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07/31/2021
Did you know that many of the foods we eat, foods that have been labeled “healthy,” are actually sources of chronic inflammation? If you consume these foods on a regular basis, they are probably causing you to experience inflammation in ways that you may not have even thought of.
Read MoreChocolate has a history that goes back as far as 4000 years, when it was used by the cultures of MesoAmerica, beginning with the pre-Colombian Olmecs and followed by the Mayans and Aztecs. Back then, it was made as a bitter drink, cooked with water, spices, and no sugar. It was a “drink of the gods,” intended mostly for the elite, with one exception: evidence suggests that some sacrificial victims were given chocolate to drink (spiked with the blood of previous victims) to “get them in the mood” to die.
Read MoreA few weeks ago I woke up and read a Twitter conversation sparked by an article written by award-winning food writer Jane Black. Since then, I have thought a lot about the article and the conversations that followed in the Twitterverse. Jane’s guest column, on the website of the Stone Barnes Center for Food and Agriculture, points out how elite foodies are fundamentally out of touch with the reasons behind why less-affluent, rural, and/or poor families hadn’t made a switch to healthier eating.
What struck me most about her essay was her observation that one of the main obstacles preventing less affluent people in red-state America from eating healthy didn’t have anything to do with ignorance, lack of desire, or rebellion against elite coastal foodie cultures. It did have to do with economics, but not in the way you might think...
Read MoreAlmost half of all Americans suffer from chronic health ailments; among these, cancer is second leading cause of death, after heart disease. Although screening and treatment options, as well as a reduction in smoking, have improved the survival odds for many different kinds of cancer, including the 4 most common kinds: lung, colorectal, breast, and lung, the numbers are still high. Over 595,000 Americans are expected to die from cancer in 2016, which translates into over 1600 people per day...
There's no foolproof way to completely eliminate your risk of developing cancer, but there are several ways to decrease your chances. These begin with making the kinds of lifestyle choices that will ensure that your immune system has the strength it needs to keep your body healthy and fight disease effectively.
Read MoreWhen Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp founded Farm Aid back in 1985, sponsoring its first concert in Champaign Illinois, American farmers were in crisis. A series of droughts had devastated farms in the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Great Lakes regions, with Kentucky and Ohio suffering their driest spells of the 20th century. Family farms were struggling to stay afloat, with many of them deeply in debt. Although the drought conditions would continue (and in some places, worsen) throughout the 1980s, Farm Aid brought the troubles faced by American family farmers to public consciousness for the first time. It also raised money to help
Read MoreIt’s official: summer is over and fall is underway! Kids are back in school and (hopefully) settled into their daily routines. If your family is anything like mine, you’ve already had to deal with the fallout from cold and flu season. Without fail, each time the season changes, the sniffles begin and (if we’re not careful), someone comes down with a cold or flu.
It’s not the temperature changes that cause colds and flu; it’s that certain viruses thrive in the cooler temperatures. Rhinovirus and coronavirus are the most common culprits that cause illness this time of year.
If you have realized that the fall season ushers in the first bouts of cold and flu in your household, there is something you can do to prevent illness from getting your kids (and you too!) off track this season.
Read MoreMost household cleaning agents contain harmful chemicals that can cause a range of health problems. One set of ingredients in these cleaners is especially problematic, because they are known to cause cancer in humans and animals: formaldehyde and formaldehyde releasers. Sometimes formaldehyde is not actually used as an ingredient in cleaning solutions, but is present as a by-product. For this reason, it does not appear in the list of ingredients; instead, you’ll know that a product contains formaldehyde if you see the names DMDM hydantoin, or 1,4 dioxane listed among a product’s ingredients. It may also be present if other chemical ingredients like formalin, formalith, methanol, methyl aldehyde, methylene glycol, methylene oxide, paraform, or BFV appear in the ingredient list.
On the other hand, you can always make your own green cleaning products.
By making your own household cleaners, you can not only have more control over the ingredients that go into them, thereby reducing your exposure to hazardous chemicals, you can also save money in the process (especially by buying them in bulk).
Here are a few of my favorite DIY green household cleaners.
Read More#CleanWaterWednesday
Although news about the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan has waned in the face of the upcoming Presidential election, the water crisis is far from over. This water crisis was a wake-up call for many people and some of their elected representatives about the dangers of toxic lead (and other contaminants) that have leached into municipal water supplies, partly because of aging or flawed infrastructure.
But while Flint has become the poster child for lead poisoning in particular, and contaminated water systems in general, the attention that has been riveted on Flint by the mainstream media in the US has done little to inform – or alarm – us about the details of other ongoing water crises around the country.
Read MoreIn my book on toxic chemicals, I wrote about the health effects of Bisphenol-A (BPA) as being pervasive: this chemical compound, found in plastics and even in some cash register receipts, has been linked to problems with metabolism, behavior, reproduction, the development of placentas and stem cells, and the growth of cancerous tumors. BPA has been blamed (at least in part) for obesity, diabetes, asthma, infertility, and even…
Read MoreIt’s hard to acknowledge you’ve failed at something, especially if you’re a type “A” personality like me. But last winter I tried, and failed, to keep my winter container garden alive. Ok, the violas survived the cold and snow, but they don’t count, since they are by nature tolerant of winter weather. Everything else – the Japanese eggplants, the miniature peppers, the carrots, and the green beans, suffered miserably before finally wilting into pathetic looking, half-frozen messes.
Read MoreUpdated 7/31/2021
The Healthy Lunch campaign to deliver more nutritious meals in schools around the country has sparked a national debate over the role of government in dictating lifestyle choices for the nation’s public school students. Yet the movement for healthier, greener lifestyles did not begin with the US government, nor does it end there. In fact, there have been a number of drivers over the past few years that have pushed us, kicking and screaming, to this point of revolution as a nation.
Read MoreWe all know that eating a Mediterranean diet leads to a longer, healthier life. A big part of this diet is fish.
Not all fish are created equal, though. In fact, some doctors have claimed that eating certain kinds of fish may be worse than eating a slab of pork bacon, a box of doughnuts, or a fat, juicy hamburger!
What determines whether any particular kind of fish is good or bad for your health depends on a number of factors...
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I was shopping at Whole Foods and noticed that the person in the aisle next to me had a shopping cart full of items. In fact, while wandering through the store looking for a marinade I used to use years ago, apparently no longer sold by Whole Foods (maybe too overpriced?), I noticed quite a few people with shopping carts full. None of them seemed to be to be the type of people who had money to burn. Now looks alone are no judge, but I wondered, how the heck can people afford to do so much of their grocery shopping at Whole Foods? Very few of the people I Having joked with the staff on many occasions about how it was impossible to get out of the store for under $30, I was pretty surprised to see more than a handful of people buying what struck me as hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries.
There are cheaper options than Whole Foods, of course.
Last week I shopped at Costco, as I do about twice a month. What was different this time was that upon entering the warehouse and showing my ID, I was handed a brochure advertising Costco’s latest organic offerings. I was curious: there seemed to be a lot more organic goods than I remembered, and some of the items I had been shopping for had disappeared from the store shelves, replaced by these new, supposedly healthier, products. If I sound a little skeptical it is because I am inherently more distrustful of organic products offered by big box stores, especially their own organic brands, than of organic products made by my local organic farmer, or sold by the small, local health-conscious stores where I’ve shopped for organic products for years. (Still, this skepticism hasn’t always prevented me from buying Safeway’s O-organics brand or more recently, Costco’s organic offerings.)
Browsing Costco’s “Save on organic at your local Costco” brochure did make me wonder, though, why some stores seem to be increasing their organic foods inventory.
Read More(This is part of a series of posts based on interviews with Loni Mc Collin, MScCN, Clinical Herbalist and Nutritionist at Knowles Apothecary in Kensington, MD. You can find more information about Loni and her work, or schedule a consultation, through her website, www.lonimccollin.com)
As Loni noted in our interview, the Body Burden refers to the amount of chemicals that have accumulated within the adipose tissue and the fat tissue or in the body’s organs. Chapter 2 of my e-book, The Little Guidebook for Green Moms & Dads: how daily exposure to chemical toxins is hurting your kids (and what you can do about it) has more information about the body burden and how it affects the health of children (and adults). Because many of the toxic chemicals we are exposed to accumulate in fatty tissue, decreasing exposure is especially a concern with children.
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