Toxin Free Living What Most Raw Vegans Miss ft. Wendy @healthy_by_wendy

Toxin Free Living: What Most Raw Vegans Miss with Wendy

The household toxins, products, and hidden exposures that even the most health-conscious people overlook

Most people who get into raw food think deeply about what goes in their mouth and not nearly enough about what goes on their skin, into the air in their home, or into the hands of their children. Wendy from @healthy_by_wendy has spent years researching exactly this and her contribution to the Ultimate Raw Vegan Bundle this year, Toxin-Free Childhood, is one of the most practical and eye-opening books in the entire collection.

We went live together near the end of the bundle window and covered sunscreen, house dust, mold, diapers, dehydrator sheets, homemade cleaning products, and the one thing she says she sees raw vegans do all the time that makes her want to shake her head. Good conversation throughout, with her toddler providing excellent background entertainment.

What Toxin Free Living Actually Means

Wendy was clear from the start. Toxin free living is not about eating raw food and calling it done. Food is a massive piece, but it is not everything. The products you put on your skin, the air quality in your home, the materials your baby sleeps on, the things your toddler chews on, all of it contributes to your total toxic load. And the body can only handle so much before it starts signaling that something is wrong.

Her own journey into this started because of severe inflammation on her hands that nothing could fix. No cream, no pill, no remedy made a dent. It was only when she started tracing the actual sources of her toxic exposure, including the products she thought were safe, that things began to shift.

The Sunscreen Problem

Wendy held up a sunscreen she had kept from when her eldest was young, labelled organic and for children, and walked through why it was making her skin worse rather than better. The water-resistant formulas work by sealing the skin with essentially a plastic layer. For someone already experiencing inflammation, hot red bumps, and lymphatic activity trying to push things out through the skin, covering that with a waterproof seal and then sitting in the sun is the opposite of helpful. You get baked from the inside.

The alternative, nano particle-based sunscreens, absorbs into the bloodstream rapidly and can sit on hormone and neurotransmitter receptors, triggering reactions that have no business being triggered. Neither option is ideal. Her recommendation if you do need sunscreen is a non-water-resistant zinc oxide formula with that white cast visible on the skin. Zinc ions are something the body can actually use. Aluminum, which shows up in many formulas, is not.

For what it is worth, she has not burned since going raw and has not used sunscreen in over ten years. Her kids do not seem to burn either. Raw food changes how the skin responds to sun in ways that deserve more attention than they get.

The Biggest Win in Any Home: Open a Window

When I asked Wendy what the single biggest offender for toxic load inside the home is, the answer was not a product. It was house dust, specifically ultra-fine particulate matter. Everything in your home off-gasses constantly. Furniture, mattresses, synthetic fabrics, flooring, your own skin. The concentration of these particles inside a closed home is often far higher than outdoors even in a city.

The simplest and most impactful thing anyone can do is ventilate. Open windows. Let air move through. This costs nothing and the effect on air quality is immediate and significant. Before worrying about which laundry detergent to switch to, if you still have plug-in wall fragrances or fabric softeners with synthetic scent, those come first. They are constant, they are absorbed through the lungs, and they mess with the hormonal system in ways that may not show up obviously for decades.

Mold, Condensation, and What to Do

We got into mold because I had a story worth telling. A friend of mine had his wife and child getting sick every month for months, red eyes, respiratory issues, constant colds. I stayed with them and within two days my nose was running constantly. We discovered his entire bedroom closet wall was lined with black mold. They moved out that day and both his wife and child stopped getting sick immediately.

Wendy made the important point that you do not need to be able to see or smell mold for it to be affecting you. Spores accumulate. The damage is often slow and cumulative. If you find it, open windows immediately, glove up, mask up, get it out, and find the cause. Mold is almost always a condensation or ventilation problem rather than a leak. Finding a construction specialist to assess the heat distribution in the space is often necessary for a real fix.

Diapers, Mattresses, and What Babies Are Actually Sleeping In

Wendy did not hold back here. Disposable diapers are made primarily from plastic derived from petroleum. The super-absorbent material inside pulls moisture so aggressively that it dehydrates the skin on contact, which is what actually causes most diaper rash. The rash is created by the diaper. Calling it diaper rash is accurate in a way nobody intends.

Her recommendation is cotton diapers, ideally older ones with thicker weave if you can find them, with a polyurethane laminate cover. She noted that new cotton diapers are often bleached white and woven more loosely than older versions, making them less effective and more irritating. Secondhand from a trusted source is often genuinely better.

On mattresses, modern foam off-gasses volatile organic compounds continuously. The new smell from a fresh mattress, car seat, or pram is those VOCs becoming airborne. Her children both slept on natural latex coconut mattresses. Letting anything new air out outdoors before use makes a meaningful difference.

Dehydrator Sheets and the Teflex Question

Wendy flagged Teflex sheets as something she sees raw vegans using regularly without much thought. The PTFE-based coating is a forever chemical that does not break down in the body. She noted that deterioration begins with normal use, not just visible damage. Every time you flex the sheet, move a spatula across it, or peel food off it, particles release.

Silicone is the better option for dehydrating. It is not perfect but it is meaningfully better than PTFE-based sheets. If you are using your dehydrator occasionally like I do, the exposure is low. If it is a daily tool, it is worth switching. Excalibur has updated their sheets over the years and their current Paraflex sheets are a different material from the original Teflex, so it is worth checking what you actually have rather than assuming.

The Easiest Homemade Product to Start With

Wendy’s go-to for introducing people to DIY cleaning is the orange peel cleaner. Take clean orange peel, any citrus works and changes the scent, put it in a jar with cleaning vinegar, let the limonene extract into the vinegar, squeeze and strain out the peel, and you have a genuinely effective natural cleaner. For floors and general surfaces, cheap cleaning vinegar works perfectly. For hair or skin applications, use organic citrus to avoid wax residue.

Her book has around twenty-five simple recipes built on the same principle. One ingredient, one sentence of explanation, one sentence of method, done. Laundry detergent, shampoo, rosemary scalp rinse, skin balms. All of it straightforward enough to try once for fun and practical enough to keep doing.

About Wendy and the Bundle

Wendy runs the Dutch Fruit Festival, which I am very much looking forward to attending in person. It runs June 22nd to 26th in the Netherlands and if you want to come, head to dutchfruitfestival.nl to sign up and get 10% off with my code rawadvantage100.

With the same code you can get $100 off any of the other festivals I am attending this year, details at therawadvantage.com/upcoming-events.

Toxin-Free Childhood is included in the Ultimate Raw Vegan Bundle alongside The Model Diet, the 80/10/10 Diet Masterclass with Dr. Douglas Graham, and 30+ other brand new resources. Over $1,500 worth of content for just $50 until midnight Pacific time May 11th.