Welcome to LowToxTots

Welcome to LowToxTots.

What's your why?

If you’re reading this, I first want to say, “Thank you!” I know life gets busy and there can rarely be ‘free-time’, especially in a parent’s world; so I appreciate you taking time to stop by to see if I can be of any help to you and your family.

Everyone loves a good story. Stories help us feel connected when connection may seem far away, or they help us see other people experiencing similar things in life in any given season when we feel like we are on our own. I want to tell you my story, and then maybe you’ll read something that helps you connect or want to read further. I’ll leave that up to you.

I will never forget the day my dad told me he had cancer. In the summer of 2011, I was back home on break from college, and we were outside watching my little sister play. I was sitting on the back of my dad’s truck in the driveway when my dad came up to me and said, “you have to try harder to get along with your sister.” We are 12 years apart, so connecting was difficult due to the large age gap. I responded with a sarcastic tone, I’m sure, and asked why he was telling me that out of the blue. He told me it was because he had cancer. My dad proceeded to make a horribly timed joke about the statistics of men getting diagnosed with prostate cancer and claimed he clearly had the luck of the Irish (we’re Italian). Your world changes when you hear the ‘c’ word. I know mine did.

Dad started treatments, and the rest of my family waited and prayed. Being away from home was hard when he went through chemo. When he went into remission, I thought the waiting game was over. Then dad told me the cancer was back but invisible in the scans. After moving on to the subsequent treatment with more medications and a removal of his prostate, all I could think about was, “what can I do to help?” Enter: my best friend, Stephanie.

I went to Stephanie’s bachelorette and she told me her fiance and her were vegan. I was shocked and probably didn’t even understand what being vegan meant at the time. Usually, people think that’s another word for gluten-free. Which she also was (not by choice because who would ever choose that). All I remember was us eating the opposite of vegan after grueling morning swim practices, so I was intrigued to find out why they made such a drastic lifestyle change. Before she started her plant-based pitch, she said, “Meghan, I did want to tell you about a lot of research I’ve found linking red meat to prostate cancer that might help your dad.” Before she could finish her sentence, I knew what I had to do. I ate my last eggs benedict breakfast that weekend and went home telling my future husband, Michael, I was going vegan to make my dad do it.

If anyone knew Michael B.M. (Before Meghan, not Bowel Movement), they knew he wasn’t scared to eat the hot dogs on the warming rollers at a 7-Eleven. He sure wasn’t asking an employee how long the hot dogs had been rolling that day either. I could say more, but I’m trying to keep you reading, so those sentences alone should give you some insight into his eating habits while he was a college swimmer. I told him he didn’t need to go vegan, I just needed to do it for myself and my dad, but he said he’d join in the ‘fun’. We dumped all of our non-vegan food that day because we figured going ‘cold turkey’ (not a PETA-approved saying) was easier than slowly taking things away from our diet.

Long story short, I was able to push my dad, the ex-pro athlete worried about not getting enough protein in a vegan diet, to make the switch to a plant-based lifestyle. While I was trying to help him remove animal products from his diet that research showed promoted cancer cell growth, his doctors were busy pushing him to jump from medicine to medicine with more negative side effects than we could count. As of today, I’m six years into being vegan, and I can count on one hand how many times I have been sick. I had a beautiful 9lb 12 ounce baby boy, Espen, last year who is growing off the charts and 100% vegan. My soreness and inflammation post-workout now is better than my entire time as a competitive swimmer throughout my childhood.

During this journey, Stephanie opened our eyes to another world that seemed lightyears away but was a world I desperately needed to see. The world of toxins. Through her own health journey and loads of additional research, we slowly learned about all of the toxins in our environment that most of the time we aren’t told about and other times we can’t avoid no matter how hard we try. Pesticides, mercury, BPA, PFAs, the list goes on. I read ‘How Not to Die’ by Michael Gregor (an excellent book on nutrition science providing overwhelming evidence for food as medicine) and learned that fish I ate years ago could have still affected my little one. It shook me when I realized he could have been born with microplastics and mercury in his bloodstream from food I was eating YEARS prior. Once again, I had an opportunity to make changes that shaped my future AND my family’s.

I know you might be thinking how overwhelming it sounds to be vegan AND toxin-free in your current world. I hear you, and I agree with you. It is overwhelming. But while it was overwhelming in the beginning, all I felt was empowerment, knowing I was in charge of so many more aspects of my life that I never knew I could control. I CAN know what is going into my child’s air, his food, his water, his clothes, his toys, and his blankets. I CAN choose what is in his day-to-day environment to try and avoid as many toxins as possible and give him the best chance at a healthy future when I’m not there to make decisions for him anymore.

As of today, my dad is still with us, and it’s a blessing every day. We continue to fight his cancer through plant-based eating and low-tox living, while the doctors just try to find the next pill. Our baby Espen is thriving, and we plan to keep it that way.

That’s my why. I’m here to show you how much you CAN control for your child in a world full of uncertainty. I’m also here to show you how much you CAN control for yourself. You are not your ‘family’s health history’ every doctor’s intake form asks you for. You can make small changes every day that create a positive, healthy, low-toxin environment for your family and for yourself. That’s why I started LowToxTots. There are definitely other blogs out there with similar information, but this space will have a little more love mixed in with that extra knowledge.

I’m committed to being there for the parents trying to do their best for their children. I’m committed to helping you remember your why when it seems overwhelming. Can you tell I love being a mom yet? Everyone loves a good story. Cancer is just a chapter in my dad’s story, and it’s just a chapter in mine. I refuse to let cancer be anything more than a previous chapter in our stories. I will keep writing about my story and hope you come back to follow along.

How are you going to write the rest of your story?