Home Safe Home: Protecting Yourself and Your Family from Everyday Toxics and Harmful Household Products

Natural Health, March-April, 1998 by Tina Spangler

By Debra Lynn Dadd

As the lifestyle editor for Natural Health, my shelves are lined with books on how to make our environment healthier; a new one appears almost every week. But whenever I need information on anything from the safest glass cleaner to where to buy an all-cotton mattress, I reach for one of Debra Lynn Dadd's books--The Nontoxic Home & Office or Nontoxic, Natural & Earthwise. A powerful advocate for safe and environmentally friendly products, Dadd has now updated and combined those books into one comprehensive volume, Home Safe Home.

Dadd is not a scientist, but rather a ferociously dedicated researcher who has become one of the country's leading resources for ways to reduce exposure to the toxic contaminants found in everyday household products. Dadd began looking for sources of chemical poisoning in the home in 1980 after she was diagnosed with a severe breakdown in her immune system caused, she was told, by a high-stress lifestyle and heavy chemical exposure. Her initial search led her to write a small directory in 1982 of safe brandname products and places to purchase them. The media picked up her story, scientific studies began to link toxic exposures to a variety of health problems, and Dadd soon had enough material to fill a book. Today, she says, it would fill a library. Home Safe Home is the best of her eighteen years of research.

Dadd seems to point the finger at everything in the home--from shower curtains (they release fumes) to synthetic carpeting (made from 120 chemicals, including toxic pesticides and the carcinogen benzene) to particleboard furniture (formaldehyde holds it together), plus toothpastes, vitamin pills, brightly colored oranges, and hundreds of other things you would never suspect.

Overwhelming, perhaps. But Dadd's opening chapter does not leave the reader feeling panic. From the start, she helps conceive a plan for assigning priorities to this whole mess and for deciding how to go about weeding out the worst offenders.

So, if you're looking for practical suggestions to protect yourself from everyday contaminants, I recommend You, too, make room for this book on your (non-particleboard) bookshelf.

EXCERPT: HOME SAFE HOME

Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, says that cancer rates are escalating to epidemic proportions. Despite the fact that many Americans have stopped smoking and lowered their dietary fat intake, since 1950 overall cancer incidence has increased by 44 percent. --Tina Spangler

Home Safe Home: Protecting Yourself and Your Family from Everyday Toxics and Harmful Household Products; Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997; 430 pages, paperback; $18.95