How To Protect Your Fertility & Health From Chemicals &GMO’s with Bill Statham – #19

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome back to another episode of The Fertility Hour. Today, we have a very interesting guest. His name is Bill Statham. He was born in Toowoomba in Queensland, Australia and grew up on a dairy farm on the fertile Darling Downs. Sounds very idyllic of an upbringing. When he was in twenties he told friends that one day he would write a book. Twenty years later, his pipedream became a reality when The Chemical Maze – Your Guide to Food Additives and Cosmetic Ingredients was first published. Little did he realize all those years ago that it would become a bestseller and create an awareness that would change many people’s lives for the better.

In the ten years leading up to the publication of his first book in 2001, Bill studied and practiced homeopathy, both in Australia and in England. It was during this time that he became increasingly concerned about the detrimental effects on people’s health caused by synthetic chemicals in foods, cosmetics and personal care products. The Chemical Maze was born out of a need to make it simpler and easier for people to recognize chemicals as additives and ingredients that have the potential to be harmful to health.

April 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of The Chemical Maze with over 150,000 copies having been sold worldwide. A 10th anniversary edition was published to commemorate this milestone. The Chemical Maze has been published in the UK and North America and in eight foreign languages. An electronic version of the book is also available as an application for smartphones.

Bill lives with his wife and business partner Kay Lancashire in picturesque town of Neerim South in West Gippsland in the state Victoria, Australia. Welcome, Bill.

Bill Statham: Hi, Charlene. Good to be here.

2:20 CL: Thank you so much. When you said that you were going to write a book one day, what was the book going to be about?

BS: I thought it would probably be a book of kind of metafiction. I was interested in the subject at the time and, yeah, but it turned out to be almost exactly the opposite to that.

2:46 CL: Right. Sort of science fiction but it’s our reality.

BS: Unfortunately, it is reality, yeah.

2:56 CL: What motivated you to do this? You said in the bio that you found that there’s all these chemicals and additives that are detrimental but they’re kind of like a turning point that put a fire in you, that you felt like you needed to make this known to the public.

BS: I’ve always been interested in health. But when I was practicing homeopathy, I realized that there were chemicals in food and cosmetics that could actually be detrimental to the patients that I was treating, so I did some research on it and I looked into cosmetics first because I thought, well, maybe there’s things in the shampoo they’re using or what they’re putting on their skin. I was pretty horrified to find that some of the additives, some of the chemicals that they were using in those products could actually cause the very problems that I was trying to treat people for. I found that by telling those people about this, then they could avoid those things and quite often their health would improve just by avoiding those very chemicals. Over a period of time, I thought, well, I really need to have something that people can take shopping with them so that they can avoid those things at point of sale because it is pointless buying something and bringing it home and realizing that it’s got all these nasty things in it.

So, I originally was going to produce like a little fold-out card but the information far exceeded what I could put on that. So, the first edition of The Chemical Maze was born and we’ve had five editions since then and you mentioned before 150,000, well that’s probably over 250,000 copies now.

4:51 CL: I would think so because you said the 10th anniversary was 2011. Congratulations and thanks for doing this work. I don’t think a fold-out card would suffice, unfortunately.

BS: No, no.

5:04 CL: Those chemical names are quite long also.

BS: That’s right.

5:11 CL: There are so many chemicals in the cosmetic products and cleaning products and food additives. What are the main culprits these days?

BS: So if we have a look at foods to start with, there are additives like whole food additives that play no part in the actual food in that they don’t contribute anything to the food apart from adding a color or a preservative, preserving things, flavor enhancers which enhance the actual flavor that’s there, the synthetic sweeteners. All of these things, essentially most of them are put in there for the convenience of the manufacturers. They’re not there to enhance the food in any way. So, the processed foods can actually be worse for you than going and buying fresh produce for that very reason because they do contain chemicals that are quite often derived from petroleum products.

6:24 CL: Are you talking about when you buy like processed bags of salad and things? I know there’s processed foods but when you’re talking about fresh versus processed, are you talking about like the pre-cut salad mixes and things like that? Because I know that they have preservatives to preserve the freshness of it.

BS: That’s right. Well, they would be included. But we’ll probably cover this at the end, but I always recommend that people wherever possible buy certified organic fresh produce. And really, ideally the best way to do it, although not everybody can, is to grow your own. Then you know what’s going on in your food and you can pick it fresh daily.

7:09 CL: Yeah, that is ideal and then secondary would be I guess shop at local farmers market if you’re fortunate enough to live in an area where they have that.

BS: Absolutely, yeah.

7:21 CL: Well, I was going to ask you about genetically modified foods. Are they that much of a problem and if so, why?

BS: Well, genetically modified foods, unlike traditional breeding techniques, genetically modified foods contain foreign material that has been put in there for various reasons, to enhance color or to enhance freshness, to actually produce something that nature wouldn’t normally do. So putting like, for example, fish DNA into a plant. Nature doesn’t do that and there are side effects to doing that and there’s a lot still unknown about that process. The other thing about it is many of the crops that have been genetically modified have actually been produced to withstand the chemical glyphosate which is commonly known as Roundup to resist so that farmers can spray there for the weeds and the crops aren’t affected. Now, for many, they thought that that was safe. But they’re now finding out more and more that this glyphosate can actually interrupt enzyme pathways in bacteria that are beneficial bacteria that are essential in our gut for breaking down food. So that, as you can understand, can be problematic and we’re seeing more and more people with gut problems these days. Now, is there a connection? That needs to be further investigated.

9:17 CL: I don’t have to further investigate it. I’d say yes. But if people need to wait for that science to come out, I think that it sounds extremely problematic.

BS: Yeah, it is. And there is research to suggest that. So an answer to your question, I would say genetically modified foods are best avoided.

9:40 CL: How does one know that they are eating genetically modified foods?

BS: Well, that’s a good question. Because they’re not required to be labeled in many countries and I believe in the US there’s been a lot of problems around trying to get foods labeled when they’re genetically modified. Now, in Australia here we do have regulations that they have to be labeled. But the regulations are so loose that I would defy anyone that they go into a supermarket and pick just one product off the shelf and it says that it contains genetically modified ingredients even though we know that maybe up to 70% or more of products on the shelves are genetically modified. So even though they’re in name only, those regulations basically are here. So which is a big problem because essentially people are being duped.

10:43 CL: That is an issue because yes, in the United States that did not pass, it did not pass that they were required to label it but there are certain grocers who carry a lot of brands that will say non-GMO and I’m sort of a consumer that trusts when it says that, non-GMO verified.

BS: Yeah, yeah. You’re much better trusting something like that than going with something where there’s nothing on it because then you don’t know. It could be or it may not be genetically modified.

11:20 CL: I see. So we talked about food additives, flavor enhancers and one that most people know is MSG, correct? MSG is problematic for a lot of people. I heard that even if you don’t have reactions to MSG, it is still considered a neurotoxin to the wider population.

BS: That’s right.

11:46 CL: I know that on your website Chemicalmaze.com you were saying that MSG a lot of times has a lot of different names that it’s called. Can you tell us a few of those that we would recognize on an ingredient list?

BS: Some of them, HVP… my mind is going a little bit blank on this but there’s probably 30 or 40 different ingredients that some of the enhancers that they use, the flavor enhancers and things like that. If people have got my app, they can actually go to MSG and it will list some of the things there that MSG, some of the other names that it can be listed.

12:45 CL: I know a common one is hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

BS: Yeah, HVP. That’s what I mentioned before, hydrolyzed vegetable protein. And anything that’s hydrolyzed basically, it will contain MSG or what they actually term as glutamate. So it is something that doesn’t occur in nature even though the manufacturers will say that it does, it doesn’t. It’s actually manufactured. It’s produced as a part of the processing.

And you mentioned a neurotoxin. MSG is what they term an excitotoxin in that it excites the neurons in the brain to the point of death. So you can actually lose neurons in your brain, it could be irreplaceable, the damage can be quite severe. And if I can just give one little case that I know of, of somebody who suffered so severely from MSG reactions that he would go to a restaurant and he would say, “Do you use MSG in your food?” and the waiter would say, “No.” And he said, “Well, you better be very sure about this. Go and ask the chef if you do because if I have even a small amount of MSG, you better have an ambulance waiting at the front door,” because he’s nearly died several times from MSG. Now, not everybody has that extent of reaction. I do react to MSG. I get tingling in the roof of my mouth. I get pains in my neck. So I know quite a few people who do react to MSG.

14:41 CL: I think at restaurants, the wait staff, they just often don’t know because I’ve asked and then you go, well, if I was really concerned, I would just… they don’t know a lot of times.

BS: No, they don’t. They don’t. Quite often they pretend they do, but they don’t.

15:01 CL: What about chemicals which are being used commonly in cosmetic, cleaning and personal care products which can negatively affect fertility in any way?

BS: Yeah. If we look at groups of chemicals here, so we’d look at parabens. Parabens are preservatives that are put into products and also foods like propylparaben is actually in foods as a preservative and they can interfere with fertility. They can interfere with motility with sperm, they can interfere with all sorts for all areas of the reproductive system. They fall into a category called endocrine-disrupting chemicals or EDCs. So, parabens are one of those.

The bisphenols, so there’s bisphenol A, bisphenol F, bisphenol S. They are used plasticizers to make plastics more pliable and retain their strength. They’re also used as solvents in various things, in cosmetics and the like, in nail polish and those sorts of things. They’re also used in containers that foods come in. That’s one of the reasons why you should never microwave foods apart from the fact that I don’t believe microwaves are good anyway. But they can leach out of, these chemicals kind of leach out of containers. They’re also used in linings in cans/tin cans with foods as well. Even here in Australia and then possibly in the US, organic foods quite often come in cans with the lining with BPA in them which, to me, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever because what’s the point in buying an organic food if it’s being contaminated by a chemical. It defeats the purpose.

So the third class of chemicals would be the phthalates. There are quite a number of phthalates which are found in a wide range of products including even sunscreens and things like that. So that would be the classes of categories and each of these categories has been shown to interfere with the reproductive cycle in various ways. So without going to a lot of details, I don’t want to complicate things but by just keeping it simple, yeah, they do have played various roles in interrupting the process and as you would understand, you only got to interrupt one part of that process for the whole thing to fail, so you’re going to end up with infertility.

18:30 CL: I completely understand why you wrote The Chemical Maze and now you have an app. I think that we get duped all the time as consumers. Let’s use the example of BPA. BPA is the devil we know and there was so much buzz around BPA, I don’t know. Now it’s almost been a decade where it was like “BPA is terrible, BPA is terrible.” “Okay, let’s make everything BPA-free.” “Oh, gosh. Thank God that that has been taken out of our plastics,” and then people continue to use the plastics. But are we any better? There’s all these like flexible plastic food containers and you go do takeout and they put boiling hot soup in these soft plastic soup containers. I guess those probably do have BPA. But I’m just saying like you’ll look at a shampoo bottle and it will say paraben and sodium laureth sulfate-free. But if you’re a savvy consumer, you look at it and go, “Well, what the heck else is in this?” They do all these buzzwords to try to divert you and then put all these other chemicals in it. So you really do need sort of a companion guide or an app to be a smart shopper because okay, they took the BPA out but you’re still using plastic with a bunch of other plasticizers, xenoestrogens in it.

BS: Yeah, absolutely. A number of these parabens are what they call estrogenic so that they can interfere with the estrogen in the body and some of them actually produce synthetic estrogen which can mimic estrogen and can make a mess with your hormones as well.

But there’s a term for what you’re actually talking about there and it’s called “greenwashing” which is where you dupe the public by putting something on a label to detract from what you’re actually doing. So the example that I would look at there is like having a lolli shop where at the front you’ve got all these nice lollies and signs and things at the back, but at the back there is a meth lab in the background. So that’s what you got to look for. You got to look behind the label and it’s one of the reasons that I produced the book and the app to make people more savvy and to have people start to question everything because it’s not being done in your best interest. You always got to think, “Okay, so what’s the bottom line? What’s at the back of all this?” And at the back of it all is money, is profit. Shareholders, what-have-you. You’ve got to become a savvy shopper. And The Chemical Maze is one of those things that can help you to become a savvy shopper.

21:37 CL: Absolutely. For those who are trying to get pregnant but then many have children already, I mean, that’s another question, is what about formulations that are used on children? There’s a very, very famous one here in America. I mean, it’s been probably since the 1800’s, Johnson & Johnson. I remember having my child and my mom giving me this whole bath set and she was kind of like offended that I didn’t want to use it. I said, “Well, have you ever looked at the ingredients?” But it’s such a trusted name, right?

BS: It is, it is yeah.

22:17 CL: I mean, they would never do anything to harm your child. But what about the diapers and all the different lotions and potions and talc and things like that? What’s problematic with those?

BS: One thing comes to mind where it is endemic in all of those that you talked about. Cosmetic, household products, cleaners and the like, and that’s fragrance. Fragrance is the number one thing and you’ll find that pretty much it’s so endemic, it’s everywhere. Perfumes, air fresheners, they call contain fragrance and most of the fragrances contain hundreds, if not thousands of different chemicals, quite a number of which are toxic. I quite often say to people when I’m talking to them that air fresheners are probably one of the worst things that have been invented. It does everything but freshen the air. It actually makes the air more toxic when you use it. So, always look for “fragrance” or “parfum” which is more of the European name for fragrance. Look for “fragrance-free” as opposed to “doesn’t contain scent” or whatever. If it says “fragrance-free”, by law it actually has to contain no fragrance in it. And certified organic products that say fragrance-free, you’re pretty much fairly safe with those. But household cleaners, you name one household cleaner that doesn’t have fragrance in it. Even like toilet paper is infused with fragrances. So yeah, that’s one of the biggest problems that I find.

And fragrances, we come back to the word that I used before with phthalate. Phthalates is used in fragrances as a fixative. What that means is that when you spray it on your skin, it actually fixes to your skin, so the fragrance stays around for much longer and they use these phthalates which are petrochemically derived to make the fragrance grab hold of your skin and stay there for the longest period of time, which in itself is problematic. So unlike alcohol, alcohol will diffuse fairly quickly. That’s the reason they use these phthalates. One of the main ones they use is one called DEP and it’s probably a kind that’s one of the least toxic of them. But, you know, when you’re trying to get pregnant and you’re having problems, you want to avoid as much as possible anything that could get in the way of that.

Another one of the phthalates is dibutyl phthalate or DBP, and some people may not realize this in receipts, so it’s in thermal paper. So these things that you’re handling all the time, airline tickets, anywhere that’s printed onto thermal paper and the oils on your skin, it can actually remove those phthalates from the paper and it can stay on your skin. And most of what goes onto your skin can actually go into your bloodstream and from there it can go across the blood-brain barrier, it can go in many different ways and cause all sorts of havoc in the body.

26:36 CL: I know in the United States receipts have BPA in them and there’s only a few stores like big health food store chain called Whole Foods claims that their receipts do not have BPA. So we’ve recommended in another podcast episode, just refuse the receipt, just minimize your exposure to it.

BS: Yeah.

27:01 CL: Yeah, it’s kind of that. And just quickly for those who have children or obviously planning to have children, talk quickly about diapers. Because gosh, I don’t know about diapers in Australia but diapers here, they are a chemical bath. Once the child urinates into it, it’s captured and turns into this gel coagulant that sits on the baby’s skin and I can’t imagine what is in there but it’s like wet, tender skin and this chemical crap, I don’t know. It’s really bizarre stuff.

BS: Yeah. Just to name a couple other things. There’s a class of chemical called VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and those are things that are like toluene, for example, xylene is another one. They’ve been found in diapers in the manufacture of them. And they’re carcinogenic. I would suggest wherever possible, if people can use – and it may take a little bit more time, I understand that, I understand why people use disposable diapers or nappies as we refer to them here in Australia – wherever possible, use certified organic cotton reusable diapers. They are available. You can buy 100% certified organic cotton and what I mean by certified organic is it means that the cotton has been grown in places where they’re not using pesticides because here in Australia, a lot of the cotton, I wouldn’t recommend using it because they use so many sprays on the cotton and onto genetically modified as well and so forth.

So yeah, that’s what I would recommend. I believe there are also disposable diapers that are certified organic as well that don’t contain a lot of the chemicals. And if we can just go back a little step, when you talked about BPA, yes there are so many things that have BPA and they may be BPA-free, I’m not arguing that they’re not; however, they neglect to tell you that they now contain BPS, bisphenol S or bisphenol F. So that’s replacing BPA and they can still legally say BPA-free. But BPS has been shown to be just as bad as BPA. It has all the same problems as BPA. You know, we talked about greenwashing. This is greenwashing. This is exactly what I was saying before.

30:16 CL: So sneaky and manipulative, it angers me.

BS: It is.

30:27 CL: But as consumers, we do have a lot of power, where we spend our money, and the more we are educated and how we choose our products is really going to influence this because going back to the Johnson & Johnson, I don’t know what this really means in the big picture, when I was showing my mom kind of the evidence of all the chemicals that are in Johnson & Johnson products. And I’m not targeting them. They’re just so well known in the United States that they finally decided to change their formulation, to take out some of the more, I guess, toxic. The perfumes, the phthalates out of their formula. I think that’s what they said.

But yeah, I’m glad that you brought up the fragrance issue. There’s people like me, it’s easy because I’m so hypersensitive to fragrances that almost kind of astonishes me that other people aren’t because it will change my mood. I’ll feel angry and nauseous. It can ruin my whole day if I was in a room where there’s like some kind of those plug-in fresheners. But other people don’t seem to be bothered by it. I know it’s affecting their health and it’s a hormone disruptor but I don’t see how they don’t get sick from it. I’ve treated plenty of people who do like all the fabric softeners, and we’ll talk about that for a second, all the detergents, they have such a strong scent and it’s to mask the odor of the clothes, but let’s talk about some alternatives to using those. I mean, those are horrible, right? You’re wearing them on your skin. Talk about fabric softeners. I read a blog post on your website about fabric softeners. What’s the issue with those? I mean you want soft fabric, don’t you? Static-free clothes?

BS: Yeah. Well, there again, we’re talking chemicals again. We’re talking in fabric softeners all sorts of toxic chemicals. In my house, I do washing here. My wife runs her business as well. She’s a jewelry maker. I choose to do the washing. That’s my part of doing the housework. And I use vinegar as a fabric softener in the final wash. A cup of vinegar. It works just as well, if not better than any fabric softener or commercial fabric softener that you would buy. Vinegars, you know, a hundred percent safe compared to any of the commercial fabric softeners. So I would recommend avoiding fabric softeners because they are going to contain chemicals and if people want to read about those chemicals, they can do what you do. Go to my website and look up in the copy of my book The Chemical Maze Bookshelf Companion, there’s a section with household products in there and it has got fabric softener in there and it will tell you what chemicals are likely to be contained in fabric softener.

Now, if I can just talk for a minute about you can go to your supermarket and you look up the labels on the foods and they will tell you what is in there. It will tell you the ingredients and the additives and so on. You can do the same thing with cosmetics. You can’t do that with household cleaners and household products because by law, the manufacturers have come to an agreement with the regulating authorities that they don’t have to put the ingredients that are in those products even though you’re breathing them in, you can get them on your hands and quite often they contain far more toxic chemicals than what’s in your personal care products and your cosmetics and the like, and it’s because they have proprietary formulas or trade secrets, which to me, is a load of rubbish because every manufacturer knows what his competitor is putting in his products. It’s not trade secret to his competitors; it’s a trade secret to the public who they don’t want to know because if they had to put and had to list these ingredients, people wouldn’t buy them. It’s because it will be like you have to label with poison and a lot of people just wouldn’t bother them if it’s got poison or not. And they do contain these things and phthalates and the formaldehyde and the like.

35:26 CL: I think here in this country, maybe they don’t have to label it but, you know, basically you can look in the back of a lot of them and they have the number to the Poison Control Center. You’re in bad trouble if your kid gets into it or anything like that on most of these.

The funny thing is that we’ve become such a germophobic culture and this being flu season here in America and of course you want to keep things clean and sanitized by you use these things like a Clorox bleach solution and it actually compromises your immune system by breathing it in that I think it makes you more susceptible to getting sick. Because you could use a healthier solution. I mean, what do you think of this, Bill? I’m a big fan of hydrogen peroxide. I love vinegar, I use it a lot. But hydrogen peroxide, I use it as a bleach alternative and if I need to spray a countertop or something, I’ll use a little bit with some castile soap and I guess I’m happy with that. I feel like my family is safe and things are good. But am I kind of being naïve in using that and thinking I’m killing germs sufficiently?

BS: Absolutely not. There have been studies that have shown that vinegar can kill just as many germs as the highest antimicrobials. Vinegar and as you said hydrogen peroxide, bicarbonate of soda, tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil, a lot of these things are very useful. And look, they’ve been around forever. Nature provided us everything that we need. We don’t have to produce these toxic chemicals. As I said before, basically it comes down to how much money can I make from producing this thing. The moral issue doesn’t come into it when money is concerned, you know. That’s been proven time and time again by the number of pharmaceutical companies that have been sued because they put a drug on the market and that’s killed so many people, but they’re still around, they’re still producing drugs, they’re still producing toxic things. It doesn’t stop them.

So this is where, like you said, as a consumer we are the ones with the power and we just got to take the power back. And we do that by educating ourselves and not buying the products that are toxic, not buying the products that are going to compromise our health and compromise our innate ability to reproduce.

I read a study where over a period of four decades, the ability to reproduce is reduced by a factor of 4. So we’re becoming more and more and more infertile and that’s both male and female from various things that we’ve talked about today. Low sperm motility, low sperm rates, abnormal sperm, all of these things. And it’s happening. I mean, the indications were there 30, 40, 50 years ago in animals, in frogs. We rarely see frogs here in Australia anymore. They’re virtually being wiped out. That’s because of hermaphroditism where the chemicals have actually turned males to females and vice-versa. So it’s wiping out species. Quite often I tell people we are just one of the species on the planet. There are species where we are in sixth-grade extinction at the moment. There’s nothing to say that we will wipe ourselves out because we’re heading very rapidly down that path in a number of ways, and it could be a chemical wipeout.

So it is critical for people to think about this but I also want to stress it’s a bit of a catch-22 situation in that stress is one of the things that can interfere with becoming pregnant. So if you think about what I’ve been talking about and you get stressed out about it, you got a catch-22 situation there. So that’s why I think, well, people should get educated and then do whatever they can. There’s three areas that they do have control over, and that’s food, what you put in your mouth, what you put on your skin, and what you use in household cleaners. Those are three areas where you have some power.

40:40 CL: I want to bring up and I don’t know if you’re familiar with this product, there’s a produce called Febreeze. I think it’s an extremely popular air freshener and their commercials claim that they don’t mask odor. It’s a proprietary formula or I don’t know what the heck it does, it neutralizes odor. But do you know anything about that? Because I think that people who are listening, there’s going to be a percentage who really sort of kind of buys into it. They have a very strong marketing campaign and they go, “Oh, it doesn’t mask odor.” It’s doing some magical thing where it captures these odor molecules and just, poof, makes them go away. Is there any pitfall? Do you know anything about that product? You might want to look into it. It’s extremely popular.

BS: I have heard of it. I don’t know the mechanics of how it works. I do know, however, that some of these products have actually got chemicals in them that dull the olfactory nerves. It’s almost like they anesthetize the nerves. So the smell, it’s just that the odor is still there but you’re not smelling it because it’s interfering with the process of your smelling. It’s almost like someone is giving you an anesthetic to your smelling mechanism as it were. Now I don’t know if this works in that way but I do know products that do work like that.

42:29 CL: Let’s just say that this particular product that I mentioned, say it really doesn’t mask odor and they’ve done this genius thing where it captures the odor molecules. I mean, you really have to ask yourself what is it doing. Okay, that’s brilliant, I guess, but like what chemical reactions are happening in your body that it’s able to do that. And God forbid you have a baby and I guess with those smelly diapers or whatever, you use some type of plug-in or some air freshener, I beg you please don’t do that. Educate yourself. Once you educate yourself on how toxic these things are, you’ll just never want to have them again. Any time I’ve gone into someone’s house, I say, “You know, I don’t want to be a bearer of bad news,” and some people go, “Oh, but I love that tropical scent,” which to me, it smells so synthetic and kind of yucky but some people really, really like it. But once I tell them, they go, “Okay, I’m going to unplug that.” Because I know that in my house if ever it’s cold and we don’t have the windows open enough, we just use peppermint oil diluted in water and spray it and it works beautifully. Use a little baking soda on the carpet that you’d get a mason jar and you shake it with your favorite aromatherapy oil, shake it on the carpet, let it sit for 30 minutes and then vacuum it, and things are very fresh and you didn’t compromise your health with that.

BS: Yeah. You can also use containers of bicarb soda in your fridge to absorb odors in your refrigerator as well. So, I agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying.

44:08 CL: Or around your home, right? I’ve walked into a room that was freshly painted and it smelled so strong that I read on the internet you just put bowls of white vinegar and bowls of baking soda around the room and it’s pretty miraculous how well it absorbs it.

Bill, it’s flu season here in America. It’s one of the deadliest strains this year. Fifty-eight children have died. It’s really affecting people. Is it time to just pull out that hand sanitizer and start slathering up like crazy? Or is there anything we should think about with that?

BS: Well, studies have shown that soap and water, just washing your hands with just normal soap and water is just as effective as the most powerful hand sanitizer. A big problem with hand sanitizers is they contain a chemical called triclosan. And triclosan, it can actually lead to antibiotic resistance which is a problem because you then end up with bacteria that become resistant to all antibiotics. So if you get a mild bacterial infection, that can run right in your body and there’s no antibiotics to treat you. This has happened in various places. MRSA is one of them, methicillin antibiotic resistance. So, we’re being warned all the time by the scientists that we’re very close to getting to that point. But I don’t see the medical profession using fewer antibiotics. And veterinary field/veterinarians are one of the biggest users of antibiotics, and that’s leading to antibiotic resistance as well. So, triclosan is the chemical that you’re talking about there in hand sanitizers, which is a big problem.

46:32 CL: There was a study that came out last year saying that triclosan exposure was increasing food sensitivities or food allergies in children, which has become a really big issue. I know why people use those. Okay, so soap and water, they work brilliant but you’re on the subway or bus or you’ve touched a doorknob that you feel uncomfortable about. That’s why people, they don’t have to access to that sink, water and soap and they want something right away. Is there like an alternative that you could carry with you like a diluted tea tree oil or something that you could spray on?

BS: Yeah. You could make up your own personal hand wipes just with a cloth with tea tree oil, with even maybe soaked in vinegar. As we mentioned before vinegar is very effective at killing germs. But we’ve become very germophobic. I remember when I was growing. I grew up on a farm and we didn’t have iPads, we didn’t have these iPhone games and what-have-you. We played out in the dirt, we played in the mud. I drank tank water that came off the roof. It wasn’t sterilized or what-have-you. And we very rarely got sick.

So, this thing about having everything, every surface in your house sterile and pristine, we’ve been educated by television, by the manufacturers and they use two techniques. They use the scare technique where they scare you into thinking that you’re going to get something really horrible. And they use the guilt technique that if you don’t give your kids those things, it makes you feel guilty if you haven’t cleaned every surface with a hundred different cleaners.

And as we’ve talked about today, the chemicals used in these things are far more likely to make you chronically ill in the long term because with a lot of these things, if they’ve ever been studied at all for safety, it’s only on animals, we’re very different from animals and they’ve never been studied over a long-term period. They might be studied for two weeks or whatever and they declare them to be safe. But who’s to say in 20 years’ time, the Alzheimer’s you’ve got now, the Parkinson’s you’ve got, whatever chronic diabetes, whatever chronic illness hasn’t been caused by the chemicals that you’ve used when you’re in your teens, your 20’s, your 30’s, they’re cumulative over a long period of time and I believe that if you look at chronic illness escalating all the time, cancers escalating all the time.

So I believe that a lot of this escalation started around the time of the chemical invasion which was after the Second World War when a lot of these chemicals were developed during the Second World War then that had stockpiles after them, so they had to work out what they’re going to do with them so they started to put them into cosmetics and personal care products and they found that they do certain things. And in a way it was an age of chemical discovery of what you could do with these things. At the time, they didn’t have the sophisticated equipment then to determine that they actually could be very detrimental to health when they found that out. It didn’t stop them using them. There’s too much money involved.  They hid those effects.

50:58 CL: You’re talking about your time growing up in the farm and it just sort of reminds me there is a condition called SIBO – I’m not going to go into a kind of unconventional treatment of it– but they were saying our ultra-sanitized lifestyle is one contributing factor because when we grew up kind of growing our own food, oftentimes it would be pick a carrot. You wouldn’t go and scrub it and peel it. You’d wipe off the excess dirt and you’d pop it in your mouth and then those microbials would colonize in your gut in a good way. But we’ve gotten so far removed from that.

I agree, too. I’m a handwasher but I don’t get crazy about that. I know people are listening and are like, “Well, I don’t care. I still want things sanitized.” So one thing that kind of comes up for me that a lot of like the bleaching solutions that they use, the scare tactic is being infected with E. coli or salmonella from our foods, raw chicken and what-have-you. Is the pH of vinegar strong enough to kill that?

BS: Look, we lead a fairly normal life. I’ve got here, my wife and myself and our family, we’re careful with what we eat. But we use natural cleaners. I won’t have any toxic cleaners in the house. My stepdaughter/my wife’s daughter and her family, they follow the same regimen. They got two kids. She tells them to go out and play in the dirt. When they come in, they just wash their hands in soap and water. They don’t use any toxic cleaners. I know many families who work like that and they don’t have toxic cleaners. And in my mind, they’re actually more healthy than the people who are actually using these toxic cleaners that we’ve been talking about, the toxic little tall end of the category of the household cleaners, be it window cleaner, oven cleaner. And as I mentioned before, in the household ingredient section of my book, I list everything from air fresheners to your window cleaner and what they’re likely to contain because as we mentioned before, the manufacturers are not required to put it on the label, what formulations they’re most likely to contain. Then I have safer alternatives that you can make yourself and you mentioned castile soap before. That’s one of the things that you can use.

So as I said before, most of these things are done for profit. They’re not done to make your lives easy or make it safer, and it can be the opposite.

54:28 CL: If you’re listening to this and you think okay, I need to make a change and I want to get all those household toxic products out, please, before you dump them out, call your local city, municipality and find a proper dumping site because we’re not kidding, they are toxic chemicals and just to put them in your trash can is sort of irresponsible so you usually have to bring them to a special place just like if you were to dispose a paint or electronics or batteries or what-have-you. Because yeah, they are toxic. And then cosmetics, too.

I think we live in an age where we’re just bombarded with all these toxic stuff but we also live in a beautiful time where we have so many choices in products because there’s so much information out there just like Bill’s site, The Chemical Maze and then the app, I want to talk about the app in a second. But there are so many alternatives. I mean, I have found how to make every type of cleaning product off the internet or I go to my local health food store if I’m feeling sort of lazy and I get something where I think it’s a pretty clean product and it’s no problem. It’s not complicated, they make it easy.

So, talk about the app. Is it just for iPhones or have you made it where an Android phone can use it now?

BS: It’s for Android and for iPhone or iOS platform or Apple. And the Android, so Samsung and the like can be used on those. It’s been around since 2009 or 2010 and we’ve sold probably over 35,000 app downloads, most of those throughout Australia and New Zealand, but in the US as well and across Europe.

56:32 CL: Well, I hope we increase the exposure of the app because I know in the United States there is such a desire to know what’s safe and not. It really is. I mean there’s so many people who are really trying to be advocates for their own health and tired of being duped and lied to by all these different companies. So that’s wonderful.

Okay, so just to kind of recap when we’re talking about fertility, and when we’re talking about fertility, we’re really talking about overall health because the focus is fertility issues and practical tips. You were talking about the phthalates, you were talking about BPA and kind of plastics in general. Are there any plastics that are safe? Is it just the soft plastics? Or should one kind of steer clear of most plastics?

BS: Now there are safer plastics. But the big problem with plastic is they’re nonbiodegradable, so it’s a huge problem in the world. Just looking on it from an environmental viewpoint, we’ve got huge problems with plastic. I don’t know whether you have in the US but there’s campaigns here in Australia to remove one-use plastic bags from supermarkets and the like because they’re destroying the environment, there’s destroying a whole species and then you get the knock-on effect because one species relies on another. And that’s disappeared so it disappears and you get down the line. But from a human health point of view, there are relatively safe plastics. Those are one of the harder plastics. But yeah, there is a problem with food packaging, apart from the environmental issue. It’s best to minimize the amount of food packaging. Use a reusable cloth bag when you go shopping so that you’re not contributing to the problem. That’s the old adage: if you’re not helping the problem, you’re actually contributing to it. So be one of the people who’s actually doing something about fixing the problem.

So yeah, I don’t know what else I can say about that. A lot of it comes down to common sense really. A lot of it comes down to common sense and despite the way with common sense, it’s not that common anymore. We talk about common sense but it really isn’t that common anymore. It’s because I think we’ve become puppets, we’ve become robots. We don’t think for ourselves. We tend to believe what we’re being told. We’ve got to start to think for ourselves and start to do our own research and start to take more responsibility for ourselves and for the planet.

60:09 CL: Our audience is smart. I don’t think there’s nothing average about this audience. They’re extremely educated and inquisitive and really want to know. So they’re not that average, definitely, not out there.

BS: Yeah. I was talking generally but that’s great. They are the people who can educate the next generation. That’s great, so I really applaud that people are willing to.

60:54 CL: So just to kind of recap again. So we were talking about fragrances, phthalates, BPA, the food additives, MSG being just one of them, sodium benzoate. Any other big ones?

BS: Aspartame comes to mind.

61:13 CL: Oh my gosh. The artificial sweeteners, yeah.

BS: Aspartame, the artificial sweetener, so many problems associated with them. If you’ve got to sweeten, you’re probably better off having, well, Stevia is an example of an alternative too and that’s a natural sweetener that you can use.

High fructose corn syrup is another big problem and most corn that’s grown in the US is genetically modified as well, so you’ve got the double whammy with that. Despite the fact that they say it’s carbohydrate, it will contain some protein that’s gotten in there from the manufacturing process.

62:09 CL: I think the sugar industry is great at sort of manipulating the message and duping people because it’s like stay away from white sugar, stay away from corn syrup and then people go, “Oh, well this has zero calories. It’s an alternative to sugar.” Do you educate people on that? We’re running out of time. I’m assuming most of us know to stay away from artificial sweeteners but then all of a sudden I see like in every restaurant in America, in California I live in a very kind of like health and holistic area, there’s three different types of artificial sweetener on the table at restaurants, so obviously people are using them. I thought the message was out on them. But there’s people who just really love the taste of it and they sort of go, “Oh, is it really that bad? I’m not using white.” So is there information on your website that they could read about artificial sweeteners?

BS: Yeah. Also on the app, you can look up aspartame on the app. You can look up sucralose in the app as well. One of the things I’ll just mention with the app. The app was written for Australia and New Zealand so in the food additives section in Australia here we use what’s called INS numbers. I believe so like the food additive, yellow coloring, tartrazine which I think is FD&C Yellow 5, which is probably how it’s labeled in the US, is Food Additive 102 in Australia. But there is an index where you can look up 102 and it will tell you what you look for in the US when you’re looking for that. So just to give people a bit of a heads-up on it when they do buy the app. With the app you can search by name or by number. In Australia when manufacturers got a bit savvy about people thinking “Oh, they’re not going to buy it because it’s got a number on it,” they started going back to putting the names. So they’re always trying to stay ahead of the game as it were.

64:37 CL: Nice move.

BS: Aspartame is now also known as aminosweet. So as people got used to the name Aspartame, they changed the name, so they’ve changed it to aminosweet.

64:54 CL: I see.

BS: Again trying to dupe the public.

65:00 CL: Oh, gosh. Well, thank you so much. If you appreciate the content today, please support us by subscribing to the Fertility Hour. We thank you so much for your support. Then Bill, give us the name of your website again where we can download the app and get the companion guide.

BS: So if you go to www.chemicalmaze.com, that will take you to our website. There’s a link that will then take you through to Google Play or to the Apple App Store where you can purchase the app. And also we have an email address team at Chemical Maze so if anybody has got any questions that they’d like answered, then they’re welcome to email me at team@chemicalmaze.com and I’d be more than happy to if I can answer those questions. I believe to purchase the book and have it sent to the US, it’s probably around about $30 US to get the Chemical Maze Bookshelf Companion.

66:15 CL: I see, okay. It has to be through the website. You do not have it on any –

BS: Yeah.

66:20 CL: Okay, got it.

BS: Yeah. It would have to be through the website. We don’t have any distributors in the US and it’s not available on Amazon either.

66:30 CL: Well, the app, at least it’s very convenient to purchase it.

BS: Absolutely. Although the app will cover food additives and cosmetic ingredients, but it won’t have the section on household products that I mentioned. That’s only in the book.

66:45 CL: Okay, all right. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time and I really appreciate it. Keep doing it.

BS: Yeah, thanks Charlene.

66:51 CL: Keep doing the great work that you’re doing, Bill.

BS: Yeah, this has been fun. It’s been good. Thanks for having me on your show.

66:58 CL: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thank you.

BS: Okay, bye.

67:01 CL: Bye-bye!