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**Arin Schultz** (0:00)
There are over 100 different chemicals than go into making a mattress.

**Melissa Magsese** (0:03)
How worried should people be about that?

**Arin Schultz** (0:06)
Green washing is a real big thing. People throw around eco, green. Green is a color, it means absolutely nothing. Cotton is one of the most heavily pesticide crops in the entire world. There's 87,000 chemicals in use in the United States right now. And of that 87,000, only 20 of them are regulated and only five of them are banned. There's two ways they test mattresses. One is the cigarette test, the other one is they literally hit it with a blowtorch. Your mattress and your couch are your two largest indoor air polluters in your entire home. In a conventional sized queen mattress, you're sleeping on 20 gallons of crude oil.
And you wonder why you sleep so hot at night.

**Melissa Magsese** (0:43)
Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Live & Well. Today we're talking about the clean sleep movement and what that's all about. We read every ingredient on our food label and we check our skincare bottles for parabens and phthalates, but almost nobody stops to ask what's actually going on inside the thing we sleep on and where we spend a third of our lives, which is our mattress. So today we're pulling back the cover, literally, on the clean sleep movement and what organic really means in this industry, and why the mattress you're sleeping on tonight might be worth a second look. So let's get into it. Today we have Arin Schultz, you're the Chief Growth Officer of Naturepedic. Welcome to Live & Well.

**Arin Schultz** (1:26)
Thank you. I'm very excited to be here today.

**Melissa Magsese** (1:29)
So tell us about yourself and what you do at Naturepedic.

**Arin Schultz** (1:32)
Well, I've been at Naturepedic now for 12 years. What's nice about being at Naturepedic for so long and why I continue to be here for 12 years is, what we do for a living, it really is impactful and it makes me feel good to do something good in the world and make an amazing product. It really drives myself and it drives everyone that works for Naturepedic.
Starting at this company 12 years ago, it's completely changed our lives for how we sleep, to what we eat, and just how we conduct ourselves.

**Melissa Magsese** (2:05)
Let's start with something that I think surprises people.
We're so conscious now of what's in our water, what's in our skincare, what's in our food, which is great, we should be. But I think that we're not talking enough about what's in our pillows and our mattresses. So why do you think people haven't been as encouraged to think about what's actually going on with their bed?

**Arin Schultz** (2:30)
I think, especially come nighttime, people are just so tired, they're just excited to have something to eat.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:34)
Just get me literally horizontal. Yes, exactly.

**Arin Schultz** (2:37)
And I always say the issue with that is, you're spending a third of your life in bed. Sure. And in the standard lifespan, that could be 25 to 27 years more or less of you're sleeping in bed.
And the amount of chemicals that go into making conventional mattresses is not one, it's not two. There are over a hundred different chemicals than go into making a mattress. And on top of that, in a conventional sized queen mattress, you're sleeping on 20 gallons of crude oil. It's literally the same stuff they're pumping out of the ground, turning into gasoline. And you wonder why you sleep so hot at night. And it's because you're sleeping on those polyurethane foam, crude oil pads that they have inside your mattress. And then putting the chemicals on top of that, it really is just a cesspool of contaminants that you're crawling into bed to every night. So you wake up, you have headaches, you have aches, you have pains, you sweat, you have skin issues. All of that could probably be related back to your mattress.
Wow.

**Melissa Magsese** (3:31)
Okay, you talked about crude oil. So didn't think that that was going to happen so quickly.
So in addition to that, and I'm sure various other things, there's kind of like a chemically smell. Is that an immediate red flag or, how worried should people be about that?

**Arin Schultz** (3:51)
I think there's a misconception with our products especially. People think organic, it's going to have zero smell.
And the thing with organic cotton, organic latex, organic wool, these are completely untreated materials. So they might have a variant in terms of the year of, maybe it's a little woodsy, maybe it's whatever. It does go away over time, but you are breathing in just natural materials. Whereas conventional mattresses, you're going to get headaches and lung issues and all these other things. And it takes years in a lot of instances for those things to finish off gassing. And you might not smell it right away, but again, because it's so fresh in your home, that it's having an adverse effect on your overall well-being. And you could probably let that thing air out for a week, and it's still going to be just as bad to sleep on.