EMF Radiation with Oram Miller: Rational Wellness Podcast 075
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Oram Miller talks about how to reduce EMF radiation in your home and office with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
2:17 Oram explains that the building biology profession that he is a part of is geared towards helping people who have sensitivity to toxins in their home. This includes indoor air quality, mold, chemical outgassing, lead, asbestos, radon, natural gas, and carbon monoxide. There is also the outgassing from paints and finishes, flooring, carpeting, glues, and adhesives in building materials, as well as trapping of moisture in walls. Oram is the co-author of a book called Breathing Walls that talks about the best building methods, available on breathingwalls.com Oram is also concerned about the EMFs (electromagnetic fields), that includes four specific types: 1. magnetic fields from house wiring that we recognize in the building biology profession; 2. electric fields from house wiring; 3. dirty electricity, and 4. all the radio frequencies from cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, smart meters, etc.
5:57 If you go into a bedroom with a Gauss meter that only measures magnetic fields, you will miss the magnetic fields coming from wiring errors due incorrect connections of the neutral wires between circuits.The black, hot wire naturally has a magnetic field that goes clockwise around it that is supposed to be canceled by the magnetic field going counterclockwise around the neutral coming aback the other way when they they’re together and equal. But if you have a wiring error, which occurs in up to 50% of homes in Southern California is that they connect these neutrals together under one lug, which is a violation of the code. But the code inspectors don’t look for this because they don’t care about magnetic fields–they just want to make sure that the lights work and there won’t be a fire.
12:24 Another source of magnetic radiation is current that runs along metal water pipes under your home. These pipes are actually meant to conduct electricity as a path for lightning to get into the earth and we don’t want to disrupt that but we can shield our homes by having an electrician put a 3 inch piece of plastic near the beginning where the water comes into your home which will stop this magnetic field.
18:35 You could have a broken neutral coming from your power line and power lines are difficult to shield against. It’s also very difficult to shield against strong radio frequencies from cell towers if they’re close by. We can shield against those but it’s very expensive. And we are going to 5G, which will result in more exposure from more cell towers closer to our homes. 1G (the first generation) was voice, 2G added texting, 3G added cellular data, 4G (fourth generation) added data at higher speed and greater volume. But we are running our of bandwidth in the frequencies that are currently in use below 6 gigahertz (6000 megahertz), in the 800, 900, 1800 megahertz range and the industry would prefer to stay in this range because it penetrates walls easily, etc. But some of the range of frequencies is being held by the military for future use and they are running out of bandwidth in this range. But this new 5G bandwith, including the super 6 gigahertz range from 20 gigahertz and up, doesn’t go through walls easily, so they have to aggregate and focus the beam to drill through our walls easily, which require cell phone towers every 2 to 10 houses. Fortunately, these 20 gigahertz and higher frequencies can be blocked by YShield paint and you can also put foil in your walls. There are also transparent films for windows and there’s metal mesh window screens.
30:20 While it would be safer not to use cell phones, given that we are going to use them, it is safer to text than to make a call. It is better to use a set of headphones and a microphone with an air tube in the last six inches that you can get from LessEMF.com. At home, it is better to use your landline to make and receive calls with a hard-wired phone. When you use your cell phone it is better to speak through the speaker rather than hold it up to your ear. There are shields you can put on the outside of your cellphone that can reduce the levels somewhat.
When listening to podcasts in the car, like this one, the best thing to do is to have the podcast already downloaded onto your phone by plugging it into your computer and downloading it from Itunes. Then plug your phone into your car stereo through a wire and make sure to place your phone in airplane mode.
37:17 Oram explained that when he inspects someone’s home he finds lots of sources of electric fields that can affect their health, esp. in the bedroom. People who have electrical hyper sensitivity should have a kill switch to shut off all the electricity going into their bedroom at night. Even if you plug an ethernet cable into your laptop computer, your will still be receiving radio frequencies unless you turn your wifi off. They may also have a Nest thermostat sending out a signal every five seconds or so. They may have a smart meter on the outside of their home. They may have smart speaker like the Echo sending out signals constantly. Your Bluetooth, your router, your cordless telelphone, when you hang up the phone and place it into the base unit, it’s still emitting radio frequencies 24/7, like an ashtray full of burning cigarettes. In fact, France has recently voted to ban wi-fi in day care centers and nurseries for children and they’ve banned cell phones in schools up the middle level. So you want to avoid such sources of electric fields, esp. in your bedroom, and at least turn them off at night. Do what you can to reduce and limit them.
Oram Miller is a Certified Building Biology Environmental Consultant and Electromagnetic Radiation Specialist based in Los Angeles. Oram provides on-site & phone healthy home & office EMF evaluations for clients throughout Southern California who have electro-magnetic sensitivities, as well as those who want a healthier home or office. He also consults on the healthy design and construction of new and remodeled homes. His website has lots of great information createhealthyhomes.com and his phone is 310.720.7686.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.
Podcast Transcripts
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness Podcast, bringing you the cutting-edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast on iTunes and YouTube, and sign up for my free eBook on my website by going to drweitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcast listeners. Thank you so much for joining me again today. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, please go to iTunes and give us a rating and review. That will ensure that more people find out about the Rational Wellness Podcast.
Our topic for today is EMF radiation, which is a very important topic. A lot of people are not really clued in to it, these are forces in your home, at work, in your car that can potentially negatively impact your health. Today with us today we have Oram Miller, Building Biologist, expert on EMF radiation. Oram, thank you so much for joining me today.
Oram: You’re welcome and thanks for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in this field.
Oram: I’ve always been interested in biology. I was interested in particularly the environmental aspects of this work and how they impact people’s health. So, I took training in the building biology profession. It is headquartered in New Mexico, although originally it was in Florida, because this knowledge was brought to America by an architect from Germany, Helmut Ziehe, who married an American woman 30 years ago and started the International Institute for Building Biology and Ecology in Clearwater, Florida.
He and his wife ran this and trained many people, and those individuals, 30 years ago, are now the faculty today and they trained me and now I teach with them as well. So, our profession is geared towards helping people who have sensitivity to toxins in their home, and that expands the gamut from indoor air quality, mold, chemical outgassing, lead, asbestos, radon, natural gas, carbon monoxide, and then the out gassing from paints and finishes, flooring, carpeting, glues, adhesives that you’d have in building materials, as well as trapping of moisture in walls.
I wrote a book called Breathing Walls that talks about building methods. Actually one of the writers for the principal author George Swanson who’s in Texas, a building biologist and builder, who is the principal person with that knowledge on how to build homes that don’t develop mold in their walls, that’s called Breathing Walls, and you can go to breathingwalls.com for information on that.
Then there are EMFs and that stands for electromagnetic fields, and that includes four specific types that we recognize in the building biology profession. That would be magnetic fields from house wiring, electric fields from house wiring, which most people don’t know exist, and then all the radio frequencies from cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, smart meters, and so on, and then so-called dirty electricity. Those are the four EMFs that we focus on.
Dr. Weitz: What’s the difference between the electric forces and the magnetic forces?
Oram: So, when we talk about EMFs, they’re really talking about two fields. The E of EMFs refers to the electric field, and the M of EMFs refers to the magnetic field and they’re actually … So, let’s start from the beginning and here we have a sine wave going from zero to maximum, to zero to maximum, to zero in a positive direction and negative direction. That’s one cycle, and there’s 60 of these per second.
I don’t know if you can see that on the camera, but that’s what we deal with with alternating current here in the world for the last 100 years. The voltage varies from zero to maximum, to zero to maximum in a positive, negative direction. That’s actually Tesla who convinced Edison to switch from DC to AC back in before they turned from the 1800s, so the 1900s, late 1800s that’s when that happened. Ever since, we’ve had alternating current, which allows-
Dr. Weitz: It’s all Edison’s fault.
Oram: Well, in the sense that … In a way because the voltage varies, but it’s 120 times a second and it’s able to go down the wires for many miles because with DC, which is the way it was all distributed in the 1880s and 1890s, the voltage dropped within a block or two.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: There were little decentralized coal-fired power plants in throughout all urban areas in the world for 20 years or so, and they just couldn’t get industry to develop because everything had to be generated. All electricity had to be generated locally. So, when they switched over to AC, alternating current, then they could send electricity at 120 volts for many miles and that allowed industry to develop, but there are health effects from being in the field of these power lines within your home and from power lines that are outdoors.
So, what you have here is electric fields and magnetic fields at right angles to each other. I don’t know if you can see that, but see the red here going vertically and the beam here coming out horizontally, so you have these two fields and they’re either coupled or uncoupled. I won’t get into the physics of it, but when you’re in the near field which is three wavelengths within three wavelengths you don’t have couplings of the electric and magnetic field. That means if you go into a bedroom with a Gauss meter that only measures magnetic field and it’s low, you could have low magnetic fields, and usually do in a bedroom especially on the second floor at night because most of the magnetic fields that occur in the home are either from power lines outside, in which case that would involve the second floor bedroom.
But if you don’t have the power lines there in the front or back of the house, then the other three sources of magnetic fields in the home are wiring errors, current on water pipes and other grounding paths and point sources like being near a refrigerator. So, the wiring errors are due to incorrect connections of neutrals between circuits that the electrician does, but the code inspector doesn’t catch because they’re not looking for them. But that’s only there, the magnetic field from wiring errors are only there if you have loads on. So, at night, you turn all the loads off so there really aren’t any magnetic fields from wiring errors. That’s a day and evening time problem when the lights are on and current-
Dr. Weitz: What is a wiring error?
Oram: It’s a misconnection between different neutrals, we call them. This is an example here, I know you can’t see this at home but it’s from a book by Karl Riley, who was a science teacher who worked with some parents in Southern California 20 years ago at the invitation of them and their electricians, and he helped them find the wiring errors that were causing the magnetic fields, and so he wrote a book about it called Tracing EMFs in Building Wiring and Grounding, which is available from lessemf.com, and also Southern California Edison the electric utility here outside of Los Angeles municipal. For most of Southern California, except for San Diego, they have their own utility. Southern California Edison hired Karl Riley to come and do a video, a 22-minute video explaining wiring errors and that is available from Less EMF, 22 minutes there. The EMF consultants from Edison give that video to their customers who call up for EMF information.
Dr. Weitz: Both have a positive, a negative, and a ground, is that right?
Oram: Well, you’ve got the hot wire.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so the hot wire is where the electricity is.
Oram: You’ve got the hot wire, which is the black wire here.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: That’s the hot wire.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Here’s the neutral, and here’s the ground, so the hot wire carries current to the loads when you turn on a light, and then the current goes through the light and comes back on the neutral wire, which is the white wire here, and there shouldn’t be any current on the ground. That’s just for safety in case you have a short, the ground will trip the breaker. So, basically you have a magnetic field which is a circle of energy invisible around the flow of electricity through a single wire, and if you have two wires where the current goes out from your breaker panel or from your light switch, and then up the wire in the wall, so it would be the black wire in here going up to the light, and then the neutral carries the current from the light back down again, which is right next to the hot wire. The magnetic field around any wire goes clockwise if you look from behind, the right-hand rule. These arrows are actually backwards, but the point is that the current, when it’s present, causes a magnetic field in every wire, in every circuit, in every house. The reason why you don’t have magnetic fields in the room is because the magnetic field that goes clockwise around the black hot wire going one way is canceled by the magnetic field going counterclockwise around the neutral coming back the other way when they’re together and when the currents are equal.
Dr. Weitz: That’s good. That’s what you want?
Oram: When they’re equal, yes. But if you have what’s called a wiring error where you have two circuits in this particular case here in what we call the junction box, and they’re separated the blacks are separated because there is a chance, depending on which leg you’re on, that if you turn them both on or turn them on, they’ll trip the breaker if the blacks are connected. Every electrician knows this, although occasionally we still see that happening. But what’s very common in up to 50% of homes in Southern California and 30% of homes throughout the country is that they’ll gain these neutrals together under one wire lug, which is a violation of this particular code in the National Electric Code. But the code inspectors don’t look for this, because they don’t care about magnetic fields. The lights work and they’re more concerned with making sure that fires don’t occur from having too much current on a wire that’s not rated for the amperage that it carries.
I’m not disparaging code inspectors. When they learn about this, it’s in the code, it’s just that they’re so understaffed and overworked that they just don’t have the time. They don’t care. Nobody looks for these. Now, these new arc fault breakers are mandated to prevent tripping or they trip the breaker when there’s fraying of the insulation, and that’s a safety feature to prevent fire. Those arc fault breakers, which are now code required in the last two cycles, so every three years they update the National Electric Code, so the last two cycles so six years or so that’s been in there. All the homes built in America in the last six, seven years, some circuits need that.
Now in the most recent edition a revision of the National Code from what I understand all circuits require this, and they’ll trip the first time the electrician turns on that circuit when they do the installation if there’s a wiring error. Now, in France, they’ve had these variations on that for 30-40 years so they don’t have wiring errors in their housing stock going back half a … Maybe 50 years.
Dr. Weitz: If the wiring’s not done properly, if the white wires are connected together like that, then you won’t have this balancing of the current.
Oram: Right.
Dr. Weitz: Then you’ll get excessive amounts of electrical field-
Oram: Magnetic field.
Dr. Weitz: Magnetic fields.
Oram: In this case.
Dr. Weitz: And so those can affect us.
Oram: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Right, all right. So, that’s an example of one type of EMF, the magnetic field in your home when certain lights are turned on. It can be lighting loads or it can be things you plug in.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: So, wiring errors are one of the important four types of, four sources of magnetic field. Another source is current on water pipes, and that’s a little bit hard to explain, but it’s all on my website www.createhealthyhomes.com, homes is plural. If you go there and click on articles on EMFs, then you’ll see an introduction to EMFs that I wrote, and then four separate articles on each of these types of EMFs. So, click on the magnetic field EMF article, and then I explained the four sources power lines, wiring errors, current on these water metal grounding paths like water pipes and TV cables coming in and out of the house, and the last is point sources like transformers and motors that have a big field close up when you measure with a Gauss meter, but as you move away from the field, from the source like the back of a refrigerator, it drops off exponentially. Instead of linearly, it drops off quickly so 90% of the reduction is in the first one flow, and then the last 10% takes another two feet to drop away. So, you’re okay, distance is your friend. The shielding is very difficult and expensive, and it doesn’t work very well because the magnetic fields will creep around the edges. So, it’s better to just distance your-
Dr. Weitz: I’ve even seen paint that’s supposed to be a shield.
Oram: The paint is not for magnetic fields. It’s for radio frequency fields.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: And electric fields, which we haven’t talked about yet, if you ground it. That basically covers magnetic fields. If there’s current on your water pipe, and I explained in the article how that happens.
Dr. Weitz: And the water pipes in most of our homes are made of copper.
Oram: Yes, so that they conduct electricity, and they’re meant to as a path for lightning to get into the earth. Their code requires for that, and we don’t ever disrupt that but if we do put a piece of plastic in the water pipe, we’ll put an earth rod in this place.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: The point is that water pipe doesn’t end like an earth rod does eight feet in the ground. That water pipe keeps going and then connects to a water main that every other house is connected to so your house is electrically connected to the grounding system, to every house of every neighboring house, and so current which … So, if 8 amps comes in on the two hot wires overhead or underground from the utility transformer, that’s the only way that the electricity comes in. But when electricity goes back, it will take all available paths not just the path of least resistance. It does that primarily, but not exclusively. So, if you give it parallel paths, then it will take all of them. So, 85% will go back on the path it should, which is on the neutral wire of the overhead service drop cable, but that means that there’s 8 amps coming in and 7 amps going back, so there’s a 1 amp net difference. So, there’ll be a magnetic field coming down into your yard and up the side of the house from that cable, two hot wires coming in, one neutral wire going back and that comes into your house and maybe a bedroom there.
But what’s most important is there’s that 1 amp will go from there to the water pipe, which could be in the front of the house under your living room floor right here into your kitchen, and there’s a big magnetic field coming up through the floor 24/7. If you have a bedroom on the first floor, it’s under your bed and under where you sit because that’s the way that that extra 1 amp gets out.
Dr. Weitz: What can you do about that?
Oram: Plumbers can put in a piece of plastic outside that they dig down, and in California where it’s warm, it never freezes, the pipes come out of the earth right in front of the house and then turn 90 degrees and go in and there’s a valve for a hose and a valve to shut our hose bib and then they have a valve to shut the water off there and a pressure regulator. The plumber will cut a three inch section and put a piece of plastic in there, a plastic dielectric union or copper brass with a ring of plastic and rubber in it to block the flow of electricity, and that takes care of that magnetic field among the entire right through the middle of your house. Just one fell swoop you take care of it that way, few hundred dollars and the problem is solved.
We also have a cable isolation filter for $15 that I can put in to the TV cable that the sheeting of that can carry current. That’s another parallel path because they’re all grounded in the house and at the utility pole, so they’re all connected. The cable company grounds the sheathing of their incoming coaxial cable to the electrical system at the utility pole or underground. So, there are several ways that that can happen so we now have-
Dr. Weitz: Is that the same thing if you have your internet through a high-speed cable from the phone company?
Oram: Yeah, telephone lines tend not to have this phenomenon.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Overhead.
Dr. Weitz: So, cable lines but not phones lines.
Oram: If they’re underground, sometimes they can but we check for it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Usually it’s … And it’s not always the case with cable, and it’s not always the case with water pipes either because in Southern California, the municipal water departments like Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and et cetera, have been putting in little pieces of plastic, these dielectric unions, themselves for decades at least up until recently. They did it for completely different reasons to stop the leaking because if you have current on your copper pipe, then that means that the coppers are at one potential, the salts of the earth are at a different potential, when we watered our lawns before the drought there was some moisture of the soil and electricity and different potentials it caused little pinhole leaks, electrolysis caused little pinhole leaks. So, the water would leak out like a sieve and the water pressure was dropping all over the neighborhood over the decades. To stop that, they had to stop the current. They understood that. They had no concept of magnetic fields being an issue as well, but by doing that they stopped the magnetic fields. But they didn’t get to all the houses and then they stopped the program.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Their EMF expert told me that, at least for DWP. So, about half the neighborhoods that I go to in Los Angeles County have this and half don’t, so in those that don’t we have to put that in. You could have a broken neutral, which causes a big magnetic field from your power lines. Power lines are difficult because we can’t shield against that. That’s the one thing we can’t do anything about, and also strong radio frequencies from cell towers if they’re close by it. We can shield against those but it’s very expensive.
Dr. Weitz: There’s more and more cell phone towers especially as we go from 3G to 4G and now 5G?
Oram: Yes, that’s true. 5G is a whole another can of worms we’re moving into, and 5G is not 5 gigahertz by the way, which many of us already have. It’s one of the two Wi-Fi frequencies there’s 2.4 gigahertz and 5.8 gigahertz, so you’ll see 5G which is an abbreviation for 5.8 gigahertz on your router, 2.4 and 5G and that’s gigahertz. But what we’re talking about here is fifth generation.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: So, every 8 to 10 years for the last 40 years or so, the cell phone industry has moved from voice originally, which was 1G, second generation added texting, third generation, which was 20 years later or so, added cellular data, fourth generation or 4G plus LTE is the last most recent changed 10 years ago, and that added data at a higher speed and greater volume than 3G and ramped that up considerably. So, we’re at the point now where we’re heading towards the fifth generation and the difference there will be we are running out of bandwidth in the frequencies that are currently in use below 6 gigahertz, which is where the industry is now and all of our phones have transmitters and receivers in frequencies that are less than 6 gigahertz or 6,000 megahertz. So, we’re at 800 megahertz, 900 megahertz, 1800, 1900, 700, and this is where industry would prefer to stay because those frequencies get through walls and and we all have equipment that can pick it up. But some of that frequency is held by the military for future use and the FCC knows it’s going to have to free that up for the industry to obtain it through auction, and that’s where they prefer to stay.
What they’ve been talking about is expanding to the super 6 gigahertz range, which is the millimeter band from 20 gigahertz and up, and we’re not using that now and the problem … Oh, except we do use it, satellites use those frequencies 20, 30, 40, 50, 80 gigahertz and the wavelength is so short it’s called the millimeter band, because one way there’s only like a quarter of an inch or a few millimeters. The problem with that for use by cell companies is it doesn’t go through walls easily at all. You don’t even have to have special shielding material like the paint we talked about or foil, or certain fabric like margin mesh here, which is a silver fiber and I believe this is rayon, and this blocks radio frequencies maybe 80, 90% but 5G is blocked by any wood wall, any plywood, piece of plywood or asphalt shingles or bricks.
So, they have to aggregate and concentrate and focus the beam to drill through those materials and they’re going to exceed FCC limits to do that, but they’re going to get a waiver in order to do that. But beamforming means it’s going to be certain when you have these small cell antennas that you’re planning to put in neighborhoods every two to 10 houses at lower power than legacy macro cell towers, which exist now using for fourth generation and LTE technology, which is at 800 to 1,000 watts that’s what those cell towers out there send out, and your cell phone is at three-quarters to one watt. So, these small cell antennas are going to be … We don’t know yet what the power is going to be and they’re going to still send out 4G frequencies, right … You’re going to have like a mini cell tower right outside your neighbors.
Dr. Weitz: So we’re going to have a lot more of these.
Oram: Yes.
Dr. Weitz: So, we’re going to get more exposure, unfortunately.
Oram: Yes, yes, unfortunately. But they’re going to add to it the gigahertz signals up in the gigahertz above 20 gigahertz range, and those are not going to go through the wall so they’re going to focus them and use beamforming, which means the antenna’s going to search. That’s what everyone’s worried about because those are the frequencies that they don’t penetrate the skin, but they affect the skin greatly. Those are the frequencies that we use.
Dr. Weitz: Is there any way we can block this?
Oram: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here’s the-
Dr. Weitz: I mean, society wise do we have to go to 5G?
Oram: The reason-
Dr. Weitz: Are we running out of frequencies? Is that what it is?
Oram: Well, we’re running on a bandwidth even though they have technologies that they’ve been working on for decades actually, but they’re perfecting to increase the amount of traffic in the existing frequencies we have in the sub-6 gigahertz range.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Fifth generation, 5G is going to include sub-6 gigahertz. All the frequencies we have now we’re going to keep. We’re not giving them up, and then they’re going to open up the 20 gigahertz and above so everyone’s focusing on this but this will still be there. However, there’ll be more data push through those pipelines and those channels, but the difference is we can measure those with the radio frequency meters that we have. There are frequencies that we already can measure now and we can shield them easily with materials that we have. The 20 gigahertz and higher frequencies will not be blocked by cloth very well, but they will be blocked by YShield paint, which is currently in use now for sub-6 gigahertz frequencies that we currently use for cell towers, and foil that you can put in your walls.
Then there are transparent films for windows, there’s metal mesh window screen, and well as I said for the 20 gigahertz and above a millimeter band cloth will not help with that, but the film should. The windows are your big Achilles’ heel because they’re a hole in the wall, even if you put YShield paint on the outside or inside as a primer and then cover it with whatever color you want and it’s a non-toxic paint or foil if you’re building a house or remodeling it, you could put foil in and then put your Sheetrock over that. I have done that before. That will block the frequencies coming through the wall even in the millimeter band, even with the beamforming and the aggregation that they’re going to do. But your window, you’ve got to be very careful with windows. These meters, by the way, can’t measure up in the millimeter band but there are two people I know of, Rob Metzinger, who is at Safe Living Technologies, and a gentleman here in Southern California are both working on a version of this, something like this that can pick up these millimeter band frequencies of 20 gigahertz and above.
They’re just waiting for the industry to zero in on certain frequencies and then they’ll tune their crystals and chips to those frequencies and it will be affordable. Now, Rob Metzinger at Safe Living Technologies just released this called a Safe and Sound, which is only $140, very accurate radio frequency device and this is almost $2,000. This is from Gigahertz Solutions and he sells it. This is from Safe Living Technologies, but this is only … It’s a fraction of the cost and it has sound, that’s your router. You’ve a router in the house here because that sound, which sounds like a very fast helicopter, well tick-tick-tick tick-tick-tick, that’s the sound of a router. So, I know when I turn my meter on what a person has in their house. That’s the sound of a router. That’s the sound that a router makes. Then you have this little guide.
Dr. Weitz: Well, this is actually connected by wire, but there is a router in the house for sure.
Oram: Yeah. So, you see here where we’re at in the orange and so that corresponds to 100 to 1,000 micro watts per meter squared. That’s how this works. You get a little guide here, and you could have without sound or with sound. That’s about 100 to 1,000, so let’s see. That’s exactly what we’re getting here about 140. Now, if I turn it just right, it’ll go blank and that’s over 200. So, we’re right in the ballpark, okay?
Dr. Weitz: So, basically if you don’t understand what we’re talking about, that’s because our brains have been totally fried by the Wi-Fi electromagnet radiation.
Oram: Right. Now, this is the new TriField Meter. This is the old TriField Meter, the 100 XE, which many of you have. We don’t recommend this because it’s not as accurate. It’s not at all accurate as far as we’re concerned to get into levels that we consider to be safe in the electric or radio frequency band, and the magnetic field settings it tends to overstate the case. That was the frequency weighted model, so they came out with a model that has little magnets in it to dampen that effect, and they called it the flat frequency response model, and it says flat frequency response on the back if you have one of those. This is not that one, or one of those, so you don’t see that here. If you called up Less EMF or went to Amazon online and just ask for a TriField Meter, this is what you would get, the frequency weighted one.
Dr. Weitz: I know there’s … Yeah, go ahead.
Oram: So, what TriField did was they came out with a new one this year, 2018, the TF2 TriField 2, and it’s excellent. I love it. It’s very accurate. You have standard mode or weighted mode in terms of the frequency response. So, Ben, you have a good magnetic field level in this room, less than one milligauss is what we’re looking for and it’s hovering around 0.6 to 0.9 milligauss, occasionally flipping up to one. You have sound, you can hear the … You can turn that off from the back here, now it’s quiet. So, that’s for magnetic field, and then electric field it’s much more accurate, and then you can … We don’t use, in my profession, the weighted mode for electric or magnetic, we go with standard because that is similar to the Digital Gauss meters that we use.
Then we have RF, and this is … You hear the ticking here, which is not the ticking of the router. This is different. This is just a Geiger counter. These other meters, this one from Safe Living Technologies is called Safe and Sound, and this one which is the Acousticom 2, which is the little brother of the Acoustimeter from Alasdair Phillips in England, EMFields. They both have the real sound. These both have the real sound of the radio frequency source in the room. This one is just a Geiger counter for the level, but still I credit Alpha Labs with the TriField 2, for being much more sensitive and so we’re getting numbers that are very similar to the numbers that we get from these other meters, in the RF mode for Wi-Fi, cell phones and so on.
Dr. Weitz: I’d like to use the rest of the time we have to focus on cell phone and Wi-Fi radiation, because I know that’s something a lot of us are concerned about and I’d like to see what we can do about making some recommendations for some of the best choices we can make, given the fact that we’re going to use cell phones and then cell phones do emit this radiation.
Oram: Okay.
Dr. Weitz: I know it’d be better not to use cell phones, but that’s not going to happen, so I wonder if you can give specific recommendations. When I’m using a cell phone, first of all, what are the best things to do? Is it better to text rather than call? Is it better, if I’m calling, to hold the phone here? Is it better to have a plug, a wire connected into my ear with a little microphone? Can you make some of those recommendations for us?
Oram: Yes, and everything you just said is accurate, spot-on. The general recommendation that my profession makes, based on European research, is reduce use generally.
Dr. Weitz: Meaning try not to use your cell phone at all, but that’s very hard to do.
Oram: Well, increase distance.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: And then use hardwired connections whenever possible. When you’re home, for instance, don’t give up your landline just to save money because you’re going to be penny wise and pound foolish, because in the end your risk of developing tumors goes up.
Dr. Weitz: But you know with all due respect, nobody is using a landline.
Oram: I have clients who do.
Dr. Weitz: Very few. I mean we have one, we never use it.
Oram: Right. Right, okay.
Dr. Weitz: Then when we were, we had a wireless phone which is just as bad, right?
Oram: It is. It is just as bad.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: The effects are cumulative, and so here this is-
Dr. Weitz: If I hold my phone and speak through the speaker option, is that significantly better than holding it here?
Oram: Yes, and the reason is because the transmitter is now here instead of here.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: So, when it’s here-
Dr. Weitz: So, the signals are not going through my head.
Oram: When you use a cell phone, and I forgot to bring my … It’s in the car but …
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Oram: When you use a cell phone, the cell phone is transmitted 360 degrees.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Now, there are shields, there are technologies, Pong and many, many different shields and that redirect the energy that’s helpful, and again, I have in the car a shield that opens up and then you can start your call, close it up, and if you hold it here, which I don’t recommend but it is shielded. It does reduce, but the level that it reduces down to even if it’s 80, 90%, it’s still way above what we recommend.
Dr. Weitz: Is it better to have a headphone plugged in to it rather than use the speaker part?
Oram: With an air tube in the last six inches, yes.
Dr. Weitz: The air tube? What’s an air tube?
Oram: Well, I’m sorry, it’s in the car. I forgot to bring it in, but it’s called an air tube earphone, so it’s wire from you plug it into the phone and it’s a wire with a little microphone in it.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Then it ends with a little speaker that goes up through a clear plastic tube, sometimes it’s blue, where the sound just goes through the tube to a little diaphragm that you put in your ear and they call it an air tube earphone.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so it’s different than the typical one.
Oram: Yeah. Oh, yes. You don’t get one of those with your cell phone.
Dr. Weitz: Where do we get this?
Oram: Less EMF and a whole host of other companies that sell these that are EMF.
Dr. Weitz: One more time, best way to talk on your cell phone is to use …
Oram: Well, the best way to talk on your cell phone is to hold the cell phone here because the transmitter, which sends out a signal 360 degrees is this far from your body, okay?
Dr. Weitz: Right, and so let’s say you have … Is it better to use the speakerphone or better to use this wire thing?
Oram: Well, that’s your choice relative to privacy and the ability of the other person to hear your voice.
Dr. Weitz: Well, let’s say in terms of just radiation, is it better … I can either use my speakerphone here or I can have a wire, what’s better?
Oram: It doesn’t matter that much.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so those are both going to decrease.
Oram: Well, it does because there is some coupling of the radiofrequency onto the wire, but it stops here.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Now, of course, there can be some effect.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. But the bottom line is don’t hold the phone up to your ear, okay. How about in the car, what’s the best way to speak on the phone in the car? If I plug it into my radio on my car …
Oram: Most people have Bluetooth where they sync up, so then-
Dr. Weitz: Let’s say I don’t use … So, one choice is it just syncs up with the Wi-Fi or what if I plug a wire into my phone and plug that into the car sound system, does that change anything? Does that make it safer, better?
Oram: What, through the earphone? That won’t work, because the microphone and …
Dr. Weitz: It doesn’t go directly into the sound system?
Oram: No, no.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Not that I know of. Not for years. There was a technology in the past that allowed that to happen, and then we also had access to a jack for an external antenna that we put on the roof of the car, but they don’t have those anymore.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: These new phones are completely sealed. You can’t take the battery out.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: The new generation of phones, you have one port and that’s for … Well, you have your charging port, your lightning port if it’s an Apple or your USB.
Dr. Weitz: So, is it worse talking in the car using the Bluetooth than it is speaking through the speaker of the phone?
Oram: You’re getting strong signals no matter what. There’s no way around that, Ben, in the car.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Let me take two steps back and say-
Dr. Weitz: Okay, let me just ask one more question and get to that. If I want to listen to music or a podcast like this one in my car, and I have downloaded it onto my phone already, I’ve gone to my computer, I downloaded it to my phone. So, now the podcast is on my phone. I’m not getting it from Wi-Fi, and I plug that into the sound system, so now the sound system is just taking that recorded podcast-
Oram: Through the speaker.
Dr. Weitz: Through the speaker, is that-
Oram: Or through the earphone jack.
Dr. Weitz: Right, is that safer than receiving it-
Oram: Yes.
Dr. Weitz: Is it a safer way to do it?
Oram: Provided you put the phone in airplane mode.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Because if you don’t put the phone in airplane mode, it’s still sending out a beacon signal every minute or so.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. I see.
Oram: Especially when you’re traveling, because then you’re in the mode where-
Dr. Weitz: So whenever possible, put your phone in airplane mode.
Oram: Yeah, but then you can’t get a call.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Oram: Now, I say that because people need to understand when I go to a person’s home I’m there for six or eight hours, because I spend the first hour going over what we’re talking about now, what EMFs are, where they come from, how they affect your health, and what we do about them. Then the other six to seven hours is spent going through the house with the client to each room where the client and their family sit, sleep, and stand to measure magnetic fields, electric fields, radio frequencies, and dirty electricity. Now, some people tell me, “I know all about EMF, so you can skip that part.” I said, “No, no. You need me to go over it with you, because I’m going to show you things that you haven’t heard before.” Nobody knows about electric fields, which we haven’t talked about yet, and electric fields are very important. You must get them down where you sleep, because otherwise you’re not going to get the deep stage four rest every 90 minutes, and you’re not going to get the melatonin you should have.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: We have clients shutoff breakers, and then eventually do it automatically with a kill switch. So, I can explain that to people at createhealthyhomes.com. They can call me and email me through my website, and there are articles on that. That’s the missing link. There are a lot of people who have electrical hypersensitivity, who come to me who’ve done everything right from all the EMF websites that they’ve looked at. They’ve got chips and pendants everywhere stuck on every device, and including your cell phone. They’re still using their cell phone, which I can’t even fathom if they’re electrically sensitive that they don’t have a hardwired. Some of them can’t use a cell phone, so they have to go to a hardwired line, and they think that they’ve gotten rid of all the radio frequencies in their house. But if they don’t have one of these little meters, then they don’t know for sure and they plug in an ethernet cable to their laptop and their router and say, “I’m hardwired.” I say, “Yeah, but you didn’t … Did you shut off the Wi-Fi?” They said, “No, it happens automatically, doesn’t it?” I said, “Let me show you,” and then I turn this on and then we get that and they say, “What’s that? I have an ethernet cable.” I say, “You didn’t turn off the Wi-Fi.” “I didn’t know I had to.” This is the dialogue I have with my clients, so they don’t know.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: Or they have a Nest thermostat that sends out a signal every five seconds, or they have … Not just a smart meter. There’s so many things inside the home that are filled with radio frequencies now. We’re in the Internet of Things, the era of the IoT, the Internet of Things. So, there’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth coming out of everything now.
Dr. Weitz: Especially now you have the device like the Echo.
Oram: Yeah, yeah those smart speakers.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Oram: They’re constantly emitting Wi-Fi. Your Bluetooth, your router, your cordless telephone, when you hang up the phone and that base unit that’s in the kitchen or God forbid, next to you on the bedside table that has the cord that goes to the phone. That thing is emitting radio frequencies 24/7 like an ashtray full of burning cigarettes. I’ve showed people where the cigarettes are. Now, people say, “Well, I have a chip. I have a pendant. I have a Home Harmonizer. I’m good. I have this round thing.” I don’t mean to cast aspersion on any of these manufacturers. There is evidence, and I believe it, I’m one of the few in my profession, because the other guys are engineers they poo-poo all those things, which is unfortunate because they do work. They do help people, by a technology we don’t understand, but-
Dr. Weitz: They just don’t help us as much as we-
Oram: Well, that’s our opinion in the building biology profession. Here’s why, because it’s like someone having four ashtrays with burning that cigarettes filling the room with smoke who then brings a person in who says, “I have an air purifier that will clear the room of smoke.” It does, but the ashtrays are still producing the smoke. So, we say let’s find the ashtrays and get rid of them, at least the ones you have control over in your house, and if necessary shield the ones the frequencies coming in from outside not power lines. We can’t shield the magnetic fields, they’re too vast but the radio frequencies, we can. So, depending on how sensitive the client is, we can do that. But they still have stuff inside their house, or they can’t get their family to give them some safe space. I always work with family members to get them to understand what this person who brings me in needs for them to be more comfortable and healthy. What we do is we educate people and say if you want to best help yourself, reduce these sources and find hardwired alternatives and learn how to disable the Wi-Fi on your laptop there and your cell phone and switch over to corded telephone, why hard lines ethernet cables and telephone lines, and then you can still use the chips and pendants. We’re not opposed to those.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: But we don’t recommend them as the sole way of protecting yourself.
Dr. Weitz: They’re beneficial, but they’re not really fully protecting you. They’re helping a little bit, but you need to do a lot more.
Oram: Right. So, in Europe, France has voted to ban Wi-Fi in day care centers and nurseries for children under three, two years ago, and now they’ve completely banned cell phones in all schools up to the middle level and it’s voluntary in the senior level as of this year, this month. In England, the benign tumors went down over the last 20 years, aggressive tumors went up on the side where the cell phone is used. They balance each other out so all that gets reported is tumors are unchanged in England. That’s what gets reported. You can’t win.
In 2015, in Brussels, electrical hypersensitivity and multiple chemical sensitivity is being declared in a scientific declaration, they care about that sort of thing. This was in the Nation magazine last March, “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: A Special Investigation by two investigative reporters. It’s been a year. Great, great article and follow-up interviews on Democracy Now, and so on. That’s on my website, createhealthyhomes.com.
Scientists warn a potential serious health effects from 5G, fifth generation cell technology, over 200 scientists. Here, we have the FCC which says on page 67 of this bulletin from 1997, “Evaluating compliance with FCC guidance for human exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields,” and they say one milligauss excuse me, one milliwatt per square centimeter is safe. But if you look at the table here, the one milliwatt per square centimeter, which is a thousandth of a watt striking a half inch by a half inch, so that’s a square centimeter, is equivalent to 10 million micro watts, which is a millionth of a watt per square meter, which is three feet by three feet. That’s the unit of measurement that Europe uses, and therefore, the unit of measurement here is micro watts per meter square because this is a German meter from Gigahertz Solutions. So, the international … This is Powerwatch Alasdair Philips website from EMFields who makes the Acousticom 2 and the Acoustimeter, and he says here if you have a link in my RF radio frequency article, he has a table here that shows the FCC at the top, and look at all these other countries that are lower than that in terms of recommended levels, going all the way down to 100 micro watts, not 10 million like the FCC. But all these other countries Belgium, Italy, Russia, China, Switzerland, that consume they’re all 10, 100, 1,000 times lower. My profession is way down here, six orders of magnitude less. Then it went from 10,000 down to 1,000, I’m sorry to 10 in four years, because more and more research came out showing that there was evidence of harm and that was included here in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. This is seven years ago, potential dangers have left magnetic fields and their effect on the environment. This would be like the FCC in America saying, “Take precautions.” I won’t take the time to go over this, but this is a stunning document, and in every newspaper in-
Dr. Weitz: That’s not really surprising that these European countries are more proactive on this. On many health issues, they’re more proactive. A lot of these countries have already banned-
Oram: GMOs.
Dr. Weitz: GMOs, require labeling, and we don’t even require labeling.
Oram: Every newspaper in every capital in Europe carried an article about this, this Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2011, not a word in the United States.
Dr. Weitz: Isn’t it the case that even though none of us read our cell phone contracts when you get your cell phone, there’s actually specific warnings?
Oram: I had a little booth at the Vitamin Barn in Malibu, and this guy came by and I told him this sort of … He said, “I’m a producer and I live here in Los Angeles and New York. I have a friend who’s a producer who was hired by one of the big cell phone companies based in Europe to film seven TV commercials for the European market, and they said, ‘Your models have to hold the cell phones at arm’s length. You cannot show any model with the cell phone next to the head.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll follow that instruction, but I’m just curious, why did your company have you tell me that?’ The guy said right now flat out, ‘Because they cause cancer.'” These companies know this. They know this, and so-
Dr. Weitz: Doesn’t it even say on your contract that the cell phone company cannot be held liable?
Oram: Right, because insurance companies will not write insurance for cell companies.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Oram: They’re in for a big train wreck, a big collision down the road but they’re all … They have money set aside. If you listen to George Carlo, he was a keynote speaker at our conference 10 years ago this year, and back then he already knew about this. Because he was the one, and this is saying that Nation magazine article from last March, they interviewed him extensively. Also, I forgot to mention the documentary Generation Zapped, go to generationzapped.com and you’ll see a link that you can download it.
Dr. Weitz: Is it now available?
Oram: Yes, and also at the top of my homepage at createhealthyhomes.com, I have links to, you can get the DVD, iTunes, Vimeo, Apple, or Google Play. It’s all available there for streaming or purchase, and it’s a hour and a half documentary. I’m one of the contributors to it. I gave the … She’s a client of mine, Sabine El Gemayel, and four years ago she said, “I know we can do better,” not that there was anything wrong with the documentaries that were out at that time but she said, “I’m a Hollywood documentary filmmaker, we need a Hollywood quality film on this topic, but I don’t know who to interview, and I don’t have the money for it.” So, she crowdsourced it for the next four years or three years and released it a year ago in beta, and I gave her the names of all the people she needed to contact within the industry. Then she contacted them, flew all over the world, and they gave her more names. So, those are the people, she has the top people in this field in that documentary, Generation Zapped. It came out, and they had screenings all last year, and she was trying to get a distributor and ended up doing it herself. So, it’s now out as of July, as of two months ago. It’s really a game changer, that and this article in the Nation magazine last March.
So, the word is getting out, and with fifth generation cell technology where they’re going to blanket both outside the home and inside the home with more and more radio transmitters that the industry just completely thinks is safe because that’s what they’re told. That’s what they’re told by their own scientists and by the FCC that there is no evidence of any harm. It’s all swept under the carpet, but it’s front and center as far as Europe that there are at least a dozen countries that have banned Wi-Fi or are in the process of banning Wi-Fi in public places, in schools, hospitals, and libraries. France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Italy, India, Russia, Australia, China, they’re all contemplating this or have done it.
So, what do they know that we don’t know? What evidence are they seeing that we don’t see? For one thing, they don’t have the same campaign finance laws that we have, where the lobbyists provide money and all of our Congress people need a lot of money to get reelected. In these other countries, elections are quick, they’re all publicly funded, and industry does not have a toehold or foothold in that process. They all have government-funded health care delivery systems, so there’s no profit motive. So, if they see something, this is the fourth or fifth health crisis in 60 years, the first being asbestos, tobacco, and lead in gasoline, and then the next one was GMOs, and now this, and they’re looking at what happened. They know what happened in the past, and they’re already seeing an uptick in disease in people who are of childbearing age and so on using these technologies and having many symptoms including not being able to hold a job. That’s a serious problem, and they expect some Alzheimer’s and dementia to develop in midlife in some of these people who use these wireless devices exclusively.
Dr. Weitz: Wow, that’s amazing information or we could talk for hours about this, but thank you so much for what you’ve provided for our audience.
Oram: You’re welcome.
Dr. Weitz: I know you mentioned your website several times.
Oram: Www.createhealthyhomes, with an S, dot com, all one word.
Dr. Weitz: Right, and for anybody who lives in the Los Angeles area, you’re available to come out and do it.
Oram: Throughout Southern California, Santa Barbara to San Diego, and then I get a lot of calls and emails from people outside of this area, I occasionally will travel and I have been brought to other places. I do a lot of work over the phone. I have people have a building biologist come to their home, if they have one in their area and we just finished a training program. We do this once a year and I help teach it last week in New Mexico where we gather together and train 20 to 30 students every year in the beginning entry level.
Then every other year, we have the advanced next coming up later this year, a training program to make more of us so that we have people all over the country in Canada to do this work. If there’s nobody nearby, then my clients can … They’ll get meters and then they’ll take readings on their own, and I’ll guide them. They’ll give you the data and then they know how to use the meters, which is helpful.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Thank you, Oram.
Oram: Okay, you’re welcome.
Dr. Weitz: Talk to you soon.
Oram: Thank you.
