Cleaning Green at Home

Here's an article from the UK about the potential health impact of the traditional cleaning products that you use at home. The article gives scary facts, such as:

the air in [your house] is about two to five times more polluted than the air outside – due entirely to the amount of chemicals in your everyday cleaning products

and

basically, whatever you put down the drain ends up in your drinking water, so as you drink more water, you get a higher concentration in your body. It ends up in our fish and in plants, which we eat, too.

Scary, huh?

I like this article because it lays out the problems in common ingredients, so you know what to avoid and why. Check it out -- your body will thank you.

Safe Cosmetics Campaign

A few weeks ago, I attended a panel on toxins in cosmetics. The lesson that stuck with me the most is that the skin is the largest organ of your body, and the most absorbant... makes you think before spreading on some random cream that has ingredients you can't pronounce.

Here are two great websites to learn more:

• Campaign For Safe Cosmetics
• To look up a product, ingredient, or learn more about a specific company: Skin Deep

What Happens within the First Hour of Drinking a Cola?

Here we thought the bad news about buying cola products was the multiitude of maladies wrought by the multinational corporate purveyors of the product. Here's some other bad news about the stuff.

-10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system, which is 100 percent of your recommended daily intake. You'd normally vomit from such an intake, but the phosphoric acid cuts the flavor.

-20 minutes: Your blood sugar skyrockets. Your liver attempts to maximize insulin production in order to turn high levels of sugar into fat.

-40 minutes: As your body finishes absorbing the caffeine, your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and your liver pumps more sugar into the bloodstream.

-45 minutes: Your body increases dopamine production, tricking you into feeling pleasure and adding to the addictiveness of the beverage.

-60 minutes: The sugar crash begins.

Source- Dr. Mercola: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_9665.cfm