Why People Misunderstand You & The Fashion Health Crisis - SYSK Choice

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Built for business by American Express. Today on Something You Should Know, just how healthy is the air you breathe on an airplane? Then, miscommunication.
It's amazing how often we don't understand and misinterpret each other in speech, emails, texts, even song lyrics. Forty years ago, the group Toto put out the song Africa.
I would have sworn if asked that the line from the song was, I guess it rains down in Africa. The actual line of the song is, I bless the rains down in Africa.
Also, how pickles can help control your appetite.

And why do we have all these toxic chemicals in our clothes that claim to make them anti-odor, anti-stain, anti-wrinkle?

They're mostly just marketing gimmicks.

You don't need to have anti-odor technology or anti-stain technology on your clothing.

It doesn't even really work that well.

It's just a way for them to mark up the price, in most cases.

All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.
I think it's a pretty common experience when people fly. They sometimes get sick after they fly.
And the theory I think people have very often is that it's the air in the airplane. It's recycled air and there must be a lot of germs and that's why you get sick when you fly.
But actually, that's probably not true. It turns out that airplanes are not hermetically sealed environments.
During a flight, fresh air from outside the plane is being continuously circulated into the cabin through a system of vents in the engine. But the air isn't all fresh.
Yes, some of it is recycled. Apparently up to 50% of the air is recycled.
But that doesn't mean it's unclean. The majority of airlines equip their planes with hospital-grade filters specifically for the purpose of keeping the cabin air clean.
If you do get sick after flying, the more likely culprit

is the surfaces you touch.

The tray table, the doorknob to the bathroom,

the seat back, that kind of thing.

Those things have a lot of germs on them

and if you touch them with your hand

and then touch your face,

you could get sick.

But it's probably not the air.

And that is something you should know.

It was all just a misunderstanding. How often have you heard that? People misunderstand each other all the time.
We read meaning into a text message or an email that was never intended. Or we say things that people mishear or misinterpret.
Sometimes someone's tone or inflection sends a wrong signal. There are so many ways miscommunication can and does happen, and it often creates a lot of unnecessary trouble.
So why is it that human communication often goes so wrong? And how can we get better at making sure it doesn't? Here to discuss this is Roger Cruz. He's an associate dean at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis and a professor in the university's psychology department.
He's author of a book called Failure to Communicate, Why We Misunderstand What We Hear, Read, and See. Hi, Roger.
Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey there.
It's great to be here. I have a sense that a lot of miscommunication happens because people don't think about it, that they think they're communicating.
Why wouldn't somebody from my perspective understand what I'm talking about or writing about or saying or whatever? Yeah, that's exactly right. There's something called the curse of knowledge.
Yeah, yeah. So talk about that.
We talk about psychology and it really is the case that it's very hard to put yourself in somebody else's cognitive shoes to see the world the way they do, especially if you have a great difference in knowledge. I always think about this when I give people directions on campus.
So I work on a college campus and occasionally students will come up to me and ask me for directions and I'm terrible at it. I've been on this campus for decades, but that's my problem.
I know it so well. I will give people the best directions I can, but I'm almost positive.
I'm not very hopeful because once again, I'm having a hard time putting myself into the shoes of somebody who doesn't know anything about the campus or anything about what the buildings are called or things like that. So this is a kind of a mundane example, but I think it's very common where we have a hard time putting ourselves in the cognitive shoes of somebody else.
Well, right. Yeah.
I mean, I don't worry about miscommunication because I think I'm doing it just fine. So there's no problem until there's a problem when you didn't understand.
And then it's your problem because you didn't understand. Well, my favorite quotes about miscommunication is that the greatest problem with miscommunication or communication in general is our illusion that it has occurred.
So we really believe that most of the time we get through just fine. But in fact, research shows that we actually check each other quite frequently.
But every 90 seconds, typically in a conversation, somebody will have to ask for repetition or clarification. So we do it so naturally, we don't really think about it as being a failure of communication.
But it's really part of the process. We have to indicate the things that we don't know or don't understand.
So every 90 seconds, we need someone to clarify what the hell they're talking about because we're not understanding what they're saying. Yeah, it's a fascinating study.
They actually looked across many different languages because they thought it might differ from language to language, but research showed that on average, about every minute and a half,

there's kind of a, you put the brakes in the conversation because something has gone wrong, and you kind of have to get back on track again. So it's a very common experience as we go through our days.
There's also this kind of balancing act, it seems, that, I mean, I also know people who over-explain. And I'm like, yeah, I heard you the first time.
So So when do you know how do you how do you find the the sweet spot the the line between over explaining over communicating and being so vague that nobody knows what you're talking about yeah it's really hard the advice is to really think about the perspective of the other person which we don't we aren't really very good at that at. There's a great study I want to tell you about in which they had people in the laboratory tap out the rhythms of well-known songs, like maybe a Christmas Carol or a National Anthem.
They recorded the tapping of the rhythm and then they asked the subjects, do you think somebody else would be able to figure out this song based upon your tapping? And about half the subjects who were college students said yes. So then they played these tapping rhythms for other people, and they got it right about 2.5 percent of the time.
So by a factor of 20, people were horrible at being able to figure out the rhythm based on the rhythm, what the song was, because of course, the people who were tapping could hear the song in their heads and think yeah i'm doing a great job here i'm tapping out the rhythm but obviously the listener didn't have that that that uh same information and therefore we're really almost a chance of being able to even guess what the song was about so there's really nice empirical support for the idea that it's really hard for us to take the other person's point of view into account enough to give information that might be useful or appropriate in every situation. I imagine, well, you tell me that the miscommunication that happens is probably more verbally than written or not? Oh, it's definitely both.
Clearly the ideal form of communication, because language evolved with us in this way, is face-to-face verbal communication. That's what language evolved to do.
And now, of course, we are using it in all kinds of different ways, written forms, and especially online language and using things like emoji. People are really, really bad at figuring out what these kinds of things mean because we don't yet have a common language in terms of what emoji refer to or how to communicate sarcasm online.
So the online world has been a very interesting place to observe the degree to which communication breaks down. You know, all these online flame wars that you see are really the result of, to a large degree, miscommunication or misunderstanding of the other person's point of view.
Because we read into what we think the meaning or the emotion in it is. I mean, I've read texts and there's 15 ways you could interpret this.
They're happy, they're mad, and you have no way of knowing. You filter it through your own head, which is irrelevant.
Yeah, it really is the case that taking your own point of view is not going to help you at all. You might be able to figure it out, but there's no guarantee that you're going to be in the same emotional or cognitive ballpark with somebody else in terms of what they actually meant.
How often is the miscommunication, I'm not even sure if this is a good question, but I'm kind of curious, it's the words we use that are wrong or being miscommunicated or misunderstood rather than the overall meaning, that you picked the wrong word and that's what threw this person off base? Well, that's part of it. I mean, the example I sometimes use is that miscommunication is like a car accident.
You kind of assume it's the other person's fault. And sometimes it is, but sometimes it's your own.
There's even a third party involved here, which is the language itself. The language that we use is actually quite ambiguous, and some terms can mean more than one thing.
We have words in English like sanction. Sanction can mean to approve of something, but it also means to impose a penalty.
So if you hear on the news that the UN sanctioned the group without more context, you have no idea that's a good thing or a bad thing. Biimonthly, is that twice a month or every two months? We have lots of words like this in which the meaning is not really established and therefore it can be more than one thing and really is another vector by which people will miscommunicate by trying to rely upon what is quite imperfect in terms of a communication system, the words that we have in the language.
Is bimonthly every two months or twice a month? If you ask the dictionary, the dictionary will say, whatever you think. The dictionary has literally thrown up its hands and said, we can't resolve this.
People use it both ways, so just do what you want. And therefore, people tend to avoid terms like that.
Another example is peruse. Peruse can mean to read carefully or to skim over quickly.
And that's a very useless word if you think about it because you have no idea, based on that term, how the person read the material. So there really are some issues that arise in the language itself that people really aren't aware of that also plays a role in this process.
How much of a problem is it in communication where it's really, I didn't hear you, like, I didn't understand the words you said, because you didn't speak clearly as opposed to if I'd heard what you said, I probably would have gotten it.

I just didn't hear it.

Yeah.

Mishearing is a really fascinating area and it's been talked about a lot in terms of things like misheard song lyrics.

So here's an example.

40 years ago, the group Toto put out the song Africa. I was in college back 40 years ago, and it was a popular song.
I've heard it many times. I would have sworn, if asked, that the line from the song was, I guess it rains down in Africa.
The actual line of the song is, I bless the rains down in Africa. That line is repeated over a dozen times in the song.
I'm sure I've heard the song dozens of times during my lifetime, but only very recently did somebody point out to me that I misheard it and misremembered it for all these years because, once again, it's kind of an unusual thing to say. I bless the rains.
That seems like an odd kind of statement. And so what a lot of people do is they normalize what they hear, and I guess it rains, makes more sense, at least to me anyway, than I bless the rains.
Lots of examples like that. Oliver Sacks talks about how as he was becoming more deaf as he got older, he would actually write down all the mishearings that he encountered.
And so one day, it told him that she was going to choir practice and she was actually going to the chiropractor. Other times he was heard, chiropractor is firecracker.
Well, I've actually, I'm really interested in that because of, I guess, because of the business I'm in and I'm kind of a stickler for pronouncing words so you can understand them and all that. But I've actually paid attention in conversations to how often people say, huh, what? It's amazing if you pay attention to that, how many times people have to repeat themselves.
Yeah, the idea of huh is actually a topic of study by linguists. It's one of the ideas that it's universal across languages.
Every language has some way of, in a very short phrase, being able to communicate the idea that I didn't hear or I didn't understand. So clearly it's one of these things that is true across all the world's languages.
We're discussing how we all miscommunicate with each other. And my guest is Roger Cruz, author of the book Failure to Communicate, Why We Misunderstand What We Hear, Read, and See.
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So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you.'s such a minefield of miscommunication. I mean, there's nothing more ripe for miscommunication than sarcasm, I would think.
Because you simply don't have a really good set of cues to indicate it with. So, you know, if we're talking face-to-face, and I kind of like cock my head at you or wink or kind of nod knowingly, you're going to get the idea that I probably am speaking non-literally in some way, that I mean the opposite perhaps of what I'm saying.
But all that's really stripped away when we're looking at written language. And people have devised fill-ins online.
For example, there's a slash S that people use on Reddit to indicate that their entire comment was meant sarcastically. Because once again, if you untell people, they're not going to necessarily understand that you're speaking sarcastically online.
And therefore, you might expect there to be emoji that also indicate the idea of sarcasm. The problem with emoji is that there's no agreed upon meaning for any of them.
People appropriate them and sometimes use them for certain purposes like that. Maybe a winking eye emoji to indicate that kind of visual cue you would get face to face.
But once again, it's like the wild west to a large degree. It really is the case that trying to be sarcastic or ironic or even as funny online is gonna be somebody who's gonna misunderstand you almost invariably.
There's going to be people who are not going to get what you're trying to accomplish and might be very angry with you as a result. Do you sense that more miscommunication happens because people are too brief and don't give enough information or because they overload you with information and your message gets lost in the words? Well, certainly online, like in the world of texting, I think that too little is typically what I see.
I get lots of text messages from people who are trying to communicate, you know, briefly. They're trying to, you know, thumb out a quick message to me.
But in a lot of cases, it's really left fairly ambiguous. And you kind of wish that they had said more to be more clear about what they were feeling, what they wanted you to do.
And so I think that's probably the side that people err on most is probably saying too little. It just seems that if people were more conscious of, let's make sure we're all on the same page here, let's make sure we all understand.
But nobody does that, it seems. Well, I do, but I mean, it doesn't seem that people really focus on this problem, that there could be a miscommunication here.
So let's make sure there isn't. And even the reverse.
Sometimes people are being cryptic or unclear for a reason. There was this phenomenon in the last year or so online called Algo Speak.
I don't know if you're familiar with that idea, but there's content moderation on sites like TikTok, and they block out using certain terms that they don't want to have on their site, references to death or to suicide or to LGBTQ topics in some cases. And so people started using these circumventions to avoid content moderation and being blocked.
Unalive is now a way that people on TikTok refer to death. Opposite of love instead of the word hate.
Going camping instead of getting an abortion. So there's this whole language that's evolved to really kind of circumvent this content moderation.
But as a result, for people who are uninitiated in this kind of language, it's really hard to understand exactly what people are talking about. So that's an example of miscommunication that's actually being created by our communication system because of this content moderation and trying to get around that.

One of the other ways it seems that I see miscommunication happen is often when people are talking and I guess they're just not that interesting.

It's hard to pay attention.

It's like, God, get to the point.

And your mind starts to wander and then you missed it. What did he say? What? Yeah, it really is the case that some people have a very hard time getting to the point.
And then when they finally arrive, you kind of have checked out to a degree that makes it hard to really kind of circle back and figure out what the person was, in fact, trying to ultimately communicate. So, yeah, we all know people who really, you know, overshare or undershare or simply are very cryptic in terms of trying to ask for assistance.
They're very indirect. And so, yeah, there's a lot of minefields out there in terms of having the communication proceed smoothly.
Well, primarily in writing, but also I think in verbal, there's that whole problem of burying the lead that people don't ask for what they want. Like I'm texting you or writing you because I need you to do this or that rather than five paragraphs later.
Oh, and by the way, can you do this? And then it's, well, no, I missed that part. Well, in cultures like ours, where politeness is actually fairly important, it really is the case that asking somebody to do something for them is kind of a big thing.
And therefore, people are very indirect. You know, you don't say, pass me the salt.
You say, can you pass me the salt? Do you know what time it is? It really is the case that we're quite indirect using English. And that's quite different from other languages where people are much more direct.

And so that's another example of a cultural issue that can cloud communication.

What are some of the other things, little quirks in this that we haven't talked about yet that

you write about that we haven't talked about yet?

Well, I'm just really amazed at how very disparate phenomena fall under this category. For example, road rage.
Why do people get upset when they're driving? Other people do things that are perhaps unsafe or they don't drive very well. And part of the problem, it seems to me, is that we have an impoverished way of

communicating to other drivers what our intentions are. So there's no way to be contrite on the road.
We have a horn, we have our lights, but you really can't use either of those to signal contrition. And so it really is the case that you can very easily escalate to road rage when other drivers are being unsafe and also they aren't really sorry for having done it.

Some people propose having some sort of I'm sorry light that you could use on the back of your car, dislike your brake lights. But then, of course, people might use it sarcastically and therefore that wouldn't actually help.
but yeah this idea of impished channels for communication, I think can really explain lots of situations where people simply don't understand because they can't get enough information from the other person to understand, for example, that they're sorry for having cut them off in traffic. Well, the whole road rage thing, and I think this applies to other kinds of communication.
If I make a mistake, if I cut in front of somebody by accident, I'm a good person who made a mistake. If somebody else does it, they're an idiot.
And it's all in your perception that now you're dealing with an idiot, well, that communication is probably not going to go very well because you've already determined that this guy's an idiot. Yeah, I'm sure that everybody thinks of themselves as being a decent driver, and yet we've all probably done things that would make other people think that we're probably extremely unsafe on the road.
And that's another example of just how hard it is to leave our own frame of reference and to take on the point of view of somebody else. Because obviously, their person doesn't know you.
All they see is that you've been an idiot on the road, and therefore they're going to assume the worst about you, even though you assume the best about yourself. Yeah, right.
I mean, if the Pope cut you off, would you scream and yell at him for being an idiot? Probably not. But that's because you knew he was the Pope.
But the guy that cut you off may be a great guy who just made a mistake. And boy, that just fuels the fire for bad communication, it seems.
It really does, I think, yeah. Well, I keep going back to what you said at the beginning of this conversation, that in an average conversation, somebody asks every minute and a half, every 90 seconds, somebody asks for clarification or repeat what you said or something, that there's so much miscommunication, and we're so not conscious of the possibility of that happening.
This was, I think, very eye-opening. I've been speaking with Roger Cruz.
He's an associate dean at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis, and he is author of the book, Failure to Communicate, Why We Misunderstand What We Hear, Read, and See. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Appreciate it, Roger. Thank you for being here.
Oh, you're welcome. I enjoyed it.
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Visit GMC.com to learn more. I'm sure you've probably heard something about how clothes are made and that there are chemicals in the clothes we wear.

You probably have even heard the advice that you should wash new clothes

before you wear them because of the chemicals in them.

But, at least for me anyway, this has all seemed very vague.

You know, how bad can it be? How many

chemicals could be in our clothes? I mean, what would they be in there to do? Well, since we all wear clothes, perhaps we should bring this into focus and get a better understanding of the issue and what, if anything, we should do about it. Here to explain is Alden Wicker.
She is an award-winning journalist and author of the book

To Die For, How Toxic

Fashion Is Making Us Sick. Hi, Alden.
Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike.
Thank you for having me. So, as I said, this problem seems a bit vague to me, so can you bring it into focus? Yeah, Mike, the problem is that we have a lot of chemicals on our clothing, more than

almost anybody realizes. And many of those chemicals are toxic in several different ways.
They can be connected to cancer, but also autoimmune disease, infertility, thyroid disease, skin problems, chemical sensitivities, all sorts of things that are becoming more and more of a problem in Americans and especially women. So this is an incredibly undercover topic.
So give me a specific example or two of toxins on clothes and how it affects people to put a face on this. Sure.
So one really good example, and this is how I came to this topic, is four different major airlines have introduced new airline attendant uniforms over the past decade. And those new uniforms came with all sorts of finishes and brightly colored dyes on them.
They came with flame retardants because now these new uniforms are polyester instead of wool, which is naturally flame retardant. So that's one type of finish.
They're also anti-mold, they're anti-wrinkle. So they probably have formaldehyde on them to give them that anti-wrinkle, anti-wrinkling effect.
They're also very, very stain resistant and water resistant. So that is achieved with what you might know as Teflon, the sort of stuff that's on your old nonstick pans.
That is the class of chemicals called P fast, which you might have heard have been in the news a lot lately because they've contaminated a lot of drinking water. They're, you know, they're extremely, extremely toxic.
They've been connected to several types of cancer, weight gain, thyroid disease, all these different things. And they also were on these uniforms.
And the practical effect that these uniforms had on a significant portion of the attendance, up to 22% at one airline, is that they started having all sorts of reactions. So first it started with rashes and then the rashes got worse to the point where they were bleeding.
Some of the attendants at a couple different airlines lost all of their hair. They had extreme fatigue so that they could barely work, brain fog, blurry vision, breathing problems, severe breathing problems so that they had to be taken off the plane and sent to the hospital.
So there was a lot of mystery around how this could be happening because it wasn't common knowledge that uniforms could do this to the attendants, but there ended up being a Harvard study at Alaska Airlines, which is the first airline that this happened at. And it showed that the symptoms of a lot of these different illnesses that I've talked about went up after the introduction of uniforms.
And so it did connect it to those uniforms. It sounds like those uniforms, though, were designed and manufactured to do a lot of things, be flame retardant and have bright colors and probably do things that my normal everyday clothes in my closet are not designed to do.
So that's a great example, but talk about like what kind of chemicals are in my pants and shirts that are hanging in my closet. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the things that I've named are usually present on,

can be present on a lot of different consumer clothing too.

Usually not all at once like they were with the uniforms.

But, you know, you can go out and buy anti-wrinkle clothing

and anti-wrinkle sheets right now.

You can buy anti-odor clothing from various sportswear companies.

You can buy clothing with restricted dyes. Technically, these types of azo dyes are known to be toxic and they shouldn't be put on clothing, but nobody's really checking, so they could end up on your clothing.
You can definitely get waterproof or water-resistant and stain- stain resistant clothing, especially if you're going hiking, that sort of thing. You can get quick dry bathing suits, which also have the same water resistant finishes.
So all of these things that were present on those uniforms are present on consumer clothing. You're right that, you know, the clothing that you're probably wearing every day doesn't have quite so many performance qualities but the thing is is that the only reason we know that those symptoms were caused by those uniforms was because all of the attendants would get the uniforms at the same time they would start falling ill they would start talking to each other especially since they were wearing the same uniform every day that they were working.
And even then it took them many months to figure out to make that connection. And if you or I had a toxic piece of clothing, we would know why I kind of feel tired today or, oh, you know, my eczema is flaring up or I have a rash because you don't, you're not in a situation, you just have such more of a chaotic, you're not in this natural experiment, you know, closed experiment that these attendants have.
You're, you're living your life normally. And so, uh, my message is that if you have chronic health issues and you've done all these other things to clean out your cleaning products and your, cabinet, get rid of toxic beauty products or buying organic food, fashion is something that you should absolutely be looking at as well.
So when clothes or sheets or whatever are wrinkle-free, the only way to make those things wrinkle-free or wrinkle-resistant is with chemicals? Yeah, absolutely. If it's a cotton thing or if it's a linen thing, you know, those things wrinkle a lot.
So if you're buying something

that's cotton and it says it's wrinkle-free, it's because it has an added chemical finish on it.

Absolutely. And usually that's based either on formaldehyde or it's based on a chemical that

is made using formaldehyde. And as it breaks down and off gases, that formaldehyde can come off into your air, into your home.
And so what's the solution here? I mean, we got to wear clothes. I'm not going to make my own clothes.
So what do we do? As a consumer, there's a lot you can do just in your own home and for your own family and your own health. It's not a hard and fast rule, but you can definitely look for more natural fibers as opposed to synthetic fibers because synthetic fibers are just more prone to have things like azovenzine disperse dyes, which are known skin sensitizers.
They, you know, they're less likely to have other finishes on them. You can look for clothing brands that, you know, have a reputation that they care about and might have a label such as Okotex or Blue Sign denoting that they've invested in having safe chemistry on their clothing.
So that's another thing that you can do. And I would advise everybody to stay away from ultra fast fashion brands.

You know, those brands that you see advertised on Facebook and Instagram or those sort of gibberish names you see on Amazon that you've never heard of. Those are incredibly dangerous to shop if you care about this.
Why? Well, because it takes a lot of money and fastidiousness on the parts of on the part of a brand to to make sure that their clothing isn't made with toxic chemicals. As you may know, almost all of our clothing these days is made abroad in countries that have a lot looser environmental and safety standards.
And so these clothing could be contaminated with a lot of different things that are not allowed in the United States and then shipped over here. And so in order to make sure that doesn't happen, a brand has to have a really close, good relationship with its factory.
It needs to have its stuff tested every once in a while to make sure it's not contaminated with things. It has to pay a little bit more to make sure that those, those factories are using certified chemicals from reputable suppliers.
That all takes a little bit of money. It takes oversight and those ultra fast fashion brands, they are doing things as quickly and cheaply as possible.
So it's a big risk. I guess I don't understand what ultra fast fashion brands are.
Like how would you know what one from not one? Yeah. I mean, one big ultra fast fashion brand is Shein.
Talk to anybody under the age of 30 and they will have heard of Shein and they might have bought something from Shein. It has exploded.
It's moving more fashion at this point than even Amazon in the United States. I mean, it is a big deal.
It's a company based out of China, and they make things ultra, ultra cheap, ultra, ultra fast. And so, and a lot of these things, they ship straight from China.
So they're not going through a retailer. They're not being checked at the border.
They're just going straight from china so they're not going through a retailer they're not being checked

at the border they're just going straight from china to your front doorstep and a couple years

ago there was an investigation by the canadian broadcasting corp where they tested a bunch of children's products from xian and they found high levels of phthalates and lead in several of the children's clothing from Shein. So that's a good example of what super fast and super cheap will get you.
I would think that if there are chemicals coming off of my clothes that could make me sick, that if I just washed them a few times, that would solve the problem because it isn't an infinite amount of chemicals in my clothes. If it's coming off, at some point it will stop coming off because the chemicals will go away.
You are partly correct. You absolutely should wash all your clothing when you get it because there are some things that can be washed off.
I'm thinking about, you know, fungicides and fumigants that might have contaminated the clothing as it was shipped over. So definitely don't know where your clothes have been.
You should definitely wash them. But there are other chemicals that are that they hang on for a really long time.
They're called forever chemicals because they never break down. They just hang out and they accumulate in our bodies and in the bodies of wildlife and

in the environment. So for a long time, we were told, oh, it doesn't matter for you.
It's more of an environmental thing. You know, they found PFAS in the bodies of animals in the Arctic.
They found it, you know, on Mount Everest base camp because of all the people hiking and their waterproof gear. But the problem is, is that we now know, according to research, that those chemicals can sort of come off your clothing and into your house dust.
And once it's in your house dust, it's not going away and you can ingest it, you can breathe it in, you can become, you're exposed to this stuff just because you've brought it into your house, much less worn it. So these are things that, you know, you should definitely wash your clothing, but it's not going to handle everything.
If I buy clothes that are labeled 100% cotton, wool, you know, natural fibers, does that mean they're chemical free? Because if it's 100% cotton, it can't be anything else but cotton. You would think that that's true.
But unlike other consumer products, like cleaning products or beauty products, fashion does not come with a complete list of chemicals or ingredients. So it only has to tell you what fiber is in there.
But there's been research out of Germany showing that the dyes and finishes can be up to 8% of the weight of a garment. I mean, that's a huge amount.
And we just, we're not, fashion brands are not required to disclose all the chemicals that are put on even deliberately onto the garment. You know, it might say like Gore-Tex, which is a branded, you know, waterproof garment, but that's only a hint at what's really happening in there.
And I think that's one huge failing of our system right now that even if you find out that you're allergic to disperse dyes, which are the dyes used on polyester, which is a really common allergy, or lead or nickel or any of these other chemicals, there's no way for you to find out before you buy a product that they're on there. And I've talked to women who have severe allergies or chemical sensitivities, and they just make sure to shop at fashion brands with really great return policies.
So they try it on, they see if they get a rash in the next few days and then if they do they return it are there

retailers or are there clothing brands that you can count on that this stuff isn't a problem or

it's just so unregulated that that it would be hard to do that there are some brands that have voluntarily taken this up and done some really good work.

Levi's and H&M and Patagonia were three of the first, and Eileen Fisher were some of the first fashion brands to come up with a restricted substance list and say, you can't use these chemicals on our clothing, and then to start testing for them. It doesn't mean they're perfect, right?

It's not a guarantee, but they are better than some other brands. on our clothing and then to start testing for them.
It doesn't mean they're perfect, right?

It's not a guarantee, but they are better than some other brands that haven't done anything in this area. So if I got rid of all the clothes in my closet that have toxic chemicals and bought what you're talking about, what would it look like? There is a lot of beautiful fashion that's completely non-toxic.

If you get silk or cotton or merino wool items, those are great.

They're beautiful.

You can get a lot of different colors without using toxic dyes.

I talk to a lot of moms who have kids who have really sensitive skin and eczema.

This is something to look at.

And you can find athletic clothing in cotton. You can find even performance clothing in merino wool instead of polyester.
And all of those performance qualities, they're mostly just marketing gimmicks. So you don't need to have anti-odor technology on your clothing or anti-stain technology on your clothing.
It doesn't even really work that well. It's just a way for them

to mark up the price in most cases. Well, if this is true for clothing, I would imagine it would be true for everything else like furniture and carpeting and wall coverings and anything else made out of fabric.
Yeah, this has been a problem that's been widely covered for things like couches with lame retardants. You know, we know that a lot of new furniture can off-gas formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds.
Paint can be really toxic. You know, this is a problem for a lot of things in our home.
Yeah, well, I guess it's a trade-off, right? I mean, you don't want your couch catching fire and burning your house down in the name of chemical-free couch. But then again, you don't want chemicals in your couch.
So how do you decide? Actually, I would disagree with that. I mean, a lot of these flame retardancy mandates and requirements were created during a time when people would accidentally fall asleep with cigarettes in their mouths, you know.
And people aren't really doing that as much anymore. And as well, there's been tests comparing flame retardant couches to non-flame retardant couches and doesn't really increase your safety that much at all.
And then on top of that, you know, I mentioned in the case of the flight attendants that the reason why they were adding flame retardancy was because they had switched from wool, which is naturally flame retardant, to polyester. And so if you could just, if you're just okay with having a wool couch, I actually have a wool couch and it's beautiful and I've had it for 10 years and it looks great and it feels way more comfortable, in my opinion, than polyester, well, it's also the safer choice because not only is it free of toxic chemicals, it's also naturally flame retardant.
One of the concerns I think people have heard and are aware of when it comes to chemicals in clothing is dry cleaning. We've all heard the advice of air it out and God knows what's in there.
But that's not made in the clothes. That's an after the fact thing.
Yeah. I mean, this is also a really important thing.
One advocate told me like, look, do not have your clothes dry cleaned or wash your clothes with, you know, scented laundry detergent because you're going to be doing all the good that you did in buying eco-friendly, non-toxic clothing, because there is some extremely toxic, or one particular extremely toxic chemical that's used known as PERC to dry clean clothing. Some of the most toxic waste sites that need to be remediated are former sites of dry cleaning places, and also scented laundry detergent.
There's been some research showing that when you do your laundry and you use laundry sheets, dryer sheets, scented laundry detergent, all those different things, the fumes coming out of your dryer are extremely toxic. And a lot of people, when they go to the dermatologist and they say, hey, I've got these rashes.
A lot of times the dermatologist will say, okay, so what detergent are you using? So yeah, don't go to the dry cleaner if you can help it. So we've talked about a lot of things.
Give me a few bullet points to remember. Okay.
Go for natural fibers. Avoid anything that starts with the word poly, right? Avoid promises, anti-odor, anti-wrinkle, quick dry, all of those different fancy things that you're like, wow, I can't believe a fabric would do that.
It's not the fabric, it's the chemicals. Well, when we started this conversation 20 minutes ago, I made the statement that this problem was all very vague to me.
I didn't really understand much about it other than I've heard that there are chemicals in clothes. It's not really vague to me anymore.
This has been very eye-opening. I've been speaking with Alden Wicker.
She is an award-winning journalist and author of the book To Die For, How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick. And if you'd like to read that book, you can find a link to it at Amazon in the show notes.
Thank you, Alden. Yeah, thank you so much, Mike.
Say, if you're trying to cut back on sweets, you might want to stock up on pickles. Pickles can do wonders at curbing cravings, especially if you've got a soft spot for sweet things.
Pickles are crunchy, sour, pungent, and spicy all at once, and they overwhelm the senses. In an experiment, hungry participants were practically drooling over some delicious desserts that they would soon be eating.
But first, they had to eat a pickle. In most cases, the urge to eat the sweets was gone in as little as 10 seconds.
And those who did insist on dessert anyway say they ate less of it than they would have if they hadn't eaten the pickle. And that is something you should know.
Podcast listeners, I'm told, and I think the research bears this out, podcast listeners like to get recommendations for podcasts because there are just so many to search through. So do your friends a favor, and we'd appreciate it too, if you would recommend something you should know to someone you know.
I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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