EP 96 - Exposure to Chemicals in Our Daily Lives and How to Avoid Them with Ken Cook

Today, Vidal welcomes one of the highest exponents in the environmental field, Ken Cook.

 

Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and influential critics of industrial agriculture, U.S. food and farm policy, and the nation’s broken approach to protecting families and children from toxic substances.

 

Under Cook’s leadership over the past 20 years, EWG has pioneered the use of digital technologies to expose the harms done by misconceived crop subsidies, crop insurance, and runaway agricultural pollution. The organization has also empowered American families with easy-to-use, data-driven tools to help reduce their exposure to potentially harmful ingredients in foods, drinking water, cosmetics and other household products. These unique digital resources are searched hundreds of millions of times by consumers, journalists, and policymakers.

 

Cook is a widely sought public speaker on these and other environmental health issues and is frequently cited for the outsized impact that his and EWG’s work has had on policy debates in Washington and state and local governments across the country.

 

Cook has addressed food, agriculture, and toxics policy in countless media interviews, including with 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, the Today Show, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX Business News, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. He testifies regularly before House and Senate committees and for the past 20 years has briefed top White House officials and every U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and EPA Administrator on EWG’s research and policy positions.

 

He has been recognized with multiple awards from health and environmental organizations including Mount Sinai Hospital’s Children’s Environmental Health Center, the U.S. Healthful Food Council, and Epidemic Answers.

 

Cook is a board member of Food Policy Action (and founding chairman), Organic Voices and the Amazon Conservation Team and a former member of the board of the Organic Center. He earned a B.A. in history, a B.S. in agriculture and an M.S. in soil science at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

 

Get ready to learn the truth about the products you are buying. You will get many easy-to-take-into-fast-action tips. Detoxing might be way easier than you think!

Outline of This Great Episode

[6:30] Ken Cook career briefing.

[10:25] Pesticides on golf courses.

[11:26] How did Ken Cook got involved in environmental issues?

[16:05] What EWG is about?

[20:28] There is no regulation in the ingredients that go in personal care products.

[20:50] Skin deep rate.

[21:15] Healthy living: Practical tips to reduce your exposure to toxins and chemicals.

[24:25] BUYcott: small changes in markets.

[33:14] The most concerning toxins and chemicals currently.

[34:26] Industrial pollution begins in the womb.

[35:46] Not enough data on the consequences on the combination of chemicals.

[37:12] Carcinogens, neural system toxins, PCBs.

[43:35] By changing your diet you can reduce the toxicity caused by mercury in your body.

[49:11] Passing environmental legislation.

[56:51] Changes you can make today: buy locally at a farmers market, drink distilled water.

[1:00:22] Organic farms.

[1:02:08] Benefits of organic products.

[1:03:42] There are not enough organic products.

[1:04.55] We have to find out a way of scale produce organic food.

[1:08:37] Farmers that change from chemicals to organic.

[1:11:03] Arsenic in rice.

[1:12:46] Toxins used in beauty products.

[1:13:50] Check your products in skin deep website.

[1:16:37] EWG app.

[1:18:53] Three tips to enhance your living.

[1:20:48] Reduce the amount of meat you eat.

 

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