I’m so pumped about today’s episode! I found the amazing Dr. Libby Darnell through my own research into the best ways to start reducing EMFs in our home. Dr. Libby is a Functional Medicine Practitioner and Doctor of Chiropractic who found out firsthand just what a bad effect EMFs (electromagnetic frequencies) can have on our bodies.
In response, Dr. Libby created Revived Living, a health and lifestyle coaching company with customized programs to help people get their health and happiness back. A cornerstone of Dr. Libby’s programs is reducing EMFs and the long-term cellular damage they cause.
Reducing EMFs in Our Homes: The Why and the How
So, where to start? How can we limit EMFs and still live in the “real” world?
Thankfully, there are smart, realistic ways to start reducing EMF exposure … without pitching our cell phones.
Dr. Libby says reducing EMFs where we can control it most — in our homes — is the place to start. I’m grateful for her expertise and dying to ask some questions, so let’s jump right in!
In This Episode You’ll Learn
- the surprising personal reason Dr. Libby became an EMF expert
- how electromagnetic frequencies work (and why we might want to think about reducing them)
- why the U.S. energy grid discharges “dirty” electricity … right into your home
- symptoms that might mean you are sensitive to EMFs (hint: poor sleep is one of them)
- how EMFs affect our bodies on an everyday basis (whether we feel them or not)
- the biggest contributor of EMFs to the average American home (this one really surprised me!)
- the way our appliances may be harming our health
- one major reason to not have electronic gaming systems in your house
- a big reason to avoid fluorescent and CFL lights
- why dimmer switches affect more than just the ambiance
- tips on which EMF filtering products are worth it … and which aren’t
- how to test and filter your home outlets (with an easy to use $100 tool)
- one small change a plumber can make for reducing EMFs
- what your shoe sole has to do with EMFs
- how to tell if you have a smart meter, and steps to take if you do
- and more!
Update: Following the podcast, Dr. Libby confirmed that halogen lights are 100% “clean.” I also checked with Dave Asprey (of Bulletproof.com) and he uses incandescent halogen lights without reservation. Good to know there’s another option.
How to Get Started Reducing EMFs Right Now!
According to Dr. Libby, the best 3 things you can do today to start reducing EMFs are:
- Change out your lightbulbs – Replace fluorescent or CFL bulbs with incandescent or halogen light bulbs.
- Get your WiFi on a timer – Buy a simple timer outlet to turn WiFi off at night, cutting exposure in half.
- Brush your teeth while standing on a piece of tinfoil – Yes, you read right!
Take a listen to find out why, and check out Dr. Libby’s top 10 tips for reducing EMFs below!
Resources We Mention
Follow Dr. Libby at Active Medical Center
- Dirty Electricity by Samuel Millham, MD
- Programmable outlet timer
- Stetzer meterand Stetzer filter
- Blue light blocking glasses
Further Reading
- 110: How Vibrational Frequencies Affect Our Daily Lives
- 73: Truth about WiFi, EMFs, and Radiation (+ How to Avoid Them)
- Is WiFi Safe?
- How to Avoid the Health Risks of Computers
- Why I Wear Blue Light Blocking Glasses at Night
[toggle title=”Read Transcript”]
Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Healthy Moms Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I’m really pumped about today’s episode because it’s with someone I got the chance to meet in person recently but had already found her work through my own research. Dr. Libby Darnell is the Founder of Revived Living and she’s the creator of the Revived Life Program. She’s a Functional Medicine Practitioner, a Doctor of Chiropractic. She has adorable children and she’s written her own nutrition programs, taught hundreds of one on one workshops. She was even named one of the top 10 chiropractors in Illinois. And I’m really excited to go deep on EMFs with her today because I think this is a huge growing issue in our society and not enough people are talking about it. And she’s gonna mention resources as we talk but also you can find on her site, revivedliving.com/emf, she has some resources to get you started, but, Libby, welcome, and thanks for being here.
Libby: Thanks so much Katie for having me. I’m so excited for all of your listeners. This is gonna be awesome.
Katie: It is and I think you’re raising awareness, like I said, about such a big issue because for me I…earlier this year, I spent some time in Switzerland and I was at a functional medicine clinic there, they call it I think biological medicine there. And there were people there who called themselves EMF refugees essentially, or there, they call it Electrosmog Refugees where they were reacting to EMFs to such a strong degree that they had to go a place where they were much lower levels to be able to function. In fact, one of them was having grand mal seizures from exposure.
So that really drove home for me that this is a big issue. This is…it’s easy to dismiss because we can’t see the EMFs and we can’t like necessarily unless we’re to that level, feel the effect on our bodies but it seems like there is a really real effect. So I think let’s start at the beginning. Can you kind of give us a primer of defining what are EMFs?
Libby: Yeah, absolutely. So they are…so EMF stands for electromagnetic frequency and it’s also referred to as EMR or electromagnetic radiation. And essentially, that’s gonna be any form of electronic frequency that is at a frequency different than our own. So to back that up a bit, you and I and every living thing, every plant, every animal, we have, since the dawn of time, we have vibrated at specific frequencies. You know, and you and I actually have a friend of ours right now who’s promoting a book all on that topic, all on vibing. And, you know, our vibrational frequencies and kind of honing in on that and realistically, that’s exactly how we’re designed to live and designed to function. And then relatively recently, like a hundred years ago, we developed electricity which is a very different frequency than what our bodies are meant to be exposed to.
So if we were to track, and there’s actually a book called “Dirty Electricity,” and again, you know, for the listeners, they don’t have to write anything down, I’m gonna give you all these information and all these resources. So just concentrate on listening. If you’re driving, don’t worry about trying to remember anything but there is a book that actually as…it tracked as the introduction of electricity grew from cities out to farm countries in America, they tracked increased incidents of suicides, diabetes, cancers and it all coincided perfectly. And so really, that kind of just shows us as we’re exposed to these things, we’re in this kind of social experiment right now where our technology advances so much faster than our safety studies. And so at the end of the day, when you think of any form of electromagnetic frequency and let’s just take one example, let’s take a cell phone. So everybody has a cell phone, you might even be listening to this podcast right now on a cell phone. And so that device sends out a frequency into the surrounding environment that’s at a different frequency than what our bodies are used to.
And just like anything, if we’re exposed for a short period of time, our bodies are designed to heal. You know, we get a…we fall down, we get a scrape on our knee, after a couple of days, you know, right back, right as rain. But think about our current environment especially if you’re in America, you know, most people are probably listening to this while surrounded by wireless even at work, at home or sometimes even in our car is, you know, our 4G hotspots. Then we have our phone that’s adapted to wireless and also in transmitting data, and then we have got dirty electricity that I’ll get into and we might be walking by our refrigerator motor. You know, there’s just so many things going on that we are constantly, constantly bombarded by this.
And the way that that works, you know, study show that probably a third of people are sensitive to these foreign frequencies. And my, you know, my theory on that and, again, at the end of the day, it’s a theory is that those are the people that are gonna feel it. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not affecting you. You know, there are about a third of people are gonna get symptoms, so like when you mentioned in Switzerland, those are the people that are getting real symptoms and feel it and that’s exactly what I went through but I think at the end of the day, it’s affecting us no matter what. So the whole purpose of, you know, you and I talking today is to bring light to the topic like you said and then also give people some real simple things that you can do just to reduce your own exposure. So I don’t expect people to be perfect. You know, it’s just like talking about nutrition. If we sat here and talked about a list of every single bad food to avoid, people would be left totally overwhelmed wondering what in the world are they gonna eat at all.
So at the end of the day, when you get my EMF Action Step which is at revivedliving.com/emf, that’s where you’re gonna be able to see, okay, here’s a list and here’s how I can get started. And so you’re just gonna cross one thing off at a time and do it in a reasonable manner.
So to back up, yes, we’ve got these foreign frequencies and now what happens to our bodies is that vibrational frequency that we’re not exposed to usually ends up throwing off our cells. So we’ve got like 72 trillion cells in our body and so for the nerds out there, I’m gonna give them a really, very short little rundown of how this works and for everybody else, you can just understand that yes, it’s documented, there’s a ton of research on this topic. But we have, if you remember back in cell biology in high school, we’ve got electrons, protons, neutrons, and we have something in our cells called photons. And essentially, they just keep our cells organized. They tell everything what to do, where to be in a sense of space and time and those foreign frequencies create chaos. So you can think of the orchestrator of our body just being thrown off.
So here’s an orchestra trying to play and it has no conductor. So that’s essentially what happens to us and so the reason that I mentioned that is because if you think on a cellular level, if we are being bombarded by these frequencies, that is why people can have a whole range of symptoms. You know, it’s so hard to diagnose electromagnetic frequency sensitivity also known as EHS. There’s so…you can be diagnosed with so many things before you actually figure out what’s going on with you. So for that reason, like those people in Switzerland that you met, it’s pretty incredible that they figured out the problem. And I can tell a little bit about what happened to me and then just because it’ll help people understand that it can happen to anybody really. But essentially, I…so I own an integrated medical office in the Chicagoland area and I was working, you know, 12 hours a day like so many other entrepreneurs and I loved it. You know, I love my job. I think it’s wonderful. And I started using a machine called the Biomeridian, have you ever heard of that, Biomeridian?
Katie: I’ve heard of it, yeah.
Libby: Yes, So it’s an awesome tool, it’s a noninvasive way of testing via acupressure points for chemical and food sensitivities, any vaccine damage, any, you know, anything. And so I was doing that. When I started doing it, I was so excited about it. I was actually the one testing people. And I was doing that for 12 hours a day and it’s a totally safe device to get tested on but it does put out a little bit of frequency towards the person who is the tester. And all of a sudden…I mean, it was an immediate onset when I started doing this that I had extreme fatigue and my personality started to change.
You know, I’m a health and happiness coach and I, you know, I kind of teach people how to use tools to become happier and I was angry and I was frustrated and I was newly married and my husband was looking at me going, “Who is this?” And I’d come home from work and I just get in bed, fall asleep and I would begrudgingly get out of bed the next day after sleeping for as long as I possibly could. And I’d been one of those people that, you know, my alarm went off, I was probably up before it. My feet at the ground, you know, it’s all sunshine and roses. I’m just that internationally positive person and here I would become somewhat of a nightmare and it got so bad to the point where I at one point looked to my husband and I said, “I think I’m probably gonna start to hear voices.” I felt like I was losing my mind. And I’m a healthcare professional, you know. I’m here to help people and so I just felt terrible not only that was I incapable of doing what I love to do but I literally felt like I was gonna hear voices and I needed to either be on psychotropic drugs or committed or something, you know. That was the next step for me.
So for a lot of people out there, I think had…if anybody out there is going through something like that and it is without a reason and it comes on from nowhere, please know that yeah, there could be an outside source to this. And so I always tell people that you’re not going crazy. And at the end of the day when I stopped, I finally figured out what was going on and it took me a while, you know, I called every colleague I had, I called everybody and I said, “Well, what’s going on?” And, of course, they’re using common sense and they said, “Well, what changed?” Like, “Oh, right, I started doing this.” “Well, yeah, Libby, you have…you’re sensitive to EMS.” “Oh, okay, I’m not crazy, that’s great.” And so I started doing everything I could. If there was a product out there, I bought it. If I could spend time doing something, I did it. I tried everything. And I did get my health back but that’s why I love talking about this topic because not only do I want to spread awareness that you can lose your health to this, I also think that there are amazing things you can do to help your family from ever getting sick in the first place, really simple tools. And then I wanna help people that might be already going through something like this, know what works and what doesn’t, because…just like any industry, there are always people out there that are maybe gonna put out products that don’t necessarily work and you can waste a lot of money and time like I did. And so that is absolutely the goal. So if it’s okay, I’d love to talk about what some of those common sources are that most people are exposed to. Sound good?
Katie: Yeah, I’d love to start with the problem, and I think that’s such an important point you raise too about like obviously most people are listening on their phone and not just that, probably most people have their phone attached to them 24/7. Like I was recently at a talk with, I think, about 2,500 people in the room and the speaker said like, “Who here does not have a cell phone on them right now?” And one person raised their hand and it was because theirs had been stolen. So like that’s the world we live in. So I’m like it’s so good that we’re talking about that because this is what we’re facing. So yeah, absolutely, let’s start with the problem. Where are the sources of this?
Libby: Yes. So, let’s talk about the most common sources. Obviously, your cell phone. Really quick step that we can just dive into, keeping your cell phone on airplane mode as much as humanly possible is the best bet. We live in the real world where you do need a cell phone, like especially if you’re gonna travel, you know? You’re gonna use an Uber, whatever it is, like where…you know, we have our cell phones, that’s the nature of society right now. So with that said, keep it in airplane mode as much as possible. The only thing that’s transmitted in airplane mode is GPS signal every so often because it’s mandated by law. So it’s very, very low and very infrequent. So if your phone is in airplane mode, you’re safe.
Now, if you have people that use their cell phones as alarm clocks, keep it in airplane mode, you can still use it as an alarm clock. Then you still have your calendar with you, but again, nobody is gonna be able to call you, you’re not gonna receive text messages. If you’re one of those people that you want to be able to be accessible to other people at, you know, at night or at work, keep your phone away from you as much as possible. So, you know, during my research into this topic, I worked with a gentleman named Dave Stetzer. He’s a member of the IEEE. He’s an electrical engineer and has developed a lot of the products that really work around this topic. So IEEE just means he’s about as high as up as you can go from an electrical engineer standpoint, and he does speak at mayo clinic on this topic of EMFs and how we’re creating sick people in America. And he even has a cell phone, you know? And what he does is he’ll keep it on the window sill by the window in his office so that it’s just away from his body and in that way, it’s not touching you, it’s not near you.
So those are just real simple things that people can do right off the bat when it comes to their cell phones. Same thing with computers, as much as possible, keep your Bluetooth off, keep your phone in airplane mode where you’re just turning off your wireless, that’s off as much as you can, same thing with your iPads. You know, wireless network at home, in an ideal world, if people could hardwire everything, that would be great. I know that’s not gonna be realistic for some families especially if they’ve got different schedules. So a simple thing that you can do if you have wireless still at home is to get a Christmas light timer. You know, just like where you use it with our Christmas lights, you plug your Christmas lights into an outlet timer, so you can just go to Home Depot, Menards, wherever, and just get an outlet timer. And I’m gonna provide a link to that for people if they just wanna know what I’m talking about if they’ve never used Christmas lights before, it’s real simple.
But all you’re doing is you’re plugging the power source of your wireless into that timer so you set it to go on and off and it’s only on in times where you would realistically use it. So anybody with children, that is an awesome thing to do because kids are so much more susceptible to EMFs just the way that our body is developed over time. Kids, I mean, they don’t have to have symptoms. I would recommend every single person, if you’ve got children, please put your wireless on a timer so they’re at least sleeping through the night without that exposure to wireless, specifically one of the things, you know, that I talked to Dave Stetzer about is the severity of different sources. And we’re gonna get into talking about electricity but wireless is still one of those but he always says, “You know what? First tackle dirty electricity, then get your house hardwired.” So wireless, in the grand scheme of things, is about a middle of the road offender. But it is constant and it does, you know, every single day.
And then I wanna just take that one step further because most people by now are probably thinking, “Well, okay, then they’re not exposed at night but then they go to school and they’ve got their Chromebooks and they’re around wireless there and there’s so many things I can’t control at school.” And your mind can almost start going down this rabbit hole. And so right off the bat, what I’d like to tell parents is only concentrate on controlling the things you have control over. You know, we’re talking about things right now that you’re gonna start thinking, “Oh, my gosh, it’s all…” Yeah, yes, you’re right. There are a lot of exposures. Control your home environment, just concentrate on that. Let the other things go for now. So take one step at a time.
So another major source are gonna be dirty electricity. So I’m gonna pop into that real quick. What that means is our grid system in America specifically and most other countries is set up on something called the Wye system. And at the end of the day, that means that our energy comes from our grid. It’s sent through a wire, it powers our homes. Then it returns from a wire back to the grid, it’s designed to be an efficient system, however, it’s not efficient because the return wire which is called the neutral wire, the return wire isn’t thick enough to actually transmit that energy back to the grid. And so for that reason, what we’ve done, what our energy system has done, is rather than installing either a second wire or a thicker neutral wire, they’ve grounded, so every so often on power lines, they’ll actually have a metal rod going into the ground which allows the energy instead of traveling through wires to actually travel through the ground and return back to the grid system because energy is just like water. It’ll travel from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible.
And so what that means is we’ve got all this excess energy that’s actually coming out into our environment from the wires in our house. So if you’re walking around your home, there are gonna be specific hotspots based off the wiring in your home because our energy system is not as efficient as is should be. Now, if you’re in countries like Germany, they’re on what’s called a Delta system. It’s a closed loop system. What leaves the grid returns to the grid and are given no other options. So people that test products, a lot of these EMF products, will go to Germany because it’ll actually look like it’s really, really working just because they don’t have the same sources of EMFs that we do in America.
And so to elaborate on the dirty electricity piece, when you’re having that excess energy come out into your environment, you know, and let’s say in your bedroom or as you’re sitting on your coach, there’s a really, really simple fix to this. Part one is you test to see if it’s bad, if it’s something that you do need to address and you can do that with a pretty inexpensive meter that again, I’m gonna link to. It’s called the Stetzer meter. It’s about a $100. You just plug it into different outlets in your home and anything that measures above 50 units, you just need a filter for. It’s a really simple fix. You plug a filter in and it’s filtering out all the dirty electricity in that wiring system.
So I always tell people, a great action step to start with is at least to get a couple of filters per room per child in your house. And there are lots of different filters on the market. I mean, there’s whole-house filters which I could…you know, for the sake of time, I don’t wanna get into anything that doesn’t work but I can tell you that there’s specific reasons why I don’t recommend whole-house filters. They do reduce but they’re not gonna eliminate 100%. But there are lots of different things out there and I do recommend the Graham-Stetzer filter just because they’re the developers, they’re the engineers that actually found a solution to the problem and they were the ones that invested the millions and millions of dollars going over to Russia and figuring out all this research to actually solve the problem. So I always like supporting people that have a heart to help other people.
And so that is a really simple fix and I will tell you if you’re somebody who has a problem sleeping at night or you wake up in the middle of the night or I’ve been told a lot, you know, with clients where I haven’t put these in, some people have racing hearts at night and just overall insomnia. Once they put their filters in, they notice a huge, huge difference. And I was talking to a gentleman in Australia who he installs filters, actually test homes in Australia, and he was saying, “Oh, my goodness. If I just spent my days helping people that couldn’t sleep, I’d have a job for life.” You know, that’s kind of one of the biggest things that people notice once that dirty electricity is gone. But if you think about it, when you’re finally able to sleep, that’s when your body heals. You know, when you’re sleeping at night, that’s when your nervous system can actually kick up and really, really heal. So that’s super important. And our, Katie, our friend, Robin, that was the first thing she told me after she got green-smooth girl. After she installed her filter, she’s like, she texted me the next day and was like, “Oh, my goodness, I’m sleeping, you know, that’s the best night of sleep I’ve had in years.” And so if that’s one thing people could do, I’d really, really recommend that.
So those are gonna be some of the most common sources along with, now, we’ve got cell phone towers. Oh, my goodness, this whole 5G rollout. We’re really in this experimental phase and I’m really worried that with the introduction of 5G, that we’re gonna be having people get sicker and sicker and so that’s why I’m so thankful that you’re talking about this today because I just know that we’re gonna really help people when they start to feel sick, understand why.
So cell phone towers, what I’d recommend that people do is if they live near a cell phone tower, I’m gonna give you resources on where you can go to get some shielding for that if you already live there and especially people like…you and I had a great conversation about building a home and you have done all the right things to help minimize your exposure, which is amazing, for people that are in the market for homes, making sure that there are no visible cell phone towers in your area and staying away from tension wires or, you know, big power system wires that run by your house, that’s what they would look like, I would stay away from those as well if possible. If not, you can always get shielding. So for those of you listening that are like, “Oh, my goodness, I have all these things.” That’s okay, there’s a fix to them and I’m gonna send it to you.
And, oh, my goodness, I have kind of an upsetting story about smart meters but do you have a smart meter in your house? I assume that would be a no.
Katie: We don’t but I know like, especially with certain new houses, there’s not even an option now, although I think I got this information from you but I checked with our local power company and they verified that it’s the kind that only transmits like once a month when they actually need to be read, not constantly. And I think there’s the difference there, but if you could explain that because I knew what to check but I don’t think I know how to explain.
Libby: Yeah, that is awesome. I’m so glad that that is the case. So what I would recommend that people do is when you get home or if you’re already home, go outside and walk around the perimeter of your apartment, your home, you know, whatever unit that you live in and you’re looking for a meter that is reading the energy usage of your house. Now, once you find that meter and it’s usually a metal circle, you’re gonna look on the front of it and you’re gonna see five clock-like devices, just five little clock dials and that means it’s an analog system, it’s an old-school system and you’re good. If you see that, you’re done. No more action steps and do a happy dance.
Now, if you see something that has a digital reading on it so just like a digital clock, a digital wristwatch, you’re gonna see something just like that on the front of that middle circle. That means it’s potentially and most likely a smart meter. So then you’ve got a couple of action steps and they’re pretty simple. You’re gonna call your energy company, so for me, it’s ComEd and you’re gonna ask, “How is the signal transmitted? Wire or wired?” Meaning through a wire or is it transmitted through space wirelessly. And you’re gonna get an answer to that. Five percent of the time usually it’s still actually transmitted via a wire which is great, then you’re done, hang up with them.
If they say it’s transmitted wirelessly, then the next question is, how frequently is that signal transmitted. And so what you wanna know is, okay, is it once every 30 days which means it’s a really intense signal but it’s only every 30 days. And your body, like we talked about, can recover from something like that. Most likely it’s happening while you’re out of the house anyway. Or it could be as frequently as every 30 seconds which I would…then I would definitely ask what your opt-out options are.
So in my area, I can still opt out and I still have that, and most people actually do have the ability to opt out. So if you can, what that means is that you’re probably gonna be paying a monthly fee which I think mine is $20 a month to have an individual person come and read my meter. So I still have to pay a person to come read it and I’m okay with that because I think of it as, “Hey, I created job for someone. You know, they’re coming out and reading the meter, and I’m all right with that.” But if it is every 30 seconds, yes, definitely, opt out if you can and if not, there’s a really great shielding material that’s actually in development in Israel right now. And so as soon as that is available, it’s gonna be on the revivedliving.com/emf page. So I update that continuously. And so that’s a great thing that people can use to shield their smart meter.
And so not to, you know, go too deep into that topic but the energy company owns that meter. You can’t touch that meter, that’s theirs. So you can actually get in trouble if you touch the meter. So any shielding that you can do and it’s pretty basic, it just has to be around the meter. You own the space around the meter. If it’s an apartment complex, you can ask your superintendent to shield that for you and that’s okay too. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’re not violating any laws. You have authority over the space around that meter. And I do have a quick story on that. So I had a client of mine whom I had known for years. She’s a really happy person. I mean, she’s this bubbly little light of energy and she came in one day and told me she was suicidal. And, of course, you know that there’s something wrong there. You know, she had felt like over Christmas she completely lost her health and was thinking of ending her life and she was newly engaged. There’s no reason. There’s no, you know, physical, emotional reason for her to feel this way.
And I said, “When did it start?” And she pulled out her calendar and could tell me the day this started. And funny enough, she…I said, “Hey, it’s gonna sound weird but can you go home, call your energy company and see if you had a smart meter installed that day.” And that was the day they installed a smart meter and it was right by her bedroom right by her head. So here she sleeps eight hours a night. There was a smart meter inches away from her head transmitting a signal every 30 seconds. And, you know, there’s so many stories of, there are people that will actually come out and inspect your home, for those people that know that they, you know, want a professional to help them with this that have found, you know, when there are, you know, a couple like a man and wife that are both diagnosed with brain cancer, they’ll find that is most likely that the case either that or there was an intense amount of wiring in their home right there.
And so for a lot of people, their smart meters aren’t going to be anywhere near where they’re living so I don’t want people to be too overly concerned about this but it’s definitely something that you should dive into and explore. And so for you, every 30 days, that’s fine, you know? That’s totally fine, but those are the steps to take for that and again, I’m gonna send that to you. And some other big exposures, again, would be radio towers. So we’ve got cell phone towers and radio towers and again, those are more easily tested by somebody coming to your home but as a general rule of thumb, if you can see it from where you live, there’s gonna be some exposure. So if you’re really curious, you could actually have it tested to see how much or you could simply look at getting some shielding just on your windows of that side of the house, which is what I did.
When I had my home tested, one part of…just one side of the house really, it maxed out the machine and I had no idea where it was coming from and I could barely see it and it took us a while to find it but if we just looked through the trees, you could see the cell phone tower that was less than half a mile away but again, it was maxing out our machines and that’s where, when my son was born, that’s where, at that point, when we had our home tested, that’s where I was sitting everyday nursing him. And so right away, I just got window shielding, I had it post-tested, no problems, no frequency coming through and that was great.
And so then another big exposure are gonna be the appliances in our house, so, you know, you think about if you’re using your electronics like you’ve got a fridge that has a motor running and the thing that actually causes, for those people that are curious, the thing that cause the EMF readings are when you hear the motor running, it’s doing an inversion of power, so it’s actually the inverter of any appliance that actually causes a problem but for everybody else who doesn’t have…wanna worry about what that means, if you hear the motor running on certain devices in your house, that’s when it’s doing an exposure. So your refrigerator doesn’t run all the time. You know, when you use a blender, you’re only using it for a very short period of time. But then we think about things like our Xboxes, like if your children are using electronic gaming systems, that’s something where there’s some definite exposures and really quick fixes too.
So like a Wii system, Playstations, as long as you’re appropriately filtering, so plugging those filters in where those appliances are being used, that’s great. One thing that was really, really interesting on testing is that the Xbox, even if it’s turned off, still transmits a signal that I can read through three floors. So if you were, you know, in your basement using an Xbox and you went upstairs into, you know, the top floor in your house, you could still pick up that signal. Isn’t that crazy?
Katie: Yeah, that’s amazing and scary.
Libby: Yeah. So when I was at Robin’s house, I actually showed her son. I was like, “Okay, you know, turn your Xbox off.” And we tested that, you know, I was able to show him. So I said, “Okay, now you know once you’re not using your Xbox, unplug it, that’s simple. Just unplug it.” To take that a step further, if you think your kids won’t remember to do that, plug that Xbox into a timer so it’s only on like in the evenings when they would be using it. That way, you don’t even have to think about it. But that’s a really, really simple tool but…and I don’t know why that is. And it’s just one of those things that I was talking to another tester and he said, “Yup, this is what’s going on. This is what I just found.” And I thought, “You got to be kidding.” And I ran around and tested it and sure enough, every single one of them, and I don’t know why and I don’t know if it’s just the new ones or if it’s just the old ones but just in general, if it’s an Xbox, unplug it.
Any questions on this stuff so far?
Katie: That’s super helpful. I’ve been actually writing a few follow-up questions but to go back to kind of the beginning, I’ve been curious. So you said we are on the Wye system, correct?
Libby: Yes.
Katie: Versus Germany being on the Delta system.
Libby: Yes.
Katie: So if anyone is ever going to build a house or like do a drastic remodel, can you on your own home put a bigger wire out? Like is that something you can remediate in your own home?
Libby: Unfortunately, the answer is no because we don’t own that process. You know, we can’t touch that part of the process. That belongs to the energy companies so you would actually be liable if you try to do that. But if you were kind of like off the grid and you owned a lot of land and you had like an off-the-grid setup, well, then yes. So there were a lot of people like the people that you mentioned in Switzerland that will build their own…you know, almost like a little community, totally off the grid and then yes, they absolutely do that. But then they’re also paying to use certain amounts of electricity that does come from the grid or they’re creating their own using solar energy which then I wanna just make a note, for people that do have solar energy, try to have the actual inversion of that energy which usually happens right by the panels away from your home.
And that’s something, Katie, you and I talked about but as long as it’s not happening like on the roof above your head where it is for some people, then you’re totally safe and that’s a great thing to do. But no, you and I can’t just go to a standard energy system and install an extra neutral wire ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s just not allowed.
Katie: Okay. So that would only work like on private property.
Libby: Yea.
Katie: Or if like the wire is only running to a certain point and you control to be on that section.
Libby: Yeah.
Katie: Got it.
Libby: Yup, exactly.
Katie: That makes sense. Well, the thing that, again, you said it but I wanna hammer it home is like these things can sound super scary and they are and we should take them seriously, but they’re also fixable. I think that’s the important point. So these filters, like if those are used in every room of the house, can those be just pretty much plugged into every outlet and just…?
Libby: Yeah.
Katie: Like does that actually offer like a substantial degree of protection along with things like just turning off the Wi-Fi and some little things?
Libby: Yeah. So that’s an awesome question. So to elaborate on that, so the average home needs about 20 filters and some homes simply don’t need as many as other homes do and you don’t know until you test but what you’re using is just that Stetzerizer meter. Again, it’s the $100 meter and you just plug it in to outlets. You start in your children’s bedrooms and in your living spaces where you spend the most time. And if you get a reading that’s above 50, you just plug in a filter and then you’ll notice that that reading comes down. So you’ll notice it right away. As you proceed through your home, you’re gonna need less and less filters. So as an example, if you bought a meter and you just walked around and tested all of your outlets, everything is gonna look high. But as you start installing filters, it’s bringing the excess energy from the dirty electricity down as you go through your house.
So if you were to just willy-nilly plug in that meter, it would look like you would literally need to install filters in every outlet which then means your outlets aren’t usable, but no, you’re not going to. And you’re gonna find that there are hotspots. So for example, when I was testing my team members, I just, you know, I…well, they know that I talk about this stuff all the time. I just showed up at their house with all of the equipment and I just tested and installed filters where they needed. And they were great about it, they were such good spots, but they had certain hotspots. So for example in my nutritionist’s house, right where she stands and she’s our nutritionist, so she is in her kitchen all the time. Right where she is standing in her kitchen was the hottest spot in her house and it maxed out the machine. It maxed out the meter. It was over 2,000 units and will only read up to 2,000. And so, okay, we knew right away she needed two filters and we just got a little three-prong outlet, they’re called outlet tap but a little three-prong divider which costs about a $1.50 at Home Depot. In that way, she still has access, you know, to all of her outlets but she’s brought that reading way, way down into non-biologically active levels.
And then so my assistant, Alison, when I tested her home, it was her children’s bathrooms that were really high, just one specific bathroom but it was maxed out and that’s where they’re standing and they’re using their hair dryers which of course they’re gonna pull a little bit more energy. And so again, she needed two filters in there and it brought it completely down. So the amount that you need is dependent on testing but the average home needs 20 filters. And my house, I mean, keep in mind I was super sick and we had just moved into that house maybe a year before I got sick, so I’m sure it was a buildup but my house, because it was so bad, needed 60 filters and that is not normal. You know, that is not a normal number to need. But now, you know, fast-forward, a couple of months later when I was pregnant with my son, I had this peace of mind knowing that, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not bringing this little small child into an environment that was so toxic.”
You know, we’re so used to talking about our homes being toxic from a chemical standpoint, you know, we use harsh cleaners and, you know, we could have a mold exposure, you know, whatever. But we don’t generally think about the electricity toxicity that comes into play. So for all those moms out there that are thinking about this, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve made all these wonderful changes.” And this is just an extra thing that you can do for peace of mind that you’re gonna notice a big difference with your children.
Katie: Yeah. And anything that’s kind of helps with improving sleep, I think most moms are like, “Sign me up.”
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Katie: And so I’ve researched these filters and just to clarify, so the design I’m remembering in my head, they plug into like one outlet, they’re not like a double plug. So could you like put one in the bottom plug on an outlet and still use the top plug for instance?
Libby: oh Yeah, yup.
Katie: So they can easily use pretty much any outlet as long as you’re not overloading?
Libby: Yes. And you…one thing I wanna tell people because I do get this question. They’ll plug a filter in and they’ll hear a buzz and that’s when that filter, there’s actually way too…it’s almost at capacity and you have to plug in two. And so my bathroom is one of those. I plugged my filter in and it was like, “Oh my goodness,” but it was the highest point in my house. So it was overloading that filter so I plugged two in and I got an outlet splitter so I still have use of and it actually added an extra outlet so now I had three outlets instead of two but now that buzzing was gone and the reading was below 30. But it went from again above 2,000 to below 30.
Katie: Okay, so there is a plug in the filter as well. So you’re like plugging in into an outlet and you can still plug something else in to it?
Libby: Yeah. Unfortunately, there aren’t. So the ones in Australia have a plug in the filter itself but the ones in America don’t, yeah. So if you’re online and you ever come across ones with a plug in them, they’re designed to work on a different energy system that like we talked about. There’s the Delta system and the Wye system, so they’re just two different filters. The same developer but designed for two different energy systems. But that’s a great question.
Katie: Got it. So you can, in most cases, you can just plug it into like the bottom plug for instance and you use like the top plug or use a splitter on the top plug as long as that gets down to a good level.
Libby: Yup, absolutely. And again, those splitters are like a $1.50 and I bought mine because I’m too lazy to go to…I hate driving. It’s like my least favorite thing to do. I just got on Amazon and bought a bunch of them and so that was a quick fix for me so I didn’t lose any of my outlets.
Katie: Yeah. That’s smart. Great idea. Cool. Let’s see, I’m looking through my other…so the window shields. That’s also a great thing to know because I think like virtually when I started researching it, I was like, “Oh, gosh.” So if you have outside exposures, you have to shield your entire…like that entire part of your house and that was great to hear from you that it’s really just the window that you need to focus on most of the time.
Libby: Yeah, absolutely. And I learned that just from actually seeing it implemented in live testing. So I was already…I was told that and, you know, it’s always nice to be told something and then it’s great to actually see it when it’s being tested. So as soon as we got the window shielding and they, you know, they make different versions. So there’s the totally see-through ones that you wouldn’t even know. It’s kind of like a screen, like your door screen, so you still see through it. But it’s filtering that out and that worked a 100% and that’s one of the reasons that I, you know, after talking about this so long, I finally created like one place with all the products that I know 100% work because it’s so hard to know. You know, there’s so many different shielding options out there and it’s so hard to know, you know, your common sense is like, “Well, let me buy the least expensive option.” But then when I did that, it didn’t work. I’m like, “Oh, my goodness.” You know, so that’s why I try to help people as much as I can in that realm but yeah, you will only really need to shield your windows and that is the big…because it just comes right through your windows but it has a really hard time coming through your drywall and your concrete and the framing of your house, the siding of your house. So it’s not…that is not gonna be nearly as much of a concern.
Katie: That makes sense. So I know this one won’t apply to a lot of people although I have gotten a surprising number of questions from people lately who are doing remodels on their home for another reason and they’re like, “What do I need to know from the health side? Are there materials that I should or shouldn’t use?” So I’ve been researching that myself and I’m happy to share but I think EMFs are a big question there as well. So I’d love to hear just from like a home perspective, if someone’s ever going to remodel or build a home, like are there structural things they could do or like just seeing things they can build in kind of from the beginning? And hopefully, these are things that will be implemented by builder’s over time if enough of us request it. You know, I’m hoping that that can change going forward.
Libby: Yeah. And, you know, it’s funny because on that topic, I’ve got a client who she does residential wiring in homes, that’s her job. So I talk to her about this. She had no idea. You know, like this is not something that’s talked about in that industry. So unfortunately, as of right now, when you get your home wired, you don’t have a lot of options. As far as making it 100% safe, you’re just gonna need to install some filters because again, the problem isn’t with the wiring, the problem is with our energy system. So we’ve just…we’re using a filter to solve the energy systems problem. So you’re still gonna need to get filters. However, some quick things that you can do from your home perspective is make sure when you’re looking at…and I’ll talk about why, but when you look…when you go down in your basement and you look at your water intake into your home, a simple thing that you can do is pay a plumber for an hour’s worth of labor to take out part of the metal piping right after your water intake and replace that with PVC.
And the reason that you’re doing that is you’re disrupting the electric current that comes in through your water intake in your home. And that will apply to, and this is a guess, but it’s probably gonna apply to about 70% of people because I’ve seen some people where they don’t have grounding, current coming in through their home and some people where they do. So for me, I could test it on my home and when I touched my bathroom kitchen faucet, I was actually getting, and I hooked myself up to an EMG reader, I was actually getting the current traveling through my body. So it was traveling up my arm and then the way our arm is designed, you know, we’ve got striated muscle fibers. They kind of run like little roadworks but then when it gets to our chest area, that’s where the muscles starts to dissipate and it’s almost kind of like a spider web. So the energy will actually run through your fingertips, through your arm and it dissipates in our chest. And so let’s take that a step further. We see, you know, a lot of incidents of breast cancer on the rise but that is, on testing, where that energy stops and is absorbed in your system.
And so it took literally half an hour for him to switch out a piece of metal piping for PVC and when I post-tested it, there’s nothing there. There’s nothing running. So every time you touch your kitchen sink, your shower faucet, your bathtub, you know, all of that, then you’re nixing that. So that’s, if I were building a new home or that could be a great thing for anybody to implement really, that’s a really excellent action point. Now, I wanna make a caveat to that. By building standard codes, when you go to sell your home, there is a risk that you might have to switch it back. Again, it will take like half an hour of the plumber’s time. And I don’t even think anybody would even catch it but I was told that when I had it installed. They said, “We don’t know if this is to code, it probably is. You know, it doesn’t change anything in the hose, it’s just disrupting that current. But on inspection, they might ask you to switch it back.” And I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine with me.” I’m gonna go through years of zero exposure and that is absolutely fine with me. So keep that in mind.
And then another great thing is when you’re looking at installing all the lighting in your system, two main rules. Don’t install fluorescent lighting or compact fluorescent lighting like the swirly light bulbs, the ones that are promoted to be energy efficient which don’t get me started on that topic. But the swirly ones, compact fluorescents, the ones that we talk about, you know, that have mercury in them and that kind of thing, those are the worst offenders when it comes to light bulbs in your home. If you have those, unscrew them right now. Like live in the dark, get rid of them, and replace them with ideally incandescent light bulbs that’s just the straight-up light bulb that Tom Edison invented. Those produce zero EMFs and if you can’t find them for whatever reason, you know, they sell them here right at, you know, my local hardware stores.
LEDs, so if you have LEDs, those are gonna be a middle of the line offender and I can’t give a definitive…because the brands change and when they were manufactured changes. So I’ll test some and they’re real high and then I’ll rest other LEDs and they’re just fine. But nothing is as bad as a CFL. So grand scheme of things, if you’re thinking about the best light bulbs to install in your home, get incandescents and then if you can’t find those for whatever reason, get LEDs. So in my integrated medical office, I’ve got…some sources had to be LEDs because of the nice long light bulbs and I know that Dave Stetzer, that engineer, actually right now is developing a zero EMF LED light bulb to fix this problem because he…and it was funny, I asked him, I was like, “Oh, that’s great. Why are doing this?” Well, he needed it for his own workshop. You know, he’s got all these employees and he’s like, “I had to make their work environment safe so if I’m gonna produce it for them, I might as well make it for everybody else.” And I thought that was so funny.
And then the second part when it comes to light bulbs and your lighting, in general, is to not have dimmer switches in your home or if you already do, don’t dim those lights. Use them on full blast. And I’ve learned that the hard way because I had just remodeled my house and I had installed dimmer switches everywhere a dimmer switch could be involved. It was…so it was just so funny. And so I’d, you know, paid all that money for individual dimmer switches and then on testing, they, you know, like literally made the readers scream. I mean, they just scream because you’re taking energy that’s supposed to being used and you’re dampening it, but it’s got to go somewhere so it comes out into your environment. And so that’s what’s made the meters that are testing this stuff just go out the charts. But as soon as I raised it back up to full-blown, it was a lot less. So again, then I bought just the straight-up like flip of the switch switches from Home Depot for about…I think they were just under a dollar but I don’t…it was so expensive because I had installed all of these dimmers everywhere. I paid for all that and then threw those out and got the flips. But, you know, we learned the hard way and I’m just glad to have known it.
Katie: Yeah, for sure. And I’m curious if you’ve ever tested any of the types of halogen because Dave…I recently talked to him Dave Asprey who’s pretty aware of the EMF issues as well and he was building a commercial space for his new Bulletproof Labs and in California, they have to meet all these crazy code and power specs and usage of electricity and all that which pretty much all commercial builders only wanted to use LED but the options that he had were like really high EMF. And so he found out he was able to, at least with the halogen bulbs, he had found use halogen in place of the LEDs and it ended up being cheaper for him but also lower EMFs. Have you tested…I know those aren’t used as much but have you tested any halogens?
Libby: Yeah. So I haven’t tested them but what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna get you the answer to that question from, you know, all my colleagues that do this as well, and then that way, you could just put the answer in your show notes. That sounds like a good step.
Katie: Perfect. So those, I will make sure to include that and those will be at wellnessmama.fm under this episode. Also, so you mentioned like the electrical system here, the Wye system, it grounds the outlets as opposed to actually like sending the electricity back like it should. Are there anything that we can do on that level with grounding or I know that that’s a whole movement as well, the idea of grounding or groundings. So you can you talk about the connection and if it’s helpful at all.
Libby: Yes, for sure. And the answer is gonna be a little bit frustrating because you don’t know until you actually test to see what’s happening. But for most people, like so for example when I tested my team members, only one of them had a grounding issue but it’s still like 50-50. So what that means is that when you walk around barefoot in your yard, are you actually having a current run through your body? And that happens. You know, so we’ll go around, we’ll hook people up to again these EKG patches, we’ll be able to test, when they’re barefoot in the grass, test the amount of current coming up one leg and down the other. So you’re actually creating this circuit. It’s crazy to think about, but unfortunately, that is a reality because of that Wye system. And the Delta system, that’s not a problem, so you can ground an earth all day long.
Now, you could…and I don’t…there’s so many benefits to being barefoot that I don’t wanna discourage people to be barefoot. And, for example, you know, you’re out there, you’re walking around in the dirt, your kids are playing in the dirt, and they are getting exposed to soil microbiome, they’re building their immunity. You know, they’re doing so many wonderful things to where as long as you’re not…you’ve eliminated these other exposures, that is, at the end of the day, gonna be a lot more important.
So the grounding, if you wanted to know definitively, you’d have to have somebody come out and actually hook you up just like they did me and test to see if that’s a problem. There have been times where it’s a real low level and I say, “You know what? I’d rather have you in the sunlight resetting your adrenal glands and working on your soil microbiome,” that I’m not gonna worry about this as much because you’ve eliminated other factors. And then there are other times where it is so intensely high and this person’s already has health complaints that I say, “Yeah, unfortunately, when you’re outside, you’re gonna wanna wear shoes.” And when I say shoes, I’m talking about the rubber-soled shoes where there is no circuit there, so you’re not gonna have any energy passing from the ground to your shoes. If you’re wearing leather-soled shoes, that’s the same thing as going barefoot.
So with that said, you don’t know until you get testing. However, so part of my…and part of my story, to give a side note, because I can make the testing option a lot more manageable for people. So when I got sick and I totally lost my health and I got better, I had a niece, her name is Kiana and she’s seven years old and she was diagnosed with a glioblastoma and she was given two months to live. Long story short, we flew to Spain and we saw Dr. Raymond Hilu who does blood analysis and he put her blood up on this big old screen and we could actually see her red blood cells clumped together and not circulating and he looked at us and he said, “She is incredibly EMF sick.” And he did tell us, he’s like, “This is really bad. I’m not sure how this is gonna go.” But we did everything we could and I have to give Dr. Raymond Hilu a shout out because he actually did come back…we flew to Spain, he was on vacation in America. He flew back just to see her. And I just think that is wonderful.
Unfortunately, getting treatment, alternative treatment for someone with terminal cancer is too big of a liability issue for most doctors in America. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that it’s a huge liability issue, and so we couldn’t find anybody here that could even give her some options. But we flew over there, while we were there, I had…actually, we had Dave Stetzer go in and test her home and then test her classroom. And when you’re testing your home, you wanna see…using specific…there’s so many different pieces of equipment and they all have different units.
So for the sake of simplicity, with this one device that we used, you wanna see under 2,000 units per room. And her bedroom is at 42,000 units. Again, biologically active, above 2,000. Her bedroom, right near her head, only room in the house that was like this was at 42,000 units. Her classroom is at 62 and she’d had a teacher pass away. She’d had another teacher that had late-term miscarriages. A teacher in the adjacent classroom had brain cancer. I mean, like all these bizarre things were happening and we were able to definitively say, “Yeah, this is what got her sick.” And it was just heartbreaking because all of these was preventable, you know. By doing the things that we’ve talked about, she would never have been diagnosed and unfortunately, she did. She lost her battle.
So now, her dad, because he…you know, again, losing a child, I hope nobody listening ever has to go through anything like that, but he now…this is what he does. He actually does virtual home inspections where he’ll mail you all these equipment and he actually has videos on how to use it and then he gets on a consultation just via Skype and says, “Okay, these are your readings, this is what it means and this is what you can do about it.” So in the course of a weekend, you can actually have your home tested if you wanted to. Now, so that’s where that when it comes to grounding, yes, it does take testing to know if that’s a problem or not. But now that there’s this virtual home inspection option out there, I love that, and we do…we actually…it was his idea but it was such a blessing to have an answer because so many people out there have someone fly out and test your home because not a ton of people do this and there are different ones throughout America and if you happen to be close to them, it’s a lot more economical. But for people that don’t live by somebody who does this, it can be kind of cost prohibitive. And so I’m so glad that he decided to do this because he just wanted to be able to reach more people and so that’s what he does. So I linked to all of that for people that do want to see if that is a problem for them. For the grounding issue, they can absolutely do that.
But in the meantime, for people that have things like Biomats, you know, there’re all these grounding mats out there. I mean, people spend so much money on this stuff, and on testing, if you don’t have your home filtered or where you’re using that mat filtered, it will actually create a current in your body, not get rid of it. Can you believe that?
Katie: That’s crazy. Yeah. That will be the opposite of what you’d expect. It makes sense when you understand the whole issue of the Wye system.
Libby: Yeah, absolutely. And so, this is the funny part. I’m skeptic of all these stuff. I’m always like, “I wanna see research. I wanna actually see it tested.” So I had a Biomat, plugged it in, tested myself, current going through my body. I was shocked. Again, expensive, promoted to help you, and then unplugged it and then it worked because there’s still metal fibers in these mats, you know, there’s metal fibers. When it was unplugged, it worked just like I was standing on tinfoil which actually is a great way to discharge excess energy in your body. It sounds totally coo-coo. I used to not even talk about it because I was afraid people would think that this is just totally off the wall. But I’ve seen it, you know, tested time and time again and this 100% works, but if you stand on a Biomat that is not plugged in, it actually does work as a discharge. But again, it works just the same as if you’re standing on tinfoil, believe it or not, which is a lot cheaper. It lasts a really long time and I always tell people like especially if you know the grounding is a problem for you or you’re not sure and maybe budget doesn’t allow for you to get that tested, well, then your kids go outside, they’re playing, they’re being kids, they’re, you know, not on their iPads, they’re not playing their Xbox, but they’re being full-on children outside which is what we want them to be doing. They come inside, when they go to bed at night, you have them brush their teeth, right? So they’re brushing their teeth, have them stand on a piece of tinfoil, which, again, I know that sounds bizarre but that is 100% effective at helping to discharge the energy that we’re around every day.
So the way that I do this is in our bathrooms where we’ve got our toothbrush and our toothpaste, underneath the counters, I have a piece of tinfoil. And so my son, Grayson, knows and he’s two when he knows to do this. When he brushes his teeth which sometimes is still a battle and then I like pin him down on the ground on his tinfoil but as long as you’re standing barefoot, you’re doing great. And so you’ll only need to stand on there for about a minute. But the nice part is if you do it while you brush your teeth, it’s already part of your habit. So it’s just training to add something to your health routine, it’s something you’re already doing and it makes it really, really simple to do and so that’s why I always say, “If you can do that, if you’re not sure about the grounding, that is a great action step to take.”
Katie: Yeah. And that’s super easy and super cheap and I’m always telling people not to use your tinfoil in cooking, so that’s a great thing. Like use it here instead. One thing I’ve read and you could either confirm or like tell me this is not true, but that our cells are actually much more sensitive during sleep because we’re in the time of trying to like rebuild tissue and it’s just a different state of the body. Is that true? And if so, is that like where if someone is super overwhelmed right now, should you start with the sleep part and, you know, minimize the Wi-Fi while you’re sleeping, turn off the Xbox, is that like a good place to start or does it make a little difference?
Libby: Yeah. No, that absolutely does. So just the way that your body works is when you’re asleep, every other system in your body down-regulates. Like your respiratory system, your digestive system. You know, your digestive system is gonna down-regulate. It’s not gonna work that hard. You breathe slower and deeper when you sleep. But your nervous system which is in charge of your healing actually kicks into gear and that’s when all your healing is taking place. So the best thing to start with is exactly what you just said, focusing on getting better sleep. And you talk about a lot of these strategies that I think work hand in hand with the whole side of EMFs. So, you know, we talk about wearing blue light blocking glasses and using something like night shift on our phone or blue light blocker on our phone or on our laptop or our iPad just to help regulate our melatonin levels and help us get into a deeper sleep. So really nice add-on is at the same time, we’re turning our wireless off.
Ideally, we’re reading a book and we’re not on a device before bed and then we install a couple of filters in our bedroom and we’re just gonna get a better night sleep overall. And then we’re healing and we wake up actually refreshed to the next day which for people that know that they struggle with sleep, to wake up feeling like yourself again is such a wonderful thing. And all these people out there, you know, we talk about adrenal issues, you know, adrenal glands that are taxed and our cortisol levels are off which is a stress hormone in our body. But you think about that, if we’re constantly exposed to this stuff and then we also live crazy hectic lives, we’ve also got emotional stress and physical stress that we’re around and then we add in this EMF, it’s almost like, how could we expect our adrenal glands to function properly? You know, it’s amazing sometimes when we think about what we put our bodies through that we’re still functioning and that’s just how amazingly brilliant the human body is. But absolutely, if you can give it a good night sleep using those tools like things that you’ve talked about and adding the EMF piece, oh, my gosh, we’ll be unstoppable.
Katie: Yes. I think that’s such a good thing and like bringing it back to like there are things you can do, I know that this…it does sound super scary but there are things you can do and I know some doctors especially the ones in Switzerland and other people, they have installed master kill switches on their house or on their bedrooms. So I’m curious like does that fix the problem like if you stop the power coming into your house? Does that fix the current problem or what if you just… because some people would wanna maybe leave on like the air conditioning or the heater while they’re sleeping. Could you install that in bedrooms if you had an electrician or how would that work?
Libby: Yup. So you can install a kill switch and I do…actually, I do have colleagues that have done that. You can install a kill switch but it will leave things like your refrigerator still running. If you have a deep freeze, it’ll leave that running. So you can have a professional actually come and do that and I would talk to my brother-in-law about that, and again, you know, his information is gonna be in all the information that we’re sending people. But you can actually get that done and that’s gonna be incredibly safe and then it’s turning everything off. So it’s turning off your Wi-Fi, it’s turning off that plugged in Xbox, it’s taking the power away from everything.
And so other than the unfortunate exposures like cell phone towers, radio frequency, and grounding, you know, you can still have that ground current running through the pipes in your home but other than that, that is an awesome, awesome action step to do as well. And if that seems overwhelming, then, you know, that’s when you’re just gonna use your wireless timer for now and get some filters, you know, that will take care of the problem 24 hours a day.
Katie: Yeah. That’s a great tip and I know you’re gonna mention those in your resources and the links to all of that. Your resources will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm so people can find it, definitely, don’t try to write while you’re driving. That’s not safe. So I feel like we covered so much info and people might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed and I know your resource guide to check out the whole all 10 tips. They can get them all there like where to start. But can you give us like the top three? Like if someone is super overwhelmed and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what I do.” Like what are three easy things to start today?
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Libby: Yeah, absolutely. So three easy inexpensive things that you could do today are gonna be to swap out your light bulbs. So if you’ve got those swirly CFL light bulbs, get rid of those and install its counterpart either in the incandescent or, you know, LEDs. If you can’t find the incandescent, then again, I’m gonna get back to you on the halogens. The second step is to get an outlet timer from a hardware store. You can order it online, again, I’ll tell you where to go to get that. And you’re gonna plug your wireless into that. And then after that, start brushing your teeth on tinfoil and it as weird as it sounds, you don’t even have to like…I’ll talk with clients and they’re like, “My spouse doesn’t get it.” I’m like, “He doesn’t have to. It still works even if he doesn’t get it. Just have him do it. He loves you, he’ll do it. You know, he won’t care.” So you pull it out, you stand on it, you brush your teeth and you’re done. And so those are really things that people could implement the next couple of days just to help get started. And then after that, then you’re just gonna build onto it, you know, and keeping your phone in airplane mode, just really simple inexpensive things.
Katie: That’s awesome. And I have such creative readers and listeners that I bet if…since you’ve said that, I’m like, guys, this is a call. If you do something with the tinfoil, I know you’re also creative, Instagram it and tag me and tag Libby because I can just see readers making like a, you know, Japanese stone massage mat out of like balls of tinfoil or braiding it or something cute. So if you guys do that, share it, because that’s a cool idea. But, again, like the links will be in the show notes as well, of course, and it’s also revivedliving.com/emf. I’ll have a recap and links and all the kind of bullets that we talked about in the show notes as well. I have a feeling there’s gonna be follow-up questions so maybe we’ll have to do a round two one day but thank you so much, Libby, for being here. This was awesome.
Libby: Yeah. Thanks so much Katie. Just such an honor to be on your podcast and thanks for being willing to spread this message. It’s a complicated one but thanks for being willing to spread that message to everybody.
Katie: Of course. Thank you and thanks to all of you for listening and I will see you next time on the Healthy Moms Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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