California Kool-Aid

I spent most of the week in LA with Wilson and Anne from our company. The weather was unbelievable. I actually got chilly a couple of times! We spent the week interviewing people for the Healthy Child project. Wilson took an earlier flight on Thursday and got back to the office before Anne and I. Since we're all really cognizant of trying to make this film we're doing appeal to everyone, Mat asked him something along the lines of "please tell me that not everyone you interviewed was a total fanatic" at which point Wilson launched into a lecture about all the environmental toxins that we're surrounded by that are making us all sick. Mat realized that he was in for it because we all drank the Kool-Aid while we were out there.

I'll try not to completely alienate myself from everyone by talking about this stuff too much, but we did learn some things and will definitely be making some changes at our house. The cool thing about Healthy Child, though, is that they aren't trying to scare people or force you to radically change your lifestyle. They just present the information and suggest easy things you can do to keep your family healthy (which also happens to be good for the environment as a whole). You can do as little or as much as you want, and it's actually kind of fun. The bottom line, though, is that it all makes sense and once you have this information it's impossible to ignore it, especially because it's your children who are potentially at risk. Here's a few things I learned, and then I promise I'll shut-up:

- If you bring something into your home that says "POISON, HAZARD, KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN" and then you spray it all over your furniture or floor or grass or bathtub where they are crawling around and putting things into their mouths, you can't possibly think that is good for them. There is a cumulative effect over time of small exposures to chemicals. And chemicals that are in household products aren't tested for their effects on children. If they are tested at all, it's on 150 pound males. Because of their size, children breath in more air, drink more, and eat more per pound than adults. Many disorders like learning diabilities, ADD, asthma, autism, allergies, non-hereditary cancers, etc. have been directly linked to environmental triggers found in household items like herbicides, pesticides, cleaners, plastics, mattresses, lotions, carpet, paint...the list goes on.

- The level of herbicides and pesticides in non-organic food is enough to change your child's behavior at best and at worst cause them to get sick. Studies have been done on hyperactive children who have trace levels of many, many pesticides in their blood. After one week of switching to organic foods the traces are gone and behavior improves. If you're going to switch there are certain foods that are treated more than others that you can focus on; anything made with peanuts, potatoes, and milk to name a few.

- Easy things you can do at home: take off your shoes at the door so you don't track in stuff from the grass, open the windows for 5 minutes a day, choose a few foods and switch to organic, don't heat plastic in the microwave, switch to non-toxic or homemade cleaners, and consider outfitting your nursery with an organic mattress since babies spend so much time on them and they are made from petroleum products and contain uneccessary chemical fire retardents.

A lot of people say things like, "My grandparents lived to be 100 years old and didn't worry about what they were eating or any of this stuff." That's an objection I have even thought of myself. But if you think about it, before WWII we didn't have all these chemicals and plastics and pesticides and hormones, etc in our everyday foods and products. I mean we wonder why breast cancer is so prevalent today but do not consider that you spend decades wiping a product designed to clog your pores and filled with chemicals and aluminum on your lymph nodes everyday. I'm not saying to stop wearing deoderant, but I'm just saying to think about it. A lot of scientists are making the connection between epidemic increases in diseases to exposures that we can control! Okay, enough.

Here are a few pics from the trip...

We shot in this cool Asian inspired hotel in Santa Monica called The Hotel Ambrose. Here's Wilson in the lobby. I think the sand raking was counteracting the stress of the phone call.



Here's Anne. She's happy now because this is before we learned that we are slowly killing ourselves with Pledge and Tilex. :-)



This is the room where we were set-up. We were getting ready to shoot an interview with Christopher from Healthy Child.



Here's a group shot. Bottom row is Anne, Beth, Mandy and Christopher. Top row is Wilson, Adam, and Justin. Adam was our local sound guy and Justin was the grip. These guys were so glad to be working on something for a good cause since they spend most of their time doing reality TV. They just recently got back from The Real World Sydney.



We never made it to the beach while we were there. But we ate at some really great resturants, and Anne and I stopped in Beverly Hills on the way to the airport to shop and eat a cupcake at Sprinkles - yum. I was happy to get home and see the boys on Thursday night. Tonight we're going to see The Bourne Ultimatum with a big group of friends. Review to come...