I have learned recently that having all your friends intimately involved in your life via online connections – and being used to all day, everyday contact with those friends via Facebook – can get pretty toxic. Switch off and engage with people face to face. Or enjoy your solitude. On Facebook, you’re not really alone and you’re not really in company. Rejoin the real world and breathe a breath of fresh air.

8. Plant something. If you have nothing to plant, weed. Get those fingers in the soil. Getting dirt under your fingernails is a good way to calm down. If you have no garden, consider buying a planter and some soil and seedlings. You could also buy a potplant or a bunch of flowers.

9. Drink tea. Better for you than coffee, and you can have a whole teapot’s worth without jumping off the walls. Don’t rush around while you drink; be present with your cup of tea.

10. Forgive. I’m not there yet, but it is worth putting on the list. It is much easier to let go and move on and be happy when you accept what has happened and release all those pent up feelings back into the atmosphere. At least try not to be bitter. We are all really lucky for something in our lives. Celebrate whatcha got.

Baking Bread

The first loaf

When I was in high school, I was a mean baker. I made white loaves, brown loaves, baguettes, croissants, pain au chocolat. If it involved bread and yeast in some shape or form, and butter in the eating, I was there. Of course, that was years ago. I kind of figured that my bread-making proficiency back in the day was because I had oodles of time to spare making it – after all, I knew next to nothing about the science of what I was doing. Also, I thought it was one of those things you had to make very frequently to be any good at. Happily, there may yet be a second chapter.

I’ve begun making my own bread again.

The impetus for starting to bake bread again is that I’ve been trying to increase the amount of organic food we are eating, and buying organic bread was pretty much bankrupting us. I was ordering it online from PureBread as if you order in bulk over $23, you get free shipping (in New Zealand). While their bread is fine – a bit like Vogels – I wasn’t overly enthused by it. And at $6.70 a loaf, it wasn’t cheap either.

So instead I’ve been purchasing organic stone-ground wholewheat flour from Commonsense Organics. Commonsense aren’t known for being wallet-friendly either, but this flour is $4.40 per kilo and I get four loaves out of that. You do the math – I am stoked! They have plenty of other flours but I’m yet to get experimenting.

As it has been a long time since I used to make bread, I followed the brilliant tutorial at Down To Earth. While I wouldn’t recommend it as Rhonda clearly knows her bread, her recipe seems to tolerate tinkering fairly well. The first loaf I made without gluten flour or milk powder and it turned out fine. The second loaf I made without milk powder or butter and it was also fine. I am yet to have the full set of ingredients for her recipe, but I have a hunch it will be even better.

I must say, there is something very therapeutic about kneading a loaf of bread. And watching it rise. And buttering it. And even eating it.

Boric Acid in Play Doh

Tags

boric acid, boric acid in play doh, boric acid in play dough, edible play dough, play dough recipes

Until recently, Mila has been playing with bought Play-Doh from the Warehouse. It’s cheap, colourful, soft and she really liked to squish it. She also really liked to eat it. After trialling making my own play-dough, I realised one other difference – it also never goes off. That got me thinking, I wonder what preservatives are used in Play-Doh, and what are the other ingredients?

As it turns out, the main ingredients of Play-Doh are:

Wheat flour

Salt

Water

Silicon Oil

Boric Acid

You won’t find this on their website – where they are irritatingly coy about the ingredients – but Play Doh’s patent reveals that it also contains small amounts of unspecified starch-based binders, a retrogradation inhibitor, lubricants, surfactants, preservatives, hardeners, humectants, fragrance, petroleum additives and colour. Yikes.

Fragrance, petroleum additives, preservatives and colour are all problematic, especially for children. But they’re a lot more ubiquitous. Let’s look for now at Boric acid. Boric acid is a naturally occurring acid of the element Boron. You can find  it in some areas as a mineral in soil, and in fruit and some veges. Sounds pretty harmless so far, right? As Paracelsus, the founder of toxicology said, it is the dose that makes the poison. Boric acid is added to Play Doh as an anti-fungal. Cut fruit will still go mouldy fairly quickly, but Play Doh never will: I’m guessing because the levels of boric acid it contains are much more than we would naturally find.

Boric acid has wide-ranging industrial uses. It’s used as a rodent and roach-killing pesticide, antiseptic, in weedkiller, anti-rot timber treatments, photography chemical solutions, disinfectants, flame retardants and in nuclear plants. Our family has recently switched to organic produce in order to avoid pesticides, so seeing pesticides turn up in her play things – especially one that she does eat bits of – does not make me a happy camper.

Information about boric acid is very mixed. You can find everything from the acid as a dietary supplement (!) to a deadly toxin. However, the majority of non-industrial sites suggest that while acute poisoning is rare, ingesting boric acid or having repeated exposure to it is definitely something to avoid. Repeated exposure to boric acid can cause sexual development problems, infertility, weight loss, skin and lung irritation and liver or kidney damage. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency classes boric acid as moderately acutely toxic, but has yet to define “safe” limits for the acid in food and edible products. My suggestion would be zero tolerance, but the EPA has yet to call me . In New Zealand, boric acid containing pharmaceuticals are classed as restricted medicines.

I’m not suggesting that your kid gumming a mouthful of salty dough will prevent you from having grandchildren, but there is also no way I want my kid eating this kind of chemical cocktail. Yes, the packages of Play-Doh are marketed for 3+ years, but that seems like a bit of butt-covering to me; squishing dough has long been a fun past-time for toddlers well below that age.

Hmm

So we’ve swapped commercial dough for home-made. It doesn’t last quite as long, but it is far more exciting to mix up a batch of something totally different each time.

Here’s my very simple recipe, for salt-free edible peanut butter dough:

1 cup peanut butter (get 100% peanuts, or at least no salt, no sugar added)

1 cup icing sugar

1 cup flour

Add these three ingredients, then enough hot water to work into a dough.

I love the idea of sensory play doughs: adding oatmeal or rice (for eaters) and glitter or sand (for non-eaters) to home-made dough. Unlike the commercial stuff, the possibilities for home-made are endless.

No salt play dough

Natural play dough recipes

How to make natural dyes for play dough

Epiphany

Tags

breastfeeding, extended breastfeeding, steiner, television, tv free, waldorf

I’m a big believer in doing. If something doesn’t feel right – change it. Do something else. Try something different. And yet it took a while for me to realise that I’d been getting in a rut. I needed to make a change, and I wasn’t doing it. Funny how we are the last to recognise weaknesses in ourselves.

I had noticed that something wasn’t right. I felt a bit uneasy. I was irritable. I was worried – aren’t we all – that my mothering wasn’t quite up to scratch. I was jealous of blogger mothers who seemed to know exactly what they were doing and were able to pour every inch of themselves into their children. I wanted the commitment and easy dedication they seemed to possess, where caring for one’s child was both a joy and a passion. I was worried I didn’t feel like that.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my daughter deeply. She is a beautiful and cheeky little soul and I’m so blessed to have her in my life. But. I run out of ideas for things to do. I get tired and feel run down. I get exasperated by being bossed around by a 2 foot tall nipper who knows what she wants and how to complain loudly if she doesn’t get it. I get frazzled trying to juggle toddler and friends and partner and housework. Obviously, my complaints are nothing special; every mother knows what it’s like to feel like they are shortchanging most aspects of their life in some shape or form. There is never enough time or oomph for everything.

Having said that, being a mother is so important to me. It is, after all, who I am. I wouldn’t be endlessly fretting about being ‘good enough’ if it weren’t important. So I had a mental filing session and got my priorities in order. For the first time in a while, I feel at peace with myself. What has changed?

We’re going television free. While Mila is awake, she won’t be watching tv or dvds. Normally she watches about 30-40 minutes per day of a kid’s dvd: Pingu is her favourite. I spend the early evening alone and tv has been my crutch while I cook dinner. I’m yet to decide if the tv ban will extend to weekends, but switching off during the week is a great step forward for us as a family. It could be my imagination but I already notice Mila’s concentration span is improving. She is flitting from one activity to another that much less. I can’t wait to see how she changes over the next few weeks!

No screen time for me either. I have a bad habit of internet grazing while Mila is awake. I’ll spend time with her, then get distracted and check email or read a blog post. But now I’m switching off the computer while Mila is awake. It’s amazing how much more focused on her I can be, and how much more we get done together. My concentration span is improving too

Being present during breastfeeds. This is something I have struggled with for a long time. We had a very rocky start to breastfeeding and it wasn’t ’til she was around 13 or 14 months that I began to enjoy feeding her. By then, I’d learned to ‘switch off’ during feeds by browsing the internet or watching tv or reading while she fed. Anything to distract myself from feeling helpless, uncomfortable, irritated, guilty and in pain while I fed her: the emotions that usually bubbled under the surface. But now without screen time we are finally connecting. We are smiling silly grins at each other. I am relaxed and ok with it all. I finally get why all the other mums are mushy over breastfeeding. Hearing about “the wonderful bond” that breastfeeding creates used to incense me, because I found it so hard. Now I think we’ve found our second wind.

More creative play. I’ve been reading a lot of Waldorf/Steiner blogs lately, and I’ve fallen in love with parts of their philosophy. Not all of it, but the idea of a pleasant, natural space for toddlers to play in, with simple and beautiful toys. I have realised that many of our toys, though wooden, are not very natural in colour or shape and are more about education than imagination. I haven’t yet won lotto, so I’m not about to fill our house with beautiful Steiner toys and Waldorf dolls. But I am sewing Mila a doll. And collecting baskets of leaves and shells and pinecones. Thinking about our living room in terms of Mila’s playspace has been exciting. Creating change isn’t about having money – lack of it just adds to the challenge. I’m looking forward to finding more frugal ideas to transform our play area into one filled with natural shapes, colours and textures.

Life is on the up.

DIY: Ridiculously Easy Cleaning Swaps

Tags

baking soda for cleaning, home-made cleaning products, homemade cosmetics, homemade deodorant

Green cleaning: It's addictive

After getting rid of our toxic cleaning stash, I needed some greener solutions pronto. What amazes me is how easy these cleaning solutions are. Why did I not do this earlier? And what are people really paying for when they buy expensive Eco products? The answer to the first question is probably that I assumed there were lots of ingredients required to clean your house with, and I couldn’t buy and make do myself. And the answer to the second question? Pretty packaging, good marketing and a nice fairytale.

On with the recipes.

DIY: Washing Powder

1 cup baking soda

1 cup washing soda (ground in food processor if you want to get the most efficiency out of it)

Optional: Castile (olive oil) soap, vinegar, essential oils

Add 1tbsp each baking soda and washing soda to each wash. Voila! Clean clothes (told you it was dead easy).

For smelly nappies I add a splash of white vinegar to the rinse near the end of the wash. You can also mix the sodas together with 1/4 cup Castile soap and a few drops of essential oil and use that way – a la Wendyl Nissen‘s Laundry Clay.

DIY: Dishwasher powder (this recipe is from Bin Inn)

1 cup baking soda

1 cup washing soda (are you sensing a theme?)

1/4 cup salt

1/4 cup citric acid

Mix together all ingredients and blitz in a food processor.

DIY: Dishwasher rinse aid

White vinegar.

…Yup, that’s it. Just pour into the rinse aid dispenser until it’s topped up. That’s really all you need.

DIY: Cream cleaning liquid (like Jiff)

Baking soda

Enough water to mix soda into a paste.

Mix.

DIY: Exfoliant/Facial scrub (this idea is from Pig Tits and Parsley Sauce)

3 parts baking soda

1 part sweet almond oil.

Mix. Alternatively (this is also from Wendyl Nissen’s Green Goddess)

200g sea salt

4Tbsp olive oil

juice of one lemon

Mix.

DIY: Deodorant (this recipe is from One Green Generation)

1 part baking soda

6 parts cornstarch

Mix and apply sparingly with a cotton ball or a fat make-up brush. You can also add a few drops of tea tree oil or essential oil if you like a nice smell. There are a LOT of nasties in commercial deodorant and antiperspirants (like parabens, fragrance and aluminium) – so I’m pleased as punch to have such an easy and natural alternative.

Not Very Free Range Eggs

Tags

best free range eggs, free range eggs, glenpark eggs, mainland polutry, woodland eggs

I’ve bought Glenpark Woodland free range eggs for years. They weren’t the most expensive free range eggs out there, but I assumed that was because they were non-organic. They were certainly more expensive than Pams free range eggs, and seemed a bit more reliably free range.

Turns out, I’m a sucker for good marketing.

My mother asked me the other day what the best brand of free range eggs were, and I had to admit (yet again) that I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out, and spent precious Nap Time and a further evening trawling through company profiles and advertising slogans. When the dust settled, it became clear that neither are Glenpark Woodland eggs what I would call free range, they’re also not a company I would ever want to support.

To start with, the Glenpark brand is owned by Mainland Poultry. Yup, the company that owns the largest battery hen sheds in the country, and is responsible for what in my eyes amounts to animal welfare abuses in the photos below.

Hen from Mainland Poultry farm

Mainland Poultry battery cages

Mainland Poultry is a company that is fine with hens being raised in battery cages, so its free range brand is about cash, not ethics. It’s no accident that their “free range” eggs are marketed under a completely different name – most customers who buy free range do so precisely because they want nothing to do with battery farming. Unsurprisingly, Mainland have tried hard to cover their tracks. Woodland Eggs are a Glenpark brand, which is run by the Natural Chicken Company, which is owned by Mainland Poultry. Even Dunedin chef Joanne Bain – and chefs normally have very good networks of suppliers and producers – found it difficult to establish where exactly the Woodland eggs were coming from.

Despite the fact that Mainland Poultry have set up a separate brand in order to capture the free range corner of the market, Glenpark Woodland eggs are not what I would describe as free range. When I imagine free range egg farms, I think of something very much like what the Woodland website describes:

From hens free to roam in the natural shelter of trees.

Woodland’s premium eggs are more than ordinary free range eggs. They are produced by hens which spend their days exploring, foraging and dust bathing under the shade and security of their own woodland environment. Situated in New Zealand’s beautiful South Island, the Glenpark Free Range Farm is 24 hectares of pasture, dotted with hundreds of evergreen and deciduous trees. It is from this idyllic environment that your Woodland free range eggs are gathered daily and distributed around New Zealand and overseas.

It’s a very pretty image, but it’s not quite the truth.

Consumer organisation says,

Minimum standards for free-range egg production are set in the code of welfare for layer hens… It sets maximum indoor stocking densities for free-range production (10 birds per m²) but there are no rules prescribing the size of the outdoor range area or maximum flock numbers.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t imagine ten hens to a square metre when I think of free range hens. The reality of this high density free range farming is more like this:

Free range hens

Than this:

Image from Woodland eggs website

Woodland eggs come from a flock of 8,000 hens. That’s less than some companies like Otaika Poultry Farm, who have 21,000 hens (the mind boggles) but it’s still a huge number of animals. Hamish Sutherland, Mainland Poultry’s general manager, admits that some hens will never set foot outdoors. FRENZ free range chicken farmer Rob Darby alleges that around 70% of Woodland hens will never set foot outdoors. And SPCA chief executive Robyn McDonald seems to agree:

Many free-range hens are in barns all their lives, eating only grain. Consumers are being cheated if they think every (free-range) egg is equal – they certainly aren’t going to get the beneficial flavours and colour of yolk from the big flocks… Many big producers keep thousands of birds in one barn, with just a tiny exit at one end, and aggressive birds tend to “guard” the door.

While it’s good for the SPCA to confirm the facts, I wish they’d do more than pay lip service to the principles of free range farming and stand up for the animals they purport to protect. The SPCA’s standards for meeting their seal of approval allow for debeaking chicks and for up to 4,000 birds per barn. Debeaking is to prevent cannibalism, which results from stressed-out birds. But I have a hunch that if the birds were kept in smaller flock sizes, with greater access to the outdoors, a more natural outdoor environment, food source and lifestyle – they wouldn’t be aggressive, and they wouldn’t need to be debeaked.

The final nail in the coffin for my customer-of-Woodland-eggs days is the fact that they dye their chicken feed with beta carotene in order to produce eggs with bright orangey-yellow yolks. It’s true that I associate a bright yellow yolk with a chicken that has been well raised and grass fed, rather than the insipid pale yolks of battery hens. Artificially colouring the yolks is cheating, plain and simple. If your hens aren’t actually foraging in grass, at least be honest to your customers and stop pretending that they are.

So whose eggs can you trust?

- Any free range eggs are better than battery laid eggs

- Sunset free range eggs are from a company which does not also own battery hens. They are SPCA approved which means the flock is no larger than 4,000 hens – but beak blunting is still allowed.

- Eggs which have been certified by AsureQuality Organic are in my opinion the best. These include FRENZ Organic Eggs and Pasture Poultry Organic. Bio Eggs are also AsureQuality certified, although the same company also produces a barn-laid egg range. While AsureQuality standards are still not the idyllic conditions described by Woodland eggs, they are a much better start. The AsureQuality standards include:

• A maximum flock number of 1,500
• No beak blunting
• A minimum of 4m per 100 square metres of barn of “pop holes”
• Birds must be fed mostly (but not necessarily exclusively) organic food
• A maximum indoor stocking density of 6 birds per square metre of deep litter space
• A maximum outdoor stocking density of 850 laying hens per hectare (350 per acre)

AsureQuality says,

Poultry must have access to an open-air run whenever weather conditions permit and, whenever possible must have such access for at least one third of their life. These open-air runs must be mainly covered with vegetation, be provided with protective facilities, and permit birds to have easy access to adequate numbers of drinking and feeding troughs.

You can read the rest of their poultry standards here.

From a personal perspective, our family has switched to FRENZ Organic Eggs. While not all their eggs are organic, and therefore not able to be certified by AsureQuality, the company claims that all their hens are raised in accordance with the organic standards in terms of living space and outdoor access. They don’t produce any non-free-range eggs. The hens are not debeaked and the eggs are not dyed with beta carotene. Their website has a nifty feature where you can track the flock by the code on the box. The boxes are 100% recyclable, biodegradable and made in New Zealand. If the hens are fed uncertified organic food instead of 100% Certified Organic, the 100% Certified Organic label is removed from the box. In all my digging I’m yet to hear anything untoward about the FRENZ label, other than a cheeky predilection for harassing other egg companies about their standards.

You could say, I’m sold.

What The Hell Is A Paraben, And What Is It Doing In My Shampoo?

Tags

parabens, parabens in New Zealand, parabens in nz, what are parabens

I tried to ignore it.

Then I heard the word again. And again. I started Googling, and my heart started sinking. Parabens.

I like using shampoo and conditioner, and having nice shiny hair that smells like fruit. Yes, I was aware they weren’t great for the environment, but I protested (in my head) that my budget didn’t stretch to the organic, natural options. After all, some of them are frickin’ expensive. But now that I know what parabens are, I’m determined not to rub any more of them into my scalp.

What are parabens?

Parabens are chemical preservatives that have been hanging around since the 1930′s. They usually come with prefixes: methylparaben, ethylparaben, butylparaben, propylparabens are common. Pretty names for ugly toxins. While some parabens are found in nature, there is a difference between those naturally occuring parabens and the synthetic ones used as preservatives:

Parabens occur naturally at low levels in certain foods, such as barley, strawberries, currents, vanilla, carrots, and onions, although a synthetic preparation derived from petrochemicals is used in cosmetics. Parabens in foods are metabolized when eaten, making them less strongly estrogenic. In contrast, when applied to the skin and absorbed into the body, parabens in cosmetics bypass the metabolic process and enter the blood stream and body organs intact.

Where are parabens found?

Nearly everywhere! You can find parabens in most commercial shampoos, moisturisers, shaving gels, shower gels, personal lubricants, topical pharmaceutical creams, spray tan, make-up, toothpastes and sunscreen. Parabens are also added to processed food to stave off mould so that the “food” can sit on the shelf for months without going off. Lovely!

A Green Party survey in 2004 found that 81% of cosmetics available in New Zealand contains parabens. The real number is likely much higher as parabens which are mixed into perfume are simply listed as fragrance, and other companies may not disclose their ingredient lists. Good magazine asserts that “almost everyone will be exposed to them daily, unless they deliberately choose paraben-free products.”

Unlike the Prell lady, I don't find that thought particularly reassuring.

What’s up, Doc?

Like Bisphenol A, parabens are xenoestrogens. That means they mimic they way eostrogen acts in the human body and interfere with normal hormone function. In women, this can drive the growth of breast cancer. In 2004, researchers from Reading University discovered parabens in breast tumours. Back in 2002, a study from Tokyo found that newborn male mammals exposed to butylparabens showed that the parabens adversely affects the secretion of testosterone and the function of the male reproductive system.  There is a growing collection of reports with similar findings; that parabens affect normal hormonal function.

Other studies show that methylparaben applied on the skin reacts with UVB leading to increased skin aging and DNA damage. Kinda ironic if spendy anti-aging creams are actually causing premature skin aging.

Finally, parabens are skin irritants and can cause allergic reactions in some people.

What regulations does New Zealand have regarding parabens?

It took a while for this penny to drop.

I couldn’t find any information on New Zealand legislation regarding parabens in cosmetics. Then I realised, there aren’t any.

The Auckland Allergy Clinic says,

Cosmetics in New Zealand are only self-regulated by CTFA (Cosmetics, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association). The CTFA in NZ was formed in 1972 by a core group of cosmetics companies who were manufacturing their products in NZ at that time. In NZ there is a reasonable code of practice through the local CTFA. The problem arises where cosmetics are brought in from Asian countries where no similar requirements are applied. Some of these products can have undisclosed allergens, including peanuts.

What is even more worrying is the fact that there are at present no regulations in New Zealand that cover cosmetic ingredient labelling… In New Zealand it is still possible to buy cosmetics with no proper labelling, with known allergens omitted from the label or with the term “hypoallergenic” used loosely on the label.

…In New Zealand Product Safety Standards are regulations made under section 29 of the Fair Trading Act 1986. The purpose of these regulations is to prevent or reduce the risk of injury to any person. At the present time cosmetics are not included under the Product safety standard. From verbal communication with Medsafe & Consumer Affairs, there is no proposal for cosmetic labelling in New Zealand at this stage.

Even the head of the CTFA, Garth Wyllie, concedes “compliance [with the guidelines] is a problem.” That was enough to put me right off my Wella Balsam.

What now?

• Go paraben free. Buy products which explicitly state they are free of parabens, and look out for parabens on package labels. Not all products will list parabens, but there are plenty which do and you can avoid these.
• Many paraben-free products replace parabens with other synthetic preservatives, so check the ingredient list
• Buy unscented/fragrance free products. These products may not actually be fragrance free, as they can contain both fragrance and masking agents to hide the fragrance. But you are likely to find fewer parabens in an “unscented” product than one which fills the room with flowery scents. This is partly because fragrances are often volatile chemicals, which require more preservatives so that the perfume does not diminish over time
• Buy from this list of products (which admittedly needs updating) from the Green Party, which claim to be paraben free
• Read Wendyl Nissen’s list of recommended beauty products. Nissen says that Living Nature and Dr Haushka are the only beauty products to be investigated by consumer that do NOT contain synthetic preservatives

Or make your own shampoo and conditioner! I haven’t tried it yet, but having read through the page on Frugal Kiwi’s blog, it really doesn’t seem that hard at all.

Green Times

Tags

eco living, going green, non-toxic living, sustainable living

These last few days, I’ve been on a mission. I’m greenifying my life.

My original forays into research on plastics and phthalates have made me realise just how many toxic chemicals I use every day. They’re in my shampoos and conditioner, cleaning products, deodorant and cosmetics. They’re in everything plastic that I own and some of the foods. That makes me pissed.

I’m pissed off at myself; I feel like I’ve been caught off guard and I should have been paying more attention. But I’m also pissed at the companies that think it’s OK to put noxious crap into cosmetics, cleaning products, toys and more. And I’m pissed off at the New Zealand government, for its incredibly lazy attitude towards regulating these chemicals. All of these factors have combined to put my family at risk. But while I can’t change the past, I can make better choices for the future. It’s a thought that doesn’t quite squash down the guilt, but it helps.

So, changes I’ve made so far:

1. Replacing most of our plastic toys with wooden (I have kept a couple of Tolo brand toys which are good quality, phthalate-free and BpA free).

2. Ditching most of our cleaning products. I’ve recycled what I can, but I haven’t finished every bottle. I toyed with this one. Is it better to not waste products you have already bought or better not to use products you think are harmful? In the end I felt it was silly continuing to use products which I felt were endangering to our health, purely to save a few bucks.

3. Switching back to cloth nappies. Mila was a cloth bum until she was 7 months old, when we started to have problems with leaks. We then drifted slowly but surely into using exclusively disposable nappies. Now she’s back in cloth during the day. We still have leaks, but I think the issue is with the elastic and I’m looking into having it replaced.

4. Using cloth wipes. They’re super easy, and if you’re already using cloth nappies you might as well use cloth wipes too. In fact, even if you’re using disposable nappies, given the recent stink about IPBC (iodopropynyl butylcarbamate, a preservative acutely toxic by inhalation) being used in Woolworths Homebrand wipes, Select scented wipes and Precious flushable wipes – you might want to use cloth wipes too. Here’s my recipe.

5. Going organic. We can’t afford to eat all organic food – if we did that we’d also have to live in a tent and weave clothes out of leaves. But I’m making a start by switching to organic fruit and veg, courtesy of Organic Connection. They say their Standard Box of fruit and vegetables, for $61, lasts 4+ people one week. We have two adults and one child, but as my fiance works long hours and often eats away from home, we’re about the equivalent of two. By my reckoning, I can stretch one Standard Box out to last two weeks. Will it be enough? We’ll see how it pans out.

 

Changes in the works:

1. Recycling and binning our plastic food containers and BpA-containing cups and bottles. I’m half there, but I need to stock up on glass storage containers before I can chuck anything else out

2. Replacing our plastic chopping boards with wooden and our plastic electric jug with a stainless steel one.

3. Making my own shampoo, conditioner, toilet cleaner, dish-washing liquid, dishwasher powder, shower gel, laundry powder, toothpaste and anything else I need from scratch. I have a feeling that baking powder will be figuring prominently in my life from now on.

4. Switching to cloth nappy liners (we currently use paper). I just need to figure out how that works with poo, and whether I can handle washing poo – I like being able to just bin it! But with cloth nappies and cloth wipes already on the go, it could be easier to just bung the whole lot in the wash, instead of separating out the paper liner.

5. Investigating, researching, becoming informed. Ne’er again will I feel caught out. I’m determined that our home will be free of nasty chemicals, a true-to-the-blog-title non-toxic nest. And a haven to hyphens, apparently.