00:03
Hello and welcome to breast cancer conversations podcast brought to you by survivingbreastcancer.org. I'm Laura Carfang, breast cancer survivor and founder of survivingbreastcancer.org, a nonprofit organization providing community education and resources to empower those diagnosed with breast cancer and their caregivers from day one and beyond. Hi everyone! Welcome!
Today we have a recording and a special guest Katerina from EcoThriver here with us today.In this podcast we are actually doing a live recording, this is from one of our most recent webinars and demonstrations where Katarina gave us a great tour of her kitchen and all of the non-toxic products she uses, some great advice and how we can start making simple changes in our kitchen to live a more eco-friendly life. Welcome to the conversation!
00:55
Thank you, Laura, for inviting me. I'm happy to be here and this is something I'm very passionate about, I always welcome the opportunity to connect with other women and especially other cancer survivors. So, a little bit about me, I was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 years ago, I was 32 years old. My daughter was four months, my son was two and a half. My mother had passed away from breast cancer when she was 48. Breast cancer always was a little bit part of my life. As I say, I kind of thought I would get it but I just never knew it would be so young. When I was diagnosed, my goal was to just have my children know who I was, because they were so young. So I threw myself, and I'll be honest, it was an anxiety ridden state. But I threw myself into learning whatever I could to keep myself healthy to keep the cancer from coming back. I know there's only so much you can control but I was determined to control what I could. For me that was the way I ate, what I put on my skin and the cleaning products I used. To be honest cleaning products came a little bit later because I found it so daunting to find recipes and try them. I was reading labels, but everything seemed so brainwashed, I didn't know what to believe. I didn't know what worked and I wasn't ready to just start dumping a lot of money into products that didn't work at the time as well.
But once I found green cleaning and did take the plunge into recipes, I am just so grateful that I did. So, with the business side of EcoThriver, I help women and families make greener choices and go less toxic and it looks different for different people. I just follow where people are and bring them even just one step closer to choosing healthy, whether it be beauty products or food products, pantries, makeup, whatever it may be. Now I'm doing it virtually, I used to go to houses and do like a one hour consult and we would just walk through the house. But now I do it virtually for some of these classes as well. I also have a nonprofit that is right now local to North Carolina, which we started a year ago and that is Healing Respite. We grant women with cancer a respite in the form of a half day spa event or a two night spa hotel respite. That is obviously all for now, so we are just connecting virtually with that community as well. I don't know if anyone's been to Mary's Place by the Sea in New Jersey or has heard of it. That's another great location and I stayed there years ago when I was living in New Jersey.
I was born and raised in New Jersey. We've relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina about eight years ago. Well, this February I celebrated 10 years and we had a great fundraiser for Healing Respite. And, in the beginning, I was determined to change my story, which led me down a path of choosing greener because my mom died. I have the BRCA (The name “BRCA” is an abbreviation for “breast cancer gene”) gene, my mother's mother died young, my grandfather, my great grandmother, my mother's first cousin. So we have this strong family history where no woman really lived past the age of 60 or 55. And so I was determined to change the story for myself and my children.
And here I am. I'm very happy to be with all of you today and share this space and I will go through sort of a beginner of why you want to choose green in your kitchen. Just some simple things that you can do. I do not believe in spending a lot of money in order to make greener choices. That's my issue with a lot of the beauty companies right now is because I feel like their makeup is very expensive and natural cleaning products can be very expensive and there's no need. I have a more back to basics approach, and it's cheaper so that's always a benefit, especially now. And with COVID in mind, I'm also chemically sensitive, so another reason that we really pay attention to everything we bring in our house. And I know people who deal with COVID are cleaning more and for some, that means Lysol and more bleach. But there are other things you can do that are healthier options, to kill germs to clean surfaces. And to just be a little bit more mindful about what you're bringing in the house.
I'll just go into a little introduction about going green and then I can talk about our ‘green cleaning arsenal’ and then how to make some products as well. Before I do that I can just show you some things in my kitchen, choices we made in order to green our kitchen out and make sure that we weren't exposing ourselves to toxins. One of the first things we did is we got rid of all of our Teflon and non-stick pans. And I know that's hard for some people to just get rid of things but if you're going to get rid of anything, it should be your Teflon pans in your kitchen. And what we did is we switched to cast iron.
I do have a couple of stainless steel items but this this pan, and I don't know if any of you cook in cast iron, but this is actually a Le Creuset but the cheaper version is Lodge for $20 you can get a really nice cast iron pan. They are a little bit heavier, so if you're recovering from surgery you may want to definitely pay attention to that so you can get a smaller size. So this is one of my favorite pans. And this is a Lodge and it's a skillet pan and this is our egg and morning pan and you just really put olive oil on it, you put it in the oven and then it really does come close to nonstick. So this is much healthier and you can actually get some extra iron in your food which is good as well. So that's number one if you can ditch the Teflon pans. The other thing is with food storage is to go with glass as an option. So, for all of our leftovers and food preparation I have this Snapware, and it does have a plastic cover but it’s glass so especially for heating hot foods and refrigerator storage it's a good option and then if you shop in Costco they have these in bulk, even Target, they have really great deals on them. You can get sets for like $20, so this is something else that we did right away.
Something else in the kitchen is dish soap. So, I grew up you know, using Palmolive green dish soap. And what I use now is called Ecover, it’s a brand I really like, they also make a really wonderful dishwasher detergent. And everything I use is unscented, and that is because fragrance, just fragrance, can have hundreds of chemicals in it and so that's a great place to start too with reading labels is if it has fragrance just move on. It's an easy way to kind of limit things. And so what I do is I have this glass bottle by my sink. And I fill it up with this much dish soap, and then the rest water and then I spray my dishes. So it's easier to clean, we're using less soap, and it's just a win-win and the kids have more fun with it actually, when they're doing dishes, which they've been doing more of, since we've all been home together. I do recommend this brand Ecover. And these glass bottles you can get on Amazon, you can also get them in bulk on some of the other sites as well.
So while I'm talking about soap, here's another cost-saver, and these you can get on Amazon in both plastic and in glass. And it's a Foaming Soap Dispenser. So why this is great, is A) it's reusable and it's glass so you're not just tossing those, you know those soap pump bottles and what I do with this is, this is one of my favorite products. And this is Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap. And this big bottle, it costs about $16 but you can sometimes find the big bottle on sale for $10 but I use this for my laundry detergent. And use this to wash the dog. This is for our all-purpose cleaner. This we use in most of our cleaning. In a foaming dispenser, all you put is like that much of the soap in and the rest is water. So it really does save you money as well. And I don't know if any of you deal with dry hands, eczema on your hands or burning in the winter. If you're using hand sanitizer right now, you're probably dealing with that as well. And I use the unscented as well. This is a great way to combat hand sanitizer hands right now because it's much more gentle. And this also comes in a bar soap, which I use in the shower, Dr. Bronner's, there are other brands of castile soap.
There's another brand called Kirk's, which is a little bit less expensive. And I just stock up when these things are on sale. So sometimes they go down to like $2.50 bar and then I just stock up. So that's sort of my way of doing that. But Kirk's is another as well. And for the homemade laundry detergent, if you're using a powder versus a liquid, these are what I use, and then these get grated for the laundry detergent. So they really are all-purpose and a little bit goes a long way, especially with with the Dr. Bronner's Soap, and there's a whole list of other things you can use it for as well. You can also use a little bit to clean your floors if you wanted a little bit of soap. Is that the Dr. Bronner's that you have?
12:06
Yeah, so I was looking at the label as well because I use Dr. Bronner's Soap, actually like the lavender scent. Now that I’m thinking about that I’m hoping that that fragrance is ok, I gotta check. But just looking on the side of the bottle it looks like there’s 18 different uses for this particular Dr. Bronner's Soap, so it’s very versatile.
12:27
And I think they use essential oils, I don't think they use fragrance so they just use some essential oils. So if you do want that smell as well. And you know, I grew up thinking that pledge and Windex and Tide smelled clean, so there was a little bit of un-conditioning for my brain as it switched to unscented as actually clean. And, you know, maybe with like a hint of lavender or a hint of lemon with essential oils. So vinegar as well, some people need to get used to. But, for me, when my house smells like vinegar, my house smells clean. So it's almost rewiring your brain to recognize that as clean, and I use vinegar a lot, and I'll get into that in a moment.
Something else you can do if you don't like the smell of vinegar: so when it's citrus season, this winter, we ate a lot of oranges, especially with COVID. So whenever I could find organic oranges, we just had a ton of them. And you can take the peels and then put them in any jar. This is a Mason jar, but you can use any of your recyclable jars. And then you just soak the orange peels with vinegar. And then you let it sit about a couple of weeks in a bottom dark cabinet. And then you have vinegar that smells like orange oil because the vinegar takes the oils out. And this is really great for cleaning too because you have the vinegar, but then you also have a little bit of that orange oil that does help clean and break up grease as well. And again, very cheap. I get the big bottle of vinegar from Costco. And I think depending on where you go, prices can actually be high on vinegar, but I think this is like $3 or $4 in Costco for this really big bottle. When I go I just stock up and then use that to clean.
So why should you use natural cleaners? Popular store bought cleaners contain a lot of chemicals that can poison our bodies and then we can pick them up from surfaces. And also, as they wash through our water systems, they wind up polluting the environment and affecting insects and wildlife. So it isn't just us, these chemicals actually don't really break down and then they do transfer out into the forests and streams wherever your water may go. So it is important to look at. And I think especially during COVID, as we're trying to really focus on our health and keeping our immune systems up.
If your body is fighting a way to break down these chemicals, your body isn't fighting viruses. So it sort of lessens the load on your body, so our bodies can do what they're supposed to do. And that's, you know, fight cancer, fight viruses, fight bacteria, whatever it may be. So the other thing is that indoor air can be up to five times more polluted than outdoor air because of a lot of the fragrances we're using. So if you're using any plugin fragrances or anything like that, I know they may smell nice, but they're actually adding a lot of chemicals into your home. And that affects your lungs, it increases asthma, allergies in children. The same goes for scented laundry detergent, it increases the toxic load, really, and it can cause allergies. There's been studies as well that it can have some impact on fertility and affect thyroid levels. So the science is there. I am not a scientist, I don't pretend to be, but if any of you want to delve in further the science is definitely there.
And of course, children and anyone who's immunocompromised, anyone dealing with cancer is more at risk than other people would be. I have a list of chemicals to avoid and I can send that out. I apologize for not getting it out before, it was my goal to get it up before this class. But I can send you a list of some of the things you want to avoid if you want to look through your cleaners. As far as store bought options, I really like Ecover and Seventh Generation, most of their stuff is good. A lot of people have moved over to Mrs. Meyers, but they have a lot of fragrance in it, so I do not recommend them. And I think they're expensive. And they tout themselves as green, but they're not.
The other issue is something called greenwashing and a company, you know, on the bottle, it says fresh and natural, or, you know, green, whatever it may be, but they're really not. So it really is important to read labels. I know when I started this wellness journey, I would be gone in the supermarket for like two hours, and my husband would be like, Where were you? And I'm like, literally just the supermarket reading labels. But then it got a lot easier.
So and now what I do with women is I just sort of use my information. So you know, there are researchers and then there's people who just want to be told what to buy. I help either with resources or with just telling people what to buy for people really don't have the interest. A great site is Women's Voices for the Earth. They are a nonprofit, and they really put out some great information. Also, EWG, is anyone familiar with EWG? Environmental Working Group? They have some really great resources. They have great information out there, they have an app where you can put in your product and it'll rate it from one to five. I really suggest that as well. And that's from cleaning products to cosmetics, whatever, any household items, which I think is really great.
18:46
How do you clean a cast iron pan?
18:53
Salt and water, so I put a little bit of water in sometimes if it's stuck, and I'll just let the water boil and then, when it's dry, I just take salt with a paper towel or a cloth rag and then wipe it all out. Part of the green-cleaning arsenal is cheap kosher salt. And I keep this under my sink in a glass jar, so that way I just take a scoop and then I can put a little bit in the pan and then wipe it out. It works as an abrasive. The salt is really great as a scrubber.
18:54
You said that when you use those soap cleaners as opposed to the one that Laura got, you buy unscented. Do you have an aversion to using essential oils to change the fragrances is that just a personal aversion?
19:07
It's personal. Some people are a little more sensitive than others, if you're going to use some essential oils, especially if you're putting it in like vinegar, do it right before you're going to be cleaning. Otherwise it just falls apart and breaks apart. So you don't want to store something with the essential oil in it unless it's more of a dry product. So, carpet cleaner: this is baking soda and it's just in a mason jar, and you can get these tops that have holes. For the baking soda, I do have a little bit of lavender in here. So I just do baking soda. I do some drops of lavender, shake it up and then put it on the carpet, let it sit in, and vacuum it up. We have hardwood floors but we have some throw rugs and I have a dog. So when I need to get pet stains out it is what I use.
20:06
What I love about your approach is like, you know, sometimes it’s overwhelming, I can’t just bring myself to clean my entire house all at once. I won't do anything. This is great because we can take it in small baby steps and little pieces and chunks. Maybe it’s the pots or maybe it’s the pans, even just the cleaning materials or the soap and then gradually we can just keep adding to it until we have our whole arsenal.
20:30
Yes, so I mean small steps, even if you start with one thing, it really does make a difference. You know, again, I did this in an anxiety ridden state and it wasn't healthy for me. And I think it worried my family at that time. So, looking back, what I just teach is whatever works for you. If it's one thing that's great, maybe next month it'll be something else, maybe next year. But it all doesn't have to be done together. And I do believe every step you take helps us become a little bit healthier. So, my green cleaning arsenal, and again, I will send this out to everyone. Lemons are really great, Lemons are great for cutting boards. So I put lemon in my water on most days and I'll have the peel left. Then I'll just rub it down my cutting board, you can also clean out your sink, it'll disinfect. You can also put it down your garbage disposal with some ice, which the ice will sharpen your blades and the lemon will help disinfect it and freshen it. You can also clean your dishwasher with a lemon.
So if you want to run it with half a lemon and a little bit of white vinegar in the rinse, it'll help clean out your dishwasher. I know most people don't clean out dishwashers but if you ever noticed: “like oh wow that why does this smell?” It's because your dishwasher needs to be cleaned out. So lemons are great. Lemons are great for that. And, of course, in water, add a lot of vitamin C which is good as well. So lemons, white vinegar, so with vinegar, it's a one to one ratio. I have these in my bathrooms and kitchen. It's half vinegar, half water and this is used for the floor, for kitchen counters. This is my kind of ‘go to’ cleaner and it does kill germs. This is not strong enough to kill COVID, but it does kill other viruses and germs depending on their makeup. I also use this for Windows.
And the other thing for Windows is, I don't have it out right now, but vodka and water. You got to get the cheapest vodka you can find that you won’t want to drink, but the alcohol in it, you can also use isopropyl alcohol but the smell of it is a little bit more toxic. So if you use half vodka, half water and it's great for shining surfaces. If I want to shine my granite countertop or for Windows, that's what I use it for sinks as well and that also kills germs. While we're talking about killing germs, for my counters during COVID, I disinfect two ways, and one is with soap and water. So I use my kitchen spray bottle and I also use this to clean my stove and remember this was just the dish soap and water. I'll spray down my counter and then scrub it, it's the same idea of washing your hands. Soap will break down the outer part of the COVID virus and that will work and then peroxide is my ‘go to’ disinfectant.
I get these at Costco as well for cost purposes. I have a spray bottle, but you can order just the tops. So peroxide, you don't want to move to something that's clear. In order to stabilize it, you want to keep it in a dark container. This is how I disinfect, this I use for my bathrooms, toilets, counters, doorknobs. For the cell phones I've been using Everclear for, because I couldn't find any more isopropyl alcohol, but you could just use either vodka or Alcohol to wipe down that as well. You could do peroxide too. For peroxide you want to let it sit for a couple of minutes in order to fully kill the germs, and peroxide is approved and it's the main ingredient in the cleaners that have been approved for COVID from the CDC.
25:06
What was the ratio again?
25:09
Full strength, do not dilute it, you want full strength for the peroxide. So Castile soap is olive oil based, again, I think I went through this for all the uses. And these pump bottles, they do have some plastic ones or some glass ones, and these I just love. We have them in all of our bathrooms and I have it in the kitchen as well. And they're fun, like people enjoy pumping soap as well. So pure essential oils, I was asked by Laura, there are benefits to some of the oils as well: oregano can kill germs, it's very powerful, thyme as well, cinnamon, lemon, grapefruit is really uplifting and so is lemon. If you want to put a little bit of that in sometimes it's nice to just have a little bit of an uplifting scent. If you want an air deodorizer in a misting bottle, you could put vodka water and a little bit of essential oil. You could spray that around your house and it's actually quite lovely to give the air a little bit of freshness.
Baking soda, So baking soda is a powerhouse of cleaning, I use this to scrub in the shower and the toilet, sinks as well, it takes out odors. If you have something that you can't get the odor out of you can soak it in vinegar or soak it in baking soda. If you have clogged drains, you put like half a cup of baking soda down the drain, vinegar and wait like five minutes and then put some really hot water and it'll clear out the clog, like the science experiments of baking soda and vinegar making an explosion, it helps clear out the clog in the drain. It helps clear out like the gunk in sinks as well. So there is also vodka, and that's mixed as a one to one ratio. Something else vodka is good for is tics, we took vodka and you put it on a tick, it actually will help the tick sort of loosen up, the same way as Dawn detergent is supposed to do as well. So this is washing soda, and some people aren't familiar with washing soda and really all washing soda is, is stronger baking soda. So it's baking soda that has been baked at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time and it makes it stronger. So, you could use this for a soft scrub or in laundry detergent as well. And it will also take out odors. You can also add in a little bit of extra washing soda, like really stinky workout clothes that sometimes don't get fully dry and they wind up forever with that awful smell. So sometimes I'll just wash them with a cup of the washing soap.
28:22
So that's not your basic laundry detergent? That's just a booster?
28:26
Yes, so this, I make my homemade laundry detergent with but you can put it in as a booster. So another laundry booster is oxygen brightener and this is Nellie's brand. It's like Oxy-Clean, is basically what it is. And this is actually peroxide. So it's peroxide that has been baked and it's a powder. I also put this in laundry sometimes like a teaspoon or so into the main compartment and this helps whiten as peroxide does. Peroxide helps take out stains as well. Olive oil can be used for cleaning stainless steel, some stainless steel cleaners are really toxic, but olive oil can be used, and you just have to wipe it in the way of the grain and you can use it on leather furniture as well.
The other thing that's suggested for stainless steel is straight vinegar, but you just want to make sure you get it off well. Actually, my refrigerator prefers olive oil and my dishwasher prefers vinegar in order to get all the fingerprints and oils and stuff out. It may just depend on what you have if you have stainless steel appliances, which I really despise at this point because of how much cleaning they need. So peroxide I keep in my kitchen sink as well. And then I'll spray it down every night to disinfect and I'll spray it into the garbage disposal as well. I really don't enjoy cleaning, but I do enjoy making my own cleaners. So it makes it a little bit more fun.
30:21
Where did you say you ordered the spray part for it? On Amazon?
30:25
Amazon, yeah, Amazon.
30:27
Yeah, that’s the Costco peroxide bottle because I recognize it.
30:32
It is and these come in a pack of two and I think they're like $4 there's very, very inexpensive.Does anyone have any questions? Denise?
30:44
So, you mentioned about stainless steel and cast iron. What about like ceramic? Like coated baking? Because I'm trying to get away from aluminum and aluminum foil. So is ceramic coating you think okay?
31:03
Yes ceramic coating is okay. I have like a Dutch oven that's ceramic coated. It's just not okay if you get a nick in it and it's and it's broken. But as long as you just take care of it, absolutely, ceramic is great. You can also get stainless steel baking pans for cooking, I also use silicone. So for muffins and cupcakes we use these, they're little silicone cups.
So some of the homemade recipes that I have are our dishwasher detergent, both a liquid and a powder. The dishwashing detergent is citric acid. If anyone is up for the challenge of making your own dishwasher detergent: Citric acid. You can get this bag from Costco and it is approved for organic foods so it is safe. It's basically citrus peels that are processed. So, citric acid with washing soda and salt can be used for dishwashing detergent. And what the citric acid does is it helps eliminate the watermarks and things in the washer and the salt and the washing soda both help clean. I will definitely send that recipe out, I make a batch and then I keep it underneath my sink. And when I have it, I just leave the scoop. And the brand that I really like for dishwashing detergent as well is Ecover brand. Seventh Generation has an unscented powder as well that's pretty good.
The issue with Cascade, is that Cascade has bleach in it and you could smell it as well, and again, sometimes we associate that with clean, but it's not clean and it actually leaves a residue on your plates and dishes and then you're drinking. So it is better to go with a natural dishwasher detergent. And the Seventh Generation brand is reasonably priced for sure.
33:27
I have a question. How was it with your family? Was there an adjustment period for them to embrace these non-toxic products that you were making? Or did they just not have a choice because you were going to do this anyways?
33:38
Yes, so when I started, my husband would basically laugh at me. And my, son started calling me a hippie. He's like: “Mom, you're being such a hippie!”. And I'm like, okay, he's 13 now, and he's sort of come around, we made these changes when he was young with food. And he did not get on the bandwagon so fast. With food my daughter was raised, because she was four months old. She was raised on like healthy food. Like someone gave her a piece of pizza and a hot dog. And she was like: “This is disgusting. I want my healthy bowls and lentils and rice”. She's not like that anymore but she was for a while. And my husband was just like, whatever will keep you alive. I'm okay with. And he did have a meltdown. I mean. We went vegetarian for like a year. And one day my husband came home. And I just went food shopping. And he's like: “I need meat!” he just had a mini meltdown. And I'm like: “Well, it would have been helpful if you could have just said that to me instead of, you know, keeping it all in and exploding on me”.
We've definitely navigated through a little bit of opposition but I mean what I like about cleaning naturally is I have no issue making my kids cleaners, you know, it's not like vacate the bathroom, I need to bleach it down. It's: “Here you go, you can use this product and I know it's safe for you”. It actually helped them get engaged, which has really been great. And you know, some of the families I've worked with, they're like some of my favorite pictures to get is kids cleaning, because it's like a new toy almost in a way like new spray bottles and new like brushes and they're like: “no more guilt!”. They don't have to clear out of the bathroom anymore.
35:45
My motto typically is if there's an interest in demand, we can make it happen. So I thank you all for being here tonight! I will share Katrina's website and contact information and a list of resources probably with everyone tomorrow. You can also find them in the show notes and recording of this website below. Give me a little bit of time to collect everything and we'll send it over. Thank you again Katrina!
Thank you everyone for listening to our show. I would like to acknowledge that all of the information on our podcasts are from personal experiences, and are not a substitute for professional medical advice. You should always contact your medical care team. If you're looking for specific topics or would like to be a guest on our show, please feel free to reach out to me. My email is laura@survivingbreastcancer.org. Until next time, keep on thriving!