Posts Tagged ‘Home’

Keeping Medicine Out of the Water

Researchers have found traces of medicines, from both people and animals, in surface water and drinking water supplies.

The medicines can get in the water supply in many ways. Old medicine is often flushed down toilets (for years we were told to do this; now we know it’s not a good idea). A second source is our own bodies: People who take medicines end up…

Back to the Tap (Water)

Many doctors recommend drinking 8 glasses of fluids a day to keep your systems flowing and going. Water is a much healthier zero-calorie beverage than soda, juice, or energy drinks. Clean drinking water straight from the tap was a great technological advance, and bottled water is an important backup for emergencies. In the last two decades though, bottled water sales skyrocketed as people turned away…

Plastics: Choose What to Use

Plastic containers are incredibly convenient and nearly impossible to give up entirely. But  the chemicals in plastics can get into our food and drinks and affect our health and our environment. So, it makes sense to think about how to cut back on using plastic and find other kinds of containers. It also makes sense to think about the types of plastic you use, especially…

Let Your Light Shine, Except at Night

We’ve become a 24-hour culture. It used to be that the only place to find a restaurant or hardware store open at 3 a.m. was New York City. Today, even the smallest communities have a 24-hour convenience store or burger joint. Our mobile phones buzz and blink with new emails and texts at all hours. Televisions and computer screens light up our rooms most of…

Think Pink, Clean Green

Spring has sprung in my neighborhood, and I see a lot of people doing their spring cleaning routines: washing the outsides of the windows, deep cleaning rugs and carpeting, and decluttering and degriming the garage.

While there’s not a lot of research on cleaning product exposure, we do know that many are made from petroleum byproducts or contain chemicals that are considered hormone disruptors. Hormone…

Grilling Wisely

If you’re like me, grilling is a big part of what makes summer fun. To make your cookout as healthy as possible, try to follow these steps.

Start with unprocessed meats. Researchers are beginning to tease out the differences between eating processed versus unprocessed meat. Processed meat includes hot dogs, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, and lunch meats. Many scientists now think that some of the risks…

How Green Is Your Garden?

Because neither of my thumbs is green, my husband does almost all the gardening and lawn care at our house. Since my diagnosis, we’ve been talking about how to make our green space truly green – a healthy yard and garden with no chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

I always thought that using a chemical spray was the easy way to kill weeds and insect pests…