Robert Becker was an MD, twice nominated for the nobel prize, and he said “The greatest polluting element in the earth’s environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment.”
it is vital to the health of humanity and our planet that we each have a basic understanding of this concept. Here is an overview of electropollution, plus practical steps to protect your family.
What is electropollution?
Here’s my definition of electropollution in a nutshell:
Electropollution introduces biologically toxic electrical frequencies into our environment. These frequencies, called electromagnetic frequencies or EMFs, clouds up the electrical communication in the human body. This has been shown to cause serious health issues ranging from diabetes to cancer.
Everything is electrical
Perhaps you remember from biology class that atoms are always moving, although this movement is imperceptible to the human eye. The clothes you are wearing, the table at which you are sitting, the food you are eating… these all vibrate in unique patterns depending on their molecular structure. The human body is no different. Every cell, organ, and tissue in your body vibrates in a unique pattern. This vibration is energy, and that energy is electrical.
All information transmitted within your body is electrical. Sensory information, muscle movement, your heartbeat… these are all made possible by electrical waves and magnetic fields. Ancient cultures harnessed the electrical flow of the body to bring healing and modern science now proves that these practices, including acupuncture, are effective in balancing the body.
When the frequencies of the body are disrupted or when the electrical communication between cells are interrupted due to electropollution, we open the door to a host of health problems.
Sources of electropollution
As a culture, it seems like we are eternally plugged in. Our extremely close proximity to a wide range of EMF-producing factors equals a devastating burden on the electrical balance of our bodies.
- Cell phones – Cell phones and cell tower emit radio frequency fields (RFs), a type of high frequency EMF.
- WiFi – Wireless internet emits powerful radio frequency fields (RFs).
- Cordless phones – Do you have cordless phones in your home or office? The base for these phones emits a high concentration of high frequency EMFs.
- Dirty Electricity in homes, schools and offices – This U.S. electrical power grid is polluted by “invisible dirt”, high and mid-frequency signals that is equated with static on a radio station.
- Fluorescent Lights – Fluorescent lights emit much higher levels of EMFs than their incandescent or LED counterparts.
- Wireless baby monitors – emits RFs which are shown to be damaging especially to infants
- Smart Meters – emits high frequency radiation. If you have a Smart Meter, you can ask your power company to have it transmit only once per day (preferably when you are out of the house) to drastically reduce this radiation.
- Appliances and electronics – all appliances and electronics emit EMFs, some more than others. For example, refrigerators and electric stoves create a powerful EMF field. Obviously, we can’t reposition our fridge or ditch our stove. Use the remediation steps below and read more in Zapped.
The health consequences of electropollution
Cancer
The RF exposure from cell phones creates a risk for cancer. RFs have been shown to damage cellular DNA, which may lead to cancerous mutations. Even low-level RF exposure causes the body to create heat stress proteins, a temporarily protective measure that is harmful if this stress response is chronic. The incidence of partoid gland tumors and brain cancer is strongly correlated the use of cell phones and the World Health Organization classifies cell phone radiation as a class B carcinogen (Dr. Mercola shares helpful overview of the growing research here).
As recorded in the book Zapped, Dr. Ronald Herberman, M.D., a director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said
“Although the evidence is controversial, I am convinced that there are sufficient data to warrant issuing an advisory to share some precautionary advice on cell phone use.” He counseled his staff to limit the amount of time they spend on their cell phones and to avoid making calls in public places “where you can passively expose others to your phone’s electromagnetic fields.”
Behavioral disorders
Dirty electricity makes its way into buildings, where it can disrupt moods, alter behavior, impair sleep, induce confusion, and more. A high percentage of the population may be sensitive to dirty electricity. Schools that install dirty electricity filters (discussed below) report a drastic improvement in the focus and performance of teachers and students, as reported in Zapped.
Type 3 Diabetes
According to a study published in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine by Dr. Magda Havas, a PhD at Trent University, electromagnetic fields creates blood sugar spikes and an increased heart rate in electrosensitive individuals (read more here).
Electrosensitivity
Electrosensitivity, also called electromagnetic hypersensitivity or electrical sensitivity, is a simple issue made complex because it is difficult to diagnose due to a lack of recognition of the syndrome. Individuals may develop this sensitivity after prolonged exposure to normal or abnormal amounts of electropollution. It causes a wide range of symptoms ranging from ear ringing, headaches, insomnia, mood disorders, and more. Once sensitive, individuals must take extreme steps to prevent exposure to WiFi, cell phones, and other EMFs.
How to reduce your electropollution exposure
Keep your phone away from your body. Don’t put your cell phone to your ear to speak, because every inch counts when the radioactive waves are near your brain. Always speak on speaker phone or with earbuds. When you aren’t speaking on it, keep it as far away from your body as possible. If you must wear your phone in your pocket, use a radiation shield.
Turn your cell off (or put it on airplane mode) at night. Keep your phone out of the bedroom while you sleep, and preferably turn it on airplane mode. A cell phone should NEVER be used as an alarm clock, because our brain is most susceptible to the damaging RF radiation when you are sleeping. Instead, use a battery-powered alarm clock, which emits almost no EMFs.
Turn off the WiFi at night. When we sleep, the body switches to full parasympathetic mode. This is the “housekeeping” nervous system mode and it means our defenses are completely down. As a result, we are most vulnerable to the DNA-altering effects of EMFs so it is important to turn your WiFi router off while you sleep. Even if you live in an apartment, he WiFi waves from your apartment neighbors will still reach you, but every yard of distance from the router counts. If you can, the best option includes switching to wired internet through the whole house. My family isn’t making the switch to wired internet, but we religiously turn off our router before bed.
Install Stertzerizer Filters. Stertzerizers are unique filters that reduces the amplitude of dirty electricity to the safe range of 4 -100 kHz. It requires about 20 filters (at $35 each) to neutralize the dirty electricity, a cost of about $700. These filters address the dirty electricity in a home about 98% of the time (source). But that still leaves the concern of non-dirty electricity EMFs, which these other steps can help remedy. I currently have two filters on order, so I have not yet tried them.
Protect and educate your kids and teens. After my research on the biological effects of cell phone radiation on the developing brains of children, I strongly believe that children should very rarely use a cell phone. It is up to the parents to do their own research and educate their kids and teens about the heath risks of phones. Phone calls should be made on speaker phone or with earbuds, so the phone isn’t held to the head. Texting is also preferable to calling.
Switch out your wireless home phones for the old-fashioned corded phones, like this one. Wireless phones bathe your home in a concentration of harmful radio frequency fields, a high frequency EMF. We were able to find a corded phone from at Radio Shack.
Favor natural negative ion producers. Negative ions help purify the air, boost mood, and combat electropollution. I reach for 100% pure beeswax candles and salt lamps, two powerful negative ion producers, and use these particularly in my bedroom (also great for your office).
Connect with the earth’s electrical charge. When we walk barefoot on sand, grass or dirt, we allow the healing electrical charge of the earth flow through our bodies. This practice – called “earthing” – sounds esoteric, but it’s actually science. Skin-to-earth contact allows the negative ions from the ground flow into our body, and this is shown to reduce stress hormones and inflammation (source). Since we can’t always sink our feet into the grass, I use an earthing mat. It plugs in and then releases the same charge as the earth. I sleep on my earthing mat (it must have skin-to-mat contact), but you can also purchase earthing sheets.
Use a DefenderPad under your laptop. If you place your laptop on your lap, it directs radiation right into your vital parts. I worry about this especially for couples who are trying to conceive… men, you don’t want to fry your swimmers and women, you don’t want to zap your uterus! I have a DefenderPad and keep it in the family room for the whole family to share. It is light weight and research shows that it is effective in blocking the radiation from laptops.
Where do I go from here?
I remember feeling utterly overwhelmed when I first learned about electropollution. This makes my head spin! I whined. I don’t even want to bother with all of these tedious and expensive steps! I knew, however, that I needed to trudge ahead and learn how to reduce the EMF burden on my body. Since I struggle with a chronic disease, I’m always trying to fill in that missing piece in my wellness puzzle.
I’m taking it one step at a time, and suggest you do the same. Follow the above steps for reducing your EMF exposure as it fits into you budget. When you’ve completed those steps, I recommend reading Zapped: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn’t Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Other Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution, which outlines more steps to take to stay safe from EMFs in your home and office.
I was so inspired after reading this article… Thanks for posting it, Lauren. I ordered a cheap, cool, retro alarm clock and got rid of our old one. Started charging my phone in the other room overnight, pulled out the old rotary-dial phone we had in the garage, and threw the cordless phones away. I feel better already!
Oh, but then I splurged and got some beeswax candles, and one of those salt lamps. Stone age, here we come, haha!
Hi you shouldn’t charge your phone at night it destroys your battery
Hey… I have missed you and reading your blog. I happened to see my name in this article ;). I still love my house plug and I got the phone protector for Christmas and love that too. Miss you!
Miss you too!! I think I am going to get the house plug for when I move into a dorm room next fall so I’m glad that you still love it. Let’s talk soon 🙂
Lauren, do you have any information on whether there are any paints for walls that can help block EMFs from, say, neighbor’s WiFi or nearby cell towers, and that is also low-VOC or no-VOC?
I haven’t used any anti-EMF paints, so I can’t answer your question right now, but this is something that I want to look into in the future.
Most of the things addressed herein are harmless non-ionizing radiation.
You need to make your way thru Jack Kruses website! Overwhelming but he is so right on! So many other precautions to take, this stuff is so scary!!! Non native EMF is changing our biology and causing so much of our disease in this world!
Being that I am an indigo and a spiritually inclined person I really appreciate this post but please look into orgonite as it greatly neutralizes the effects of EM pollution. Try placing a pyramid in your home and by cell phone towers, refineries, etc. You can even make your own and customize it with crystals to suit your needs!
I’ve heard good things about orgonite but haven’t looked into it, I’m definitely intrigued!
Hi Danny. I have quite a few pieces of orgonite around the house and sometimes wear it, but do you know of any controlled studies done to measure the shielding effects? I’d really like to feel that I could use it at work where I’m in a sea of wifi for 8 hours a day (see my post below) and that it would really make a difference!
Great that you mention pyramids. We are starting to build one for my friend here in costa rica on my project . The ground floor will be 2500 sq.ft. with organic garden and tilapia. Second floor living area and who knows what on the 3rd. floor. We are very exited about it and plan to do more. We are smack in the middle of a blue zone which makes it more exiting. He plans to have it all for under $40k including land. I want to build mine next.
Mel Stevenson
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I agree not to sleep with phone on at night, to put it on airplane mode. Then you state not to use phone as alarm clock due to radiation. This is incorrect, with my i phone anyways. I place my phone on airplane mode every night AND use it as an alarm clock.
Yeah, the best solution is turning your phone off. The phone is still connecting to cell towers when it is on airplane mode, but it is not connecting to internet. The lowest EMF alarm clock is a battery-operated one 🙂
Hey everyone. While I agree that certain types of radiation (which is what “EMFs” are) CAN be dangerous… saying that things like radio waves and microwaves (literally “waves” of energy that travel in a straight line out from a force until they exhaust their energy for motion and collapse) create invisible “fields” around them that can harm you, would mean that VISIBLE light would do all those things too! Radio waves, micowaves, and infrared radiation is at a lower frequency than the visible light spectrum. The reason you can’t see through trees, buildings and other people, is because any thing at the visible light level and below can not pass through nor interact with those things. Even constant exposure to those types of radiation, at the low levels we encounter every day in cellphones, electrical appliances and air distance radio waves can’t effect us. Even the giant power lines create an electrical field weaker than the one in our body. But if they WERE stronger, it still wouldn’t matter. To change the shell level of an electron, a very specific energy needs to be given to it. That energy needed also increased dramatically with each shell jump. There’s a reason nuclear fission takes a huge amount of heat and pressure to begin! That heat (another form of radiation) is what causes the electron to jump free of every shell and become radiation in the sense of nuclear gradation, causing the atom to collapse and create heat energy.
So to finish, there is literally NO physical way that the vibrations or frequencies in your body could be effected by these low level electromagnetic powers. Our bodies are too finely tuned, too perfectly constructed to be effected by anything but VERY specific frequencies (as in the ones that are generated by our bodies themselves). While anything higher on the spectrum CAN cause difficulties, and are what we classically think of as radiation, the lower EMP’s have absolutely no influence on our body. That’s like putting the wrong key in a lock. The lock simply won’t turn.
“There is no convincing evidence in the published literature to support the contention that exposure to extremely low-frequency electric and magnetic fields generated by sources such as household appliances, video display terminals, and local power lines are demonstrable health hazards.”-Davis JG and others. Health Effects of Low-Frequency Electric and Magnetic Fields. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1992 (original study done)
It is well known that fluctuating magnetic fields give rise to an electric field by the Faraday effect in physics. Yale physics professor Robert Adair demonstrated that these electric fields are very small in comparison with the naturally occurring electric fields arising from thermal fluctuations.-Adair RK. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physics Review A43:1039-1048, 1991.
(Previous study done due to power line concerns)
For more information, simply go to a credible source of scholarly essays and search for information yourself! Biased information kills.
Are you including Smart Meters in your statements? Cause I can tell you since one was installed on my neighbor’s house my ears ring ALL the time. First I got pulses of sound for a couple days then constant high-pitched ringing 24/7. Last night my husband told me he woke up with ringing ears. He got up to go to the bathroom and his ears stopped ringing. When he returned to bed and lay close to me his ears started ringing again. Sure would like to know what causes that! Your thoughts??
However, being the energy healer that I am, I WILL say that ANYTHING (including the Q-Link, which doesn’t really have anything in it ‘scientific’ in the traditional sense) that is made in the spirit of/considered to be healing could very well effect other types of vibrations (energies) in the body that science cannot measure. Microwaves cannot make someone depressed, but an as-yet unmeasured energy could (such as those apparent in Reiki, energy healing, or the Pagan idea of magic). Electrical waves in the physical world’s sense cannot act on the energy plane healers work with. I cannot change your electrical frequency. If I could, I would win the nobel prize because that means I’d have invented a whole slew of other impossible things, in a sense.
But there are other frequencies in the body that I believe exist (that are partially responsible for the ‘placebo effect’, I think), that COULD very well be effected by something LIKE the Qlink, which is created for healing and help. ‘Traditional’ science and ‘alternative’ sciences (called pseudoscience by some because they ‘mimic’ traditional science, but cannot draw the same concrete conclusions in the same cisumstances) both agree that there are many vibrations, electric charges, and frequencies in the body. While some of them scientifically CANNOT cross, they can still be effected by other similar things.
So this is NOT a negative review of the Qlink, or anything else. This is simply saying that “Electrical Pollution” could literally not happen, but that by strengthening those other immeasurable vibrations in your body, you CAN support your health. The woman that originally wrote about electrical pollution was angry (rightfully so) because the state forced her to allow them to install giant power lines in and around her yard. That anger, and the subsequent dwelling on it by writing about electrical pollution, could have very well caused all of the symptoms she named. Stress hormones caused by anger can kill and hurt you MUCH faster than even low dose NUCLEAR radiation could.
This website is a wonderful source of information and inspiration, given by someone who truly cares for the people that follow her advice. While we may not agree on somethings, thank you Lauren for empoweredsustenance:)
Well, it looks like we disagree on this topic and from my research, I believe your claim that “there is literally NO physical way that the vibrations or frequencies in your body could be effected by these low level electromagnetic powers” is not true. We do have the studies to show that the waves from cell phones are harmful, and I discuss this in the post. I’m glad you enjoy my site, however, and I appreciate hearing your perspective as an energy healer.
Ooops! Too late, Miranda. The cat is already out of the bag, take a look:
1) Drs. Pall and Dart presenting to the Oregon State House of Representatives Committee on Healthcare
Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-nYxZHak6I
2) University of California Berkeley, Center for Family and Community Health, “Tips To Avoid Wireless Radiation”
Here is the link: http://www.saferemr.com
3) The BabySafe Project, “Bringing physicians, scientists and educators together to help inform women about the risk that wireless radiation poses to pregnancy and to urge expectant mothers to limit their exposures.”
Here is the link: http://www.babysafeproject.org/
The scientific evidence of harm is now documented in thousands of studies and has been known for decades. It is now irrefutable.
A couple of questions for you! 🙂
I have the QLink phone button on my iPhone – do you feel that it is as effective for protection from the phone as wearing a pendant? My main reason for using the button is my 8 month old son. I use my phone to read and research a lot while nursing him, and wanted to protect him from the EMF’s. It is also more cost effective than a pendant.
Also, my husband wears a pendant as he seems to really be affected by EMF’s. Does me sleeping next to him while he’s wearing it protect me from wi-fi signals? (That may be a silly question!) I am unsure if the QLink protects only the wearer, or if it puts out a “force field” (for lack of a better word). My chiro seemed to think it could cover a whole room with protection.
Thank you for taking the time to compile this info- what a helpful, “empowering” read! 😀