health

Polluting my bathroom

You know that little rubber duckie in your bathroom? I always thought the little fella was sorta cute, nestled there between the shampoo and the loofa.

Well, it turns out the little ducky's not so rubber after all -- it's plastic, namely the dreaded PVC. And it further turns out the bathroom is full of the stuff.

An interview with J. Matthew Sleeth, evangelical environmentalist and author

In 2000, a wealthy hospital chief of staff and evangelical Christian named J. Matthew Sleeth looked around at the life he’d built — suburban neighborhood, huge house, two cars, lots and lots of stuff — and decided it failed to properly honor God. J. Matthew Sleeth: listen to the heart.In what he describes as a […]

Why the Hudson Insitute needs to compost its manure a little better.

Very few people are actually passionate about industrial food. Sure, people will buy rock-hard and flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket without thinking much about it, but they won't get mad because, say, there's a farmers' market down the road where someone's selling flavorful heirloom tomatoes grown without chemicals.

Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute -- funded lavishly by right-wing foundations and agribiz giants -- is a different breed altogether. Indeed, it's as though Monsanto conjured him up in a test-tube: the fellow seems to have a congenital hatred of organic food -- and a burning desire to make you hate it, too. His preferred method for achieving his goal is fear.

Take the BS he's been spreading about the recent E. coli outbreak affecting pre-washed, bagged spinach, on Gristmill and elsewhere.

E. Coli news is bad news, any way you cut it

Grim headlines for organics, as the feds are linking Natural Selection Foods (Earthbound Farm) and its prepackaged fresh organic spinach to an outbreak of E. coli in many states.

If the linkage is confirmed, I bet we'll be hearing a lot from organics skeptics (including chief skeptic Dennis Avery), who'll do their darnedest to say that organic food on the whole is a scary thing (inputs like cow manure may contain contaminants and dirt is, you know, dirty!). And we'll probably be hearing too from smaller farmers, local-is-best-ers, and back-to-the-landers, who'll say, see!: organics doesn't work well on an industrial, Earthbound-size level. And what's up with packaged spinach in the first place?

Stay tuned.

It’s time to get serious about reforming school lunches

Playground bullies aren’t the only ones shaking down kids for their milk money. Despite lots of recent fuss about the poor quality of school-cafeteria fare — and mounting evidence of widespread diet-related maladies among kids — corporate interests are still lining up for their cut of the cash the federal government and families spend on […]

Nature and allergies

Want to make sure your kids don't have bad allergies? Take them out into messy, dirty nature.

The recipe for twins (sorry, vegans)

Attention female vegans (and no, I'm not soliciting romance, thanks): If you're dreaming of birthing twins, you may want to read this.

Women who eat a vegan diet -- a strict vegetarian diet that excludes all animal products including milk -- are one-fifth as likely as other women to have twins, a U.S. researcher reported on Saturday.

But despite what some headline-writers suggest ("Vegan diet lowers odds of having twins" and "Meat-Eaters More Likely to Have Twins?"), neither meat-eating nor even necessarily veganness seem to be the key.

The reason [for the vegan twin-birth difference] may be hormones given to cattle to boost their milk and meat production, said Dr. Gary Steinman, an obstetrician specializing in multiple-birth pregnancies at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York.

So if you vegans want to increase the likelihood of twins without disrupting your diet, seems you could maybe skip the dairy and just go right for the growth hormones. Yum.

Rhymes with unanimity

Basically everyone agrees: we're full of chemicals. Hooray, agreement!

Now what to do about it? Some California lawmakers are suggesting a program to monitor and catalog said chemicals in residents' bodies.

Senate Bill 1379 would create the nation's first statewide biomonitoring program to study levels of chemical contamination in blood, urine, fatty tissue, or breast milk.

Essentially it's a state-specific version of the CDC's National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. Predictably though, powerful forces are aligning against it, fearing an educated, informed, environmentally aware public.

Gristmill shameless product placement: Steelcase Think chair

I got my Steelcase Think office chair in the mail yesterday, at long last. As a back-pain sufferer who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, I've been thinking about, researching, and generally fussing over ergonomic chairs for a long, long time, all the while sitting miserably on a cut-rate Office Max chair with a seat that made my butt ache after about 10 minutes.

In the end, I went with the Think, for four reasons:

1. It's aesthetically simple and elegant. There are lots of good ergo chairs out there, but you wouldn't believe how fussy some of them look.

2. It's about as environmentally advanced as any consumer product available today. It's 99% recyclable, easy to disassemble, and best of all, Cradle-to-Cradle certified. In general, Steelcase is an environmentally enlightened company.

3. It's at the lower end of the decent-ergo-chair price scale, at $600. That may seem like a lot for a chair, but amortized over the number of minutes I spend in it, it pays off handsomely. Anyway, the Allsteel #19 is around $1200, and hell, Herman Miller Eames chairs run up to $2200.

4. It's ergonomically sound, but doesn't require 500 adjustments to get up and running. In fact, aside from seat height, there's just one knob, with four settings. There's a weight balance mechanism that automatically adjusts support based on weight and position, and tensors in the back that adjust automatically to shape and posture. It's designed to conform to your movement, and keep you moving, which is ergo task No. 1.

If you buy through Office Environments, you can also choose custom fabric. Mine is "cinnamon," roughly like the one pictured here.

Obviously, having had only one day to test it out, I can't pass full judgment yet. But so far it's a dream. Steelcase, my ass thanks you! And you can quote me on that.