The Case for Tossing the Toxins

By Marilee Nelson

There is a question often asked that is usually meant to be rhetorical. “Is there anything new under the sun”? And, of course, you are expected to answer “NO” to yourself. But, unfortunately, today, we face an unprecedented situation. An emergency healthcare crisis so severe and of such a magnitude that it has already started to and will eventually completely revamp consumer behavior and the way we practice medicine.

Each of the great healing traditions in history arose in its own culture to help resolve the health issues of that day. If you were to combine all the best elements of each of these traditions, they would not be able to accommodate what we face today. We need to reform our point of view in our medical practices to meet the healthcare challenges of the 21st century. We must rise to the occasion and develop a system that works for our day. So, what exactly are these challenges?

First, we must acknowledge that today’s healthcare crisis is a cry for change. What we are doing is not working! Chronic diseases and disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, men, women, and children. To put this in perspective, that is more than one-half of the U.S. population. One in two American children has some diagnosed chronic health condition. Autism spectrum disorders, asthma, allergies, learning disabilities, childhood diabetes, depression, and obesity are increasing at alarming rates. Cancer is the #2 killer of children after accidents. We are losing our children! The American Cancer Society states that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women are projected to get cancer in their lifetime. We are not winning the war on cancer! Neurodegenerative diseases in adults, such as ALS, MS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, are skyrocketing. This list does not include all the people who are not feeling well or have not been diagnosed.

The game has changed, and we have to adjust. Two additional will change how we diagnose and treat illness must be acknowledged.

First, our world is thoroughly contaminated with chemicals that impact animals and people. For example, polar bears have PCBs, heavy metals, pesticides, and other contaminants stored in their body fat. Sadly, all people have a toxic body burden. A study by the Environmental Working Group submitted to Congress in March 2010 states that American newborn babies are born with up to 232 toxic chemicals already in their system, including endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, neurotoxic agents, etc. Second, we are now surrounded by a sea of electromagnetic frequencies never before experienced in the history of human civilization. With our constantly emerging wireless technologies, scientists estimate that your daily exposure to Electromagnetic Field Radiation is over 100 million times higher than in your Grandparents’ time.

Scientists are now linking this unprecedented rise in degenerative disease to exposure to harmful chemicals in our food, water, air, and products.

Why is this happening?

Since World War II, the volume and number of manufactured chemicals have multiplied exponentially. We currently have American industry that have never been tested for safety. The with radio waves, has exploded phones, devices, Wi-Fi, and now 5G permeate the globe. The American public has been bombarded by the allure and glamour of the marketplace at every turn. Products containing these chemicals and smart technologies make life easier and have revolutionized our lives. But, allowing the production and release of these toxic substances understanding their full biological ominous situation. birthright and potential, distort who we are, steal from our lives, and hijack our ability to heal.

The inconvenient truth is that we are facing the unintended consequences of the wonders and convenience of our modern life.

Our challenge – how do we solve this problem in a focused, systematic way?

Years ago, two potentially lifethreatening events that had no good medical answer awakened me to revolutionary discoveries in that my thirty years of experience with the chronically ill. These revelations were so simple, based on common sense, and literally right under my nose. Eating food with harmful chemicals and living in a home with harmful products undermines your health.

In my twenties, I had exploratory surgery that revealed endometriosis so extensive that I would never have children, needed to go on dialysis, and would need a kidney transplant. I couldn’t accept that and was determined the transplant and recovered from many lifelong chronic health issues, including asthma, hormone disruption, extreme allergies, chronic ear infections, fevers of unknown origin, and skin problems just by eating a nutrient-rich, realfood diet. I had been a sugarholic, junk food junkie, and removing harmful chemicals from my diet transformed my life. Years later, my son was catastrophically chemically injured at age ten and had what the doctor said was irreparable brain and immune system damage. I was to give him twenty-three shots daily and medications to control him. He had been a calm, obedient, coordinated boy. He was brilliant, but now he couldn’t even spell a three-letter word or do simple math. He was deemed a “bubble boy” as he could no longer break down and detoxify the common chemicals we are all exposed to in our everyday life. I was determined to recover him even though the brain’s neuroplasticity then. The doctor had never seen anyone recover from such an extensive chemical injury.

I had changed my career, became a medicinal cook, and already used food as medicine, but this was not enough for my son. It turned out that the answer was literally right under our noses, not what he was eating, but what he was breathing. The doctor told us we needed to create a safe room for him with nothing in it but an organic bed. We decided we wanted him to be able to be in the entire house. As I struggled to create a safe haven for him, I did not realize that creating a healthy home wasn’t a ISN’T! I can say from experience this nebulous ambiguity doesn’t cut it! The doctor said to wash our everything from our home that could be an immune stressor, and only use non-toxic products, yet he kept reacting.

In the meantime, we found he got relief in the clean country air. We were sleeping outside on cots (he reacted to tents) because my son felt agitated in the house and had why – what had we not done or left out? We had virtually stripped our home and had almost no products. One night, around midnight, as I looked up at the stars, I had a nagging thought – “Get up and get that box in the closet out of the house.” I was tired and tried to talk myself out of it. Finally, after mentally arguing against getting up, I removed the box containing some of my favorite perfumes and skin care products I had put away in a closet. I thought I would bring them out again when my son recovered.

I didn’t tell my husband or son about the removal of the box because they would have thought I was crazy. The next day when my son came into the house while I what did you do?” My ears perked up, and I said, “What do you mean?”

I do not feel agitated like I want to leave!” I acted dumb and said, “Oh really, well, just stay until you feel like you want to go outside.” I immediately started thinking, this is insane, this is just coincidental, BUT he continued to stay and even slept in the house!

The next day, I was perplexed and questioning myself. I didn’t dare say what seemed to have happened. It didn’t make sense that the box in the closet could impact him. But then, a few days later, I had a major aha moment when I walked past the grocery store aisle containing the cleaning products. I almost skidded to a halt and went – “That’s it! Those cleaning products are not only closed, but they are also sealed, yet I can smell the VOCs escaping from the bottles. I realized that was what was happening with the products in my box – their VOCs were escaping, and Douglas was reacting to exposures to chemicals at minute levels that spread throughout the house from that box!” Once that box was removed, we had no products with harmful chemicals in the house that caused him to react and hijack created a baseline – a home that he didn’t react to, could sleep in, and start to recover. I had learned how important it was to remove every harmful product from our home but didn’t realize that even more, critical learning was about to come.

After we cleared the house and he could sleep, Douglas gave warnings every time he was exposed to even tiny amounts of chemicals. We had created an environment where he was stabilized. Still, his emotional, and physical well-being were vulnerable to deterioration whenever we inadvertently brought something into the house that had harmful chemicals. It was clear-cut this baseline, it was all a blur - we did not understand that exposures to products or chemicals caused his continual reactions. We learned that we had to take a shower, wash our hair, and change clothes if we went anywhere, like Walmart, because he would react to the chemicals picked up on our clothes and hair at the store. We also had to air out (outgas) the bags and any products we bought to remove chemicals picked up from the air in the store. It also became clear that he was reacting even to products with a non-toxic label. I realized I had my own little canary in the mine* that alerted me to what was not safe. The problem was he was reacting to everything I brought into the house. to help him fully recover. Since the body naturally heals on its own, I reasoned he needed to recover from a chemical injury. Maybe it was like being cut. If you take a knife every day and reopen the cut, it doesn’t heal, but if you stop irritating it, the injury will naturally close up and heal. So likewise, we had to give his body a break when we were not irritating the thought, “That is why it was not only essential to have a safe haven – where the body is not bombarded by chemical exposures and can rest and repair - but to really repair and recover, we had to keep him in a state of no exposure as much as possible.

I was convinced that maybe he would heal if he didn’t keep having exposure to chemicals he couldn’t to try! We had to be vigilant. We could not say – “Oh, I am too tired to shower, wash my hair, change clothes, etc. We had to go the extra mile, try our best to prevent exposures, and be as consistent as possible. (This was going against the doctor’s prognosis that it was impossible for him to recover.)

I had to do a deep dive and become a materials, EMF, and environmental specialist to learn about immune stressors and ingredients in products and the home. Bringing in some products caused him to go berserk and hyperactive, cry uncontrollably, become angry, or be depressed. Other products would make him sleepy, unable to focus, have blinding headaches, or be super sensitive to light and sound. I learned preservatives in many nontoxic products were neurotoxins that impacted the brain. Any product with fragrance, even essential oils, would cause extreme and emotions. Later studies by Dr. Anne Steinemann on “green, experience with Douglas and clients over the years that it is vital to go completely fragrance-free to create a healing environment. Further research into surfactants, chelators, etc., revealed a list of chemicals to avoid. He continued to be on a mental, physical, and emotional roller coaster until this was all experiment. I observed a severely disabled child drop physical, emotional, and mental symptoms and improve without exposure. If he had an unintended encounter, it might cause any number of symptoms – irritability, spontaneous crying, rage, depression, splitting headaches, wheezing, insomnia, extreme ADHD, hyperactivity, hypoactivity, lack of concentration, and distractibility. Then, when the source was removed, he would gradually return to normal. Slowly but surely, my loving, calm, intelligent, coordinated child began to emerge as we learned more and more about what was safe and what was not. He not only recovered but super recovered, which was nothing short of incredible. He went on to graduate from the U.S. Naval get into both from an academic and physical standpoint. He then went over 200 intelligence missions over Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, and the Far East. He now has a wife and three children.

During his recovery, I started to have the deep conviction the harmful chemicals we put in, on, and around our bodies that had to be removed for my son to heal completely undermine everyone’s health. My husband and I realized that we were continually gaining more and more energy, stamina, and well-being as we learned more and more. I began to think about all the children with health issues on medications to control their behavior and focus their minds. I potential-hazards-hidden-greenproducts)

I felt like I was in the middle began to realize that all Americans are unintentionally eating food with harmful chemicals and living in homes with a low-level chemical soup that they must use energy to detoxify continually. This would later be proven and borne out with my thirty years of work with clients, studies.

Word of my son’s recovery spread, and I began working with people with chemical injuries, children with health issues, and other chronic illnesses. Most people had seen numerous doctors and felt they had done everything possible but didn’t have the desired results. Without fail, upon questioning, I discovered that even if they said they were eating healthy and using safe products, they didn’t know how to evaluate the safety of a product. And even though they were buying what they thought were organic and non-toxic products right and left, they still had maybe even hundreds of toxic products throughout the house under sinks, in drawers, closets, and cabinets, creating that low-level chemical soup.

Therefore, I developed a categoryby-category approach to remove foods and products with harmful chemicals that were stress-free, easy to accomplish, didn’t take much time, and only had to be executed once. People started improving, sometimes immediately, and removal and safe replacement proved essential to their healing. I found that completely removing products with harmful ingredients from your home is just as important as eliminating harmful chemicals from the diet. Combine the two, and the results can be even more spectacular! We now call that process Toss the Toxins. I soon saw that the elephant in hinders recovery for everyone - the nagging chemical load from food eaten and emitting from products that create a chemical soup throughout the house. Creating a safe haven enables a person to go out into the world where we all get exposed but have a place to return each day where the body can recharge, rejuvenate and heal. a healthy college student, and about a week after starting her sophomore year at the University of Texas, all of a sudden, she was riddled with mysterious symptoms – neck pain, excruciating back pain, burning in her face and numbness that ran down her calves and arms. She started losing motor control and, for two years, sought help nationwide. She was told she might have everything from lupus to Multiple Sclerosis. No doctor or therapy helped her. She had to numb the pain with increasing medications, but it worsened. Allison and her best friend Kelly ended up coming to stay with me, and in just two months after getting back to basics – eating only real food, using safe products, and staying in a home that contained no harmful chemicals her life was transformed. She was out of pain and ready to go. And THIS IS IMPORTANT because Kelly, who considered herself healthy but symptoms she just accepted as normal, like menstrual cramps, dry, itchy eyes, headaches, muscle aches and pains, tight neck, and shoulders, all disappeared! She was shocked they all vanished when she was in a toxin-free environment. Because of the radical change in Allison’s condition and the unexpected changes that Kelly experienced, they decided to shift the course of their lives, join me and dedicate themselves to helping people transform their lives. That is how our mission-driven company Branch Basics was born.

The transformation that happened to many of my clients and us through the years demonstrates how important it is to toss the toxins. This concept is now being substantiated by cutting-edge the exponential rise in degenerative disease to exposure to harmful chemicals in our food, home water, and products we put on and around our bodies. Unfortunately, applied in the medical community.

We can’t wait for this information accepted by our healthcare system. America is facing an emergency healthcare crisis now!

The longer it takes the medical establishment to grasp this vital point, the direr our situation will become. It will take more and modalities to recover health. Relapses will become inevitable as the ever-present toxic background is not fully understood and addressed. The non-clinical laboratory of human experience with myself, my son, and clients has provided solid repeatable results that reveal a mechanism of disease that is insidious, which has largely not been recognized but is now supported by the science of epigenetics. This is the human body’s widely variable, environmentally induced deviant responses to the current unprecedented exposure to chemicals and how the complete removal of these exposures can result in the improvement, reversal, and sometimes full resolution of research, in study after study, is validating these contentions and documenting the principle of the power of epigenetics - that exposures to even tiny amounts of even one chemical can impact behavior, mood, and physical well-being, alter gene expression, and even the ability to turn cancer be eye-opening and encourage questioning. But how long will it take the medical world to make a full application?

Do we have to wait for pharmaceutical-driven research and results from costly doubleblind experiments that drive the direction of medicine? No, we should apply the Precautionary Principle! We already have vital information gleaned from the recovery of children with disabilities, the chronically ill, and the chemically injured - and we can act now on this information!

Branch Basics is releasing our Toss the Toxins to Create a Healthy Home and Diet course. It is the same process I have used with my clients for many years. However, it is presented in a focused, systematic way that untangles the confusion and greenwashing in the industry. We empower and teach people how to be their own product experts and take them step by step. As a result, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

This simple one-time process will change the course of your life.

This is a message of opportunity! Creating a healthy home and diet is foundational to health and essential in this time of unprecedented chemical exposure. This removal immediately dramatically improves a home’s air quality. It is recommended for anyone with health issues or who wants to optimize and protect their health. It eliminates products in the home that hijack the body’s healing potential. The process is liberating, system, and reduces the body burden of all family members.

We do not know how much these harmful chemicals impact us until they are removed!!! So we want to inspire a healthy home and diet revolution to turn around the

* The canaries released into the coal mines served as a warning to protect the coal miners. The canaries would die when exposed to poisonous gases – this warned the miners to stop and turn around because the area was unsafe. We need to listen to our canaries.

When given vital information, we stand at a crossroads – we can turn and head back down that road that holds future health consequences for many generations, or we can choose a “new” path that recognizes and acts on this information now. We believe that the poem by Robert Frost, “The Road Less Taken,” illustrates how tossing toxins has transformed our lives.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

Note: When the public, the food industry, the product industry, and the medical profession understand the impact that these chemicals and EMFs have on our health, then that will be the beginning of a new era in medicine. Until then, that many are experiencing will only grow worse as we continually unintentionally increase our body’s toxic load.

Case study

Noelle Haddad came to us with various health issues, including constant stomach aches, frequent sinus infections, painful periods, mood issues, sleeping issues, fatigue, brain fog, allergies, and digestive issues. was to help Noelle toss the toxins tossthetoxins). She had never heard of toxic body burdens and the importance of removing chemicals from home.

First, she ran tests to see where her body was at.

Her biomarkers indicated fatigue, anxiety. Although her microbiome issues.

The biggest change we made was removing products from Noelle’s home. We went through her home using the method in our course, Toss the Toxins, which included toxic cleaning products, pesticides, laundry products, cleaning products, fragrances (candles, perfumes, scented trash bags), personal care products, pantry, and fridge products, things with BPA, sunscreen. We also focused on food packaging (removing her plastic water bottles and plastic food storage), and Noelle started cramps. In addition, her digestion was greatly improved; she had no more bloating, she and her husband were sleeping much better, they felt their air was cleaner, and their allergies were vastly improved. It changed their health dramatically.

We removed 2 huge boxes from Noelle’s home. (Please refer to what pantry-and-refrigerator.)

She got tested again 3 months later.

Her glyphosate levels were 6x lower (Roundup)

Her DPP, an endocrine disruptor,

Her chemical levels went down.

Her perchlorate (disrupting her thyroid) was no longer detectable.

Slowly over time, Noelle introduced safer products into her home to replace the others. However, this whole process was more about removal than anything!

Get the TOXINS out of your home. It will transform your life. Take action now.

The following is one of our success stories.

“My name is Emily. I stumbled across Branch Basics 2 years ago after going me with eczema and an ear infection. It was on the inside of my ears. I had ear infection after ear infection. It wasn’t until I looked at the Branch Basics Kit, the blog at Branch Basics, and I tossed out all the toxins, got rid of everything, learned to check the ingredients, and changed my diet, that I started feeling better. It’s been two years, and I have not had an infection. Tossing the toxins was the best thing I ever did.” ~ Emily

Her endocrine disrupters were lessened, and she no longer had

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