Fran Drescher: Detox Your Home
Sandie Sedgbeer: Good for you, and it is a beautiful vision and a very practical one which is the main thing, because if it’s not practical, then people can’t get there, can they? On October 26th this year, you’re hosting Cancer Schmancer’s 2nd Annual Health Summit at the Cultural Centre in Los Angeles and, true to form, you’re going to be covering some progressive approaches that the establishment might dismiss as fringe, but are actually proving to be extremely valid. Tell us a little bit about the event. Who’s going to be speaking, and the topics they’ll be covering.
Fran Drescher: Oh, we have wonderful speakers. It’s a full day of speakers and panel discussions and videos. It kicks off with a brunch, if you buy the $300 ticket, and then you get preferred 
table seating that’s up-front and center to the stage where all the speakers are. We’re going to be focusing on many different things from mental health, breast health, kids’ health, inflammation, cancer and breakthroughs with that. Alternatives – encouraging the body to heal itself through alternative methods rather than poisoning the body to destroy the cancer cells before the poison destroys you.
We want to make people, by the time they leave, be transformed from patients into medical consumers, so they can go home and say now I’ve got some tools. I know what I need to look at. I know what I need to think about; and it’s everything from your home to what you eat, your personal care items, what you do when you are told that there’s something seriously wrong with you. We have Meriel Hemingway speaking; we have Mary-Lou Hanna speaking; I’ll, of course, be speaking. I can’t remember off the top of my head all the wonderful people that are coming, but we’re going to talk about GMO’s and how that impacts our health. You know, it’s a whole afternoon of education so that you have some tools to bring home to your family and begin the change.
Sandie Sedgbeer: What, in your experience, doesn’t the average person know about cancer that they really should know?
Fran Drescher: I think that almost 95% of cancers are environmentally stimulated – only 5% is genetic – so I think it behooves us to look at our environment, and that includes not only what we put in, on, and around us, what we are eating, all our personal care items. What are we cleaning and gardening with, and what are the fabrics we’re living with, wearing, and putting on our furniture – the carpets, the drapes – all of these things that have off-gassing or dangerous dyes, or dangerous chemicals like flame retardants; or things like what makes a shirt wrinkle-free is actually toxic; what makes the new cars smell is actually toxic off-gassing. And we just have to look at everything differently, and just start. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, but just begin, and use our good, old-fashioned, all-American consumerism to dictate manufacturing trends. Because, at the end of the day, manufacturers don’t want to kill us, they want to sell us, but they’ll sell us anything that we’re willing to buy which, right now, is anything. But we have to change that, and in so doing change the way we live.
When I walk into an office building where the windows don’t open, and everything in it is an unnatural material, from the industrial carpets to the fluorescent lighting, flame-retardant drapes, and upholstery, and the industrial cleaners that are used to keep that building clean night after night – which, by the way, is also a terrible occupational hazard for those poor people that are in the janitorial business – I can’t wait to get out of a building like that. I can’t believe that people go there every day and work there. They don’t even seem to realize what a toxic space they’re spending every day in, and then they go home to another toxic place, and I feel that it’s our job, our mission at Cancer Schmancer, to wake them up because once you wake up and smell the coffee it’s hard to go back to sleep.
Sandie Sedgbeer: The more you learn about cancer, the more research you do, and obviously you’re in a place now where you’re extremely well-informed it could get very daunting. Do you find that it just galvanizes you even more to spread the word?
Fran Drescher: Without question, every time I hear somebody lost a loved one it keeps me in it that much stronger. Every time someone comes to me and says, because of you I made that Doctor’s appointment and got diagnosed early; because of you I changed the way I cleaned my house, and it gives me the energy to keep on going. I feel like I have a purpose to my life that I didn’t expect to have, but it’s meaningful, and I feel like I got famous, I got cancer, and I lived to talk about it. So I’m talking about it, and we’re a celebrity-driven organization. We’ve leveraged the reach of celebrity to help change the world.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You’ve won a host of awards for your work as a health advocate – I won’t go into them now, but I’ll fill them in when I edit this transcript – but when you reflect on your life BC and up – before and after cancer – with your original career goals and ambitions, and your more recent achievements – how do you feel about the way your life path has evolved?
Fran Drescher: I think it’s deepened me as a human being and as an Actor. It’s made me more sensitive to other people’s pain and vulnerability. It’s set me on a path of health and wellness, personally. I feel like I live my life as an exemplary life, and then I share it with everyone else so they can learn from the things I had to learn the hard way. I’m trying to change the way we eat. We cannot keep eating industrial-raised animals and plants. They’re laden with chemicals that are not serving us well. We have to support sustainably-farmed, family farmers that practice organic growing practices. Our food source is being tainted. GMO’s are a terrible thing to happen to our food source, and we’re looking at all that. Once again, not bias (?), and wake people up to realize that they’re trying to dumb us down. They’re trying to make us think that we don’t have the right instincts; that their research is what will justify how we live our lives, but whatever they do is fueled by greed and we have to listen to our inner voice which is closest to our Creator.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I’m so thrilled to hear you saying this because this is something that I’ve been saying for several years. You’ve used a phrase in one of your interviews: “Not in my home; not on my skin; not in my stomach; not in my world.” That is a wonderful rallying cry.
Fran Drescher: Well, you know, I didn’t expect to be the one out of everyone I know to get cancer at a young age, but I did. And bad things happen to good people. What you do with it, how you work through it, and what becomes of you, as a result, is what makes all the difference.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Finally, Fran, your energy, drive, passion, and your determination, is very inspiring. You’ve already accomplished more in the past 16 years than many people manage to accomplish in a lifetime. So, I can’t imagine you stopping now. What is next for you?
Fran Drescher: Well, I’m writing two projects, and one is a Broadway Musical. I can’t really talk about it. And the other one is a television pilot who would be for me to star in, and I’m very excited about it. I’m taking meetings with networks right now, and it could be something that if I get a network to want to buy it, that could be the next series that makes my heart sing. I have the Cancer Schmancer thing, you know, and I am going to be speaking in Savannah, Georgia, and after that going up to New York with my parents to celebrate my sister’s birthday and be with the family. And, you know, between the organizations, I’m divorcing, so I’m starting a new life on my own again, and a new chapter, and that’s exciting to me with no regrets. I feel great. I learned a lot. Both about myself and from my ex-husband and now I take that new information, and I tuck it under my arm, and I go write the next chapter.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You know, you’re obviously extremely well-known for your talents as an actress, and a producer and a writer, and an entertainer, and I’m sure that gives you so much pleasure. Your advocacy and your outlook, though, they are going to be your legacy, aren’t they? And what you’ve achieved since you had cancer.
Fran Drescher: You know, that would be nice. It’s not really my motivation, and I never really understood that because for a large part of my life I was motivated by the desire to leave my mark. But then this kind of took over in a way that’s almost deeper than that which is a little more ego-driven, and I just feel like it’s my calling, and it’s something that I have to do. I’m very clear on the messaging, which also I don’t take credit for completely. I think that I’m part of a much bigger story and a higher power.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Fran Drescher. Having read your book, I feel like I know you. I feel like I know your family intimately. I feel like we’ve hung out together. As you take this new path in your life, I’m inspired by your resilience and this ability to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. I wish you every success.
About the Author
Veteran broadcaster, author, and media consultant, Sandie Sedgbeer, brings her incisive interviewing style to a brand new series of radio programs showcasing the world’s leading thinkers, scientists, authors, educators and parenting experts whose ideas are at the cutting edge.
A professional journalist who cut her teeth in the ultra-competitive world of British newspapers and magazines, Sandie has interviewed a wide range of personalities from authors, scientists, celebrities, spiritual teachers, and politicians. sandiesedgbeer.com
Listen to Sandie Sedgbeer on OMTimes Radio’s What Is Going OM, Thursdays at 7 PM ET.
