01: Healthy Home Take Control
Healthy Home Take Control
Journey to Healthier Living
This chapter explores the personal journey of adopting healthier living practices, inspired by a child's awareness of harmful chemicals. It discusses the prevalence of toxic compounds in household products and their effects on indoor air quality, while also offering actionable steps for creating a healthier home environment. Key resources like the Environmental Working Group and the National Green Building Standard are highlighted to guide consumers in making informed choices.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of our brand new podcast, Healthy Home Take Control! Your hosts are Jillian Prichard Cooke and Marla Esser Cloos and, and over the next ten episodes, we will be helping you explore how to live healthier in your home, and how taking control can make that happen.
In each episode, we will cover one of the ten steps of the Healthy Living System, and we will bring on a different guest each time.
Why this work is so important to Jillian
Fourteen years ago, Jillian suffered a health hiccup when she got diagnosed with cancer. That resulted in her having chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and she does not want anyone else to have to go through that. So having the opportunity to share with you, the listener, what she has learned over the past fourteen years about taking control of herself and her environment brings her joy!
How Marla got into healthy living and healthier homes
Marla initially got into the concept of healthy living and healthier homes as a result of the way her daughter reacted to certain chemicals that were in the laundry soaps and detergents when her family was on vacation more than a decade ago. And the health issues that her husband experienced more recently cemented the concept of healthy living for her because that brought her attention to all the other aspects of health and wellness.
Environmental cancer
Jillian discovered that cancer she had was not genetic. It was brought on by environmental factors. So she backtracked through her entire life, to find out what she had been exposed to that could have brought cancer on.
Environmental factors
At first, Jillian looked into the possibility of her cancer having occurred as a result of black mold, asbestos, or lead in the environment when she was much younger. She has subsequently come to believe, however, that cancer started as a result of the toxins she was exposed to at a later age in the oil paints and solvents she used while studying Fine Arts.
The Healthy Living System
The Healthy Living System was created by WWYW to give the consumer a template that is easy to maneuver through. It is a nice add-on to some of the certification programs that are there to assist builders, architects, designers, and manufacturers in coming together with a holistic approach to produce a healthier home.
Why the Healthy Living System was created
The Healthy Living System was created as an opportunity for the home occupant to do their part every day, once they have taken possession of their new home. You can also apply the ten steps of the system to an existing home.
The ten steps of the Healthy Living System
- Clean air – Making the right everyday choices will contribute to you having cleaner air in your home.
- Clean water – You need to know what is in the drinking water in your home, and also in the bottled water that you buy.
- Natural light – Let the sunshine in. It is full of Vitamin D, and it also contributes to your mental health.
- Chemical control – We will take a deep dive into chemical-control in future episodes of this podcast.
- Physical wellness - Exercise, do outdoor activities and feed into the physical side of what your body needs.
- Mental wellness – Make sure that your environment is secure.
- Spiritual wellness – Unplug all your devices from time to give yourself a break from the EMF (Electromagnetic Frequency) that they give off.
- Conscious consumption – Start making conscious choices about the products you choose to buy. Swap out one or two of the products you use in your home for better, safer, and healthier options each time you go to the store. And remember to reuse, reduce, and recycle, and also refuse to use single-use plastic items.
- Food science – This is about nutrition and about how you provision, store, and prepare your food.
- Behavioral strategies – How you spend your money, what you put in your body, how you conduct yourself within your home environment, and your habits are all behavioral strategies.
If you apply these ten steps in your home, you are sure to have a healthier outcome, and you are likely to be a lot more careful in the choices you make.
Making a difference
Marla explains that there is a lot that you can do in your home and in your life to make a difference, and they don’t have to be big things.
Toxic compounds off-gassing
There are certain products that we bring into our homes that contain toxic compounds and give off toxic gasses called VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds). And there are 88 000 chemicals used that have had no meaningful testing done on them.
The thirty-six chemicals that show up regularly
WWYW has identified thirty-six chemicals that show up regularly in home-furnishings and home-building and products and finishes that could cause problems with your health. We want you, the listener, to know what those chemicals are. So we will be listing them and telling you more about them in future episodes of this podcast series.
Modern homes
New homes get built to energy-efficient standards, so they are tighter. That is a good thing if the right systems are in place. If they are not, however, it is hard for the toxins to escape, so they leech into the textiles and draperies in the home, and also into our bodies, which could lead to an unhealthy outcome.
Getting rid of toxicity in our homes
To get rid of toxicity in our homes, and to contribute to the air being cleaner, we need to use our common sense when it comes to off-gassing, and we need to take control of understanding what goes into all the products we use in our homes.
A bit about us
We met through Professional Women in Building and the Sustainability and Green Building movement at the National Association of Home Builders. It took us a while to finally really connect and lightning struck when we did! Our missions intersected and, in our quest to do more, the Healthy Home Take Control podcast was born.
Jillian Pritchard Cooke, WWYW – Jillian was driven by her own journey with cancer to found Wellness Within Your Walls® (WWYW), an award-winning informational resource group, which created a ground-breaking program designed to reduce toxins in living environments. An environmental-cancer diagnosis led Jillian to use her years of experience as the head of an interior design firm, DES-SYN, and think outside the energy-efficiency box to consider how the materials we use to build, specify and furnish homes might be making us sick.
The resulting WWYW standard reframes the construction conversation and outlines proper construction techniques and healthier design and building practices, as well as behavioral strategies to ensure sustained wellness. Along with her WWYW team, Jillian developed WWYW's Healthy Living System™ (HLS), which sets forth 10 holistic steps for achieving health and wellness in homes and communities. Jillian and WWYW have been the recipient of numerous awards to recognize their groundbreaking work.
Jillian@wellnesswithinyourwalls.com (work) 404-365-9094 (cell) 404-326-234
Marla Esser Cloos, NAHB Master Certified Green Professional, LEED AP and WWYW - Marla is the principal of Green Home Coach where she uses her "superpowers" to help home professionals, and inhabitants to discover and create better homes for healthier, more comfortable lives. Making simple swaps to green and sustainable choices helps create better homes – a bit at a time in existing homes or all at once for new and remodeled homes.
She also is the immediate past chair of Professional Women in Building of Central OK and Build My Future OKC 2019, an interactive, hands-on construction career day, and Build My Future Online for high school students. marla@greenhomecoach.com (work) 405-237-8188 (cell) 314-740-7251
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