INTERVIEW Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins | The David Knight Show

All right, joining us now is David Steinman. He’s the author and co author of the groundbreaking bestsellers Diet for a poisoned planet and the Safe Shoppers Bible. He’s also a director of HLF, featured as one of the experts and activists in an HBO Max documentary, not so pretty. And his investigative reporting and writing have won awards from best of the West, California Newspaper Publishers association, the Sierra Club, and the Green Book Festival. He’s publisher of Healthy Living G magazine and serves as director of the nonprofit HLF, which is Healthy Living foundation. His book that we’re going to be talking about today is raising healthy kids, protecting your children from hidden chemical toxins.

And of course, you can find that on Amazon, probably everywhere else as well. Thank you for joining us, Mister Simon. Oh, it’s great to be here today. Well, thank you. Thank you. I was interested when I looked at this. Let’s begin with the youngest kids that are developing and the risk to them from chemicals in the household and chemicals that the pregnant mother may come in contact with. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great, that’s a great issue, David, because our lives have become so inundated with chemical toxins, most of them not revealed to us, but hidden. I’ll just give you an example.

You were talking about our youngest kids, or rather our during pregnancy when so much of our kids destiny really is determined from exposures that we may not even be thinking about. Like for example, cosmetics, a lot of cosmetics don’t reveal the hidden chemicals that can cause harm to the fetus or the embryo. For example, there’s a chemical called phthalate and everyone is talking about plastic today, plastic in our water, plastic even in our bodies, in the ocean, in our food. And what researchers have found is that phthalates, which are plastics, they’re used in cosmetics to make them a little more pliable or hold in cosmetics.

When mom is using these cosmetics and just has high normal everyday levels, high normal everyday levels, her child is at much higher risk for being born with lost iq points. As many as six to seven IQ points could be lost. Wow, that’s a lot. Yeah. Plus. Yeah, I’m sorry, I was going to ask what kind of cosmetics, I mean, is it, we’re talking about lipstick or face powder or eye makeup. What kind of stuff, Doctor Justin? You know, it’s really pervasive. I’ll just give you an example from the book. I talk about how when my kids brought home fragrances, right? You know, every teenager gets really concerned about social acceptance, so they start using deodorant fragrances and all.

So my kid, one of my sons brought home english leather cologne, which David, which I think every teenager since like 1965 is probably used. That’s right. I remember using it when I was a teenager. Oh, I know. And it hasn’t stopped, my friend. It hasn’t stopped. But we measured it for phthalate. I actually had it sent to the lab and it was loaded with so much phthalate. And I told my son, I said, look, I want to have grandkids and I want your kids to be really healthy. And if you keep using this stuff, I could speak frankly to him.

I said, it’s going to damage your testicles and your sperm. Because what researchers have found out is that phthalates act like the sex hormone estrogen. So when your son’s testicles are loaded up with phthalate, which they will be. If mom continues to use the wrong cosmetics, not only does he lose IQ points and fertility and could be at risk for ADHD, but he loses his testosterone. Because phthalates are like sex hormones. They imitate the hormone estrogen. So when we ask why do, why do our daughters now help, why do our daughters have so much endometriosis or polycystic ovary disease? The answer is we’re overloading them with estrogens that are hidden.

And one of the big culprits is cosmetics. So I do share in raising healthy kids. How do you find safe cosmetics? I make it really simple, but it’s so important. And of course, we talked about, we laughed about english leather and it’s been around forever, but the formulations are changing all the time. Right. You know, today, the products that you get today are going to likely be very different than what you use as a teenager. Even if it is the same brand and the same fragrance is still going to be probably a different formulation. They’re constantly changing and improving these things, right, in terms of the things that they use for the manufacturing process and that type of thing.

If you’re looking at the ingredient list, you certainly will see that there are a lot of chemical toxins being used in cosmetics today that were not used 20 or 30 years ago. And cosmetics have always been a problem in society. I mean, the Romans use cosmetics with lead and mercury for the cosmetic effects. So really, in some ways, David, the safety has not really improved. It’s probably just as bad today as it was 2000 years ago. It’s just that we changed the chemicals that are causing problems and we’re not telling. The worst thing is people would buy safe products.

If they only knew. But the way the game is played or rigged, industry doesn’t have to tell consumers when they know there are hidden chemical toxins. I agree. And that’s why my group, Healthy Living foundation, has done so many legal actions in Washington DC and California to make companies reveal these hidden chemical toxins in their consumer products. And of course we look at this and we say, well, that’s going to be fine because I use that as a kid or whatever. I’ve always used that. Well thats not the same product. And you might look at these products and you say, well, I know I dont want something thats got lead in it or other things like that, but they might get the lead out, but now they put in some new chemical that you have no idea what this is or what the health effects of it are.

And so thats how, as you point out, thats why youve got to keep current on this. Why something like your book, your publication is going to help people because those things are constantly changing. Oh, they know about that one. So lets take that out. But weve got this new thing here and nobody has tested it. Were going to put that in and it can be something that you don’t even necessarily really internalize, but um, uh, in terms of eating, but you’re still going to be uh, getting that in through your skin, breathing it in, other things like that.

And it’s going to have a, a big effect on you, isn’t it? Yeah. You know the um, the thing is, there’s no pre market safety testing for cosmetics either. Yeah, yeah. So it’s not like as you mentioned, the concoctions are being tested to see what they will actually do to our reproductive capacity. We and our kids are actually the test animals in this case. That’s right. That’s what I was just talking about. That with vaccines, that’s becoming the new thing, you know. Oh you got an MRI vaccine, you’re approved, go straight through. If they got a technology like 5g or something.

We don’t need to do any tests. We need this. So let’s just run this thing through. We’ll just rubber stamp this through. And of course, that is going on with everything, but especially with things that people are not necessarily even thinking about in terms of cosmetics. You mentioned things like bubble baths. Yeah. As a matter of fact, bubble bath is another big culprit. A lot of bubble baths are made using what’s called an ethoxylated alcohol and they’re contaminated with dioxane. So essentially the same dioxane by the way, is in shampoos. My nonprofit group, the Healthy Living foundation, we sued Procter and gamble.

We sued them for having high amounts of a carcinogen in pantene and herbal essence as shampoos. And we got them to reduce the levels by 90% in a consent judgment that we won in California superior court to make those products much safer. But, you know, bubble bath like shampoos will contain a carcinogen called dioxane. Here’s one big tip that’s in my book, though, that I want to share with your listeners. If you see an ingredient on your cosmetic label that has these three letters, eth, like sodium Laureth sulfate, don’t buy it. Those are the ingredients that will be contaminated with chemicals that cause cancer.

So mom and dad, when you’re buying, or mom and dad, if you’re buying shampoos for your kids or if you’re just buying them for yourself or a bubble bath, the big tip is avoid any chemicals with ethanol. You’ll see it on the label. And if you do, you know that company is not looking out for your health or your kids health. Wow, that’s very important. Well, we’ll check our shampoo today. I’m going to get your book as well. When you look at all this, and you mentioned some of the biggest brands that are there, of course, you know, Johnson and Johnson’s and something as fundamental as baby powder that has gone on for decades.

And they continued to do it even after it was identified. They continued to run that through, didn’t they? Youre talking about the talc issue, that baby powders had talc and that has been linked with ovarian cancer. So its a really big issue. But ill tell you something else, David, if you want to move a little from cosmetics to foods, ill just give you an while were on the topic of our children in court in California, the HLF, the Healthy Living foundation, we had to sue a large almond nut butter company. And I don’t know if you want to mention names or not, but it’s helpful.

And I don’t mind sharing a little bit because it’s in public record, actually. But we sue Justin’s nut butters, which is one of the most popular brands in the country because they had such a high amount of an industrial chemical called acrylamide that they were not telling their consumers about. Now, my kids, like a lot of kids are trying to go healthy and a lot of folks are trying to go paleo. So they are buying a lot of almond butters for example. And what I share in raising healthy kids, protecting their children from hidden chemical toxins, is when you’re at that Whole foods and you’re looking for nut butters, you could reach for the Whole Foods nut butter, which we also tested and was very low and very safe compared to the Justin’s.

But neither is labeled for this industrial chemical called acrylamide. So the consumer is left in the dark. The problem is that acrilamide, as we were talking about with talc, is linked with an increasing incidence of endometrial cancer in our daughters. And that risk begins when they’re kids and they’re eating snack foods, because the foods most likely to have acrylamide are snack foods like nut butters or potato chips or french fries. And if we let our kids keep eating these foods, we wonder again, why is there so much endometriosis, endometrial cancer, reproductive cancers, breast cancer, all these cancers? Well, I mentioned that some chemicals act like estrogen.

Acrylamide also acts like the hormone estrogen. So when our daughters are eating it, it messes with their genes and causes them to produce a toxic form of estrogen that then increases their risk for reproductive cancers. Again, David, these things are not being shared with consumers. And that’s why I really felt it was necessary to write the book and share this information. One of the fastest ways to make change in America is through the marketplace, through the free market. And we’ve kind of always said, well, America is a free market. We’re capitalists. But how free is a market when the manufacturers are withholding such vital information from the consumers and dumbing them down? And that’s what I’m fighting against, to make people smarter and let them see what’s really going on so they can protect themselves and their families.

That’s right. You can’t have a marketplace. You can’t have a free marketplace if the consumers don’t have any information? Exactly. That’s exactly what I say. Let me ask you this. Why are they putting these industrial chemicals in? Is it to be able to process the food more easily? Is it to make it go through the machines better? Is that why these industrial chemicals are finding their way in? Processing is a big part of it. Sometimes companies are just cheap, and they buy cheap materials and inferior materials. Also, companies pretend like they have all these testing procedures in place.

They’ll say, our products are third party tested, et cetera, et cetera. What they’re really saying is when we buy our materials, we tell our raw source material suppliers to test the products for us and give us those test results. But what they don’t tell their suppliers is, this is what we want to test you for, what we want you to test for, and these are the levels we want you to test at now, because I’ve been in the trenches so long, David, I know what the suppliers to the brand say is, well, we’re going to test the products, but we’re not really going to look for the chemicals that they’re concerned about, nor are we going to test at levels low enough to find them.

So we’re going to send them a quality certificate that says that everything is non detectable. Well, we go in there and test the products with really good lab methods, and that’s when we find the phthalates, for example, or the dioxane. So this is really kind of a self induced blindness that the companies don’t want to know the truth about their own products, so they leave it to their suppliers, and their suppliers willingly lie and deceive them because they want to keep supplying inferior materials that don’t cost as much to process. Yeah, yeah, we always see that.

I mean, we see it with political polls, we see it with, when they’re looking at pharmaceuticals, you might have three different companies, and they both got pretty much the same. They got three different drugs to teach a, to treat a particular problem, and so they’ll each hire their people to test it. And lo and behold, the people that you hired that you’re paying are going to say that your brand is better than brand b and brand c. They’ve seen that over and over again. And so that’s really what’s happening, because there isn’t any overseas site. There isn’t any information outside this.

You’re our director of the chemical toxin working group. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, we began in 2012, and our mission is to make companies reveal the hidden chemical toxins in their products. And we do a lot of testing, and I’m always buying, you know, I spend hours every day or one of our shoppers will buying products. For example, we took on bumblebee and chicken of the sea, and we took them on for selling oysters and clams from China that were filled with lead. So these products have so much lead in them that one.

And, folks, these products are being sold in your neighborhood. So if you see canned clams, oysters, mussels, and you want to have kids, these are not the products to buy. They have so much lead and cadmium in them, so much lead that eating one serving of one of these products is equivalent to drinking about 20 glasses of drinking water from Flint, Michigan, during the height of the lead crisis. Wow. So I’m telling mom and dad, don’t buy these canned shellfish products. If you want to have kids, you’re going to inundate your fetus or your children. Heavy metals.

So we take on big companies. In that case, we took on chicken of the sea, as I mentioned, Bumblebee, Kroger, the supermarket chain, and Walmart, all in one court case. And these are billion dollar companies. They joined together to fight us. But we won. We won in court. We got a consent judgment. And that consent judgment said, now, at least in California, where we have stronger consumer laws, you have to notify the consumer on the label if your product contains heavy metals like lead or cadmium. So we won. A big victory for consumers. And we continue to do that.

We continue to work in the area of foods, cosmetics, vitamin supplements. And we test, and we test another product we found. This is how we screw up fertility in America. There was a very popular olive oil product we tested that had a chemical called Carbaryl in it. They weren’t telling their customers, but we enlisted the help of the best, the most respected researcher in this field in the country, if not the world, who had found that Carbaryl at very low levels. David from everyday exposures, was damaging men’s sperm. So here you have a company selling olive oil products with Carberryl.

Now, men and women are using olive oil products daily. We use it for our health because of the fats, the different kinds of fats that are olive oil. But if you’re using it daily and has so much Carbaryl in it, and you’re on the cusp of either having a family or not, as so many couples are in America, this is the kind of exposure that can bring you from able to have a child to not being able to have a child. And it’s every day and you’re not being told, and, you know, your mom and dad are going, why aren’t we conceiving? And dad is going, I don’t know.

I’m eating olive oil every day and trying to be really healthy. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that that olive oil is tainted with Carbaryl and that’s damaging his sperm. His sperm can’t make it up the vaginal canal to the egg because they’re not strong enough. They don’t have enough motility, so. Or they’re misshapen. So we really are damaging. This is a micro world, a nano world we’re talking about within our bodies. But these are just examples of the kinds of things we’re fighting on a daily basis. We want a big settlement there. So carburetor will no longer be found in this company’s olive oil products.

That’s great. Yeah. When we look at this, we see spermageddon. People have talked about that. Look at the decline in sperm. Look at the decline in population. Of course, there’s a lot of different, there’s sociological factors involved in it. But a lot of this, I think, is, as you point out, a lot of it is the environment. A lot of it is the products that we use. It can be cleaning products. It can be cereal. It can be bubble bath. It can be all these cosmetics that we use. And we really don’t understand that. And it is something that is constantly changing and difficult to keep up with.

Well, one thing, though, for listeners, don’t get defeated. Don’t throw your hands up and say it’s all poisoned. The reason why I wrote raising healthy kids is to give you a black belt in protecting your children in the chemical toxin jungle. Yes. Reading the book will really equip you. You’ll read it once, you’ll have all the information, and then you can go on with the rest of your life. There’s so many things that are so important that you might not know about. One little story in the book I’ll just share. Family is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

They just started their family. They had two young kids they were sending off to preschool. David, what they didn’t do was check the drinking water, the tap water at the preschool. That preschool was connected to a well that was drawing from an air force base that had been using all these forever chemicals. Wow. So their children were, their bloodstream was inundated with chemicals that caused cancer, kidney and liver disease. These kids were like four and five years old. The only thing they didn’t do was ask the preschool, did you check your water? Do you test it? If they had just done that for $200, wow.

They would have avoided a huge. Do you know the recrimination that we parents feel when our children suffer? Yes. You know, so there’s so many things that people need to know, big things that are simple, but if you don’t know them, it can change your life. That’s what I’m trying to do in raising healthy kids, is give you those big tips that will protect you and your family. And even as you pointed out before, you know, you talked about the products that one of them is bad, and the other one sold right next to it, the whole foods.

If you’ve got eat this, don’t eat that type of thing. But also, as you point out, to check the water, it’s amazing how much stuff finds its way into the water. It can be something that’s put there by the water system, or it can be something that is a spill. I remember a reporter that I talked to was on the beat out in California, and there was a situation in a military base where they had disposed of a lot of instruments that had radium in it, and nobody knew that. And it worked its way down into the water system.

And so even though people were on, well, water, people out there in California were getting this radium, high concentrations of radium in their water. And it’s like, you know, what. What’s people getting sick. So then they started investigating that. But, yeah, that. That’s probably a good tip to constantly be checking your water to see if there’s something there. Even if you’re not on a. On a city system or something like that. Even if you’re pulling it out of the ground, there can still be groundwater contamination that you don’t know about. Well, that’s true. Now, some people might think that, well, what good will checking my water be if I can’t afford to correct the problem? But what I did in raising healthy kids is we went down to cancer Alley, Louisiana, and I wanted to go there to write some of the book raising healthy kids, because I wanted to make sure that everyone, no matter what their budget is, could do the things that I’m talking about in raising healthy kids.

So cancer alley is a stretch of river, Mississippi river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. It’s about 85 miles, and there are about 150 to 200 chemical plants packed into these 85 miles. You’ll see all the ships coming up from the gulf with their oil and coal or coming down the river with their coal and ore to these plants. This is where all the chemicals in our cosmetics, personal care products, this is where they’re all made, is cancer alley, where all these plants are. The trouble is, their drinking water there is atrocious. We measure atrazine in it, phthalates, which we talked about, hexachlorocyclopentadine.

I won’t even go into what that is, but lots of different chemicals. And some people there, though, may make like 15, $17,000 a year. They don’t make a lot of money. So what I often tell folks is, if you’re on a budget. Don’t worry about testing your water at home. I’m talking about at home. Now, if you’re on a budget, I want you to do these things. And this is what I share in the book, too. So this is a tip from our chapter on drinking water. Get yourself a little faucet filter that fits at the end of your faucet.

That costs about $25. And they do a pretty good job of filtering their water. But then I want you to get a pitcher filter, like zero water or burrito. In our home, we use zero water. Why? Because it filters out those forever chemicals. So you put the water from your faucet, and then you put it into your pitcher. So you’ve double filtered your water. That pitcher will cost about $30. So for about dollar 50, David, you have filtered your water and reduced probably 85% to 90% of the contamination. Now, a really system can run 300, $400 or more, but not everyone has an available three or $400 at one time.

But most people can afford a $25 $30 purchase. Yeah, that’s right. So that’s why I’m saying, now, if you were mentioning all these chemicals and your home, well, when you shower and the water gets hot, then these chemicals become volatile and you breathe them. So I want you to take another $20 and buy yourself a shower filter with activated carbon. Yes. Now, for about $75, you’ve done most of your home. But what if you garden? Now, I want you to get a little filter for your hose so you can get them out of your garden, too, for another 20 or $25.

So, for about $100, no matter where you live, whether it’s cancer alley or the Hamptons, you can protect yourself. And you need to do this because, you know, the chemical toxins we’re talking about tend to attack people of color more, but they do attack everyone. So everyone should be aware of this. The point is, is that all of us can do this. Don’t let your budget be. Don’t say, I can’t afford it. I bust so many myths in raising healthy kids. People will say, for example, I can’t afford organic foods because they’re too expensive. Not true anymore.

All the staples, David, all the staples, lettuce, celery, apples, they’re all about the same price as conventionally growing now. And that’s because so many shoppers for the last 20 years have been waking up to wanting food without chemicals like pesticides or fungicides. So they’ve grown this market again, it’s the free market. As the demand has grown, prices have gone down. So this summer, for example, or last summer, I could find organic produce just by shopping online that was cheaper than conventionally sourced produce. That’s because we, the shoppers are waking up and making a difference. That’s great.

Yeah, tell us a little bit about that too, because, you know, and I like what you had to say about the water, and everybody should start with water because you consume so much of that. And even if you can’t get one of these very expensive several hundred dollar filters is going to take out 99.9% of so many things. If you can get 90% of it out, that that is a huge difference it’s going to make in your life. But talk, talk a little bit about the labels in terms of, you know, something is organic, something versus something that is non gmo.

And some of these other things, I think people get confused about that. I’m sure you cover that in your book. By the way, the book is raising healthy kids, protecting your children from hidden chemical toxins. Educate us a little bit about some of these labels that we’ll see out there and depend on. Sure. Well, one of the things I do talk about with regard to food is I do think organic food is a better choice than conventionally sourced food. I’m not saying that organically grown foods are perfect, but in writing, raising healthy kids, I reviewed thousands and thousands of tests that were done on foods organic and non organic.

And the non organic food was really infiltrated with a lot of chemical pesticides that you’re obviously not told about on the labeling, whereas the organic foods rarely ever had any detectable pesticides. So the difference is enormous and the reason why this is really important, again, we were talking about cosmetic shaving IQ points. Researchers at Columbia in New York City and UC Davis in California found that when kids were exposed to the chemicals in our foods, like the pesticides, they also lost five to seven IQ points. Now the researchers in California found this among children who were exposed to pesticides because so many of their parents were farm workers.

But in New York City, the kids parents weren’t exposed to pesticides because they were farm workers. The kids were being exposed to these chemicals because they were eating the foods and they were also losing five to seven iq points. Organic is the real thing and there are a lot of health benefits that come from organic foods. I know it’s really fashionable to bash people like me who say, well, organics are great foods. You want to call me a hippie or I don’t know what but listen, the published, peer reviewed studies show that when your child is on an organic diet, they have less obesity, less diabetes, fewer skin and other kinds of allergies, lower risk of cancer.

Mom, when she’s pregnant and on organic foods, has fewer complications during her pregnancy, too. And dad, dad will have more of those little baby sperms. His fertility will increase. So organic is the real thing. Now you can buy non GMO. That means the foods were not genetically modified. This is important, too, because one of the reasons why foods are being. Crops are being genetically modified is that so farmers can apply more herbicide to them. There’s a reason why glyphosate or roundup is showing up in so many foods in America today. And glyphosate is thought to cause cancer, among other problems.

But the reason why it’s showing up is so many crops are being genetically modified to withstand heavy doses of roundup, so the herbicide companies can sell more roundup. And the seed companies have modified their crops so they can take that more roundup because they’re the same company. The seed companies and the herbicide companies are one in the same. So you really do want to get non GMO, but non GMO may still have other pesticides applied to it. That’s right. I want to give you an example so you could have something that’s non GMO, as you said, they might be putting that on there because they might want to really load it up with pesticides.

But something that is non GMO. GMO can still have pesticides, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every loaf of bread weve ever tested at the healthy Living foundation has an organophosphate pesticide in it. These organophosphate pesticides are nerve toxins. They actually damage the synapses between your nerves and inhibit an enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. So at high doses, that you would go into spasms, be unable to function, but at low doses, these are what are causing adhd in our kids. And so every loaf of bread, it may say non GMO, but it’s still going to be sprayed with herbicides or pesticides.

So organic is superior to non GMO. Organic will still be non GMO, but it also precludes most of the pest, all synthetic pesticides. And that’s the key thing, that the organic is also non GMO. Right? Organic is also non GMO, but it’s also precludes so many pesticides that would be used. So it’s a better label. It checks, checks both of those boxes, both pesticides and GMO exactly. Yeah. That’s good. That’s important because it gets confusing. What about, do you talk anything about eggs? I know this isn’t really a chemical thing, but it gets so confusing when you go there.

It’s like this is free range. And this, you know, all these different labels that they got for the egg stuff is very confusing. It’s like, I don’t even know what the difference is with these different labels that they got for the eggs. That’s a great question, too. Now we’re talking about animals. And, for example, free range, pasture raised and grass fed for beef, for example, is another one. So being a bleeding heart for animal liberal, for animal welfare and human welfare as well, both of us, I do try to buy products, but I’ve looked them up.

And these labels can be misleading because if they say free range, it could mean like maybe an hour or two a day that they’re let out of their coop. So there are, again, I buy organic and I do look for uncaged poultry eggs and it will say it on the label. Also, you should get to know the company you’re buying your eggs from because, as I said, they can claim to be free range but not let their birds out very much. Because, again, unless it’s a cert, most of them are certified. If they’re certified, the animals will be treated much better.

Also with beef. We also have now organic versus grass fed beef. And I’m okay with grass fed beef. Now the big thing with beef is that cattle in America are treated with hormones, both estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. And these levels can be measured in your beef. So there have been articles recently about our daughters reaching menarche or puberty earlier and earlier. Yes. And the reason why this is happening in western society, again, I’ll come back to the sex hormones that we’re inundating our kids with. If your daughter is eating a lot of beef and it’s not grass fed or organic, shes getting a lot of extra hormones.

And these things will cause earlier menarche in our daughters. And thats not a good thing. One, it increases their risk for breast cancer and other reproductive cancers. The longer that reproductive window is open for women, the greater the chance is for cancer later in life. We really want to be careful about that. Now, with beef, I mentioned I’m okay with grass fed, and I’ve studied this. And that’s because grass fed beef also tends to be, it may not be labeled organic, but if you get beef that’s been grass fed from beginning to end, it’s still going to, it’s not going to have hormones and, and it’s going to be very low in any kind of pesticides that would have accumulated in the grains that are being fed, for example, corn fed beef.

So grass fed and organic are your best choices for beef. And there’s a big reason for that. Another good reason is ranchers who sell grass fed beef, pork and so on tend to think of themselves really as grass managers. What they say is, give me a little rain, give me a little grass, and I can give you your beef or your pork. So they’re very conservation oriented. And I interviewed for raising healthy kids. Mel Coleman, who ranches up in Colorado, and he just talked about 100 years of regenerative ranching. They’ve really remade so much of that area into grasslands, healthy grasslands, because they move their herds.

In this case, it was a couple thousand cattle at one time, but they moved them in ways that the grass would regenerate and they were not fed corn and grains. You want to avoid corn fed or grain fed beef, though. That’s the beef that will have the hormones added to it. You want grass fed or organic when it comes to beef, pork and your other meats. Thats interesting. And of course, let me ask you this, because weve just had some of these cases come up with the amish farmer, Amos Miller. You had a situation where everybodys buying shares of his beef and he was raising them grass fed.

And then when Covid came and it was difficult to get things to the market and have them slaughtered, he decided that he would do the slaughtering there. And it was kind of a club situation. And so he did that. The USDA came in and shut him down, saying that you got to have all of the cattle slaughtered at an official USDA site. Now, when they’re taken there, they put them on grains there at the feedlots, right. But it’s not enough that it’s going to really make that big of a change. Is that the way we would look at it or what do you think about that? Not every feedlot, no, grass fed beef would not be fed.

You want to be sure, but most grass fed beef is not being finished with grains. Oh, it’s not? Okay, they’re not being finished with grains. But you’re right about the slaughterhouses, and that’s, the USDA is really, really strict. And even the labeling for natural USDA water down. That’s why you’re asking about labels. You’ll also see natural naturally raised on your beef products. That doesn’t mean anything. So you want grass fed. What naturally raised means is just, they will still be given hormones or antibiotics. In the case of poultry, naturally raised does not mean that they weren’t given hormones or antibiotics.

So naturally raised is not enough protection. You want grass fed or organic for your beef products? Let me ask you, just mention poultry. I talked to a Tennessee state senator here, and I’m in Tennessee senator nicely, and he was talking about how they finish off. In many cases, chicken with arsenic makes them gain weight very rapidly. Do it at the end of it, you know, you get this bloating of the chickens. It’s not enough to kill them before they slaughter them, but what do you know? And he said, I’ve tried to get this stuff out, but there’s a lot of, lot of interest.

The big business of the, the chicken thing, they really fight stopping this arsenic. Is that something that you’ve seen or know about the arsenic and chickens at the end? Wow, that, that is a new one, the arsenic. I don’t know about arsenic. Yeah. But I do know. I do know that, generally speaking, people will ask me, what about when I’m dining out? What do I do then, if I don’t, if I’m not quite sure about the source of the meat, generally speaking. And when I wrote raising healthy kids, what I’m trying to do is get you the biggest reductions possible for the least effort or the least cost.

Yeah. Like we’re talking about in the water. If you can get rid of 90% of it, that’s a huge improvement. I mean, it’s, you know, but when you’re dining out and you’re looking at meats, poultry is a much safer choice than beef. And the way to make your poultry safest or your beef safest is to cut out the fatty portions. If you can resist not eating some of the fat. For example, some of the most harmful chemicals that we know today, like DDT, heptachlor, accumulate in the fatty portions of animals and humans. So if you have a nice cut of beef with a lot of fat on it, it will tend to have more pesticide in it.

If you are serving, if you’re buying poultry, for example, and you have fried chicken, the skin is the fattiest portion. Plus that breaded portion will have all those organic phosphate pesticides. So you might be better off with a piece with grilled chicken, for example. When you’re dining out, poultry is always safer than beef. Turkey is always safer than chicken. And it’s just the way the studies come out. So that’s another tip that I bring up in raising healthy kids is when you’re dining out, what do you look for? Doctor Justin. That’s great. That’s great. And that’s the key thing, is just being wise and trying to minimize, because there isn’t a hundred percent solution for anything in the real world.

You’re just trying to minimize the harmful stuff and maximize the. The beneficial stuff. And that’s the real wisdom of the book, I think. Well, is there a category here that we haven’t talked about? We talked about pesticides, we talked about cosmetics, we’ve talked about. We’ve talked about vegetables. We haven’t talked about cereals and stuff. I guess, you know, when you look at the cereal and it’s all these bright fluorescent colors, you might think that something’s wrong. But there’s probably a lot of things that put themselves out there as a healthy cereal that probably have the same problems as that bright fluorescent colored stuff too, maybe, huh? Oh my God.

You mean those fruit loops? You mean those fruit loops weren’t that healthy? I thought fruit loops were part of a winning breakfast. That’s right. Oh no. Tell me things. So they really advertise that stuff heavily to the kids, don’t they? So what does a parent do if they want to get some cereals? What’s the best bet on that cereal? Yeah. Again, the grains are heavily sprayed with organophosphate pesticides. So your number one decision maker for cereals, mom and dad, is get it organic. Don’t think they will be more expensive. And don’t let anyone tell you that you’re being silly or dumb for buying organic foods.

I know there’s a lot of organic food bashing going on, but it makes a huge difference in your kid’s life. I’m really coming to you with straight facts. When you’re buying cereal, you want organic. I talked to so many parents who find that when they stop serving their kids all these food dyes, like we were talking about fruit loops, right? And cereals can be so brightly colored with often they were and still continue to be with food dyes. These food dyes are another cause of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And mom and dad will find that when they new food diets from their kids diet, as well as the organophosphate pesticides in their grains, their kids behavior will improve.

And it comes pretty fast. So organic is the big key for buying cereals as well. And it will go a long way towards giving your child a better breakfast. Stay away from all those food dyes that are in the cereals. And that’s the key thing. What you mentioned, the fact that as, as the marketplace says, we want more organic, then that starts to build a critical mass and it starts to get cheaper. As you point out, it’s not a premium product anymore. You can get it at the same price. As you said, some places you can find it less than the non organic stuff.

So it’s no longer something that’s available only to people who have more money to spend on the food. You could certainly make the argument that you’re going to save, as you did with the water. Testing money spent up front on making sure that your food is clean, your water is clean, is going to be a real economic decision rather than having to treat the results of eating food that is loaded with all these other things. I mean, you know, let the food be your medicine upfront and not create these situations. That’s the really wise thing, I think.

Yeah, I think that, you know, the $100, for example, we talked about you may spend to filter your water if you’re on a budget, is going to be so much more valuable than the health insurance you get. Filtering your water is going to prevent illness. Health insurance is going to pay for some of your illness. Yeah, that’s right. David, these changes come when you start on a really wholesome diet, like I’m prescribing and raising healthy kids, you feel better. And these changes come almost immediately. Our bodies are extremely sensitive to our environment, our internal environment and our external environment.

And mom and dad, as you put your kids on a healthier diet, their behaviors will improve. Your health will improve. It really works. Plus the big thing is we were talking about organic foods, how shoppers have created that market. In my reporting in California, I used to go to a town in California called Salinas. And Salinas is called the salad bowl of America because about 70% of all lettuce is grown in this area of California. The town and all the schools are carved right out of the farm fields. You’ll see thousands of acres of farm field and then a little school in the middle there.

I used to go to these schools and they were surrounded by fields being sprayed with pesticides. And the kids were playing in the yard. There’s a chain link fence, and on the other side of the yard in the chain link fence is the farm field. And there’s no buffer and they’re all being sprayed. I returned to Salinas to write raising healthy kids during the pandemic and went to these same schools. They were all surrounded by organic strawberry and lettuce fills. So I called up the teach, one of the teachers, I said, what’s going on here? He said, well, David, it’s because of shoppers like you that have motivated all the farmers here to go organic.

So they’re planting organic strawberry and lettuce fields all around the schools now to grow these crops that you’re buying. And I was really, David, I was really overjoyed. I was kind of crying with joy because, listen, for years, in the early two thousands, when there was barely an organic market, I would listen to all these people saying, why waste your money on organic foods? Why pay this much for those organic strawberries? I was doing it kind of on faith that I was making a difference. That’s great. But to see it materialize in Salinas like I did showed me that my actions are not only good for my health and my family’s health, but they’re actually helping my neighbors, people I may never have known 300 miles north of me, but now I can see that my choices were improving their lives, too.

That’s right. Yeah. I always say that the issues are local, and we do it one on one, and we do it from the ground up if we want real change. And I’ve seen this type of thing even in my life. I’ve told the story before on the radio here that 40 years ago, we had a dog that came down with a particular type of lymphoma. And I heard a radio report about how farm workers were getting that same thing and said, yeah, they use this stuff. They spray it on lawns, you know, to keep the weeds down and everything.

And our dog was getting out and got into that. And so it’s like that. That really clicked with me right there, how important that exposure is. And it’s been a. That’s huge, David. That’s so huge. Because, you know, to back up what you’re saying, there are actually studies that show that when we use these, and we didn’t really talk about our lawns, but ask if you’re able to afford someone who’s taking care of your lawn, ask them what they’re using. Please know what they’re using. And if they’re using chemical pesticides, please tell them to stop, not only for your kids.

But, David, there are studies now that show that these same chemicals do cause increased cancer in our canine friends. Yeah, that’s right. So what’s your dog? You know, the lymphoma was definitely. Oh, yeah. You see the link pretty clearly. It was even the company that did it even put a sign out said, you know, keep kids and dogs and pets and everything off of this lawn. It’s like, why would you put something on that you can’t have kids and pets on in the first place? But, you know, we were doing our lawn, but the neighbor was, and hes getting out, escaping out of the fence and getting over into their lawn.

And so, yeah, it was pretty clear what, what was happening with it. Same type of cancer that they had with that. So, yeah, it affects our lives in so many different ways and its something that is being done. I think in many cases taking an economic shortcut, as you point out, you know, they might save just a little bit of money, but its the volume that they make it up on. And so I think thats one of the other reasons why if we keep it small, if we keep it local, that helps a great deal. But as you pointed out, by voting with our pocketbook and voting for organic stuff, and I think the same thing is going to happen if we do that with other products, if we do that with cosmetics and other things like that.

Make it known to them, hey, hey, we don’t want this stuff. You know, that’s such a marketplace thing, can work with other things other than organic food. We can have organic makeup and other things like that. Yeah. You know, there’s a lot of stupidity in the world and someone has to be the adult. Yeah. And to be adults, we need information if they keep keeping. You’re so right, though, because, you know, organic cosmetics are now widely available. David, again, it’s because of shoppers saying, hey, I just don’t want these chemicals. And companies are responding because of the profit motive.

That’s right. That’s right. So you’re absolutely right. We are changing the market. So be a smart consumer and one of the ways that you can educate yourself about what is going very quickly. Excellent book, raising healthy kids, protecting your children from hidden chemicals and toxins. David Steinman. And David, it’s on Amazon. Is there a place that you’d prefer that they go? Is there some place that you sell that directly or a website? Thank you for asking. Support your local bookseller. The book is available everywhere. So go to your local independent bookseller and you can get raising healthy kids, protecting your children from hidden chemical toxins.

Good. Or you can go to Amazon and Barnes and the people that work there, guys, pretty hard. I agree. Yeah, get it locally if you can and it probably is everywhere. Raising healthy kids by David Steinman. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you. And that’s a very important book, and we will be getting that for our family. Absolutely. Because that’s my, my son’s wife is pregnant, and so we really want to. Oh, you need stuff right now. Yeah, that’s right. We better, yeah, we better get you a copy ASAP, my friend. Thank you so much, David.

It was great talking to you. Very important book, raising healthy kids. Have a good day. Thank you so much. And folks, thank you. We’re just about the end of the show here, and I want to thank everybody for joining us. I’ve got one more thing that I did not cover that was sent to us besides the flag, and that is this book. They said, I can give this to my kids. Doctor Fauci, how boy from Brooklyn became America’s doctor. Yeah, that can educate the kids about Doctor Fauci. Or I guess we could go back and get the archives for when the kids a little bit older, and I’ll educate them about a lot of things about Doctor Fauci and other things that are happening in our society.

Thank you so much for joining us. Have a good day. Let me tell you, the day, the night show you can listen to with your ears. You can even watch it by using your eyes. In fact, if you can hear me, that means you’re listening to the David knight show right now. Yeah. Good job. And you want to know something else? You can find all the links to everywhere to watch or listen to the show@thedavidknightshow.com. that’s a website.
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