Clean living has become both a movement and a minefield. With endless information, conflicting advice, and rising anxiety, many people feel paralyzed before they even begin. Lindsay Dahl, Chief Impact Officer at Ritual and longtime leader in the environmental health and clean living movement, brings clarity to the noise.
With more than two decades of experience spanning nonprofits, policy, beauty, and supplements, Dahl offers a rare blend of scientific rigor and compassion. In this episode of The Healthspan Collective podcast, she reframes clean living as a long game rooted in systems change, not perfection.
Finding Purpose by Accident
Dahl did not set out to build a career in clean living. “I stumbled into this work by accident, really,” she shares. Fresh out of college with passion but little experience, she took a role focused on environmental health without fully understanding what that meant. “I didn’t really get what environmental health is, but I’ll take the job.”
Working to remove toxic chemicals from baby products revealed something powerful. “It was hard sometimes to get people to care about the environment, plant ecosystems that they’re far away from,” she explains, “but their home environment was very easy to get people engaged and talking about.” That connection became the foundation of a career that has helped reshape consumer awareness over the last twenty years.
You Cannot Shop Your Way to Safety
One of Dahl’s most grounding messages is also the most liberating. “You can’t shop your way to safety.” Rather than discouraging action, she sees this as a call to release misplaced responsibility. “This shouldn’t be on our shoulders,” she says. “Consumers can’t solve the problem.”
At the same time, she is clear that individual choices still matter. She points to biomonitoring studies showing dramatic drops in chemical exposure when policies change or consumer habits shift. After bans on leaded gasoline and paint, “blood lead levels in children absolutely plummeted by 90%.” Even short term changes can make a difference. “Within three days, the levels of BPA and phthalates in those families dropped by up to 60%.”
The takeaway is balance. “Your consumer choices matter,” she says, “and passing laws to help protect people is really the magic combination.”
Where to Start Without Getting Overwhelmed
For those trying to begin, Dahl emphasizes strategy over scarcity. “I don’t want people to absolutely get overwhelmed,” she says. “You don’t have to go and get your body tested.” Instead, she encourages focusing on high impact areas.
In supplements, transparency is critical. “Over 86% of prenatal vitamins have heavy metals in them,” she explains. This reality helped shape her work at Ritual, including passing California legislation requiring prenatal brands to publicly disclose heavy metal testing. “What this really is gonna do is create a positive incentive for companies to find lower contamination raw materials.”
In beauty and personal care, Dahl advises prioritizing what stays on your skin. “Your lotion, makeup, things like that,” matter more than rinse off products. Certifications like EWG Verified and Made Safe help consumers navigate without fear.
Clean Living Without Perfection
As a mother of two, Dahl brings empathy to the realities of family life. When it comes to gifts, toys, and food, her approach is refreshingly grounded. “I don’t sweat it,” she says. “We can’t take away and steal the joy from childhood.”
She applies the same mindset to food. “If they’re at a birthday party, they’re gonna have a piece of cake with their friends.” The goal is not control, but consistency. “I’m really in this to play the long game.”
She offers a powerful metaphor shared by a cancer researcher. “Think about a pie,” she explains. “One of those slices is the environmental slice.” Reducing exposure matters, but it is only one part of the whole. “Stress and cortisol are also very toxic to our bodies.”
Systemic Change Over Fear Based Wellness
Dahl is candid about the current clean living landscape. “There’s such strong backlash to clean living,” she notes, driven by exaggerated claims and misinformation. But she cautions against swinging too far in the opposite direction. “Just because there’s overstated wellness influencers doesn’t mean there’s not a real issue with toxic chemical pollution.”
This belief shapes her work at Ritual, where she saw the supplement industry as “the next frontier” in need of accountability. “Companies don’t have to prove safety or efficacy,” she says. Ritual’s commitment to human clinical trials and ingredient traceability is an attempt to raise the bar across the industry.
Closing Reflection
Lindsay Dahl reminds us that healthspan is not built through fear or perfection, but through informed choices and collective action. “Trying to use our time on this earth to make the world a little bit better,” she says, is her guiding principle. At The Healthspan Collective, this perspective resonates deeply, wellness that supports individuals while pushing systems to evolve. Clean living, when done with intention and compassion, becomes not a burden, but a pathway to a healthier future for all.
