Change Your Brain Every Day - Why You Should be Using Healthy Cleaning Products, with Kelly Vlahakis-Hanks

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

To help protect yourself from the coronavirus, the CDC recommends cleaning and disinfecting your home. The problem is that most cleaning products on the market are actually filled with toxins that could damage your health. In the first episode of a series with Earth Friendly Products CEO Kelly Vlahakis-Hanks, she and the Amens discuss the importance of using clean products while cleaning.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Well, welcome everybody. We have a very special week for you. One of our brain warriors, Kelly Vlahakis, who is the CEO of Earth Friendly

Products, they bring you the ECOS brand in your store. She and I have been friends for many years. We created a Brain Healthy Earth Friendly Products. And I wanted to have her on the Brain Warriors Way podcast because this is a time you need healthy cleaning products more than ever before in your life. And so Kelly's the president and CEO of Earth Friendly Products. They're the makers of Ecos laundry detergent and over 200 environmentally friendly products that are safe for people, pets, and the planet.

Made with plant-powered ingredients, Eco's cleaners are thoughtfully sourced, pH balanced, readily biodegradable, easily recyclable, and never tested on animals. Kelly's a graduate of UCLA. She's the daughter of the founder of Earth Friendly Products. And Kelly, it is just such a joy to introduce you to our audience. It's so nice to see you. It's so wonderful to be here with you, Dr. Amen and Tana. I mean, our longstanding friendship has been such a valuable part of my life and really sharing the mission of creating healthier people and a healthier planet is something that I'm really proud that we both participate in. So thank you for having me on the Brain Warriors way today. Well, it's just such a critical time right now.

Well, and we talk about toxins, right? So Brain Warriors know about bright minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place. You have to prevent or treat these 11 major risk factors. And the T in bright minds is toxins. And we are assaulted with toxic products. And, you know, I actually never thought, Tana and I have been telling people to read food labels forever.

And then when I wrote my book, Memory Rescue, and I was working on toxins, I'm like, you never read product labels. You should be reading product labels. We basically threw out half of our bathroom. Oh, no. I looked at him and I'm like, this is going to cost you. I don't know what I'm going to do. I didn't talk to you about my products.

It was terrible. You know, it's really something because I think for consumers, they first thought about food, what they put in them. Then they started thinking about personal care products, what they put in them. Then they started thinking about personal care products, what they put on them. And it's just recently that consumers have been really aware of what's around them. That's kind of been their journey.

And so now that they're finally aware of what's around them and they have more access to information than ever before, they've got their cell phones, they're Googling it, they're looking on Amazon, and they're really hungry for information. And so I can tell you that what we've tried to do is really fight to have transparency in cleaning products. So it's really something that as of today, there is no federal requirement for the disclosure of ingredients in cleaning products. Oh, it's terrible.

It's unbelievable. I mean, Europe, Asia, so many other countries have requirements, and we don't have that here in the U.S. Now, the thing I'm proud about is that here in California, back in October of 17, then Governor Brown signed into law the Cleaning Product Right to Know Act, which went into effect on January 1st of this year. So for the first time, we have a state in our nation that does require the disclosure of ingredients in cleaning products. As of January 1st, 2020, you can go online to find the ingredients.

And then on 2021, it'll be on pack. And our great hope is that if companies make products for the 40 million citizens here in California, they'll change the way they make their labels all across the country. Because consumers have a right to know. And when you see a lot of these companies fighting and saying, oh, it's a proprietary secret, we can't release the ingredients, the real truth is all of us know in the cleaning product industry what's in one another's products.

We can reverse engineer everything, but it's the consumer in the store buying the product that doesn't have the information, and they need the information, because there's nobody, there no fda or anybody policing what goes into cleaning products so you can put anything you want in them and it's a company it's so wrong whatever goes on your body goes in your body and during the pandemic i've been doing the dishes. And so I use your dish soap. But you know, when people are breathing them in, or they're on your clothes, it's going in your body and affecting your body. But you bring up a really good point, because we're all really scared right now about killing this virus, right in our homes i've been i'm i'm an icu nurse no i'm a little annoying i need a little grace from my family because i went into

full-blown like war mode like i'm not kidding i'm i'm a warrior right but i'm like i'm in that icu mode and i'm like i'm normal i'm really into this whole non-toxic thing but i got freaked out and i stripped the shine off of my marble bleachedached everything because I'm like, I have no idea if natural products are going to do the same thing or not. And I CDC clearly says step one is to clean and step two is to disinfect. So I want to talk about step one, because step one is what we should be doing regularly all day long, and that's cleaning. And the cleaning portion, you want to be using products that are safer for you and your family, because there's so many toxic ingredients in those disinfectants and other products that are actually very dangerous for your immune system, for your lungs, and we know that COVID is something that attacks the lungs.

And so we really want to do everything we can to responsibly use those disinfectants with proper ventilation, face masks, and follow the instructions. But step one is cleaning. So when we're cleaning, the CDC defines cleaning as the removal of pathogens. And pathogens would be bacteria and viruses and germs and, you know, parasites and other things. So we first want to remove all of those things. Because when we remove that, you actually reduce the viral load so that a disinfectant could even do its job. So as we're really removing and washing away things, we should be using safer products, products that don't have hormone disruptors and carcinogenic substances, because we now know there's so many ingredients like formaldehyde, that's a common

preservative in cleaning products that we know is linked to cancer. We really want, you know, I say all the time to people that cleaning should not mean spreading toxins. Cleaning should not mean... I love that. Now, before we talk, because we're going to talk about a stepwise process to cleaning and disinfecting, give us a little bit of the history, maybe in about two minutes, the history of Earth Friendly Products. Absolutely. Well, you know, my father started our company in 1967. He was such a passionate visionary man, so far ahead of his time. Way ahead. I mean, before people were talking about organic food, he was talking about the importance of greening your cleaning.

And so he was originally from the island of Crete in Greece, and he grew up there. And he was born in 1935, so he grew up during Nazi-occupied Greece during World War II, and he saw a lot of atrocities, lost his father in the concentration camps, and so when he was 18 years old, he hit on a ship, and he came to the United States with $20 in his pocket. He didn't speak English language. He lived in homeless shelters. Unbelievable story. There's actually a Hollywood film they made about him called The Green Story. But he starts the company after going to Roosevelt University in Chicago. And he went to Roosevelt and studied chemistry because of all the Greek

root words. So he was really attracted to that. And then worked for nine years for other people. During that time, he was inspired by a lot of works. Rachel Carson had just written in the early 60s, Silent Spring, about DDT and the dangers of pesticides. And he was looking around him in the cleaning products industry, and he was wondering, why in the world are we using so many toxic ingredients? He saw, you know, colleagues of his getting burned, having injuries, and all of these things in an effort to clean. And he really thought back to his childhood in Greece, and he thought about how his mother utilized vinegar and lemon and all these natural ingredients.

And so in 1967, he started our company in his garage with a mission to create products that are safer for people, pets, and the planet. And I joined him full-time 2003, so 17 years ago. And it's just amazing, the growth even in the last 15 years because the first 30 or 40 years, you know, he was constantly championing change and letting people know about these dangers, but the consumers hadn't really fully understood it yet. And so now it's really an important time when people finally have access to the information to really elevate that message.

Because, you know, the residue on your plates and glasses, you put your water in your glass, you put your food on your plate. So you're consuming these things that have skulls and crossbones on back labels. I unfortunately lost my father in 2014. But certainly his mission and vision has gone on. In the last six years, we not only make the greenest products in the marketplace, we also make them in the most sustainable fashion possible. So we have four geographically diverse manufacturing facilities here in the United States. All of our facilities are carbon neutral,

they're water neutral and they're platinum zero waste. So we divert more than 90% neutral. You were so impressed. I would love to see it. Oh, it's incredible. So when we come back, I mean, it's just such a great story. I want you to tell people where they can find your products

because this is hard, but this is a hard time. And then let's talk about how to properly clean. We're here with Kelly Vlahakis, the president and CEO of Earth Friendly Products. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others

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